In Mali, Russia Faces Its Saigon Moment

Mali was the poster child of Russia’s new profit-making Afrikanskiy Korpus. In 2023, this expeditionary force of 2,000 Russian soldiers replaced French soldiers and United Nations peacekeepers and spread out across 20 bases in a country almost twice the size of Texas.Despite equipment shortages due to Russia’s war with Ukraine, the Kremlin shipped trucks, tanks, and armored personnel carriers to its Africa Corps in Bamako, capital of landlocked Mali. Convoys left from Guinea’s Conakry, a deepwater port run by local units of two Russian mining companies. As in other African countries, Russia’s goal was hire out its security services and to get a cut of gold production. Mali is West Africa’s second largest gold producer, after Ghana.Symbolizing the importance that Moscow put on Mali, the Kremlin named as ambassador to Bamako Igor Gromyko, a grandson of Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Foreign minister for nearly three decades. Despite this impressive pedigree, Mr. Gromyko now risks looking like the last American ambassador in Saigon.On Tuesday, the Ambassador and three grim-faced Russian colleagues met with Mali junta leader Assimi Goita at the Presidential Palace. After the meeting, Mr. Gromyko said: “Russia will always be alongside Mali.”Mali’s President had been in seclusion since Saturday, when a rebel car bomb exploded in a Bamako suburb, killing Defense Minister Sadio Camara. Trained in Moscow where he learned Russian, General Camara was the architect of Mali’s move toward Russia. Wounded in the attack was his aide, General Modibo Koné. As Mali’s intelligence chief. Gen. Koné is paymaster for the Russians, who are, effectively, mercenaries.Bordering seven countries of West and North Africa, massive Mali is a linchpin for Russia’s big power aspirations in the region. In 2020, General Camara and likeminded officers took power in the first of seven military coups in five countries. Three of these countries — Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso — expelled troops from France, the former colonial power, and welcomed soldiers from Russia.Now the Russians are proving no more successful than the French in containing Islamist and separatist insurgencies. Last weekend, a convoy of Russian soldiers withdrew under fire from Kidal, leaving behind a drone command post and armored personnel carriers. In 2023, the Russians scored their sole victory in Mali to date by capturing that northern city from Touareg separatists. In contrast, this week’s Internet videos show wraith-like guerrilla fighters, fresh from the desert, their faces wrapped in scarves. They dance around an abandoned Russian-made Mi-24 helicopter.The symbolism of the loss of Kidal was made all the more greater by the news that the Russian retreat was facilitated by an Algerian mediator. The separatists apparently allowed the Russians to escape with their lives, in this case in a two-day road trip north across the Sahara to Algeria, long a regional rival of Mali.This week, Touareg separatist spokesman Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane told reporters in Paris that the goal of his movement, the Azawad Liberation Front, is to force all of Russia’s Africa Corps to “withdraw permanently” from Mali. Today, a separatist official told AFP that Russian soldiers and their government allies have abandoned Tessalit, a former French Foreign Legion camp that dominates a key crossroads of the Sahara. While the separatists threaten Mali’s northern cities this weekend, their Islamist allies move to the big stage. Today, they are implementing a road blockade of Bamako, home to 4 million of Mali’s 25 million people. Islamist checkpoints control the capital’s key supply routes from the Atlantic Coast, from Senegal, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast.Yesterday, the Islamist army, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, an Al Qaeda affiliate, called on “all segments of Malian society” to end the “dictatorship” of the “terrorist junta” and to adopt Sharia law. Adoption of a strict Islamic state is the main call of rebels across the Sahel – 4,000 miles from Mali to Sudan.Mali’s government responded by saying they are conducting “intense air campaigns” against the Islamists, who may number 6,000. Russia’s Africa Corps said today that its ground and helicopter forces escorted a large fuel convoy into Bamako. In Moscow, a Kremlin spokesman vowed to reporters yesterday: “Russia will continue, including in Mali, to combat extremism, terrorism and other harmful phenomena and will continue to provide assistance to the current government.”The fate of Mali is not lost on Washington.“A region that accounted for 5-10 percent of terrorism-related deaths a decade ago, now represents more than 50 percent,” the State Department’s senior official for Africa, Nick Checker testified last week at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in Washington. According to this year’s Global Terrorism Index, maintained by the New York-based Institute for Economics and Peace, the Sahel region is the epicenter of terrorist activity worldwide. It accounted for more than half of all terrorism-related deaths last year.“Across the Sahel in West Africa and in East Africa, terrorist groups are expanding, embedding, and operating with increasing capability,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, told the Committee. “ISIS affiliates and al-Qaeda-linked groups are growing, controlling territory, and exploiting weak governance.”On December 26, the Trump Administration took a stab at the problem. A US Navy ship in the Gulf of Guinea fired a dozen Tomahawk missiles at two Islamic State camps in northern Nigeria, near the border with Niger. To follow up, the Pentagon sent 200 American soldiers to train and give intelligence to Nigerian Army units fighting Islamic insurgents. With the Islamist threat growing, the State Department last month authorized ‘non-emergency’ US embassy to leave Nigeria.In February, Mr. Checker visited Mali to reopen the door for American military cooperation. As a result of the visit, the Trump Administration lifted sanctions on General Camara, the proponent of aid from Russia. Talks started on intelligence sharing and the resumption of American drone reconnaissance flights over Mali. President Goita, who depends on Turkish bodyguards for security, seems open to repairing relations with the West.The fear in the West is that if the Islamists take over Mali and declare a caliphate, they will set their sights on pushing radical Islam among Mali’s large diaspora in France. As many as 1 million Malians live in France, where they are generally at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.As the rebels tighten the noose on the capital, the American, British, and French governments urge their citizens to get out. Last weekend, rebel attacks forced the temporary closure of Bamako’s international airport. On Wednesday, France’s Foreign Ministry warned: “French nationals are advised to make arrangements to leave Mali temporarily as soon as possible on the commercial flights that are still available.” Today, the Air France flight from Bamako to Paris was cancelled.

In Mali, Russia Faces Its Saigon Moment

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