Between triumphant declarations and denial of reality
In January 2013, France launched in Northern Mali its biggest military operation overseas since the Algerian war. At the beginning, the intervention was quite successful, as it chased jihadist armed groups out of the cities of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. A year later, however, Opération Serval was extended to four neighbouring countries, all former French colonies: Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad. Renamed Operation Barkhane, the ‘war on terror’ was to continue under the aegis of presidents François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron, who was elected in May 2017. But jihadist groups proved to be resilient. While the extrajudicial killings of civilians by national armies contributed to exacerbate the conflict and legitimise the rebels, the French military did not prevent the insurgents from expanding in central Mali and the Liptako-Gourma, a region known as the ‘three-borders’ because it also straddles Burkina Faso and the Republic of Niger.
Africans were disappointed by the failure of the former colonial master to contain the jihadist threat. They found it hard to believe that a well-trained and properly equipped professional military could not eradicate a ragtag band of local bandits. As a result, they suspected France of supporting the insurgents in order to recolonise the continent and control hidden mineral resources. Meanwhile, the ‘war on terror’ gave national armies a prominent role that fuelled the political frustrations and ambitions of commissioned officers, as well as the rank and file. Operation Barkhane, which was supposed to help stabilise the region, was thus challenged by a first military coup in Mali in 2020, soon to be followed by a second one in 2021. In 2022 in Burkina Faso and 2023 in Niger, captains and generals also took power and toppled civilian regimes allied to France. With the support of Russian mercenaries, the putschists then asked for a withdrawal of French troops.
The contrast is quite striking. On 19 May 2017 in Gao, Mali, President Emmanuel Macron was still declaring that ‘Operation Barkhane [would] only end the day there are no more Islamist terrorists in the region’Footnote 1. But five years later, French troops were driven out of the area, even though the jihadist threat had by no means disappeared. Such setbacks raise many questions and should normally have prompted Paris to learn lessons from the failure of its biggest overseas military operation since the Algerian war. Indeed, it seemed quite necessary to analyse the underlying reasons for a retreat that French journalists described as a ‘defeat’, a ‘rout’ or, to mock the triumphant declarations of the chief of army staff, ‘uninterrupted success for a miserable failure’Footnote 2.
In other countries, decision makers have sought to understand the setbacks of overseas military interventions. In Brussels, for example, some experts have called on the European Union to learn from its failures in the Sahel in order to review and reset its foreign policyFootnote 3. In the United States and Great Britain, legislators have also criticised their government and commissioned investigations into the operations carried out in Afghanistan and Libya in 2001 and 2011. In the 1970s, the U.S. army’s setbacks in Vietnam even led the Congress and Senator Dick Clark (Democrat) to pass an amendment that forced the White House to restrict its military cooperation abroad.
In France, on the other hand, there was nothing of the sort. Members of Parliament did not demand an inquiry into the end of Operation Barkhane after 2022, and the government has stifled public debate by insisting on the urgency of other wars in Ukraine, Palestine and Syria. While a reset of the French policy in Africa is now high on the agenda, this article analyses the arguments and the political, military, historical and cultural reasons that led the Elysée to conceal, or even deny, a failure that also resulted in a loss of influence in its Francophone ‘preserve’ and among European Union partners who had overestimated the former colonial power’s ability to solve crises south of the Sahara.
The fear of a global terrorist threat
The imperatives of a ‘global war on terror’, from the beginning suppressed any inclination by critics to challenge the need for military intervention. In the Sahel, the jihadist evil was so demonised that it precluded any consideration of alternatives that might have involved negotiations with the insurgentsFootnote 4. Yet the fear of a global terrorist threat was very much a political construct. Indeed, none of the groups fought by the French army in the Sahel has ever committed an attack overseas. From the point of view of the national interest and the fight against terrorists, operations Serval in 2013 and Barkhane from 2014 onwards were thus part of a preventive war, even if it meant exacerbating the resentment of insurgents and their desire to take revenge through attacks on French soil. In practice, the decision to deploy soldiers in the area was based more on political and electoral considerations. The impact on public opinion and respect for international legality, in particular, took precedence over strategic reasoning as to the feasibility of a long-term intervention.
