Africa

In Egypt, there has been an outpouring of sympathy and support for the Palestinians who are being subjected to one of the most brutal Israeli wars ever waged on the Gaza Strip, in response to the Al-Aqsa Flood operation carried out by Hamas and allied groups on Saturday 7 October.

La colonne de l’armée malienne partie le 2 octobre de Gao, composée de dizaines de véhicules et de blindés, se trouve désormais à 110 kilomètres au sud du fief rebelle.

L’armée malienne a indiqué le 5 octobre au soir qu’un important convoi de ses forces avait progressé jusqu’aux environs d’Anéfis, à environ 110 kilomètres au sud de la ville stratégique de Kidal, fief de la rébellion séparatiste qui a repris les armes contre l’État central. La colonne a brisé un rideau défensif constitué de tranchées à 10 kilomètres au sud d’Anéfis, a dit l’armée sur les réseaux sociaux. Elle a assuré avoir détruit plusieurs pickups et avoir infligé des pertes « très importantes » à ses adversaires.

The displacement crisis prompted by ongoing conflict in Sudan continues unabated with nearly six million people forced out of their homes and women and children making up nearly nine in 10 of those uprooted, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Wednesday.

“This is one of the largest protection crises that we are faced with today,” said Mamadou Dian Balde, UNHCR’s Regional Director for the East and Horn of Africa and Great Lakes.

On March 21, nine Algerian migrants died when the boat taking them to Italy capsized in the Mediterranean Sea. The tragic story, along with countless others like it, highlights the cost of migration, which is not limited to the loss of lives. In fact, the highly publicized reports of migrant deaths have increasingly shaped a vision of irregular migration as a symptom of a broader social tragedy, one that drives thousands of skilled young people from Africa to set off down unknown, dangerous paths in search of a better future for themselves.

A lack of state and industry accountability has turned the ocean into the world’s biggest transnational crime scene.

The ocean is central to global illicit trade. Criminal networks plunder marine resources, scour shipping lanes for vessels to hijack, and traverse coastal state waters and the high seas to move commodities to distant destinations.

North African states have seen an uptick in the number of migrants arriving and risking the perilous Mediterranean crossing to Southern Europe since a military coup in Niger severed cooperation between the West African nation and the EU.

President’s Take: Hot Spots Near and Far

The year 2023 has seen peace and security challenges both far from the EU’s borders and closer to home. The latter, especially, have heightened in recent weeks and months, which have seen fighting in the South Caucasus and Kosovo, even as a second year of war in Ukraine stretches on. While the three crises are very different in nature, all suggest a worrying inclination on the part of some governments to seek solutions to disputes through force of arms. Insofar as this jarring trend involves a proliferation of new wars, large and small, it flies in the face of the decades of energy that the EU has invested in turning the page on past conflagrations in Europe and its neighbourhood. Crisis Group is working on a report about how these conflicts are shaping the emerging European security architecture and how best to minimise the risk of future clashes. In the meantime, however, these three crises demand immediate attention. We have explored all of them in earlier work, but I want to share a few thoughts about recent developments.