ADF

ADF STAFF Northern Ghana has emerged as a logistical base from which violent extremist organizations from Burkina Faso launch attacks into other areas as they try to expand farther into West Africa. Terrorists linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group (IS) also use Ghana’s north as a medical base where their injured fighters are treated. According to new reporting by Reuters, Ghanaian authorities are “turning a blind eye” to terrorists crossing over from Burkina Faso to stock up on food, fuel and explosives. While that approach has spared Ghana from the kind of deadly terror attacks that have plagued…

ADF STAFF The Russian Orthodox Church is quietly winning allegiance from priests and parishes from the Patriarchate of Alexandria in Egypt with offers of humanitarian aid, vaccines, infrastructure, schools, hospitals and spiritual patronage. Experts say this is a geopolitical strategy meant to help the Kremlin spreads its influence on the continent amid an ongoing battle within the Orthodox Church over the war in Ukraine. “Most analysts of Russia’s presence in Africa would miss this development,” Bob Wekesa, director of the African Center for the Study of the United States at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, told the…

ADF STAFF The TikTok video spread like an out-of-control fire in October. Dramatic music swelled in the background while the video frantically jumped from clips of security forces in action to police vehicles mobilizing with flashing lights and other scenes of chaos. The voice-over, generated by artificial intelligence, urgently narrated: “Coup d’etat in Côte d’Ivoire! Alassane Ouattara has been ousted from power.” By mid-November the video had been viewed more than 5.9 million times and shared more than 35,000 times on TikTok. Thousands of users lefts comments. “Obviously, this is false since there has been no coup d’état in Côte…

ADF STAFF Sudan’s war is inflaming ethnic tensions across the country and threatening to turn the battle between two military factions into a broader war along tribal lines. “The escalation of war narratives by both sides is fueling ethnically charged rhetoric,” the Advocacy Group for Peace in Sudan (AGPS) said in a statement. The group said that inflammatory claims by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have spurred dangerous regional and ethnic mobilization. The AGPS compared Sudan’s rising ethnic animosity to the early stages of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. “Sudan stands on the brink,” the…

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…