On November 7, 2025, twenty-year-old Malian TikToker Mariam Cissé was publicly executed by the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimeen or JNIM—al-Qaeda’s Sahel affiliate. The jihadists shot Cissé in front of a crowd for sharing pro-army videos with her 100,000 followers, and warned that a similar fate awaited other supporters of the military junta.
Her killing is one of thousands of deaths in a war running since 2012, when Tuareg separatists rebelled for an independent northern state, al-Qaeda-linked groups seized the major northern cities and imposed Islamic law, and UN peacekeepers and French troops were drawn into stabilization and counter-terror operations. Coups in 2020 and 2021 brought Colonel Assimi Goïta to power; he expelled French forces and UN peacekeepers, and hired Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group. In April 2026, JNIM and a group of Tuareg separatists mounted the largest offensive of the war, killing the defense minister and blockading the capital city of Bamako.
Mali’s information space is now dominated by “videomen”: young, mostly male smartphone broadcasters livestreaming across online platforms, often in Bamanankan—Mali’s most widely spoken language. Their marathon livestreams and commentary interviews on the war and the junta’s enemies reach hundreds of thousands of viewers, sometimes millions. Gandhi Malien is the most prominent, with more than 1.8 million followers.
