The Western press was apparently keen to report a sizeable failure of Wagner in Africa. (It seems they've been renamed 'Africa Corps' after Prigozhin's demise, but I'm not entirely sure since in some later communications they still apparently refer to themselves as Wagner PMC.)
But have there been any sizeable successes in them fighting Islamists in Africa [i.e. outside Syria]?
ADF (which is "published quarterly by U.S. Africa Command"") was willing to concede that the 2023 capture of Kidal was a sort of victory for Wagner:
Aided by Wagner, the Malian military took control of Kidal, a center of rebel activities in northeast Mali. The assault on Kidal, which include drone attacks, killed dozens of women and children and forced nearly 12,000 people to flee their homes.
Kidal is part of the territory Tuaregs identify as Azawad that includes parts of southern Algeria, eastern Mali, and western Niger. The city was the location of rebel victories against government forces in 2012 and 2014.
In January, the junta announced it would no longer honor the Malian government’s 2015 peace deal with the northern rebels.
[...]
Since capturing Kidal, government forces have done little while rebels elsewhere in the country have felt emboldened, according to observers.
France24 somewhat similarly wrote:
The capture of Kidal is a significant symbolic success for Mali’s military leaders, who seized power in 2020.
France24 didn't even mention Wagner in the piece. But Wikipedia writes about the same battle, citing RFI:
Wagner forces raised their flag over the historic Kidal Fort on November 22, but the flag was replaced by the Malian flag on November 26.
After reading the actual RFI story though, it seems Malian [government] sources denied the Wagner flag was ever raised there, so dismissed the story as 'fake news'. The photos themselves are quite blurry.
(I'm not going to wade here into a [long] discussion of how Islamist the Azawad forces are. As in Syria, there seems to be a spectrum.)
Somewhat related (ADF again):
Russian mercenaries arrived by helicopter near the rural village of Intahaka in the Gao region on February 9 and seized Mali’s largest artisanal gold mine. With the help of the Malian military, the mercenaries secured the site by forcing out a Tuareg rebel group.
Control of the sprawling site, which can accommodate as many as 4,000 miners, has changed hands several times in recent years, as violent extremists associated with al-Qaida and the Islamic State group have fought civilians, government forces and each other for a share of the spoils.
“Wagner’s men controlled access to the mine for a time,” a Malian source told the Africa Report magazine. “They charged an entrance fee to people coming to extract the gold.”
Gold is Mali’s most important commodity, dominating total exports. Mali has become Africa’s third-largest gold producer and 13th-largest in the world.
Both of these areas see artisanal gold mining, according to ISW (Gao is somewhere SW of Kidal).
How important that capture is--economically--depends whom you ask...
Malian officials have privately estimated the figure to be between 30–50 tons, while recent investigative journalism from France 24 reckoned that at least half of Mali’s gold, over 60 tons, comes from artisanal mines.
The most compelling reason to doubt official Malian figures for artisanal production is that other countries claim to import a great deal more gold from Mali than Mali claims to produce. According to the UN Comtrade Database—an online aggregator of international trade statistics—the UAE purchased nearly 81 tons of gold from Mali in 2019. By comparison, the same year, the Malian government reported exporting a mere half ton to the UAE. Similar discrepancies pervade recent trade statistics between the two countries. The production and export of Mali’s industrial gold is tightly controlled—most of this output goes to Switzerland, whose import figures largely match Mali’s export figures. It is Mali’s artisanal production and exports, then, that far exceed official estimates.
Wagner seems to have had considerable success in stabilizing the Central African Republic, a country with a very contentious post-colonial relationship with France which at times seems to have been nearly as exploitative as Wagner is alleged to be.
For example, Wagner played a major role in bringing the government of the Central African Republic and fourteen armed groups to sign the 2019 Khartoum Agreement. When six of the signatories formed a new rebel alliance (CPC) and attacked the capital Bangui in January 2021, Wagner’s mission restructured from instruction to counterinsurgency.
In 2021 and 2022 Central African Armed Forces (FACA), backed by Wagner, launched a counteroffensive against the CPC that saw most major towns return to government control. Western analysts’ focus on the counteroffensive’s brutality, while merited, made it appear unsuccessful. Among Central Africans, however, the defeat of armed groups and the restoration of territorial integrity was broadly — though certainly not entirely — popular.
Also covered here:
In 2017, Touadéra’s government was struggling to emerge from a devastating civil war. The government controlled little territory outside Bangui, the capital, with powerful armed groups entrenched in the countryside. The government asked the UN Security Council to lift a civil war-era arms embargo. The UN kept the embargo but also approved a Russian offer to donate weapons and send advisers.
Russia then brokered a peace accord between Bangui and 14 armed groups, the 2019 Khartoum Agreement. Presidential elections upset the delicate balance and, in December 2020, former president François Bozizé partnered with six rebel groups to form the Coalition of Patriots for Change, or CPC. The CPC’s militias reached Bangui in January 2021 before a combination of Russian PMCs, Rwandan troops, MINUSCA peacekeepers, and FACA pushed them back.
The ensuing, often brutal counteroffensive launched by FACA and backed by Russian PMCs and Rwandan troops saw the government retake more territory than it had held in years. Most major urban centers are back in government hands.
That it is still successful is confirmed in a 2023 BBC article:
"We need a win-win partnership. That's why the Russians are here... so that this country can also benefit from future development," says Emery Brice Ganzaléis, a Central African businessman who recently relocated to Bangui after two decades living in France.
"If Russia adopts the same policy as France in Africa, that won't work."
i.e. France's past, some of it not that ancient, has a significant part in making Wagner look attractive. France-Afrique is not a shining model to many in the continent.
p.s. More details, not all of which make Wagner look all that great, at wikipedia's Wagner Group activities in the Central African Republic. But I'd be careful assessing that page's neutrality, considering some of the other coverage that seems more positive overall. Note also that pre-2022/pre-war Wagner behavior and methods may not align that closely to latter Wagner behavior and methods.
And, yes, some CAR rebels have at least a partial Islamic motivational component.
