JNIM’s fuel siege turns one as Bamako breathes and the regions keep paying

JNIM declared its embargo on fuel imports into Mali on 3 September 2025, and RFI’s David Baché, writing on 3 September 2026, marked the anniversary with the first sourced sign of relief: attacks on tanker trucks have killed dozens and caused severe fuel and electricity shortages, but the introduction of military escorts has progressively secured convoys, and in recent weeks the situation has substantially improved in Bamako. Elsewhere in the country, supply remains uneven. The weapon works because Mali is landlocked and imports roughly 95 per cent of its fuel by road from Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. It is also not one continuous siege: OpsCon reported on 19 July 2026 that the blockade eased early in 2026 before JNIM reimposed it in late April, and the Soufan Center dates the reimposition to a 28 April announcement covering all routes into the capital, followed on 6 May by a new wave of attacks including an arson attack on trucks carrying food.

The destruction figures in circulation are two different exercises, not one trend line. Bellingcat’s count, cited by ACLED on 3 December 2025, was more than 130 tankers destroyed between September and December 2025; OpsCon’s open-source tracking put the total above 300 for September 2025 to July 2026. Different methods, different windows. What has moved more clearly is geography. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies reported on 6 May 2026 that roughly 20 per cent of JNIM activity in Mali had shifted to the west and south over the previous twelve months, with fatalities doubling to more than 450; during the SYNACOR stoppage in early September 2025, around 1,000 fuel trucks sat parked at the Ivorian border for about two weeks. Carnegie’s assessment places the group on the road from Kayes — the region that accounts for 80 per cent of Mali’s gold production and carries the trade corridor to Senegal.

The Russian half of the arrangement has been judged, on the record, as something other than counterinsurgency. The Soufan Center wrote on 12 May 2026 that much of the partnership appears to be about regime protection and security rather than a sustainable campaign, and quoted its senior research fellow Wassim Nasr, from a CTC Sentinel interview, saying recent events “will consolidate the relationship because the objective of the relationship is to preserve the junta.” Soufan also reported that in the preceding week remaining Africa Corps personnel had consolidated around Bamako and evacuated the north. Carnegie’s verdict is that the Malian army, helped by an estimated 1,000 Africa Corps combatants, was able to secure convoys, yet access to fuel had still not fully resumed in Bamako in early 2026, with insurgent violence continuing largely unabated and jihadist groups expanding in rural areas.

Assessment: Treat the improvement as perishable. RFI’s line is the freshest sourced statement on Bamako’s pumps and it is nine days old; one ambush on an escorted convoy reverses it. The more durable reading is that the siege has changed shape rather than failed — pushed off the capital’s forecourts and into the west and south, where the road to Kayes carries both the fuel and four-fifths of the gold. That convergence, not the tanker count, is the metric to watch. And note what Moscow is being paid for: Nasr’s formulation is insurance on the junta, not a war plan. Bamako’s parallel courtship of Ankara, Beijing and Tehran caps how much leverage that insurance buys.