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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Al-Qaeda’s new empire rising in Mali. Europe, US, Russia failed to halt its rise

The world’s attention is fixed on the Persian Gulf, but the crisis in Mali demands urgent attention.

From the markets behind the Friday mosque in Bamako—packed with shops selling prayer beads, the Quran and horns, skulls and quills of wild animals used in folk religion alongside medicinal herbs, as well as betting slips for horse races in France—the street loops back to the National Assembly and the offices of 107.4 FM, the state-run Radio Islamique de Bamako. A coup led by Lieutenant-Colonel Amadou Touré in 1991 had dismantled both authoritarian rule and the dysfunctional socialism that had kept Mali, a landlocked country in West Africa, among the world’s poorest nations. 

For a while, the marketplace seemed evidence that many faiths and practices could coexist.

Last week, jihadists from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM)—the Al-Qaeda-led coalition operating across the Sahel—swept aside Mali’s small army and its Russian mercenary forces in the northern city of Kidal. Bamako itself has been under siege for months.

Even as jihadists tightened their grip on the capital, the International Criminal Court announced $8.4 million in damages for 65,000 victims subjected to violence by JNIM’s predecessor groups in 2012. The city where the worst atrocities took place, Timbuktu, has been under siege since 2023 and tens of thousands of refugees have fled. Flights to the city were suspended last week.

The world’s attention is fixed on the Persian Gulf, but the crisis in Mali demands urgent attention: for the first time since the fall of Kabul in 2021, a jihadist organisation is close to seizing control of a nation-state. France sent its military to Mali in 2012 and liberated Timbuktu from jihadist control after ten months of fighting. JNIM retreated into the desert and waited. After another coup in 2021, French troops left Mali. The Russian mercenaries who replaced them proved both brutal and ineffective.

Evidence of an emerging problem has been evident for decades. 

Warning signs had been visible for decades. Around 1992, the scholar Benjamin Soares recorded an early public expression of Islamist pressure: “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” a handwritten sign read, “We ask the management to stop the advertising and........

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