Jihadists target fuel trucks, strangle capital

Recent footage of Islamist militants running amok in a village in Mali provides appropriate context for discussing the existential death struggle tearing the west African nation to pieces. The military junta in Mali finds itself in an existential death struggle with the Al Qaeda affiliate JNIM, which is waging a simple, yet crippling campaign to starve the government of fuel. As a landlocked nation, Mali depends on its highways for trade and for commodities such as fuel, and the jihadists have correctly identified this constraint as the regime’s critical vulnerability. Targeting fuel trucks on roads from Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, JNIM is cutting the supply of fuel to the capital and threating to strangle the government in Bamako.

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