Somali officials say a pre-dawn attack by militants on an army base was repelled but left at least seven soldiers dead. The attack took place in a part of southern Somalia recaptured from the militant group al-Shabab last week.

The attack took place early Friday in the village of Hilowle Gaab, on the outskirts of the recently liberated town of Runirgod in the Middle Shabelle region.

The army said Runirgod, 240 kilometers north of Mogadishu, was the last al-Shabab stronghold in the region.

Daaud Haji Irro, the spokesman for Hirshabelle state, told VOA via WhatsApp that the attack began with five explosions and was followed by a heavy gunbattle.

He said seven soldiers were killed, including a military colonel and two other officers, and that a number of attackers were also killed.

He said the “khawarijs” have this morning attacked forces in Hilowle Gaab, and  troops inflicted heavy casualties on the group, leaving their bodies are scattered on the battlefield. He said the militants fled into a forest in the Galgadud region.

Khawarijs is a derogatory term used by Somali government officials to describe al-Shabab.

Locals who spoke with VOA over the phone after the deadly attack said several civilians were also killed in the fighting.

Al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack and said it killed 31 soldiers, including five senior commanders. It also said it had seized 8 military vehicles.

VOA could not independently verify the group’s claims.

The attack comes a day after a twin suicide car bombing in the country’s central town of Mahas killed more than 30 people and wounded more than 40 others.

Al-Shabab also claimed responsibility for that attack, the deadliest in the Horn of Africa nation since the start of the year.

Last year, Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mahamud, declared an “all-out war” against the militant group. Since then, Somali government forces backed by clan militias have succeeded in recapturing towns and villages in central Somalia that the group had controlled for years.
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Some of the more than 70,000 Ethiopians who fled to Sudan during the two-year war in the Tigray region are hoping to return home soon, as a November peace deal between Ethiopian federal forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front appears to be holding.

However, many of those refugees are skeptical the peace will last.

Tigrayan Tesfai Gabriel-Mariam, who is 61, fled Ethiopia’s civil war to Sudan’s Um Rakuba refugee camp two years ago after his wife was killed in the fighting. He has since lived with his two grandchildren in a makeshift shelter.

The peace deal has raised hopes they may be able to return home soon, but Tesfai says he worries about their safety amid reports that people are still being killed.

Rights groups say hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans were pushed out of their homes in what amounts to ethnic cleansing — a notion that Ethiopian authorities reject.

Even if their safety was guaranteed, it’s not clear what Tigrayan refugees like Tesfai would have left if they returned home. Tesfai worked as a grocer in Tigray’s capital, Mekelle, but says his shop was looted during the war.

His story and fears are echoed by other Tigrayans living in Um Rakuba.

Muluk Garsihar, a 58-year-old mother of four, also arrived at the camp two years ago. She says life as a refugee has been difficult, and she wants to return to Tigray if there is peace. However, she doesn’t know how to be sure the agreement will be implemented.

The peace deal stated that foreign forces would withdraw from Ethiopia, the TPLF would disarm, and key services would be restored to Tigray.

In December, Ethiopia restored some telecommunications, power and flights to Tigray, and allowed more humanitarian aid to enter the region.

Witnesses in the Tigray region towns of Axum and Shire last week said Eritrean troops fighting on the side of Ethiopia’s federal forces withdrew — though it was not clear if the Eritrean fighters had left Tigray completely.

But 61-year-old Tigrayan refugee Birhan Hairo still fears the peace deal will not hold.

She says services in Um Rakuba camp have worsened in recent months, but she still prefers staying in Sudan rather than returning home to risk being killed.

Birhan says she and her family lost many relatives during the war, so they will only feel safe going back when Ethiopia has a new prime minister.

The United Nations in October estimated half a million Ethiopians have died from conflict, hunger, disease, and lack of medical care during the war.

The U.N.’s refugee agency in Sudan was not immediately available for comment on when it would be safe for Tigrayans to return to Ethiopia. The Sudanese Humanitarian Commission, which is responsible for the country’s refugee issues, did not respond to requests for comment.
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Police in Somalia say two suicide car bombers killed at least 10 people early Wednesday when they targeted a military facility in a region at the heart of the government’s offensive against al-Shabab extremists. 

The attack occurred in the Mahaas district of Hiran region after the dawn prayer. “It was loud and heard all across the town,” resident Osman Abdullahi told The Associated Press. “I have rescued several people wounded in the attack, including soldiers and journalists who were embedded with soldiers.” 

Police official Mahad Abdulle told the AP the vehicles exploded in a neighborhood full of civilians and that at least 10 people were killed. 

