The Trump administration is apparently shopping for country number eight on its second term military action punch card, and Mali just moved to the front of the line. According to recent reporting, officials are in early talks about launching strikes against JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliated jihadist organization that has been spreading across West Africa's Sahel region like an unwanted chain restaurant franchise.
Current and former U.S. officials spilled the beans to the Washington Post under the cloak of anonymity, because apparently nobody wants their name attached to "hey, we might bomb another country" conversations. If the president gives the green light, Mali would become the eighth nation targeted by American military force since Trump kicked off his second stint in the Oval Office. Eight countries. That's more locations than most fast food chains open in a single quarter.
The reason Mali is getting attention right now is that JNIM has been on an absolute tear lately. They teamed up with Tuareg separatists and managed to take out Mali's defense minister while also seizing key strategic spots, including the city of Kidal. So things are going great over there, clearly.
Inside the administration, opinions are apparently split like a dinner check nobody wants to pay. Sebastian Gorka, who serves as a senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, is reportedly banging the drum hard for direct U.S. military force against the group. Meanwhile, other officials are pumping the brakes, pointing out that both France and Russia already tried the whole "send troops to fix the Sahel" approach and got absolutely nowhere despite pouring in massive resources. A compelling counterargument, one might say.
This whole situation fits neatly into the administration's broader Africa counterterrorism playbook, which favors precision strikes and intelligence cooperation over parking thousands of troops on the ground. You might recall that on Christmas Day, the president announced strikes against ISIS affiliated groups in Nigeria who had been massacring Christians. Trump's holiday message included festive wishes to "the dead Terrorists" and a promise of more to come. Nothing says Merry Christmas quite like a military communique posted on social media.
The Sahel region has basically become a buffet of insurgent groups that refuse to go away. JNIM and Islamic State affiliates like ISGS operate freely across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, controlling enormous swaths of territory and launching hundreds of attacks on both soldiers and civilians. Making matters even more complicated, the governments running these countries are military juntas that grabbed power through coups between 2020 and 2023. These regimes told Western nations to take a hike and instead started cozying up to Russia, which, as we just established, also failed spectacularly at containing the problem.
So the question becomes: will the eighth time be the charm, or just another entry on an increasingly long list?
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