Russian Troops Withdraw From Northern Mali

What happened in Mali on April 25 is not a minor insurgent flare-up. It looks like the opening move of a coordinated, large-scale offensive by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and JNIM, and the results in the first 48 hours have been significant enough to shake the foundations of the Malian junta.

The scope of the attacks was wide. Fighting broke out simultaneously across multiple locations including Bamako, Kidal, Gao, Sévaré, and Kati, meaning this was not a single front engagement but an organised attempt to stretch Malian and Russian Africa Corps forces as thin as possible. Russia's Africa Corps, characteristically, framed the whole thing as a Western-backed coup attempt, claiming 10,000 to 12,000 militants were deployed and that over 1,000 were neutralised across the various battlefields. Those figures should be treated cautiously. The Africa Corps has a well-documented habit of inflating enemy casualties and attributing setbacks to foreign intelligence services rather than acknowledging the organic military capability of groups like JNIM. The reality at the moment is that the Africa Corps is not running as efficiently as its predecessor ‘Wagner’ did under Prigozhin. If I had to guess, there is a large difference in management and “work culture” when you’re a PMC under Prigozhin and working for an already corrupt military bureaucracy.