Twelve months of the JNIM fuel blockade have produced four shortages and four escorted reliefs

Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin declared in September 2025 that it would stop any fuel tanker entering Mali from neighbouring countries, hitting hundreds of trucks arriving from Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, ADF Magazine reported on 18 November 2025. A Bellingcat investigation cited by ACLED on 3 December 2025 counted more than 130 tankers destroyed since the blockade began — the cleanest sourced figure available, against a widely circulated cumulative claim of at least 300 whose primary anchor is not established. AFP reported on 17 October 2025 that after one month the security stock of Mali’s Office national des produits pétroliers was under strain and escorted tanker entries into Bamako had become exceptional. The Dakar-based Timbuktu Institute assessed that JNIM “cherche ainsi à asphyxier Bamako en coupant ses artères logistiques.”

The sequence since is a loop. Jeune Afrique recorded a marked improvement in Bamako supply on 28 November 2025. By 5 March 2026 Maliweb described the capital back in a diesel shortage and framed it as structural rather than a supply accident; RFI reported roughly a fortnight of diesel scarcity that month with intense electricity and water cuts, and noted that escorted convoys had reduced but not eliminated attacks on tankers. On 8 August 2026 Maliweb reported supply progressively returning to normal and queues receding after several weeks of disruption. No development inside the 13–15 September window was retrieved for this brief; that absence is not evidence of quiet, and no wire copy from the past 48 hours was available to test it.

Assessment: The metric that matters is not tankers destroyed but whether fuel moves unescorted. It does not. Each restoration of supply to Bamako has been an armed-convoy operation, which means the Malian state is now paying a permanent military premium to perform a function — road freight — that it no longer controls, and JNIM can reimpose scarcity at a cost far below what relief costs Bamako. Distrust the round numbers: the 300-tanker total is aggregated, a reported 15 dead in a February convoy attack near the Senegalese border reaches us only through an aggregator, and the most alarming current assessments come from subscription threat-advisory products rather than reporting. Note also what Algiers is not offering Goïta: convoys.