Drone strikes in war-torn Sudan have killed hundreds in just three days. Most of the deaths were in West Kordofan state, including in an area contested with South Sudan, sparking fears of a spillover of the war.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) reportedly killed 41 people by striking a gathering of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) near Sudan’s southeastern border with Ethiopia in the Blue Nile state last Friday, October 9.
Later on Sunday, October 18, air defenses of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which heads the government, intercepted multiple suicide drones launched by the RSF. The drones targeted Upper Atbara and Setit dam complex in Gedaref state, and the Khashm El-Girba dam in neighboring Kassala.
The following day, on October 19, the RSF launched a wave of drones toward the airport in the national capital, Khartoum. While the air defenses intercepted most of them, one drone struck near the airport, killing four people, including three children.
The RSF took over the capital soon after starting this war in April 2023 against the SAF, the national army with which it had ruled as part of a military junta. The SAF regained control of the capital in March 2025.
In the meantime, later in October 2025, the RSF consolidated control over most of Sudan’s vast western region of Darfur, overrunning the SAF’s last holdout, El Fasher, and depopulating the city in a campaign deemed genocidal by a UN investigation.
After thus taking over Darfur – except for some SAF small holdouts on the border with Chad – the RSF has since been pushing eastward toward Khartoum. The Kordofan region in between, comprising three states, has since become a main front of this war.
Here, on October 18, in West Kordofan’s RSF-controlled town of al-Dabba, SAF struck a transport hub that was crowded on a market day, killing 80 people on the spot. 30 others later died in hospital. Another SAF drone also struck a market in the Al-Mujlad town.
Then, on the morning of October 19, SAF drones struck yet another market it suspected to be a source of fuel supply for the RSF, killing 153 people in Abyei, an area disputed by Sudan and South Sudan, ever since the latter seceded from the former in 2011.
This area in the Nile oil basin has over 4,000 UN peacekeepers and is jointly administered by Sudan and South Sudan. South Sudan’s government summoned Sudan’s ambassador to protest this strike.
A spillover of Sudan’s war into South Sudan could have dire consequences, especially since South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, is itself at a heightened risk of slipping back into its own disastrous civil war, which had claimed up to 400,000 lives between late 2013 and mid-2015.
The death count of the war in Sudan has been lost after exceeding 150,000 as early as June 2024. By the time the war entered its fourth year in April 2026, drone strikes had become the main driver of civilian casualties in this war, causing 80% of all the civilian deaths in the first four months of this year, killing at least 880 people.
“We are alarmed by the continued deadly drone strikes across the country that are killing civilians, including children, and that are disrupting essential services,” UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said on October 19.
Cereal production in Burkina Faso has risen 53% to a record high under the government of Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, who has made food self-sufficiency an urgent priority since coming to power.
The country has produced 124% of the national cereal needs, the agricultural minister, Commander Ismaël Sombié, said earlier this month at the 3rd edition of the National Days of Patriotic Engagement and Citizen Participation (JEPPC).
Paddy rice production for the first time exceeded a million tons in 2025, while Maize production reached well over 2,68 million tons, he added in his address to a panel titled “From field to market: producing and consuming Burkinabe to strengthen our sovereignty.”
Including all other cereals, the total production of over seven million tons is a historic high. It was only 4.66 million tons in 2021-22. It was a tumultuous period. Amid mass protests calling for the expulsion of the troops of Burkina Faso’s former colonizer, France, the regime of President Roch Marc Kaboré, widely perceived in the country as a French puppet, was ousted in a coup.
However, the new military government replacing this regime, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo, dragged its feet on meeting the protesters’ demand for the expulsion of French troops. In this backdrop, another coup followed that September, bringing Captain Ibrahim Traoré to power.
In less than half a year after taking power, he expelled them, asserting Burkina Faso’s sovereignty. However, his government, backed by the anti-France protest movement, trade unions, and progressive sections of the civil society, has repeatedly insisted that sovereignty cannot be consolidated without reducing the country’s dependence on imports for basic food needs.
Soon after swearing in as transitional president that October, Traoré launched the Presidential Initiative for Agricultural Production (2023-2024), which later became part of the larger, more ambitious 2023-2025 Agro-Pastoral and Fisheries Offensive (OAPH), launched in September 2023.
Spending 273.99 billion CFA francs on this initiative, the state developed 11,774 hectares of irrigated areas and 41,275 hectares of lowland areas, making them available to farmers.
It invested in water management, installing 485 high-yield boreholes. It increased mechanization, including by deploying 1,261 tractors. And through this initiative, the state supplied inputs, including 160,560 tons of mineral fertilizer, to farmers and created 418 new storage facilities.
A concrete impact on consumer plates
The 1,008,737 tons of rice produced in 2025 is 101% of the target set under the OAPH. For maize, the 2,686,531 tons produced amounted to 134% of the target achieved.
Presenting these figures to the Council of Ministers on July 31, Amos Kiénou, OAPH’s executive secretary, said that these gains have had a “concrete impact” on the consumer plate.
A bag of maize, for example, “used to cost between 35,000 and 40,000 CFA francs” during lean seasons before this campaign by Traoré’s government, he said. “Today… a bag does not exceed 20,000 CFA francs,” even as the government has set minimum prices of several crops to ensure that farmers are not forced to sell at a loss.
