Gunfire began a little after 5 a.m. on September 17, 2024, in Faladie, a district on the edge of Bamako. Within minutes a second burst of shooting started at the military side of the city’s main airport. Residents of Mali’s capital, long used to hearing about jihadist violence in the far north and centre of the country, woke to it on their own doorstep.
Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, known as JNIM and affiliated with al-Qaeda, claimed both attacks. Its fighters went after a gendarmerie training school and the airport’s military zone, where the presidential hangar and army drones are based. The civilian terminal was not the target, Malian security officials and the group itself agreed.
Two raids, one morning
JNIM said two teams of suicide fighters from its Katiba Macina unit carried out the operation. One, led by Salman al-Bambari, hit the school. The other, led by Abdul Salam al-Fulani, went for the airport. According to the Long War Journal, the group said all of its men died once Malian forces arrived.
At the school, the fighting ran for more than three hours, The Defense Post reported, and produced most of what it described as about 70 casualties. At the airfield the clashes lasted into the afternoon. JNIM released photographs and video of burning aircraft and claimed it had destroyed at least six, drones among them. The Defense Post said the fighters damaged President Assimi Goita’s Boeing 737, along with planes belonging to the World Food Programme and Sky Mali.
AFP reported that attackers briefly held part of the airport and used rocket-launchers.
A toll nobody would state
The numbers are the murky part. Mali’s general staff conceded only that the “cowardly and treacherous attack caused some loss of human lives on our side.” Officials spoke of “a few casualties.” Eyewitnesses told a different story: Med Africa Times wrote that many people were dead and that dozens of wounded filled hospitals in the capital. JNIM, for its part, claimed to have “killed or wounded over 100 Malian and Russian military personnel,” a claim The Defense Post cautioned the group tends to inflate. The group also said the school raid killed “dozens” of troops and alleged Wagner mercenaries.
Army Chief of Staff General Oumar Diarra went on state television that day. “The terrorists have been neutralised,” he said. “The sweep is continuing.” State broadcaster images showed about 20 blindfolded prisoners with their hands bound.
Why Bamako, and why now
The strike landed one day after the first anniversary of the Alliance of Sahel States and shortly after Goita described terrorist groups as “considerably weakened,” Med Africa Times noted. The same outlet pointed out that detainees awaiting trial in a scandal over the purchase price of a presidential plane were held at the targeted school.
For a capital that had mostly been spared, it was a jolt. The Defense Post called it the first time since 2015 that militants had hit the heart of the city, and the Long War Journal described it as the first such operation inside Bamako in several years. JNIM had struck a major base just outside the city in 2022.
Analysts at the Long War Journal argued that the group has spent two years pushing steadily south, building attack zones that nearly ring Bamako in Koulikoro region. The junta that took power in the coups of 2020 and 2021 has cut ties with France and other Western partners and leans on Russia and its Wagner fighters instead. The same analysis put jihadist control of Burkina Faso, Mali’s neighbour, at an estimated 40% of that country’s territory.
Sources
- Analysis: Al Qaeda strikes the Malian capital (FDD's Long War Journal, Caleb Weiss)
- Jihadist group claims rare attack on Mali capital (France 24 / AFP)
- Bamako Breached: JNIM's Capital Strike Signals Dangerous New Chapter for Mali (The Defense Post)
- Mali: Large-scale JNIM jihadist symbolic attacks in Bamako (Med Africa Times)
