Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Mali’s junta-led government retaliates against insurgents, U.S. and Nigerian forces kill a major Islamic State figure, and the World Health Organization sounds the alarm about an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
A few weeks after coordinated rebel attacks rocked Mali, threatening the junta government’s grip on power in the country’s north and marking a new phase of its security crisis, the Malian military is retaliating with drone strikes, some of which have killed civilians.
Mali launched air strikes for several days late last week in the northern city of Kidal, which was seized in late April by the Tuareg separatist Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and al-Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM).
Military drone strikes also hit Tene, a town in the central San region, on Sunday. The strikes, which reportedly targeted a motorbike procession, killed at least 10 civilians, including children preparing for a wedding.
The military’s campaign follows unprecedented assaults by the FLA and JNIM, whose joint attacks last month across major northern cities killed more than 30 people, including Defense Minister Sadio Camara. The rebels have continued assaults on civilian communities and infrastructure. JNIM fighters also stormed a prison near Bamako, Mali’s capital, that housed 2,500 prisoners, including members of the group.
So far, there has not been a counter-coup within Mali’s military ranks or a toppling of the junta, as some analysts predicted. But the junta’s position in north and central Mali remains tenuous at best.
An expanded blockade imposed by JNIM on Bamako and the surrounding areas has restricted movement and led to food shortages, further destabilizing the country. At least three of the six main roads leading to Bamako and connecting it to regional ports were under attack by JNIM militants as of May 15, Amnesty International warned.
“On the ground, the threat is very real,” the Journal du Malireported on Thursday. “Armed terrorist groups are carrying out increased acts of sabotage, ambushes, and intimidation against civilian transport operators in order to disrupt supplies to the capital and create a climate of fear.”
On Friday, the Malian Armed Forces broke a year-long siege on the central town of Diafarabé, escorting vital food supplies inside. But despite that breakthrough, many parts of the country still lack basic necessities. Several areas, including Bamako, are experiencing prolonged electricity blackouts. Earlier this month, rebels set several buses on fire in Zambougou, a village near Bamako.
Mali has long faced insecurity. Past foreign military interventions—including the French-led Operation Barkhane, the European Union-backed G5 Sahel force, and a United Nations peacekeeping mission—failed to curb decades-long instability in the country.
More recently, after two coups led by military leader Assimi Goïta in 2020 and 2021, Mali’s military governments have turned to Russian mercenaries for support. But those forces have also struggled to suppress rebel violence. Russia’s Africa Corps could not hold onto Kidal last month; in 2024, its predecessor, the Wagner group, lost dozens of experienced fighters in an FLA ambush.
Despite the losses, Russia remains an essential partner for Mali. Bamako is expecting fuel and fertilizer shipments from Moscow in the coming months after a Malian delegation visited Russia last week, Malian news outlet Bamako Matinreported.
Meanwhile, insecurity in Mali is spreading to its neighbors. JNIM emerged in 2017 as a coalition of several jihadist groups that the French military had pushed back in northern Mali five years earlier. Since then, the group has expanded into coastal West African states, where it has attacked state security forces and engaged in cattle theft and gold smuggling.
The FLA, JNIM’s ally, formed in 2024 when ethnic Tuareg groups fighting for self-determination merged into a single separatist front. Tuaregs have more in common culturally with North African communities than with Mali’s majority-Bambara population. Their disaffection is a story that’s all too common across West Africa and the Sahel, where northern populations often feel economically and culturally marginalized by central governments located in the south.
Many analysts believe that military force alone will not be enough to combat the emergence of separatists and Islamists across the Sahel. Instead, states must also address socio-economic grievances. Crucially, the International Crisis Group recently argued, this will require recognizing “the stigmatisation of communities where the jihadist message could gain traction.”
Thursday, May 21: The U.N. Security Council is set to adopt a resolution to inspect vessels headed to or from Libya suspected of violating the arms embargo.
