Nigeria prisoner swap secures release of 82 Chibok girls Abuja, Nigeria | AFP | Nigeria on Saturday said it had negotiated the release of 82 of the more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram Islamists more than three years ago, securing their freedom in a prisoner swap deal. The …
Read More »Murders touch off riots in DR Congo’s gold-rich northeast
Kisangani, DR Congo | AFP | Protesters angered by a string of unsolved murders threw up roadblocks and mobbed government offices in three days of riots in the restive gold-rich Ituri region of Democratic Republic of Congo, local officials said Monday. The trouble erupted Saturday in the town of Mahagi …
Read More »Burundi refugees find hope in ‘at home’ bar in Rwanda
Kigali, Rwanda | AFP | Outside Rwanda’s national stadium is a bar that has become a second home for Burundian refugees fleeing their country’s two-year-old political crisis. The clues are in the name, “Imuhira” meaning “at home” in Burundi’s Kirundi language, in the voices of those who gather on the …
Read More »‘The LRA and Kony have never attacked US interests, why do we care?’
After six years, US troops end hunt for LRA warlord Kony Libreville, Gabon | AFP | US special forces on Wednesday begin pulling out of Central African Republic where they deployed in 2011 to help hunt the brutal LRA warlord Joseph Kony. The move, which was announced last month, will …
Read More »South Sudan war strains Uganda’s generous refugee policy
Yumbe, Uganda | AFP | Michael O’Hagan Ugandan motorbike taxi driver Sadiq Agotre grumbles as he waits for a rare client among thousands of South Sudanese refugees hoping to receive food rations in the outskirts of his town. “Business is not good. These people don’t have money,” he says, gazing out …
Read More »UPDF: Kony and LRA have been neutralised
Ugandan army says LRA ‘neutralised’, begins withdrawal Kampala, Uganda | AFP | The Ugandan army said Wednesday it has neutralised the Lord’s Resistance Army, as troops began withdrawing from the Central African Republic where they had been hunting the group’s feared leader Joseph Kony. “The decision to withdraw was premised …
Read More »Sixty aid workers forced to flee South Sudan fighting
Juba, South Sudan | AFP | A surge of fighting in eastern South Sudan has forced 60 aid workers to flee, the UN humanitarian agency said Saturday, hurting efforts to help civilians in the famine-hit nation. An increase in violence nationwide has seen thousands flee in the past two weeks, including …
Read More »UK says South Sudan violence amounts to ‘genocide’
Entebbe, Uganda | AFP | Targeted killings of specific ethnic groups in South Sudan’s civil war amount to “genocide”, according to Britain’s International Development Minister Priti Patel. “It’s tribal, it’s absolutely tribal, so on that basis it’s genocide,” Patel told reporters in Uganda this week, according to a ministry press officer …
Read More »IS boasts of ‘zero casualties’ after ‘Mother Of All Bombs’
IS denies suffering casualties from huge US bomb in Afghanistan: Amaq Cairo, Egypt | AFP | The Islamic State group denied on Friday it had suffered casualties from the US military’s largest non-nuclear bomb which hit its mountain hideouts in Afghanistan, in a statement on its propaganda agency Amaq. “Security source …
Read More »In Pajok, South Sudan: ‘We buried Jacob, Paul and Amos’
Ngomoromo, Uganda | AFP | Michael O’HAGAN | In the no man’s land between South Sudan and Uganda wind lashes though scrubland, whipping hot dust into the eyes of David Otong Oroma and his sister as they struggle to push their heavily laden motorbike over the border. The pair fled …
Read More »