The soldiers had a grievance, and it was a real one. For weeks, Tuareg rebels of the MNLA, hardened and heavily armed with weapons brought back from the collapse of Gaddafi's Libya, had been routing the Malian army across the north. Some soldiers had been sent to the front without enough food, let alone enough weapons, and they blamed President Amadou Toumani Touré's government for sending them to fight and lose. Layered beneath the fighting was a deeper crisis: a region Bamako had struggled to control since the 1960s, an influx of armed Islamist groups, and a harsh food shortage that had already driven families into refugee camps. The mutiny at Kati was the moment all of that boiled over.

By the morning of 22 March, the mutineers controlled Bamako. A spokesman appeared on state television to announce that soldiers calling themselves the National Committee for the Restoration of Democracy and State, the CNRDR, had seized power from what they called Touré's incompetent regime. Their figurehead was Captain Amadou Sanogo, a mid-ranking officer who had trained in the United States and who insisted, almost plaintively, that he wanted no power for himself. 'We are not here to confiscate any power,' he told the BBC, promising elections once security was restored. Touré was never caught. Guarded by his loyal Red Berets at a base in the capital, he later said simply, 'I am free and in my country,' adding that what mattered was not his own position but Mali's democracy.

The soldiers said they had acted to fight the rebels more effectively. Instead they handed the rebels a gift. With the army in Bamako turned against its own government, the north was left undefended, and the MNLA swept forward, taking the regional capital of Kidal and then more. Reuters called the coup 'a spectacular own-goal,' and the phrase stuck. The world responded with near-total condemnation; Mali's neighbors imposed harsh sanctions, foreign aid was frozen, and a nation that depended heavily on outside assistance was suddenly cut off. Around 200,000 people fled the fighting in the north. Insurgents looted thousands of tons of food from aid warehouses, and Amnesty International warned that Mali stood on the brink of a major humanitarian disaster.

Under mounting pressure, the junta blinked. On 6 April, Sanogo's CNRDR agreed with West African mediators to step aside in return for an end to sanctions, and on 12 April the coup leaders formally handed power to a transitional government under interim president Dioncounda Traoré. But the soldiers never truly let go. A bloody countercoup by the loyalist Red Berets at the end of April was crushed, with at least fourteen killed in a single night and later reports that captured soldiers died under torture. In May, demonstrators allowed into Traoré's office attacked the interim president himself. For months Sanogo's men were still widely thought to hold real control. The 2012 coup did not end Mali's troubles; it opened a decade of them, the first in a chain of upheavals that would shake the country again and again in the years that followed.