ADF

ADF STAFF Dozens of people were killed and crucial infrastructure such as water, electricity and communication lines was damaged after days of fighting in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, and nearby areas in mid-August. The Darfur Bar Association said the attacks were carried out by Arab militias driving vehicles supplied by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The attacks targeted a rival Arab group rather than non-Arabs. Several Arab groups have pledge allegiance to the RSF. Darfur’s violence — typically between Arab and non-Arab ethnic groups — has been fueled by the fighting that broke out in April between the…

ADF STAFF Mario Boris Fernandez pulled his artisanal fishing canoe ashore at Porto de Bandim in Guinea-Bissau. A longtime fisherman in Bissau, the national capital, he did not struggle with the weight of a large haul. That’s the upside of fishing all night and returning with little catch. “Two decades ago, when I started fishing here, our catches were so plentiful that I could take care of feeding, clothing and other social issues of my family, without any difficulty,” Fernandez told China Dialogue Ocean. “It’s now proving difficult to get the quantity and quality of fish we used to have.”…

ADF STAFF As recent military coups have swept aside civilian governments from Guinea to Sudan, one question lingers: When will those countries return to civilian or democratic rule? The answer, experts say, depends on how determined the military is to remain in power, particularly if it tries to rig elections to give leaders a veneer of democratic legitimacy. In some cases, junta leaders promise to hold elections and restore democracy within a defined period of time — three years in the case of Guinea and, more recently, Niger. However, a coup permanently damages a country’s political and social institutions. “In…

ADF STAFF The military junta that overthrew Niger’s democratically elected president claimed it was necessary to stop the extremist violence affecting that country and its Sahel neighbors. A few weeks later, 17 Nigerien soldiers died in an extremist attack near the Mali border. Niger’s junta, like those that overthrew governments in Burkina Faso and Mali, claimed that the military can solve the extremist problem that civilian leaders could not. Oumar Moctar, a leader of Niger’s Democratic and Republican Renewal Party, challenged that assessment. “The military council claims that it has turned against the regime of the ruling party due to…

ADF STAFF Nvou Michael had 15 handmade rifles and 400 rounds of AK-47 ammunition when police intercepted her on an expressway in Kaduna State in 2022. Nigeria Police Force public relations officer Olumuyiwa Adejobi elicited Michael’s confession during a media briefing in Abuja: She had been selling AK-47s for 15,000 naira (about $20) each to various bandit groups that have plagued Nigeria’s North West region for more than a decade. “What a man can do, a woman can do even better,” Adejobi said. “The suspect specializes in smuggling arms and ammunition to various states, such as Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara and…

ADF STAFF A woman who lives in Moura, a town in central Mali’s restive Mopti region, recalled the horrors inflicted on her when Malian soldiers and Russian Wagner Group mercenaries launched a five-day assault in March 2022. After days of slaughtering men, the Malian troops and Wagner fighters turned their attention to Moura’s women. The woman said soldiers searched her house for men but found none. They returned the next evening and, she said, a white man with tattoos raped her. “A fter that, I was injured in my genital area. When I tried to resist, the other soldier came…

ADF STAFF There are signs of progress in the fight against the Islamic State group (IS) and other terrorist groups in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province. But a spate of recent attacks show that the insurgents are far from defeated and are executing more sophisticated strikes. A remote-controlled improvised explosive device (IED) badly damaged a Mozambican Defense Armed Forces (FADM) armored vehicle in Quiterajo in July. The explosion triggered a gunfight during which at least one FADM Soldier was killed, according to a report by Cabo Ligado, which is published by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. Insurgents have…

ADF STAFF Since entering the Central African Republic (CAR) in 2018, Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries have ruthlessly exploited the country’s natural resources, most recently turning to logging to fund the organization and to fuel Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. In 2021, CAR authorities granted a 30-year logging concession to Bois Rouge, a company affiliated with Wagner, to harvest logs from a tract covering nearly 186,000 hectares — an area more than twice the size of the Mbaéré-Bodingué National Park just across the Mbaéré River. If Wagner exploits just one-third of its land, the mercenary group could reap nearly…

ADF STAFF The Baka people of Cameroon have thrived amid the lush rainforests for thousands of years, but recently they have seen their lives upended by expanding Chinese rubber plantations. “When they destroyed the forest, they were actually destroying our homes,” Baka village elder Moise Ndjelee told South Africa’s Daily Maverick. Ndjelee and about 100 other Baka were evicted from their homes to make way for the 450-square-kilometer Sudcam rubber plantation. Today, the hunter-gatherers live in poverty and crowded conditions in the Bantu village of Nyabibéte. Sudcam is the common name for Cameroonian-owned Sud Cameroun Hévéa, which is a subsidiary…

ADF STAFF Terrorists of the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) kidnapped Boubacar Moussa in Niger in 2019 and forced him to fight for them in Mali. Moussa was with JNIM when Mali experienced the first of its two recent coups in 2020. At the time, he said, many radical extremists viewed the government overthrow as an opportunity. He now fears that the recent coup in Niger will boost extremist recruitment, possibly escalate violence and further erode stability in the volatile Sahel region. “Jihadis are very supportive of this coup that happened in Niger,” Moussa told The Associated Press (AP). The…