ADF

Djibouti’s position at the southern end of the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandeb Strait has made it vital to international and regional counterterrorism efforts aimed at disrupting al-Shabaab in Somalia and Houthi rebels in Yemen. Djibouti is an island of stability and calm in a region marked by instability. It is also the home of the Djibouti Code of Conduct, adopted in 2009 to support regional and national capacity to counter the threat of piracy and armed robbery against ships in the Western Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden. With the recent attacks by Houthi rebels on transiting Red Sea…

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has announced plans to activate its standby force as terrorism from Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger continues to spread. On the sidelines of a March 11 ECOWAS meeting, Nigerian Defense Minister Mohammed Badaru Abubakar said the plan is to mobilize 5,000 ECOWAS Standby Force (ESF) troops and other resources across the region, which is a hotbed of terrorist violence. The ESF will combat terrorism, banditry, violent extremism, cross-border crimes and political instability. It was not clear when or where the ESF will be deployed first. “The activation of this force underscores our…

For most people in the volatile Tigray region, the two-year war fought against Ethiopian federal forces with support from the Eritrean Army didn’t really end with the Pretoria peace agreement in November 2022. “What was left of the Pretoria Agreement’s security framework is rapidly collapsing, with former comrades-in-arms now clashing, civilians again fleeing in fear, and Addis Ababa’s authority in the region becoming increasingly tenuous,” columnist Hafed Al-Ghwell wrote in a March 29 opinion piece for the Arab News daily newspaper. The instability has observers fearing that Ethiopia’s northern neighbor will increase its involvement militarily. “Neighboring Eritrea is watching these…

Speaking to the United Nations Security Council in February, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Thérèse Kaykwamba Wagner, said more than 4,000 people were killed in 48 hours when Rwanda-backed M23 rebels overran the city of Goma. “Goma has been taken hostage by the war,” she said, noting that Rwanda’s presence in her country is no longer up for debate. Independent U.N. experts have documented that between 3,000 and 4,000 Rwandan troops are in eastern DRC to support the M23. Wagner characterized the latest violent conflict in eastern DRC as a “political project spearheaded by Rwanda”…

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) on March 13 announced the termination and phased withdrawal of its military mission in the embattled eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where M23 rebels have gained ground. The decision was foreshadowed by the late February repatriation of about 200 troops with the SADC Mission in the DRC (SAMIDRC). These Soldiers, from Malawi, South Africa and Tanzania, had been confined to their bases in M23-held territory and complained of a lack of food, supplies and medical care. Analysts say the M23 outgunned and outmaneuvered the mission with high-tech weaponry. SAMIDRC troops were meant…

The Islamic State group (IS) aims to expand its terrorism beyond the Sahel region and into North Africa and West Africa, analysts say. Beverly Ochieng, a senior analyst at geopolitical risk consultancy Control Risks, said IS is focused on exploiting security gaps in areas it views as vulnerable. “Because the counterinsurgency infrastructure in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger has been compromised, then it allows them to make inroads into other countries that they perceive to be vulnerable,” Ochieng told Voice of America. On March 24, at least 12 Cameroonian Soldiers were killed and more than 12 wounded during a nighttime…

Longtime mistrust between South Sudan’s top two political leaders threatens to reignite civil war in the country seven years after a peace deal ended the previous one. At the heart of growing tensions is the relationship between President Salva Kiir and his rival, First Vice President Riek Machar. Both men control armed forces. Kiir controls the South Sudan People’s Defence Force (SSPDF), and Machar control his own militia, known as the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO). Both men also have other armed groups willing to fight alongside them in a country awash in militias and weapons. South Sudan’s post-independence civil…

Less than two weeks after 50 million liters of toxic mining waste burst from the Sino-Metals Leach copper mine into the Kafue River, three Zambian government ministers conducted a surprise visit to another Chinese-owned mine 11 kilometers away where authorities previously had suspended operations due to environmental noncompliance. On March 1, at the Rongxing Mineral Processing Plant, they found acid leaking from the same kind of tailings dam that collapsed at Sino-Metals on February 18, causing the country’s worst environmental disaster in years. A livid Collins Nzovu, minister of Water Development and Sanitation, spoke to reporters after seeing the leaky…

A Zambia Air Force pilot flew his helicopter close enough to the ground to see riverbanks full of dead fish. He was tasked in late February with assessing the environmental damage of a massive spill of concentrated acid and toxic heavy metals from a Chinese-owned copper mine that contaminated the Kafue River, the country’s most important waterway. “You could see a layer of oil or film over the water,” he told ADF. “It looked a bit white-ish, cream-colored, and we saw a lot of dead fish. We put lime in the water to raise the pH level. It took us…

As the role that artificial intelligence plays in society increases, African nations must factor the technology into their national security plans, according to experts in the field. “AI strategy can be considered a sectoral strategy within the larger security framework,” Joel Amegboh, a security expert at the African Center for Strategic Studies, said during a recent webinar. “That could allow governments to integrate AI as a critical tool to enhance national intelligence, law enforcement, national defense or economic development.” AI has the potential to improve defensive capabilities, whether the task is predicting terrorist attacks or forecasting maintenance schedules for key…