By Michael Kramer
May 6, 2026
May 4 — Mali, along with Burkina Faso and Niger — all former French colonies — is a founding member of the revolutionary Alliance des États du Sahel (Alliance of Sahel States or AES). It is a landlocked country whose capital, Bamako, has a population of nearly 4 million people.
On April 25, Mali was the target of a coordinated attack by thousands of fighters, on motorcycles and wearing Malian military uniforms to sow confusion.
Some were armed with shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles. Military drones were also used against the Forces Armées Maliennes (Malian Armed Forces or FAMa).
General Sadio Camara, the Minister of Defense and Veteran Affairs, was killed along with his spouse and two grandchildren by a suicide car bomber who drove into his home.
The anti-government attackers came from two different organizations which had never coordinated together on anything before: Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam (JNIM), which has ties to the Saharan branch of al-Qaeda, and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a separatist group based in the Tuareg community, which inhabits a vast area of the Sahara Desert across many national borders. They attacked six cities at the same time and threatened a land blockade of Bamako.
Western media, led by the network France 24, began interviewing JNIM and FLA members as soon as the attacks began. Disinformation regarding the imminent fall of the Malian government and the breakup of the AES spread through various media platforms. Media showed video footage of weapon storage facilities in Ukraine as weapon stockpiles captured by JNIM and FLA forces.
Coup attempt fails
Project Libya/Syria Part II was not to be. The FAMa quickly regrouped. Instead of collapsing, Mali adapted. The AES provided a coordinated response with a unified command structure. Ground forces and air support from Burkina Faso and Niger gave the FAMa needed space to go on the offensive.
All of Africa was watching to see what would happen while Pan African solidarity took a giant leap forward. Also assisting the FAMa with ground and air support as well as intelligence gathering was an arm of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Africa Corps. When the attacks began, the Malian people, especially the youth, went into the streets greeting and assisting the FAMa while identifying individual attackers in some very confusing street fighting situations.
The JNIM and FLA have retreated back to where they came from after suffering casualties in the thousands. The roles of Algeria and Mauritania, which both border very remote parts of Mali, have yet to be uncovered. Ukraine has been accused of providing drone technology and targeting support to the JNIM and FLA.
Who provided the weapons, motorcycles, uniforms and political and military coordination between two disparate organizations is a question that must be answered.
On April 28, Assimi Goïta, President of Mali, addressed the Malian people in a national broadcast. He described the attacks as: “highly complex, well-coordinated and simultaneous. … They are part of a vast destabilization plan conceived and carried out by terrorist armed groups and their internal and external sponsors who provide them with intelligence and logistical support. … No violence, no intimidation and even less so desperate attempts at destabilization will be able to reverse the course of our country.” (africaispowerful YouTube channel, April 28)
The blockade of Bamako never happened. On May 1, 800 tanker trucks in a FAMa-escorted convoy carrying various kinds of fuel — gasoline, diesel, aviation — reached Bamako after a 900-mile journey from Senegal.
Although the coup attempt collapsed, the death of Sadio Camara was a major blow to the revolutionary leadership of Mali. Remember his name!