Beyond these carbohydrate sources, the government has also prioritized greater protein availability for the population. Against OAPH’s poultry target of 18,000,000 chickens, 18,262,480 were counted. Fish production rose from 30,574 tons to 58,476 tons during this offensive, although it remained below the target. OAPH also produced 51,818 tonnes of potatoes and renewed 3,170 hectares of mango orchards.
This campaign aimed at achieving food self-sufficiency has generated 91,027 jobs, including 26,202 permanent positions. Women have secured over a third of them. 4,724 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) have also found work. During this OAPH, agricultural GDP rose by an average of over 12% annually, while household incomes grew by 4.3%.
Agropastoral, Hydraulic and Fisheries Offensive 2026-2028
With this success to show, the government is set to expand the campaign, launching an even more ambitious Agropastoral, Hydraulic and Fisheries Offensive 2026-2028 in late July this year.
The state funding of 839.99 billion CFA francs is expected to finance this new offensive, which is to develop another 50,000 hectares of irrigated areas and 100,000 hectares of lowlands.
Plantain, sunflower, pineapple, rabbit, oil palm, and cocoa are included as the six emerging sectors in the 2026-2028 offensive. The gains made in maize, potato, mango, livestock-meat, fish and poultry are to be consolidated in this new phase, while rice, milk, soybeans, sesame, peanuts, wheat, cassava, and shea fall under priority sectors.
The plan also targets the building of 418 more storage facilities, including 11 cold rooms and 63 processing units.
The government’s aim is to develop domestic capacity across the entire agricultural value chain – from cultivation to processing to final consumption – to consolidate Burkina Faso’s sovereignty, said agriculture minister Sombié in his remarks on October 7.
60,000 security personnel were deployed across India’s national capital on October 10. This included the police of Delhi and neighboring states, as well as paramilitary forces pulled from regions of India affected by armed insurgencies.
They sealed off central Delhi to stop protesters opposing the mass disenfranchisement of 130 million voters from reaching Jantar Mantar, the designated protest site on Parliament Street.
The railways cancelled over 250 trains to Delhi. “So far as I remember, it has never happened in the history of Indian Railways that so many trains were cancelled just because of a protest or agitation,” said Shiv Gopal Mishra, general secretary of the All India Railwaymen’s Federation (AIRF).
Scores of activists already travelling to the national capital from other states of India were detained on moving trains and forced to alight at numerous railway stations in multiple states. Many grassroots activists in several other states were placed under preventive detention in their homes ahead of the protest. Paramilitary forces were deployed at checkpoints on Delhi’s borders, where vehicles were searched for any signs of protesters, placards, etc.
Within the national capital, 45 metro train stations were closed. Internet and telecommunications were down in the four-kilometer radius of Jantar Mantar. Around Parliament Street alone, where Jantar Mantar is located, over 3,000 security personnel were deployed, with multi-layer barricades, each manned by about a hundred.
Evading this anticipated hurdle, hundreds of activists from the Students Federation of India (SFI) and the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) had already positioned themselves the previous night just over three kilometers northeast of Jantar Mantar at HKS Surjeet Bhavan.
A memorial to the freedom fighter and veteran communist leader, HKS Surjeet, it serves as an education center of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPIM] and also hosts SFI’s Central Committee office.
The Delhi Police's midnight attempt to intimidate students at the SFI Central Committee office in HKS Surjeet Bhawan was promptly rebuffed by the CPI(M) party leaders there. pic.twitter.com/x45gOglsCk
“But the police knew we were there,” recalled SFI activist Asikul. The police had tried over the last two nights to enter the premises to take stock of the preparations, but were stopped. Activists worried the police could barricade the gates and stop this mobilization of hundreds from stepping out to protest the following morning.
Quietly, after midnight, student activists slipped out of HKS Surjeet Bhavan in groups of five, one after another, with cover stories for travel reasons if intercepted on the way. By six in the morning, about 250 of them had relocated to the CPIM’s national headquarters, AKG Bhavan, to the west of Jantar Mantar.
Back at HKS Surjeet Bhavan, where hundreds more stayed behind, barricading began between 10 and 10:30 am, just 100 meters from its gate, recalled Aman Saini, the Delhi State Secretary of the DYFI.
About 300-350 activists stormed out of the gates and made it through before the barricades could cut them off. Waving red flags and holding placards calling for the dismissal and arrest of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Gyanesh Kumar, they marched barely a kilometer before facing a police cordon. The police lined up shoulder to shoulder, batons held horizontal to block the protesters’ way forward.
Continuing to march, the protesters headed straight into the cordon. A tussle ensued amid chorus chants of ‘vote chor, gaddi chhod’, demanding the “vote thief” CEC’s resignation. As the protesters in the front line grappled with the police – each engaging multiple officers by dropping to the ground and resisting detention – others broke through the cordon and sprinted ahead.
Barely 300 meters ahead, a line of barricades blocked the road. Protesters stormed ahead and engaged the police. Slipping through the tussle, “I pulled the barricade from below and shoved its top. Thaad! – it fell over,” explained Aman.
Wrangling themselves free from the security personnel, many more dashed ahead, several slashing their feet against the metal of the fallen barricade, only to turn left on Minto Road and drop another barricade.
They had covered nearly half the distance to Jantar Mantar, reaching within 150 meters of the Connaught outer circle, one curve away from Parliament Street hosting the protest site.