In 2013, the grand narrative of jihadists on the verge of taking over the Malian capital was sheer propagandaFootnote 5. In reality, the insurgents did not have the capacity to reach Bamako, and their advance towards the airport of a remote small town in the north, Sévaré, was only intended to thwart plans for a military reconquest of secessionist areas after the declaration of Azawad’s independence in 2012. The risk of a general destabilisation of Mali nonetheless convinced France’s Western, African and Arab partners to pass a resolution at the United Nations legalising Operation Serval. Over time, the Elysée’s communications department took care to keep the flame alive by dramatising the global scale of the threat posed by groups which, unlike al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or the Islamic State in Iraq, did not attract Europeans and did not attempt to mount attacks overseasFootnote 6.
It is true that the story of a grand Arab and Salafist conspiracy to expand into Africa and conquer the world has always served the purposes of some actors. Indeed, dominant narratives about the international support received by movements allegedly affiliated to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State enabled terrorist groups to inflate their importance and instil fear, while allowing local governments to dramatise the scale of foreign threats in order to deny their own responsibility in the conflictsFootnote 7. In the Sahel, however, the progress of the insurgents hardly seems to be part of a concerted plan between different organisations that claim to be fighting for a strict application of the Shariah Law. In practice, jihadists often settle into new territories because they are driven out of their strongholds by government forces, or because they are fleeing rival groups. Over time, the criminalisation of insurgencies can also lead opportunistic fighters to widen their field of action and move on to raid other areas for purely lucrative reasons. Finally, the contagion of revolutionary models such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State does not mean that there are strategic connections between various peasants’ rebellions in Muslim Africa.
The rhetoric of a ‘global war on terror’ has produced much confusion in this respect. Indeed, there is no legal consensus on the definition of terrorist movements. In the absence of an international convention, the very same group can thus be considered terrorist by some but not by othersFootnote 8. Hence, the discrepancies in the blacklists of foreign organisations designated as terrorists by the United States since 1997, Great Britain since 2000, the European Union and Canada since 2001 and Australia since 2002Footnote 9. In the 2010s, for example, there was only about 25% overlap in these respective listsFootnote 10. Member states of the same military alliance, NATO, thus considered Kurdish militias and the Taliban alternatively as terrorist groups, or, on the contrary, as allies against the Islamic State in Syria or as guerrillas with whom to negotiate a withdrawal of the American army from Afghanistan. Similarly, in Mali, there was disagreement from the outset over the main targets of Operation Serval in 2013.
For Bamako, Tuareg separatists were the terrorist public enemy number one; for Paris, it was the jihadists of AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). Such a misunderstanding was to have far-reaching consequences. Indeed, Bamako quickly suspected Paris of supporting the separatists when the former colonial power forbade the Malian army to go north in the town of Kidal, the traditional stronghold of Tuareg nationalists. At the time, the French military were still traumatised by the role they had played during the Rwandan genocide, and they wanted to prevent soldiers from southern Mali from using Operation Serval as cover to take revenge, commit atrocities and massacre civilians. But their caution was understood as an attack on Mali’s national sovereignty. From the outset, the war in the separatist north was thus fraught with tension, given the different agendas of the two allies.
Another flaw was that Western narratives about a global jihadist threat masked the local dynamics of conflict and the shortcomings of national armies that exacerbated hostilities by terrorising civilians. People got confused. Who were the terrorists? Predatory soldiers or insurgents? In principle, terrorist movements are supposed to be non-state groups. But some politicians referred to Libya or Sudan as terrorist states. Observers have also argued that targeted killings by drones constituted ‘the weapons of state terrorism’Footnote 11. Meanwhile, some authors wrote about ‘terrorist state-building groups’, ‘terrorist semi-states’ or ‘jihadi proto-states’ Footnote 12. In Africa, south of the Sahara, such a phraseology did not help to clarify the situation as the word ‘terrorist’ did not constitute a single phenomenon and did not exist in vernacular languages. Imported from the West, the notion of terrorism in the end encompassed all kind of rebels: cattle rustlers, sea pirates, kidnappers, street gangs, ethnic militias, secessionist movements, non-violent political opponents, ordinary delinquents and so on.
