It was close to four in the morning when I woke up in the courtyard of our house in Bandiagara. The town we had once known as a tourist haven—a place people visited for the Bandiagara escarpment and the Dogon country—had become unrecognisable. The steady stream of visitors, the simple tents, the night camps: all of it had been replaced by long rows of white shelters, filled with families who had fled their villages to escape a constantly advancing wave of terrorist violence. The four‑wheel‑drive vehicles that used to bring tourists were gone, replaced by exhausted newcomers who had walked for miles along rough, punishing roads in the hope of finding safety in town.
At that hour, my grandmother was already awake, as she always was. She moved quietly around the courtyard, kindled the fire and set water to heat before praying. A woman of unwavering faith and a pilgrim to Mecca, she was deeply respected in the community. She listened intently to the radio as it relayed the now-familiar grim headlines: fuel tankers set ablaze, entire villages on the move, and a local station issuing yet another plea for solidarity.
Since 2022, armed groups had been torching supply trucks on the roads linking Bandiagara to the rest of the Mopti region, causing acute shortages of fuel and food. In one series of attacks, fighters linked to Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) burned more than twenty fuel tankers in just a few months, according to reports from the former UN mission in Mali. By the end of 2024, almost half a million people had been displaced from central and northern Mali, most of them from the regions of Mopti, Bandiagara and Timbuktu. Some villages emptied out entirely; others remained trapped in the middle of active fighting.
After I finished my ablutions and glanced over at my grandmother, I saw her slowly shaking her head with sorrow. Then she asked, “Who are these people doing this to us?” I told her it was JNIM and its leader, Iyad Ag Ghali. At the sound of the name, she straightened in surprise. “And who is this Iyad?” she asked, unable to hide her disbelief.
The Man with the Black Glasses
I took out my phone and showed her a picture: a man in dark glasses and a turban, leaning against a tent with the desert stretching out behind him. “Is he Muslim?” she asked. I said I believed he was—that he was Malian before anything else—but added that he had not always been the armed commander who burned warehouses, shut children out of school and left people stripped of their dignity.
The violence carried out by these armed groups went far beyond torching storage depots and terrorising villages. Since 2015, their campaigns have forced more than 1,700 schools to close, cutting off over half a million children from education—one of the most severe learning crises in West Africa. She listened closely, so I went on. In the 1990s, I told her, Iyad had led a Tuareg rebellion as secretary‑general of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Azawad. Her eyes widened. “So the Azawad story is old?” she asked. I explained that its roots went much deeper than most people realised: conflict in the north had begun in the 1960s and flared again in 1990, 2006 and 2012, when the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) put political marginalisation and chronic underdevelopment at the centre of its demands.
Later, Iyad shifted roles and became a mediator in negotiations over Western hostages during the 2000s. Back then, the kidnappers were linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—the same network with which he is now aligned through the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin alliance.
Saudi Arabia and the Shift in Iyad’s Ideology
My grandmother shook her head in disapproval, repeating the warning she often gave her grandchildren: “If someone is a gang leader once, he’ll always be a gang leader.” I went on, “He joined the 2006 rebellion, then later went back into official life, serving as a diplomat at the Malian consulate in Saudi Arabia between 2008 and 2010—years when, people say, he became more drawn to Salafi ideas.”
Azawad, in northern Mali, is the region where the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) unilaterally declared independence on 6 April 2012, after what became known as the Fourth Tuareg Revolt. The declaration, however, has never been recognised internationally, as the United Nations maintains that the right to self-determination does not apply when force or illegitimate armed groups drive the process.
Grandmother asked, “How can rebels who claimed to defend Azawad become terrorists?” I explained that many trace that shift back to his time in Saudi Arabia and to the rise of jihadist groups like al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—a turning point that marked a complete break in Iyad’s trajectory.
“Where is Iyad now?” she asked quietly. I told her that this was the question with a five-million-dollar price tag—the amount of the US reward for information leading to his capture. He is wanted for crimes committed between 2012 and 2013 in Timbuktu and Aguelhok, when he led Ansar Dine. According to the International Criminal Court, the charges against him include rape and sexual violence, torture, religious and gender persecution, attacks on religious sites, unlawful detention and the execution of more than forty soldiers in Aguelhok.
My grandmother looked at me with a mix of shock and sorrow. “With all these international armies… they still couldn’t find him?” she asked. “No,” I answered. The UN mission in Mali, which stayed for a decade, withdrew in 2023 after more than 300 personnel were killed, making it one of the deadliest peacekeeping operations in UN history.
“This is serious,” she said, her voice heavy. I mentioned that he had once lived in Bamako with his family. She sighed deeply. “Does he fear God at all? His parents wouldn’t be proud of him. How can a Malian do this to his own people? People are being killed and tortured, villages burned, women raped”.
Since 2019, more than two thousand civilians have been killed in central Mali alone, with entire villages—Ogossagou, Soubani Da, Anakana and others—wiped out. Many more have died in landmine explosions, ambushes and militia attacks. “We don’t even know what they want…” she murmured, before falling silent, gathering up her prayer rug and returning to her room.
As the sun rose, I set out on my bicycle with a 20-litre jerrycan, joining the long line at the petrol station. Ever since armed groups began torching the fuel tankers headed for the city, military convoys had been escorting them, and getting fuel had turned into a struggle for survival. All the way there, a single question kept echoing in my mind: How did we end up here?
Georges Théodore Dougnon, journaliste malien
