标签： Africa

A joint military mission carried out by Ugandan and Congolese forces has secured the release of more than 200 civilian captives held by the Islamic State-linked Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda’s military has confirmed.

The operation targeted a fortified militant encampment controlled by the ADF, an insurgent group with roots tracing back to 1990s Uganda, formed by dissidents opposed to the Ugandan government’s treatment of Muslim communities. After being driven out of Uganda by national forces decades ago, the remaining ADF fighters re-established their base across the border in eastern DRC, where they have built a brutal reputation for widespread violence, kidnappings, and killings. Among the freed hostages were multiple children, including a 14-year-old girl, according to an official statement from Uganda’s military.

While details of when and where the captives were abducted remain undisclosed, survivors reported being held in appalling conditions, including persistent food shortages, forced labor, and harsh punishment for any disobedience. Many of the rescued civilians were found in fragile health, with widespread reports of malaria, respiratory complications, and extreme exhaustion among the group.

“You are not under detention. You are victims of abduction, and we shall ensure you are handed over to the relevant authorities so you can reunite with your families,” Maj Gen Stephen Mugerwa, commander of the joint Uganda-DRC mission, told the freed captives, per the official statement.

The raid on the ADF camp also left multiple militant fighters dead and resulted in the seizure of a large weapons cache, the military confirmed. No details have been released about potential casualties among the joint Ugandan and Congolese force.

The ADF has operated out of remote areas of eastern DRC for more than 20 years. Group leader Musa Seka Baluku first pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2016, and IS formally recognized the ADF’s activity in the region in 2019. After years of limited overt operations inside Uganda, the group has been linked to a string of high-profile attacks in the country in recent years, including 2021 suicide bombings in the capital Kampala and a 2023 attack on a school in western Uganda.

In eastern DRC, however, the ADF’s campaign of violence against civilians has reached staggering levels. A 2024 analysis by BBC Monitoring found the group responsible for more than half of all civilian deaths in the conflict-plagued eastern region. Late last year, a senior researcher with global human rights group Amnesty International described the frequency of ADF abductions and killings as “alarming,” noting that women and girls captured by the group are systematically exploited as sexual slaves.

“Men, women and children told me how they ran for their lives as fighters armed with blades and guns descended on their villages. Released hostages talked of agonizing spells – sometimes months and years – spent in captivity, practically starved and forced to do various tasks in ADF camps,” Rawya Rageh, Amnesty International’s researcher, reported.

Uganda first deployed its troops to eastern DRC in 2021 to target ADF strongholds as part of the joint offensive with Congolese forces, a campaign launched to eliminate the militant group from its regional bases. Despite repeated military operations, the ADF has continued to carry out frequent attacks on civilian and military targets across the region, leaving thousands displaced and dead.

As Sudan’s devastating civil conflict stretches into its fourth year of brutal fighting, a high-ranking commander from the country’s powerful Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has announced his defection to the national army, a shift that Sudan’s top military leadership has framed as an opening for reconciliation and national rebuilding.

Army chief and Sovereign Council chair Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan formally welcomed Maj. Gen. al-Nour Ahmed Adam — widely known by the alias al-Qubba — in a meeting held Sunday in Sudan’s Northern province, which shares a border with Egypt. The country’s ruling transitional body publicly shared video footage of the meeting across its social media channels, confirming the defection that was first reported earlier this month. Local Sudanese media outlets have confirmed that Adam fled RSF-held territory in the Darfur region alongside dozens of armed fighters and military equipment to cross into government-controlled areas.

According to independent regional publication *Sudan Tribune*, the commander’s departure stemmed from internal leadership disputes within the RSF. Tensions boiled over after the paramilitary group captured el-Fasher in October 2024 — the last remaining army stronghold in the entire Darfur region — but failed to appoint Adam to the top military commander post for North Darfur province, a position he had reportedly expected. The RSF has so far declined to issue any public statement addressing Adam’s defection.

Burhan emphasized in an official statement following the meeting that Sudan’s military remains open to reconciliation for combatants willing to lay down their weapons and join efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation. “Doors are open to all those who lay down arms and join the path of national reconstruction,” Burhan said.

