Rachel Chason, Sarah Cahlan
Families travel through the night on desert backroads, arriving in this desolate borderland each day with new stories of terror about the white men in masks who drove them from their homes.
Mercenaries with Russia’s Wagner Group, fighting alongside Malian soldiers, have assaulted women, massacred civilians and burned villages in Mali, the displaced say - a campaign of wanton violence that is fueling a rapidly growing refugee crisis in neighboring Mauritania.
“We have never seen anything like this,” said Kossi ag Mohamed, a 31-year-old herder who described fleeing his village in Mali’s Timbuktu region. Wagner, he said, had brought “catastrophe”.
Mali’s military junta, which seized power from the democratically elected president in a coup d’état in 2020, began working with Wagner in late 2021. Nearly two years later, the future of the Kremlin-linked mercenary group was thrown into doubt when its founder, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, was killed in a plane crash after a short-lived rebellion against President Vladimir Putin.
But Wagner never went away, and its fighters have continued to deploy overseas - a shadow force that experts say now operates as an extension of Russia’s Defense Ministry. In Mali, the group’s footprint has only grown providing a revenue stream for Putin’s cash-strapped government and a base of influence for Moscow in an increasingly anarchic West Africa.
Malian authorities say the partnership is designed to combat Tuareg separatists - who have long agitated for their own state in northern Mali - as well as militant groups loyal to al-Qaeda and Islamic State. But it is civilians, not armed groups, that have borne the brunt of Wagner’s brutality.
“They kill people very indiscriminately,” said Héni Nsaibia, West Africa senior analyst for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, or ACLED, a nonprofit research group. “They see a convoy of transport vehicles or people doing business, and they attack. They kill men, women and children. Then they loot the goods.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry, Wagner and the Malian government did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
In recent months, Ag Mohamed said, the men in his area had developed a grim ritual: hiding in the trees when they heard a military convoy approaching, and then, when it was safe, following the gunshots they had heard to collect the dead.
His eyes were blank as he scrolled through videos he and his friends had taken. One showed seven bloodied corpses sprawled on the ground. In another was a decapitated man, his head placed between his hands. The bodies of women and children were visible in a third video, lying in the ashes of a burned home.
“It is death that made me flee,” Ag Mohamed said. “I saw death everywhere.”
A policy of terror
When Mali’s junta extended the invitation to Wagner - it always said its contract was with the Russian state, not the Kremlin-linked mercenary group - violence by Islamist extremists was on the rise. One of Wagner’s goals, an operative recounted in a recent interview, was helping the army take back bases and territory that had fallen under the control of extremists.
The Malian government pays about $10 million a month for Wagner’s services, analysts say. Russia has also been awarded concessions at several gold mines, giving the country a material stake in Mali’s security.
Although Malian forces have made some gains since the arrival of the Russian mercenaries, now believed to number around 1 500, experts say military operations in areas beyond state control have been characterised by overwhelming brutality.
“It’s a policy of ‘kill them all,’” said Wassim Nasr, a Sahel specialist and senior research fellow at the Soufan Center. “They are trying to terrorize the local population.”
ACLED estimates that at least 925 civilians were killed last year in attacks involving Wagner - more than double the 400 civilians the group estimates were killed by Islamist militants.
Andrew Lebovich, a research fellow with the Clingendael Institute in the Netherlands, said that Mali’s military has long been accused of human right violations but that the scale and ferocity of abuses have increased since Wagner entered the picture.
The mercenaries have adopted “dirty-war tactics,” Lebovich said, including kidnapping, torture and decapitation. Multiple refugees said that corpses were often mutilated before the army withdrew.
Desperate flight
Even before the crush of new arrivals, the Mbera refugee camp in Mauritania’s southeastern desert had become the third-largest population center in the country.
Tens of thousands of Malians arrived here in 2012, when extremists and separatists overran much of their country, and the camp continued to grow over the next decade as Mali lurched from one crisis to the next. But the exodus last year was unprecedented; there are now some 149 000 people in and around Mbera - triple the number in 2023, according to the United Nations. The camp itself is long past capacity and sprawls in every direction.
In more than two dozen interviews, refugees who have arrived since 2023 said it was attacks by Mali’s military and its Russian allies - not Islamist militants - that made them flee. Al-Qaeda’s regional affiliate, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM, controls large amounts of territory in Mali and competes for influence with a local branch of the Islamic State, which is smaller but more brutal.
Some refugees said that they had experienced intimidation years ago from extremists who sought to impose their rule but that village life had largely returned to normal before the army came.
“They consider everyone who wears a turban a terrorist,” said 45-year-old Cherfe ag Mama, who said his brother was killed by Wagner mercenaries in the Timbuktu region.
A women’s leader in the camp, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described a whisper network of women who have shared stories of sexual assault committed by Wagner operatives.
Russia’s growing presence
While Wagner’s initial focus was on central Mali, analysts say, the group has increasingly expanded its operations into the north - the center of a long-running fight between the state and ethnic Tuareg rebels, who have fought for decades to establish an independent state.
One of Wagner’s most significant victories in Mali was taking back the historical rebel stronghold of Kidal in 2023; the group suffered its largest setback last summer, losing dozens of men in a battle with Tuareg fighters near the Algerian border.
Analysts said the losses were controversial in Russia, and prompted questions about the future of the group in Africa. But in recent months, there has been a spike in military equipment coming from Russia into Mali, according to analysts and visuals.
Jennifer Jun, an associate fellow for imagery analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said satellite images show signs of recent expansion at a military base at Bamako’s Modibo Keita International Airport, where Wagner has been known to operate since 2021.
There have also been more recruitment efforts by Wagner, and more chatter on social media from the mercenaries themselves.
Additional reporting by Cahlan reported from Washington. Ely Cheikh Mohamed Vadel, Issa ag Mohamed and Walid ag Menani in Mauritania contributed to this report.