标签： Africa

Years of simmering conflict in the resource-rich eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have erupted into one of the world’s most devastating unaddressed humanitarian crises, with a new bombshell investigation from leading global human rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) exposing systematic atrocities against civilians during the weeks-long occupation of the key lakeside city of Uvira.

The investigation, the first comprehensive on-the-ground account of abuses during the occupation, documents extrajudicial summary executions, widespread sexual violence, targeted attacks on children, and mass civilian displacement, with direct blame placed on both the M23 rebel movement and uniformed troops from neighboring Rwanda.

M23 forces, long alleged by Western powers and United Nations experts to be militarily backed by Rwanda, seized Uvira – a strategic port city on the shores of Lake Tanganyika that serves as a gateway to Burundi, a key Congolese military ally – in December 2024. The capture came just days after then U.S. President Donald Trump brokered a high-profile peace deal between Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame, designed to de-escalate years of fighting in the unstable region.

Over 130 local residents who remained in or fled Uvira during the occupation were interviewed by HRW investigators, who collected firsthand testimony corroborating 53 documented civilian executions carried out during door-to-door search raids across residential neighborhoods. The victims included 46 men, one woman, and five minor boys. Multiple witnesses described watching family members and neighbors killed in cold blood. One survivor recalled, “I wasn’t hit so I just ran to the lake. I saw my brother, his wife, and two of his children fall,” after M23 fighters opened fire on his household. Another witness described seeing fighters execute his neighbor with a point-blank gunshot to the head.

Beyond extrajudicial killings, HRW verified eight separate accounts of gang rape and sexual assault committed by M23 fighters and Rwandan soldiers, with many survivors describing brutal violence against their families for attempting to intervene. In one account, a woman told investigators that after uniformed men sexually assaulted her, they shot and killed her husband when he tried to stop the attack. Another survivor recalled Rwandan soldiers threatening to murder her if she did not comply with their demands, while a third survivor described fighters debating whether to kill her before deciding to assault her instead.

Children were not spared from the violence, the report confirms. Multiple children were shot and killed after being falsely accused of being pro-government informants. One 12-year-old boy survived a execution attempt, HRW says, after fighters shot him and stabbed his leg with a bayonet to confirm he was dead before leaving him for dead. Investigators also located three unmarked mass graves in Uvira, including one on a site previously controlled by United Nations peacekeeping forces.

The Rwandan government has long rejected all claims that it provides military support to M23 or deploys its own troops inside Congolese territory, and neither the Rwandan government nor M23 leadership responded to HRW’s requests for comment on the specific allegations outlined in the report, nor to separate requests for comment from the BBC.

Following intense regional and international diplomatic pressure, M23 withdrew from Uvira in January 2025, allowing Congolese government forces to retake control of the city. By that point, tens of thousands of residents had already fled their homes to escape the violence.

HRW says the pattern of documented abuses – which also include widespread abductions, enforced disappearances, and forced recruitment of local residents – meet the international legal definition of war crimes. The organization is calling for immediate international accountability measures to be brought against all parties responsible for the violence.

This report is only the latest to highlight the catastrophic scale of the ongoing humanitarian disaster in eastern DRC. A separate 2025 analysis from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found that more than 35,000 cases of sexual violence against children were recorded across the country in the first nine months of 2025, the vast majority in the North and South Kivu provinces, where M23 controls large swathes of territory. The persistent fighting has displaced nearly two million people in South Kivu province alone, according to UN figures, leaving millions more facing acute food insecurity and limited access to basic medical and humanitarian services.

In the parched semi-autonomous region of Puntland, northern Somalia, 70-year-old pastoralist Abdi Ahmed Farah guards a rapidly dwindling stock of food that keeps his family of 23 alive. Three years of failed consecutive rains have turned his once-thriving herd of 680 goats into a pile of carcasses littered outside his makeshift tent, leaving just 110 emaciated animals barely clinging to life. Already trapped in debt from purchasing overpriced water, Farah’s family now survives on a single daily meal of rice mixed with sugar and oil. Three weeks after his youngest child was born, his wife produces barely a drop of breast milk to feed the newborn.