As for the ‘terrorists’ themselves, at least those designated as such by the French army, they rejected a term that discredited their political and religious struggleFootnote 13. The notion of jihad is just as controversial. In the Muslim world, it questions both the spiritual or military dimension of ‘striving in the path of God’ (the original meaning of the term), on the one hand, and the offensive or defensive aspects of ‘holy war’, on the otherFootnote 14. But the debates have never been free of ambiguity, depending on the point of view of the belligerentsFootnote 15. In northern Mali in 2012, a group labelled ‘terrorist’, Ansar Dine, thus declared that it was waging a defensive jihad to protect Muslims against the oppression of a miscreant state that divided the ummah (the Muslim community) and did not respect former peace agreementsFootnote 16. After 2013, the arrival of French troops further legitimised this discourse, reformulated in terms of resistance against an invasion of ‘crusaders’ and an attempt at ‘recolonization’, a bit like in Somalia, where Ethiopia’s military intervention in 2006 enabled the Shebab to portray themselves as defenders of the ummah and national sovereigntyFootnote 17.
A failure in retrospect
Far from being indispensable from the point of view of France’s security, Operations Serval and Barkhane were in fact counterproductive. While attempting to fight terrorism, Paris supported corrupt and authoritarian governments whose misdeeds were only recognised in public when they turned against the Elysée. In practice, Barkhane served as life insurance for regimes which had provided a breeding ground for Salafist dissent because of their ‘impiety’, their ‘immorality’ and their ‘submission’ to Western imperialism. In the context of asymmetrical warfare, the operational superiority of the French army also deterred African governments from professionalising their security sector, undertaking structural reforms and, at least initially, negotiating with the rebels. Moreover, the war on terror legitimised and legalised human rights violations, which in turn fed the popularity of insurgents which could then be seen as forces of resistance against the occupying troops of the former colonial power.
As a result, the French military were involved in abuses that clearly ran counter to the traditional objectives of counter-insurgency strategies aimed at winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of civiliansFootnote 18. In practice, the tasks officially assigned to Barkhane troops were more akin to international police operations than to a war against insurgents who were alternatively described as terrorists, separatists, traffickers, drug dealers, cattle rustlers or thieves. The objectives were blurred. According to the Minister of Defence, the aim was to ‘eradicate’ jihadist terrorism; according to the general staff, simply to ‘contain’ itFootnote 19. A highly political issue, the challenge was in fact to assert the presence of fragile states in long-neglected rural areas. But the problem was not strictly speaking a military one and it required international relief to gain the support of civilians. The chief of the French Development Agency (Agence Française de Développement), Rémi Rioux, thus had to coordinate with Operation Barkhane to focus aid on ‘vulnerable zones where the risk of radicalization [was] most acute, and where the state [no longer provided] the basic services that the populations [expected]’Footnote 20.
Yet, the local authorities did not necessarily approve and follow the recommendations of the international community. Moreover, the cooperation between security operators and development actors did not work any better than it did for the Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan. As for the French army, it could not be a substitute for failing states, given that operations Serval and Barkhane only tried to tackle the symptoms rather than the causes of complex, protracted, multidimensional crises. The war on terror was unwinnable. As time passed, the situation went from bad to worse with the multiplication of coups d’état, the return of the military to power, the advance of jihadist groups, the arrival of Russian mercenaries, the humiliating departure of the French army, the growing unpopularity of Paris in the Sahel and the breakdown of diplomatic relations with Niger and Mali.
In the end, the failure was both political and military. France could no longer claim to be Africa’s gendarme and revealed its powerlessness in the eyes of international partners, especially in Europe. At the same time, it worried its last allies in the region when it refused to come to the rescue of presidents deposed by coups d’état. It also frustrated and disappointed the people of the Sahel, who could not believe that the former colonial master was incapable of defeating a few ragtag guerrillas. Belief in occult and invisible powers fuelled conspiracy theories that France had intervened to recolonise the area and seize natural resources. Many Africans became convinced that Paris had a hidden agenda that the Elysée continued to pull the political strings and, worse still, that Barkhane soldiers were supporting jihadist groups in order to carve up the continent.
