On April 25, an alliance of Tuareg nationalist militias and Islamists launched a coordinated offensive across Mali. This offensive shook the ruling military junta, which responded in 2013 to mass demonstrations against the French-led war in Mali by imposing the withdrawal of French troops and allying itself with the Kremlin.

While the junta retained power and control of the country’s more populous southern cities, the Tuareg-Islamist offensive shook it badly. Mopti in the north fell under control of Islamist and Tuareg forces, backed by the Algerian military regime and above all by Paris. In the global context of the imperialist war against Iran and Russia, the conflict between the anti-imperialist aspirations of the Malian working masses and the bourgeois politics of the junta is emerging ever more clearly.

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