“I have considered abandoning my family because I cannot provide for them,” Farah said, his voice heavy with desperation that echoes across millions of Somali households as the country faces what experts warn could be the worst drought in its recorded history. One of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, Somalia is now grappling with a climate-driven catastrophe that has dried up major rivers, withered entire harvests, and pushed a third of its population to the brink of starvation.

The crisis has been severely compounded by cascading external pressures: deep cuts to international humanitarian aid, most sharply from the United States, Somalia’s former largest donor, and skyrocketing commodity prices spurred by ongoing tensions in the Middle East. Somalia relies on imports for 70% of its food supply and purchases nearly all of its fuel from the region, leaving its already fragile economy extremely exposed to global market shocks. Data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization shows production of the country’s staple crops—maize and sorghum—during the key October-to-December rainy season fell to the lowest level on record this year.

Humanitarian agencies now warn that nearly 500,000 children across Somalia are at risk of severe acute malnutrition, the deadliest form of hunger, a toll higher than that recorded during the catastrophic droughts of 2011 and 2022, according to UNICEF. “2026 is the worst year on record for Somalia in terms of drought,” said Hameed Nuru, country director for the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) in Somalia. “Children have started dying.”

Official joint estimates from the Somali government and the United Nations put the number of people facing crisis-level hunger at 6.5 million, a 25% jump since the start of the year that equals one-third of the entire national population. While aid organizations are stretching already thin resources to respond and the Somali diaspora has been sending critical funds to family members back home, humanitarian workers warn the support being mobilized is nowhere near enough to meet the scale of need.

“This drought is not just another cycle of dry season. It’s a repeated climate shock with shrinking humanitarian support,” explained Mohamed Assair, a senior manager for Save the Children in Puntland.

In Usgure, the small Puntland village where Farah and his family have taken shelter for 10 days after fleeing their depleted grazing lands, the local economy that relies entirely on pastoralist activity has completely collapsed. Almost a dozen rotting goat carcasses lie within meters of Farah’s tent, and even when herders manage to hold onto livestock, emaciated animals cannot be sold or traded for staple grains like they once could. “There is no market for my goats because they are so thin. Previously we would trade them for rice, but now we can’t,” Farah said.

Community leader Abshir Hirsi Ali, who heads the 700-family village, says local shops have shuttered and food reserves have run dry. A brief, unseasonable shower that recently passed through the region left behind pools of contaminated rainwater, but desperate families with no other source of drinking water had no choice but to consume it. “Some families were so desperate they drank it … now there is a high number of people with fever,” Ali said. Save the Children occasionally delivers free water to the village, but private water vendors have quadrupled their prices amid scarcity. The cost of a 50-kilogram bag of flour has jumped by a third to $40, out of reach for most displaced and local households.

For 47-year-old mother of 11 Muhubo Tahir Omar, the drought has erased even the possibility of education for her children. Like other families, she sold all her goats one by one to cover school fees, but when the money ran out, teachers abandoned the village school. Her last remaining goat is now also sick, leaving her with no assets to fall back on. “I’m not only afraid for my family but the future of the whole village,” she said.

Decades of ongoing conflict in Somalia have already displaced millions of people across the country, and the drought has pushed an additional 200,000 people from their homes this year alone, per U.N. estimates. Many families cross hundreds of kilometers of harsh, arid terrain with almost no food or water to reach the nearest aid distribution sites, a journey that often proves fatal. “People are on the move … and when people move, people die,” said Kevin Mackey, country director for the humanitarian organization World Vision. Mackey recently met with a group of displaced people who walked for nine consecutive days across open desert to reach aid in the southern Somali town of Dollow.

In a displacement camp outside Shahda village, Puntland, 20-year-old mother of four Shukri—who only provided her first name for safety—says she once managed to scrape together one meal a day for her children from aid handouts. Now, there is no food at all, and clean water remains almost impossible to access. “The children got diarrhea from dirty water and malnourishment worsened,” she said. “I know a few people who have died.”

