A year into JNIM’s fuel blockade, the last hard reading on Bamako is five weeks old
The blockade on tankers entering Mali was declared in September 2025 and has now run twelve months. The most recent Malian reporting available, dated 8 August, said the shortage had eased — and nobody has published a September count.
JNIM announced in September 2025 that it would stop fuel tankers crossing into Mali from neighbouring states. A Bellingcat investigation carried by ACLED on 3 December 2025 documented more than 130 tankers destroyed between September and late November 2025 — the most rigorous count available. A figure of 300-plus destroyed circulates in later coverage, including a Rio Times piece of 15 June 2026, but rests on weaker sourcing and should be handled as a subsequent estimate rather than a verified tally. The same Rio Times report describes at least 15 people killed in an attack on a fuel convoy near the Senegalese border in early February 2026; that remains single-sourced here. The Dakar-based Timbuktu Institute assessed in late September 2025, in remarks carried by AFP, that JNIM “cherche ainsi à asphyxier Bamako en coupant ses artères logistiques” — seeks to asphyxiate Bamako by cutting its logistical arteries.
What the twelve-month record actually shows is a cycle, not a continuous siege. AFP reported in mid-October 2025 that a month of blockade had drawn down the security stock of the Office national des produits pétroliers. Jeune Afrique reported on 28 November 2025 that supply to Bamako had markedly improved. Maliweb reported on 5 March 2026 that the capital had fallen back into a gasoil shortage, and RFI put it at roughly two weeks, with intense electricity and water cuts. Ops Con Intelligence — a commercial travel-risk vendor, and therefore an interested party — assessed in July 2026 that the blockade was still in force and the capital supplied only in armed convoys. Then Maliweb, on 8 August 2026, described queues easing and supply progressively normalising. Four troughs in a year, and no September datapoint.
The military government’s cover for the logistics war is Russian. Africa Corps, the defence-ministry successor to Wagner, is put at roughly 2,500 men by All Eyes On Wagner, an activist-investigative project, which characterises the mission as junta support rather than joint operations; Africa Defense Forum, published by U.S. AFRICOM and thus an interested reporter on Russian effectiveness, argued in May that ceding the countryside lets JNIM grow. Wassim Nasr of the Soufan Center, quoted in a CTC Sentinel interview carried in the centre’s 12 May IntelBrief, said the offensives “will consolidate the relationship because the objective of the relationship is to preserve the junta.” On Wednesday the Alliance of Sahel States marks three years since its founding charter. All three members remain inside WAEMU, using the CFA franc.
Assessment: The temptation this week is to write the anniversary as a present-tense strangulation. Do not: the freshest Malian reporting available says the pumps eased in August, and asserting a siege today would be the cheapest error on this desk. What is defensible is the pattern — shortage, escorted convoy surge, relief, shortage — which tells you the blockade is a tax on movement rather than a stranglehold, and that it is sustainable for JNIM at low cost. The Russian pivot to air operations was designed to cut Moscow’s own losses; no one has measured whether it changed the ratio. Wednesday’s test is narrower: whether the currency question is addressed or dodged.