Al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack. 

Mahaas is at the center of the ongoing government offensive against al-Shabab, the al-Qaida-linked group of thousands of fighters that has controlled parts of central and southern Somalia for years. The government has vowed to defeat it this year. 

The Somali army, together with local militias, recently opened a key supply route to Mahaas after it had long been under siege. 
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Twenty-eight bodies were found in northwest Burkina Faso over the weekend, the government said, and rights activists blamed a volunteer militia created to support the army’s battle against jihadis.

Attacks targeting the security forces and civilians have increased in recent months, especially in northern and eastern regions bordering Mali and Niger.

“The government was informed of an incident at Nouna … during the night of December 30-31,” a government statement said late Monday.

Preliminary reports “indicate 28 people killed,” it said, adding that an investigation had been opened and urged calm.

But a rights group called the Collective of Communities against Impunity and Stigmatizations (CISC) pointed the finger at the Volunteers for the Defense of the Fatherland (VDP), a civilian auxiliary force that supports the military in its 7-year-old fight against jihadis.

The public prosecutor in Nouna, Armel Sama, said in a statement that “most of the victims, all of them males, were shot dead.”

The landlocked West African country is one of the poorest and most volatile nations in the world. 

Since 2015, it has been grappling with an insurgency led by jihadis affiliated with al-Qaida and the Islamic State group that have killed tens of thousands and displaced around 2 million people. 

The VDP, set up in December 2019, is made up of civilian volunteers who are given two weeks of military training and then work alongside the army, typically carrying out surveillance, information-gathering or escort duties.

Experts have long worried that the poorly trained volunteers are easy targets for the jihadis and may also dangerously inflame ethnic friction without proper controls.

The CISC said the weekend events in Nouna had begun with a reported “terrorist attack” on a local VDP headquarters.

Armed men then carried out “deadly attacks in reprisal,” it said. Victims said the assailants were VDP who were members of a traditional hunting community called the Dozo, according to the CISC.

CISC Secretary Daouda Diallo called on the authorities to pay “special attention” to the situation.

“Armed terrorist groups exploit these kinds of transgression to attract recruits among the public,” Diallo warned.

Three incidents of abduction and extrajudicial killings allegedly involving Dozo or VDP had occurred in the runup to the events at the weekend, CISC said.

Government spokesman Jean Emmanuel Ouedraogo said the weekend killings “unfolded at a time when Burkina Faso has launched an operation to mobilize the entire population in a united action in the fight against terrorism.”

In November, the authorities, backed by a patriotic campaign, launched a drive to recruit 50,000 VDP, and 90,000 signed up.

The government is “fundamentally opposed to all forms of abuse or violations of human rights for whatever reasons,” the statement said.

The VDP has taken the brunt of losses suffered by the security forces in the face of the jihadi campaign.

Hundreds of volunteers have died, especially in ambushes or explosions caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) planted along roadsides.

The escalating toll among the army, police and VDP unleashed two military coups last year, launched by officers angered at failures to stem the bloodshed. 
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Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud announced Sunday the country will hire a record 3,000 new teachers to try to bridge a wide education gap.  The move follows a four-fold increase in the Somali ministry of education’s budget for 2023.  But critics note funding for education is still poor, and that insecurity and poverty have pushed the majority of Somali children out of school. 

The New Year’s Day budget announcement by President Mohamud marked one of Somalia’s most ambitious education campaigns in years.     

Mohamud said Somalia this year will hire 3,000 more teachers to address a shortage that has hindered learning.  

In an interview with VOA, Somalia’s Ministry of Education Director General Mohamed Hassan says the teachers are sorely needed.

He says one thousand teachers are on the government payroll in Mogadishu and all the regional states combined for the past five years. Hassan says the ministry’s latest report shows only a quarter of school-age children have access to education.  

Hassan says the new teachers will be recruited with priority given to areas of Somalia that have little access to education. 

He says special opportunities will be given to districts where there are very few school students and also to areas where the Khawarij were dislodged.  

Khawarij, which loosely translates as “those who deviate from the Islamic faith,” is the term Somali authorities use to refer to the Islamist militant group al-Shabab.   

Mohamud last year declared all-out war on the Islamists and federal troops and their backers have since made gains in taking back territory under that was under the group’s control.   

Al-Shabab-run areas of Somalia are locked out of Somalia’s formal education system, as the group imposes a curriculum based on a harsh interpretation of Islam.  

President Mohamud in his New Year’s Day speech vowed to eliminate the militants in 2023.  