Adam’s defection marks one of the most high-profile departures from the RSF’s ranks since full-scale conflict erupted in April 2023. He is not the first senior RSF commander to switch allegiances in the past year: earlier in 2024, Abu Aqla Kaikel, leader of the Sudan Shield Forces, also left the RSF after the Sudanese Army retook control of the strategic central province of Gezira, a key agricultural and population hub.

The current conflict grew out of a years-long unresolved power struggle between the Sudanese Army, led by Burhan, and the RSF, a paramilitary force that evolved from the country’s former janjaweed militias tied to decades of conflict in Darfur. Fighting first broke out in the capital Khartoum before spreading across the vast northeast African nation, triggering one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises in modern history.

Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a U.S.-based conflict monitoring organization, records at least 59,000 confirmed deaths from the war to date. The group has repeatedly warned that the actual death toll is almost certainly far higher, as widespread insecurity, collapsed healthcare infrastructure, and limited access to conflict zones make accurate casualty reporting nearly impossible.

For decades, hundreds of children born near the British Army Training Unit in Kenya (Batuk) have grown up without answers about their paternal heritage, many left in poverty, socially ostracized, and told their British military fathers were deceased. Now, an unprecedented cross-border legal and genetic initiative has identified 20 missing fathers, secured paternity confirmation for 12 cases through the UK’s highest Family Court, and unlocked life-changing access to British citizenship and child support for dozens of Kenyan people.

One of the cases at the center of this breakthrough is nine-year-old Edward, a pseudonym to protect his identity. From early childhood, Edward has faced relentless bullying over his lighter skin tone, with peers taunting him as a “British coloniser” – a reference to the United Kingdom’s 68-year colonial rule of Kenya that ended in 1963. Edward’s mother, Nasibo, a Kenyan woman who entered a relationship with a British contractor stationed at Batuk, was cast out by her family after her partner left Kenya abruptly when she was four months pregnant. She says the man promised to return, gave her an engagement ring before leaving, and never contacted her again. For years, she and Edward have lived in extreme poverty, with no way to trace the man who fathered her son. Now that paternity has been confirmed, Edward is eligible for formal child support payments, though his father has refused to share contact information, forcing legal teams to pursue court action to secure maintenance payments.

Another story that underscores the years of misinformation surrounding these cases is 18-year-old Yvonne. Orphaned as an infant after her mother’s death, Yvonne was raised by her grandparents and told by Batuk soldiers that her British military father had died. Through genetic matching with her father’s maternal cousin, who had uploaded their DNA to the commercial genealogy platform Ancestry.com, the legal team confirmed Yvonne’s father is alive and currently residing in the UK. After ignoring five court orders to appear for paternity proceedings, he finally attended his hearing, requested a DNA test, and the results confirmed he is Yvonne’s father. Like Edward’s father, he has declined any contact with Yvonne at this time, though extended family members have expressed interest in building a relationship with her.

Not all outcomes have involved estrangement, however. Twenty-year-old Cathy grew up believing her father, a former British soldier named Phill stationed at Batuk in 2004, was dead. Her mother Maggie told her this after Phill lost contact when his phone was stolen following a deployment change. As a teenager, Cathy tracked Phill down on Facebook, but he did not recognize her name and blocked her messages. Struggling with the loneliness of growing up without a father and lacking answers about her mixed heritage, Cathy made a suicide attempt. Meanwhile, Phill had left the military, struggled with poor mental health, and experienced homelessness after transitioning to civilian life. When paternity was confirmed through the project, Phill called the discovery a “very happy surprise.” He has already begun providing financial support to Cathy and Maggie, and the two are rebuilding their relationship, with Cathy planning to visit the UK in the near future. To date, Phill is the only confirmed father who has voluntarily provided financial support to his Kenyan child.

The project was launched in 2024 after UK-based solicitor James Netto was approached by families in Nanyuki, the Kenyan market town 185 kilometers north of Nairobi that has hosted Batuk since the base opened in 1964. More than 5,000 British military personnel pass through the training base each year, and the facility has long been mired in controversy over allegations of abuse and misconduct. In December 2024, a two-year Kenyan parliamentary inquiry concluded that British personnel at Batuk operated within a “culture of impunity,” resulting in sexual violence, two murder allegations, widespread environmental damage, and the systemic abandonment of children fathered with local women.

