by MOHAMED ISSOUF AG MOHAMED & MARIANA BRAS FONSECA
In Mali, Wagner militias are terrorizing the Fula, Tamasheq (Tuareg), and Moura population.
The Sahel region is facing a series of crises, and the rest of the world seems unaware. In addition to the ecological dimension, which includes advancing desertification and climate catastrophes, the region is experiencing political instability with successive military coups, notably in Mali (2020 and 2021), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023). While for some, these military governments offer hope for a permanent break with French neocolonialism, part of the population is suffering an unprecedented escalation of violence.
After NATO’s invasion of Libya in 2011, criminal networks were formed to smuggle people, weapons, and drugs across the Sahara Desert, expanding beyond national borders and challenging the power of armies. For more than ten years, this region of the African continent has been immersed in a multidimensional crisis that gets worse every day. In the last three years, the number of massacres and deaths of civilians has evidently and alarmingly increased. Mass population displacements are being driven by armed groups, which are sometimes agents of the state and other times third-party agents acting under the protection of the military.
As the eyes of the world are focused on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the military that controls power in Mali is taking advantage of the situation in the Middle East to discreetly exterminate ethnic minorities, using the fight against terrorism as justification. In this context, against a backdrop of a major political crisis and growing international isolation of the military junta in power in Bamako, the Russian mercenary company Wagner arrived in Mali in December 2021 to “help” the military junta in its antiterrorism fight.
Africa is a Country for more