标签： Africa

A wave of coordinated cross-national attacks carried out by separatist fighters and Islamist militants over a single weekend in Mali has led to a landmark development: Russia’s Africa Corps has formally confirmed its full withdrawal alongside Malian government forces from the strategic northern city of Kidal.

In a sequence of public posts shared across social media platforms, the Russia-aligned Africa Corps confirmed that both its own personnel and local Malian troops had exited the Kidal locality. The Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), the Tuareg separatist group leading the push for an independent northern state, announced Sunday that the Russian force had agreed to a permanent pullout. The separatist movement subsequently claimed full control of Kidal, releasing a statement declaring the city “now free” from government and allied control.

Mali has grappled with decade-long instability, pitting government and allied forces against two overlapping threats: northern separatist movements led primarily by ethnic Tuareg factions, and violent insurgent groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. This most recent outbreak of violence began Saturday, when reports of explosions and sustained automatic gunfire spread across multiple population centers nationwide, including the capital Bamako.

Attacks were also documented in central Malian cities of Sevare and Mopti, as well as the northern Saharan fringe cities of Gao and Kidal. In Kati, a garrison town just outside the capital that hosts one of Mali’s largest military bases, Malian Defense Minister Sadio Camara was killed in a suicide truck bombing targeting his official residence. Security analysts confirm the FLA’s assault focused primarily on regional urban centers in the north, while Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), a jihadist insurgent group, carried out parallel strikes across multiple regions to stretch government defenses thin.

Sporadic fighting continued in Kidal through Sunday, but shortly after clashes tapered off, FLA spokesman Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane announced the group had finalized a deal with the Russian Africa Corps to facilitate the force’s safe exit from the city. Ramadane had previously told the BBC the FLA maintained a presence in Kidal’s outer neighborhoods because Malian army units and Russian mercenary personnel remained deployed in the city center.

Kidal holds deep symbolic importance for the Tuareg separatist movement: it served as the movement’s unofficial headquarters for more than a decade before Malian government troops, backed by Russian mercenary fighters, retook control of the city in late 2023. The separatist group now holds full administrative and military control of the urban center following the withdrawal.

While confirming its exit from Kidal in a Monday post on the social platform X, the Africa Corps emphasized that counter-insurgency operations would continue across other parts of Mali, though it declined to provide further details on upcoming deployments or operational goals. The force added that all wounded personnel and heavy military equipment had been fully evacuated from Kidal ahead of the pullout.

“The situation in the Republic of Mali remains complex,” the Africa Corps wrote in its statement, noting that multiple civilians had also been wounded in the fighting and were transferred to the corps’ medical facilities for treatment.

The majority of the Africa Corps’ serving fighters are veterans of the Wagner Group, the infamous Russian private military firm that built a widespread presence across Africa over the past decade, contracted by local friendly governments to help suppress insurgent movements and stabilize central control. Following the 2023 death of Wagner leader Yevgeni Prigozhin in a plane crash, most of the group’s African operations were absorbed and reorganized by Russia’s Ministry of Defense, which formed the newly branded Africa Corps to continue the mission.

Today, the Africa Corps is overseen by Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, with day-to-day operations led by Maj-Gen Andrey Averyanov, a senior core leader of Russia’s GRU military intelligence directorate. Russia’s military support to friendly African governments has consistently been rewarded with access to the continent’s lucrative critical natural resources, including gold, diamonds, and uranium, a key input for Russian domestic nuclear energy production.

Just like its predecessor the Wagner Group, the Africa Corps has faced repeated international accusations of systematic human rights abuses and mass atrocities against civilian populations across its areas of operation. Reported salaries for Africa Corps fighters deployed in Mali start at a minimum equivalent of $3,000 (£2,200) per month, a rate far higher than most local or even regular Russian military salaries.

This report included additional reporting from Vitaly Shevchenko of BBC Monitoring, with original production by BBC Africa.

ABUJA, Nigeria — Armed attackers launched a raid on an orphanage-affiliated school in north-central Nigeria over the weekend, abducting 23 young pupils before local security forces recovered 15 of the children in immediate follow-up operations, state authorities confirmed in a public announcement Monday.

The assault targeted the Dahallukitab Group of Schools, a mixed educational and orphanage facility located in a remote, cut-off area of Lokoja, the capital city of Kogi State. In an official statement, Kogi State Commissioner Kingsley Femi Fanwo noted that the institution had been operating without legal authorization from Nigerian educational regulators, a detail that raises new questions about oversight of community-based care facilities in the region.

