Category: General

Nigeria’s air force says armed bandits have for the first time shot down one of their fighter jets. It says the jet was shot down Monday as it conducted an airstrike against criminal gangs in northern Kaduna and Zamfara states. An air force spokesman said the pilot ejected safely but analysts and critics warn the attack shows a previously unknown level of firepower and threat to stability.

Officers cheered at a military base in Kaduna as the pilot of the ill-fated Alpha attack jet, Abayomi Dairo, arrived back on the base Monday.

The Nigerian air force statement said Dairo ejected from the jet shortly before it crashed and also survived intense ground fire from the bandits.

Nigerian authorities have increasingly turned to air operations to decimate criminal gangs, locally referred to as bandits, operating in the country’s northwestern regions. Authorities say hundreds of bandits have been killed in airstrikes in recent weeks.

But security analyst Senator Iroegbu says the downing of the fighter jet shows the bandits are getting emboldened.

“It’s alarming that the so-called bandits have so much capacity and capability because to bring down an Alpha jet… meaning they could have air missile[s]. I’m not sure an ordinary anti-aircraft gun could have brought down such a jet,” Iroegbu said.

The criminal gangs gained notoriety late last year through mass kidnappings of school students and demands of huge ransoms.

More than 1,000 school students have been kidnapped since December. Most have been freed through negotiations, but some are still being held captive.

Iroegbu said he suspects the ransom money paid to kidnappers is being used to purchase more sophisticated weapons. “This is their way of getting more money to acquire more weapons for whatever they’re doing,” he said.

Authorities strongly oppose ransom payment to bandits. Last month, authorities moved to enact a law that criminalizes the payment of ransoms and punishes those who do with up to 15 years in prison. The bill has been met with resistance and is being reviewed.

In May, eleven top ranking military officers, including the chief of the army, were killed in a plane crash in northwest Kaduna state. Officials said that crash was caused by bad weather, and there have been no claims the plane was shot down.

Source: Voice of America

MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA – Gunmen abducted at least 60 people in northwestern Nigeria after riding motorbikes into five villages and firing sporadically into the air, a police official and several residents said Saturday.

Nigeria is battling an increase in armed robberies and kidnappings for ransom, mainly in northwestern areas, where thinly stretched security forces often fail to stop the abductions.

The latest kidnapping took place in Zamfara state overnight Friday, said regional police spokesman Mohammed Shehu, adding that investigations were ongoing.

Four residents told Reuters armed men had attacked villages in the Shinkafi area, causing panic and abducting at least 60 villagers before escaping into the nearby forest.

The gunmen, who are known locally as bandits and have increasingly targeted schools, also fired a rocket that hit the house of the senior district head of the local council, said one resident, asking not to be named.

“The armed bandits rode on over 70 motorbikes and each motorbike was [carrying] three people with weapons destroying properties and abducting people,” Junaidu Badarawa, one of five people who were kidnapped but later released, said by phone.

Source: Voice of America

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA – South African authorities in the port city of Durban said Saturday they were investigating a coastal chemical spill that may have been caused by a warehouse fire during unrest this week.

Other possible sources are also being investigated as the cause of the spill, which is affecting marine and bird life, the eThekwini municipality said late Friday, urging local residents not to use beaches in the area.

“Extensive environmental impacts are being reported at uMhlanga and uMdhloti lagoons and beaches in the vicinity, that have killed numerous species of marine and bird life,” the municipality said in a statement.

“The pollution is considered serious and can affect one’s health if species are collected and consumed. Lagoon and seawater contact must be avoided.”

Reuters reporters saw dead fish that had washed onshore on Saturday, as a clean-up company worked to mop up the spill.

KwaZulu-Natal province’s head of environmental affairs, Ravi Pillay, said water samples would be tested Monday.

“We will see the results from there,” Pillay told Reuters. “We have some evidence of some limited impact on marine life. Our team is satisfied that there is no impact on public health.”

President Cyril Ramaphosa said Friday the unrest that ripped through several parts of the country in the past week was stabilizing and calm had been restored to most affected areas.

Protests broke out after former President Jacob Zuma was jailed for failing to appear at a corruption inquiry and swiftly degenerated into looting and arson which has killed more than 200 people and destroyed hundreds of businesses.

