The Friday protest by Yerewolo - Debout sur Les Remparts (The Worthy Sons - Standing on the Ramparts) demanded French troops leave the Sahelian nation, where they have been fighting Islamist rebel groups since 2013. The group has been a consistently anti-French voice in Malian politics for years.
France, the former colonial power that ruled Mali until 1960, sent troops to fight Tuareg tribes rebelling against Bamako in 2013 at the request of the Malian government under the aegis of Operation Serval. A coup d’etat against the government of Amadou Toumani Touré in 2012 by soldiers mutinying over the poor conduct of the war against the Tuaregs only created further chaos in Mali, allowing Tuareg forces to quickly advance over half the country’s territory. The destruction of nearby Libya brought Islamist groups to the region as well, including groups pledging themselves to Daesh* and al-Qaeda**.
Last month, Macron announced the end of Operation Barkhane, the follow-on operation to Serval, after another military coup in Bamako that the French president denounced as a “coup within a coup.” Malian Col. Assimi Goita, leader of the August 2020 coup that brought down the deeply unpopular but democratically-elected government of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta after months of mass protests, forced the civilian leadership of the interim government from office in May 2021, prompting international outcry.
Barkane was widely viewed as a “forever war,” suffering from the same kind of “mission creep” as the related US War on Terror. It is deeply opposed by both the French public and the public of the five Sahelian nations that partnered with France, including Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad. Attacks on civilians by French forces have bred a deep resentment, such as a wedding in Mali that French aircraft bombed in early January 2021, which the Ministry of the Armed Forces claimed to be a terrorist training camp.
Macron’s first term as president ends in April 2022, and he kicked off his re-election campaign at the beginning of June.
However, the 5,100 French troops in the Sahel aren’t all going home: several hundred will remain in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger as part of the Takuba Task Force, a special forces operation against terrorist groups in the Liptako region, which straddles the tri-nation border area.
*Daesh (ISIS, ISIL, IS), al-Qaeda - terrorist groups banned in Russia and many other countries