“But the barricade there was re-enforced. We had almost managed to pull one down when the police charged at us with batons,” added Aman. Having lost numbers at each of the previous barricades, “we were only about 50 left. So they managed to detain us and shove us into buses. At least six of us were injured.”
Those who had evaded detention at the previous barricades, but were unable to push ahead, regrouped outside HKS Surjeet Bhavan and started sloganeering. Police, accompanied by paramilitary, charged with batons and detained them, and even allegedly tried to break into the premises, but were held back at its gate.
Paramilitary at the party gates
The contingent of activists who had relocated to AKG Bhavan under the cover of darkness did not have it any easier. They had only managed to stretch the security personnel and their barricades across two fronts. A paramilitary force began assembling outside its gates around 10 am, roughly the same time as the barricading began at HKS.
Several members of CPIM’s Central Committee (CC) and Politburo, including current and former Members of Parliament, many of them grey-haired, were staying at the AKG Bhavan for a CC meeting. They joined the students as they marched out.
“Some 20 people were detained right outside the gate – almost the whole frontline. The rest of us behind them pushed through. We kept running,” recalled Asikul.
About 15-20 minutes into the march, SFI activist Noel was detained. “I was not taken to a detention bus, where others were held. I was held alone in a bus used to transport the police. There I was beaten for two hours,” he said, sharing pictures of the injuries he sustained on his face.
“Two of my comrades realized that I was being held alone. So they intentionally got themselves detained near my bus and joined me. They also got beaten up,” he added. Later, when the police started marching them to the detention bus, allegedly prodding them forward by jabbing the blunt ends of their batons into their backs, “we managed to escape.”
Meanwhile, others had pushed ahead. Among them were SFI National Joint Secretary Aishe Ghosh and the DYFI’s national president, AA Rahim. They marched about a kilometer from AKG Bhavan before being apprehended at the roundabout near Gurudwara Bangla Sahib. The SFI alleged that “Aishe Ghosh was assaulted by male police personnel in the absence of women officers.”
A showdown ensued. Dropping to the road and bracing in a huddle, Aishe and other female activists held ground as female police personnel who arrived later grappled with them, eventually dragging them away to detention buses, about 1.5 km away from Jantar Mantar.
Other activists, including Asikul, had strode ahead, breaking through three barricades, and reaching within 400 meters of Jantar Mantar. “We were not able to break through the fourth. We were only about 35 left,” said Asikul.
“Using chokeholds and baton charges, they detained us. Some managed to escape detention by breaking out through a bus window,” an increasingly popular mode of resistance by the younger generation of activists, determined to make detentions as costly and as strenuous as possible.
Police detaining student activist and SFI president Adarsh M Saji. Photo: CPIM
Detention at the stadiums
Asikul and the rest of the detainees were driven almost 50 km to Bawana in northwest Delhi and held at the Rajiv Gandhi stadium, where hundreds more were already being held. Among them was 77-year-old Manik Sarkar, a senior communist leader and Tripura state Chief Minister from 1998 to 2018. He was accompanied by the northeastern state’s current opposition leader, Jitendra Chaudhury. Veteran trade unionist and former Member of Parliament (MP) Tapan Sen, along with other ex-legislators, were also held there.
“There was not a drop of water in any tap in the toilet. We were not even provided with clean water to drink. When we demanded, we were asked to drink from” an old, ill-maintained leaky tank in the premises, said SFI activist Utkarsh, who was also held here. “We challenged the police to drink that water. They refused.”
When detainees began falling sick, Utkarsh and other activists warned the senior police officer in charge of this detention of consequences for mistreating a former Chief Minister and ex-MPs. They reminded him of his responsibility if one of these elderly political leaders fell seriously ill. Only then did the police “finally provide us with water and some snacks.”
Seven other stadiums in the city, along with several other public facilities, were reportedly turned into detention centers that day, when security personnel detained over 7,000 people from the streets of the national capital, including protesters, journalists and even pedestrians suspected of being protesters.
More than 7 km south of Jantar Mantar, near the INA market, outside barricaded central Delhi, police detained protesting activists of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), led by Neha Bora, one of the most recognizable faces of the protest movement.
Detentions were also reported in Raj Ghat, about 4.5 km northeast of Jantar Mantar, where the Revolutionary Workers’ Party of India (RWPI) and its affiliated mass organizations had organized a protest.
At the airport, almost 15 km to the southwest of Jantar Mantar, the police boarded a plane as soon as it landed from Mumbai – even before the passengers could disembark – to detain Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das, and Ashutosh Ranka from their seats. They are the top leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).
“Cockroaches”
The pressure group started as a satirical protest on social media in May, after the Chief Justice of India said: “There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, RTI activists and other activists.”
The CJP has since become a material force, playing a key role in the protest against exam paper leaks that forced the Union Education Minister to resign in July.
About two months after his resignation, an investigation by the Indian Express newspaper exposed irregularities in the conduct of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Gyanesh Kumar. Several times, his two fellow election commissioners had flagged their concerns about his potentially illegal and unconstitutional decisions.
These pertained to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, still underway after already deleting the names of 130 million people from India’s voter rolls – in an unprecedented shrinking of India’s electorate. Opposition parties have long alleged that this exercise is meant to help the ruling far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, consolidate its hold on power.
Earlier this month, on the birth anniversary of Gandhi on October 2, protests began, calling for the scrapping of the SIR and the CEC’s resignation. On October 7, the CJP called on youngsters to take Jantar Mantar again on October 10.
