The African Tribune

Mali's drone campaign has killed 731 civilians in three years. Between September 2023 and September 2026, 199 air strikes hit mostly civilian targets, according to a three-year investigation that cross-referenced satellite imagery, video, photographs, munitions debris, witness testimony and geolocation data. The scale of those losses places Mali's air war among the most costly for civilians anywhere in the Sahel. 199 Strikes, 731 civilian deaths: the three-year record The tally covers September 2023 through September 2026. Conflict-monitoring data compiled for the investigation records 199 strikes that primarily struck civilians, and 731 civilian deaths over that period. Those numbers do not mean every victim has been individually named, nor that the legal responsibility for each strike h...

With Nigeria's presidential election drawing closer, the security of the ballot has moved to the front of the national conversation. Public anxiety over political violence, fraud and insecurity in several parts of the country — echoed well beyond its borders — has pushed the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) high command, under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, into a run of reassuring public statements. A pledge of strict neutrality from the top The Inspector General of Police, Olatunji Disu, together with regional commands, has publicly restated a commitment to a "free, fair and transparent" vote. Acknowledging long-standing accusations of bias or leniency towards the ruling party, the leadership says its officers will remain strictly neutral from the campaign trail through to the counting of ballo...

Mali's prison system is being crushed by a wave of arrests rather than by a wave of convictions. The country's detention centres, strained for years by structural neglect, have slid into outright saturation since the political transition, as police sweeps and military security operations funnel thousands of new detainees into facilities that were already full.Bamako's central jail: 10,000 detainees in a space built for 600The Maison Centrale d'Arret in Bamako tells the story in a single figure. Designed to hold 600 people, it now houses more than 10,000, leaving it at nearly 17 times its official capacity. The driving force behind that number is a security doctrine built around locking down major urban centres and a loosely defined campaign against crime and terrorism, which has turned arr...

A bitter reality behind Burkina Faso's sovereignty discourse In Tougan, the observation is stark. Beyond the rhetoric of sovereignty, industrialisation, and national production, agricultural producers state that they continue to confront a far less glorious reality alone: selling their harvests at a loss, repaying their credits, and, at times, considering crossing the border to survive. “Last year, maize yielded well. They capped the price, and producers made no profit. This year, others will cross the border because of the credits,” reports a testimony from Tougan. A situation captured by a particularly telling phrase: “The producer weeps when harvests are good, and he weeps when harvests are bad.” This contradiction raises a fundamental question: where has the priority granted to those w...

The Front Populaire pour la Justice (FPL) has gone public with a direct appeal to Niger's youth, inviting them to join its ranks against the military government in Niamey. The message was released as a video carried across social networks and delivered in several languages, including Arabic, at a moment when the junta is struggling to contain a security crisis that keeps striking civilians. What the FPL said, and who it was addressing The wording from the group's spokesperson was short and pointed at a single target. "We have no problem with the people of Niger. Our main and only problem is the current regime in Niger. We are making a special call to the youth to join us on the FPL front against this regime," the spokesperson declared. The framing is deliberate: rather than confronting th...

At least 43 civilians were killed and many more wounded when air and ground operations hit vital water infrastructure around Kidal in northern Mali on 15 and 16 September 2026. By striking the wells that keep nomadic communities and their herds alive in an arid landscape, the offensive has pushed an entire region into a deepening humanitarian crisis. Two days of strikes, one target: the region's water Water decides everything in Mali's northern desert. On Tuesday 15 September 2026, a Su-24 bomber struck Amassine, a locality in the Kidal region. The target was the village well, the single watering point used by the nomadic herders living around it. Tassik hit the following day Military pressure escalated at Tassik on 16 September. Mali's armed forces, supported by Russian paramilitary uni...