Malian troops enter Kidal after the Azawad front withdraws under air strikes

A column of about 120 vehicles carrying Malian soldiers, Russian Africa Corps troops and Tuareg fighters already integrated into the Malian army left Anéfis on Tuesday morning and entered Kidal shortly before 1pm local time. A Malian officer told AFP the force met no resistance. A second officer said the army had arrived ahead of schedule.

The Azawad Liberation Front, the Tuareg separatist group known by its French initials FLA, had announced hours earlier that it was leaving the city. It called the move a strategic and controlled withdrawal, meant to preserve lives under the danger of air strikes. Government spokesman Brigadier General Issa Ousmane Coulibaly said air and ground forces carried out the operation with Africa Corps assistance.

A city taken without a street fight

Kidal sits in the Adrar des Ifoghas massif, close to the roads that run toward Tinzaouatène and the Algerian border. It has been the political capital of Tuareg rebellion for decades, and control of it has flipped more than once since the 2012 collapse of the Malian state in the north. The army retook the town in 2023 after the Wagner Group, Russia's previous force in Mali, backed a junta offensive. Separatists and fighters from the al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims, or JNIM, seized it again in late April this year.

RFI's sources said the Tuesday column had been built up at Anéfis and Aguelhoc. Air strikes around the city intensified from Sunday, including drone strikes. The FLA said the aerial pressure, which it attributed to Russia's Africa Corps, made a stand inside the town untenable. Its departure cleared the streets. Residents and reporters described a largely empty city. For some time, fewer than 100 civilians had remained.

Sahel researcher Rida Lyammouri told the Associated Press the recapture was a major symbolic victory for the central government. The same accounts treat it as a gain on the map, not a settlement of the war. JNIM and the FLA had taken Kidal in a coordinated push in April. The FLA's withdrawal does not, on the statements issued so far, amount to a ceasefire or a political deal.

The cost of the road back

The approach to Kidal has been expensive. At least 50 people died in July when separatist and jihadist fighters ambushed a convoy near Anéfis, according to figures carried by RFI. In September, a jihadist attack on the Dioura military camp killed at least 100 Malian soldiers. Casualty figures from the recent air strikes have not been independently verified. Human Rights Watch has separately pressed Bamako to investigate abuses it links to Africa Corps operations, including a 10 July raid in the Mopti region in which it said more than 100 Africa Corps fighters and several Malian soldiers entered a village at about 5am.

Africa Corps is the formation Moscow put in place after Wagner's public role in Mali ended. Its presence on the Kidal column puts Russian personnel at the centre of a town whose loss, five months ago, was read in Bamako as a humiliation. France, which ran a counter-insurgency mission in Mali for the better part of a decade, is no longer the partner on the ground. The junta has made that break a point of policy.

What the withdrawal leaves open

The FLA framed its exit as a choice made under air power, not as a defeat in close combat. That wording matters for what comes next. A force that leaves a town to avoid strikes can return when the aircraft are elsewhere, and JNIM has shown it can hit fixed camps far from Kidal. Holding the town will require a garrison, fuel, and a road south through Anéfis that has already been ambushed this year.

For the junta, the picture from Tuesday afternoon is simpler. Troops are inside Kidal again, the separatist flag is down, and an officer can say the column met no resistance. Whether that line still holds in a week depends on who is prepared to fight for a town that both sides have now taken without a final street battle.