Trump Administration Weighs Airstrikes in Mali, Which Would Make It the Eighth Country He Has Bombed This Term

Senior Trump administration officials are weighing military strikes in Mali against Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, the al-Qaeda affiliate known as JNIM, according to officials who described the internal debate to The Washington Post. If the president approves, Mali would become the eighth country the United States has struck since he returned to office.

The push is being driven inside the National Security Council by Sebastian Gorka, the senior director for counterterrorism, who has argued that JNIM has grown into a threat that will eventually reach beyond West Africa. Other senior officials have resisted, and the administration has not settled on which groups or sites would be targeted, what legal authority would be invoked, or whether Mali's ruling junta would be consulted or even notified in advance.

The timing follows a bloody stretch on the ground. On July 18, fighters ambushed a Malian military convoy near Tabankort in the northern Gao region, killing at least 50 soldiers in an attack claimed jointly by JNIM and the Azawad Liberation Front. Earlier this month, JNIM-linked fighters seized the town of Anefis, trapping Malian troops and Russian mercenaries who had been deployed to hold the north.

JNIM's rise has been fast and largely uncontested. Over the spring the group mounted coordinated attacks across the country, including gunmen operating openly on the streets of the capital, Bamako. In April a suicide bombing killed Mali's defense minister. The group now moves across a corridor that runs from the Malian interior into Burkina Faso and Niger, and has increasingly pushed toward the coastal states of Benin, Togo and Ivory Coast.

Washington has little to work with in the region. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are all governed by juntas that seized power in coups, expelled French forces and, in Mali's case, replaced them with Russian security contractors. The United States lost its drone base at Agadez in Niger in 2024, stripping away the surveillance architecture that any strike campaign would normally depend on, and there is no status-of-forces arrangement with Bamako.

Critics inside and outside the administration point to a more basic problem: the president is already fighting a war with Iran that he has not been able to end, and adding a counterterrorism campaign in the Sahel would open a front with no local partner, no clear objective and no obvious way to stop. No decision has been announced, and officials cautioned that the options under review range from a single round of strikes to a sustained air campaign.