Africa
Central African Republic rebels advance
Rebels who have taken up arms again in the Central African Republic’s south, accusing the regime of not honoring peace accords, have seized several towns in the south.
Tag: Sahel
North Africa
Mali: shrines destroyed; intervention approved
Islamist militants in Timbuktu destroyed more Sufi shrines days after the UN Security Council approved an intervention force to retake Mali’s breakaway north.
North Africa
Libya declares martial law in southern region
The Libyan government closed the country’s southern borders and declared the southern provinces a military zone in response to growing lawlessness.
North Africa
Mali: regime, rebels both divided
As Mali’s prime minister is removed by the junta, Ansar Dine rebels are embraced in peace talks—while the MUJAO rebels are sanctioned by the UN as an al-Qaeda front.
Africa
Protests rock Sudan, South Sudan…
Security forces mixed it up with protesters both in Sudan, hit by a wave of student unrest, and in South Sudan’s West Bahr el-Ghazal state, where 10 were killed by army troops.
North Africa
Mali: final bid to avoid intervention?
Mali’s government is in talks with Islamist rebels who control the country’s north, while Gen. Carter Ham in Washington warned that al-Qaeda has established a haven in the country.
North Africa
Mali: Europe prepares intervention
Military experts from Africa, the United Nations and Europe have drafted plans to retake control of northern Mali, as West African nations prepare a request for armed intervention.
North Africa
The left and the jihad: love-hate relationship?
"Leftists" in the West are waxing paranoid about how the Syrian revolutionaries are a bunch of jihadists. But if the West intervenes in Mali, they will likely be rooting for jihadists—again.
North Africa
Algeria claims blow against AQIM
Three armed Islamists, including a senior member of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), were apprehended in Algeria, in what authorities call a "fatal blow" to the network.
North Africa
Mali: intervention, power-sharing —or ‘national liberation’?
As West African powers mull whether to invade Mali’s Islamist-held north or work out a power-sharing deal, young Malians are forming ad hoc militias to “liberate the north.”
Planet Watch
Chevron fire: how many more?
From Richmond, Calif., to the Gulf Coast, to the Niger Delta to the Ecuadoran Amazon—how many more disasters until a public seizure of the oil industry is finally at least broached?
North Africa
Mali: pastoralists trapped between drought, jihadis
Hundreds of nomadic Fulani pastoralists in central Mali are trapped between floodplains to the south and armed Islamist rebels to the north, and fear their way of life faces extinction.