Mali: Al-Qaeda affiliate JINM claims responsibility for deadly terror attack in capital Bamako

An extremist group affiliated with Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for a deadly assault on two military sites in Mali’s capital, Bamako, on Tuesday, bringing a conflict that has ravaged vast swaths of the country to the capital for the first time since 2016.

Mali, a large, landlocked West African nation in the Sahel region, just south of the Sahara, has been battling an Islamist insurgency for 12 years. But the conflict has been mostly concentrated in the north and center of the country and has largely spared Bamako, in the southwest.

Before Tuesday’s assault, the last attack in Bamako was in 2016, when armed gunmen attacked a hotel that had been converted into the headquarters of a European Union military training mission.

Here’s what to know about the attack and security in Mali.

How did the attack unfold?

The first target on Tuesday was a school for military police in Faladié, a neighborhood halfway between Bamako’s downtown and its airport. Attackers opened fire around 5:30 a.m. and then entered the school, according to two security force members and an official in the presidential office who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to comment publicly on the attack.

They said the attackers then made their way toward an air base south of the Bamako airport, which hosts personnel from Wagner, the private Russian military group, according to Western officials.

Mali’s armed forces blamed “a group of terrorists” for the assault and said that as of 9 a.m., it was working to clear the area around the school.

Hours later, the Islamist group JNIM issued a statement saying it was behind that attack and the later one on the air base. The U.S. government has designated JNIM a terrorist organization.

The assailants set fire to a Malian government aircraft used by Mali’s military leader, Col. Assimi Goïta, and fired shots while roaming inside the presidential terminal as well as a large hangar, according to photographs and videos published by the group and verified as authentic by The New York Times.

It was unclear how many insurgents had stormed the sites or whether they were part of the same commando.

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Several officers were killed or injured, according to the two members of Mali’s security forces, who said a dozen ambulances carried the soldiers to one of Bamako’s largest hospitals. A doctor at the hospital said that more than 20 soldiers wounded in the assault were being treated there as of Tuesday morning.

Maj. Gen. Oumar Diarra, the chief of general staff of the Malian military, said on Mali’s public television that all attackers had been killed or arrested as of Tuesday afternoon, though he did not provide details.

Who is the extremist group behind the attack?

The members of JNIM want an Islamist state in West Africa that is based on a strict interpretation of Muslim laws and values. They regularly attack military forces and have killed countless civilians who refuse to cooperate with them.

JNIM stands for Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, which is Arabic for Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims. It was established in 2017 when five Islamist groups in Mali, including Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, announced that they were merging.

Mali, a country twice the size of Ukraine, began to implode in the wake of the 2011 NATO-led overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime dictator of Libya, over 1,000 miles away. A flood of heavily armed rebels poured out of Libya and into Mali, where they conquered the country’s three northern cities, including the historic Timbuktu.

Islamist insurgents then ousted the rebels and imposed strict Shariah law. Exploiting socioeconomic and political grievances that many hold against the Malian state, they have since grown in parts of neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger. JNIM is now one of the deadliest extremist organizations in West Africa, along with the regional branch of the Islamic State.

The group’s leader, Iyad Ag Ghaly, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity that the court says were committed by a different group he led in 2012 and 2013 in northern Mali.

How has Mali tried to defeat insurgents?

Successive Malian governments have tried to stem the advance of Islamist groups, with limited success so far.

Mali’s government initially asked France, its former colonial power, for military support. The presence of French troops was initially welcome: They took back the northern cities in 2013. But over the next decade, the 2,500 French troops posted in Mali became increasingly unpopular as insurgents kept making inroads from the north to the center and over Mali’s borders.

In 2020, coup plotters overthrew Mali’s unpopular elected government, replacing it with a military junta that has been in power ever since. It was the first of a string of coups in countries in a long belt across Africa’s middle.

Relations between Mali’s junta and France soured, and Malian military leaders ejected French troops in 2022. Colonel Goïta, Mali’s interim president, turned to Russia. About 1,500 operatives from the Wagner group have been deployed since early 2022 in Mali.

Colonel Goïta’s military-led government also ordered U.N. peacekeepers out last year, leaving the Malian military fighting the insurgents with help from Russian mercenaries and Turkish drones.

The military is also battling rebel groups in the north from the Tuareg ethnic group. These rebels have at times allied themselves with Islamist insurgents.

Colonel Goïta has claimed some victories against these groups, but violence against civilians, committed by Islamist insurgents as well as Malian soldiers and their Russian allies, has spiked under his rule, according to researchers.

Civilians have also struggled with rising food and electricity prices over the past year, and in recent weeks, deadly floods have ravaged large areas of West and Central Africa.

The Malian military has suffered regular, severe losses while fighting both Al Qaeda affiliates and Tuareg separatists. Last September, Islamist militants killed 49 civilians and 15 soldiers in separate attacks on a passenger ferry and military camp in the country’s north.

In late July this year, a handful of Malian soldiers and about 50 Wagner mercenaries were killed in clashes with rebel groups near the border with Algeria — one of the deadliest battles ever recorded by the Wagner group outside Ukraine.

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