As of Monday, no insurgent or criminal group had publicly claimed credit for the abduction. The wider north-central and northwestern regions of Nigeria have recorded a steady uptick in kidnapping-for-ransom attacks targeting civilian institutions over the past three years, with criminal gangs increasingly focusing on soft targets including schools and orphanages.

While official confirmation of the victims’ ages has not been released, local context clarifies that the term “pupil” in Nigerian educational and law enforcement discourse almost exclusively refers to young learners in kindergarten or primary school, meaning most of the abducted children are likely 12 years old or younger.

Fanwo confirmed that intensive search and rescue operations are currently underway across Lokoja and surrounding rural areas to locate the eight remaining abducted children and take the perpetrators into custody. “Our security teams are working around the clock to bring every missing child home safely and hold those responsible for this horrific attack to account,” the statement added.

Widespread school kidnappings have emerged as one of the most visible markers of the persistent insecurity plaguing Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation with over 220 million residents. Security analysts who study the country’s criminal landscape explain that armed gangs deliberately target students and educational facilities because attacks on children generate widespread media and government attention, increasing pressure on authorities and families to pay large ransoms for captives’ release.

Nigeria has grappled with a layered, multi-faceted security crisis for more than a decade, with instability concentrated most heavily in the country’s northern regions. A long-running Islamist insurgency first emerged in northeast Nigeria in 2009, led by the militant group Boko Haram. The group splintered in 2016, with a breakaway faction calling itself the Islamic State’s West Africa Province, or ISWAP, which now carries out most large-scale attacks in the northeast. In recent years, a new IS-affiliated group called Lakurawa has established a foothold in northwestern communities along Nigeria’s border with Niger, further expanding the scope of extremist activity in the country.

A simmering local dispute over access to a water well has exploded into deadly inter-ethnic violence in eastern Chad, leaving at least 42 people dead and 10 others wounded, senior Chadian officials have confirmed. What began as a confrontation between two families in Wadi Fira province quickly escalated into a sustained cycle of retaliatory attacks that spread across multiple communities, leaving multiple villages burned to the ground in its wake.

Chadian government announced on Sunday that a high-level delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Limane Mahamat has been dispatched to the conflict zone to oversee security operations and mediate local tensions. Officials confirmed that the violence has now been contained, and stability is gradually being restored to the area.

Deadly inter-communal clashes are a persistent crisis across this central African nation, where long-standing frictions between farming and pastoral communities, compounded by deep-seated ethnic tensions, have created a repeating pattern of violence. Competition over increasingly scarce water resources and grazing land is the most common trigger for these outbreaks of conflict.

In recent months, the already fragile security situation along Chad’s eastern border has been further exacerbated by the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the ongoing civil war in neighboring Sudan. The influx of new residents has placed enormous additional strain on limited natural resources, driving up resource competition and stoking broader security tensions. On Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Mahamat reaffirmed the Chadian government’s commitment to deploying all necessary measures to stop Sudan’s conflict from spilling over and destabilizing the country’s border regions.

This latest deadly incident is part of a years-long trend of escalating communal violence across Chad. Over the past several years, hundreds of people have been killed in these clashes; in November last year alone, 33 people died in a similar conflict over a contested water well in the southwestern town of Dibebe. Data from the International Crisis Group, a leading international think-tank, shows that between 2021 and 2024, roughly 100 separate communal clashes across the country left more than 1,000 people dead and another 2,000 injured. Global human rights organization Amnesty International has also documented seven major outbreaks of herder-farmer violence between 2022 and 2024, which collectively claimed 98 lives.

In a report released last year, Amnesty International linked the rising frequency and severity of these clashes to the accelerating impacts of climate change, which has worsened drought conditions and scarcity of critical resources across the Sahel region. The organization also criticized Chadian authorities for failing to effectively protect civilian populations, noting that security force responses to emerging violence are often delayed, and few perpetrators are ever held legally accountable for their actions. “This pattern of inaction fuels a widespread sense of impunity and deepens feelings of marginalization within affected communities,” the report stated.

In the early hours of Saturday, a long-simmering local dispute over access to a critical water source between two families in eastern Chad erupted into widespread, revenge-fueled violence that left at least 42 people dead and 10 others injured, the Central African nation’s deputy prime minister confirmed in a statement late Sunday.

Deputy Prime Minister Limane Mahamat made the confirmation during an official visit to Igote, the small border village in Wadi Fira province where the violence unfolded, located just kilometers from Chad’s shared boundary with conflict-wracked Sudan. The injured victims have already been evacuated to the region’s main provincial health facility for urgent medical care, Mahamat added.

The cycle of retaliatory attacks quickly spread across multiple communities in the area, forcing Chadian military forces to deploy to curb the violence. According to Mahamat, the army’s rapid intervention successfully halted further bloodshed, and public order has now been fully restored across the conflict zone.