In response to its call, thousands of youngsters, most in their late teens and early 20s, kept arriving in small groups to central Delhi throughout the day, only to be whisked away by the police.
Detention as deterrence
“These youngsters, who were not part of any cadre-based organization, were particularly harassed by police because they identified them as vulnerable. They were threatened, their phones and keys were snatched,” said DYFI’s Delhi State Vice President, Rikta Krishnaswamy, who was held with hundreds of them at a makeshift detention center in Jafar Kalan, over 45 km west of Jantar Mantar.
Bundled into a bus at the final barricade reached by the march from HKS Bhavan that morning, Rikta was brought here by midday, when “the electrician was still installing the fan. We were held until evening with nothing to eat – not even a cup of tea. The police are trying to make detention as much of a deterrent as possible.”
But the protesters were not deterred. The very next day, DYFI activists, including several central committee members, gathered at Connaught Place, a 15-minute walk from Jantar Mantar, which remained cordoned off, even as the overall restrictions on movement in central Delhi had eased.
Custodial torture, sexual harassment
Soon after they began staging a protest, security personnel swarmed in. The detained protesters “were not taken to any police station,” according to a petition alleging custodial torture, filed in the Supreme Court by AA Rahim, the youth organization’s national president and an MP.
“Instead, while still near Connaught Place, the bus was driven to a closed and heavily guarded space in front of the Daryaganj restaurant, away from public view, out of the reach of the media and without any CCTV cameras. There, the detainees were sorted according to gender and then forcibly shifted into a specialized police van divided into five separate cells.”
These vehicles “functioned as unrecorded, mobile places of detention, wholly outside the safeguards of the Constitution,” added the petition. “Inside the cells of the van, the detainees were beaten on the face, kicked on the backbone with boots and struck on the head. Several of the personnel wore no name badges.”
At a press conference on October 12, women activists of the SFI showed bruises and alleged sexual harassment by security personnel.
But even the alleged custodial torture and sexual harassment has not deterred the protests, which are widening, drawing in more sections of society into the agitation.
Farmers and workers to join the agitation
Representatives of India’s largest and oldest farmers’ union, the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), the All India Agricultural Workers’ Union (AIAWU), the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), along with SFI and DYFI leaders, met at the HKS Surjeet Bhavan on October 14.
Several public intellectuals and artists also participated in this meeting of mass and class organizations’ leaders, where they jointly formed the All India Platform of People Against SIR. This platform announced October 23 as a Nationwide Street Action Day Against SIR.
Condemning the central government’s denotification of Jantar Mantar as a designated protest site on October 12, the platform gave a slogan to turn every street and every village into Jantar Mantar.
In less than five months, the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreak in world history has killed at least 4,205 people in the conflict-ridden eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as of October 7.
It is the deadliest outbreak in the DRC since the disease was first discovered in the country in 1976, killing nearly one in two of the 8,728 people confirmed to be infected.
With treatment still in experimental stages, there is no specifically approved treatment for the particular Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus that caused this outbreak, declared on May 15.
However, the virus had been circulating in communities in Ituri province since mid-February, three months before the outbreak was identified and officially declared.
Aid cuts: unpaid frontline workers
When the health response started, already late, it was severely underfunded, as the UK, France and Germany have also followed in the footsteps of the US to slash humanitarian aid and increase military spending.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in late September that the Humanitarian Response Plan had only half the funding needed to counter the outbreak.
Contact tracing is well below the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the WHO-recommended 95% to effectively break transmission. Only now in October, it has been built up to 80.4%, which still means that almost 20% of the people at risk of exposure to the virus due to contact with confirmed cases are off the radar of the health authorities, and could potentially be transmitting the disease further.
Lack of funds has meant that the understaffed and overworked frontline health workers – scores of whom have died in the line of duty – have been repeatedly forced to go on strike to protest unpaid wages. Their efforts are further impeded by the poor transport infrastructure and lack of healthcare facilities in the remote eastern region where the disease is spreading.
Armed conflict complicating health response
Armed conflict displacing millions on this mineral-rich land is another major hurdle in the way of effective health response. In Ituri, the epicenter of the outbreak, a key Ebola transit center in the fighting-affected Kigonze camp burnt down on September 29.
The camp, which had housed 19,000 Internally Displaced People (IDPs) fleeing violence, was reportedly infiltrated by the Convention for the Popular Revolution (CRP).
Uganda
This coalition of armed militias, formed in March 2025 at a hotel in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, is led by Thomas Lubanga, a former warlord, convicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of war crimes, released from prison in 2020 after serving 14 years. He resides in Uganda, where he is also known to have recruited fighters along ethnic lines.
In a 2022 judgment, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Uganda to pay DRC USD 325 million in reparations. This included USD 225 million for killings, rapes, child soldier recruitment, and displacement, USD 40 million for damage to property, and USD 60 million for plundering its gold, diamonds, and timber as an “occupying power” in Ituri from 1998 to 2003.
The nature of the occupation has since evolved. Under a bilateral agreement with the DRC, Uganda had deployed 2,000 troops to the country to jointly fight an Islamic State-affiliated group. However, Uganda deployed an additional 4,000 troops without the DRC’s consent in early 2025, around the time as the CRP’s formation in Kampala.
Searching for CRP militants and weapons, soldiers and police entered the camp on September 20. When they came under fire, clashes erupted between the security forces and the militants. Thousands of IDPs fled again as gunfire continued rattling around the camp for days. Deaths, injuries, and arrests were reported.
