Two enemies who hate each other attack Mali together — and its army is running out of ground

World News 5 min 80 sources

A Tuareg separatist group and an al-Qaeda affiliate, whose goals are opposite, struck Mali's army in five towns on the same morning. Plus a besieged Sudanese city under drone fire, Ukraine's strikes deep inside Russia, and a Peru election settled by 50,000 votes.

Key takeaways

A Tuareg separatist group and an al-Qaeda affiliate — who want opposite things — attacked Mali's army in five towns on the same morning, because both need the same government gone.
Across Africa, cheap drones now let armed groups besiege whole cities, a power that used to belong only to states — as in Sudan's El Obeid.
Peru's presidency was settled by under 50,000 votes; when margins are that thin, institutions, not the count, decide whether a result stands.

Mali’s army loses ground on two fronts at once

Before dawn on Saturday, armed men attacked Mali’s army in five places at once — from Anefis, Aguelhok and Gao in the north, down to Sevare in the centre and Kenieroba, a town just 74 km (46 miles) south of the capital, Bamako [12]. Mali is a landlocked West African country of about 22 million, run since 2021 by a military government that took power in a coup and promised to end exactly this kind of violence [6].

The striking part is who did it. Two different groups claimed the attacks — and they want opposite things. The Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a Tuareg-led separatist movement, has fought for years to carve an independent state out of northern Mali [12]. Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), the region’s al-Qaeda affiliate, wants an Islamic emirate under religious law — the opposite of a secular breakaway state [6]. An FLA spokesman confirmed his fighters entered Anefis; JNIM said it seized at least seven army positions [6]. These are not natural allies. Yet this is the second time in three months they have hit Mali together: in April they jointly struck Bamako’s airport and killed the defence minister [6].

Mali’s army said it repelled the attacks and that the situation was “totally under control,” reporting 20 attackers killed in Sevare and six in Gao [12]. But the geography tells a harder story. Anefis and Aguelhok are now the last two spots in the northern Kidal region where the army still has any presence, having been driven out of Kidal town itself in April [12]. Government forces in Anefis fight alongside Russian troops — mercenaries from the group formerly known as Wagner, whom the junta invited in after it expelled French and UN forces [6]. The men Mali brought in to hold the north are now defending its final footholds there.

Why the enemy of my enemy needs no treaty

For a reader watching from far away, the puzzle is why a separatist group and a jihadist group — with incompatible visions of Mali’s future — keep showing up on the same battlefield on the same day. They have no shared cause and, if they won, they would fight each other. What they share is a single obstacle: the same army stands between each of them and what they want. When you are both trying to knock down the same wall, you don’t need to agree on what to build behind it. You just need it down. The alliance isn’t loyalty; it’s arithmetic, and the government created it by being everyone’s problem at once. Watch whether the pattern holds — every joint operation makes Mali’s military look less like a state and more like one more armed faction fighting for the middle.

A besieged Sudanese city under a swarm of drones

Sudan, in northeast Africa, has been at war since 2023 between its national army and a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — a fight that has driven the world’s largest displacement crisis [1]. The city of El Obeid, home to about half a million people, has become a key battleground [1]. An aid volunteer said the weekend’s drone attacks were the most violent yet, hitting schools and fuel stations and killing more than 20 people, including students [1]. “Over the past few months, seeing 40 or 45 drones is the norm. You can literally count them,” she said [1].

The thread linking El Obeid to Mali is not the fighters but the shape of the fight. In both, a formal state army faces armed groups it cannot decisively beat, and the cost lands on civilians who never chose either side. Cheap drones now let a paramilitary force pin down a city of half a million — a capability that a decade ago belonged only to governments.

Ukraine reaches deep into Russia

Ukrainian drones struck a large oil terminal near St Petersburg overnight, one of the furthest long-range attacks Kyiv has managed — St Petersburg sits over 800 km from the front [8][13]. Ukraine’s logic is to hit the fuel and export revenue that pay for Russia’s war, rather than trade soldier for soldier along a line that barely moves [8]. On the ground, Russia claimed it captured Kostiantynivka, a fortified town in the eastern Donetsk region; President Volodymyr Zelenskiy denied it had fallen [7][18]. Separately, Zelenskiy said he spoke with US President Donald Trump and called for “American resolve” to help end the war, as Trump repositioned himself as a would-be peacemaker after a long call with Vladimir Putin [10][2]. For anyone tracking the war’s economics, the target list matters more than the map: refineries, terminals and railways, not trenches.

