A convoy rolls out of Gao at dawn.
Dozens of vehicles.
Air cover overhead.
Russian mercenaries and Malian soldiers, heading to rescue their own cohorts, trapped in a desert camp.
They don't make it.
This is the second ambush in five days.
And it's happening in one of the most fought-over corners of the Sahara.
Anefis.
A dusty town that barely registers on most maps.
But it sits 100 kilometres from Kidal — the northern stronghold Tuareg separatists seized just two months ago, killing Mali's defence minister in the process.
Control Anefis, and you control the road to Kidal.
That's why everyone wants it.
👉 Tuareg separatist group FLA now claims Anefis.
👉 A handful of Russian paramilitaries and Malian troops still hold a military camp inside it.
👉 Reinforcements are being sent in to save them.
👉 Reinforcements keep getting ambushed.
Here's the part that should raise eyebrows.
FLA — a secular Tuareg separatist coalition — is fighting alongside JNIM, an Al-Qaeda affiliate.
Two groups with almost nothing in common.
Except one shared enemy.
Mali's junta, and the Russian mercenaries propping it up.
The FLA spokesperson didn't mince words about who they hit.
"Our troops engaged in combat this Thursday... against the reinforcement force, which is composed 90 per cent of Russian mercenaries and Malian soldiers."
Ninety percent.
Read that twice.
Since Mali's back-to-back coups in 2020 and 2021, the junta has leaned hard on Moscow.
First it was Wagner.
Now it's Africa Corps — the Kremlin-run outfit that absorbed Wagner's African operations after its founder's death.
The promise?
Restore security. Crush the insurgents.
The reality?
A security crisis that's raged since 2012, still raging, now with foreign fighters dying in it too.
This isn't a random skirmish.
It's a pattern.
Three strikes.
One direction.
Away from the junta, away from Russia's grip on the Sahara.
Mali's generals promised calm after seizing power.
Instead, they've imported a foreign army to fight their war — and that army is now bleeding in the sand alongside them.
The desert doesn't care who backs whom.
It just keeps swallowing convoys.
That's all for now!
