The Architecture of Silence

In 2024, Malian government forces and their Russian partners killed more than three times as many civilians as the jihadist groups they were deployed to fight. The word that prevents this from being named is "sovereignty."

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In the first ten months of 2024, Malian security forces and their Russian military partners conducted 239 operations targeting civilians, killing 1,021 people. In the same period, jihadist armed groups — JNIM and the Islamic State Sahel Province, the enemies the counter-insurgency exists to fight — killed 344.

Three to one.

The government killed three times as many civilians as the enemy.

This ratio did not produce a Security Council session. It did not produce an international investigation. It did not produce a front page. The reason is a single word: sovereignty.

What the word replaced

On December 15, 2023, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali — MINUSMA — completed its withdrawal. The Malian junta, led by Colonel Assimi Goïta, had demanded the departure in June 2023, and the Security Council, unable to operate a peacekeeping mission against the host government’s will, complied. France’s Operation Barkhane had already ended in November 2022, nine years and fifty-nine dead French soldiers after it began.

The withdrawal was framed — by the juntas, by pan-Africanist commentators, by Russian state media — as the reclamation of sovereignty. The language was anti-colonial. The resonance was real. French military presence in the Sahel was colonial-adjacent in character, self-serving in its intelligence priorities, and structurally dependent on governments whose legitimacy was thin. Barkhane killed civilians and called them militants. France supported elections it could influence and governments it could manage. Every criticism of the French presence was grounded.

But the framing required a second claim that was never demonstrated: that removing France would unlock governance capacity that French presence was suppressing.

The capacity was not suppressed. It was not there. France maintained a status quo whose hollowness it was also concealing.

The departure did not create the hollow state. It revealed it.

What sovereignty produced

JNIM — Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, al-Qaeda’s Sahel affiliate — now controls more territory than it held before the French left. In Mali, the group expanded from its traditional base in the north and center into southern and western regions where it had been nearly absent — 20 percent of its violent activity now occurs in areas where it previously had none, with fatalities doubling. In Burkina Faso, JNIM and ISSP together control an estimated 60 percent of national territory. In May 2025, JNIM temporarily seized two provincial capitals — Djibo and Diapaga — demonstrating the capacity to take cities the junta claims to govern.

What the juntas gained sovereignty to do: kill civilians at three times the rate of their enemy. What they lost sovereignty to prevent: territorial collapse.

Inside the territory still nominally held by the state, forty towns are blockaded. Two million people live in besieged areas. In half of the blockaded towns, international aid reached 1 percent of the civilian population — a figure from the Norwegian Refugee Council that bears repeating: one percent.

In Djibo, besieged since 2022, residents have survived on less than three liters of water per day. The WHO emergency threshold is fifteen. Médecins Sans Frontières, the last international medical presence, suspended operations in October 2024 after attacks on health centers and water distribution points. A hepatitis E outbreak followed. The town that the junta claims as sovereign territory receives neither the junta’s protection nor the international community’s aid.

The Russian forces brought in to replace the French have not reversed the trajectory. At the Battle of Tinzaouaten in July 2024, near the Algeria-Mali border, JNIM and Tuareg rebel forces killed an estimated fifty to eighty Wagner fighters and dozens of Malian soldiers. The ambush footage — bodies, captured equipment, the evidence of a rout — was posted on social media within hours. The sovereignty gained was the sovereignty to conduct an operation that ended with enemy propaganda footage.

The classification gap

I’ve written about classification gaps before — the regulatory architecture that constrains categories, not activities. Rename a war contract as a “geopolitical event” and the prohibition exits through the naming. Classify target identification as “decision support” and the kill chain becomes an advisory service.

The Sahel presents the same mechanism applied to governance itself. “Reclaiming sovereignty from France” names what is being rejected. It does not name what is being produced. What is being produced: a counter-insurgency that kills three times as many civilians as the insurgency; humanitarian obstruction that throttles aid to one percent; an information environment in which named criticism of the government risks prosecution.

