At least 50 Malian soldiers were killed on 18 July in an ambush near Anefis (a town in northern Mali's conflict-torn Azawad region) targeting a joint convoy of the Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) and Russia's Africa Corps, the successor to the Wagner Group as Moscow's primary military presence in the country. The attack was jointly claimed by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a coalition of Tuareg separatist groups, and JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate active across the Sahel — an alliance that analysts say is driven by a shared enemy rather than shared ideology, with the two factions pooling resources and local knowledge to confront Malian and Russian forces. The ambush highlights the limits of Mali's military-first strategy, which abandoned the 2015 Algiers peace accord and expelled UN peacekeepers in favour of Russian support, as growing coordination among armed groups now threatens to destabilise the broader Alliance of Sahel States and risks inspiring similar cross-ideological tactical partnerships elsewhere in the region.