Mali War: Timeline & Latest Developments

Mali’s war began on January 16, 2012, when the secular, Tuareg-led National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) attacked Malian army positions in the north, seeking independence for a territory it called Azawad. The MNLA’s ranks were swollen by fighters returning from Libya’s collapsed Gaddafi government, heavily armed and battle-hardened. Within weeks the rebellion had triggered a coup in Bamako, and by early April rebels, now allied with the jihadist group Ansar Dine, had captured Mali’s three main northern cities: Timbuktu, Kidal, and Gao. The MNLA declared Azawad’s independence on April 6, a claim no government recognized. That alliance of convenience did not last: in June 2012, jihadist factions led by the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa defeated the MNLA at the Battle of Gao, and by November, Ansar Dine, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and their allies controlled nearly all of northern Mali under the informal leadership of Ansar Dine’s Iyad Ag Ghali.

France intervened in January 2013 with Operation Serval, halting a jihadist push toward central Mali and, with African and later UN forces, recapturing the north within months. The UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) deployed that July and would go on to become one of the deadliest peacekeeping missions in UN history, losing more than 300 personnel to hostile action before its 2023 withdrawal. France’s Operation Serval gave way in 2014 to the broader, longer-running Operation Barkhane, a regional counterterrorism force. A 2015 peace agreement, the Algiers Accord, brought the Malian government and a Tuareg-led coalition, the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA), into a fragile settlement promising local autonomy, but jihadist violence kept expanding regardless, formalizing in 2017 when several factions merged into Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda affiliate, while a rival Islamic State Sahel Province built its own following in the east. Central Mali, meanwhile, saw a separate and often overlooked dimension of the war: communal violence between Dogon and Fulani militias, including the March 2019 Ogossagou massacre that killed over 150 Fulani civilians, documented by Human Rights Watch.

Mali’s politics turned again in 2020 and 2021. Colonel Assimi Goita led a coup in August 2020 that ousted President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, then led a second coup in May 2021 against the transitional civilian government he had helped install, ultimately taking the presidency himself. As the junta’s relationship with Paris collapsed over delayed elections, it turned to Russia, and Wagner Group mercenaries began deploying to Mali by late 2021. France announced its withdrawal in February 2022; the junta demanded an immediate exit the following month, and the last French troops left Mali on August 15, 2022, ending a nine-year military presence.

Wagner’s arrival coincided with a well-documented rise in mass-casualty abuses attributed to Malian and Russian forces. In late March 2022, Malian troops and Wagner personnel conducted a five-day operation in the central town of Moura. Human Rights Watch documented over 300 people killed; a UN Human Rights Office fact-finding report published in May 2023, built on MINUSMA’s own field investigation, found strong indications that more than 500 people were summarily executed, and documented sexual violence against 58 women and girls. Mali’s government rejected the UN’s findings. Human Rights Watch reported further extrajudicial killings attributed to the army and apparent Wagner fighters in July 2023, part of a pattern that continued despite international condemnation.

MINUSMA’s mandate ended by Security Council resolution in June 2023 at the junta’s request, and its withdrawal, completed that December, removed a stabilizing presence from the north just as tensions with Tuareg groups escalated again. Malian and Wagner forces captured the CMA’s historic stronghold of Kidal in November 2023, and in January 2024 the junta formally terminated the 2015 Algiers Accord altogether. Tuareg forces regrouped as the CSP-DPA and won a major battlefield victory at Tinzaouaten in July 2024, ambushing a Malian-Wagner convoy in what analysts called Wagner’s largest single loss of life in Africa; that November, the CSP dissolved into the more explicitly separatist Azawad Liberation Front (FLA). In parallel, Mali joined Burkina Faso and Niger, both also under military juntas, in the Alliance of Sahel States, formalized as a confederation in July 2024 and formally exiting the West African bloc ECOWAS in January 2025.

By September 2025, JNIM had shifted from territorial insurgency to economic siege, imposing a fuel blockade that has since destroyed over 300 tankers bound for Bamako. In April 2026, the FLA and JNIM launched their first documented coordinated offensive, killing Defense Minister Sadio Camara and retaking Kidal, while Russia’s Africa Corps claimed over 1,000 militants killed in response, a figure that remains unverified. Renewed coordinated attacks followed in July 2026, with analysts describing Malian government forces as increasingly confined to secured enclaves rather than facing imminent collapse. As of mid-2026, roughly 415,000 people remain internally displaced within Mali according to UN OCHA, part of a broader Central Sahel displacement crisis that also spans Burkina Faso’s own, distinct national insurgency, tracked separately at WeaponSpecs’ Burkina Faso insurgency page.