How Foreign Intervention Failed Mali

Wagner’s counterinsurgency operation in Mali has been ongoing since late 2021, when the regime of Malian Col. Assimi Goïta struck a deal with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Russian private military company. Yet, in a surprising turn of events, in the days following the attack, another actor announced that it was involved: Ukraine.

Although details remain scarce, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency claims to have provided Malian rebels with “necessary information,” (although the statement also suggested that the Ukrainians provided resources beyond information) “which enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals.” The move is likely a bid to gain additional Western support for Kyiv’s ongoing war with Russia.

Today, Mali finds itself at the center of overlapping civil wars involving separatists, ethnic militias, jihadis, and international actors. The insurgency in northern Mali, which began in 2012, fundamentally changed the geopolitical makeup of the region—especially after 2022 and subsequent military withdrawals of France from the former colonial territories that it once considered its backyard.

Amid the French departure, Russia has pushed, and been pulled, farther into the Sahel. In Mali, Russian military planners and Bamako’s top brass initially settled on a military solution to the country’s crisis, though negotiated settlements were also discussed. However, the events at Tinzaouatene make clear that a military solution cannot solve both irredentism and jihadi politics in northern Mali—nor is there evidence to suggest that Mali’s warring parties are ready to attempt another diplomatic solution.

This should not prevent stakeholders, including geopolitical rivals, from laying the groundwork for a future settlement. It is in the interest of all actors involved to seek political solutions to these unwinnable wars and ultimately to sit at the negotiating table before things turn from bad to worse.

In 2012, pro-independence Tuareg armed groups forged an alliance with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and local jihadi movements to launch attacks on the Malian Armed Forces in several northern cities. After taking the north, the Tuareg groups—called the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA)—declared an independent state, Azawad, across northern Mali.

Their alliance with jihadi groups was short-lived: The jihadis ousted the MNLA from major towns and cities, including Timbuktu and Gao, then shifted focus to government-controlled central Mali. The move triggered a French military intervention in 2013 at the request of the government in Bamako, which wanted to save the country’s territorial integrity and prevent a jihadi takeover.

The French intervention quickly pushed back jihadi fighters and regained control of northern Mali’s towns. Having achieved the primary objective of maintaining the country’s territorial integrity and existence as a state, the intervention morphed into a regional counterterrorism operation in 2014, Operation Barkhane. Spread out across Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad, Barkhane’s mandate was to conduct counterterrorism operations with a focus on killing “high-value targets.” This would theoretically clear the way for the Malian state, supported by the international community, to consolidate a political settlement with the north’s non-jihadi armed groups.

But while Barkhane was effective at killing several jihadi commanders, it never attempted to address the economic and social problems that fostered armed politics in the first place. In one exemplary case, the French exacerbated local political divisions by partnering with the MNLA to hunt down jihadis, temporarily blocking the Malian Armed Forces from entering Kidal in 2013.

The international community stepped in to support a peace accord between Bamako and pro-independence groups in May 2015, and a U.N. stabilization force (MINUSMA) helped reestablish government control in certain vulnerable areas. The security situation nevertheless continued to deteriorate.

The jihadis’ move into central Mali grafted onto complex local conflicts between nomadic herders and farming communities. By 2017, central Mali had become the site of ethnic massacres perpetrated by both jihadi groups—which were dominated in the Mopti region by Fulani fighters—and local hunter militias known as dozo militias, which were comprised of members of the Bambara and Dogon groups and supported by the government in Bamako.

The 2015 peace accord between Bamako and the Tuareg separatists stalled, and jihadis began controlling territory and offering Islamic courts for those seeking justice along with other so-called traditional forms of governance.

By 2020, Mali was bleeding. Jihadi groups controlled nearly all rural areas in the center and north of the country. Intercommunal violence peaked, resulting in large-scale massacres of civilians. Implementation of the peace accord saw virtually no progress. And ordinary Malian citizens began seriously questioning the purpose of the huge international presence in the country, leading many to assume that Mali’s problems were fostered primarily by the French intervention.

Nevertheless, the conflict’s main actors—the Malian government, the signatory armed groups, jihadi actors, and local militias—couldn’t or wouldn’t address the proper causes of the country’s wounds.

This frustrated Western backers, especially France, who were hoping for a stable transition to civilian rule. Relations between Mali and the government of French President Emmanuel Macron, along with other donor governments, soured quickly, leading the French government to float the idea of military disengagement from the country.

Supported by anti-French sentiment in Bamako, the junta began looking elsewhere for international support.

