Leaders of French-speaking countries gathered Saturday on a Tunisian island to discuss debt relief, migration, food and energy shortages amid a soaring cost-of-living crisis across Africa, Europe and the Middle East due to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The Minister of National Security, Mr Albert Kan-Dapaah, has revealed that 346 terrorist attacks were recorded in Africa in the first quarter of 2022, with 49 per cent of them occurring in West Africa alone.
Also, he indicated that between July and September this year, 246 terrorist attacks resulting in 745 fatalities and 239 injuries were recorded in West Africa.
In October 2022, Somalia’s capital Mogadishu suffered yet another massive suicidal attack. More than 100 people were killed. Hundreds more were wounded and thousands will have been traumatised by an attack claimed by the Somali insurgent group Al-Shabaab.
The Kurdish-led authority in northeast Syria called on residents on Saturday to unite against any possible attack by Turkey, warning that such an offensive would lead to long war.
The statement by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria came a week after a Nov. 13, explosion targeted Istanbul’s bustling Istiklal Avenue — a popular thoroughfare lined with shops and restaurants — and left six people dead, including two children. More than 80 people were also wounded in the attack, which came as a stark reminder of bombings in Turkish cities between 2015 and 2017, crushing the public’s sense of security.
Turkey announced on Sunday it had carried out air strikes against the bases of outlawed Kurdish militants across northern Syria and Iraq, which it said were being used to launch “terrorist” attacks on Turkish soil.
The raids in northern and northeastern Syria overnight, primarily against positions held by Syrian Kurdish forces, killed at least 31 people, British-based war monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Bulgarian prosecutors have charged five people for supporting terrorist acts in connection with an explosion in central Istanbul that killed six people on Nov. 13, chief prosecutor Ivan Geshev said on Saturday.
France seems to be losing the grip it once had on its former colonies, and the rift is growing every day.
“Sixty years on, francophone countries in Africa still do not have true independence and freedom from France,” Nathalie Yamb, adviser to Ivory Coast’s Freedom and Democracy Party (LIDER), told Deutche Welle in 2020. Even the content of school textbooks was often still determined by France, Yamb said, and the political systems in many of the countries were introduced by France.
When
December 16, 2022
9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Where
National Press Club
529 14th St NW
Washington, District of Columbia 20045 (Map)
On October 23, 2022, the Kurdish Autonomous Administration in northeastern Syria, which controls parts of the Hasakah, Deir Al-Zour, Al-Raqqah and Aleppo governorates, issued a memo to all the education committees in the areas under its control specifying a dress code and other guidelines for the local schools. In addition to banning cellphones in the classroom and mandating school uniforms, the memo bans wearing the niqab (a veil that covers the entire face, except for the eyes) on campus.[1]
Several areas of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq were targeted overnight after an IRGC commander warned of possible ground invasion and the Iranian ambassador set out demands.
A massive orange fireball lit up the sky in an area outside the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq on the night of Nov. 20-21, as sirens sounded at the US Consulate within the city itself.