Thousands of displaced people flock to Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, in search of better access to aid, but food scarcity plagues even the capital city. Forty-five-year-old mother of seven Fadumo fled to Mogadishu from Lower Shabelle, a region already besieged by violence from the al-Qaida-linked militant group al-Shabab. “The water sources we depended on for farming, including the river, dried up,” Fadumo said. “Conflict made our situation even worse, forcing us to flee.”

The catastrophic 2022 drought in Somalia killed an estimated 36,000 people, per U.N. data, and today, the level of emergency aid that was rushed to the country during that crisis has all but evaporated. Total international aid funding to Somalia dropped to just $531 million in 2025, down from $2.38 billion in 2022, a collapse driven largely by deep cuts from the United States, which was previously the country’s largest donor.

“Unless there is a sudden and substantial response from donors, the outlook is deeply concerning. A drought of similar severity in 2022 received a response five times greater than what we are seeing,” said Antoine Grand, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Somalia. WFP originally planned to deliver food aid to 2 million vulnerable Somalis this year, but crippling funding gaps mean the organization has only been able to reach 300,000 people to date.

At a severe acute malnutrition treatment center run out of the main hospital in Qardho, Puntland, life-saving therapeutic milk for malnourished children is now rarely in stock, forcing nurses to rely on unfortified cow’s milk as a homemade alternative, according to center director Shamis Abdirahman. The center currently treats around 15 children a month, but staff expect cases to surge dramatically as more displaced families arrive from drought-stricken rural areas.

Four-year-old Farhia, who weighs just 7.5 kilograms—less than 17 pounds—with sunken eyes and visible bones under her skin, is one of the children currently receiving care. Her family fled to Qardho after all of their goats died back in their home village. “I don’t know what to hope for, or see how we can get back to what we had,” said Farhia’s mother, Najma.

Two weeks of brutal, concentrated armed clashes in Sudan’s southern South Kordofan region have claimed the lives of more than 61 people — nine of them children — a Sudanese medical monitoring organization confirmed Wednesday, in the latest outbreak of violence tied to the full-scale civil war that has torn the East African nation apart since early 2023.

According to the Sudan Doctors Network, a group that tracks civilian and combatant casualties across Sudan’s active conflict zones, the fighting flared earlier this month between fighters aligned with the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) and militias from the local Otoro tribe in the town of Kauda. SPLM-N, a breakaway faction of the ruling party of neighboring South Sudan, has long operated in South Kordofan’s Nuba Mountains, where the Otoro are an indigenous minority community.

SPLM-N leader Abdel Aziz al-Hilu has openly aligned his faction with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the powerful paramilitary group that has been locked in a war for control of Sudan against the country’s official national military since April 2023. Al-Hilu’s group has even joined a local governing administration established by the RSF in territories the paramilitary controls along Sudan’s border with South Sudan.

As Sudan’s civil war enters its fourth year, the two main warring factions hold control over distinct swathes of the country. Sudan’s regular military governs most of the north, east, and central regions, including strategic Red Sea shipping ports and the country’s critical oil processing and pipeline infrastructure. The RSF and its allied armed groups, by contrast, hold the western region of Darfur as well as large sections of Kordofan along the South Sudan border — both territories rich in untapped oil reserves and gold deposits.

The casualty breakdown compiled by the Sudan Doctors Network, drawn from firsthand survivor testimonies collected by the group’s on-the-ground teams in South Kordofan, shows that five women and nine children are among those killed in the recent Kauda clashes. Mohamed Elsheikh, spokesperson for the medical network, told the Associated Press that severely limited communication infrastructure in the conflict zone makes full casualty verification nearly impossible, and the actual death toll is almost certainly higher than the current confirmed count as fighting continues.