The president last week quadrupled Somalia’s education budget this year to $34 million. 

While it is the highest education budget in years, critics say it’s still far from the funding needed to instruct the country’s youth.  

Suad Abdulle is the founder of the Somali Institute of Special Educational Needs and Disability.  She tells VOA that poor funding is the main reason why most Somali children are failing to attend school.

Abdulle says close to 70% of children are not in school because of several factors.  The first one is the lack of funding, she says, as a large percentage of Somalis are living on less than a dollar per day while most schools in the country are private.

Mohamed Osman Ali is a teacher at Faruq Primary and Secondary School in Mogadishu.  

He says the increased funding, while much less than to other ministries, will still help boost education. 

Ali says education in Somalia has suffered underfunding for the longest time.  He says ministries such as defense and security get more than ten times what we get in the education sector.  Ali says he is happy the government is now increasing funding to enable Somali children to go to school.

Access to education in Somalia remains among the lowest in the world. The U.N. Children’s Fund, UNICEF, says three million Somali children are out of school.  
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A new report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies says “once in a hundred years” floods will become more common in coastal communities due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. As a stretch of West Africa’s coast is set to become the world’s largest megalopolis and an economic powerhouse, academics worry rising sea levels will stymie growth and impact the continent and the world. Henry Wilkins reports from Ganvie, Benin.
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Cameroon’s military says it deployed scores of troops to Oku, Kumbo and Kakiri districts Monday in the central African state’s English-speaking Northwest region.

The military says armed gangs over the weekend sealed markets, chased people and vehicles from the streets and abducted scores of civilians who did not comply with their orders.

Motorcycle taxi driver Lukong Genesis, 54, said armed men seized his motorcycle. He said the separatists, who call themselves Ambazonians or Amba, pointed guns at him and demanded he go home.

“The situation in Kumbo for the past two days has been very, very precarious,” he said. There has been serious gun firing between the Amba and the state forces and today being Monday, the ghost town has been reinforced and the streets are dry. No movement of vehicles and people. Everybody is indoors.”

Lukong said battles between troops and rebels intensified after President Paul Biya’s New Year’s Eve speech.

Biya said many rebel groups have been crushed and the threat from separatists has been significantly reduced.

He praised the central African state’s military for protecting civilians and property during the six-year conflict and said peace would pave the way for the region’s reconstruction.

The rebels say they want to carve out an English-speaking state they call Ambazonia from Cameroon and its French-speaking majority.

Capo Daniel is self-declared deputy defense chief of the Ambazonia Defense Forces, one of the rebel groups. He dismissed the allegation that their forces have been significantly reduced.

“That Paul Biya mentioned that peace is returning is laughable. Ambazonia-controlled areas have largely increased. Nineteen Cameroon military men were targeted in Bui and some of them were airlifted for treatment. There have been some arson attacks by the Cameroon military in Bui as well as in Oku. Ambazonia will not give up their fight until we have achieved our goal of independence,” said Daniel.

Civilian people

Cameroon’s military admits that troops have been in running bottles with rebels in several western towns and villages but says their forces did not suffer any casualties.

The military says it killed at least 11 separatists in battles in Kumbo and Oku, a claim which VOA could not independently confirm.

Bernard Okalia Bilai, the governor of the English-speaking Southwest region said civilians should denounce members of armed gangs and hoodlums causing havoc in the community to the military and government officials. Bilai said armed gangs are harassing people, stealing, and abducting civilians for ransom claiming it is a fight for freedom and liberation.

The separatists deny their fighters are abducting and harassing civilians.

Rebels on social media posts Monday said their fighters were enforcing the curfew to counter Biya’s claim that fighters were being defeated.

Separatists in English-speaking western Cameroon launched their rebellion in 2017 after what they said was years of discrimination by the country’s French-speaking majority.

Biya says Cameroon is indivisible and anyone attempting it will be crushed.

The U.N. says the conflict has killed more than 3,500 people and displaced more 750,000.
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At least 20 people have been killed in Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland in clashes between anti-government protesters and security forces over several days, according to a doctor at a public hospital.

For more than a week police and the military have been battling the protesters in Laascaanood, a town in Somaliland’s east which is disputed between Somaliland and neighboring Puntland, one of Somalia’s semi-autonomous regions.

Mohamed Farah, a doctor at Laascaanood Hospital, a public facility in Laascaanood, told Reuters at least 20 people had been killed and dozens injured. He said he had seen the bodies of victims brought into the facility.

Protesters are demanding that Somaliland cede control of the town to Puntland and also accuse security forces of failing to end insecurity in the town.

