For months a fragile demarcation had held in central Mali, separating the government-held south from the north, where the towns of Gao and Timbuktu lay under the control of armed Islamist groups. In the first days of January 2013, the talks collapsed. Ansar Dine, led by Iyad Ag Ghali, demanded autonomy for the Azawad and the imposition of Sharia, the government refused, and the ceasefire was declared over. Fighters from several groups gathered near the line. They moved carefully toward Konna, traveling in small scattered bands through wooded country rather than open columns, their pickup trucks smeared with mud and the men hidden under cloth to slip past aircraft and infrared. On the ninth, a Malian reconnaissance patrol rolled out, found nothing, and turned for home, where it drove into an ambush. The line broke that day.

The objective, French intelligence judged, was the twin towns of Mopti and Sevare, and above all the airport at Mopti-Ambodedjo, the only airfield in central Mali. Whoever held it could choke off any outside intervention before it began. For a few hours on the morning of January 11, the defense of that airfield came down to about seventy French special forces soldiers, hastily flown in, backed by a thin Malian line of two aging tanks and a handful of rocket launchers. If Mopti fell, the road to the capital, Bamako, lay open. That morning France launched Operation Serval. It was a decision forced early by the speed of the advance, and the small garrison at the airfield held while reinforcements scrambled toward them.

Malian Mi-24 helicopters, freshly repaired, flew up from Bamako to strike the fighters near Konna, and French Gazelle helicopters joined the effort to halt the column pressing toward Mopti. The insurgents had mounted anti-aircraft guns on some of their trucks. In one low pass, a burst of fire struck a French Gazelle, wounding its pilot, Lieutenant Damien Boiteux. He and his co-pilot brought the helicopter back to base, but Boiteux died of his wound — the first French soldier to die in the intervention. He was forty-one. Over the following nights, Mirage jets flying from Chad struck buildings the insurgents used in Konna. The strikes were not clean. Local accounts describe civilians killed in the bombardment and the helicopter fire, among them children, some of whom drowned trying to cross the Niger to escape the fighting. The town's people paid a price that no tally fully captures.

The recapture came a week later. On the evening of January 16, around four hundred Malian soldiers under Colonel Didier Dacko advanced from Sevare, a few dozen French special forces alongside them, and clashed with insurgent groups in wooded country near Dengaourou. Two Malian soldiers fell at the start of the fight, one to a sniper. Through the night, French observers guided Malian rocket fire onto the enemy positions, and by the morning of January 18 the town was back in government and French hands. Residents came out waving flags. The reckoning that followed was grim and contested: insurgents had summarily executed wounded Malian prisoners during the town's capture, and human rights investigators later documented detainees executed by Malian soldiers in the camps around Sevare. The battle that opened the war was over. Counting its dead, soldier and civilian alike, would prove far harder than winning it.