Dozens of mercenaries from Russia’s notorious Wagner Group were reportedly killed in two separate ambushes in Mali over the weekend.
An affiliate of al-Qaeda claims to have killed 50 Wagner fighters in the northern Kindal region on Saturday, while Tuareg separatists boasted of killing dozens more near the Algerian border.
“Our forces decisively obliterated these enemy columns on Saturday. A large amount of equipment and weapons were seized or damaged,” said Mohamed Elamouloud Ramadane, spokesman for the Tuareg insurgency in northern Mali, which calls itself the Permanent Strategic Framework for Peace, Security, and Development.
Ramadane said the rebels additionally killed and captured Malian troops, losing seven of its own fighters in the process.
The insurgents posted videos on social media showing dozens of corpses, many of them white men who might have been Wagner mercenaries. Some of the bodies were piled around damaged vehicles and, as Fox News Digital delicately noted, the dead were photographed in “varying degrees of undress.”
Wagner released a statement on the messaging app Telegram that said its forces fought alongside Malian troops in the area described by the insurgents, and supposedly “destroyed most of the Islamists before a sandstorm saw the militants regroup and return with more than a thousand” reinforcements.
“Thanks to the coordinated actions of storm troopers and Malian servicemen, the attempted attack was repelled,” Wagner claimed.
“Over the next two days, radicals have stepped up the number of massive attacks, using heavy weapons, drones and car bombs, which caused losses on the part of the Wagner PMC and the Malian armed forces,” the statement concluded.
The Wagner statement conceded that its operatives “suffered losses,” but did not specify how many. It is extremely rare for the Wagner Group to admit its employees suffered casualties in a pitched battle.
Russia’s state-run Tass news agency cited Wagner sources who claimed only three of the group’s mercenaries were killed fighting the Tuareg, but one of them was an “assault squad commander” named Sergey Shevchenko. Shevchenko’s military call sign was “Pond,” so his unit was known as the “Pond Group.”
Fox News Digital noted that some other Russian media sources reported at least 20 Wagner mercenaries killed and some non-Russian sources claim “death toll could be as high as 80.”
Meanwhile, an al-Qaeda branch called Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (“Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims,” or JNIM) claimed it killed 50 Wagner mercenaries and ten Malian soldiers in a “complex ambush” on a military convoy.
Two Malian security sources told Reuters the ambush was a joint effort between the al-Qaeda group and Tuareg separatists. The convoy was reportedly attacked while retreating from the town of Tinzaouaten, near the Algerian border, after an unsuccessful attempt to recapture the town from the Tuareg insurgents.
Pro-Wagner social media accounts claimed one of the casualties was a 29-year-old mercenary named Nikita Fedyanin who runs a Wagner channel on Telegram called “The Gray Zone.”
The Malian military, like the Wagner Group spokesman, said local sandstorms were used to great effect by the insurgents and their terrorist allies, giving them cover to regroup and surround the convoy. Wagner did not offer any details of the Tinzaouaten ambush, but Malian officials said there were “heavy human and material losses.”
The Tuareg are a restless nomadic people spread across the Sahara region, including Mali, Algeria, Niger, and Libya. Somewhat like the Kurds in the Middle East, they have ethnic nationalist groups that extend across the borders of the nations they inhabit, with dreams of cobbling together an independent Tuareg republic someday.
Tuareg society has a long tradition of feudal government, rigid class systems, and fighting with hit-and-run raids on their enemies. Most Tuareg adhere to an offbeat sect of Sunni Islam called the Maliki School, mixing the teachings of a 16th-century prophet with elements of pre-Islamic Tuareg tradition. Their brand of Islam is apparently compatible with al-Qaeda, but not ISIS, which the Tuareg fought against in northern Mali. Tuareg leaders insist their separatist movement is secular, but they have enlisted numerous Islamist militias as allies.
Tuareg rebels launched an insurgency in 2012 that has come to be known as the Mali War. Their ranks swelled by defectors from the Malian army and experienced fighters returning from the civil war in Libya, the Tuareg were able to capture northern Mali’s main cities.
The civilian government of Mali was overthrown in 2012 by a military coup, led by junior officers who were frustrated by their government’s inability to defeat the Tuareg rebellion. Civilian rule briefly returned, only to be overthrown by another coup in 2020, which was once again driven by anger over the ongoing instability in the Tuareg region.
The 2020 junta was itself overthrown in 2021, a “coup within a coup” that left Col. Assimi Goita holding power as “interim president.” Goita consolidated his rule by giving himself sweeping new powers under a “reformed” constitution in July 2023.
Goita, like his fellow junta leaders in neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, turned to Russian mercenaries for muscle after losing the support of Western powers. The Wagner Group, founded by onetime Putin ally (and probable Putin victim) Yevgeny Prighozhin, has a reputation for merciless brutality when hired to suppress insurgencies. Village officials in northern Mali have accused Wagner mercenaries and their Malian Army allies of executing dozens of civilians in cold blood and looting their homes.
JNIM is an alliance of jihadist groups formed in 2017 and linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The “emir” of JNIM swore fealty to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawairi when the alliance was created.
The objective of JNIM was to create a multi-ethnic, trans-national jihadi terrorist organization in the Sahara region. The group treats captured civilians every bit as brutally as the Wagner mercenaries do.
JNIM fighters have alternately worked as hired muscle for the Islamic State and fought against ISIS forces, with hostilities intensifying after a non-aggression pact between the terrorist organizations collapsed in 2019. Some observers believe JNIM is now trying to forge an alliance with a jihadi group called Ansaroul Islam in Burkina Faso.
