Mali

The appearance of a shaken Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra on state television just before dawn on 11 December proffering apologies to the Malian people along with his...

Growing divisions among Mali’s politicians and military, as well as among foreign powers, will delay plans for an internationally backed intervention to oust jihadists from the north and...

This week, teams of West African, African Union and United Nations military planners descended on Bamako to get an agreement from President Dioncounda Traoré’s government on a strategy...

President Dioncounda Traoré’s formal request to the United Nations was clear. On 18 September, he asked for a resolution for military intervention, under Chapter 7 of the UN...

Momentum is building for international backing for the proposed military intervention in Mali to expel the jihadists.

The handling of the killing by Malian troops of 16 Islamic preachers, nine of them Mauritanian, threatens the delicate balance between the interim regime and the army, say...

President Dioncounda Traoré has now officially requested military help from the Economic Community of West African States to help quell the revolt in the north. Sensitive to the...

Mali’s regional neighbours are planning a three-phase military intervention, according to a document from the Economic Community of West African States which Africa Confidential has exclusively obtained. The ‘Strategic Concept’ report...

In a desperate bid to hold itself together, a much weakened Mouvement national pour la libération de l’Azawad has abandoned its ambition of an independent Azawad state. The...

Mali’s transitional Prime Minister, Cheick Modibo Diarra, is now echoing the talk in the corridors of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) of creating an enlarged...

When day dawns in northern Mali, another faction emerges. Sharp divisions have opened within the Mouvement national pour la libération de l’Azawad over how best to confront the...

Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo has begun to distance himself from his hardline radical supporters and could well be on the road back to accepting constitutional rule. Sources in...

Captain Amadou Sanogo’s military followers duly saluted his 20 May deal to back Dioncounda Traoré as interim President, but his radical civilian allies were determined to press...

After weeks of wrangling, Tuareg nationalists and their jihadist allies reached a shaky agreement to share power in northern Mali and formally declared the Islamic Republic of Azawad...

While demonstrators stormed the presidential palace in Bamako and assaulted interim President Dioncounda Traoré, the leaders of the Tuareg revolt were hammering out a provisional government for what...

The Islamist burning of the shrine of Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar in the ancient city of Timbuktu last week has compounded the national trauma of March’s military coup...

After regional leaders called his bluff with financial sanctions and threats of military action, putsch leader Captain Amadou Sanogo beat as dignified a retreat from power as he...

Tuareg separatists of the Mouvement national de la libération de l’Azawad are in a bitter struggle with a jihadist faction – Iyad ag Ghali and his Ansar Eddine...

With Islamists, putschists and nationalists claiming all the attention in Mali, the growing food crisis in the Sahel is in danger of slipping under the radar. There were...

The protests in Bamako started out with disgruntled soldiers, angry at how politicians had allowed their comrades to be overrun by Tuareg rebels. This then snowballed into a...

Battle-hardened fighters of the Mouvement national pour la libération de l’Azawad – equipped with heavy weapons they brought back from Libya – are confronting the Malian army in...

Attacks by the Mouvement national pour la libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) have been not only fierce but well planned. The late January assault on Ménaka, in the far...

China will continue to support the Bamako government’s position and ‘will bring our aid to the extent that it is possible, in particular to the army, where we...