Africa

For the last five years, the international community has tried a range of different approaches to mediating the Libyan civil war. All have failed. Most nations and observers not actively fueling the war with weapons, money, training, and mercenaries now see that halting these destructive flows is critical to bringing the rival militia factions to the negotiating table. The Berlin conference slated for February 2020 has the creation of an effective arms embargo as its stated primary goal. However, merely meeting this challenge will not be enough to stem the violence or solve the conflict. Once militias are cut off from external sources of military support, the core economic issues that gave rise to the conflict will still remain. Only a new approach empowering Libyan economic reformers, while reworking the Libyan economic system’s role as a driver of conflict, can fix the dysfunction. To achieve this, international actors need to facilitate and support the establishment of a Libyan-requested, Libyan-led International Financial Commission vested with the requisite authorities to completely restructure the economy.

Italian intelligence has named the Nigerian mafia “the most structured and dynamic” of any foreign crime entity operating in Italy, according to the Washington Post…. What distinguishes the Nigerian crime networks is their severe brutality…

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.

Active armed conflicts continues to ravage parts of Africa be it as a result of the state versus terrorist groups or infighting between political factions, a typical case of the latter being South Sudan.

Turkish President Erdogan recently suggested that Ankara might intervene militarily in Libya if requested by the government in Tripoli.

Turkey, which signed a military and economic accord with the Libyan government in November, could deprive Greece and the Greek Cypriots of large swaths of their oil and gas exploration areas and force Egypt and Israel to negotiate with Turkey over the construction of natural gas pipelines to Europe.

The ongoing civil protests in Sudan have brought up the authoritarian regime of Khartoum into irreversible inevitable decline. However, the escalation keeps on despite the brutality force being used by regime security forces which is unlikely able to stop things from where they departed—things are completely out of control.