Mali’s fuel siege passes twelve months with no fresh numbers out of Bamako

Africa Defense Forum reported in November 2025 that JNIM had declared it would stop any fuel tanker entering Mali from neighbouring countries, and that hundreds of trucks from Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal had since been attacked and burned inside Mali, in some cases while under Malian military escort. The best-documented figure on the file remains a Bellingcat investigation, cited by ACLED on 3 December 2025, counting more than 130 tankers destroyed between September 2025 and early December 2025 — open-source, with a stated method and a stated date range. A running total of “at least 300” circulates in a Wikipedia infobox; it is a pointer, not a source. A claim of at least 15 killed in a February 2026 convoy attack near the Senegalese border traces only to an aggregator and does not survive scrutiny. Bamako is supplied in armed convoys. Twelve months on, no Malian government or ONAP figure has been published.

The blockade compounds a year in which Bamako’s defensive perimeter contracted. Between 25 April and 1 May 2026 the Azawad Liberation Front and JNIM mounted coordinated attacks across Bamako, Kati, Bourem, Gao, Kidal, Mopti, Sévaré and Ménaka; France 24 reported JNIM assuming “la responsabilité” for strikes it described as targeting “le siège du président malien Assimi Goïta”, the seat of Defence Minister Sadio Camara, Bamako’s airport and military sites at Kati. The BBC reported on 26 April, hedged as “reports say”, that Camara had been killed; Goïta took the defence portfolio himself on 4 May. Casualty claims from that week — 200-plus killed per the Malian army, 2,500-plus per Africa Corps, 305-plus in Russian airstrikes per Moscow, 200-plus Malian soldiers captured at Kidal per the FLA, reported by RFI’s David Baché — are belligerent claims, none independently confirmed, and diverge by an order of magnitude on force size alone.

Assessment: The interesting question is not whether the blockade hurts Bamako but what it has done to the Russian bargain. All Eyes on Wagner and INPACT put Africa Corps at roughly 2,500 personnel in Mali as of 30 April 2026 — an NGO estimate, not an official count — and by June analysts cited by ADF described it pulling fighters out of the north to shield the capital and the junta. Lou Osborn’s observation that Africa Corps “weighs risk-taking more heavily than its predecessor” and Wassim Nasr’s that the relationship exists “to preserve the junta” describe the same contraction. A protection contract is not a counterinsurgency. Watch for any September fuel number; its continued absence is itself reporting.