Ebola transit center burns down
Amid this violence, on September 29, fire engulfed the camp’s Ebola transit center. It is a facility for the isolation and care of suspected cases, until the results of the lab tests on their blood samples. If confirmed as positive, they are then transported to an Ebola treatment center.
“It’s been a huge struggle to create Ebola transit centers [and] Ebola treatment centers; it’s required money, bringing in staff and it’s been a struggle all across the east. So, when we lose a center, that means we lose capacity, we lose investment and we have to start again,” said Julien Harneis, UN’s senior Ebola response official in the DRC.
“Eastern DRC now faces a catastrophic collision of disease and conflict, with the Ebola outbreak in Ituri province outpacing the response,” the WHO’s director general, Tedros Ghebreyesus, had warned in May.
The outbreak has since reached seven of DRC’s 26 provinces, predominantly in the east. About three-quarters of the confirmed cases remain concentrated in Ituri. However, its neighboring province, North Kivu, which has another 20% of confirmed cases, is emerging as the new hotspot.
Rwanda
Large areas of this province are occupied by Rwandan troops and its proxy militias, the M23, which captured its capital, Goma, in January 2025, and went on to expand territorial control into South Kivu province.
Without humanitarian access to these occupied areas, the government cannot mount a health response, Communications Minister Patrick Katembwe said in late May, second week after the outbreak was declared. He called for the “withdrawal of foreign forces and the removal of their auxiliaries.”
Instead, the M23’s parallel administration launched a separate health response in the areas under its control, independently of the DRC government, with which cooperation was limited to data sharing and lab testing. This severely hampered contact tracing, especially because people regularly travel between the M23-held areas and government-controlled territory.
“Multiple outbreaks are developing at the same time”
The parallel M23 administration has also meant additional delays in diagnosis. With bed capacity in Ebola treatment centers stretched taut in North Kivu, medics in this province are forced to refer infected patients to general health facilities, where a third of all confirmed cases are being treated, posing further risk of transmission into the wider community.
The spread has rapidly increased since September in this province, which now accounts for nearly 40% of all new confirmed cases, up from 24% in August-end, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on October 5.
“It is like fighting a megafire,” said Stéphanie Hoffmann, MSF coordinator of the treatment center in Butembo, a major commercial city in the province. “Multiple outbreaks are developing at the same time, with varying intensity and in different locations. As long as new hotspots continue to emerge while the virus spreads across northern North Kivu, containing the epidemic will remain extremely difficult.”
After expanding domestic control over mining to pursue economic sovereignty, Burkina Faso has moved up the value chain with its first gold refinery, inaugurated by its president, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, on September 28.
Most of the gold mined in the country was previously exported as unrefined dore to be processed abroad. Now, it will be processed, tested for purity, and certified domestically at the Raffinerie Nationale d’Or du Burkina Faso, built at a cost of USD 19 million on more than 12 acres in the capital, Ouagadougou.
“From now on, gold … must not only be extracted in Burkina Faso, it must be processed, controlled, valued and certified in Burkina Faso,” Traoré said, inaugurating the new facility.
Inviting the country’s youth “to learn to master the whole value chain,” he added, “Natural resources belong to the people. They must contribute to improve their living conditions.”
In the struggle for sovereignty
Burkina Faso has long been one of Africa’s largest gold producers. However, proceeds from its extraction were historically siphoned out of the country by foreign companies owning its mines. Burkinabe ownership was limited to only one mine, which a former mines minister owned privately.
The state-owned mining company, Société de Participation Minière du Burkina Faso (SOPAMIB), served only as a dormant holder of 10% stakes in Burkina Faso’s foreign-owned mines.
Changes began in 2022 with the ouster of then-president Roch Kaboré in a popularly supported military coup amid mass protests against the Burkinabe state’s subjugation to French neocolonialism.
Subsequently, in 2023, Traoré’s transitional military government (backed by the trade unions, the anti-France protest movement, and wide sections of the civil society) consolidated mass support by expelling French troops from the country, asserting Burkina Faso’s sovereignty.
Recognizing that control over its own economy and natural resources is a central pillar of sovereignty, his government launched sweeping reforms to the mining sector in mid-2024.
In the remaining foreign-owned mines, the reforms raised SOPAMIB’s free stake from 10% to 15%. It also enabled the state to buy an additional paid stake of 30%, either entirely through SOPAMIB or in partnership with domestic private investors, potentially raising the Burkinabe stake in foreign companies to 45%.
Mining revenues finance national development
As state revenues grew from its expanded ownership, the government undertook major infrastructural projects. In 2025, it laid 500 kilometers of low-voltage lines and 165 kilometers of transmission lines, connecting almost 160,000 new households to the national grid and electrifying 131 rural localities.
Its National Development Plan (NDP) for 2026–2030 is one of the largest economic programs ever rolled out in the Sahel. It is a 64-billion-dollar plan, two-thirds of which is to be funded domestically from state revenues generated and citizen shareholding programs.
Further inspiring confidence in the viability of its five-year plan, the government expanded the 2026 annual budget by 7.58% mid-year, having already collected almost 57.5% of the projected annual revenue. This has boosted infrastructural spending without increasing the budget deficit.