“Somaliland forcefully occupied Laascaanood and failed to secure it. We are demanding that they leave,” Adaan Jaamac Oogle, the spokesperson of the protesters told Reuters.

“We cannot tolerate continuing bloodshed of civilians.”

The police did not immediately respond to a call from Reuters requesting comment.

Somaliland broke away from Somalia in 1991 but has not gained widespread international recognition for its independence. The region has been mostly peaceful while Somalia has grappled with three decades of civil war.

Puntland’s Vice President, Ahmed Elmi Osman Karash, accused the security forces of violence.

“What is being done by the Somaliland army is a massacre of civilians,” he told Reuters by phone.

Mahad Ambaashe Elmi, a senior commander in the Somaliland army, did not return a Reuters call requesting comment.

Somaliland’s Minister of Information, Saleebaan Cali Koore, appealed to the protesters in a statement Saturday to stop their demonstrations and begin negotiations with the government. 
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The European Union on Saturday urged Rwanda to stop supporting the M23 rebel group, which has captured swaths of territory in the North Kivu province of neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.

The DRC, along with the United States and several European countries, has repeatedly accused its smaller central African neighbor of backing the M23, although Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, denies the charge.

The Tutsi rebel group has in recent months advanced to within a few dozen kilometers of provincial capital Goma.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Saturday that the European bloc had urged Rwanda to “stop supporting the M23 and use all means to press the M23 to comply with the decisions taken by the EAC (East African Community)” and at a November summit in Angola.

“It also firmly urges all states of the region to prevent the provision of any support to armed groups active in the DRC,” Borrell said.

He called on Kinshasa to “take all measures necessary to protect the civilian population in its territory.”

Under heavy international pressure to disarm, M23 joined a ceremony last week to deliver the strategic town of Kibumba to an East African military force as a “goodwill gesture” for peace.

The EAC also said the group had to withdraw to the border between the DRC, Uganda and Rwanda.

However, the Congolese army promptly dubbed the Kibumba handover a “sham.”

Borrell’s comments came after a U.N. experts’ report on DR Congo indicated it had collected proof of “direct intervention” by Rwandan defense forces inside DRC territory between at least November 2021 and last October.

The experts’ report says Rwandan troops launched operations to reinforce the M23 against the mainly Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), notably by supplying weapons, ammunition and uniforms.

Kigali sees the FDLR as a threat that justifies interventions inside the DRC.

Rwanda has also accused the DRC, where presidential elections are scheduled for next December, of using the conflict for political purposes as well as fabricating a November massacre of at least 131 civilians.

A U.N. probe blamed those deaths on M23 rebels.

In a statement Saturday, Kinshasa welcomed the findings of the U.N. experts, which it said “put an end to the lies and manipulations” of Rwanda.

Given the gravity of the allegations, it called for the U.N. Security Council to examine the experts’ report with a view to possible sanctions against Rwanda.

Meanwhile, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame blamed Kinshasa for the chaos in its war-torn eastern regions in his New Year’s address.

“After spending tens of billions of dollars on peacekeeping over the past two decades, the security situation in Eastern Congo is worse than ever,” Kagame said in a statement Saturday.

“To explain this failure, some in the international community blame Rwanda, even though they know very well that the true responsibility lies primarily with the government of the DRC. It is high time that the unwarranted vilification of Rwanda stopped.”
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A vessel carrying at least 700 migrants was intercepted off the eastern coast of Libya, the coast guard said. It was one of the largest interceptions in recent months of migrants seeking a better life in Europe through the war-torn North African country.

The coast guard said the boat was stopped Friday off the Mediterranean town of Moura, 90 kilometers (56 miles) west of the eastern city of Benghazi.

It said in a statement that the migrants hail from different nations and that those who illegally entered Libya would be handed over to their home countries.

The statement did not provide further details.

The coast guard posted images on Facebook showing a large, overcrowded vessel with most of those on board appearing to be young people.

It was one of the largest interceptions in recent months of migrants sailing to Europe, a destination for thousands fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

In August last year, Italian military vessels aided a boat crammed with 539 migrants off the southern island of Lampedusa. The boat was launched from Libyan shores.

Libya has in recent years emerged as the dominant transit point for migrants seeking a better quality of life in Europe. The oil-rich country plunged into chaos following a NATO-backed uprising that toppled and killed longtime autocrat Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

Human traffickers in recent years have benefited from the chaos in Libya, smuggling in migrants across the country’s lengthy borders with six nations. The migrants are then packed into ill-equipped rubber boats and other vessels and set off on risky sea voyages. Officials didn’t say what kind of vessel was found over the weekend.

