ADF

Strife is growing in eastern Chad’s ethnic Zaghawa communities amid allegations of support for Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. Suspicions of Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Déby’s support for the paramilitary RSF can be traced to the beginning of Sudan’s civil war in 2023, and have gained currency with the revelation that Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo’s cousin, Gen. Bichara Issa Djadalla, is President Déby’s special advisor. While Chad denies direct involvement in Sudan’s war, analysts say weapons, particularly from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), continue to be trafficked to the RSF through Chad, despite the border of Sudan being…

A few weeks after Tuareg fighters pushed the Malian Army and its Russian supporters out of the northern city of Kidal, hundreds of metal balls the size of oranges rained down on the nearby community of Tadjmart. The Malian Army soon announced what Tadjmart residents quickly learned: The military has launched cluster bombs against communities in the northern region held by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA). The Tadjmart attack came after a similar attack a few days earlier in the community of Oubder in the Timbuktu region. “This is the first time we have seen these cluster bombs,” Tilla Ag…

Boko Haram fighters killed nearly two dozen Soldiers in early May when they attacked a Chadian military base on an island in Lake Chad. The attack is the latest reminder that militaries must adapt their tactics to stay ahead of terrorists operating in the region, according to analysts. The “MNJTF [Multinational Joint Task Force] must step up its tactical and technological efforts and, above all, engage more consistently to continue weakening the factions and ensure stabilisation to facilitate support for affected communities,” researchers with South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies (ISS) wrote in a recent report. In recent years, Boko…

More than 400 Congolese were killed in bombardments and executions in eight South Kivu province towns over a one-week stretch in early December 2025. The violence forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee to neighboring Burundi and other areas, and prompted a scathing assessment of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) by the National Assembly’s Defense and Security Committee, which met in the aftermath of the carnage. Viewed by The Africa Report magazine, the assessment highlighted the military’s lack of policy for maintaining a security presence in crucial areas, weak cohesion, fragile chain of command,…

Two raids on terrorist cells in Tunisia earlier this year demonstrate security forces’ ability to detect and neutralize plots against the country while also highlighting the persistent terrorist threat. Security forces staged the raids in January in the Kasserine governorate in the western part of the country. A January 3 operation stopped an attack near a weekly market, killing the ringleader, Seddik El Abidi. He was a Tunisian native and a member of the Jund al-Khilafa (Soldiers of the Caliphate) battalion, an offshoot of the Islamic State group, the news agency Tuniscope reported. Authorities arrested an accomplice and later detained…

Southern Africa remains a significant source of rhino horn entering Chinese markets, despite an overall downturn in rhino poaching on the continent in recent years. A March 2026 report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) analyzed 258 Chinese court cases involving rhino horn trafficking that were uploaded to China Judgements Online between 2013 and October 2025. However, that total doesn’t represent all the rhino horn trafficking cases. Of the cases studied, Mozambique and South Africa represent the most prevalent African source and transit countries for rhino horn. “Court verdicts from 2013 to 2025 reveal that rhino horn enters and is…

Nigerian authorities arrested a Chinese grandmother in mid-May when they discovered more than 1,825,000 tablets of Indian tapentadol worth nearly $1.6 million in her luggage. Tapentadol is a strong, highly addictive synthetic opioid that is often added to kush, a synthetic drug. Kush looks like marijuana but can be 25 times more powerful than fentanyl. Often called the “zombie drug” for the debilitating effects it has on users, kush has fueled a synthetic opioid epidemic that has ravaged West African communities for several years. In April, Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based open-source investigative cooperative, reported that Indian companies shipped more than 320 million…

In a provocative move, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) announced it was taking back control of the regional government in northern Ethiopia. The announcement by the region’s powerful political party and armed group came just weeks before a national election on June 2 in which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his ruling Prosperity Party were expected to maintain control of the federal government. It provoked fears of a return to war, with each side accusing the other of violating the terms of a peace deal. “The decision by ‌TPLF … ⁠is clearly a major escalation,” Kjetil Tronvoll, a professor…

Russian cargo aircraft were tracked making at least 167 flights to five Algerian air bases between March 2025 and April 2026. Many of Moscow’s aircraft using the bases are connected to the United Aircraft Corp., Russia’s state-owned maker of military jets. According to Defense News magazine, these flights roughly coincided with the deliveries of several types of Russian-made warplanes to Algeria, where the jets have been seen and heard thundering over the countryside near the Oum El Bouaghi Air Base. The shadowy Kremlin fleet is known as “Air Wagner” in reference to Russian mercenaries engaged in African conflict zones. The…

Boko Haram’s Jama’atu Ahlis-Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (JAS) and other terror groups are increasingly launching attacks around Nigeria’s forested Borgu-Kainji axis. Analysts say these groups are using tactics long employed in the Lake Chad basin and are establishing a foothold in the sprawling area linking northwest to southwest Nigeria. In recent years, terrorists have used Kainji Lake National Park, a 5,300-square-kilometer former tourist attraction, as a base to launch attacks in the porous tri-border region Nigeria shares with Benin and Niger, according to the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). The Borgu Game Reserve is located within the park. The number of violent events…