Financed by surpluses generated when international mineral prices rise above the state-set benchmark, the FSMIB is not for easing short-term budgetary pressures. It is ring-fenced for long-term strategic infrastructural and industrial projects to reduce the need for external funding, on which such projects have historically depended.
The mining reforms have not only reorganized the distribution of mining proceeds away from foreign extraction toward national economic development, but have also helped to massively increase production itself. The 94-ton annual output in 2025 is the highest ever recorded in Burkina Faso – a nearly 47% increase from the 64 tons in 2024.
Formalization of artisanal mining – a game changer
Critical for this rise was the formalization of artisanal mining. In the absence of state procurement infrastructure, artisanal miners have historically sold the gold they mined to smugglers who paid the international spot price in cash. Tons of gold were thus extracted from Burkina Faso every year with no paper trail, no taxes, and no yield to the national economy, beyond sustaining the meager livelihoods of the artisanal miners.
A meager quarter to less than half a ton of the gold extracted by artisanal mining annually entered the official channels overseen by the National Agency for the Supervision of Artisanal and Semi-Mechanized Mining Operations (ANEEMAS). [See: years].
In October 2023, the government reorganized ANEEMAS into the National Society of Precious Substances (SONASP), tasking it with developing infrastructure to procure metals from artisanal miners. The annual official artisanal production rose in 2024 to 7.13 tons, a 15-fold growth over the previous year.
When the annual gold production in 2025 reached a historic high of 94 tons, roughly 42 of those came from artisanal miners. Rising from just over seven a year ago, artisanal production was nearing the industrial mines’ output of about 52 tons by 2025, as SONASP’s procurement infrastructure expanded.
To further help SONASP expand coverage in a concentrated manner, the government established nine new cooperatives of artisanal miners in the first half of 2026. It also delineated four mining corridors exclusively for artisanal miners, de-escalating the historic conflict between artisanal and industrial miners.
With this state support structure in place, artisanal miners had already supplied 29 tons to SONASP this year by June 30, exceeding the 26 tons produced by industrial mines in the first half of this year. In this period, the government completed the construction of four new power plants, adding 126.4 megawatts of generating capacity to the national grid.
Due in part to the improved power supply, the industrial mining output rose in the first half of this year by 7.25% over the first half of 2025. Official artisanal output grew by 45%.
“We want to master everything to the last detail”
“Comrades, producing in quantity is no longer enough. Extracting is no longer enough. Exporting our resources is no longer enough,” Mines Minister Yacouba Zabré Gouba said on September 28 at the inauguration of the country’s first gold refinery with an initial annual capacity of 164 tons.
“The revolution we have engaged in requires that each national resource be used by the nation,” processing it across all stages of the value chain. “Our gold will no longer be used” by foreign companies “to create added value” while “our people remain in need,” he added.
”We start with gold,” said Traoré. But there are “many other metals … in our subsurface that we want to extract,” including manganese, copper and zinc. “We want to master everything to the last detail.”
The Ugandan army, which had offered to capture Iran’s capital within 72 hours for Israel earlier this year, is now readying a troop deployment to Gaza under US command.
Discussing the deployment, senior Ugandan military officers were at the US-led Civil-Military Coordination Center in Kiryat Gat on August 17. The town on the edge of the Negev desert – barely 25 km from the northern Gaza Strip – was established in 1955 after depopulating the Palestinian villages of al-Faluja and Iraq al-Manshiya during the Nakba.
Burundi’s military officials were also reportedly present at the meeting here, after which the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) gave them both a tour of the city of Rafa in southern Gaza as part of the “pre-deployment site survey.”
Burundi is yet to confirm the deployment of its troops. However, Uganda’s parliament, practically a rubber stamp with over 70% of the seats held by the ruling party, approved the deployment of its troops on August 6.
This made it the sixth country to join the International Stabilization Force (ISF) proposed by US President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, envisioned as the 20,000-strong force led by US Major General Jasper Jeffers.
The remaining five contributors of troops hold relatively diverse positions on the Israel-Palestine question. Indonesia has been a vocal critic of Israel, backing South Africa’s genocide case against it at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It maintains no diplomatic ties with Israel. The largest contributor has reportedly put its 8,000 troop deployment on hold, although it hasn’t formally withdrawn from the ISF.
Kazakhstan, on the other hand, has maintained deep diplomatic ties with Israel since 1992. Morocco joined the Abraham Accords in 2020. Both have done so while mouthing the two-state solution for an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital as official state policy.
The remaining two European countries are staunchly pro-Israel. Albania has announced plans to open a commercial liaison office in Jerusalem. Kosovo has outdone Albania, following Trump’s lead by moving its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.
The sixth country to come on board, Uganda, professes a commitment to Israel that dwarfs that of the European troop-contributors.
Offering to join US-Israeli war on Iran
“Any talk of … defeating Israel will bring us into the war” against Iran on “the side of Israel,” Uganda’s military chief, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, posted on X in late March. He is the son and heir apparent of Uganda’s 81-year-old president, Yoweri Museveni, ruling the country since 1986.
After 40 years of rule, Museveni was handed a seventh term by the Electoral Commission in January, following an election marred by “widespread repression and intimidation against the political opposition, human rights defenders, [and] journalists,” according to the UN.
Soon after the results, Kainerugaba began hunting down Museveni’s political opponents, forcing his main challenger in the election, Bobi Wine, into exile, bragging about killing 30 of his party’s members, and swearing to “get them all.”