Beyond the human toll, the medical group documented widespread property destruction: SPLM-N fighters are accused of burning down residential homes and local commercial shops, as well as looting civilian property across the Kauda area. Multiple survivors told the organization that civilians were deliberately and indiscriminately targeted in the attacks. The network added that systematic arson attacks on civilian communities have become commonplace around Kauda, with no established safe corridors to evacuate wounded civilians or bring life-saving humanitarian aid into the besieged area. The SPLM-N has not yet issued a public response to requests for comment on these allegations.

In a separate outbreak of violence Tuesday, artillery shelling carried out by the RSF in Dilling, another major South Kordofan town, killed seven people and wounded 17 more, according to local hospital officials. Omran Teia, director of Umm Bakhita Hospital in Dilling, confirmed to the AP that civilians were the main targets of the shelling, carried out jointly by RSF fighters and their SPLM-N allies.

Sudan’s ongoing civil war has already resulted in catastrophic humanitarian consequences across the country. The conflict erupted after years of escalating tensions between the military and the RSF boiled over into open combat. To date, the conflict has officially killed at least 59,000 people, displaced roughly 13 million Sudanese from their homes, pushed multiple entire regions into full-scale famine, and left more than 30 million people — nearly two-thirds of the country’s population — in need of urgent humanitarian aid.

Both the Sudanese military and the RSF and its allied factions, including the SPLM-N, have been repeatedly accused by the United Nations and international human rights organizations of committing widespread atrocities against civilian populations. These accusations include mass ethnic cleansing, extrajudicial executions of non-combatants, and widespread sexual violence as a weapon of war. International aid organizations have repeatedly warned that the true overall casualty toll of the conflict is far higher than confirmed counts, because independent monitors are blocked from accessing most active fighting zones across Sudan’s large territory.

A major joint rescue operation by Ugandan police and animal welfare groups has freed dozens of dogs held at bogus animal rescue shelters, where the animals were exploited to run fraudulent international fundraising schemes, the operation was launched after an undercover investigative project by the BBC.

Officers executed raids on two neighboring fake shelter facilities in Mityana, central Uganda, where the scam operation was based. One suspect, 54-year-old Owen Godfrey Membe, has been taken into custody, while two other individuals linked to the racket remain at large, according to animal rights activists working on the case.

Membe has entered a plea of not guilty to a single count of animal cruelty brought under Uganda’s 100-year-old Animals (Prevention of Cruelty) Act, which accuses him of killing an animal through unnecessarily cruel methods. He has been remanded in custody ahead of a next court hearing scheduled for 27 May.

All dogs seized during the raids, including animals from Membe’s operation and a connected nearby scam facility, remain at the original shelter sites but are now under the care of Animal Welfare Alliance Uganda (AWAU), a coalition of local and international animal protection groups focused on dismantling organized animal exploitation networks. The coalition, which includes board-certified veterinary professionals, has already secured a plot of land to build an emergency temporary shelter where the rescued dogs will receive ongoing care, treatment, and eventually be matched with adopters.

The prosecution against Membe is being handled as a private case by the Animal Justice Center, a Ugandan animal rights legal organization, with financial backing from We Won’t Be Scammed, a UK-based community group that conducts targeted online investigations to expose fraudulent animal rescue operations based in East Africa.

The legal action and rescue come one month after the BBC published its undercover investigation, which lifted the lid on a widespread scam ring in Mityana that manipulates photos and videos of distressed dogs to trick animal lovers across Europe and North America into donating hundreds of thousands of pounds. The scheme, which has grown rapidly over the past three years as social media algorithm changes prioritized emotional animal content, sees scammers create dozens of fake shelter accounts to harvest donations from well-meaning donors.

Secret filming by the BBC’s Africa Eye investigative unit found that instead of directing funds to veterinary care and shelter upkeep, most of the scammers funneled the donated money into high-end personal purchases including new motorcycles, designer clothing, and private housing.