The International Organization for Migration has reported 1,522 dead or missing migrants in the Mediterranean this year. Overall, the IOM says 24,871 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014, with the real number believed to be even higher given the number of shipwrecks that never get reported. 
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Ugandan police fired tear gas and arrested more than 30 opposition supporters attending a Friday prayer rally organized by musician-turned-politician Bobi Wine. Police say the meeting was illegal as organizers failed to inform the chief of police before holding it.

Uganda police have confirmed the arrests of at least 30 members of Bobi Wine’s opposition party while at a prayer meeting organized by the umbrella group, the United Forces of Change.

Those gathered were set to pray for people arrested, dead, abducted and all opposition supporters, especially from Wine’s National Unity Platform, whose whereabouts are still unknown in the past two years.

Other opposition members included the Conservative Party and the Forum for Democratic Change.

But Lucas Owoyesigyire, the deputy spokesperson for the Kampala Metropolitan Police, told VOA by phone that the opposition group did not give the Inspector General of Police Okoth Ochola advance notice about the prayer meeting so he could set up security for it due to ongoing terrorism threats.

“This was a public place,” said Owoyesigyire, “and they ought to have informed the IGP — especially the owners of the venue — should have informed the IGP about this. So, we could not allow them to go ahead with this.”

Owoyesigyire added that “we have some suspects here, at CPS [Central Police Station] but they are more than 30.”

Ugandan politician Joel Ssenyonyi told VOA that they had paid for the venue but upon their arrival Friday morning, the police and army had cordoned off the venue forcing them to pray from outside.

“When we got there, we saw one of the guys who had the most peeps,” said Ssenyonyi. “We requested him, please come and speak to us. He refused to come. Because we were at the gate, they couldn’t let us in. The law says notify…the law does not say ask for permission. We informed them and asked them to provide security for our function to go on undisturbed because we were going to be indoors.”

In the past two years, especially before the 2021 general elections, a number of opposition supporters have been bundled into vans and taken to both known and unknown detention centers.

While many have returned maimed, claiming torture, many others are suspected to either have died or still be in detention. The opposition said it has provided those names several times to parliament, asserting they are being held by security and demanding in vain that the government provide an explanation.

To date, the abductions continue — including a 17-year-old boy picked up from his place of work as he peeled potatoes.

Speaking to VOA, the boy’s mother, Nambazira Sauda, recalled that on November 5, a friend of her son told her about her son’s disappearance. Since then, Sauda said she has checked all known detention centers without success and fears her son may be dead.

“They say when a child is dying, a mother gets birth pangs,” she said. “I go to the bathroom all the time, I don’t eat, I don’t drink, I lose my senses. When I start moving, I find myself coming out from another direction.”

“My son is young,” she said. “They should come and kill me instead.”

President Yoweri Museveni has in recent months stated he is not aware of any abductions going on in the country. He also maintains that mistakes by security personnel while on duty are being corrected.

It is still not clear exactly how many members of the opposition group are either dead or in detention.
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A prominent Algerian journalist is behind bars and the offices of his website and radio station were shut down based on accusations that they threaten state security, according to a defense lawyer.

Ihsane El-Kadi was detained December 23 at his home and held in a police facility until Thursday, when he appeared in an Algiers court. An investigating judge ordered him kept in custody, according to Zoubida Assoul, a lawyer who is part of a collective that is defending the journalist.

El-Kadi, who was active in Algeria’s Hirak pro-democracy protest movement in 2019, appears to be the latest target of an encroaching crackdown on dissenting voices in the North African country.

The case against him is linked to the crowdfunding used to finance his media outlets, Maghreb Emergent and Webradio, Assoul said. The website and radio station operated in Algeria for years but did not have government recognition as official media organizations.

El-Kadi is accused of violating an article in the criminal code targeting anyone who receives funds aimed at “inciting acts susceptible to threaten state security,” stability or Algeria’s fundamental interests, the lawyer said. If convicted, he could face five to seven years in prison.

His supporters view El-Kadi’s arrest as punishment for articles that angered Algerian authorities.

His outlets were seen by many as outposts of free debate in Algerian media that provided journalists and opposition politicians a platform to point out contradictions or shortfalls in the government’s policies.

Police questioned El-Kadi in the past then released him. His family and friends expected that to happen again Thursday, but instead were disappointed and indignant at the decision to hold him.

“Algeria is sliding dangerously into an Orwellian universe,” said Madjid Madhi, who is also a journalist.

Algerians expressed dismay online, including some who said they disagreed with El-Kadi’s views. 
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