To Fight Extremists, Trump Administration Warms to Russia-friendly Junta

America has ramped up intelligence sharing with Mali’s repressive military junta, current and former U.S. officials said, as extremists gain ground in West Africa.

September 15, 2025

Washington Post

By Rachel Chason

BAMAKO, Mali — The United States has in recent months ramped up intelligence sharing with Mali’s repressive military government, according to three current and former American officials with knowledge of the situation, as Washington tries to help repel the advance of Islamist extremists in West Africa.

The intelligence has been used in strikes by Mali’s military, the officials said, and is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to reengage with the isolated junta, which has been largely shunned by Washington since seizing power in 2021.

Under President Joe Biden, U.S. officials unsuccessfully urged Mali’s generals to implement democratic reforms and sanctioned several top officers for partnering with Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group, which was accused of grave human rights abuses while fighting alongside the country’s military.

Under Trump, both U.S. and Malian officials said, a new rule book is taking shape.

Follow Trump’s second term

“The administration is making it clear: We don’t believe it is for us to judge how you came into power,” said one of the former U.S. officials, who like others in this story spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive subjects. “The message is … we are here if you are.”

The pivot comes at a critical time for Mali, site of the first in a series of military coups across the Sahel region over the past five years. The junta leaders were at first buoyed by support from the public, wary of rising extremist violence and disillusioned with the French, the country’s former colonial ruler and longtime security partner. The regime quickly expelled French troops, invited Russian mercenaries and launched a scorched-earth campaign to retake areas controlled by extremists.

Civilian deaths soared, according to rights groups, along with accusations of torture, sexual violence and forced disappearances. And the insurgents grew stronger, turning the Sahel into a global epicenter of terrorist violence.

Al-Qaeda-aligned militants from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM, have expanded their territorial and strategic ambitions across West Africa, analysts say, and are now pressuring Mali’s government to enter into negotiations as they close in on the capital. The Sahel affiliate of the Islamic State, meanwhile, has consolidated power along Mali’s border which Niger, using it as a launchpad for strikes into Benin and Nigeria.

When Rudolph Atallah, Trump’s deputy senior director for counterterrorism, met with Malian officials in Bamako in July, he held an event with local media, saying the U.S. wanted to help Mali in its fight against extremists — if Mali was a willing partner.

In private meetings, Atallah told his counterparts that everything from intelligence sharing to U.S. equipment and training for Malian forces was on the table, according to two U.S. and Malian officials. Already, the CIA had been given “more latitude” to share information with the Malians, the three current and former U.S. officials said.

William Stevens, deputy assistant secretary for African affairs at the State Department, visited Mali later in July; House and Senate delegations followed last month.

Atallah, the CIA and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Biden “had a more traditional approach to U.S. norms and democracy in this part of the world,” said Franklin Nossiter, the International Crisis Group’s Sahel analyst. “With Trump, everything is on the table.”

On recent visits, American officials have “respected our sovereignty,” said Moussa Ag Acharatoumane, a member of Mali’s transitional government, and have not raised concerns about the country’s close relationship with Russia.

“They recognize that we have the same enemy,” he added, referring to the extremists.

The American strategy is still evolving, the U.S. officials said, as the administration figures out how to navigate concerns over the junta’s human rights record, and the possibility it could pass on U.S. intelligence to Moscow.

“Mali,” one of the current officials said, “is a highly imperfect partner.”

An urgent threat

There were more than 10,000 deaths last year linked to militant groups across the Sahel, a vast geographic belt that extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. But in Washington, one of the former U.S. officials said, it had become “a blank spot-on the map.”

The Biden administration de-emphasized relations with Mail, Burkina Faso and Niger — which are at the center of the extremist threat and are all ruled by military regimes — and focused its efforts on democratic coastal nations like Benin, Ivory Coast and Ghana, which have only recently been impacted by spillover violence. It was like “trying to put out a fire from the edges,” said one of the current U.S. officials.

When the newly empowered junta in Niger, once a stalwart U.S. ally, demanded that U.S. troops leave their base in Agadez last year, the regional estrangement deepened. “Hurt feelings had been dictating policy,” in the words of a former American official.

