Key Events

Why it mattersThe trigger that turned decades of northern grievance into capability. The returnees provided the core of the MNLA's fighting strength within months.

Why it mattersThe fourth Tuareg rebellion since independence, but the first with Libyan-grade weaponry and a jihadist partner riding alongside — a partnership of convenience whose breakup would define the next phase.

Why it mattersThe coup meant to save the north accelerated its loss: within ten days the three northern regional capitals fell. It also set the template — military seizure of power justified by security failure — repeated in 2020 and 2021.

Why it mattersThe high-water mark of the separatist project — and the moment it began losing control of its own rebellion to the jihadist groups that had fought alongside it.

Why it mattersThe separatist rebellion and the jihadist project were connected but never identical: within three months of "Azawad", the jihadists owned the north and the separatists were in exile. Conflating the two remains the most common analytical error about Mali.

Why it mattersThe intervention prevented the probable fall of the Malian state — but it froze, rather than solved, the questions of governance, legitimacy and the north's status that had produced the collapse.

Why it mattersA fast conventional victory that revealed the war's real shape: the enemy did not need cities. The insurgency traded terrain for time and outlasted the intervention that expelled it.

Why it mattersMINUSMA became the scaffolding of the post-2013 order: protection in the northern cities, logistics the state lacked, and a documentation record — while never having a peace to keep.

Why it mattersThe only comprehensive settlement of the northern question ever signed. Its implementation stalled almost immediately, and its slow death — terminated in 2024 — tracks the whole arc from peace process to renewed war.

Why it mattersCentral Mali proved the insurgency was not a northern or Tuareg phenomenon but a state-absence phenomenon — and put it astride the river, the roads and the food systems the whole country depends on.

Why it mattersThe merger unified command, propaganda and finance across the jihadist field — creating the organisation that now pressures every region of Mali and much of the wider Sahel.

Why it mattersThe moment the central war's communal dimension became undeniable: militia formation, ethnic targeting and jihadist recruitment feeding each other, with civilians paying for every cycle.

Why it mattersSecurity failure once again consumed the civilian order. The coup began the transition-that-isn't: five years on, the officers of August 2020 still govern.

Why it mattersThe "coup within the coup" ended any pretence of rapid civilian return, triggered ECOWAS sanctions and the rupture with France — and opened the door to Moscow.

Why it mattersThe pivot that redrew the Sahel's security architecture: Russian partnership without governance conditions, purchased with mining-adjacent revenue and paid for in a harsher counterinsurgency.

Why it mattersDjibo is the blockade instrument applied completely, and it is why this module covers Burkina Faso and Mali together. What Bamako has experienced since 2025 as corridor interdiction, Djibo has experienced since 2022 as total encirclement: population concentrated inside, roads mined, convoys ambushed, supply by air. The siege has run for more than four years and the town has not fallen — which is also the point. This is a method for making a place ungovernable without capturing it.

Why it mattersThe end of the intervention era. The capabilities France took with it — air power, medevac, intelligence — were precisely the ones the army and its new Russian partners could not fully replace.

Why it mattersThe second coup gave Burkina Faso the government it still has and the doctrine it still fights under — mass civilian mobilisation through the Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland, declared as "total war". It also completed the Sahel's political realignment: within a year, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger were all governed by officers who had seized power on the argument that the previous order was losing the war. The argument has not been vindicated: insecurity and displacement have both worsened since.

Why it mattersThe third of the region's coups, and the one that completed the bloc. Within eighteen months Niger had expelled both of its Western security partners, joined the confederation its neighbours had formed, and replaced its constitution. It is also the coup that produced the sharpest external reaction: the ECOWAS threat of intervention that followed it is what turned a mutual-defence pact between Mali and Burkina Faso into a bloc of three.

Why it mattersThe junta's defining victory and proof of its drone-enabled model; it held for twenty-nine months. Its loss in April 2026 measures exactly how far the pendulum has swung back.

Why it mattersRemoving the UN buffer detonated the frozen northern question: the race to occupy MINUSMA's camps restarted the war between the state and the CMA within weeks.

Why it mattersThe legal death of the negotiated northern settlement. From this point the state's northern policy is military victory, and the separatists' answer would be reorganisation and revenge.

Why it mattersProof the northern movements retained real combat power after Kidal — and an early, contested signal of tactical convergence between separatists and JNIM against their common enemy.

Why it mattersThe end of the Western counter-terrorism architecture in the Sahel, and the clearest single measure of what the region's realignment cost the states that made it. Niger gave up a surveillance and strike capability that has not been publicly replaced, in a theatre where its own losses have since become an internal political problem. The overlap at Air Base 101 — Russian trainers arriving while American troops were still on the base — is the substitution stated in its plainest form.

Why it mattersThe fragmented separatist field became one organisation with one flag — easier to command, easier to ally with, and, as 2026 showed, capable of taking back the north's symbolic capital.

