War / Africa
Ethiopian Civil War
Pretoria is dead: TPLF installs Debretsion, Eritrea coordinates multi-front pressure, and Addis Ababa restructures Tigray administratively.
Since 2022, a cascade of military coups has overthrown elected governments across a continuous arc of West and Central Africa: Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, Gabon, and Chad.
The juntas share a playbook. They expel French troops, exit ECOWAS, and invite Russia's Africa Corps, the Wagner successor, to provide regime protection and counterinsurgency muscle. The trigger was the Sahel's jihadist crisis, which discredited a decade of French-backed counterterrorism and left soldiers convinced that civilian governments could not defend the state. In two years, Paris lost its security architecture in Africa and Moscow built one.
The region's democratic experiment of the 1990s is being unwound junta by junta.
Trajectory
The April 2025 JNIM-FLA offensive constitutes a phase change in the Mali conflict: Kidal fell, Defense Minister Sadio Camara was killed, the international airport was struck, and a fuel blockade now cuts three of six supply roads into Bamako.
Africa Corps surrendered at Kidal and has contracted to regime-protection duties in the capital, reversing the symbolic junta victory of 2023 and exposing the structural limits of mercenary cohesion under sustained pressure.
Weekly net escalation pressure, last 90 days
Analysis
Africa Corps' Kidal surrender and the killing of Defense Minister Camara together constitute a credibility collapse, not a tactical setback.
The JNIM-FLA fuel blockade is a structural chokepoint operation exploiting Mali's landlocked dependency on coastal fuel imports; the junta has no short-term fix because the vulnerability is geographic, not operational.
Niger's 45% Wapco equity stake and uranium nationalization via Tsumco SA show AES resource sovereignty consolidation is accelerating in parallel with the Mali security crisis.
Historical Context
Decolonization created artificial borders across West and Central Africa, leaving behind French- and British-trained military elites with outsized political power and weak civilian institutions.
International pressure produced a wave of democratic transitions across the region, but most new governments remained dependent on military loyalty and vulnerable to coups.
Jihadist groups JNIM and ISWAP expanded aggressively across the Sahel, exposing catastrophic governance failures in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger and discrediting French-backed counterinsurgency efforts.
Mali suffered two coups in nine months, signaling the collapse of France's Françafrique security architecture and opening the door to Russian Wagner Group involvement as an alternative patron.
A cascade of military takeovers consolidated: Burkina Faso fell to juntas in January and September, Guinea remained under Mamadi Doumbouya following his 2021 coup, and Guinea-Bissau survived a coup attempt in February.
Niger's presidential guard ousted elected President Mohamed Bazoum in July; Gabon's military removed President Ali Bongo in August, bringing the total of active juntas in the region to eight and triggering ECOWAS threats of military intervention that were never enforced.
Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger formally withdrew from ECOWAS and established the Alliance of Sahel States, fracturing the region's primary collective security and sanctions mechanism.
France completed a full military withdrawal from Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Senegal under junta pressure, formally ending Françafrique's military presence while Africa Corps (successor to Wagner) expanded basing and operational roles across the belt.
Proxy Network
Africa Corps (Wagner successor) provided direct combat support and regime protection in Mali and Burkina Faso but suffered a structural credibility collapse.
Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) formed an operational alliance with JNIM for the April 2025 Kidal offensive.
JNIM retains coercive reach sufficient to contest state-aligned areas, blockade Bamako's supply corridors.
VDP auxiliaries in Burkina Faso function as a state-backed irregular force responsible for the majority of documented civilian killings across 11 regions.
Africa Politology, a Russian influence network founded by Prigozhin and absorbed by the SVR after his death.
PRO-RESTORATION
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