When Atallah — a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel with decades of experience in West Africa — was appointed, according to the former official, he essentially said: ‘The terrorists are in the Sahel. Why don’t we have a policy on the Sahel?’”

Shortly after Atallah’s July visit to Bamako, Mali’s military said in a post on X that it had conducted a successful strike in northern Mali against “important leaders” of Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, an Algeria-based group that has seen its influence wane in recent years. The Americans were initially hopeful that AQIM leader Abu Ubaydah Yusuf al-Anabi was hit, according to current U.S. and Malian officials, but there has been no confirmation of his death. The officials declined to say whether U.S. intelligence was used in that strike.

In a statement, Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism, congratulated Mali’s military for a “complex and highly professional operation against some of the World’s most dangerous terrorists.”

The White House and Mali’s military did not respond to requests for comment.

The security stakes have grown even more urgent, analysts say, with extremists gaining ground and mounting increasingly audacious attacks.

In recent days, JNIM has ordered a fuel blockade in Mali and its fighters have set fire to tankers and taken drivers hostage in the southwest. They a strategically significant Malian military base in the Ségou region, north of Bamako, Aug. 19, setting fire to barracks and looting weapons and ammunition over the course of multiple days. They have also broadened their attacks on economic targets, including cement plants, sugar refineries and mines, and have kidnapped foreign nationals from China, Russia and India.

“They want to destroy the Malian economy and deprive the central government of resources, forcing their hand to negotiate,” said Héni Nsaibia, West Africa senior analyst for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, or ACLED, a nonprofit research group.

Newly arrived members of Africa Corps — sent by the Russian government to replace Wagner mercenaries this summer — have been unable to blunt the militants’ momentum.

“Africa Corps and Mali’s military are basically playing whack-a-mole,” said veteran Sahel analyst Corinne Dufka. “It’s not clear how long it can go on.”

A potential ‘minefield’

Retired Air Force Gen. Kenneth Ekman, who led the U.S. drawdown from Niger, sees U.S. reengagement with the Malian junta as “a good thing,” helping remedy a dangerous security and information vacuum.

“We need to be helping them do things that we are not willing to do ourselves,” he said.

But such a strategy comes with its own pitfalls.

Providing intelligence for Malian strikes would be “extremely problematic,” said Ilaria Allegrozzi, the senior Sahel Researcher at Human Rights Watch, which has extensively documented the civilian toll of the country’s military crackdown, including summary executions, forced disappearances and indiscriminate drone strikes. In March, across the border in Mauritania, Malian refugees told The Post about arson, assault and torture committed by state forces and Russian mercenaries.

“Countries that are helping them are complicit in those abuses,” Allegrozzi said.

A security partnership also risks turning the United States into a target for JNIM which, unlike the Islamic State, has not explicitly targeted American interests, according to Dufka. And she said it could disrupt efforts to broker a peace deal between Mali’s government and JNIM, which has sought to distance itself from al-Qaeda’s global jihadist goals. A current U.S. official also acknowledged it would be virtually impossible to keep U.S. intelligence from the Russians, who now control much of Mali’s airspace.

“It’s still not clear whether the Trump administration is really serious about engaging here,” said Nossiter, “or how open Mali’s government is to it.”

Ag Acharatoumane, the member of Mali’s transitional government, said officials in Bamako are “taking time to think” about how to manage the relationship. Though many want to work with the United States, he said, sanctions on top officials, including Defense Minister Sadio Camara, remain a sticking point.

But all agree the security situation is dire, he said, and “we need international engagement to put an end to this.”

There are still debates within the Trump administration, U.S. officials said, about whether to lift the sanctions on junta leaders, and what a long-term strategy would look like.

“Mali is a minefield,” one of the current U.S. officials said, “that we are all very much trying to figure out.”

By Rachel Chason

Rachel Chason is The Washington Post's West Africa bureau chief. Before becoming a foreign correspondent in 2022, she was a reporter on the Local desk, focusing on politics and government in Prince George's County, Md. follow on X@rachel_chason