A familiar claim keeps surfacing in the rhetoric of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger’s ruling juntas, echoed enthusiastically by Russian state media: the West is deliberately working to destabilise the Sahel’s military governments. It’s a tidy story. It bundles sanctions, frozen aid and diplomatic isolation into a single narrative of conspiracy. But look closely at…
Fighters attack ‘Africa’s Alcatraz’, which detains high-value prisoners, and disrupt crucial supply chains to the capital. In a new wave of attacks in Mali, an al-Qaeda-linked group has stormed a main prison housing fighters from the armed group and set fire to trucks with food supplies heading to the capital Bamako. Fighters from the Jama’at…
The coordinated attacks that shook Mali on 25-27 April 2026 are not an anomaly. They are the culmination of a long, deteriorating security trajectory–one that has steadily eroded state authority, exposed strategic miscalculations, and now threatens to overwhelm national and regional security architectures. At the centre of this crisis lies a troubling reality: Mali is…
