ADF

Members of the Libyan and Ivoirian armed forces say that the 2026 edition of Flintlock demonstrated how special forces operators from African nations can partner across borders to confront the continent’s growing terror threats. Officers from the two countries spoke at a panel discussion in Tampa, Florida, in late May, after the completion of the April 14-30 exercise. About 1,500 service members from more than 30 African and international partner nations participated in the exercise, hosted by Côte d’Ivoire and Libya. Libya hosted Flintlock for the first time. It also marked the first time Libya’s two rival military factions have…

A propaganda video showed a boatload of heavily armed Boko Haram fighters heading toward a Lake Chad island held by their rivals, soldiers from the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). The Boko Haram fighters noticed another boat nearby and chased it down, guns blazing. After a couple of minutes, the Boko Haram fighters celebrated as blood clouded the water. Videos produced by both terror groups suggest that the massive basin straddling the porous, largely ungoverned borders of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria has become a war zone, with civilians caught in the crosshairs. In their back-and-forth battle for control…

Strife is growing in eastern Chad’s ethnic Zaghawa communities amid allegations of support for Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. Suspicions of Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Déby’s support for the paramilitary RSF can be traced to the beginning of Sudan’s civil war in 2023, and have gained currency with the revelation that Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo’s cousin, Gen. Bichara Issa Djadalla, is President Déby’s special advisor. While Chad denies direct involvement in Sudan’s war, analysts say weapons, particularly from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), continue to be trafficked to the RSF through Chad, despite the border of Sudan being…

A few weeks after Tuareg fighters pushed the Malian Army and its Russian supporters out of the northern city of Kidal, hundreds of metal balls the size of oranges rained down on the nearby community of Tadjmart. The Malian Army soon announced what Tadjmart residents quickly learned: The military has launched cluster bombs against communities in the northern region held by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA). The Tadjmart attack came after a similar attack a few days earlier in the community of Oubder in the Timbuktu region. “This is the first time we have seen these cluster bombs,” Tilla Ag…

Boko Haram fighters killed nearly two dozen Soldiers in early May when they attacked a Chadian military base on an island in Lake Chad. The attack is the latest reminder that militaries must adapt their tactics to stay ahead of terrorists operating in the region, according to analysts. The “MNJTF [Multinational Joint Task Force] must step up its tactical and technological efforts and, above all, engage more consistently to continue weakening the factions and ensure stabilisation to facilitate support for affected communities,” researchers with South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies (ISS) wrote in a recent report. In recent years, Boko…

More than 400 Congolese were killed in bombardments and executions in eight South Kivu province towns over a one-week stretch in early December 2025. The violence forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee to neighboring Burundi and other areas, and prompted a scathing assessment of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) by the National Assembly’s Defense and Security Committee, which met in the aftermath of the carnage. Viewed by The Africa Report magazine, the assessment highlighted the military’s lack of policy for maintaining a security presence in crucial areas, weak cohesion, fragile chain of command,…

Two raids on terrorist cells in Tunisia earlier this year demonstrate security forces’ ability to detect and neutralize plots against the country while also highlighting the persistent terrorist threat. Security forces staged the raids in January in the Kasserine governorate in the western part of the country. A January 3 operation stopped an attack near a weekly market, killing the ringleader, Seddik El Abidi. He was a Tunisian native and a member of the Jund al-Khilafa (Soldiers of the Caliphate) battalion, an offshoot of the Islamic State group, the news agency Tuniscope reported. Authorities arrested an accomplice and later detained…

Southern Africa remains a significant source of rhino horn entering Chinese markets, despite an overall downturn in rhino poaching on the continent in recent years. A March 2026 report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) analyzed 258 Chinese court cases involving rhino horn trafficking that were uploaded to China Judgements Online between 2013 and October 2025. However, that total doesn’t represent all the rhino horn trafficking cases. Of the cases studied, Mozambique and South Africa represent the most prevalent African source and transit countries for rhino horn. “Court verdicts from 2013 to 2025 reveal that rhino horn enters and is…

Nigerian authorities arrested a Chinese grandmother in mid-May when they discovered more than 1,825,000 tablets of Indian tapentadol worth nearly $1.6 million in her luggage. Tapentadol is a strong, highly addictive synthetic opioid that is often added to kush, a synthetic drug. Kush looks like marijuana but can be 25 times more powerful than fentanyl. Often called the “zombie drug” for the debilitating effects it has on users, kush has fueled a synthetic opioid epidemic that has ravaged West African communities for several years. In April, Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based open-source investigative cooperative, reported that Indian companies shipped more than 320 million…

In a provocative move, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) announced it was taking back control of the regional government in northern Ethiopia. The announcement by the region’s powerful political party and armed group came just weeks before a national election on June 2 in which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his ruling Prosperity Party were expected to maintain control of the federal government. It provoked fears of a return to war, with each side accusing the other of violating the terms of a peace deal. “The decision by ‌TPLF … ⁠is clearly a major escalation,” Kjetil Tronvoll, a professor…