To address the longstanding issue of unacknowledged paternity, Netto partnered with Kenyan lawyer Kelvin Kubai, who runs the charity Connecting Roots Kenya to support these children, and leading genetics professor Denise Syndercombe Court. The team traveled to Kenya with hundreds of DNA testing kits, collected samples from claimants ranging in age from three to 70 years old, and cross-referenced the results against the nearly 30 million genetic profiles available on commercial genealogy platforms – a large enough dataset to make familial matches even with distant relatives. Netto says the scale and methodology of this project are unprecedented in UK legal history, and the team was stunned by how successful the process was, with matches ranging from distant cousins all the way to direct identification of the fathers themselves. To secure official contact information, the courts ordered UK government agencies including the Ministry of Defence, Department for Work and Pensions, and HM Revenue and Customs to release the identified fathers’ names and addresses.

Netto says his team has already documented nearly 100 active cases of children born to British soldiers and contractors near Batuk, and he estimates the true number is far higher. In the 12 cases that have received formal paternity confirmation from the UK Family Court, most claimants are now eligible to apply for British citizenship, and all minors and students are eligible for court-ordered child support.

Rejecting calls for a ban on relationships between British soldiers and local Kenyan women as inherently racist, Kubai argues the only just solution is to hold men accountable when they father children during their deployment. Netto and Kubai plan to bring dozens more cases before the UK High Court over the coming months, continuing their work to connect claimants with their heritage and secure the financial and legal rights they are owed.

In response to questions about the allegations and the paternity project, the UK Ministry of Defence stated it “deeply regrets those issues and challenges which have arisen in relation to the UK’s defence presence in Kenya” and said it continues to take action to address concerns where possible. It noted that consensual relationships between personnel and local women do not violate MoD policy, and that the ministry does not investigate cases where no criminal allegations have been filed by local authorities. Brigadier Simon Ridgway, commanding officer of the British Army’s Collective Training Group, added that the MoD works with Kenyan children’s services to address paternity claims as they are received. The December 2024 Kenyan parliamentary inquiry has called on the Kenyan government to create formal new systems to hold Batuk soldiers accountable for child support, including mandated DNA testing and long-term psychosocial support for affected children.

On a historic stop of his African pilgrimage in Luanda, Angola, Pope Leo XIV kicked off Sunday with a rousing call to action for Angolans to root out the pervasive “scourge of corruption” by embedding a culture of justice and collective sharing across the nation. The visit, which later brought the first U.S.-born pontiff to one of the trans-Atlantic slave trade’s most significant remaining sites, weaves together calls for national reconciliation in Angola with overdue reckoning over the Catholic Church’s centuries-old complicity in human trafficking.

Speaking to a crowd of roughly 100,000 worshippers gathered in Kilamba, a large residential development constructed by Chinese partners 15 miles outside the Angolan capital, the pontiff used his homily to lift up the aspirations of the Angolan people, while calling out the continued exploitation of the nation’s abundant mineral resources and its most vulnerable citizens. Decades after the end of a brutal post-independence civil war that left deep, unhealed scars across the country, Leo urged an end to old sectarian divides, hatred, and violence. “We wish to build a country where old divisions are overcome once and for all, where hatred and violence disappear, and where the scourge of corruption is healed by a new culture of justice and sharing,” he told the assembled crowd.

By Sunday afternoon, the pontiff traveled to the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, a revered contemporary Catholic shrine located 70 miles south of Luanda on the banks of the Kwanza River. But the site’s origins stretch back to the late 16th century, when Portuguese colonizers built the Church of Our Lady of Muxima as part of a colonial fortress. For decades, it operated as a central hub of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: enslaved African people were held at the site, forcibly baptized by Portuguese clergy, then marched overland to the port of Luanda to be loaded onto slave ships bound for the Americas.

