A sweeping investigation has uncovered a secret network of illegal prisons operated by Russia’s Wagner Group in Mali, where hundreds of civilians have been detained, tortured, and disappeared since 2021.
The joint exposé — by Forbidden Stories, France 24, Le Monde, and IStories — reveals that Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries, operating alongside the Malian Armed Forces (FAMa), have transformed military and former UN bases into clandestine detention sites. Drawing on survivor testimonies, satellite imagery, and insider accounts, the Viktoriia Project — a tribute to the disappeared Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna — identified at least six detention sites, including former UN bases and active Malian military compounds. Victims described brutal conditions: waterboarding, electric shocks, starvation, and confinement in metal containers under the scorching sun.
Between November 2023 and April 2025 alone, the human rights association Kal Akal has documented at least 668 people who have been arrested or kidnapped. Arrests, often targeting shepherds, traders, and suspected rebel sympathizers, were carried out with no due process. Survivors recounted being beaten unconscious, burned with lighters, and forced into slave labor. “Wagner has prisons almost everywhere they go,” one Sahel expert stated. “Anyone who is arrested, but not immediately killed, ends up in these prisons.”
The group’s impunity has sown terror across Mali, silencing media and forcing thousands to flee. The Malian army, according to insiders, is powerless to curb Wagner’s actions. Despite Wagner’s June 2025 withdrawal announcement, the scars remain. “These disappearances and the abuses committed by FAMa and Wagner — enabled and directed by Russia — are part of a deliberate strategy to sow terror and force populations into exile,” said Boubacar Ould Hamadi of CD-DPA, a human rights organization. For many families of the missing, hope fades — but the truth, once buried, is beginning to surface.