[dgellow]

> By helping the gov. France secures its influence on the area and makes sure French company’s business is safe.

That's not how things played out in real life, in fact the exact opposite is true. There is now a very strong anti-French sentiment in Mali (in part exacerbated by Russia), and France lost a huge part of the influence they had in the whole region.

[makeitdouble]

I'm looking at this as a reference timeline: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/17/timeline-what-led-f...

It looks to me like France/Mali gov relations took a turn after the 2020 coup ? All in all I can totally imagine Malian population having an anti-French sentiment, while their government is in bed with French entities.

[dgellow]

Do you mean the second coup from 2021? That’s when France started to have clear difficulties to deal with the Malian government, the coup was in May, Macron announced the planned end of the operation in June IIRC due to issues related to the new government.

In any case it’s a quite complicated topic, but it’s not one government being in bed with French entities. You have multiple groups fighting for territory and resources in the region for their own interest, France went there to support the government fight against Islamist groups by demand of Mali. And you now have a lot of Wagner mercenaries too (see https://www.csis.org/analysis/tracking-arrival-russias-wagne... for example. Trigger warning: be ready to read some horrifying details if you look at recent events…).

You can read about the Operation Barkhane article on Wikipedia it has lot of context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barkhane (I would recommend the French article if you read French).

And about Operation Serval if you want to understand what happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Serval.

There was a general opposition to French forces, from part of the population since the beginning which is to be expected. If you go a bit more into the details you will see that Russia took the opportunity to start an information war in the region to push against French forces, as a soft evidence you can see that protesters started asking for a Russian intervention in 2019 (in French, sorry https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2020/01/10/au-mali-le...).

That has also been communicated by Macron as a reason to stop their operation and leave the region (he made public speeches clearly pointing to Russia without explicitly saying it’s name, you can easily find them online and official translations).