Why it mattersNiger was the first of the three to close its political system, and it did so most completely: Mali revised a charter and Burkina Faso extended an assembly mandate, but Niger replaced its constitution outright and framed the result as a founding act rather than an interim arrangement. Read alongside Mali in May 2025 and Burkina Faso in January 2026, the sequence is the strongest evidence available that the AES is a convergence rather than three parallel accidents.

Why it mattersA rebrand more than a withdrawal — but a meaningful one: Moscow's Sahel presence became formal state policy rather than deniable contracting, tying Russian prestige directly to the junta's survival.

Why it mattersThis is the module's largest political development of 2025 and the point at which the transition stopped being a timetable that kept slipping and became an arrangement with no end condition anyone outside the government can verify. Every subsequent legitimacy question in this module — what the government is fighting to preserve, what a negotiated outcome could even look like, why security failure translates so directly into political risk — runs through it. The dates matter because the module previously placed this process a year too early.

Why it mattersThe blockade turned corridor geography into a weapon aimed at the capital: an insurgency strangling a state's economy without taking a single city. It reframed the war as a contest over lifelines, not territory.

Why it mattersThe three AES states face insurgencies that cross their shared borders daily while fighting them nationally, and this force is the stated answer to that asymmetry. Recording the inauguration is not the same as recording a capability: no joint operation attributable to it has been independently documented since, and whether anything it does becomes observable on the ground is one of the module's standing questions. Vigil records the institution as created and withholds the judgement on whether it works.

Why it mattersThis is the best-evidenced Africa Corps engagement anywhere in this module: an official Russian statement, a public acknowledgement from the head of the host state, and a specific casualty account. It establishes that Russia will say publicly that its forces fought alongside a Sahelian army against a jihadist attack — which is the baseline against which the far less well-sourced reports of Russian involvement in the August mutiny should be read. The reported participation of Islamic State West Africa Province is recorded as a fact about this attack; this module does not cover the Lake Chad system.

Why it mattersThis closed the last of the three political systems, and the order matters: Niger in March 2025, Mali in May 2025, Burkina Faso in January 2026. All three now run multi-year transitions with no electoral date and no legal opposition. Whatever else the confederation is, it is the institutional form of that shared position — and it means there is no scheduled moment at which any of these governments has to answer for the security record that justified taking power.

Why it mattersThe offensive reversed the junta's signature achievement, demonstrated FLA–JNIM operational coordination at national scale, and reached the government's inner circle. It did not settle control everywhere it touched — but it redrew the map of the possible. The withdrawals are the part that lasted: positions across three northern regions were given up inside three days, several of them reportedly by negotiation rather than in battle, and none has been retaken. Two of the three gains that were seized rather than vacated — Labbezanga and Ménaka — were taken from ground already abandoned or given up again within days, which is the distinction between reach and control this module keeps insisting on.

Why it mattersThe attacks showed geographic reach from the Algerian border to Bamako's approaches — pressure on positions, not proof of durable control. Anéfis became the test of whether the government and the Africa Corps can still project force up the Kidal road, and of whether the FLA–JNIM alignment can hold ground against a determined relief effort.

Why it mattersSan is a regional town on the road between Bamako and Mopti, and the attack is the module's recurring problem in its clearest form: the two sides are not disagreeing about what happened but about what it means to hold a place for a few hours. Vigil's standing rule is that attack reach is not territorial control, and it cuts both ways here — a JNIM video inside a compound does not establish control of San, and an army statement that an assault was repelled does not establish that the road is secure. What the episode does establish is that a garrison at a regional centre on a main axis could be assaulted at scale, and that the state's account of the result now comes partly from a foreign contractor.

Why it mattersThis is the second documented case in three weeks, after the 31 July findings on the June air strikes at Kyrnia in the same region, and the pattern that is now established is not about any single incident. It is that credible documentation is being produced at intervals, that it is being put to both governments in writing, and that no investigation, denial or response follows. That silence is itself the accountability finding: there is no channel through which conduct by a foreign force operating alongside the Malian army is examined by anyone who can act on it. Vigil records the allegations as the organisation's findings and takes no position on individual criminal responsibility.

Why it mattersTwo things about this are established and one is not, and keeping them apart is the whole value of the record. Established: soldiers from the units taking the heaviest losses in the western theatre turned on the capital, which makes battlefield attrition an internal political fact rather than only a military one; and the base they attacked is where Russia's force and the confederation's joint command both sit. Not established: what Russia did. Reporting attributes aerial and ground support to Africa Corps personnel, but no official statement from either government has been identified — unlike the January airport attack, where Moscow spoke within days — and Russian personnel were themselves reportedly captured during the fighting. That leaves two readings the evidence cannot separate: that Africa Corps chose to defend the government in an internal political contest, or that it defended its own base and people against an attack aimed at them. Those imply very different things about what the partnership is for, and Vigil does not choose between them. A single official account would settle it.