Mali’s fuel blockade passes thirteen months with no measurable sign of breaking
JNIM’s interdiction of fuel convoys into Bamako began on 3 September 2025 and is still recorded as running. What has changed is not the siege but the fact that nobody — the junta, its Russian partners, or the blockaders — appears to need it to end.
The Carnegie Endowment, writing in February 2026, described what JNIM has imposed since September 2025 as a “selective blockade” — a word that matters, because it is not a total interdiction and should not be written as one. Al Jazeera, on 26 April 2026, reported that fighters had been attacking fuel tankers since September and had brought Bamako to a standstill in October 2025, describing JNIM, on ACLED’s assessment, as the al-Qaeda affiliate and the most active armed group in the region. RFI, carried by allAfrica on 16 March 2026, reported that Bamako had by then gone roughly two weeks without diesel, with intense electricity and water cuts. Jeune Afrique reported around the same period that fuel reaching the capital was being reserved for EDM, the state energy company, to keep thermal power stations running.
JNIM’s own stated rationale is under-reported. AFP, in copy carried by Connaissance des Énergies on 29 October 2025, reported that the group casts the blockade as retaliation for the Malian authorities' ban on selling fuel outside service stations in rural areas, where it moves in jerrycans for resale — a ban whose declared purpose was to dry up jihadist supply. The counter-force has not shifted the equation. Africa Defense Forum, published by US Africa Command and therefore an interested publisher, put Africa Corps strength in Mali at roughly 2,000 personnel in June 2026, many of them former Wagner: significantly smaller than the old Wagner contingent and about half the size of France’s Operation Barkhane, expelled by the junta in 2022. The Council on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker, updated around July 2026, records JNIM as having expanded territorial control after the French and UN withdrawals and as having blockaded Bamako’s fuel supply.
Assessment: After thirteen months the interesting question is no longer whether Bamako is encircled but what the arrangement costs and who collects. A selective blockade implies passage is negotiable, and negotiated passage implies payments, intermediaries and tacit lines of supply that neither side will describe. The measurable indicators — pump prices, EDM load-shedding hours, tonnage moving on the Dakar and Abidjan corridors — are the ones nobody is publishing, and their absence is itself a data point about what Bamako wants counted. Treat the widely repeated “300-plus tankers destroyed” figure as an aggregated round number until a primary source carries it. And note what the Russian presence has not done: it has not lifted the siege.