When the military overthrew the democratically elected government in Mali in 2020, coup leader General Assimi Goita promised to root out jihadists in the north of the country. Mali had been struggling to defeat them for nearly a decade.
Multiple terrorist groups operate in Mali. An al Qaida-linked group known locally as Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) is the most lethal, considering the audacity and scale of its attacks. The group rejects the state’s authority, and seeks to impose its interpretation of Islam and sharia.
Despite the military government’s pledge to enhance security, there has been a 38% rise in violence directed at civilians in Mali in 2023, as reported by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data.
Human Rights Watch reports that Islamist armed groups carried out 326 attacks against civilians between 1 January and 31 October 2024, and 478 people were killed.
In September 2024, JNIM attacked Bamako’s international airport and a military barracks in the capital city.
After years of mounting attacks, Mali’s insurgency has entered a new phase. Violence has now diffused from northern and central Mali to southern Mali. JNIM’s blockade of southern Mali since September 2025 has cut off trade routes, starved towns, and tested the limits of the Malian state’s control over the landlocked country.
As a security scholar with a focus on west and central Africa, I have researched security in Mali on broader issues like terrorism and arms trafficking. I believe JNIM’s latest strategy is particularly dangerous because the objective is strategic, economic, psychological and political.
Such blockades are deliberate instruments of coercive governance and asymmetric warfare (a conflict between irregular combatants and the army), designed to weaken the military government, incite the public and possibly consolidate control.
My view is that the Malian military has been unable to dislodge the terrorists because the blockade zones are vast, semi-arid, and crisscrossed by ungoverned routes that defy easy surveillance. Many of these areas lie beyond the reach of effective state presence. There, the army’s movements are predictable and slow, while insurgents blend into local communities and forests with relative ease.
The terrain favours guerrilla tactics: narrow roads, bush paths and seasonal rivers create natural obstacles to mechanised military movement. Terrorist groups with motorbikes can easily get around.
The blockade
The blockade of southern Mali, which began in September 2025, has cut off the region from essential supplies. It’s creating severe humanitarian and economic consequences.
Mali recently suspended schools and universities due to a severe fuel scarcity caused by the blockade. The siege underscores the fact that the Malian army is ill-equipped, overstretched and strategically disadvantaged in countering evolving terrorist tactics.
The blockade is not a conventional military siege involving trenches or fortified positions. Instead, it operates as a networked disruption, blocking roads that link Mali to its coastal neighbours, particularly Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.
These roads are vital arteries in Mali’s economy, serving as corridors for trade, fuel and humanitarian supplies. Cutting them off not only isolates communities but also undermines public confidence in the state’s ability to govern and secure its peripheries.
The army’s constraints
The inability of the Malian army to lift the blockades is rooted in the fact that it is fighting an irregular, asymmetric conflict against a mobile and deeply entrenched insurgent group. The Malian Armed Forces are structured for conventional warfare but are being drawn into a battle that requires flexibility, intelligence dominance, and rapid response capabilities.
JNIM, on the other hand, thrives on mobility and decentralisation. Its fighters move lightly, using motorcycles and small arms. They can strike swiftly and retreat into difficult terrain before state forces can respond.
The army also has logistical and operational shortcomings. As I’ve written elsewhere, Mali lacks military capabilities and cannot easily acquire them under current sanctions and international isolation.
Although the junta has sought help from military partnerships with Russia’s Wagner Group (now the Africa Corps), such collaborations have yielded little.
When JNIM imposes multiple blockades simultaneously in southern Mali, the army faces an impossible task. Its forces are too dispersed to mount a coordinated and sustained counteroffensive. Reinforcements face ambushes on poorly maintained roads or find themselves in unfamiliar terrain.
Geography, governance and strategic decentralisation
Geography helps explain Mali’s military paralysis. The blockade zones are vast and out of reach. The terrain is full of natural obstacles.
The Malian state has long struggled to extend state presence beyond urban centres like Bamako and Segou. In rural areas, the army’s arrival is often seen not as a return of governance but as an intrusion, with the risk of human rights abuses.
Decades of neglect, corruption and abusive counterinsurgency practices have alienated local populations and eroded intelligence networks.
The blockade operations aim to paralyse Bamako. Once confined to the country’s northern deserts and central plains, JNIM has, over the past few years, steadily advanced southward, carrying out sporadic attacks near the capital.
What explains this growing audacity of a group armed with little more than motorcycles and Kalashnikovs?
The answer lies in organisational logic. Unlike movements that depend on a single command structure, JNIM operates as a highly decentralised network of semi-autonomous cells. This allows it to adapt quickly to local conditions, exploit state weaknesses, and expand its influence without overstretching its resources. Each cell draws upon local grievances to recruit and sustain operations. Adaptability is JNIM’s greatest strength and the Malian state’s most enduring vulnerability.
The paradox of militarisation
Despite increased military spending, new alliances and aggressive rhetoric, JNIM’s territorial reach and tactical sophistication have only deepened.
The more the state militarises, the less secure its citizens appear to become.
This paradox reflects a broader trend in the Sahel. Counterinsurgency efforts are mostly military, without addressing the socioeconomic and governance conditions that sustain insurgencies.
Corruption, inequality and local marginalisation are some of these conditions. Thus, military campaigns become mere exercises in containment rather than resolution. In this context, JNIM’s blockades and incursions are not only military manoeuvres but political statements about who truly controls Mali’s hinterlands.
A war beyond firepower
The blockade in southern Mali reveals the limits of state-centered military power in an asymmetric war. To lift blockades for good requires more than tactical victories; it demands rethinking security.
The military government must cooperate with neighbours such as Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.
More importantly, reclaiming territory must go hand-in-hand with rebuilding trust, restoring governance and addressing grievances. Until then, the motorcycles and AK-47s of JNIM will outpace the tanks and rhetoric of Mali’s military junta.
