Lessons for the United States in the Militant Attacks that Killed Mali’s Defense Minister

The security crisis in Africa’s western Sahel region has entered a dangerous new phase with the recent unprecedented and coordinated attacks in military-controlled areas and urban centers of Mali by al Qaeda–linked militant groups and Tuareg separatist forces. The Sahel already accounted for more than half of all terrorism-related deaths globally in 2024 and continued to dominate in 2025 among the 10 countries most affected by terrorism. But the attacks in Mali on April 25 and 26—the largest joint insurgent-separatist offensive in the country since 2012—were particularly shocking, killing the country’s defense minister and forcing the withdrawal of Russia’s Africa Corps (formerly the Wagner Group) from key territory.

The developments reflect a precipitous and fundamental decline in the security situation in Mali and the western Sahel, and they highlight the weakness of the region’s governing military juntas and their Russian partners. The volatile trajectory holds important lessons for the United States as it seeks to reengage in the Sahel to pursue its economic and counterterrorism interests through a model that appears to trade security for resources—one that may risk ignoring the region’s underlying dynamics.

A String of Military Coups

The junta in Mali, like its counterparts in neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, seized power in a string of military coups in the Sahel region between 2020 and 2023. These coups, while instigated by military officers, were largely driven by public frustration with escalating violence as well as widespread corruption and a powerful surge of anticolonial sentiment, mostly directed toward the former colonial power, France, which had been their key security partner and also had struggled to contain the violence.

As ties with France and the West soured, the elected governments and, more so, the military regimes that took over in the wake of the coups increasingly turned to Russia—specifically the Wagner Group and then the Africa Corps—for security assistance. Russia took advantage of internal discontent to position itself as an external champion of the juntas’ nationalist posturing on sovereignty and “pragmatic” security. The military regimes of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger officially withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which had relations with the United States and Europe, and established the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), essentially fracturing a once unified—if weak—regional front against the growing jihadist movements in the region.

The military juntas promised improved security but have mostly failed at that. Instead, they have busied themselves with maneuvering to delay political transitions to civilian rule and fending off various domestic, social, and economic pressures. What the military juntas initially touted as a pivot away from Western dependence to restore sovereignty has instead produced a state weakened even more by a fragmented security landscape. Insurgent groups have expanded, and the juntas’ newly chosen external partner, Russia, has clearly reached the limit of its operational model, judging by Africa Corps forced retreat from Kidal during the recent fighting.

The Trump Administration’s Reengagement

Following years of suspended U.S. cooperation due to the coups, the Trump administration is trying to reengage the United States in the region, though on a platform that it says will be fundamentally different from that of previous U.S. approaches. Nick Checker, the senior bureau official for the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, visited Mali in February and told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy in April in his written statement:

We will pursue a disciplined, interest-driven strategy rooted in flexible realism.... Going forward we will prioritize enabling and cooperating with African nations with demonstrated commitment and capacity to take the lead in addressing their security gaps while advancing core U.S. national interests.

Before the recent attacks in Mali, the administration had lifted sanctions on Wagner-linked officials of the ruling junta, including the late Defense Minister General Sadio Camara, who was the government’s key liaison with Russia. The United States also was nearing a deal with the junta to resume intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance flights over Mali to help battle expanding jihadist activity, and in part to help locate an American missionary pilot kidnapped in Niger in October and believed to be held in Mali by the al Qaeda–linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM).

The Trump administration’s focus on counterterrorism reflects its 2025 National Security Strategy, which outlines plans to address “resurgent Islamist terrorist activity in parts of Africa while avoiding any long-term American presence or commitments.” However, the convergence between al Qaeda–linked terrorist groups and Tuareg separatist forces in the recent attacks in Mali reveals a complicated security landscape that links territorial disputes with broader insurgent campaigns. The main adversaries of the Malian state are not a single terrorist insurgency but a layered network of armed groups. The most prominent include JNIM (itself an amalgam of militant groups aligned with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) and the separatist Tuareg-led Azawad Liberation Front. These groups have increasingly synchronized their operations, combining jihadist ideology with local grievances and separatist aspirations.