Israeli military technology, from weapons to surveillance equipment, has long enabled Museveni’s domestic crackdown. Recalling that Israel has supported his regime for decades, “Why wouldn’t we defend her now?” asked Kainerugaba. He added in a subsequently deleted post that the Ugandan military had offered to join the US and Israel in their war efforts against Iran, claiming, “We could have captured Tehran in 72 hours.”
This bold claim of being able to defeat the world’s 16th largest military power, with a military ranked 107 out of 145 countries, was gently mocked, even in the Israeli media at the time.
“Gaza, here we come”: Ugandan soldiers post on social media
Nevertheless, barely five months later, Ugandan soldiers began uploading posts on social media, captioned, “Gaza, here we come,” filming themselves loading equipment onto planes – taking off and landing in undisclosed locations.
These posts by Ugandan soldiers began circulating on social media after the Ugandan parliament approved the troop deployment on August 6.
Military deployment as a diplomatic strategy
Addressing the parliament ahead of the vote, Maj Gen David Gonyi, parliamentary representative of the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF), explained the rationale of the deployment to the legislators: “Uganda submitted the name of a Ugandan [veteran diplomat, Olara Otunnu] to become Secretary-General of the United Nations. It would be like shooting ourselves in the foot to say that Uganda should not participate in [the] deployment in Gaza.”
Military deployment has long been a central plank of Ugandan diplomacy, currying favor of the Western countries by sending its soldiers to missions in Somalia, South Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Its Somalia deployment has been especially crucial for the Ugandan army to receive training and support from the US Marine Corps and US Africa Command (AFRICOM).
Last November, Johan Borgstam, the European Union (EU) Special Representative for the Great Lakes Region, met Kainerugaba to propose expanding Ugandan troop deployment in DRC, on behalf of Brussels. Borgstam brought this proposal, despite the UN confirming the validity of the DRC’s accusation that Uganda is supporting the M23 armed group, a proxy of Rwanda which, along with its army, has occupied large swathes of the region in a war for DRC’s minerals.
Presenting this Western demand for Ugandan troops as a diplomatic success, Major General Henry Masiko, another parliamentary representative of the UPDF and the Joint Staff Political Commissar, told the legislators: “The UPDF is viewed as the anchor of stability in a sea of turbulence, regionally and now globally.”
He went on to add in his remarks to the parliament that the “doctrine of the force is that we go out not to dance but to confront threats against society and humanity,” in a thinly veiled reference to Palestinian resistance.
“Some troops will return in coffins,” warns opposition MP
Opposition politicians have raised concerns that deploying troops when the Ugandan government has done little to conceal its neutrality may have consequences.
“Some [troops will] return in coffins,” warned Jamal Ayagalaki. “We need answers on who will pay the UPDF, what the terms and conditions of service will be, and what support will be available to soldiers and their families.” He further warned that Uganda’s involvement in a conflict “that is not ours” could expose the country itself to new security threats.
The “parliament passed a resolution for peacekeeping, [but] what peace is [there] is Gaza?” he questioned, pointing to the lack of agreement between Israel and Hamas.
Uganda risks complicity in war crimes: former intelligence chief
“The permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups” – i.e. the Palestinian resistance – is one of the tasks the International Stabilization Force must carry out in coordination with Israel, according to the resolution adopted by the UN Security Council in November 2025, with abstentions from Russia and China.
Hamas has refused to hand over weapons to Israel or any foreign force. It has called for the creation of a Palestinian national committee, which will hold the weapons collected from Hamas and other resistance groups within Gaza.
This transfer of weapons, however, can only happen after Israel withdraws from Gaza, Hamas insists. Israel, on the other hand, has refused to withdraw from Gaza until the resistance is completely disarmed.
Therefore, in the absence of any “clear implementable political framework,” Uganda will be deploying troops in an “un-militarized active conflict area … where a belligerent state continues strikes on the occupied population,” Sejusa said. This, he warned, places Ugandan troops at the “risk of complicity in war crimes.”
After a 43-day nationwide strike, nurses in Kenya returned to work on Thursday, September 10. Their union finally secured an agreement from the government on September 9, a day after thousands of nurses and midwives from all of Kenya’s 47 counties converged at the Greenpark in the national capital, Nairobi.
From there, they marched to Delta House, headquarters of the Council of Governors (CoG), demanding the implementation of an agreement the government signed nearly a decade ago.
A decade-long struggle
The nearly five-month-long strike in 2017 had ended with both the national and county governments signing a return-to-work agreement, committing to finalize the draft of the agreed Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) and implement it within a month.
It was to incorporate measures to address the nurses’ grievances, including, among other things, increases in nursing service allowance, uniform allowance, and risk allowance. The increases were to be staggered annually and completed by 2021.
The nurses returned to work after this agreement. However, almost nine years later, the commitments contained in the return-to-work agreement remain unfulfilled, while the CBA it was meant to underpin has never been concluded.
Promised risk allowance withheld even during COVID
The government refused to increase the risk allowance even when the COVID pandemic was declared in early 2020, by the end of which it had claimed the lives of scores of nurses in Kenya. Those who survived infections in the line of duty had to spend long periods isolated from their families, estranged from their young children and suffering enormous anxiety and stress. But the increased risk allowance promised to them in 2017 remains unfulfilled, even in 2026.
