Mali is deteriorating again, and in ways that are hard for Paris to ignore. On 18 July, a joint force of JNIM, the regional al-Qaeda affiliate, and the separatist Azawad Liberation Front ambushed a Malian army convoy travelling from Anefis to Gao at Tabankort, killing or capturing scores of soldiers and destroying multiple armoured vehicles.
The FLA’s spokesperson Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane said there were “many soldiers killed, others captured alive” and that “army cars including armoured cars were destroyed and others seized in good condition.” Crucially, the convoy also included members of Russia’s Africa Corps, the paramilitary force that has been supporting Mali’s military since France’s departure, confirming that Russian personnel were caught in the ambush alongside Malian troops.
The attack was not an isolated incident. The JNIM-FLA partnership, formalised after the Tuareg separatist groups merged into the FLA in 2024, produced what observers described as the largest coordinated offensive in Mali in over a decade in April, when simultaneous attacks killed Mali’s defence minister, struck Bamako’s airport and drove Russia’s Africa Corps out of a desert town. Nearly 20% of Mali’s population, around five million people, now require humanitarian assistance. Mali’s ruling junta, despite years of nationalist rhetoric and Russian-backed security support, still cannot control its own territory.
France Left, Russia Arrived, Stability Did Not
Mali is not just another crisis on the African map for Paris. It is the country that most clearly symbolises the collapse of France’s old Sahel strategy. France intervened militarily in 2013 under Operation Serval to stop jihadist advances and spent nearly a decade presenting itself as the indispensable security actor in the region. By the end of 2022, Macron had been forced to withdraw French troops after relations with the junta broke down. Mali then expelled French influence, embraced Russian support and turned the anti-French narrative into a governing ideology. The problem is that what followed French withdrawal was not order. It was the April offensive, the Tabankort ambush and a security situation that continues to worsen.
Mali has since become a running indictment of almost every side in that story. France lost leverage. The junta did not restore order. Russian involvement did not produce security. And yet Paris continues to carry much of the political blame in the wider regional narrative. A Malian court sentenced French intelligence-linked official Yann Vézilier to 20 years in prison in June for allegedly plotting to destabilise the junta, a charge France rejected. The case shows that Mali is still politically useful for anti-French posturing even as its security situation worsens. Paris is not just excluded. It is actively cast as an enemy.
Macron’s Kenya Reset and Its Limits
Macron arrived in Nairobi in May for the Africa Forward Summit with an ambitious offer.
Co-hosted with Kenya, the first such summit ever held with an Anglophone country, it drew 30 African heads of state and produced a €23 billion investment pledge, split between €14 billion from French public and private funds and €9 billion from African co-investors, targeting energy transition, digital technology and agricultural infrastructure. Macron declared a “partnership of equals” and said France could “disagree” with West African governments but “never disagrees with the people.” The summit delivered important optics and real investment commitments. It was also, by design, a gathering of the partners France still has rather than the ones it lost.
As TRT World observed, the countries that expelled France from the Sahel were not in the room. That absence is the structural flaw in Macron’s reset. France can travel to Nairobi, announce investments and speak about partnership, but Mali remains the most visible reminder that French influence in parts of Africa was not gracefully reinvented. It was forcibly reduced, publicly humiliated and replaced by something that is neither more democratic nor more secure.
The Alliance Between Jihadists and Separatists Changes the Calculus
What is happening in Mali right now is bigger than one battlefield setback.
The deepening partnership between JNIM and the FLA is particularly alarming because the two groups have entirely different ultimate objectives. JNIM seeks to impose Islamist governance; the FLA seeks an independent Azawad state. Their tactical coordination since 2024 shows how fragmented and dangerous the conflict has become, and how far the Malian state’s authority has retreated in its own north.
For Macron, that is politically awkward because he spent years arguing that France’s military presence was necessary to prevent exactly this kind of collapse. His critics said the French operation entrenched dependency and inflamed sentiment. His defenders said it was at least containing something worse. Mali’s current disorder gives partial ammunition to both sides, and the ambiguity denies Macron a clean retrospective defence of his Sahel policy.
The Sahel’s worsening insecurity also feeds into European concerns about migration, arms trafficking and organised crime. France once claimed special competence in this theatre. If Mali now looks like a case study in failed Western counterterrorism followed by failed post-Western militarism, France does not emerge looking merely unlucky. It looks like a former power that shaped the region deeply and still cannot escape the consequences. Macron wants to speak about Africa in the language of future partnership. Mali keeps dragging the conversation back to failure, force and the wreckage of the Sahel.
Why the Sahel Remains Macron’s Most Visible Liability
For Macron, that combination is uniquely difficult. Not because France can easily fix Mali now, and not because Mali alone determines France’s Africa policy. It is because Mali remains the sharpest rebuttal to any easy story of strategic success. The country shows what happens when a former colonial power loses control of the narrative, loses military access and then watches the replacement order fail anyway. Kenya offered Macron a clean stage and a willing partner. Mali offers no such stage. It offers only the long, unresolved bill of a policy whose consequences are still accumulating in the Sahara desert.
The Tabankort ambush, with Russian and Malian soldiers caught together in the same convoy by the same insurgents who drove France out, is an almost perfect image of the Sahel’s current disorder. Three actors, three failures, one ambush.
Macron, watching from Nairobi’s investment forums, cannot yet claim that any of this is truly behind him.
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Read also:
Mali Crisis: Patchwork Insurgency Challenges Sahel Confederation
Diplomatic Immunity No Longer: What Mali’s Arrest Means for Europe
Black Winter: Sahel Power Calculus and Global Security Partnerships
