The Tuareg are a Berber people of the central Sahara, herders and traders whose homeland was sliced apart by colonial borders that paid no heed to where they actually lived. When French Sudan became independent Mali in 1960, many Tuareg found themselves a minority within a state run from distant Bamako, and they rose against that rule again and again - in 1962, in the 1990s, in the late 2000s. The grievance was persistent: a sense that the desert north, with its distinct people and culture, was governed as an afterthought. Azawad, as the rebels imagined it, would gather the regions of Timbuktu, Kidal and Gao together with part of Mopti - roughly sixty percent of Mali's land - into a homeland of their own.

The opportunity came from outside the desert. The 2011 collapse of Muammar Gaddafi's Libya sent weapons and battle-hardened Tuareg fighters streaming home into a destabilized Sahel. On 17 January 2012 the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, the MNLA, launched its rebellion. Within weeks the Malian army was reeling. Gao and Kidal fell in March, Timbuktu on 1 April, and on 6 April Bilal Ag Acherif signed a declaration of independence, naming Gao as the temporary capital and pledging a constitution and a democracy that honored the United Nations charter. But the world said no. The Economic Community of West African States called the declaration null and void. Not a single foreign government recognized the new state.

What undid Azawad was as much internal as external. The MNLA had not taken the north alone; it had advanced alongside Islamist groups, chief among them Ansar Dine, whose vision of a strict religious state was sharply at odds with the secular nation the Tuareg separatists said they wanted. The two briefly tried to merge, then fractured, and over the summer of 2012 the better-armed jihadists drove the MNLA from the cities it had helped capture. The secular dream curdled into something else entirely. By 14 February 2013 the MNLA had renounced its claim to independence and asked Bamako to negotiate. Azawad, the country, was gone - a place where a long-held aspiration briefly took the shape of a flag, then dissolved back into a contested desert whose troubles were only beginning.