Malian and Nigerien Rebels Explore Cooperation

The two rebel groups don't have the capacity to ignite a full-scale regional war, but they do undercut Sahelian juntas' narratives of dominance.

In late August, a delegation from the Nigerien rebel group the Patriotic Liberation Front (Front Patriotique de Libération, FPL) met leaders of the Malian rebel group the Permanent Strategic Framework (Cadre stratégique permanent, CSP). The two groups met in Tinzaouatène, northern Mali, now a highly symbolic location due to (1) the defeat that the CSP (and, reportedly, jihadists) inflicted on Malian soldiers and Wagner Group (Russian paramilitary) personnel in July and (2) the drone strikes that the Malian military has conducted there after the defeat, strikes in which foreign gold miners - including Nigeriens - have been killed.

The CSP, to make a long story short, is the latest name borne by a coalition of rebels and politicians in northern Mali, some of whom have been fixtures of local, national, and regional politics since as far back as the 1990s. Not all members of the CSP are Tuareg, but many of its leaders belong to that ethnic group. The most prominent face of the CSP is Alghabass ag Intalla, who has been many things - elected official, rebel leader, (briefly) jihadist, etc. The factions in the CSP all participated in various ways in the major northern Malian uprising of 2012, and some key leaders were also part of the rebellions of 1990 and 2006. Between 2015 and 2023, a peace deal called the Algiers Accord created an ostensible roadmap towards an enduring peace between the government in Bamako and what became, in 2021, the CSP. The Algiers Accord was under considerable strain within just a few years of its signing, but it was the military coup of August 2020 that set in motion the unraveling of the Accord. In 2022-2023, the departure of French troops as well as a United Nations peacekeeping mission touched off a scramble for control of key bases in northern Mali, which precipitated direct conflict between the CSP and the Malian military, culminating in the military’s push into the CSP’s stronghold of Kidal in November 2023. The Malian military authorities pronounced the Algiers Accord dead in January 2024. The CSP are thus once again rebels at war with the authorities in Bamako.

The FPL, meanwhile, is one of several Nigerien rebel groups opposed to the military authorities that took power in Niamey in July 2023. The FPL is led by an ethnically Tebu/Toubou university graduate named Mahmoud Sallah (you can read a brief biography of him in French here). Sallah founded an earlier rebel group, the Union of Patriotic Forces for Reconstruction, in 2020. The FPL emerged soon after the 2023 coup, one symptom of the ways in which the coup made various northern Nigerien figures and communities nervous - specifically, nervous that the new authorities in Niamey might turn hostile towards the Tuareg and Tebu, after the previous civilian authorities had made some efforts to bring Tuareg elites, in particular, into the government. The FPL gained some attention in June 2024 for its attack on a pipeline in Niger, but confronting the FPL has not been as large of a priority for authorities in Niamey as confronting the CSP has for the authorities in Bamako.

How might the CSP and the FPL work together? As Yvan Guichaoua comments in this interview, the full military integration of the two forces appears highly unlikely given their different areas of operations, priorities, etc. - so this appears more “an exercise in political communication.” The two rebel groups were quick to mediatize the event - see some photographs and comments from both sides (the link is to the account of the High Council for the Unity of Azawad, one component of the CSP) here. If anything, I would say the meeting boosts the profile of the FPL, signaling that they are taken seriously by the Sahel’s most prominent non-jihadist rebel coalition.

The alignment between the CSP and the FPL also appears to be a reaction of sorts to the Sahel states’/juntas’ own efforts at integration in the form of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). The Malian military has drawn on help from its sister militaries in responding to the rebellion in the north; notably, in the FPL’s statement condemning the strikes that killed Nigerien and other miners at Tinzaouatene, the FPL blamed “the evil forces of the Alliance of Sahel States” rather than just the Malian military. At the rhetorical level, the CSP and the FPL are depicting their struggles as regional rather than national. The CSP, too, has words of criticism for the juntas beyond Mali, for example the one in Burkina Faso. One can also add that even when Niamey was under civilian control, there was little love lost between Nigerien leaders and northern Malian rebels, although at times circumstances compelled them to talk to each other.

Where is all this headed? At a minimum, the defeat of the Malian forces and Wagner at Tinzaouatene - and the FPL’s pipeline attack in June - show that these rebel forces are serious thorns in the side of the juntas in Bamako and Niamey. Neither rebel force appears poised to take major towns; the CSP is still in exile from Kidal, after all. In that sense, the situation is so far less threatening to the authorities than were past rebellions, for example the Malian rebellion of 2012 or the Nigerien rebellions of the 1990s and the late 2000s. Yet perhaps precisely because the juntas have arrived promising strength, national empowerment, and a reassertion of dignity and sovereignty, any serious rebel activity dents the image the soldiers would like to project - and also complicates the image the juntas would like to project, namely that of brave soldiers facing down jihadists. A stalemate of sorts on the ground, then, combined with a war of perceptions and information that is as fierce as ever.