Friday, May 22, to Sunday, May 24: Foreign ministers within the Southern African Development Community meet at Kruger National Park in Mpumalanga, South Africa.
ISIS commander eliminated. U.S. and Nigerian forces killed Abu-Bilal al-Minuki—the Islamic State’s global second-in-command, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed—over the weekend in a joint operation that targeted Minuki’s compound in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, where insurgency is high.
Minuki’s death marks the deep expansion of the United States and Nigeria’s military collaboration, following the deployment of around 100 U.S. soldiers to Nigeria in February to provide intelligence and training. The Nigerian military claimed it killed Minuki in 2024 but later backtracked and said that was a different person.
The United States and Nigeria conducted additional airstrikes on militant targets in Borno on Monday. The Nigerian public has largely welcomed the campaign, compared with Washington’s December strike in northwestern Sokoto state, which residents said failed to kill any militants.
Although Trump claims that Minuki was the Islamic State’s global No. 2 figure, analysts have pointed out that Minuki mostly operated within the Islamic State West Africa Province. Regardless, the partnership with Nigeria appears crucial to U.S. defense interests: Earlier this month, U.S. officials warned that the loss of military bases in the Sahel had limited their ability to monitor al-Qaeda-linked groups that could develop the capability to attack the United States.
U.S. Africa envoy. On Monday, the U.S. Senate confirmed Frank Garcia as assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Garcia has promised that U.S. policy toward the continent under his leadership will be “firmly rooted in the protection of core U.S. national interests” and Trump’s America First policy.
Garcia has not yet indicated how he intends to implement the peace initiatives struck by Massad Boulos, Trump’s senior advisor for Arab and African affairs, in Libya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Kenyan protests. Several demonstrations, including a nationwide public transport strike, were held across Kenya on Monday to protest fuel price hikes caused by the war in Iran. At least four people have been killed, around 30 injured, and more than 700 arrested amid clashes with security forces.
Kenya imports most of its refined oil from Gulf nations, including the United Arab Emirates and Oman. On Tuesday, labor organizers paused their strike for a week to allow negotiations with the government.
Deadly Ebola outbreak. On Sunday, the World Health Organization declared an Ebola outbreak in Congo a public health emergency of international concern.
As of Tuesday, 536 suspected cases and 134 deaths have been reported, mainly in Congo’s eastern Ituri province. The disease has also spread to neighboring Uganda, with two confirmed cases, as people have fled conflict in eastern Congo. A case was also confirmed in the Congolese city of Goma, which is under the control of Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.
The outbreak does not meet the criteria of a pandemic emergency, the World Health Organization said, but it might be “much larger … than what is currently being detected and reported, with significant local and regional risk of spread.” The first known patient began experiencing symptoms in late April. The disease’s current strain, which is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, has no approved drugs or vaccines.
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Faux-pan-Africanist? French President Emmanuel Macron sparked public backlash after he declared France the “true pan-Africanists” at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi last week. In an open letter to Macron in This Is Africa, Farida Bemba Nabourema argued that Macron’s statement insulted historical memory and disregarded France’s brutal legacy on the continent.
“At least 250,000 Cameroonians [were] killed between the late 1950s and the early 1960s in a counterinsurgency campaign your government conducted with napalm and collective punishment and the systematic destruction of villages, a campaign so thoroughly suppressed in French historical memory that most French citizens today are entirely unaware it occurred,” Nabourema wrote.
Abuja’s turning point. In The Republic, Lotanna Ogbuefi recounted the impact of the 2011 suicide car bombing carried out by Islamist group Boko Haram at the U.N. headquarters in Nigeria’s capital of Abuja. “Before the attack, insurgency was widely believed to be a problem confined to Nigeria’s northeast,” she wrote.
“Today, insecurity in Abuja has taken on a different form,” Ogbuefi added. “Yet, much of the day-to-day policing and security infrastructure introduced during the height of the Boko Haram insurgency remains in place.”
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