France will stop sending public development aid to Mali because of the West African country’s alleged ties to Russian paramilitaries, according to the French foreign ministry.
“Given the attitude of Mali’s junta leader, allied with the Russian mercenaries of Wagner, we have suspended our public development aid to Mali,” a ministry source said on Thursday.
West African coastal states are holding talks on boosting military cooperation against jihadist violence spilling over from the Sahel. This follows recent announcements that several international peacekeeping contingents are being withdrawn from Mali.
Benin, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Togo are confronting increased risks from Islamic State jihadists and Al Qaeda militants waging war over their northern borders in the Sahel.
Eritrea continues to send military reinforcements to the Tigray region despite the recent peace agreement, according to a statement issued by the regional government on Saturday.
Earlier this month, the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) agreed to a ceasefire as a first step to ending the two-year conflict.
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.