In early 2021, the junta leadership began discussions with a group of Russian military advisors stationed in the country. The discussions were predicated on three factors: a long history of cooperation between Russia and Mali; the belief among Russian military advisors that the French intervention had undermined Mali’s sovereignty; and the recent success of Wagner Group’s counterinsurgency operation in the Central African Republic.

Russian advisors, who were well aware of the widening gap between interveners and Malians, particularly around the issue of Tuareg separatism, saw an opportunity for Russian influence and brought Wagner Group representatives into the mix. Together, the Russians pitched to interim President Assimi Goïta an alternative security partnership—with the capture of Kidal, the Tuareg separatist stronghold in the country’s northeast, at the mission’s core.

Still, some Wagner insiders in Mali were open to the diplomatic route and floated the idea of bringing Tuareg separatists into a new accord, similar to how Wagner helped to broker the 2019 Khartoum Agreement in the Central African Republic. But the breakdown of the Khartoum Agreement and the successful counteroffensive against Central African armed groups that followed ultimately convinced Wagner leadership that the effectiveness of their military solution in the Central African Republic could apply to Mali.

This suited most of Mali’s military brass, who had little appetite for another round of peace talks. Plans were therefore put in place to take back Kidal. Such an operation would first require the expulsion of the U.N. peacekeeping mission, which Bamako requested in June 2023, just a few days before the Wagner Group’s abortive march on Moscow.

Neither the war in Ukraine nor Wagner’s mutiny called into question Russian intervention in Africa. And the reorganization of Wagner forces in Mali after Prigozhin’s death—which occurred in a plane crash not long after his group’s attempted march on Moscow—came in fits and starts. Initially, key commanders stayed in Mali while ordinary rotations took place. Soon, however, Russia’s Defense Ministry sidelined Wagner’s Council of Commanders and brought in men who preferred the relative safety of Africa to assignments in Ukraine. Unpopular commanders were promoted, though their responsibilities remained a mystery to subordinates.

Nonetheless, Bamako, its Russian partners, and their Western detractors all drew incorrect conclusions. The West, still smarting from the Malian government’s demand for Operation Barkhane’s withdrawal, underestimated the symbolic victory that Kidal represented in Bamako and how much it could galvanize regime supporters in the capital.

The quick success of the Kidal offensive also fostered the illusion that Mali and its partners could easily defeat northern armed groups. The death of Prigozhin and the confusing half-handover of his structures to official Russian Defense Ministry entities under the newly created Africa Corps, had taken a toll on discipline and command and control.

Yet Wagner’s routing at Tinzaouatene is also emblematic of a larger issue.

Bamako does not have a plan, the means, or arguably the desire to address the underlying causes of Mali’s conflict. A military-only solution cannot solve the humanitarian crisis, the lack of strong institutions (or the impartial platforms) for addressing grievances, and the economic marginalization that drives people to tolerate and even embrace armed groups.

Instead, a more dangerous trend is taking place. Just as the war on terror prevented France and the West from correctly ascertaining the root causes of jihadism in the Sahel, the rise of great-power competition narratives threatens to perpetuate misdiagnoses of Mali’s crises. The country was already the site of geopolitical competition between Russia and the West; Ukraine’s claims of involvement in the battle at Tinzaouatene only add more fuel to the fire.

The desert ambush was certainly prepared and executed with a high degree of professionalism, but CSP sources told Foreign Policy under the condition of anonymity that preparations had been underway for some time. The rebels waited for the Malian Armed Forces and Wagner Group to move farther outside Kidal and their own defensive drone range. When a sandstorm made aerial support unlikely, they seized the moment to attack.

To a certain extent, it is in the CSP’s interest to conflate its fight for Azawad’s independence with the war in Ukraine. And following its retreat from Kidal, the CSP has lobbied for financial or military support from any foreign government willing to take a call or meeting, including from Kyiv.

Still, meetings, joint statements, or even ad hoc cooperation in the field do not make an alliance. Narratives amplified over social media and in the press, though, have a way of becoming more important than facts on the ground. In Moscow, too, the rhetoric surrounding Russia’s role in the Sahel is shifting from one of aiding governments in their fight against jihadis and criminal armed groups to one in which Africa represents a new front in Russia’s war with Ukraine—and more broadly, in its struggle against NATO and the West.

Geopolitical rivalry has added another dangerous layer to an already complex crisis. But even if the conflict in northern Mali internationalizes, local actors will remain the most important players on the ground. It is in the interest of both Russia and the West to offer support when these players are ready to sit at the negotiating table.

Part of the research for this article was generously funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.