JNIM has turned the road to Gao into an argument against the counteroffensive
ACLED recorded one JNIM roadside bomb attack in Mali in the first four months of 2026, and at least 32 since the 25 April offensive — at least ten of them against joint Malian–Russian convoys.
The Critical Threats Project’s Africa File of 24 September, citing ACLED data, sets out the shift. In the first four months of 2026, ACLED recorded one JNIM improvised-explosive-device attack on Malian security forces, government-aligned militias or civilians. Since the offensive that began on 25 April, it has recorded at least 32. At least ten targeted joint Malian–Russian convoys, and the vast majority struck convoys moving north, on the Sévaré–Konna or Konna–Gao stretches. Gao is the primary staging base for the Malian, Russian and allied Tuareg forces attempting to halt JNIM and Azawad Liberation Front gains and to mount a counteroffensive; Critical Threats reports a July ambush that killed at least 50 soldiers, and continued attacks through mid-September inflicting heavy costs on personnel and equipment in central Mali.
The logistics squeeze is older than the offensive. Bellingcat’s open-source investigation, carried by ACLED on 3 December 2025, verified more than 130 fuel tankers destroyed since September 2025 — the most methodologically defensible count available, and now ten months old. Carnegie reported in February that the Malian army, with an estimated 1,000 Africa Corps combatants, could secure convoys but that fuel access had still not fully resumed in Bamako in early 2026. Al Jazeera, reporting from Bamako on 22 September for Mali’s independence anniversary, wrote that the blockade “has exposed the vulnerability of supply routes into the capital,” with separatist and armed groups increasingly coordinating against the state in the north.
Assessment: The number to hold onto is the ratio, not the total: a thirty-fold jump in a single tactic within one calendar year is a doctrinal decision, not a spike. JNIM is not trying to take Gao. It is pricing the road that would supply an attempt to hold it, and the ten strikes on joint Malian–Russian convoys show who is being invoiced. Be careful with everything else in this file. Casualty figures from the 2026 offensives — 200-plus dead per Bamako, 2,500-plus per Africa Corps — are belligerent claims about the same events, and the gap between them is the only reliable content. A JNIM claim of hitting Russian helicopters at Sévaré airport is circulating undated; it stays out until a channel and a date exist.