Key Events

Why it mattersThe trigger that turned decades of northern grievance into capability. The returnees provided the core of the MNLA's fighting strength within months.

Why it mattersThe fourth Tuareg rebellion since independence, but the first with Libyan-grade weaponry and a jihadist partner riding alongside — a partnership of convenience whose breakup would define the next phase.

Why it mattersThe coup meant to save the north accelerated its loss: within ten days the three northern regional capitals fell. It also set the template — military seizure of power justified by security failure — repeated in 2020 and 2021.

Why it mattersThe high-water mark of the separatist project — and the moment it began losing control of its own rebellion to the jihadist groups that had fought alongside it.

Why it mattersThe separatist rebellion and the jihadist project were connected but never identical: within three months of "Azawad", the jihadists owned the north and the separatists were in exile. Conflating the two remains the most common analytical error about Mali.

Why it mattersThe intervention prevented the probable fall of the Malian state — but it froze, rather than solved, the questions of governance, legitimacy and the north's status that had produced the collapse.

Why it mattersA fast conventional victory that revealed the war's real shape: the enemy did not need cities. The insurgency traded terrain for time and outlasted the intervention that expelled it.

Why it mattersMINUSMA became the scaffolding of the post-2013 order: protection in the northern cities, logistics the state lacked, and a documentation record — while never having a peace to keep.

Why it mattersThe only comprehensive settlement of the northern question ever signed. Its implementation stalled almost immediately, and its slow death — terminated in 2024 — tracks the whole arc from peace process to renewed war.

Why it mattersCentral Mali proved the insurgency was not a northern or Tuareg phenomenon but a state-absence phenomenon — and put it astride the river, the roads and the food systems the whole country depends on.

Why it mattersThe merger unified command, propaganda and finance across the jihadist field — creating the organisation that now pressures every region of Mali and much of the wider Sahel.

Why it mattersThe moment the central war's communal dimension became undeniable: militia formation, ethnic targeting and jihadist recruitment feeding each other, with civilians paying for every cycle.

Why it mattersSecurity failure once again consumed the civilian order. The coup began the transition-that-isn't: five years on, the officers of August 2020 still govern.

Why it mattersThe "coup within the coup" ended any pretence of rapid civilian return, triggered ECOWAS sanctions and the rupture with France — and opened the door to Moscow.

Why it mattersThe pivot that redrew the Sahel's security architecture: Russian partnership without governance conditions, purchased with mining-adjacent revenue and paid for in a harsher counterinsurgency.

Why it mattersThe end of the intervention era. The capabilities France took with it — air power, medevac, intelligence — were precisely the ones the army and its new Russian partners could not fully replace.

Why it mattersThe junta's defining victory and proof of its drone-enabled model; it held for twenty-nine months. Its loss in April 2026 measures exactly how far the pendulum has swung back.

Why it mattersRemoving the UN buffer detonated the frozen northern question: the race to occupy MINUSMA's camps restarted the war between the state and the CMA within weeks.

Why it mattersThe legal death of the negotiated northern settlement. From this point the state's northern policy is military victory, and the separatists' answer would be reorganisation and revenge.

Why it mattersProof the northern movements retained real combat power after Kidal — and an early, contested signal of tactical convergence between separatists and JNIM against their common enemy.

Why it mattersThe fragmented separatist field became one organisation with one flag — easier to command, easier to ally with, and, as 2026 showed, capable of taking back the north's symbolic capital.

Why it mattersA rebrand more than a withdrawal — but a meaningful one: Moscow's Sahel presence became formal state policy rather than deniable contracting, tying Russian prestige directly to the junta's survival.

Why it mattersThe blockade turned corridor geography into a weapon aimed at the capital: an insurgency strangling a state's economy without taking a single city. It reframed the war as a contest over lifelines, not territory.

Why it mattersThe offensive reversed the junta's signature achievement, demonstrated FLA–JNIM operational coordination at national scale, and reached the government's inner circle. It did not settle control everywhere it touched — but it redrew the map of the possible.

Why it mattersThe attacks showed geographic reach from the Algerian border to Bamako's approaches — pressure on positions, not proof of durable control. Anéfis became the test of whether the government and the Africa Corps can still project force up the Kidal road, and of whether the FLA–JNIM alignment can hold ground against a determined relief effort.