JNIM Has Found the Junta's Single Point of Failure

JNIM reimposed its fuel blockade on Bamako in late April, and it remains active. The mechanics are simple and devastating for a landlocked economy that imports roughly 95 percent of its fuel by tanker from Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire: burn the trucks on the western Kayes corridor and the southern approaches, and the capital chokes. Fuel now moves only in guarded convoys — the army escorted one column of some 940 civilian trucks under Russian and Turkish air cover — which is the tell. When the state can only move its most basic commodity behind a military escort, the insurgency is setting the terms of daily life. Fuel is the load-bearing variable for everything the junta relies on: vehicle mobility, generator-backed communications, hospitals, the responsiveness of the security forces — and the diesel that Africa Corps drones and convoys run on. The blockade attacks the counterinsurgency and the social contract with a single instrument.

Assessment: The leading indicator is tanker-burning: renewed fires on the Kayes, Sikasso and southern corridors mean the siege is back to full pressure regardless of official statements. Track convoy frequency and size, the reappearance of fuel queues and blackouts in Bamako, pump-price spikes, and whether the blockade metastasizes onto the coastal supply routes through Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal — which would extend the economic-warfare model to the states the AES depends on for imports, and expose Benin and Togo's northern corridors next.