ADF

ADF STAFF Military drones hummed through October’s midday sky over the central Ethiopian town of Mehalganat in the volatile Amhara region before destroying several buildings at a health clinic compound. Residents said the attack by government forces killed eight people, including a 9-year-old child, a 70-year-old man and the clinic’s pharmacist. The aerial assault lasted for four days. “When the drone came, it sounded like a vulture,” an eyewitness told the BBC anonymously out of fear of repercussions. “It dropped something explosive, and we found seven bodies together.” Drone strikes, artillery shelling, extrajudicial killings and arbitrary arrests have become commonplace…

ADF STAFF A mid-August attack on a Fulani community in central Mali left 23 people dead and 300 missing. After raiding the village of Saran, the unidentified attackers went to the Fulani village of Bidi, but people there had already fled, said Harouna Sankare, mayor of nearby Ouenkoro. “Since they didn’t find anybody (in Bidi), they burned the village and the houses and attacked the cattle,” Sankare told Africanews. The Fulani are an ethnic group with a population of about 30 million stretching across the Sahel from Senegal to Sudan. Attacks on traditionally pastoral Fulani communities around the region are…

ADF STAFF Overall governance and security was worse in 2023 than it was a decade earlier for most of Africa’s population. That is according to the 2024 Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), which found the rise in junta-led governments may drive greater conflict, fueling a trend of deteriorating living standards. After years of steady progress, Africa’s overall governance performance ground to a halt in 2022, the report showed. The IIAG is funded by Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese billionaire and democracy advocate. It is published every two years. “Going forward, any state actor seeking to strengthen their performance as reliable deliverers…

ADF STAFF A convoy composed of Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) troops and Russian mercenaries rode in military vehicles, armored vehicles, trucks and pickups as they headed toward the northern town of Tinzawaten in late September. Their mission was to recover the bodies of some of the 47 FAMa Soldiers and 84 Russian Wagner Group mercenaries killed in July during a fierce three-day battle with fighters with the al-Qaida-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) terror group and Tuareg rebels with the newly formed Strategic Framework for the Defense of the People of Azawad (CSP-DPA), according to The Africa Report. Fought near…

ADF STAFF Turkey has made significant economic, military and diplomatic investments in Africa as part of its strategy in recent years to deepen ties across the continent. When Ethiopia and Somalia agreed this year to have Turkey play the role of mediator in their feud over Red Sea access in Somaliland, experts said it signaled Ankara’s growing influence in the Horn of Africa. But with negotiations stalled and rising instability in the Horn, it is unclear whether Turkey will be able to negotiate a resolution to the conflict. Ali Bilgic, professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics at Loughborough…

ADF STAFF In Somalia’s capital city of Mogadishu, where al-Shabaab militants continue to plot attacks, people are fighting back with security cameras. In recent months, bustling commercial centers have suffered a wave of bombings by the al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist group targeting the businesses that installed closed-circuit cameras. Mohamed Ahmed Diriye, the deputy mayor of Mogadishu for security and political affairs, addressed the media while standing in Bakaara Market, the largest in the country. “They are fighting against the cameras because they don’t want to be seen,” Diriye said after a series of bombings earlier this year. “It will never stop. We…

ADF STAFF With the launch of its Gaindesat-1A satellite in August, Senegal joined the growing list of African nations establishing a presence in space. Senegalese engineers and technicians designed Gaindesat-1A in collaboration with France’s University Space Centre of Montpellier. The project took five years. The launch was the first achievement for SenSAT, Senegal’s budding national space program. The satellite is a type known as a nanosatellite. It measures about 10 centimeters on a side and was built using commercially available components. Senegal’s government expects to use it to monitor weather and environmental conditions to benefit local farmers. “After five years…

ADF STAFF Gun battles in late October shattered the typical tranquility of Debark town, nestled in the foothills of the Semien mountains in Ethiopia’s Amhara region. Months of intense fighting in Ethiopia’s second-largest region have dislodged any sense of peace in the war-torn country, as the federal government struggles with what potentially could be another civil war. While the Pretoria Agreement was intended to end Ethiopia’s conflict in the Tigray region in November 2022, it left unresolved many issues such as decades-old territorial disputes between Amhara and Tigrayan people. “The peace deal two years ago was supposed to ensure that…

ADF STAFF Terrorists that plague northern Nigeria are arming themselves with weapons that originated in Libya, according to Nigerian defense officials. Weapons traffickers in Nigeria are benefitting from instability across the Sahel, particularly in Niger, which has become a key transit point for weapons taken from Libyan stockpiles. Those weapons have moved into other Sahel countries as well as Nigeria, according to the Small Arms Survey. “When we talk about the proliferation of arms, first, you have to look at what happened in Libya years ago and in the Sahel,” Nigerian Maj. Gen. Edward Buba said during a recent briefing.…

ADF STAFF Months of battlefield losses and hundreds of defections appeared to weaken Boko Haram, but it has not stopped the extremists from continuing to terrorize the Lake Chad Basin. Experts say that because the group has shown an alarming ability to reorganize and adapt its tactics, security forces must be just as flexible and resilient. Encompassing parts of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, the Lake Chad Basin has proved to be a troublesome theater with its many swamps and islands. All four countries contribute troops to the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) that recently concluded Operation Lake Sanity 2,…