Failing to play a mediating role, wisdom dictates that Niger should resolutely keep its distance from the conflict opposing Bamako to Azawad. This is not merely one diplomatic option among others: it is a crucial condition for the internal cohesion of Niger itself.
A conflict older than the Malian state itself
The conflict currently setting northern Mali ablaze is far from a cyclical crisis. Its roots plunge into the first Tuareg rebellion of 1916-1917, deepened during the uprisings of 1962-1964 and 1990-1996, and resurfaced with the proclamation of Azawad’s independence in 2012. Each cycle has followed the same pattern: a central state responding with force to a political demand, a peace agreement signed under constraint—such as the 2015 Algiers Accords—and an agreement that then bogs down for lack of genuine implementation. The coordinated offensive of April 25, 2026, jointly carried out by the Front for the Liberation of Azawad and JNIM against Bamako, Kati, Kidal, Gao, Sévaré, and Mopti, is therefore not an isolated event: it is the reappearance, in a more violent form, of an unresolved issue—the political status of the populations of the North and their place in the architecture of the Malian state. Imagining that Niger can meddle in such a dispute without suffering the blowback is sheer blindness. What Bamako fights under the label of terrorism is also, at its core, a matter of political and territorial recognition—an issue Niger knows intimately, having faced it during its own rebellions.
A cross-border community, a risk of direct contagion
This is where the danger becomes concrete. The communities targeted in Azawad are not confined to Malian borders: they are distributed across Mali, Niger, Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Libya. A war waged against Azawad is therefore never strictly a Malian war; it crosses the borders inherited from colonization and directly impacts Niger’s community balance.
Engaging militarily alongside Bamako would amount, for Niamey, to importing the fracture lines of a conflict that is not its own into its domestic sphere, turning alliance solidarity into a factor of internal destabilization.
Yet this is precisely the line Niger has started to cross. Following the attacks of April 25, the joint force of the Alliance of Sahel States, of which Niger is a major pillar, reportedly carried out aerial campaigns in Malian territory against FLN positions. The spokesperson for the Front for the Liberation of Azawad immediately called on Niger and Burkina Faso to stay out of Malian events. This call should not be dismissed as a mere rhetorical posture: it signals that the population itself perceives Niger’s involvement as a red line, and that every aerial sortie against Azawad brings Niger a step closer to the risk it claims to avoid.
The mirage of an aes policy “without ethnicity”
No one is fooled by sovereignist discourses claiming that an AES policy exists outside of any community consideration. Beneath the veneer of the anti-terrorist fight lies a much older logic: that of preserving power balances inherited from French colonization, where the groups that captured the state apparatus at independence continue to define the terms of security and legitimacy on their own. Treating the FLN—an Azawadi political movement with long-standing political demands—and JNIM—a transnational jihadist coalition affiliated with al-Qaeda—as a single bloc serves this confusion: it makes it possible to rebrand a demand for political recognition as terrorism, and to justify through weapons what called for negotiation.
It is precisely this framework that must be transcended today so that the peoples of the sub-region can build, by themselves, a truly inclusive governance based on institutions emanating from their shared aspirations rather than on the perpetuation of power relations inherited from a colonial order that was never settled.
Refounding security on governance, not on force
The return to power struggles as the sole compass for regional stabilization has never, in sixty years, produced lasting peace in the Sahel—only precarious truces between two cycles of violence. Each military intervention has bought time without ever addressing the fundamental question: what the communities of the North consider is due to them in terms of political recognition, economic inclusion, and land rights. To bypass this question once again is to prepare the next rebellion.
For Niger, the stake thus goes beyond the simple realpolitik of regional alliance. It is about preserving, at home, the possibility of a political, rather than a security-based, treatment of its own community issues. It is this demand, more than any other diplomatic consideration, that must guide Niamey toward restraint.
Abdoulahi ATTAYOUB
Consultant
Lyon (France), July 8, 2026
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