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August 2025 Update
August 8, 2025: Mali soldiers and the Russian Africa Corps are accused of kidnapping or executing numerous Fulani tribesmen. Nearly 20 Fulani were killed and over 80 kidnapped. These operations were part of an effort to halt the movement of Moslem Fulani horsemen and their raids against Christian farmers in the north. The Russians are fighting the Fulani and Islamic terrorists to gain an edge in obtaining gold mining permits. Meanwhile the government is demanding more money from the foreign gold mining companies. As a result most mining operations have been shut down until a new arrangement on taxes. Mali is the third largest gold producer in the world.
What divides Mali more than anything else is ethnicity and geography. The desert and semi-desert north contains more than half of the territory, but only about 12 percent of Mali's 22 million people. This semi-desert area just below the Sahara extends from the east coast of Africa all the way to the Atlantic.
In the southern third of Mali, where 88 percent of the population lives, the population is quite different from the northerners. While most Malians are Moslem there are some sharp ethnic and tribal differences. The Tuareg are the majority in the north and are North African while over 80 percent of Malians are various black African tribes. Most Malians live south of the Niger River, known as Nile of West Africa. These areas are more prosperous because they have more water.
The hostility between the army composed of black Africans from the south and the lighter skinned Tuareg groups in the north goes back a long time. Before 2012 the rebellious Tuareg around Timbuktu tried something different and adopted Islamic terrorism as a promising tool to help their fight for autonomy or a separate Tuareg state. That has often failed in the past because the Tuareg have been unable to unite. Islamic radicalism has not solved that problem either as it didn’t work.
The French arrived in the 19th century and over the next 68 years created a united Mali. The black Africans along the Niger River prospered and generally ignored the Tuareg in the desert north. But after the French left in 1960, and Mali became independent, the more populous south was forced to deal with the Tuareg-dominated north they now owned and were not willing to give up. This has not worked out well for either side.
Most of the 12,000 UN peacekeepers were up north, dealing with problems the Mali government has caused and failed to remedy. The government has not come through with the autonomy and economic aid it agreed to back in 2014 if the Tuareg separatist rebels made peace. The government is still corrupt and inefficient and continues to be run by southerners who still do not trust the tribes up north.
The most dangerous rebel group in the north is the Tuareg Liberation Army of Azawad/MNLA, which signed a peace deal in June 2015. The government made a lot of promises to MNLA, mainly to keep the MNLA from reuniting with its former ally Ansar Dine, which long worked with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb/AQIM. Ansar Dine is, like the MNLA, largely Tuareg. France points out that MNLA and Ansar Dine leaders still communicate with each other, mainly because they are all Tuareg and have tribal connections. MNLA and Ansar Dine relations with AQIM are less friendly and most MNLA members see AQIM as unwelcome outsiders. This unstable situation up north won’t resolve itself unless the government keeps its side of the peace deal. MNLA is obviously ready to work with Ansar Dine again if the central government keeps stalling on meeting its obligations.
The Tuareg never trusted the national government and the current situation does not help. Azawad is the Tuareg term for their homeland in northern Mali and several other North African nations. Ansar Dine refuses to make peace and continues to fund its terrorist operations with drug smuggling profits. MNLA gave up drug smuggling and cooperation with Islamic terrorists when it signed the 2015 peace deal. The continued smuggling explains Ansar Dine involvement with the new Islamic terror group Macina Liberation Front/FLM down south. AQIM is still something of an umbrella organization for Islamic terrorists in the region and survives in the north largely because the government has not complied with the peace deal. Most Tuareg do not belong to MNLA or Ansar Dine and are mainly concerned with taking care of their families and clans. The clans often have militias and if economic conditions don’t improve up there a lot of those militiamen will use their weapons to get what they need or simply want.
There are still a lot of unresolved disagreements between the many pro-government and former rebel tribes and clans up there. These feuds are proving more difficult to solve because of the government’s refusal to deliver aid and autonomy. This is causing enough anarchy to give the Islamic terrorists opportunities to move around and carry out attacks and keep their drug smuggling enterprise running. The local squabbles tie down the peacekeepers and make it more difficult for the French led counter-terror operations.
The Mali government wants the UN to allow peacekeepers to be more forceful with uncooperative groups, especially Tuareg, up north. The UN is reluctant to do that. While it worked in places like Congo, it would likely backfire in northern Mali. In addition to the peacekeepers there were also a thousand French special operations troops there who were not part of the peacekeeping force and concentrated on finding and destroying Islamic terrorists. This French force is part of Task Force Barkhane, which has over 3,000 French troops that operate throughout the Sahel. The French have since left.
Task Force Barkhane can send more troops to Mali, but rarely does because it has so much to do in the rest of the Sahel. There are also several thousand Mali Army troops up north where they are regarded by the Tuaregs as a hostile occupying force. That attitude goes back a long way and the 2015 peace deal was to have addressed that mistrust. It hasn’t and no UN member is eager to get involved in that kind of mess.
Since 2018 the UN has been threatening sanctions against individuals and groups in Mali if the government and local leaders in northern Mali don’t implement the 2015 peace treaty that ended the war in the north, but has not yet brought peace. To placate the UN and major donors the government has agreed to work things out with the Tuaregs. But promises like that have been made before and always broken. The federal government continues to tolerate corrupt practices which includes stealing a lot of the aid money meant for the north and sending officials up there who demand bribes to get anything done. The UN also insists that presidential elections be held on schedule and would prefer that the incumbent kept it legal and not become another president-for-life. The president is also under pressure from the UN to issue a December 2017 order for police to shut down any unauthorized protests. That meant all protests against government corruption and mismanagement were to be attacked and that has created more popular