In response to the violence, Chadian authorities have launched two parallel processes: a traditional community mediation initiative to resolve underlying tensions in Igote, and formal judicial investigations to hold those responsible for the deaths and destruction accountable.

Intercommunal violence driven by competition over scarce natural resources is a recurring crisis across Chad. Just last year, similar clashes between farming and pastoral communities in southwestern portions of the country also claimed 42 lives and destroyed hundreds of residential structures.

Mahamat stressed that the Chadian government will implement every necessary measure to prevent further instability in this high-risk border region, which has faced growing strain since the outbreak of full-scale civil war in Sudan in early 2023. For months, eastern Chad has hosted hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees who fled the cross-border conflict, placing unprecedented pressure on local water, food, and land resources that has exacerbated existing intercommunal tensions.

Back in February, Chad’s government took the drastic step of closing its entire border with Sudan indefinitely, framing the move as an effort to stop the spillover of Sudanese fighting into its territory after multiple armed incursions by militias aligned with Sudan’s warring factions.

According to United Nations estimates, the ongoing civil war in Sudan has already killed more than 40,000 people, though independent humanitarian groups warn the actual death toll is likely far higher, as many casualties in hard-to-reach conflict zones are never counted. The conflict has spawned the world’s most severe current humanitarian crisis, displacing more than 14 million people from their homes, triggering widespread deadly disease outbreaks, and pushing multiple regions of Sudan into full-blown famine.

After years of near-eradication, piracy off the coast of Somalia has returned with a sharp uptick in attacks, prompting maritime security officials to issue urgent warnings for commercial and civilian shipping transiting the region. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), the leading body monitoring maritime security in the Indian Ocean, has upgraded the regional threat assessment to “substantial” following a spate of hijackings and attempted boardings in the past seven days.

The most recent incident unfolded Sunday, when unidentified unauthorized individuals seized a cargo vessel roughly six nautical miles off the Somali coastal town of Garacad, steering the ship into Somali territorial waters. No additional details on the crew, cargo, or current status of the vessel have been released as of initial reporting.

This hijacking marks the fourth confirmed targeted vessel in a single week. On April 21, a separate hijacking was reported off the coast of Mareeyo in northern Somalia. Just one day later, security officials confirmed that pirates seized the oil tanker *Honour 25* carrying 17 crew members as it sailed near the Somali coast. Under pirate control, the vessel — whose crew includes 10 Pakistani nationals, four Indonesians, one Indian, one Sri Lankan, and one Myanmarese citizen — has been anchored close to shore between the fishing towns of Xaafun and Bander Beyla. Two more vessels, a Somali-flagged fishing boat and another oil tanker, were seized this past Thursday. On the same day, two armed individuals in a small craft attempted to board a second cargo vessel, only retreating after the ship’s crew fired warning shots to repel the attack.

In its official advisory, UKMTO noted that current sea and weather conditions are ideal for small boat operations, the tactic most commonly used by pirate action groups (PAGs) to approach and board larger unsuspecting vessels. “Due to the increased threat of possible PAG activity, vessels are advised to transit with caution,” the statement read.

This resurgence marks a stark reversal of years of progress. Just three years ago, pirate attacks in this stretch of the Indian Ocean — once one of the most dangerous waterways for global shipping — had been almost completely eliminated. At the peak of Somali piracy between 2005 and 2012, the World Bank estimates pirate groups earned between $339 million and $413 million by holding crew and vessels hostage for large ransom payments, disrupting global trade routes and forcing shipping companies to pay huge premiums for insurance and security escorts.

Three years into Sudan’s brutal civil conflict, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Jamal Eltaeb has faced one impossible, gut-wrenching choice after another. Which wounded patient will get the last vial of painkiller? Is it ethical to operate without proper anesthesia to save a dying child? Where will the next liter of generator fuel come from to keep the hospital’s lights on? Through all of it, only one decision has ever felt inevitable: he would stay and keep working.

Eltaeb now leads Al Nao Hospital in Omdurman, the urban neighbor of Sudan’s capital Khartoum, a territory that has changed hands repeatedly between Sudan’s national army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the country’s powerful paramilitary group. As front lines shifted closer to the facility and patient overflow stretched its capacity to breaking point, many of his colleagues fled for safety. But the soft-spoken 54-year-old surgeon refused to leave, even after repeated bombing strikes on the hospital and the near-total depletion of critical medical supplies.

“I weighed the options of staying here, and taking care of your patients and helping other people that need you as a skilled surgeon, rather than choose your own safety,” Eltaeb explained in an interview with The Associated Press.

