Russia Bet Backfires for Mali as Rebels Retake Key Desert Town

Insurgents recaptured a Malian town that had become a symbol of Russia’s promise to deliver security where Western forces had failed.

Kidal fell during a coordinated weekend assault on military facilities across the country. The desert garrison had been under rebel control for about a decade until Malian soldiers and Kremlin-linked fighters — now operating under the name Africa Corps — wrested it back in 2023. It is now gone again.

Africa Corps, a force overseen by Russia’s defense ministry, announced Monday it was withdrawing from Kidal, in a rare public statement posted on its Telegram channel. The unit, which took over from the Wagner Group of Russia-backed mercenaries in 2023, said the pullout was “a joint decision” with Mali. 

Russia’s defense ministry did not respond to a request for comment. A Malian army spokesman could not be reached.

The withdrawal punctures the claim that Moscow could deliver where France and other Western allies could not. Mali’s junta leader, General Assimi Goïta, seized power in 2021, arguing that civilian leaders had failed to contain a decade-long Islamist insurgency that had spread across the country’s north and center, killing thousands. He also expelled UN peacekeepers, a European counter-terrorism force, and French troops. 

These longtime allies were replaced with Wagner mercenaries, later rebranded as Africa Corps.

“This will be a setback for Russia more broadly,” said Nina Wilén, director of the Africa Programme at the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations. “The Russians negotiating themselves out of Kidal, leaving their Malian counterparts behind, doesn’t give a good impression of them as security partners.” 

Kidal carries outsized symbolic weight. The Malian army was driven out of the town in 2012 by Tuareg separatists and al-Qaeda-linked militants, and a bid to retake it in 2014 left scores dead on both sides. When government forces and Wagner fighters, Africa Corps’ predecessors, finally recaptured the town in 2023, the junta presented it as vindication that it had made the right choice. 

“The army had managed to march into Kidal, where it had not been present for about a decade,” said Oumar Berte, a political analyst at the University of Rouen Normandy. But today, “the security situation in Mali is more dire than ever.” 

The weekend assault marks a further escalation in its sheer scale. Al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Mali, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, and the Azawad Liberation Front, the Tuareg separatists who have long fought for an independent state in the north, confirmed they carried out the attacks together. The convergence of the two anti-government forces signals a heightened threat to the junta-led regime.

‘Mr. Russia’

Mali’s defense minister, Sadio Camara — the junta’s second-in-command and the official credited with brokering the Russian partnership, earning him the nickname “Mr. Russia” — was killed in a suicide bombing targeting his home on April 25, as part of the attacks, military officials said.

In an unverified video shared on X by an Azawad Liberation Front spokesman, Russian forces appear to be departing their base in pickup trucks and desert vehicles as rebel fighters wave their guns and cheer.

Mali is one of three junta-led states forming the Alliance of Sahel States, alongside Niger and Burkina Faso. All three came to power in coups between 2021 and 2023, expelled French forces and turned to Moscow for security support. Mali has gone the furthest in its embrace of Africa Corps, whose fighters have operated openly alongside Malian troops, including in the 2023 campaign to retake Kidal.

“Mali is realizing that Russia is not the solution to their security problems,” said Ulf Laessing, director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s Sahel Programme. And Niger and Burkina Faso will likely draw the same conclusion from the weekend’s events.

“I’m not sure that anyone else wants to pick up the pieces left of the Sahel,” he said.

Already, Mali’s armed forces and the Russian fighters had been accused of killing and disappearing civilians during military operations in northern Mali, according to a 2024 Human Rights Watch report. Now, the Russian exit from Kidal is being read by some as a betrayal, even as the militants continued Monday to consolidate the gains from their weekend strikes. 

“We can see that they are abandoning Kidal after coming here to help,” said Moussa Sangaré, a car-parts dealer in Bamako, the capital. “You can’t tell people you’re going to help them and then you just pack up and leave.”

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