The Iwellemmedan are the southernmost of the major Tuareg confederations, with a territorial sphere covering western Niger and eastern Mali — broadly, the country between the Niger river bend in the south and the Adrar des Iforas in the north. Their name appears with regular phonological variation across the medieval and early modern Arabic sources from al-Maqrizi onwards.
The confederation is conventionally divided into two principal blocs: the Iwellemmedan Kel Ataram ("of the West"), centred on the Tahoua region of Niger and the eastern bend of the Niger river, and the Iwellemmedan Kel Dinnik ("of the East"), centred further east toward Lake Chad. Each comprises a number of constituent tribes — Kel Nan, Tellemides, Iberkoreyan, Kel Eghlal — under the rotating supreme amenokal of the bloc. The southern Tamasheq variety spoken by the Iwellemmedan is sometimes called Tamajaq or Tawellemmet.
Iwellemmedan political history is dominated by their long relationship with the Songhay Empire of the Niger bend, the post-1591 Pashalik of Timbuktu, and the successor states of the central Sahel. The confederation provided the principal Tuareg military force in the late-medieval Niger region and exercised tributary authority over substantial Songhay-Hausa populations through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The colonial period brought the Iwellemmedan under French administration after the 1899 Voulet-Chanoine campaign and the subsequent pacification of the Tahoua region. Post-independence Niger and Mali governed the principal Iwellemmedan territories separately, and the cumulative pressures of the 1968–1973 and 1984–1985 Sahelian droughts, the rebellions of 1990–1995 and 2007 onwards, and the post-2012 Malian crisis have substantially transformed the contemporary economy and demography of the confederation.