He is one of thousands of Sudanese medical workers and civilians who have stepped forward to fill the gap left by a largely disengaged international community, which has turned most of its attention and humanitarian resources to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Eltaeb has borne firsthand witness to the human cost of the war, which the United Nations estimates has killed tens of thousands of people and pushed Sudan’s entire public health system to the brink of collapse. Today, nearly 40% of the country’s hospitals are no longer functional; many have been stripped of critical equipment or repurposed as military bases by armed factions. Even after the Sudanese army retook full control of Khartoum in recent months, Al Nao remains one of the only fully operational health centers in the entire capital region.

Walking through the hospital grounds with AP journalists, Eltaeb pointed to the lingering scars of the conflict’s worst months. A shattered window across the courtyard marks the spot where a patient’s family member was killed in a strike. A tattered canvas tent is the last remaining structure of the temporary encampment erected to hold hundreds of mass casualties when the fighting reached its peak.

“We were working everywhere, in tents, outside, on the floor, doing everything to save patients’ lives,” he said.

Eltaeb’s extraordinary sacrifice has earned global recognition: he is this year’s recipient of the $1 million Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, an award that honors individuals who risk their own lives to save others. He has already donated a large portion of the prize funds to medical and humanitarian organizations working across Sudan and neighboring crisis zones.

Before the war broke out in April 2023, Al Nao was a quiet community hospital that rarely filled its 100 available beds. When RSF fighters captured large swathes of Khartoum in the first weeks of conflict, wounded residents flooded the facility seeking care. Eltaeb’s original hospital closed just days after the war began, so he relocated to Al Nao to help. By July 2023, nearly all the facility’s senior staff had fled the capital, leaving Eltaeb to take charge of the hospital with only a small team of remaining employees and local volunteers.

For weeks at a time, the hospital had no access to grid electricity, relying on irregular fuel deliveries from the army to keep generators running. Antibiotics, painkillers, and anesthetics quickly ran out as demand for care surged. Just a month after Eltaeb took leadership, the facility was hit by its first bombing strike.

“From that moment, we knew that we are a target … And from that time, they didn’t stop targeting us,” Eltaeb said. The RSF carried out three additional strikes on the hospital in the months that followed.

On one particularly devastating day in late 2024, an airstrike hit a nearby market, leaving more than 100 wounded people desperate for care. Eltaeb and his small team were forced to triage patients under extreme pressure, making impossible calls on who would receive what little care was available. Eight people died that day.

“You choose … as if you can choose who is going to live and who is going to die,” he said.

The day brought an even more harrowing choice: Eltaeb had to perform emergency amputations on two young children without general anesthetic, as the children were bleeding heavily and there was no time to move them to the damaged operating wing. Using only local anesthetic, he removed an arm and a leg from a 9-year-old boy, and a leg from his 11-year-old sister. Today, Eltaeb keeps photos of the surgeries on his phone, to show the world the unreported horror of Sudan’s conflict that few outsiders have witnessed.

To keep the facility supplied, Eltaeb’s team turned to a network of local volunteers. When the team posts requests for critical medications on social media, local pharmacists who have closed their shops amid the conflict often donate their stock, sending volunteers to collect the supplies. Volunteer Nazar Mohamed spent months navigating Omdurman’s bomb-damaged streets, often traveling by bicycle, to deliver medications while fighting echoed across the city. International donations came from aid groups and the global Sudanese diaspora, with Sudanese doctors living overseas providing remote clinical guidance for treating mass casualties when standard medications run out. When medical supplies ran low, the team improvised: they built makeshift beds and crutches from scrap wood and repurposed ordinary clothing as bandages and splints.

Today, fighting has shifted away from the Khartoum area to other regions of Sudan, and many international aid groups that supported Al Nao have redirected their limited resources to harder-hit zones. Eltaeb says the hospital currently has enough funding to cover staff salaries and generator fuel only through June, and it needs roughly $40,000 per month to stay operational. While several countries have pledged reconstruction aid to Sudan, local medical leaders worry that the ongoing conflict in the Middle East will divert attention and funding, particularly from Gulf states that had originally promised major support for Sudan’s recovery.

Across Omdurman at Al Shaabi Hospital, which was occupied by the RSF for most of the war, director Dr. Osman Ismail Osman says the few hundred thousand dollars in government funding provided for repairs is nowhere near enough to rebuild the completely destroyed facility. Millions of dollars of medical equipment lie broken and piled in dusty corridors, scattered with chunks of concrete from damaged walls and twisted metal bed frames. The goal of reopening the hospital for emergency care in the coming weeks is a distant ambition.

