Surrender or die. Last Saturday, the fewer than 400 Russian soldiers defending the military base in Kidal, the symbolic city of the Tuareg in northern Mali, had to choose between life or a retreat smelling of failure. They chose to live.
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After the largest coordinated attack in recent decades on several cities in the country, including the capital, hundreds of heavily armed rebels from the Tuareg group Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and jihadists from the Al Qaeda branch in the Sahel, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), took control of Kidal and allowed the negotiated exit of the Russian uniformed personnel, members of Africa Corps, heirs of the Wagner mercenary group after its absorption by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Although precisely the Russian defense minister assured this week that his men had prevented a coup and saved the population from a massacre after fighting for 24 hours, local informants claim that the Africa Corps troops negotiated their exit, with Algeria’s mediation, after being surrounded and overwhelmed by an unprecedented attack and that in another offensive the same day on the outskirts of the capital ended with the death of the defense minister, Sadio Camara. The images published this week by the think tank Osint Sahel with examples of the enormous military arsenal abandoned intact to rebel hands – armored vehicles, mobile artillery systems, Turkish drone control centers… – lend credibility to a negotiated exit that avoided the death of the Russian Africa Corps detachment in Kidal.
The Russians “left the Malian soldiers behind to be captured like rats”
Moussa Kondo, former officer and current director of the Institute for Democracy in the Sahel, based in Bamako, denounced that the decision was a every man for himself. “They left the Malian soldiers behind to be captured like rats,” he said in the Financial Times. A Malian officer cited by Radio France Internationale spoke directly of betrayal.
The weekend attack marks a before and after in the Russian presence in Mali. Both the death of Minister Camara, Russian-speaking and the main architect of the alliance between the Mali government and Moscow five years ago, and the fall of Kidal are a stab to Russia’s credibility to contain jihadist violence and underline the failure of President Assimi Goïta’s plan, who after coming to power following two coups in 2020 and 2021 expelled French troops and turned to Putin to guarantee his security.
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Jihadists and Tuaregs advance towards other cities in northern Mali
Although JNIM and FLA forces are already approaching other northern cities such as Gao or Timbuktu and the rebel advance seems not to have ended, the fall of Kidal is a step further: it is the symbol of Russian failure in Mali. When in 2023 the Tuareg capital, emblem of the desired state of Azawad, was recovered by the Malian army with the help of Africa Corps, after years in the hands of jihadists, from Bamako and Moscow it was sold as irrefutable proof of the success of rapprochement with Moscow and proof of France’s inability to contain jihadism for more than a decade in the region. The celebration for Kidal has proven premature: since then jihadist violence has increased, the Sahel has become the epicenter of global deaths from terrorism, and fundamentalist groups have multiplied their power to control vast areas of the country.
For the military affairs think tank SOFREP, the fall of Kidal is not just a lost battle. “Mali not only lost a city, it also lost the public argument for why the junta expelled the French, sidelined the United Nations, broke security ties with the West, and imported Moscow’s hard men to do what the Western-backed counterterrorism fight had not finished. The junta promised sovereignty. Russia promised results. Kidal now belongs to the same forces the junta said it would crush.”
In his first public appearance after the attacks, President Goïta appeared in the room accompanied by senior Russian commanders and assured he had everything under control. On Tuesday, the jihadist-rebel coalition of JNIM and FLA announced it was beginning a siege of the capital to definitively bring down Bamako and take control of Mali.
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