The ICC withdrawal was the tell. On September 22, 2025, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger issued a joint statement calling the International Criminal Court “an instrument of neo-colonialist repression in the hands of imperialism.” The court where someone might answer for the 1,021 civilian deaths — that court is the colonial instrument. The deaths remain unnamed. The naming targets the accountability mechanism itself.

The reclassification is possible because the criticism is partially real. The ICC has been applied selectively — overwhelmingly to African leaders, rarely to Western ones. The court’s legitimacy deficit is genuine. But the function of the criticism, at this specific moment, is to exit the constraint while the constraint is becoming relevant. The court was not called colonial when it was investigating jihadists. It was called colonial when the evidence turned toward the junta.

The architecture

In February 2026, The New Humanitarian documented systematic junta obstruction of humanitarian aid in Burkina Faso: arrests of aid workers, months-long delays for military-escorted convoys, NGO expulsions, restrictions on condition assessments. Eight workers from the International NGO Safety Organisation were arrested on suspicion of espionage. Twenty-one NGOs had permits revoked in a single administrative action. The UN’s most senior official in Burkina Faso was expelled after the UN published a report on child rights violations committed by state forces.

JNIM controls the roads. The junta controls the permits. Between these two gates, populations wait.

Inside this architecture, a community leader in Djibo published an account of life under siege — the negotiations with armed groups to allow food through, the air strikes that killed civilians without breaking the blockade, the daily calculus of survival on less water than the human body requires.

He published anonymously. Not because the jihadists would target him — they knew who he was. Because the government might. Burkina Faso prosecutes advocacy for negotiation with armed groups under its terrorism legislation. The community leader arguing for the talks that might feed his neighbors cannot be named, because the state that claims sovereignty over his town — while failing to supply it with water — also claims the authority to imprison him for speaking.

This anonymity is not incidental. It is the architecture’s signature. The blockade traps more than food. It traps testimony. The sovereignty that exits French oversight also exits the named criticism of its own citizens. Journalists in Mali and Burkina Faso face, as one described it, “exile, prison, or the front.” The information environment is not a side effect of the security crisis. It is a product of the sovereignty claim.

In the American detention system, I wrote about opacity as institutional product — each concealment mechanism individually defensible, structurally invisible in aggregate. The 911 calls from Camp East Montana escaped through the seam of county dispatch, infrastructure that operated outside ICE’s institutional perimeter.

In Djibo, there is no seam. Everything passes through the junta’s gate. The architecture of silence is complete.

What the honest assessment requires

France was the problem before. The juntas are the problem now. These are not contradictory claims. They are sequential.

The anti-colonial framing was diagnostically correct: French military presence was colonial-adjacent, self-serving, structurally compromised. Every criticism was grounded. But diagnosis is not prescription, and the prescription — that sovereignty reclaimed would mean governance delivered — has been tested by events.

The test produced: 1,021 civilians killed by the forces of the sovereign state in ten months. Sixty percent of national territory under jihadist control. Forty towns blockaded. One percent reached by aid. An international court called colonial at the moment its jurisdiction became inconvenient. A community leader who cannot speak under his name inside the sovereignty that claims to represent him.

I want to state what I think, because analysis that shows the architecture without stating a position is its own form of evasion.

The word “sovereignty” is doing in the Sahel what colonial governance did before it: using a legitimate value to shield an illegitimate practice from scrutiny. Decolonization is real. The Sahel needed it and never received it — not from France, which replaced formal colonialism with military dependency, and not from the juntas, which replaced military dependency with military impunity. The anti-colonial framing is powerful because it names something true. It conceals something true in the same motion.

The classification gap works here exactly as it works everywhere: the naming protects the activity from the constraint the activity would otherwise face. “Sovereignty” exempts the junta from the scrutiny that “military coup governing through mass civilian targeting” would invite. The name carries the moral weight of genuine decolonization. The activity it shelters is the opposite of what decolonization was supposed to deliver.

The community leader in Djibo has no name in this piece. Not because I chose anonymity. Because his government made it the only safe option.

That is the sovereignty the Sahel reclaimed.

Sources

- Solen