In reality, only the Republic of Niger was of any real strategic interest to France, because its mines provided uranium that is not subject to control by the Euratom Community or the International Atomic Energy Agency. This, therefore, makes it possible to keep secret the nature and quantity of materials exported for military useFootnote 21. Even before the start of Operation Serval, however, Niger was no longer France’s main supplier of uranium. Generally speaking, the Sahel offers few commercial outlets and, contrary to popular belief, Africa represents a negligible market for Paris, just 5.3% of its foreign trade in 2023 for instance. Since 2007, France has been overtaken by China and is no longer the continent’s leading supplier. As for the fifteen countries in the CFA franc zone, they account for only 0.6% of its foreign trade, even if France is still their main European client. In other words, the French army’s involvement in the Sahel exacerbated resentment against the former colonial power, while confirming the latter’s economic decline.
Arguments used to justify the travails of Barkhane
In such a context, it is important to review the arguments used to justify military interventions and their setbacks. The belief within the Elysée indeed parallels recurring patterns that resonate with the storytelling of other Western powers in Iraq or Afghanistan, each time testifying to a strong reluctance not only to admit their own responsibilities, but also to learn the lessons of repeated failures in asymmetrical warfare. In this respect, analysts should go beyond the special relationship between France and its former colonies in the Sahel. In the same vein, the debate should not be limited to the personality of a president, Emmanuel Macron, who is certainly not ready to publicly acknowledge his mistakes, despite the setbacks he also experienced on the domestic front as a result of his catastrophic dissolution of the National Assembly.
In the case of the Sahel, the Elysée has justified its failures by resorting to fairly standard narratives about patriotism, destabilisation from abroad, the misdeeds of local and international partners, and the inadequacy of military mandates to cope with the challenges of global terrorism. France’s loss of influence in the region was blamed on Russian and Salafist propaganda. Paris also underlined the failings of European countries who were unwilling to finance and equip the French military. Last but not least, the Elysée insisted on the negligence of African governments in the Sahel, an argument which, in retrospect, seems quite curious since the weakness of states in the region had precisely justified the launch of Operation Serval in 2013.
Blaming others. The first rhetorical weapon is simply to defuse criticism by discrediting and accusing detractors of bad faith. Patriotism, in particular, helps to stifle debate in order to respect the memory of fallen soldiers. Likewise, the former Minister of Defence and then Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, condemned the predilection of French people for ‘self-flagellation’ at a conference held at the IFRI (Institut français des relations internationales) in Paris on 16 October 2024. In response to a question about the Sahel, he instead sidestepped the issue, talked about the crisis in the Middle East and urged the audience not to focus on three out of 54 African states. According to him, France remains an active power on the rest of the continent, while the situation in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso got worse since the end of Operation Barkhane.
In the same conspiratorial and nationalist vein, the authorities raised the problem of foreign propaganda. This is hardly new. During the Cold War, France’s setbacks in Africa were often blamed on Communist destabilisation and the USSR. Yet, the people of the Sahel today certainly did not need Russia to fuel their resentment against a former colonial power that refused to issue them visas, failed to contain the jihadist threat and continued to support authoritarian, corrupt and increasingly unpopular regimes as they appeared to be the lackeys of Western imperialism.
The lack of resources. Clearly, it was easy for the French government to blame, in retrospect, the political and military failures of Barkhane on the incompetence and unwillingness of its local partners. However, the poor governance of weak states in the region was already known. Normally, such a challenge should have been taken very seriously as soon as Operation Serval was launched, even if it meant questioning the feasibility of a military intervention. In particular, the French government should have realised that Sahelian heads of state were quite reluctant to professionalise security systems that they actually did not wish to reform and strengthen, for the fear of mutiny or putschFootnote 22. Yet it was only at the end of Operation Barkhane that Paris really began to speak out publicly about the failings of its local partners, incurring the wrath of African nationalists when the former colonial power denounced the massacres of civilians perpetrated by soldiers from Mali and Burkina Faso.