Most disturbing of all, the investigation uncovered multiple confirmed cases where scammers intentionally injured healthy dogs to create graphic, shareable content that would drive higher donations. One high-profile case highlighted by the BBC was that of Russet, a mixed-breed dog who suffered devastating severe leg injuries that were shared across dozens of scam social media accounts alongside urgent calls for emergency treatment funding.

BBC investigators traced Russet’s journey from the Mityana fake shelters to a private veterinary clinic in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, where the operating surgeon concluded the dog’s leg injuries were most likely intentionally inflicted to generate fundraising content. Despite emergency surgery, Russet did not survive his injuries.

Bart Kakooza, vice-chairperson of AWAU, called the arrest a watershed moment for efforts to crack down on the growing scam industry. “This is the first arrest since the entire world saw how what started as small-time begging has developed into a full-fledged online scamming business built on animal suffering,” Kakooza said in an interview after the raids.

“The entire global community is now watching to see whether Uganda’s judicial system will hold these exploiters accountable, and whether we can deliver on our promise to give these rescued dogs a new chance at a life free from cruelty and exploitation,” he added.

The investigation has sparked international outcry from animal welfare groups, who are calling on social media platforms to implement stricter verification processes for animal rescue accounts soliciting donations, to prevent similar exploitation from occurring on their platforms.

ABUJA, NIGERIA — A deadly airstrike targeting alleged armed militants in northwestern Nigeria has once again left scores of civilians dead, fueling renewed questions about the counterinsurgency practices of a key U.S. security partner in the fight against regional extremism and organized armed violence. The incident, which unfolded Sunday in the market of Tumfa, Zamfara State, has claimed the lives of at least 100 civilians — including multiple children, according to Amnesty International’s Nigeria branch. A senior state-level Red Cross official corroborated the airstrike to the Associated Press, confirming the deaths of multiple civilian non-combatants.

Nigeria’s military has publicly rejected claims of civilian harm, however. Major General Michael Onoza confirmed that an airstrike was carried out at the Tumfa market location, but claimed there is “no verifiable evidence of civilian casualties.” He added that counterinsurgency operations are still ongoing across the area.

Accidental civilian deaths from mistaken military airstrikes are not a new issue in Nigeria’s conflict-affected northern regions, where security forces rely heavily on aerial bombardment to target scattered armed group hideouts. Unlike conventional military forces, these non-state fighters typically travel in large groups on motorcycles across remote forest and village areas that are largely inaccessible to Nigerian ground troops, making air attacks a go-to tactic for military command.

Data collected by Lagos-based independent research firm SBM Intelligence, which aggregates on-the-ground reports from conflict-impacted communities, shows that mistaken military airstrikes have killed more than 500 civilians across Nigeria since 2017. While Nigerian authorities have on rare occasions acknowledged accidental civilian casualties from these operations, local residents and security analysts agree such incidents are growing more frequent. Nigeria’s Defense Minister Christopher Musa has pushed back against this criticism, asserting that the military has made tangible progress improving its human rights record and holds service members accountable for errors.

The United States, a key security ally to Nigeria, recently deployed additional U.S. troops and surveillance drones to the country to provide intelligence and logistics support for counterinsurgency operations. It remains unclear whether intelligence provided by the U.S. was used to plan and execute the latest Sunday airstrike.

Beyond the well-documented Boko Haram insurgency that launched in 2009 to establish a radical Islamist state in northeastern Nigeria, dozens of separate armed factions operate across the country’s northwest and central regions. Most of these groups originated from long-simmering conflicts between pastoralist communities and farming populations competing for access to shrinking land and water resources. Once armed only with basic weapons, these factions now have access to large stockpiles of illegally smuggled firearms, fueling a crisis that kills thousands of Nigerians annually.

Analysts note that these armed groups carry out mass casualty attacks and kidnappings for ransom across the northwest, while also extorting illegal “taxes” from local communities to fund their operations. With little sustained security presence in many remote rural villages, fighters can launch multi-day attacks and then evade detection by relocating frequently and blending into civilian populations.

