ADF

ADF STAFF Montessor Saddam was staying at a camp for displaced people in Sudan’s West Darfur region when members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group attacked on November 2. Over the next three days, the RSF killed 1,300 people and wounded 2,000, local monitors told Al Jazeera. Another 310 were missing. “They went house to house to search for men and killed each one they found,” Saddam, a pseudonym, told Al Jazeera at a refugee camp in Chad. “There were so many corpses in the streets.” Other survivors and analysts say the attack was part of a campaign…

ADF STAFF The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) has intensified its campaign of airstrikes against extremist militant groups in the northeast. In revenge attacks, fleeing insurgents have begun targeting farmers whom they falsely blame for enabling the air attacks. “Anytime they kill farmers, fishermen or scavengers, they always brand them as spies,” local security analyst Zagazola Makama told ADF. Makama, a counterinsurgency expert based in Borno State, documented several NAF airstrikes in early November that targeted Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). “These military airstrikes and ground offensives have forced ISWAP and Boko Haram to adopt new…

ADF STAFF After nearly eight months of fighting, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) appears to be consolidating its control over the five states of the Darfur region along with parts of the capital, Khartoum. At the same time, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) has repeatedly fallen back, yielding more territory to the RSF while its leadership oversees operations from the eastern city of Port Sudan. The national government, led by SAF chief Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, controls Sudan’s central and eastern states, the Nile River north of Khartoum and Red Sea ports. “The situation is moving, really, to a scenario…

ADF STAFF The rise of ethnic militias in recent years threatens conflict-ridden western Niger, near the tri-border area with Burkina Faso and Mali. Two groups in particular, the garde nomade, a group of former Tuareg rebels integrated into Nigerien forces in the Tahoua region, and the Zarma zankai, a self-defense group operating in the Tillabéri region, pose significant security issues. That is according to Delina Goxho, an associate fellow in the Africa department at the Egmont Institute in Brussels, who authored a report on the subject in October. Both the pre-coup government and current ruling junta have relied on the…

ADF STAFF Insurgents killed about 100 people, mostly children and the elderly, in the northern Burkina Faso village of Zaongo in early November. A local prosecutor said the assailants were unknown, but rebel groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group (IS) operate in the area. For months, those groups have committed war crimes against civilians and blocked access to food and water in 46 localities, Amnesty International reported. Attacks commonly occur in areas controlled by terrorist groups, an estimated 30% of Burkina Faso. “These days, a town or village falls under siege every day,” the leader of a…

ADF STAFF When he traveled to Beijing for a state visit in May, Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki was retracing a trip he made more than 50 years earlier when he was trained in guerilla warfare tactics in the People’s Republic of China. Isaias is one of two sitting African leaders — Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa is the other — to have participated in China’s professional military education (PME) program. The system targets the continent’s military leadership for training that emphasizes the Chinese Community Party’s (CCP) philosophy of “the party controls the gun.” That philosophy promotes the notion that a country’s…

ADF STAFF In September, terrorists fired three rockets at a ferry on the Niger River, killing 49 people. Witnesses said the victims, all civilians, drowned or were burned to death. The terrorists reportedly were members of the al-Qaida-linked group known as Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimeen (JNIM). About the same time, Malian forces launched counterinsurgency attacks in three villages in the Nara and Timbuktu regions. In one attack, authorities arrested and killed 16 men and a boy, with their bodies later found outside the village. Witnesses said the armed forces included foreign armed white men, allegedly mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner…

ADF STAFF A new study reveals how a Chinese logging company is illegally leveling rainforests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), stripping the country of millions of dollars’ worth of irreplaceable natural resources and fueling corruption. China’s Congo King Baisheng Forestry Development (CKBFD) controlled nine logging concessions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the study said, yet the company often logged illegally outside its boundaries. Despite receiving a suspension from the DRC’s Ministry of the Environment in April 2022, CKBFD continued to log illegally. In the second half of 2022, it shipped more than $5 million…

ADF STAFF Nearly 2,000 kilometers from the seat of the government in Kinshasa, the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been beset by violence for decades. Recent tensions have surged with the revitalized M23 rebel group, backed by neighboring Rwanda. Mere months after the East African Community Regional Force (EACRF) fully deployed to the eastern region in April 2023, government authorities began criticizing the force for playing the role of peace facilitator instead of defending civilians and defeating rebel groups. Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi was well aware of his citizens’ anger and frustration with the United Nations peacekeeping…

ADF STAFF As director of the International Peace Support Training Centre (IPSTC) in Nairobi, Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) Brig. Joyce Sitienei took center stage recently as host of an international peacekeeping summit. “We are honored to host this prestigious event in Kenya, a country with a rich history of peacekeeping and a strong commitment to the cause of regional and international peace and security,” she said in a statement. “It provides an opportunity for us as an institution that for two decades has been focused on building capacity for peace support operations actors to bring together delegates from all over…