When Muammar Gaddafi fell in Libya in 2011, his weapons did not vanish. Many of the Tuareg fighters who had served in his forces gathered their rifles and their grievances and drove south, back toward the deserts of northern Mali where they had been born. They carried something the previous Tuareg revolts had lacked: heavy weapons, combat experience, and a unified movement. What followed, from January to April 2012, surprised the Malian government and observers alike. In a handful of weeks, a rebellion that traced its roots back nearly a century would seize a third of the country and shake the Malian state to collapse.
The Tuareg are a traditionally nomadic people of the Sahara, and their uprisings against central authority date back at least to 1916. For decades, Tuareg leaders argued that their people were marginalized and impoverished in both Mali and Niger, that mining projects had damaged the pastoral lands their herds depended on, and that forced modernization and a changing climate had frayed an ancient way of life. Earlier rebellions in 1990 and 2007 had failed. This time the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, the MNLA, gathered the scattered factions under one banner, seeking independence for the northern region they called Azawad. Even Western observers, Reuters noted, regarded the Tuareg separatists as having some legitimate political grievances, distinct from the militants who would later eclipse them.
The fighting opened in mid-January 2012 with an attack on the garrison town of Menaka. The rebels moved fast, capturing border towns, seizing weapons and vehicles, and pushing the Malian army into retreat. The early war was brutal on all sides. After rebels took Aguelhok in late January, the allied militant group AQIM was reported to have executed dozens of Malian soldiers who had surrendered, with estimates ranging from about 82 to 97 dead. Civilians paid too: in February, Medecins Sans Frontieres reported a girl killed and women and children wounded when the Malian air force bombed a camp for displaced people. By March, the MNLA had retaken the strategic town of Tessalit, with about 600 fighters in the battle, and the road to the great desert cities lay open.
The collapse came not from the front but from within. On 21 March, soldiers furious at President Amadou Toumani Toure's handling of the war and the poor equipment they had been given to fight it mutinied at a base near Bamako. That day they stormed the Presidential Palace, forcing Toure into hiding, just a month before he was due to leave office in a scheduled election. The next morning Captain Amadou Sanogo announced on television that the junta had suspended the constitution. The international community condemned the coup unanimously. But the chaos it unleashed proved catastrophic: with the army leaderless, the three largest cities of the north, Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu, fell to the rebels on three consecutive days. On 6 April, after taking Douentza, the MNLA declared the independence of Azawad.
The new state was never recognized. The African Union and European Union rejected it outright, and no government endorsed the partition of Mali. Worse, the secular nationalists who had led the fight soon lost it to former allies. Islamist groups, Ansar Dine and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, had ridden into the captured towns alongside the MNLA and now imposed their own harsh order. They banned music from the radio, ransacked shops and churches, and on 27 June wounded the MNLA's secretary-general in the Battle of Gao. By 17 July, the Islamists had driven the Tuareg separatists out of every major city. The movement that had declared a nation watched it stolen.
Behind the maps and front lines lay a humanitarian catastrophe. By early April, the UN refugee agency counted roughly 200,000 displaced people, with up to 400 a day crossing into Burkina Faso and Mauritania, facing acute shortages of food and water. Armed groups looted more than 2,000 tons of food from World Food Programme warehouses, forcing aid to halt. A May report from Amnesty International documented gang rapes, extrajudicial killings, and the use of child soldiers by both Tuareg and Islamist fighters. The conflict also shattered the ethnic tolerance Mali had long been known for, as Tuaregs and Arabs in the south, many of them opposed to separatism, faced reprisal attacks. In February 2013 the MNLA finally renounced its claim to independence and asked Bamako to negotiate. The dream of Azawad was over; the war it began was not.
The 2012 rebellion swept across northern Mali, but its political earthquake centered on Bamako at 12.65 degrees N, 8.00 degrees W, where the coup unfolded. The fallen cities lie far to the north and east: Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal, across the Niger bend and into the Sahara. The nearest major airport to the capital is Bamako-Senou (Modibo Keita) International, ICAO GABS. The region is arid Sahel and desert; the Niger River is the defining landmark, curving northeast from Bamako toward Timbuktu before bending south.