Mali : Will Ag Ghaly Produce an Arab (and American) Imperialist Triumph?
The beautiful mosque beside the Niger River in Mopti, the largest city in central Mali. But how stable is Mali’s military junta faced with Islamic jihad and Western retrenchment?
In the 150 years since the French army arrived, Mali has known barely 25 years of civilian rule. The current military junta is under siege from armed jihadists led by the Tuareg soldier Iyad Ag Ghaly, under his latest political label GSIM = Le Groupe de soutien à l'islam et aux Musulmans : جماعة نصرة الإسلام والمسلمين, Jamāʿat nuṣrat al-islām wal-muslimīn = JNIM in Arabic [Wikipedia].
Iyad Ag Ghaly dominates Mali today. When I first arrived in Mali in 1980 to help rebuild North Mali during a drought, Mali was ruled by soldiers and Ag Ghaly was in Algeria, his family’s herds of camels and goats dead from hunger. Food aid intended for Tuareg refugees, was sold by Malian colonels to build expensive villas that they rented to the same European and American diplomats who had provided the food aid. Many young Tuaregs found work in Muammar Gadafy’s Libyan army. In June 1990 the soldier Iyad Ag Ghaly returned to seek revenge against Mali’s corrupt military.
In the 1980s a few strange desert camps in North Mali had surrounded their huts and tents with a wall of brushwood. Nomads like open spaces and breezes, but these, I was told, were Wahhabists imitating Saudi Arabia. Back in the 1920s, the al-Saud clan seized leadership of Arabia, with British support. To boost their status, the al-Saud promoted the Salafist preaching of Abdul Wahhab, an 18th century radical who escaped hanging by sheltering in the al-Saud fortress. When the 1973 oil crisis created a huge income bonanza for the Saudi royal family, they funded an expansion of Wahhabi missionary preachers.
I often teased Malian women friends with black shawls, that they were colonized by Arabs. All Malian women wear headscarves, favouring bright colours. Fabulous fabrics are a mark of Mali’s culture and glorious historical heritage. These days all my women friends have black chadors hidden in their closets. With the threat of violent jihadism all around us, many women are wearing black for safety.
Saudis disapprove of music and colour (although they love gold). For decades, Saudis provided interest-free credit to compliant African merchants, challenging the mystical Sufi thought and peaceful coexistence practised in African Islam. The 14th century Malian ruler Mansa Musa - the richest man in the world - built the Friday Mosque in Timbuktu in 1326 that is still used to this day. Scholars calculate that Mansa (meaning ‘emperor’) Musa was richer than Elon Musk + Bill Gates together: his mines supplied two thirds of the gold in medieval Europe. Musa’s Muslim court was filled with colour and music. And gold. Modern wealth comes from Arab oil wells. As the wheel of history turns, Africans have tired of European colonial exploitation, they distrust American capitalism and “democracy” that enrich only the urban political elite. Many are ready to try Islamism instead.
Mali is divided between the North and the South
It was on June 20th 1990 that Iyad Ag Ghaly launched a rebellion against the 23-year-old dictatorship of general-president Moussa Traoré. Iyad’s Tuaregs had fought in Chad and in Lebanon: they walked over a poorly equipped Malian army led by armchair colonels with soft bellies. Trade Unionists, students, journalists, lawyers - and finally grandmothers - joined mass protests in Bamako, Mali’s capital, and the military regime collapsed on March 26th 1991. Democracy arrived with the June 1992 election of Dr Alpha Oumar Konaré (AOK, an historian and teacher). Peace in the North only came in March 1996. I was in the city of Timbuktu when Ag Ghaly and other leaders formally disbanded their rebellion. 3000 surrendered weapons were destroyed in a Flame of Peace. Hundreds of Tuaregs arrived on decorated camels to witness the event in Timbuktu, and 10,000 Malians watched as the smoke of peace rose into the desert air.
The United Nations funded a return to civilian life for thousands of “rebels and potential rebels” as herders, farmers, traders, fish farmers and Ag Ghaly got a government salary. When President Konaré was succeeded after 10 years by general Touré (known as ATT), Mali’s new democratic institutions began to unravel. North Malian society was destabilized by Moroccan hashish and Colombian cocaine smuggled across the Sahara. ATT and his colonels made deals with wealthy Arab mafia bosses, who bought protection from the Malian military. A few people became extremely rich from smuggling and kidnapping.
Iyad Ag Ghaly made money as a negotiator for the liberation of kidnapped Westerners, but Tuaregs were mainly sidelined from the cocaine business. Instead, Iyad found religion. In 2007, ATT sent Iyad Ag Ghaly as Mali Consul in Saudi Arabia, giving him access to Islamist politicians and money. Visiting Pakistan, he became enamoured of the Islamic evangelistic movement Jamiat al-Tabligh (and their funding from Saudi Arabia). When Iyad returned to North Mali, he was Salafist. Tuareg friends reported that he wore only white clothes, and Tuareg attendance at mosque prayers was far higher when Iyad was in Kidal. But Iyad is a soldier, not an Islamic intellectual. He is strong as a jihadist leader, but weak as a political figure. Iyad is a Tuareg from Kidal, with no political base in Bamako or elsewhere in Mali.
In Bamako, Spanish-speaking UN officials heard men speaking Spanish with the distinctive accent of Medellin. As the Colombian Medellin cartel moved in and corrupted Africa, NATO countries did nothing to stop the mafia. After many private meetings in Western embassies, I concluded that the French, Malian, Algerian and Libyan secret services must be feeding on the flourishing cocaine trade. And who leads NATO?
In 2007 George W. Bush announced the creation of AFRICOM, a new Pentagon command center for Africa, based in Stuttgart, Germany. What is the purpose of AFRICOM? My discussions with researchers at the US Defense University made it clear that the USA plans to take control of any part of Africa deemed essential to its security, whether the biodiversity of the Congo Basin, or the oil and gas and uranium reserves of the Sahara Desert.
Far from admitting to an imperial project, AFRICOM uses the smokescreen of Bush’s long-discredited “global war on terror” as per its website : “USAFRICOM, with partners and allies, counters malign actors and transnational threats, responds to crises, strengthens African security forces and supports U.S. government efforts in Africa to advance U.S. national interests and promote regional security, stability and prosperity.”
How does this message fit US inaction to stop the civil war in the Sudan (funded by US allies in the Gulf)? Or the twenty years of mineral warfare in the Congo? Or president Trump’s recent military threats towards Northern Nigeria? How does the destruction of USAID “promote regional security, stability and prosperity,” considering the terrible impact of US reduction of funding for health, vaccination, education, women’s protection and for protecting and feeding refugees across the African continent? Nor does AFRICOM make sense in the context of the Sahel, where “malign actors and transnational threats” are undermining the stability and livelihoods of millions of Africans in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso.
These three countries have cut military relations with France. United Nations peacekeepers have left Mali. The vacuum is certainly not filled by the incompetent brutality of Russia’s Wagner adventurers (now controlled by the Kremlin). This vacuum seems perfectly designed for AFRICOM. It is known that Iyad Ag Ghaly has close ties to Algerian military intelligence, a partner of the USA. On November 7th, 2025, AFRICOM launched its Warfighter Innovation Council “establishing a framework to better facilitate warfighter innovation.” Whether or not Iyad Ag Ghaly realizes it, he may be part of an American strategy – with or without Saudi Wahhabist connivance – to fill an imperial void that has been created in the Sahel.