Africa

Leaders from five West African countries and their ally France meet Tuesday to confer over their troubled efforts to stem a jihadist offensive unfolding in the Sahel.

Reported civilian casualties in Libya have surged over the past year amid a prolonged battle for the capital, Tripoli, with forces believed to be linked to a warlord based in the eastern part of the country responsible for most noncombatant deaths, a study found.

Some say Ku Klux was chosen as the name for the U.S. white supremacist organization because it mimics the sound of a rifle being cocked, though other evidence points to the appeal of the Greek word kyklos, which means circle. That was essentially the goal of the defeated Confederate soldiers who formed the Ku Klux Klan in 1865—to encircle or kill Black Americans. As the klan grew in power, it made its intentions publicly clear: promoting Confederate jingoism; pushing back on Reconstruction-era rights; performing terrorist raids to intimidate; destroying property, especially churches; assaulting; taunting; lynching; hanging; and dragging the bodies of Black men behind cars. These acts were carried out to promote white supremacy and also for gaining political power.

Five years after it was signed in June 2015, what has happened to the Agreement on Peace and Reconciliation in Mali?

In June 2015, the Malian government, a coalition of pro-government armed groups from northern Mali called the Platform and the Coordination of Azawad Movements (Coordination des mouvements de l’Azawad, CMA) – an alliance of rebel groups – convened in Bamako and signed an agreement to restore peace in the country. The signatories were under great pressure from an international mediation team to accept the final text, which was drafted after less than a year of often indirect negotiations. The mediation team was led by Algeria and included the UN Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union (AU) and the European Union, as well as the United States and France, who were initially designated “friends of the mediation”.

Amnesty records 200 state killings and forced disappearances in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, state members of internationally-backed G5 group

After two weeks of silence, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has finally confirmed the death of its emir, Abdelmalek Droukdel.

The area of operations in the campaign against IS/Daesh will be shifting to another theater and analysts have noticed snippets of where the shift will be moving towards.

Turkish drones in early April this year successfully carried out strikes on an Antonov military cargo aircraft from the UAE at an airstrip north of Tarhuna city in Libya. The hit was aimed at disrupting the UAE’s regular supply of weapons to the warlord Khalifa Haftar’s forces attacking the southern Tripoli front line. Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya is virtually divided into two seats of power: The Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, which enjoys UN and international recognition but seriously backed only by Turkey, and the other group led by Khalifa Haftar, a renegade general, in eastern Libya backed by United Arab Emirates (UAE) sheikhs, the Egyptian military regime, Russian mercenaries and French leader Emmanuel Macron.

Fourteen months after he launched an assault on the Libyan capital of Tripoli, Libyan National Army Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar stood on a podium on Saturday in Cairo next to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Libyan House of Representatives Speaker Aguila Saleh to announce that he would be accepting an Egyptian-sponsored ceasefire and a initiative to restart political talks in the factional conflict.