Freddie Ponton21st Century Wire
France did not really leave Mali. It changed tactics and found new hands to carry the gun. After being pushed out by a military government that turned towardRussia,China, and the widerGlobal South, Paris appears to have re-entered the war throughUkrainian military intelligencechannels, long-standingTuaregnetworks, and a battlefield configuration in which separatist rebels andAl-Qaedaʼs Sahel branch were hitting the same state enemy at the same time.
The late-April attacks in Mali said something larger about the Sahel. A former colonial power that had been shown the door was suddenly back in the frame, leaning on intermediaries and the momentum of jihadist advances to weaken a government that had chosen Russian support, Chinese weapons, and the language of anti-colonial independence over its old dependence on Paris.
Paris returns through the back door
The sequence is clear. On 25 April, coordinated attacks struckKati,Gao,Kidal,Sévaréand other strategic points in Mali.Defense Minister Sadio Camara, one of the central figures in Bamako’s post-French realignment and often described as Moscow’s man in the junta, was killed in an attack on his residence. The capital was shaken, roads towardBamakocame under pressure, and in the north, the insurgents advanced as Russian fighters and Malian forces lost ground. Four days later, while the government was still counting its dead,Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane, spokesman for theAzawad Liberation Front, or FLA, surfaced in Paris and met French security and defence representatives while demanding that Russian forces leave Mali. That alone should have set off alarms from Bamako to Brussels.
French media then supplied the missing bridge. Radio Télévision Luxembourg,RTL, reported that France was relying on French-speaking Ukrainian soldiers, including formerForeign Legionpersonnel, to provide operational support on the ground in Mali in coordination with Tuareg rebels. The report was explicit enough to describe a French effort to avoid direct cooperation with jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda by using Ukrainian relays instead. The same investigation recalled that at the beginning of 2025,Ukrainian military intelligence had presented a detailed plan to French authoritiesto help dislodge the juntas in the Sahel region and roll back Russian influence. Paris supposedly hesitated at first on security grounds. From where things stand now, the April operation feels less like an improvised response than the delayed execution of that proposal.
For readers unfamiliar with Mali, one fact matters more than any other. This is a large Sahel state that was once a core part of France’s post-colonial sphere of influence. Aftercoups in 2020 and 2021, the new authorities pushed outFrench troops, challenged the oldFrançafriqueorder, and brought in Russian security support while deepening ties with non-Western partners. That made Mali a test case in Africa’s attempt to break with inherited dependency. Seen from that angle, the April offensive was more than just local tensions between armed factions. In fact, it was part of a wider struggle over who gets to decide the political future of the Sahel.
The offensive that exposed the convergence
The April 25 offensive laid bare the forces converging against Bamako.Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), better known as JNIM, claimed major attacks around the south and center. The FLA and allied Tuareg formations pushed in the north. Together they created the sense of a government under siege, with one arm of the offensive squeezing the capital and another unravelling the junta’s hold on strategic northern towns. JNIM is not a vague insurgent label. It is Al-Qaeda’s official branch in the Sahel, born from a 2017 merger that brought togetherAnsar Dine,AQIMʼs Sahara branch,al-Murabitoonand theMacina Liberation Frontunder the leadership ofIyad Ag Ghali, a veteran Tuareg commander now wanted by theInternational Criminal Court.
IMAGE: Iyad Ag-Ghali à Kidal, in the northern part of Mali, in August 2012. (Source: Romaric Ollo Hien | AFP)
Source: 21st Century Wire