The lack of resources and equipment was also mentioned to justify the French army’s failures. But this argument, which was raised by the General Staff, needs to be put into perspective. Indeed, internal administrative and budgetary logics led the French army to favour the purchase of heavy armoured vehicles over pickups, which would have been better suited to combat in the desert. As a result, Barkhane troops remained slow and predictable against an invisible enemy that was elusive, very mobile and keen to organise ambushes rather than fight battles. Moreover, the operation’s budget has never been negligible, to the tune of a billion euros a year. On the contrary, the imperatives of an asymmetrical warfare on terror have enabled the defence sector to maintain expenditures that President François Hollande had at one point considered cutting when he came to power in 2012.
Internationally, France’s commitment has also prompted its European partners to send troops to the region, so much so that some observers spoke of a security logjam or a disorganised hyper-interventionism. Alongside the UN peacekeepers deployed in Mali, the multiplication of anti-terrorist coalitions posed problems of coordination between an ever-increasing numbers of stakeholders. In retrospect, we may well wonder whether this did not result in too many resources, a ‘paradox of plenty’ that was detrimental to the conduct of operations and likely to fuel the misappropriation of funds by corrupt and clientelist regimes.
The issue of mandates. The recriminations of the French general staff about a mandate that was alternatively seen as too narrow or too broad also deserve to be put into perspective. In fact, it was France that held the pen to write down the conditions of its intervention at the start of Operation Serval in 2013. Contrary to what Jean-Yves Le Drian said during his lecture at the IFRI on 16 October 2024, the French army was not really ‘called’ to MaliFootnote 23. In Bamako in early 2013, interim president Diacounda Traoré had asked only for air support, but no boots on the ground. A diplomat of the Quai d’Orsay subsequently rewrote his letter according to the exigencies of the French military, who considered it essential to conquer northern Mali in order to defeat the jihadistsFootnote 24.
In other words, the United Nations cannot be blamed for imposing a mandate that restricted the intervention of Serval troops to fighting designated terrorist groups within a limited zone that did not immediately take into account the expansion of the insurgents towards the south, in particular the city of Mopti and the Dogon homeland. The result, however, was that the deployment of the French army disappointed people who had hoped that the former colonial power would protect civilians and restore law and order by combating the misdeeds of cattle rustlers, highwaymen, drug traffickers, separatist movements, community militias and various paramilitary groups altogether.
In the same vein, the extension of Serval’s mandate to four other Sahel countries (Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad) continued to target some symptoms of the crisis without addressing its political and social causes. In 2014, the launch of Operation Barkhane was in fact driven by administrative and logistical considerations. The French military wanted to relocate their Bamako headquarters, which was too visible in the vicinity of the Malian capital city. They found it cheaper to move into their old base in Ndjamena than to build a new camp in Niamey from scratch. The objective was also to justify the prolongation of the French military presence in Chad, where Operation Epervier, launched in 1986 to repel Libyan incursions, had lost its raison d’être since the death of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Finally, the renaming of Serval aimed at closing that chapter and hence preserving the gains made by French troops in Mali in 2013, in the full knowledge that, in the long term, the extension of Barkhane’s zone of intervention was likely to turn into a ‘mission impossible’ and end badlyFootnote 25.
The claim of a political but not a military defeat. For French officers, Serval remains a success story. And according to them, Barkhane was a political failure but not a military one, an argument already heard many times in the aftermath of the Algerian war in the 1960s. On the contrary, they argue, Serval demonstrated the agility of an experienced army capable of deploying thousands of men overseas in the Sahara desert with few resources, combining rusticity and technology. While the initial objective was just to prevent terrorist groups from seizing the Malian base of Sévaré, unexpected successes enabled the French troops to move fast further north, where the capture of Timbuktu symbolically recalled the colonial conquest of 1893 and satisfied the demands of a president, François Hollande, who wanted quick results before the next elections.