Peru’s presidency, decided by 50,000 votes

Nearly a month after Peruvians voted, the electoral court certified Keiko Fujimori as president-elect — she won 50.135% to left-wing rival Roberto Sanchez’s 49.865%, a margin under 50,000 votes [65]. It is the fourth time Fujimori, daughter of jailed former president Alberto Fujimori, has run for the office, and she has promised a crackdown on organised crime [65]. Sanchez says the runoff was “seriously compromised” and has threatened legal action, objecting to Fujimori’s strong support among Peruvians voting abroad [65]. Her win, alongside a conservative victory in Colombia, points to a rightward shift across Latin America [65]. The number worth holding: when a result rests on a margin thinner than a single mid-sized town, the loser almost always contests it — and the country’s institutions, not the vote count, decide whether the result holds.

The story getting less attention: a new Ebola treatment tested in eastern Congo

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a clinical trial of a new Ebola treatment has begun during an active outbreak — a rare thing, since most drug trials cannot run in the chaos of a live epidemic [36]. Ebola is a viral disease that kills roughly half the people it infects when untreated [36]. Testing a therapy mid-outbreak is medically difficult and ethically fraught, but it is also the only way to learn whether a treatment works against the real thing rather than a lab version. For a region that has borne repeated outbreaks, the quiet significance is this: the next epidemic’s survival odds are being decided now, in a trial almost no one is watching.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

When your enemies unite, they're telling you what you've become

Two groups that want opposite things can fight side by side — and the thing that binds them isn't friendship, it's you.

The morning two opposites moved as one

Before sunrise on Saturday, Mali’s army was hit in five places at once. The people pulling the triggers did not share a cause. One group wants to break the north away into its own country. The other wants to erase Mali’s borders and rule by religious law. If either won, its next war would be against the other.

And yet they attacked the same targets on the same morning — for the second time in three months. Something is holding two enemies in step. It isn’t loyalty. It’s the shape of the problem.

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend — but he’ll do

There’s an old line: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s wrong in a useful way. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. He’s still my enemy. He’s just further down the list.

Two groups gang up on a third not because they agree, but because they can’t reach what they want while that third thing stands. Each is trying to knock down the same wall. You don’t have to agree on what to build behind a wall to agree on knocking it down. So the coordination is real but shallow — it lasts exactly as long as the shared obstacle does. Remove the wall, and the two “allies” turn on each other by nightfall.

This is why alliances of convenience are so easy to misread. From the outside they look like a coalition — a shared movement, a common front. They’re nothing of the kind. They’re arithmetic. Two forces pointed at one point because the geometry lined up, not because the hearts did.

The alliance is a mirror

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. When your enemies who hate each other start cooperating, the story isn’t mainly about them. It’s about you.

Their unity is a measurement of your position. It says: I have become the one thing standing between very different people and very different futures. I am no longer one side’s problem. I am everyone’s. Mali’s government didn’t broker the alliance against it, but it built the conditions for it — by being the single obstacle that a separatist and a jihadist both had to get past.

That’s a hard mirror. It’s tempting to read “everyone is attacking us” as proof you’re the last thing holding chaos back — the heroic wall. But the same fact reads another way: you’ve made yourself the wall that too many people, for too many reasons, now want gone. Both can be true at once. The measurement doesn’t tell you which. It only tells you that you’ve become central to other people’s failure to get what they want — and that is a dangerous place to stand, whatever your intentions.

This isn’t only about armies

The shape shows up far from any battlefield. A company that squeezes both its suppliers and its customers may find them quietly making common cause. A political figure disliked by the far left and the far right for opposite reasons can unite them into one strange coalition. A manager who has become the obstacle to three departments’ different goals will watch those departments — rivals in every budget fight — suddenly agree on one thing.

In each case the lesson is the same. When people who want incompatible things start moving together against you, don’t flatter yourself that you’ve clarified anything. Ask instead: how did I become the single point every one of them has to get past? Because that answer, not the strength of their fragile alliance, is what will decide how this ends.

What the mirror can’t show you

And here’s where it turns back on all of us, including anyone reading this and feeling clever. It’s easy, watching Mali from a distance, to see the government’s mistake plainly — of course it made itself everyone’s obstacle. But no one standing at the centre of such a thing sees it that way. From inside the wall, every attacker looks like proof of your necessity. The clearest view of your own position is the one you’re least able to have.

That’s the humbling part. This pattern is not just something to spot in others; it’s something we each sit inside without knowing. The people we’ve unwittingly united against us, the futures we’ve become the obstacle to, the alliances of convenience forming just out of our sight — we are the last to see them, exactly because we’re at the centre. Seeing that others are caught in this doesn’t lift you above it. It just means you now know the trap has a door you can’t see from where you’re standing.

03 · Lab · your turn

The Common Enemy

Rehearse how a central actor can either unite two rivals against itself or keep them apart.

04 · Hope · carry this

The same clarity that lets us see how enemies unite around a shared obstacle also shows us the way out — not more force, but fewer reasons to be everyone's problem at once. The hardest walls come down when someone finally offers a door.