Today, the shrine’s layered history serves as a stark reminder of the Catholic Church’s institutional role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, from the forced conversion of enslaved people to the Vatican’s long refusal to issue a full, formal acknowledgement and atonement for its complicity. The visit carries particular personal weight for Pope Leo XIV: genealogical research has confirmed the pontiff’s Creole ancestry includes both enslaved African people and white slaveholders in his family line that traces its North American roots to Louisiana.

For many Black Catholics across the globe, the trip to Muxima represents a long-awaited moment of reckoning and healing, according to Anthea Butler, a Black Catholic scholar and senior fellow at Oxford University’s Koch Center. Butler explained that millions of Black Catholics trace their connection to the faith directly to the era of slavery, when France’s Code Noir required all enslaved people owned by Catholic slaveholders to receive baptism, while many other enslaved Angolans brought their existing Catholic faith with them when they were trafficked to the Americas.

Scholars have long documented that 15th-century papal directives from the Vatican emboldened Portuguese colonizers to expand their slave trading operations across Africa. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull *Dum Diversas*, which granted the Portuguese crown and its successors formal permission to “invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” non-Christian peoples across the globe, seize their lands and possessions, and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” A second bull, *Romanus Pontifex*, issued three years later, alongside *Dum Diversas* formed the legal and ideological foundation of the Doctrine of Discovery, the framework that legitimized European colonial seizure of land across Africa and the Americas and justified the enslavement of Indigenous and African peoples.

While the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery in 2023, it has never formally rescinded or rejected the original 15th-century papal bulls that authorized the slave trade. The Holy See has argued that a 1537 bull, *Sublimis Deus*, later reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples should not be stripped of their liberty, property, or enslaved, but scholars note this directive did not explicitly reverse or cancel the earlier authorization for the enslavement of African peoples.

Jesuit priest and slavery historian Christopher J. Kellerman, author of *All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church*, acknowledges that most of the 12.5 million Africans trafficked across the Atlantic were initially sold into slavery by African intermediaries, rather than captured directly by European traders. Even so, he notes, when the Muxima fortress and church were constructed, Portuguese forces both conducted independent slave raids and purchased enslaved people, openly relying on the papal permissions granted by the 15th-century bulls. “The popes repeatedly authorized Portugal’s colonization efforts in Africa and Portuguese participation in the slave trade, but the Vatican has never fully admitted this,” Kellerman said in comments to the Associated Press. “It would be so powerful if at some point Pope Leo were to apologize for the popes’ role in the trade.”

This is not the first time a sitting pope has addressed the harm of the slave trade during a visit to Africa. During a 1985 trip to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked for forgiveness from African peoples for the crime of the slave trade, and during a 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, West Africa’s largest historical slave trading center, he denounced the injustice of slavery, calling it a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian.”

The connection between Pope Leo XIV and this painful history runs deeper than institutional responsibility. Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of the popular genealogy series *Finding Your Roots*, published research confirming 17 of the pope’s American ancestors were Black, recorded in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole, or free people of color, with the pope’s family tree including both enslaved people and slaveholders. Gates presented his findings to Pope Leo during a private audience at the Vatican on July 5, and the Harvard Gazette reports the pope asked specifically about both his Black and white ancestors who held people in bondage. The pope has not yet spoken publicly about his family heritage or Gates’ findings, and some Black Catholic scholars say it would be inappropriate to impose a public narrative about the pope’s identity before he chooses to speak on the matter.

“It’s important that we tell our own stories,” said Tia Noelle Pratt, a sociologist of religion at Villanova University, Pope Leo’s alma mater, and author of *Faithful and Devoted: Racism and Identity in the African-American Catholic Experience*. “We haven’t heard anything from him about what he thinks about it, and so to impose anything on him, I think would be completely inappropriate.”

Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the retired first African American archbishop of Washington, who helped facilitate the meeting between Gates and Pope Leo, said he was delighted to support the encounter. “It’s one of the things that I think for many African Americans and people of color, they identify with great pride the pope has roots in our own heritage,” Gregory said. “And I think he’s happy about that too, because it’s another link to the people that he tries to serve and is called to serve.”