Africa

Ten Jihadists Killed in Western Burkina Faso: Army

Ten “terrorists” died in an offensive against a jihadist base in the west of Burkina Faso on Thursday, according to the army’s chief of staff. The West African country is battling an Islamist revolt, which has also exacerbated deadly inter-ethnic tensions. Since 2015, nearly 900 people have died and 840,000 have fled their homes. A unit of soldiers and gendarme carried out the offensive in the rural locality of Worou in Sourou province, said the statement, which was not independently verifiable. “This anti-jihadist operation allowed us to neutralize 10 terrorists and to recover weapons and motorcycles,” it said, adding that one gendarme was injured. Burkina Faso’s armed forces are leading counter-terror operations with increasing frequency. The impoverished Sahel country is part of a regional effort to battle an Islamist insurgency, along with Mali, Niger, Mauritania, and Chad. Their militaries, under-equipped and poorly trained, are struggling despite help from France, which has 5,000 troops in the region. Unrest in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger killed around 4,000 people last year, according to UN figures.

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Fresh Jihadist Violence Hits Northern Mozambique

Islamist militants terrorizing remote communities in Mozambique’s Muslim-majority north mounted a fresh attack on Thursday, police sources said, striking Macomia district in an early morning assault. Gunmen forced the population of several thousand inhabitants to flee, while the military and police withdrew from the area according to a police officer who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity. “We can’t defeat them. They’re very strong,” the officer who hid in the bush since dawn told AFP. The attack comes a week after Mozambique called on its southern African neighbors to help it fend off the escalating jihadist insurgency that began in 2017. Despite President Filipe Nyusi‘s promises, neither the police nor the army, recently shored up by foreign private security companies, has succeeded in preventing attacks. Called in from the port city of Pemba some 156 kilometers (96 miles) away, reinforcement helicopters operated by private security companies flew in a few hours after the assault erupted, to repel the attackers. The officer said although government buildings were destroyed, the damage could have been worse if not for the air force response that pushed the militants back. Over the last two years over 1,100 people have been left dead by the Islamist …

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ADF Militia Kills Dozens in Eastern DR Congo

Dozens of civilians have been killed in eastern DR Congo in the latest of a string of massacres by the notorious ADF militia, a UN source and a local NGO told AFP on Wednesday. The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) have killed hundreds in the region since late 2019, in apparent retaliation for a military offensive against their bases. The UN source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said at least 22 people were killed in two attacks on Monday and Tuesday in the south of Ituri province, near the border with North Kivu province. At least 16 others were killed last Friday and on Sunday, the source said. A local NGO called Cepadho said in a statement that “at least 40 civilians (were) massacred” on Monday and Tuesday in the territory of Irumu in southern Ituri. A separate source, a monitoring group called the Kivu Security Tracker (KST), said the bodies of 17 civilians had been found in Makutano, in Irumu, on Monday and Tuesday. KST said the number of massacres in eastern DRC was “increasing sharply.” The group said that since May 7 it had recorded the deaths of 50 civilians, attributed to the ADF, in the North Kivu area of Beni …

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Five Jihadists, Two Soldiers Killed in Cameroon Clash

Two soldiers were killed early on Tuesday when jihadists attacked a military position in northern Cameroon after crossing from Nigeria, sources said, while seven other soldiers were injured in a mine blast in the same village. The device exploded when the soldiers’ vehicle was passing, according to an army colonel. Both the explosion and the overnight attack took place at Soueram, close to the Nigerian border in Cameroon’s Far North region, the colonel and a local official told AFP. “Two Cameroonian soldiers were killed” in the overnight assault, while five jihadists died in the counter-attack, the colonel said. The attack was claimed by Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist activity. ISWAP is a splinter group of Nigeria’s Boko Haram, which has led a bloody 11-year campaign against perceived Western influence. An army vehicle was destroyed and the jihadists made off with a piece of heavy weaponry, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. A local leader, who also asked not to be identified, confirmed the attack and the toll, adding that there were no civilian casualties. The Far North is an impoverished tongue of land that lies between Chad to the east and …

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Nine Militia Fighters Arrested in Central African Republic Killings

Nine fighters from an armed group that launched a week-long attack last week in south-eastern Central African Republic have been arrested. The assailants belong to a branch of the CAR’s biggest armed group, the Unity for Peace in Central Africa (UPC), the country’s special criminal court said in a statement on Monday. The court is responsible for trying cases of serious human rights violations in the country, which has been ravaged by conflict for more than 20 years. The UPC has committed “widespread and systematic attacks on the civilian population,” the court said. During the attacks on the town of Obo last week, government forces backed by U.N. troops killed around 10 fighters from the rebel militia and captured others, a government spokesman had told AFP. Led by a mercenary named Ali Darassa, the UPC has been campaigning for months to extend its grip in the southeast, at the crossroads of the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. The UPC is one of myriad armed groups that have controlled most of the CAR since the country plunged into violence in 2013. A few months away from high-risk presidential elections due in December, the CAR continues to be plagued by militia …

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Nine Killed in Eastern DR Congo Attack