Nigerian government officials have long argued that avoiding civilian casualties is uniquely challenging in this conflict because armed groups deliberately use local civilians as human shields. “Bandits and terrorists, unlike professional soldiers, don’t respect the rules of engagement. They don’t care about killing their hostages if they come under attack,” former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari previously stated.

But Abuja-based security analyst Senator Iroegbu argues that the consistent pattern of civilian deaths stems from more than insurgent tactics: gaps in intelligence gathering, and poor coordination between ground troops, air command and local community stakeholders also play a major role.

While the Nigerian government and military have repeatedly promised to launch post-incident investigations to prevent future accidental civilian deaths, analysts say these probes rarely result in meaningful policy or procedural changes. In 2024, military officials took a rare step forward by prosecuting two service members in connection with a 2023 airstrike that killed more than 80 civilians in Kaduna State. While authorities promised to release the full public investigation report for that incident, no document has been made public to date.

Oluwole Ojewale, a security researcher with the Africa-focused Institute for Security Studies, says long-term reform requires targeted investment: improved pilot training, upgraded aircraft and modern precision targeting systems are critical to reducing accidental casualties. Beyond equipment and training, Ojewale adds that the military must first rebuild trust with local communities, whose on-the-ground intelligence about armed group movements is irreplaceable for accurate targeting of militant hideouts.

A spreading wave of anti-foreign-national protests across major South African cities has triggered a regional diplomatic crisis, with Ghana launching an emergency evacuation plan for hundreds of its citizens trapped in the unrest.

Ghana’s Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa announced via a post on X Tuesday that the country’s president has formally signed off on the immediate evacuation of 300 at-risk Ghanaians. All the affected, described as “distressed” by the foreign ministry, have already registered with Ghana’s Pretoria embassy to arrange for safe passage back to their home country. The evacuation follows a formal travel advisory Ghana issued last week after the latest round of xenophobic violence targeting foreign residents.

Thousands of South African demonstrators have joined the recent protests, rallying against unregulated illegal immigration. Protesters argue that undocumented migrants have strained local access to employment, affordable housing, and contributed to rising community crime rates, amplifying long-simmering public frustration and pushing demands for mass deportations of people without legal residency.

In response to escalating tensions, the Ghanaian embassy in Pretoria issued an updated safety warning Tuesday, urging all Ghanaian citizens in South Africa to exercise extreme caution, avoid all large public gatherings, and close all businesses in the coastal city of Durban ahead of a planned anti-immigration protest scheduled for Wednesday.

South African officials have pushed back against widespread claims of targeted attacks, denying that any xenophobic violence has occurred in recent weeks and asserting that viral videos circulated online showing purported attacks are fabricated. In a public address Monday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged that recent “protests and criminal acts directed at foreign nationals” do not align with the country’s official government policy, framing the unrest as isolated criminal activity rather than coordinated, systemic hostility. Ramaphosa also reaffirmed the government’s commitment to migration regulation, border security, and consistent enforcement of national immigration laws. The South African government added that it has “nothing to hide” and condemned the spread of disinformation via fake visual content.

The diplomatic fallout has already spread across the continent. Both Ghana and Nigeria have summoned South African diplomatic envoys in their capitals to formally protest the mistreatment and harassment of their citizens living in South Africa. Ghana has also taken the extra step of formally requesting the African Union place the issue on its agenda for discussion, arguing that the ongoing unrest poses an unacceptable “serious risk to the safety and wellbeing” of African residents in South Africa.

Ghana is not alone in issuing warnings: Kenya, Malawi, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe have all followed suit, urging their citizens residing in South Africa to take extra safety precautions amid the unrest.

Official demographic data puts the total foreign-born population in South Africa at more than 3 million, accounting for roughly 5% of the country’s total population. However, analysts estimate that a far larger number of undocumented migrants currently reside within South Africa’s borders, a reality that has kept anti-immigration sentiment a persistent flashpoint in national politics. Xenophobic hostility has a long history in the country, with sporadic deadly attacks on foreign nationals recorded over the past several decades.