‘Callous': Are Malian troops and Russian mercenaries attacking civilians?
Grainy camera footage showed them lying still in the blistering heat of the desert – six or seven bodies, maybe more. Wet, red spots in the sand and belongings scattered across the landscape were signs of what had happened. As the camera shifted back and forth, it caught a dirtied pair of jeans in the sand, curiously without its owner.
It was February in northern Mali. The group lying dead in the sand were reportedly returning from a wedding in the Gao region when they were attacked, not by armed groups, but allegedly by the Malian army and allied Russian mercenaries of the Wagner group. At least 20 people who had been travelling in two vehicles were killed, including children and old people.
Mali's military government, in a rare move, promised to 'investigate' soldiers alleged to have been involved in the deaths as an outcry from rights groups mounted. Weeks later, there aren't yet any results. Analysts were not surprised – saying the incident was only one of several reported killings of civilians by state forces in the insecure West African country. The Malian army has long been accused of abuses against civilians, and now Russian fighters, who have made inroads in the country in the wake of declining French military presence, are fast building a similar reputation.
'The most striking difference with France's former military presence has been Wagner's callous strategy, characterised by wanton violence against civilians,' Constantin Gouvy, a Sahel researcher with the international affairs think tank, Clingendael Institute, told Al Jazeera, comparing the Russian fighters with French troops who were once Mali's main support against invading armed groups before they exited the country in 2021 when Bamako and Paris fell out.
Mali has since sacked an 11,000-man United Nations peacekeeping mission, as well, and turned exclusively to Russian paramilitaries. Wagner troops were almost immediately spotted deep in enemy territory upon their deployment in 2022 and were accused by rights groups of collaborating in civilian 'massacres' alongside state forces and pro-government ethnic fighter groups. However, analysts say that since August 2023, after the death of Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, the fighters appear to have intensified their involvement in Mali and expanded their scope of operations – at the cost of civilian lives.
Bamako is eager to weaken armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) and has targeted villagers in the north that it sees as sympathetic to them. But battles with Tuareg groups, some of whom are fighting for a secessionist state of 'Azawad', have become a key focus, and have reawakened a decades-long independence war in the north.
The travellers in the Gao convoy from February are believed to have been Tuareg.
Between 1,000 and 1,500 Russian Wagner fighters are on the Malian front lines, which is the group's main active battleground in the region. Wagner soldiers are similarly present in the Central African Republic and Sudan.
Since 2023, Russia has sought to control the group more directly.
Some experts say Moscow is eager to avoid Wagner getting as powerful as it was under Progozhin, who staged a rebellion that embarrassed Russian President Vladimir Putin and senior defence officials just months before his death.
Russian defence authorities have since rebranded Wagner's Africa operations as Africa Corps. But in Mali, the fighters have continued to identify themselves as 'Wagner', analysts who monitor their Telegram channels say.
Mali's crisis began in 2012, when coalitions of Tuareg secessionists known collectively as the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA) took control of three northern cities – Timbuktu, Kidal and Gao, proclaimed an independent Azawad state, and split Mali into two.
The then-civilian government sought help from the French military and the UN. The two forces were able to retake some rebel territory. In 2015, the rebels and Bamako signed a fragile peace deal that granted Tuareg separatists some autonomy.
However, low-level attacks by the CMA continued. Armed groups such as the al-Qaeda-backed Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the ISIL affiliate in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), which the CMA sometimes cooperates with, grew in power, attacking and taxing civilians, and seizing territory. In 2020, the military, riding a wave of popular anger at the France-backed government, seized power.
France condemned the coup, pledging not to work with a military government. Analysts also note that Paris was unwilling to tamper with the Tuareg deal they'd helped secure, a deal the military was especially keen on discarding because they perceived it as threatening. The fighter groups were then forced to look elsewhere for support.
'It was only Wagner troops that were willing to help take back the north,' said Antonio Giustozzi, a researcher at the United Kingdom think tank, Royal United Service Institute (RUSI). The group, he said, is especially known among global mercenary outfits for having an appetite for high-risk warfare, such as the fighter tactics needed in remote Sahelian territory.
