Africa

Libya Unity Government Claims Full Control of Tripoli, Suburbs

Libya’s UN-recognised unity government said Thursday that it was back in full control of the capital and its suburbs after more than a year of fighting off an offensive by eastern strongman Khalifa Haftar. “Our heroic forces have full control of Greater Tripoli right up to the city limits,” Mohamad Gnounou, spokesman for the forces of the Government of National Accord (GNA), said in a Facebook post. The announcement came after GNA forces retook the capital’s civilian airport on Wednesday, more than a year after losing it in Haftar’s initial drive on the capital. The airport, in Tripoli’s southern outskirts, had been disused since 2014 when it was heavily damaged in fighting between rival militias. “Our forces are continuing their advance, chasing the terrorist militias from the walls of Tripoli,” said the GNA’s Deputy Defense Minister Salah Namrush. “Some of their commanders are fleeing towards Bani Walid airport,” in the interior 170 kilometers (110 miles) southeast of the capital, he added on Facebook. Footage of GNA troops manning positions held until recently by Haftar’s fighters was widely circulated on Libyan television channels and social media. The fighting for the capital had killed hundreds and forced around 200,000 people to flee. GNA forces, …

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Thousands Flee Niger Refugee Camp After Jihadist Attack

Thousands of people have fled a camp hosting 20,000 Malian refugees in western Niger after a deadly jihadist attack devastated the site, the United Nations said Wednesday. Around 50 jihadists on motorbikes killed three local leaders, abducted a guard, destroyed communication antennas, and sabotaged the water supply at the Intikane site near the Malian border in a coordinated attack on Monday. Intikane is home to around 20,000 Malian refugees and 15,000 internally displaced Niger citizens — all of whom previously fled their villages due to jihadist violence — as well as the local population. Now many are on the move again, with some 3,000 people fleeing to Tlemces, a site 27 kilometers (43 miles) from Intikane, the UN refugee agency UNHCR in Niamey told AFP. UNHCR official Kourouma Mamady Fatta said the agency was carrying out an assessment of the damage and was trying to get the water supply flowing again. The governor of the Tahoua region, Moussa Abdourahamane, said, “Intikane is losing its population, people are moving towards Tlemces.” The jihadists “attacked the sensitive points of the site — they cut communication lines to isolate the population and they destroyed the sources for drinking water,” he told the national public …

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Sixteen Dead in New Eastern DR Congo Massacre

Sixteen civilians, five of them children, were killed overnight in a fresh massacre in the eastern DR Congo province of Ituri, a local official and a UN source said on Wednesday. “The toll, which is still provisional, is of 16 people killed by knives or gunfire. The people killed are four men, seven women, and five children all aged under five,” the administrator of Djugu territory, Adel Alingi, told AFP. The toll was separately confirmed by a source in the United Nations’ peacekeeping force, MONUSCO. The attack unfolded at a village in the area of Mambisa, north of the Ituri capital Bunia, the sources said. The authorities attributed it to a notorious ethnic militia called CODECO, for the Cooperative for the Development of the Congo. The organization is mainly drawn from the Lendu ethnic group, who are predominantly farmers and clash repeatedly with the Hema community of traders and herders. Nearly 300 civilians have been killed since the start of the year in attacks blamed on CODECO, while the UN says around 200,000 people have fled their homes. UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, in a visit to Ituri in late January, said “crimes against humanity” had been perpetrated. Tens of thousands …

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Libya Rivals Agree Return to Ceasefire Talks: UN

The United Nations’ Libya mission said Tuesday the country’s warring parties had agreed to restart talks aimed at reaching a lasting ceasefire, after a three-month suspension. In a statement, UNSMIL “welcomed” moves by the Government of National Accord and forces backing eastern-based military commander Khalifa Haftar to accept “restarting negotiations on a ceasefire and the related security arrangements.” Pro-Haftar forces have been battling since April last year to seize the capital Tripoli from the UN-recognised GNA, in fighting that has left hundreds dead and forced 200,000 to flee their homes. A military commission made up of five GNA loyalists and five Haftar delegates held talks in February, but the dialogue was suspended. A January truce brokered by GNA backer Turkey and key Haftar ally Russia has been repeatedly violated. Neither side immediately commented on the UN statement. Haftar’s rapid advance on Tripoli last year stalled to a bloody stalemate on the edges of the capital. In recent weeks, GNA forces buoyed by Turkish drones and air defense systems have taken back a string of coastal towns and a key airbase, Haftar is supported by neighboring Egypt and the United Arab Emirates as well as Russia. The UN mission urged “states backing either …

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At Least 50 Die in Burkina Attacks Blamed on Jihadists

Ten people were killed when an aid convoy was ambushed in Burkina Faso, the government said Sunday, bringing to at least 50 the death toll from a string of attacks blamed on jihadists. The ambush occurred on Saturday near the northern town of Barsalogho, it said in a statement, adding that an attack on a livestock market in the east of the country earlier in the day had claimed 25 lives, according to a provisional toll. The humanitarian convoy was returning from the northern town of Foube after delivering food there, the statement said. At least five civilians and five gendarmes were killed and around 20 people were injured. Saturday’s attacks came a day after a convoy of mainly shopkeepers escorted by a local self-defense unit came under fire in the north of the West African country, killing 15 people. That attack, in Loroum province, was also blamed on jihadists. The east and north of the former French colony are the hardest hit by attacks by jihadists, who have killed more than 900 people and caused some 860,000 people to flee their homes in the past five years. A local governor, Colonel Saidou Sanou, said in a statement that the …

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Mozambique May Have Killed Jihadist Leaders: President

Mozambican security forces may have killed the leaders of the Islamist militants who have terrorized communities in the central and northern districts of Cabo Delgado, President Filipe Nyusi said. In an interview late Saturday on state television channel TVM, Nyusi said top officials were still trying to confirm their deaths which appear to have occurred after Thursday’s attack and occupation of the Macomia district headquarters. “We have information that senior officers of this force have been slaughtered, which we can consider to be the leadership, but the Defence and Security Forces will confirm this at a proper moment,” President Nyusi said. “We are learning how to deal with that force and we are encouraging the Defence and Security Forces to fight them.” Since 2017, a shadowy Islamist group has wreaked havoc among communities in the gas-rich north, burning huts, decapitating villagers, and killing more than 1,100 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. The jihadists have grown bolder over the past two months, stepping up attacks by destroying more important infrastructure such as government headquarters buildings, bank branches, and looting money. They have now ventured into towns as part of a declared campaign to establish an Islamist caliphate. Outnumbering …

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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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