Africa

When Niger’s democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown in a July 2023 coup, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) moved within days to impose punitive measures that it hoped would force a return to constitutional order. This included financial sanctions on Niger and the closure of all member states’ borders with the country.1 The bridge over the Niger River, linking the Beninese city of Malanville and the city of Gaya in Niger ­– a key transit point for migrants and both licit and illicit trade – was therefore officially closed.

In June 2024, fighters from the Katiba Serma sub-group of Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) redoubled their efforts to cut off the town of Boni, in the Mopti region of central Mali.1 This is the latest iteration of a blockade that the jihadist group had intermittently imposed for more than nine months on the Route Nationale (RN) 16.2 Blockades are very much part of JNIM’s toolkit in its areas of influence not just in Mali, but also in neighbouring Burkina Faso.

Map 1 : The Gendarmerie Academy and barracks and the International Airport Modibo Keita

At dawn September 17, 2024, the Malian capital of Bamako witnessed one of the most brazen terrorist attacks seen in recent years. Armed gunmen first stormed a barracks of the gendarmerie in the south of the capital and subsequently attacked the military part of the airfield Modibo Keita.

Two African Union soldiers were killed and a third one injured by an al-Shabab mortar attack Sunday on their base inside the perimeters of Mogadishu’s international airport.

A statement by the head of the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS) and Special Representative of the Chairperson of the African Union Commission Mohamed El-Amine Souef condemned the attack on the facility known as the Halane Base Camp.

At a large intersection in central Mekelle, the capital of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, Asmelash Mariam waits cautiously for a speeding blue bajaj to let him cross.

The 28-year-old walks with a limp, but eases his way through the crowd, a serious and proud look on his face. Beneath his grey-washed jeans a prosthetic on his right leg replaces the limb he lost in the war two years ago.

Chad’s interim President Mahamat Idriss Deby has threatened to withdraw the Central African country from a multinational security force, which he said had failed in its task of tackling insurgent groups in the Lake Chad region.

Deby made the statement on Sunday during a visit to the region, which sits in part of western Chad and also Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon. Around 40 Chadian soldiers were killed in an attack there by suspected Boko Haram militants in late October.

Criminal gangs in Nigeria’s North West region have grown increasingly lethal, routinizing mass abductions, seizing farms in an important breadbasket, and causing massive internal displacement.

The escalating violence of criminal gangs in Nigeria’s North West region has triggered growing instability in this ethnically diverse breadbasket of some 60 million people. The violence perpetrated by these criminal gangs, known locally as “bandits,” is on pace to make 2024 the worst year of insecurity in the region’s recent history. The 1,380 violent events and 3,980 fatalities projected for the year exceed the record levels observed in 2022, following declines in 2023. Fatalities linked to criminal gangs in the North West region now exceed those tied to militant Islamist groups in the North East region, a shift observed since 2021.