The municipality also said some residents were reporting smoke residue from burned chemical products. It advised people to close windows and doors and put wet cloths over vents until the smoke cleared.

Pillay said air quality testing was being undertaken.

Source: Voice of America

The U.N. refugee agency says a series of attacks by armed groups in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has forced nearly 20,000 civilians to flee for their lives.

More than 100 armed groups, such as the Ugandan Allied Democratic Forces, have been terrorizing communities in the eastern DRC for decades.

On May 6, Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi launched a state of emergency in North Kivu and Ituri provinces. Following that declaration, peoples’ hopes were raised that violence would end and law and order would be established in the region.

However, U.N. refugee agency spokesman Babar Baloch says armed groups are continuing to devastate civilian lives. He says there is little military presence in the area to protect people from the relentless attacks.

“Where civilians are on their own, then the armed groups get a chance to make a comeback and attack civilian lives,” said Baloch. “And that is why they have been going from town to town, villages to villages killing people, burning their houses, looting the houses, injuring the people as well.

The UNHCR says the Allied Democratic Forces have allegedly killed at least 14 people and injured many others around the city of Beni since June 22. Last year, the ADF reportedly killed 500 civilians in eastern DRC.

Over the past two years, nearly two million people in North Kivu province alone have been uprooted by insecurity and violence, according to the U.N.

In the aftermath of the current crisis, Baloch says the UNHCR and partners are helping local authorities register forcibly displaced families and respond to their needs.

“More than 100,000 people were assisted with emergency shelters in 2020 and almost 14,000 so far in 2021,” said Baloch. “But needs remain high as attacks by armed groups continue to displace people in the province, with many forced to flee multiple times.”

Baloch says women and children are particularly vulnerable and are being provided with shelter, relief items and cash. He says his agency’s resources are overstretched as the international community has not responded well to its appeal. He says UNHCR’s $205 million appeal to run its DRC operations this year is only 36 percent funded.

Source: Voice of America

The conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region appears to be escalating, with reports that Tigrayan and Amhara forces are recruiting more youths to fight in the country’s north. Aid agencies are warning that a drawn-out war in Ethiopia would cost thousands more lives and worsen food insecurity.

Local media reports forces from Ethiopia’s Amhara, Oromia and Sidama region are mobilizing to attack Tigrayan forces, a few weeks after Ethiopia’s government declared a unilateral cease-fire in the country’s north.

Many now fear the fighting in Tigray may turn into an ethnic conflict.

“In the last three-four days, the fighting is over there. The TPLF wants to go back and take some of those lands which belonged to the Amhara, which were taken in the last 27 years. So it seems the Amhara are resisting and fighting back there. So things are not really that great in terms of talking about the suffering of the people there,” Obang Metho who heads the Solidarity Movement for New Ethiopia, an organization fighting for social justice told VOA. Metho says the fighting is concentrated at the Tigray-Amhara border.

The disputed territories are the Welkait, Tegede, Humera, Telemte and Raya districts. The Amhara claim the land was taken from them when the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front took control of the national government in 1991.

Amhara, the second biggest ethnic group in Ethiopia, took over some disputed areas between the two federal states in the north of the country last year.

This week, the government in Addis Ababa, led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, threatened to end its cease-fire, blaming Tigray rebel forces for provocation.

Ethiopian political commentator Befekadu Hailu says the conflict between the Amhara and Tigray needs a political solution.

“Since Ethiopian politics is shaped by ethnicity and regions are named after ethnic groups, it sounds like the ethnic groups are fighting,” Hailu told VOA. “So very distinct, the Tigray regional state has its own militia force and Amhara regional state has its own militia. So these militias are receiving instructions from their regional governments and they are fighting because they are instructed by their political leaders. So it’s not some random and communal driven conflict but it’s a politically driven one.”

Fisseha Tekle, an Ethiopian researcher for rights group Amnesty International, says civilians are caught in the latest fighting in the north and security forces are carrying out discriminatory arrests.

“The situation remains dire and the conflict seems to escalate this week. But what follows is that since the withdrawal of the Ethiopian national defense force in parts of Tigray, there has been a wave of arrests and detention targeting Tigrayans in Addis and out of Addis. So we have spoken to family members, lawyers and friends of those people who are affected. So it shows that Tigrayans are being targeted by Ethiopian security forces,” Tekle said.

