The systems a war and an economy actually run on: import corridors, ports, border crossings, transit nodes and regional hubs. Each record states what depends on the system and how completely, what has documentably disrupted it, and what disruption does. Dependence is the strategic fact — a corridor matters because there is no substitute for it.
Three overland routes supply a landlocked state's entire fuel demand — and since September 2025 they have been the target of a declared blockade.
6 nodes2 documented disruptionsConfidence: HighStatus as of 2026-07Reviewed 2026-07-26
Why it matters. This is the clearest case in the module of an insurgency taxing an entire national economy without taking a city. Fuel sets transport costs, transport costs set food prices, and electricity in the capital depends on the same imports. A campaign against these corridors reaches every household in Mali without a shot being fired near most of them.
Every force that has tried to hold the far north has had to hold one desert road — and the 2026 fighting was fought for exactly that.
6 nodes4 documented disruptionsConfidence: ModerateStatus as of 2026-07Reviewed 2026-07-26
Why it matters. Mali's war is decided on roads, not in cities. A garrison that cannot be supplied overland is a garrison that will eventually be withdrawn or lost, which is what the reported negotiated withdrawals from Tessalit and the far north in April 2026 demonstrated. Reading the northern conflict as a contest over towns misses the mechanism; reading it as a contest over sustainment explains both the 2023 recapture of Kidal and its 2026 reversal.
Context, not targeting. These records describe strategic dependence and documented disruption history. The schema has no fields for capacities, schedules, convoy composition, escort arrangements, storage or facility layout, and the alternatives section describes whether redundancy exists — never which route to use. See the methodology.