Bamako’s fuel blockade passes its thirteenth month on figures nobody has audited

The blockade was announced on 3 September 2025 in a video by JNIM spokesman Abou Houzeifa al-Bambari, framed initially as a demand for lower fuel taxes in rural areas and later broadened to the group’s own version of Sharia rule. It eased in early 2026 — attributed variously to negotiations with the government, increased military activity and JNIM’s own preparation for what came next. On 25 April, coordinated attacks across Mali by JNIM alongside the Azawad Liberation Front killed Defence Minister Sadio Camara. On 28 April, JNIM announced a full blockade on Bamako. On 4 May, President Assimi Goïta took the defence portfolio himself. The last dated assessment available to this desk, published by the private risk-intelligence firm OpsCon on 19 July, described a capital supplied only by armed convoy and a blockade unbroken.

The numbers repeated across the coverage need reading carefully. OpsCon, citing open-source tracking, puts more than 300 fuel tankers destroyed since September 2025, including more than 40 in a single October 2025 attack near Sikasso; the same figure appears in the Rio Times, an aggregator, and in the Wikipedia infobox. Roughly 95 percent of Mali’s fuel is imported by road, from Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. Against the destruction figure sits the junta-favourable counter-number, from the same publisher: more than 1,000 tankers delivered by escorted convoy since late October 2025. OpsCon’s June note records fuel queues, rationing that prioritises military and government use, a capital visibly darker at night, schools and universities closed for a period, and a general appointed in January to run what local media call the “fuel war.” Neither Russian Africa Corps nor Turkish drone support has broken it.

The protector has its own problems. RFE/RL reported in late April that hundreds of masked Russian personnel withdrew from Kidal over a single weekend, leaving weapons caches, equipment and a downed helicopter behind, during an offensive by JNIM alongside Tuareg secessionists; RFE/RL’s own assessment was that Africa Corps was meant to replicate Wagner’s results and, on the Kidal evidence, is not. Pointing the other way, RFE/RL cites The Sentry’s finding that in early 2025, as Wagner was rebranded, three major convoys of Russian-made trucks, tanks and heavy armoured vehicles were shipped into Bamako — deliveries that “suggest that the Russian government is doubling down on Mali.” JNIM claims of partial or full control over Mopti, Sévaré and Gao circulate widely; they are claims, not established territorial facts.

Assessment: The tanker counts are the weakest part of the strongest story in the Sahel. Both the 300-destroyed and the 1,000-delivered figures come from the same private publisher writing for corporate security clients, and their consistency across editions may reflect a shared upstream source rather than independent confirmation. The defensible series is the ACLED/Bellingcat blockade tracker; until its methodology is on the table, treat the tanker numbers as directional. Better indicators exist and are being published by nobody: pump prices, generation hours, convoy frequency. That absence is itself the pattern. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies, reporting Burkinabè casualty data, warns its figures are “likely higher” because the junta has suppressed the independent media the data depends on. The same logic applies to Bamako’s fuel.