The two men had been waiting for this moment for a long time. On April 28, Bilal Ag Acherif and Alghabass Ag Intalla, the two leaders of the Azawad Liberation Front (ALF), returned home to Kidal after being driven out in November 2023 by mercenaries from the Russian Wagner Group and the Malian army. Forty-eight hours earlier, their fighters, acting in close coordination with the jihadists of the Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the Sahel branch of al-Qaida, had retaken the small town in northern Mali as part of a large-scale joint offensive against the junta led by General Assimi Goïta, who holds power in Bamako.
A third key player in this campaign against the Malian authorities, true to his reputation as an elusive phantom, remains invisible: Iyad Ag Ghali. The 72-year-old Tuareg fighter, now head of JNIM, is widely considered the true mastermind of the offensive, having planned and led its operations. He is the number one enemy of General Goïta and his Russian auxiliaries from Africa Corps, which officially replaced Wagner in June 2025.
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