'The priority for the Malian government was always the north because they felt those guys got too much autonomy, and they didn't like how cozy they were getting with the French,' he said.
Fighting was ongoing in Mali when Prigozhin died in a plane crash in late 2023. Some analysts predicted that Wagner would significantly reduce its operations in West Africa as the Russian government re-arranged the unit. Some 100 fighters were recalled from Burkina Faso to Ukraine in late 2023, raising those speculations.
Giustozzi said Wagner's future was unclear for some months. Mali was unwilling to deal with a military force that was essentially under Russian government control. Moscow was also torn: On the one hand, it was wary of the group and did not want it to return to its former strength; on the other, shutting it down would mean Moscow lost access to the Sahel where it has gained significant influence, not to mention the millions of dollars in security payments.
Eventually, a compromise was reached, the RUSI expert said: Wagner would stay on for the fighting, and Russian military officials would oversee noncombat deployments, such as training and maintaining equipment. The Russian military is deployed in similar roles in Burkina Faso and Niger.
Wagner, now led by Ivan Aleksandrovich Maslov, has been pressured to prove to Bamako it can deliver despite the internal turmoil, analysts say, pointing to its doubled combat activities since then. In the last quarter of 2023, after Russia's direct takeover of the group, Wagner's activities in Mali doubled compared with the previous quarter, according to analysis by conflict monitor ACLED. That trend continued in 2024.
'What Wagner is willing to do, no one else is,' Giustozzi said. Russian fighters are active in remote parts of northern Mali, close to the Algerian border, where there is little air support or possibilities for medical evacuation. It's a situation most mercenary groups would baulk at, he said, but Wagner fighters are especially rugged and, like other mercenaries, violent.
With Wagner's help, Mali's army made significant gains against the rebels.
In late 2023, the government coalition took back control of Kidal. In February 2024, government forces also retook the Inathaka gold mine, the largest artisanal gold mine in the north which had been controlled jointly by armed groups and Azawad rebels. Government air attacks have also killed high-ranking rebel leaders.
That success has come at the expense of civilian lives as the military, Wagner troops, and pro-government fighter groups step up military operations. Where armed groups killed about 400 people in total in 2024, Wagner and the Malian military killed more than 900 people, according to ACLED.
Civilians fleeing Mali's north to Mauritania arrive with horror tales of 'white men in masks', according to reporting by The Washington Post. Experts tell of women strip-searched and abused, men decapitated, people burned alive, and entire communities razed.
Human Rights Watch, in a December report, revealed that between May and December, the Malian army and Russian forces 'deliberately killed at least 32 civilians, including 7 in a drone strike, forcibly disappeared 4 others, and burned at least 100 homes in military operations in towns and villages in central and northern Mali'.
The rights groups also accused JNIM and ISGS of dozens of civilian deaths in the same timeframe.
French troops, when they were in Mali, were not without their faults. A French air raid in January 2021 killed 19 civilians taking part in a wedding. And Mali's army is routinely implicated in civilian deaths.
Wagner and the Malian military too have been badly hit. Last July, the coalition suffered its biggest defeat yet, when a unit was ambushed by a joint force of CMA fighters and armed groups in northern Tinzouaten. Dozens of Wagner soldiers died or were taken captive.
Mali, in the aftermath, blamed Ukraine for providing intelligence support to the Tuareg in order to get back at Russia. It also cut ties with Kyiv.
Despite its military setbacks, Wagner for now appears intent on keeping both Moscow and Bamako happy, experts say.
'They are a relatively low-cost involvement which brings in money, minerals, and geopolitical sway,' Gouvy, the Clingendael Institute researcher said, painting Moscow's likely calculations with Wagner at a time when Western sanctions have hobbled revenue.
'For now, it's reasonable to expect Russia will continue to leverage Wagner and Africa Corps to spread its influence in the Sahel in one form or another,' he added.
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