Nine civilians were killed on Sunday in the eastern DR Congo region of Beni in another attack blamed on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia, according to local sources. The attackers fled after a gunfight with army troops, according to Anthony Mualushayi, a regional army spokesman. The fighters “burned down some houses” and people have fled, said Donat Kibwana, the region’s administrator, adding that there were “some wounded on the military side.” Local official Bozi Sindiwako told AFP that two women and seven men were killed. The ADF is accused of killing more than 400 civilians in six months in retaliation for a military offensive launched in October against their bases. More than 1,000 civilians have died in attacks blamed on the ADF in the Beni region since October 2014. They often target farmers returning from the fields or at home in their villages at night. The mainly Muslim movement originated in neighboring Uganda, opposed to the rule of President Yoweri Museveni. In 1995 they crossed the border into DR Congo, which became its base of operations. “Barbaric acts” are being committed by militiamen in Beni and elsewhere in eastern DR Congo, the government said at a cabinet meeting on Friday. …

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Eight Jihadists Killed in Ivorian-Burkina Operation: Ivory Coast Army

Eight suspected jihadists were killed and another 38 captured in a joint operation by Burkinabe and Ivorian forces near the two countries’ shared border, the Ivory Coast army said Sunday. The captured men — 24 in Burkina Faso and 14 in Ivory Coast — were handed over to intelligence services, a source at Ivorian army headquarters told AFP. A “terrorist base” was destroyed at Alidougou in Burkina Faso, the source added. Arms, ammunition, USB keys, and cell phones were also seized during the operation, the source said. Operation “Comoe,” named after a river that flows through the two west African countries, was launched in early May, the source said, praising the “perfect coordination between the two armies.” This joint operation, presented on Saturday by the two armies’ top commanders as the first of its kind, took place northeast of the Ivorian town of Ferkessedougou and south of Banfora in Burkina Faso. On Saturday, a Burkinabe security source said the entire operation had been carried out in Ivory Coast. But local people told an AFP journalist that the fighting took place around the villages of Tinadalla and Diambeh north of Kong in the northeast of Ivory Coast. They spoke of a considerable military …

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Sudan’s Bloody Tribal Clashes Threaten Fragile Transition

An upsurge in bloody tribal clashes in Sudan has killed at least 59 people and wounded over 100 this month, heaping more pressure on the country’s fragile transitional government. More than a year since the fall of longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir, who ruled over ethnically diverse regions with an iron fist, the joint civilian-military administration has struggled to steady a politically and economically unstable Sudan. In the latest inter-ethnic violence, 30 people were killed in clashes on May 7 between the Arab Rizeigat tribe and the Falata, who trace their roots to western Africa, sparked by a dispute over livestock. Three days later, three people died, 79 were wounded and several homes were burnt down in violence between members of the Bani Amer and Nuba tribes in the eastern city of Kassala, near Sudan’s border with Eritrea. This was followed by yet more lethal confrontations that left 26 people dead and 19 injured on May 13 in Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan province. Tribal grievances spilling over into bloodshed have been a mainstay of Sudan’s numerous ethnic conflicts since independence from British and Egyptian rule in 1956. Sudan’s most notorious violence shook the Dafur region in 2003 when Bashir’s …

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Coronavirus Fails to Halt Conflict in DR Congo’s Powder-Keg East

Coronavirus has swiftly gained status as the world’s No. 1 threat but in eastern DR Congo, one of Africa’s most volatile regions, militia killings and ethnic violence are an older and — for now — far greater source of dread. Some 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) distant from the capital Kinshasa, this beautiful region bordering Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi has been a notorious flashpoint since the Congo Wars of the 1990s. “The COVID-19 crisis must not make us forget the atrocities which are taking place in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo,” 2018 Nobel peace laureate Denis Mukwege said on Tuesday. In the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu, “civilians are being massacred,” he said. “In South Kivu, Rwandan and Burundian armies are battling armed groups in the high plateaus of Minembwe, destroying everything in their wake,” Mukwege said. “And in Tanganyika, the Zambians who had until now had good neighborly relations with DR Congo… recently invaded our territory.” Mukwege co-won the coveted prize for his treatment in helping women raped by armed rebels in South Kivu. The Kivu Security Tracker, an NGO which documents bloodshed in the two Kivu provinces, said March was one of the least violent months it …

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Worried Togo Finds Itself on Front Line of Sahel’s Jihadist War

In a makeshift bunker of sacks of rice beneath a tree, heavily-armed Togolese soldiers keep watch over villagers coming and going on foot or bike across the border with Burkina Faso. Just a dried-out river bed separates the two West African countries. In surrounding fields, peasant farmers are bent silhouettes, watering the sorghum and maize seeds sown before the arrival of the first rains. Soon, clouds will chase away the fine dust of the harmattan, the desert wind that each year sweeps off the Sahara southwards to the coast and chokes the air. Nothing dramatic, or so it would seem, ever happens at Yemboate, in Togo’s far north. Yet less than 30 kilometers (19 miles) away, over the border in eastern Burkina Faso, jihadists and militia groups have imposed their own brutal law. Those policemen, doctors, and teachers who have not fled are being hunted down and butchered. “When I was small, we spent our time swimming in the river,” says farmer Abdoulaye Mossi, leaning on his bike with a hoe, speaking to AFP before the coronavirus pandemic. The arid channel separates his peaceful village of cob huts from a Burkinabe village on the other side. “Fear rules today,” the farmer says. But fear does …

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