Campaigns

The largest coordinated offensive since 2012 — two movements with incompatible end-states fighting as one.

April 2026 – present3 phases2 linked eventsConfidence: ModerateAssessed as of 2026-08Last reviewed 2026-08-30

Why it matters. The offensives reversed the junta's signature military achievement and demonstrated reach from the Algerian border to the capital's approaches. But their significance is structural rather than territorial: two organisations with incompatible objectives — religious rule and self-determination — are fighting as one. Whether that alignment holds is the single biggest variable in the war, and it is a political question, not a military one.

An insurgency strangling a state's economy without taking a city — declared September 2025, eased once, and reimposed in April 2026.

Declared September 2025; eased and reimposed since5 phases3 linked eventsConfidence: ModerateAssessed as of 2026-08Last reviewed 2026-08-30

Why it matters. This campaign changed what the war is about. For a decade the question was who holds which towns; the blockade made the question whether the state can keep its economy running. It reaches every household in Mali, it is cheap to sustain, and it cannot be answered by the drone-and-column approach that retook Kidal in 2023 — there is no position to seize. It is also the reason the economic, humanitarian and military pictures in this module converge on one set of roads.

Niger's share of the tri-border war — the area that recorded the central Sahel's highest civilian death toll from attacks in 2025.

Documented pattern since 20253 phases2 linked eventsConfidence: ModerateAssessed as of 2026-08Last reviewed 2026-08-30

Why it matters. Two things make this more than a national security file. First, the perpetrator ranking: a state's own military placed second, ahead of an al-Qaeda-aligned coalition, in killings of civilians on its own territory is a finding that changes what counter-insurgency here means — and it is the finding of the analysts who count the incidents, not Vigil's. Second, the August mutiny: soldiers from the units carrying these losses attacked the seat of government. That is the clearest evidence in this module that battlefield attrition in the Sahel is not only a military problem for these states but a political one, and it is the mechanism by which a border region's war reaches a capital without any armed group going there.

Four years of total encirclement of a provincial capital — the blockade instrument applied completely rather than partially.

Since February 20223 phases1 linked eventsConfidence: ModerateAssessed as of 2026-08Last reviewed 2026-08-30

Why it matters. This is the same instrument as the Malian fuel blockade, applied without limit, and running four years longer. Where Bamako has been squeezed through its import corridors, Djibo has been enclosed: the population concentrated inside it by force, the roads denied, the supply line moved into the air. It is also the clearest available answer to the question the whole module keeps asking — whether reach becomes control. Here an armed coalition has had a town surrounded for over four years and has not taken it, while the state has held a town it cannot administer or supply by road. Neither side's position is what a map of control would show.