What happened
Bellingcat publishes an investigation into Malian and Africa Corps drone strikes in northern Mali, tying individual incidents to coordinates and to the imagery each finding rests on — among them Amasrakad in March 2024, Tinzaouatène in July and August 2024 and Zouera in July 2025. The investigators describe a recurring dynamic they call guilt by location, in which people are treated as targets on the basis of where they are or what they are moving — fuel or mining among the activities named — rather than on established combatant status. The systems identified are Turkish Bayraktar TB2 and Akıncı aircraft operated by the Malian air force and Shahed-type munitions operated by Africa Corps.
It records the cost of the state's chosen substitute. As ground positions contracted through 2026, strike became the instrument by which the government asserted reach into places it no longer occupied — and this is the first compiled, geolocated account of what that substitution has meant for civilians. The "guilt by location" finding also joins two files the module had kept apart: the transport of fuel is both the thing the insurgency interdicts and, on this account, a criterion by which people have been struck.
Confidence: Moderate
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