Mali fuel crisis, insecurity spark foreign embassy warnings to leave

BAMAKO - Embassies in Mali urged citizens to depart the country immediately this week while the United States and United Kingdom withdrew non-essential staff, as a fuel blockade by jihadists upturns daily life and stokes fears of growing insecurity.

Since back-to-back coups in 2020 and 2021, Mali has been ruled by a military junta that is struggling to counter various armed groups, particularly the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), which is carrying out the blockade.

JNIM has targeted fuel tankers since September, particularly those coming from Senegal and Ivory Coast, through which the majority of Mali's imported goods transit.

The US State Department on Thursday ordered the American embassy's "non-emergency employees and their family members to leave Mali due to safety risks".

The move came two days after the US embassy urged all citizens in the troubled west African nation to "depart immediately" on commercial aircraft.

The British foreign office also on Thursday said that "non-essential British Embassy staff have been temporarily withdrawn from Bamako"

It additionally warned its citizens to "leave immediately by commercial flight if you judge it safe to do so".

Italy, Germany, Canada and a handful of other countries have also told their nationals to depart Mali as swiftly as possible.

"The situation is volatile," a diplomatic source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP in Bamako.

"We have questions regarding the military. The jihadist advance is also worrying," the source said. "They control several localities in the south and the capital is becoming more fragile."

UNPREDICTABLE SECURITY SITUATION

JNIM has recently appeared to be seeking to isolate Bamako by increasing operations on the surrounding roads.

Many tankers have been set on fire, while drivers and soldiers have been killed or kidnapped in jihadist ambushes.

The blockade has hit the capital particularly hard the past two weeks, with the landlockedSahel nation's economy grinding to a halt.

Citing the "unpredictability of Bamako's security situation", the US embassy noted numerous issues while urging its citizens to leave.

Those included continued fuel interruptions as well as school closures and "ongoing armed conflict" around the capital, it said.

The various embassies' recent actions "reveal a critical and rapid deterioration of security, even around Bamako, which until now had been relatively spared", Bakary Sambe of the Timbuktu Institute, a Dakar-based think tank, told AFP.

Mali's fuel shortage is also exacerbating severe and recurrent power outages that have crippled the economy for the past five years.

The junta announced late Sunday that class was cancelled at schools and universities for two weeks due to the shortages.

In the middle of harvest season, some agricultural machinery has been rendered inoperable without fuel, with the shortages having struck daily life outside the capitalseveral weeks earlier.

JNIM is retaliating against the authorities' ban on the sale of fuel at locations other than service stations in rural areas, a move meant to dry up the jihadists' fuel supply lines, according to authorities.