On closer examination, however, it turns out that Opération Serval simply ousted the jihadists from northern Mali, but did not defeat them. It shifted the problem without eliminating the threat posed by groups that dispersed to neighbouring countries, waiting to return in force. With the exception of the Adrar des Ifoghas, where the heaviest fighting took place, the rebels avoided confrontation and offered no resistance to French troops. Even today, questions remain as to the reasons for this. Clearly, the insurgents’ retreat was primarily motivated by tactical considerations, as the Tuareg, who are in the minority even in northern Mali, were well aware that they could not hold out alone against a professional army. According to the jihadists, they also wanted to avoid street fighting and preferred to abandon the few towns in the region to spare the lives of civilians. Moreover, it is quite likely that the Algerian command of AQIM sought to restrain Tuareg combatants. Keen to consolidate their positions, they did not favour initiatives to capture Bamako, and they had already invited local jihadists to moderate their application of Sharia law in order to first win the hearts and minds of the population in the north. Their main Tuareg ally, Iyad ag Ghali, rather encouraged the creation of armed branches that made no reference to Islam, in order to be position himself to negotiate a compromise with the FrenchFootnote 26.
Once the time for military conquest was over, Serval and then Barkhane officers believed that they could eradicate terrorist networks by eliminating their heads. Inspired by the American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, President François Hollande authorised ‘signature strikes’ and so-called ‘homo’ operations against high-value targets (HVTs)Footnote 27. Based on pre-established kill lists, these eliminations resembled extra-judicial executions, as they made no provision for capturing suspects and bringing them to justiceFootnote 28. Moreover, they sometimes resulted in blunders and collateral damages among civilians, for instance, in Bounti in central Mali, in 2021. Yet the general staff were proud of their record, even if the targeted assassinations of jihadist leaders did not prevent the insurgents from renewing their ranks, and certainly did not help to resolve the political and social crises of weak states.
What does the future hold for France’s policy in Africa?
Between triumphant declarations and denials of reality, the French government lacked the foresight and overview to grasp all the challenges facing its military intervention in the Sahel. Like the United States and Great Britain in Afghanistan and Iraq, it sought instead to emphasise its tactical successes in order to mask its strategic defeatFootnote 29. But the result was to highlight the operational and informational limitations of a medium-size power that had claimed to be best placed to intervene in the Sahel on the basis of its colonial past and its knowledge of the area within its former African empire.
Even if it was not publicly acknowledged, Barkhane’s failure could still have led to a reset of France’s foreign policy in its Francophone ‘preserve’. President Emmanuel Macron thus announced a drastic reduction in the number of French troops stationed in Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad and Senegal. However, the latter two countries pre-empted his initiative by announcing the closure of French bases on their territory at the end of 2024. Since then, the Elysée has tried to continue business as usual despite the limits of its military cooperation. Operation Barkhane, it should be remembered, was supposed to strengthen the capabilities of local troops, so that they could take over. However, the failures were obvious in this domain too. Today, there is no evidence that the Elysée has really learned from its mistakes in the Sahel. In 2025, Côte d’Ivoire also decided to close the last French base on its territory, this time in a coordinated manner with Paris. Yet the Elysée continues to defend its policies and intends to maintain cooperation programs with structurally weak states and corrupt military institutions in Africa. The final word, in this respect, certainly goes to a general who recently praised the merits of the training offered by the French army, ‘as we did in Barkhane’Footnote 30.
Author biography
Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos is a Senior Researcher at the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) and a Doctor in political science. He taught as a Professor at the French Institute of Geopolitics in the University of Paris 8 and was a fellow at Chatham House in 2013–2017 and at PRIO (Peace Research Institute, Oslo) in 2015–2020. A specialist on armed conflicts and humanitarian aid in Africa, South of the Sahara, he graduated from the Institut d’études politiques in Paris (IEP), where he also taught, and lived during several years in Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya. He published some eighty articles and books, including Une guerre perdue: la France au Sahel (2020) and Un djihad sans foi ni loi (2022).
