The UNSC has extended a nine-year-old UN peacekeeping operation known as MINUSMA for another 12 months.
Malians are fleeing to nearby Mauritania to escape from bandits, fighters, the army and now Russian operatives.
Government says 132 people killed as armed group attacks villages in Mali’s central Mopti region.
Number of civilians killed in central Sahel in attacks by ISIL-affiliated group has almost doubled since 2020: Report.
![A French soldier with the Barkhane force in Africa's Sahel region, in central Mali in 2019 [Daphné Benoit/AFP]](/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/000_1FA77F.jpg?resize=570%2C380)
Gunmen were travelling on motorcycles near Niger’s border with Burkina Faso, France’s military says.
UN refugee chief says more than 100 million people around the world are displaced as a result of war and other crises.
Oumeya Ould Albakaye, ISGS’s chief of two provinces in Mali and Burkina Faso was captured this week.
The landlocked country has now replaced Mali, birthplace of the conflict in the Sahel, as the epicentre of the crisis.
West African heads of state agreed to keep sanctions on Mali unless the government proposes a new transition.
Generals hope offer will lead to lifting of sanctions imposed after they reneged on an earlier promise to hold elections
Two UN reports published this week expressed alarm at the intensification of violence in central Mali.
![A photo taken in 2016 shows a soldier of the United Nations mission to Mali guarding a UN vehicle after it drove over an explosive device in northern Mali [Souleymane Ag Anara/AFP]](/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/000_32BP3QQ.jpg?resize=270%2C180)
Concerns about security in Mali have deepened since former coloniser France recently announced withdrawal of its troops.
In DR Congo, the most-neglected country on list for 2nd year running, a third of the population went hungry last year.
The report says civilian deaths, rights abuses attributable to the Malian military surged in the first quarter of 2022.
