Mali

Malian armed forces and their allies have since July 2026 responded to mounting attacks by Islamist and separatist armed groups with abusive counterinsurgency operations in central and northern Mali, Human Rights Watch said today. Mali's military and the allied Russia-controlled Africa Corps (formally the Wagner Group) have killed and wounded scores of civilians in attacks and in custody in violation of international humanitarian law. 

Jihadists from rival Al-Qaeda and Islamic State factions in the Sahel have clashed recently on an unprecedented scale in the borderlands spanning Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, with claims of hundreds of fighters killed. … On Monday, the ISSP said it had killed more than 400 JNIM fighters, including "several leaders", in clashes four days earlier in the Burkinabe province of Oudalan on the Mali and Niger borders.

The United Nations on Friday raised the alarm about a displacement crisis in the central Sahel where nearly four million people have been forced to flee their homes in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. The number is more than double that of six years ago, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said, before a wave of coups in a region bedevilled by instability and violence.

The Malian army and its Russian allies entered the strategic northern city of Kidal on Tuesday without resistance after Tuareg separatists announced a tactical withdrawal, five months after government forces were driven out.

[…] Thursday's assault on the Dioura military camp, which was claimed by jihadists, is one of the deadliest suffered by the Malian army since the beginning of the conflict that has ravaged the west African country for more than a decade.

Jihadists, separatists, military authorities and Russian Africa Corps: every belligerent in the Malian conflict has seized on generative artificial intelligence to boost its propaganda. A report by the Timbuktu Institute, titled “Algorithms at War: How Generative AI is Reshaping the Malian Conflict” and published on 9 September 2026, offers an unprecedented overview of these differentiated uses and warns of a major risk: the line between the real and the fabricated is growing blurrier by the day, even as terrorist groups’ recruitment capabilities keep expanding.

[…] In a statement published on Thursday, HRW accused Africa Corps of carrying out the killings in the presence of Malian soldiers at the beginning of last month.

Mali President Assimi Goïta on Thursday pardoned a French national who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison. Last year, Mali's military-led government accused Yann Vézilier, an official from the French embassy, of being involved in a plot to destabilise the West African country.

Open-source investigators have confirmed two drone strikes in northern Mali involving Shahed-136-type loitering munitions in the villages of Inafarak and Talahandak, near the Algerian border. … The Shahed-136 is a long-range one-way attack drone originally developed in Iran and now also manufactured in Russia.

Mara had been detained last August and charged with undermining the credibility of the state and spreading false information.