Jihadis encircle Mali’s capital as they close in on power

After jihadi fighters led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the notorious “One-Eyed”, entered the ancient library city of Timbuktu more than a decade ago, they banned dancing and singing, and imposed sharia law.

Their takeover of much of northern Mali triggered the 2013 invasion by France in “Operation Serval”, which pushed the Islamists back and prolonged the rule of the weak French-backed government.

Today Belmokhtar is dead, the French have been expelled — replaced by Russian mercenaries — and the democratic government has been deposed by a military junta.

The only thing that has remained constant is the jihadis, whose presence has spread around a country twice the size of France and who are now tightening a blockade around Bamako, the capital, starving its 4mn people of fuel and hope.

If, as many now fear, jihadi groups eventually end up capturing the city or force the military junta of army chief Assimi Goïta to capitulate, they could plausibly turn Mali into a caliphate on Europe’s doorstep.

“Many view the imminent fall of the regime as inevitable,” said Héni Nsaibia, senior analyst for West Africa at conflict monitoring organisation Acled, which has charted the steady rise in jihadi attacks. “It’s a question of how and when, not if.”

If Bamako really does fall into the hands of Islamists it would mark a stunning reversal — and not only for Mali’s military junta, whose seizure of power in 2020 on a wave of anti-French sentiment inspired coups in the neighbouring Sahelian countries of Burkina Faso and Niger.

It would also be a huge setback for Russia, whose military presence in the country since 2021 — initially in the form of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group — was supposed to protect the regime and combat spreading jihadi insurgency.

“That shows that the package Russia provided is not very reliable,” said Nsaibia, adding that Mali’s jihadi groups have grown steadily stronger, first during Wagner’s time and later, after Prigozhin’s death in 2023, under its successor organisation Africa Corps.

Fighters belonging to Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), an Islamist group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and Maçina Liberation Front (FLM), have since September turned their attention to Bamako.

They have attacked tankers ferrying petrol from Senegal, and later Ivory Coast, blocking the landlocked country and its capital from countries that supply nearly 95 per cent of fuel.

Jihadis have blown up convoys of tankers with improvised explosive devices, or have set fire to vehicles and kidnapped drivers.

As fuel has run dry in Bamako, power generators have juddered to a halt and traffic has thinned as life is reduced to a daily struggle to find petrol or diesel. School has been cancelled. Both the US and Italy this week advised their citizens to leave Bamako immediately.

This week, crowds gathered to cheer tanker drivers who made it into the city, one of the rare current events to be aired on state-controlled TV. But many drivers are now refusing to make the hazardous journey.

“People are focused on the coming days. How will they move around town? Will there be enough food and fuel for us?” said Salif, a civil society activist in Bamako, adding that few people had time to consider the wider implications of the siege.

“Stocks could be empty by next week and then we will see the real crisis,” said Ulf Laessing, Sahel programme director for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation think-tank, who lives in the capital. “There have been rebellions in the north and even attacks in the capital, but laying siege to Bamako is new for people here.”

One senior member of the previous government, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the jihadis were getting increasingly sophisticated, broadcasting in colloquial Bambara, a widely spoken language, and collecting zakat — mandatory religious contributions — from villages as well as taxes from artisanal gold mines.

“Their strategy has been to asphyxiate Bamako and it’s working very well,” the former senior government member said, adding they had been in close contact with increasingly alarmed members of Mali’s armed forces.

A few months ago, they said, a colonel screamed down the phone when they asked if Bamako might fall under jihadi control, insisting it was impossible. When they asked again a few days ago, the phone fell silent. “What we are seeing is the country collapse before our eyes.”

The strangulation is part of a JNIM playbook repeated in dozens of cities in Burkina Faso, where the al-Qaeda affiliate also has a strong presence, said Joe Siegle, a security expert at Maryland University.

In Mali, the city of Kayes, with 127,000 people, is already blockaded, as is Nioro du Sahel, a religious landmark. Residents of both places are prohibited from leaving. Since Farabougou in central Mali fell under FLM control in August, women have been obliged to cover their heads and secular music has been banned.

As the jihadis have turned their attention to Bamako, they have imposed sharia law on bus companies travelling in and out of the city, demanding that sexes be segregated and women wear the hijab.

When Diarra Transport, the biggest bus company, agreed to their demands, the government banned it from operating — though without fuel, said people following the saga, the dispute had become moot. The company did not reply to a request for comment.

As the Islamists’ grip has tightened, the 1,000 to 1,500 Russian Africa Corps troops that analysts estimate to be stationed in Mali have appeared increasingly impotent.

In July 2024, 84 Russian and 47 Malian soldiers were killed in an ambush on the Algerian border. Last year jihadis marched into Bamako, attacking the airport and a military training school, killing more than 70 people in the fist big attack on the city in a decade.

Jihadi groups have moved into a vacuum created by Mali’s junta, say analysts. Under Goïta, who seized power promising to rid the country of its insurgency, Mali has expelled French and UN troops, depriving it of 15,000 soldiers.

Mali has turned for solidarity to fellow renegade states, Burkina Faso — with its charismatic military leader Ibrahim Traoré — and Niger, part of the so-called coup belt stretching across the Sahel to Sudan.

The head of a Russian delegation to Bamako this month held out the prospect of Moscow intervening with deliveries of petroleum and food. But analysts said that would mean airlifting supplies into the capital, something they considered highly unlikely.

Siegle, at Maryland University, said the stakes were high, not only for Mali but also for Burkina Faso and Niger. “I’m concerned that all three of those juntas could collapse,” he said.

More prosperous coastal states, including Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast, are also concerned that jihadism could spread to their countries.

The implications go further still. “Should Mali fall under control of jihadis, there is a risk that large swaths of territory could become a haven for international jihadism similar to what we saw in Afghanistan and Sudan in the 1990s in the run-up to 9/11,” Siegle said.

Nsaibia at Acled said that, to survive, the junta might have to start talking with the jihadis about power-sharing.

“The military regime find themselves in an extremely precarious position,” he said. “It would need a miracle for them to reverse the situation.”