The Tigray conflict has driven some 50,000 people into neighboring Sudan and caused a hunger crisis affecting millions. The region is largely cut off from the rest of the country and aid agencies are struggling to access the area to provide needed humanitarian and medical assistance.

Source: Voice of America

The World Meteorological Organization is calling for action to halt climate change as extreme weather becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Heavy rainfall this week has triggered devastating floods across western Europe, killing and injuring scores of people, destroying homes and livelihoods. At the same time, parts of Scandinavia — northern Europe’s coldest region — are enduring scorching temperatures.

The Finnish Meteorological Institute says Finland had its warmest June on record, which has extended into July. Southern Finland it notes has had 27 consecutive days with temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius. By Finland’s normally frigid temperatures, that qualifies as a heatwave.

The western U.S. and Canada also have been gripped by heat, with many records broken in states of Nevada and Utah. Last August, Death Valley, California reached a temperature of 54.4 degrees Celsius, the world’s highest temperature record. But meteorologists believe Death Valley may have equaled that record a week ago on July 9.

The spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization, Clare Nullis, says the heatwave in the western U.S. has led to megadrought conditions and numerous wildfires.

“The heatwave that we saw in parts of the U.S. and Canada at the end of June…This heatwave would have been virtually impossible without the influence of human-caused climate change,” said Nullis. “Climate change, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, made the heatwave at least 150 times more likely.”

Nullis says climate change already is increasing the frequency of extreme weather events. She adds many single events have been shown to have been made worse by global warming.

“We need to step up climate action,” said Nullis. “We need to step up the level of ambition. We are not doing really enough to stay within the targets of the Paris agreement and keep temperatures below two degrees Celsius, even 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.”

The spokeswoman’s call echoes that of U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who is urging all countries to do more to avoid a climate catastrophe linked to rising carbon dioxide emissions and temperatures.

Source: Voice of America

Sudan’s vice president visited South Sudan’s capital on Wednesday to reiterate Khartoum’s support for its neighbor and to urge the government and armed groups to fully implement the 2018 peace agreement.

After meeting with President Salva Kiir, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, vice president of Sudan’s transitional government, said Sudan will continue to offer its support to the peace partners in South Sudan so they can carry out security arrangements and other parts of the deal that have yet to be implemented.

Dagalo commended South Sudan’s leaders for progress made in reconstituting the National Legislative Assembly, the council of states and establishing state governments.  He said they need to move more quickly on implementing agreed-to security arrangements, especially the training of government and former rebel forces into a unified army.

“We have been assured that the joint forces are going to be graduated [from training], and this is positive news. And we hope that their graduation should not delay any more because we want to see the second batch go for training as well,” said Dagalo. He said Sudan would be monitoring “this development more closely through the different joint committees,” as a guarantor of the peace deal.

Chapter two of the revitalized peace agreement requires the parties to form a unified  army. The first group of forces registered at training centers across the country have remained at the camps for nearly two years.

Dagalo said implementing the peace deal is the only means to guarantee stability in the country.

He added that “a stable South Sudan will mean a stable Sudan.”

Sudan and Uganda are guarantors of South Sudan’s peace deal signed by the parties in September 2018 in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. The agreement calls for a 36- month transitional period to be followed directly by a national election but several of the document’s key provisions have yet to be carried out.

South Sudanese officials have repeatedly stated that the government lacks the funds needed to implement the deal.

Kiir has complained that sanctions and the arms embargo imposed on the country by the United Nations Security Council have slowed implementation of the peace agreement.  Kiir has also insisted that the country is unable to train thousands of joint forces to form a unified army due to a lack of weapons, an assertion that western diplomats and United Nations officials have questioned.

Tut Galuak, Kiir’s security advisor who also heads the country’s peace implementation committee, announced Wednesday that the joint forces will graduate shortly after the Muslim holiday of Eid Al Adha.

Despite the challenges that lie ahead such as chronic underfunding for training centers, Galuak told reporters the parties are fully committed to implementing the peace deal.

“We are certain in our stance that the peace implementation is going on well. All parties are optimistic about lasting peace in the country,” said Galuak.

 

 

Source: Voice of America