The Adrar des Iforas is a low granite massif of northeastern Mali, set on the meeting point of the Algerian, Malian, and Nigerien borders. The massif rises to roughly nine hundred metres at its highest points and extends across some forty thousand square kilometres between the Tilemsi valley to the west and the Tamesna plain to the east. Its Tamasheq name, Adɣaɣ n Ifoɣas, glosses literally as "the mountain of the Ifoghas," after the principal Tuareg confederation of the region.
The Adrar is the historic homeland of the Kel Adagh — also called the Ifoghas — Tuareg confederation, which traditionally divided its activity between transhumant pastoralism on the surrounding steppe and trans-Saharan trade through the medieval and early modern periods. The cattle-and-camel economy and the salt-and-gold caravan economy have both been transformed by twentieth-century border-drawing and twenty-first-century conflict.
Tessalit, on the northern flank of the massif, was the principal Ifoghas village from the late medieval period and is the seat of the contemporary cercle of the same name. Kidal, on the southwestern flank, was elevated to administrative capital under French colonial administration and remains the regional capital of the Malian Kidal region.
The Adrar has been at the centre of the Tuareg rebellions of 1990–1995 and 2012–present and the broader Sahel security crisis, with Kidal, Tessalit, and Aguelhok all sites of significant engagements. The civilian population has been substantially displaced; pastoral livelihoods on the surrounding plains have been compromised by the military closure of grazing routes.