Over the past two months, the ISIS international franchise has made gains from West Africa to the Indian subcontinent, with militants in several countries proclaiming for the "caliphate."
Traffickers have established a dope-for-guns pipeline across the Sahel and Sahara, integrating Boko Haram into drug-smuggling networks that stretch to Asia.
Advance units of a thousands-strong Chadian intervention force arrived in Cameroon to fight Boko Haram rebels. A critical oil pipeline passes through the war-torn border.
Up to 2,000 are feared dead in an ongoing massacre after Boko Haram seized Baga, a town on Nigeria's border with Chad in Borno state. The town was reportedly "razed to the ground."
Royal Dutch Shell reached an $84 million settlement over Niger Delta oil spills, in what Amnesty International called "an important victory for the victims of corporate negligence."
Warplanes under the command of renegade Gen. Khalifa Haftar fired missiles at Misrata's rebel-held airport, as Libya's oil exports remain effectively paralyzed by civil war.
Internet and media slueths scramble to identify the faction behind the jihadist flag raised by the militant in the Sydney hostage crisis—which follows Austrailian air-strikes on ISIS.
Rights groups in Nigeria brought an action against President Goodluck Jonathan before the Federal High Court in Abuja seeking an investigation into war crimes.
More than 400,000 in northeastern Nigeria have been forced to flee their homes due to Boko Haram violence in recent weeks, and are in "urgent need" of assistance.
In Nigeria's northwest, traditional hunters in rural areas, armed only with bows and arrows, are organizing patrols to protect their villages against Boko Haram.
A study by UK-based Institute for Economics and Peace finds there were nearly 10,000 terrorist attacks in 2013, 44% more than the year before.
A Nigerian federal court ruled in favor of the Bring Back Our Girls group, saying that the police had no right to block protests by families of the abducted girls.
