Mali: Some Implications of JNIM's July 1 Attacks
Will the skeletal Malian state be reduced to just a skull?
On July 1, the jihadist organization Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims, JNIM) attacked seven Malian military posts at, from west to east in the map below, Diboli, Kayes, Sandaré, Nioro du Sahel, Gogui, Molodo, and Niono (Molodo and Niono appear conflated on the map as they are only four kilometers apart). The attack at Kayes was especially complex, targeting not just soldiers but also administrative sites; reportedly, the attack also involved the seizure of four hostages and the vandalism of a cemetery and a factory in the villages around the city.
There are a number of implications one can take from the attacks. Many analysts and journalists have already made these points, yet let’s rehearse them briefly:
The coordination and sophistication of the attacks points to JNIM’s power. Perhaps instead of calling them a “group” or an “organization,” we should be calling them a “military.”
The cities and towns targeted include some very important ones: Kayes is the administrative center of the Kayes Region, one of Mali’s ten (or nineteen, depending on whom you ask) regions, and the city has a population of well over 100,000. Nioro du Sahel is an important religious center.
The geography of the attacks undoubtedly caused alarm in Senegal and Mauritania. Neither country is unfamiliar with the threat. Mauritania had its own period of jihadist attacks from 2005-2011, and the Malian-Mauritanian border has been a source of deep concern for authorities in Nouakchott arguably since at least 2010. For its part, Senegal has so far been free of attacks, but escalating violence in southwestern Mali and reports of jihadist recruitment inside Senegal indicate the risks Senegal faces; the attack at Diboli in particular will reinforce the Senegalese authorities’ worries, and they have already stepped up border security.
To further clarify the import of these attacks, we can bring in some additional context, namely three other sets of JNIM attacks from the past year, starting with the most recent and working our way backwards:
The June 1 and 5 attacks at Boulkessi (or Boulikessi) and the June 2 attack at Timbuktu. Those three attacks, especially when viewed in combination with the July 1 attacks, underscore the point about the geographical range and military sophistication that JNIM is now showing. Boulkessi is more than 700 kilometers east of Niono by road, and more than 1400 kilometers east of Kayes; Niono to Timbuktu is nearly 900 kilometers by road. JNIM has conducted plenty of attacks in southwestern Mali before, but the past month highlights the group’s presence across much of the territory of what is, after all, a large country. Even more important, the attacks at Boulkessi prompted the Malian military to withdraw from their base there. That retreat represents, in my view, a double blow for the Malian military regime that has been in power since 2020: first, the loss of territory; and second, a clear hole in the narrative of a “rise in power” under the junta. The attack at Timbuktu, meanwhile, reinforces the sense that even where the Malian military is not (yet) withdrawing, it is embattled. Timbuktu is another regional capital and one of several key cities in the north.
The January 6-7 attack at Nioro du Sahel, which I wrote about here. Nioro is, as I mentioned above, a key religious center in Mali, and the January attack shattered that city’s sense of security. It is significant that Nioro has now suffered two major attacks within a single year. A key turning point for any Malian (or Sahelian) town amid this long-running jihadist insurgency is being targeted repeatedly, which can evolve into a war of attrition with the kind of consequences seen in the Malian military’s withdrawal from Boulkessi. The ultimate question for the southwest is whether JNIM can replicate there what it achieved in central Mali, in parts of the Mopti and Ségou Regions, not just conducting attacks but wearing down the military’s control, intimidating local civilian authorities into fleeing or acquiescing, and thereby building a shadow government.
The September 17, 2024 JNIM attack on military installations in Mali’s capital Bamako, which I covered here. That attack represented JNIM’s reach into the heart of the junta’s power, in another rebuke that was both physical and symbolic. I still do not believe JNIM is close to marching on Bamako, but the combined picture of the withdrawal from Boulkessi, the shock of the seven attacks on July 1, and the not-so-distant memory of a major hit-and-run assault on the capital all adds up to a grim position for the country’s military rulers.
With all that said, it’s worth bearing in mind that the trajectory of jihadism in this region has often been more complex than just linear expansion. JNIM confronts a mosaic of opportunities and constraints, including the ways its expansion can trigger counter-reactions among ethnic and community-based vigilante and self-defense groups. The junta, for its part, appears to retain substantial popularity in Bamako at least and still registers some victories against jihadists. And if Russia’s position in Mali is in flux, Russian forces have nevertheless not completely left. JNIM’s calculus is also sometimes hard to decipher and predict - why hit Bamako hard, for example, and then not hit it again soon after? Is this lack of manpower, is this a strategy to move pieces all over the “chessboard of Mali,” is this the sign that there are debates and divergences within JNIM over how to proceed?
One key question is what JNIM wants and whether it knows what it wants - and to answer that we’d need to also disaggregate what and who we mean by JNIM. What Iyad ag Ghali, JNIM’s top leader, wants may be different from what unit commanders want in the southwest, which again may be different from what unit commanders want in central Mali or in Burkina Faso or in Benin, etc. The coordination of the July 1 attacks certainly suggests a unified purpose and vision regarding how to weaken the Malian military’s position in the southwest. Yet, in a point I think I’ve repeated ad nauseam by now, it’s never been clear to me what lessons JNIM took from the experience of overtly controlling territory in northern Mali in 2012-2013 (note that JNIM did not exist until 2017, so here I mean what lessons JNIM’s predecessor organizations brought into JNIM). Did Sahelian jihadists conclude from their defeat at French hands in 2013 that overt territorial control was a mistake, or that they needed to manage governance better, or that it was preferable to run an open-ended insurgency combined with shadow governance? If the latter, where does that open-ended campaign lead? There was significant intra-jihadist discussion about these points immediately after the 2012-2013 experience and amid some parallel experiences in Somalia and Yemen, etc., but also worth bearing in mind is that many JNIM fighters now, in 2025, were children in 2012. Whatever lessons the veteran rebel/jihadist ag Ghali took from 2012 may not be relevant to, or shared by, footsoldiers who were born in 2007.
As JNIM figures this out, I think it’s possible that we’ll see the Malian junta’s control shrink down to just Bamako and perhaps a few other urban centers. The Malian state is, to unpack the metaphor from this post’s subtitle, already skeletal. There are large swaths of Mali and especially rural Mali that the state has not effectively controlled for years. Indeed, jihadism in Mali and in the Sahel has taken on a largely rural character, although I wonder whether the July 1 attacks mark a trend towards more urban-focused violence. In any case, the skeletal state now faces the prospect of some of its “limbs” being lopped off, exactly as occurred at Boulkessi. We could attribute JNIM’s growing boldness and reach to various factors (some of which would be pure speculation), but one clear factor in my view is the simple force of momentum: wherever JNIM wins or indeed wherever it shocks or softens a target, it makes it easier to attack the same target again, or to pounce on another target, until the authorities are either under siege or are forced to pull back. Significantly, shortly after the July 1 attack, JNIM announced a blockade (one of its core tactics) against Kayes and Nioro, reinforcing the sense that those cities are now ongoing rather than sporadic targets. JNIM’s momentum runs, to repeat myself, in a zigzagging direction, but it does seem we’re seeing the culmination of certain trends from 2015 onwards. I don’t know what it would mean for the “body” to be separated from the “skull” of the state in Bamako. Even then, perhaps some formal shred of a state would continue to function - see Somalia and Central African Republic for examples. JNIM certainly does appear to have the basic ingredients in place for exercising something like national sway now, though, perhaps minus Bamako itself.