The Risks of Divorcing Counterterrorism from Governance and Local Dynamics

This dynamic raises an important question about the limits of external counterterrorism efforts in the region when the approaches are detached from issues of governing legitimacy and local dynamics. Russia’s recent failure in Mali is a case in point: The security arrangement between Mali and Russia is purely transactional. Mali’s junta gained regime protection and counterinsurgency support in return for Russian access to strategic resources and gained geopolitical leverage across the Sahel.

The U.S. approach to reengaging with Mali appears to be taking a similar tack, and it should beware of Russia’s failures in that respect. While Russia had several tactical successes in its security operations in Mali—Wagner Group mercenaries, in cooperation with the Malian army, actually captured Kidal in 2023 before losing it this April—the Kremlin and its paramilitaries had limited strategic control, which allowed insurgents to regroup and reemerge in new areas. In addition, the heavy-handedness of Russia’s military operations and the Malian junta’s repression, including banning political parties and delaying political transitions, alienated important segments of the population and eroded the junta’s legitimacy, allowing insurgents to present themselves as an alternative to a failing state. The recent success of the insurgents in taking back the major northern Malian city of Kidal, a pro-independence stronghold controlled for years by rebel groups before being captured by the Wagner Group in November 2023, is partly due to their ability to exploit localized grievances and distrust of the central government.

Russia’s engagement in Mali is also shaped by broader geopolitical priorities, including the war in Ukraine, which has significantly limited its ability to commit resources elsewhere. This is also an important lesson for the United States to consider, as it is engaged in its own war with Iran.

What Now for the U.S. Reset?

To succeed where Russia has failed, the United States must avoid becoming trapped in the same security-for-resources approach in the Sahel. Trading security guarantees for critical minerals access risks repeating the Russian error of backing authoritarian leaders without demanding accountability. In a conflict defined by a hybrid insurgency that combines conventional and irregular warfare, local grievances, and fluid adversaries, a transactional approach is inherently insufficient because the problem is not only tactical but structural.

The paradox of the junta security strategy across the western Sahel has been the rejection of Western-aligned and more democratically oriented regional and international partners in the face of escalating militant threats. Russia’s narrow focus on protecting junta leaders has accelerated regional fragmentation. ECOWAS, however significant its weaknesses, has been signaling for months its willingness to help address the jihadist threat. The AES is young and weak, and while the group has purchased sophisticated equipment and boasts of a newly formed joint task force, its operational reality is one of severe limitations.

The geographic scope of the recent attacks in Mali, the direct targeting of senior regime officials, and the coordination between jihadist and separatist forces reflect a change in the operational capability of the insurgents that has been building for years and spreading across the western Sahel. U.S. policymakers were caught off guard by the events in Mali, but they can still help shape outcomes moving forward.

The quest for sovereignty in the Sahel is a profound, legitimate, and widely supported goal among local populations. So, even when military juntas use it as a ploy to consolidate power, expel Western forces, and avoid democratic accountability, it remains a critical factor for the United States to take into account and to address. Senior Bureau Official Checker gave a nod to that in his Senate testimony when he said, “there are regional and cultural dynamics that must be accounted for to address the underlying conditions that fuel conflict—weak governance, lack of economic opportunity, and unresolved regional disputes.” But then the rest of his sentence called them “challenges that the U.S. cannot unilaterally address.” Perhaps not unilaterally, but in conjunction with legitimate representatives in Mali, they could be surmountable.

Rather than simply using the same talking points about sovereignty as the Russians, the Trump administration should pursue a multidimensional strategy in the Sahel that focuses on genuine partnership with regional states, addresses economic needs in a principled way that could eventually curb corruption, and honestly confronts anti-Western sentiments.

Certainly, Malian and wider West African public opinion is increasingly sensitive to anything that might be perceived as external interference. That means the United States must strike a fine balance between the pragmatism required to engage with the subregion’s military regimes and an insistence on fundamental democratic values and principles. Only then can Mali—and/or its regional neighbors—prevent the further political and diplomatic isolation of the Sahel states and embrace a renewed collaboration on more equitable terms.

Oge Onubogu is director and senior fellow of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.