But for medical workers like Eltaeb, who have learned to keep working through even the most impossible circumstances, hope persists. “I believe I did my best as a doctor as a Sudanese,” the surgeon said.

Mali has been plunged into a new wave of deadly violence following a sweeping series of coordinated attacks carried out by separatist insurgents and jihadist militants across the country on Saturday, which has left top officials dead, triggered major military clashes, and shifted control of a strategic northern city. The Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a separatist group fighting to establish an independent ethnic Tuareg state in northern Mali, announced that Russian mercenaries deployed by Mali’s ruling military junta have agreed to withdraw from the northern city of Kidal following two days of intense urban fighting. The FLA now claims full control of Kidal, a city that served as the separatist movement’s unofficial headquarters for more than a decade before Malian government forces backed by Russian mercenaries seized control of it in late 2023.

The wave of violence began Saturday, when the FLA joined forces with multiple armed groups to launch synchronized assaults across Mali, stretching from the capital Bamako to northern and central regions. The assault targeted a range of key sites, including Kati, a major military base located just outside Bamako, the northern cities of Gao and Kidal, and the central Malian hubs of Sevare and Mopti. According to regional analysts, the assault was split between two sets of attackers: the FLA focused its operations on key northern population centers, while the al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist group Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) carried out parallel strikes across multiple locations nationwide.

Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel programme at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Mali, described the coordinated assault as the largest unified jihadist attack on Mali in several years. One of the most shocking developments to emerge from Saturday’s violence was the reported death of Mali’s Defence Minister Sadio Camara, who was killed in a car bomb attack on his convoy near Kati. Multiple news agencies, citing confirmation from Camara’s family and French media, reported that the attack also killed at least three of his family members. The Malian government has not officially confirmed Camara’s death, but military officials have acknowledged ongoing fighting across multiple regions.

On the ground in Kidal, FLA spokesman Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane noted that the city was not fully captured during Saturday’s initial attacks, as small contingents of Malian army troops and Russian mercenaries remained holed up in parts of the city. Clashes between FLA fighters and pro-government forces resumed in Kidal on Sunday, but just hours after fighting restarted, Ramadane announced a breakthrough: a deal had been reached to allow Russian mercenaries, now part of the officially recognized Africa Corps, to withdraw from Kidal under secure conditions. Shortly after Ramadane’s social media announcement, the FLA confirmed that its fighters were escorting the withdrawing Russian mercenary contingent out of the city’s boundaries. One FLA field commander who participated in the offensive told the BBC that the group had spent months planning the assault, and that its next objectives are to seize control of Gao before moving on to Timbuktu, which the commander claimed would fall easily.

Mali’s state broadcaster ORTM has given a far more muted account of the violence, reporting that only 16 people – a mix of civilians and soldiers – were injured in the attacks, which it said caused only limited damage. The broadcaster also claimed that multiple “terrorists” had been killed in government counterattacks, and that the situation across all affected areas is “completely under control.” Despite the government’s claims, Malian military officials confirmed in an official statement Sunday that fighting is still ongoing in Kidal, Kati, and other regions across the country. The statement warned that the recent wave of violence would “not go unanswered,” and announced that a nationwide security alert had been issued. Authorities have stepped up large-scale patrols, reinforced border and urban checkpoints, and imposed curfews in multiple high-risk areas. In Bamako, a curfew is in effect from 21:00 local time to 06:00 GMT, scheduled to expire Monday.

The international community has quickly condemned the surge in violence. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres released a statement condemning the “acts of violence” and expressed his solidarity with the people of Mali. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the West African regional bloc that Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso left following a string of military coups that brought military juntas to power in all three nations, also issued a formal condemnation. Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, chair of the African Union Commission, said he was monitoring the rapidly evolving situation with deep concern.

Mali has been mired in continuous instability for more than a decade. The FLA has waged a long-running separatist campaign for an independent Tuareg homeland in northern Mali, and currently holds de facto control over large swathes of that territory. The country is currently ruled by a military junta led by General Assimi Goïta, who first seized power in a 2020 coup after widespread public anger over the government’s failure to contain the insurgency. The junta claimed it would restore security and push back against armed groups, and initially enjoyed broad popular support for its promise to resolve the long-running crisis that began with the 2012 Tuareg rebellion, which was later hijacked by transnational Islamist militant groups. After the junta took power, UN peacekeepers and French counter-insurgency forces that had been deployed to Mali withdrew from the country, and the military government turned to Russian mercenaries to support its counter-insurgency operations. Despite this partnership, the jihadist insurgency has only expanded, and large portions of northern and eastern Mali remain outside of government control.