On July 29, nurses downed tools in protest. The strike has since paralyzed health services countrywide. Nonetheless, even as the strike entered its second month, the county governments did not budge. On August 31, the CoG Chairperson Ahmed Abdullahi deemed the 2017 CBA financially unviable.
“Signed under duress”
He dismissed the CBA as one “signed under duress in the run-up to elections in 2017” and “never been implemented,” even as reports raised alarm about rising maternal, neonatal, and perinatal deaths across the country.
“No gun was pointed at the heads of all the signatories of our return to work agreement in 2017,” retorted KNUNM Deputy Secretary General Maurice Opetu, refuting the claim of duress. “It was signed in a very harmonious meeting out of understanding” by both the “levels of government” – the national and counties.
It is the county governors who “have made the nurses work under duress without the CBA. And then working under duress pushed us to call a strike after trying all [these] years to resolve the matter,” he insisted.
Too many nurses to pay?
The nurses’ struggle for this CBA had begun alongside similar struggles by doctors and clinical officers. The government signed and implemented CBAs for doctors and clinical officers, but refused to do the same for nurses.
“They are saying doctors are few, and clinical officers are few, but we are many, so they do not have that budget,” explained Collin Ajwang, President of the National Nurses Association of Kenya (NNAK).
“This doesn’t make sense because our large number is exactly what has helped hospitals run effectively. We have reduced maternal mortality; we are the ones making sure theatres are running; we cannot be few. We are at dispensaries where there are no doctors. Let them tell us how few they want us to be so that they can pay us this money.”
Class priorities laid bare
On the 33rd day of the nurses’ strike, the aviation workers downed tools on August 30. Flights were delayed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, while operations ground to a halt in at least three other airports. Within two days, the government signed an agreement with the aviation workers’ union, the Daily Nation reported, highlighting the contrast in the government’s handling of the two strike actions.
The “airport is a portal and exit of all serious businesses,” not only from Kenya but from East Africa and the continent as a whole, remarked the KNUNM Secretary General, Seth Panyako. “These people who are in charge of making decisions do business through the airport.” So, the government, he said, cannot afford the airports to “stop even for a minute
This business class can afford to “go to private hospitals. There is an alternative for them.” But national and county governments “really don’t care about the common” masses relying on public hospitals for healthcare, and are suffering as a result of the government’s refusal to fulfill the commitments made in the agreement it had signed, he argued.
Doctors threaten to join strike
A week later, on September 7, doctors gave the government a seven-day ultimatum, warning that they would also go on strike if it did not resolve the dispute with nurses. “Doctors cannot work without nurses. Doctors are now overburdened. We cannot continue like this,” said Davji Atellah, Secretary-General of the Kenya Medical Practitioners Pharmacists Dentists Union (KMPDU).
“In the ICU (Intensive Care Unit), in the wards, in the HDU (High Dependency Unit), only the nurses can offer that type of care,” he explained, insisting that “nursing care is very essential in healthcare.”
A day after the doctors’ warning, nurses marched on the CoG in Nairobi. Union leaders remained camped at the CoG’s headquarters.
Following a day-long closed-door meeting, the government and the union leaders signed a return-to-work agreement on September 9, with the CoG committing to pay Ksh5,000 in uniform allowance and increase the risk allowance from Ksh3,850 to Ksh8,000. The CoG also agreed to implement the pending CBA within 45 days.
“We have finally called off the 43-day strike following a breakthrough in negotiations with the Council of Governors,” Panyako announced. “We therefore call upon all our members to resume duty within the next 25 hours as we give room for the implementation of the agreements reached.”
Announcing the severing of diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Thursday, September 10, Algeria summoned the Emirati envoy and gave him 48 hours to leave the country.
“Algeria has exercised a great deal of restraint and a high sense of responsibility,” despite the increasingly “provocative or hostile actions emanating from” the Gulf power, the North African country’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
“Despite these numerous warnings, the United Arab Emirates continued to persist in these actions, which have reached limits where they can no longer be considered acceptable or tolerable within the framework of relations between two sovereign states, nor remain without a response.”
Later that day, its defense ministry announced that the UAE’s military and civilian aircraft are banned from using Algerian airspace from Friday. The only exemption is for commercial civilian planes, which can continue to fly over Algeria until the existing contract expires at the end of the year.
Algeria had already initiated the termination of the air services agreement with the UAE in February, when President Abdelmadjid Tebboune alleged attempted Emirati interference in its elections.
Multiple Algerian media outlets aligned with the state have reported that the UAE has been supporting the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK), a separatist group Algeria designated as a terrorist organization in 2021.
Algeria and the UAE also find themselves on opposing sides on several fronts of international relations.
Algeria aids Western Sahara’s liberation struggle; UAE backs Moroccan occupation
The support for the national liberation struggle of Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco immediately after it won independence from Spanish colonialism, has been a central plank of Algeria’s foreign policy.
In 2021, Algeria severed diplomatic relations with Morocco, accusing it of supporting the MAK in retaliation for Algerian support to the Polisario Front (PF), which is fighting for Western Sahara’s national liberation. But there is no equivalence between the PF and the MAK.
The MAK, which has long had close links to Israel, largely operates from Europe and is based in France, Algeria’s former colonizer. The PF, on the other hand, is fighting for Western Sahara’s liberation, with its military operating in its liberated territory adjoining Algeria. The UN recognizes the PF as the sole representative of the people of Western Sahara, a country it lists among the last few pending decolonization.
Despite funding and arming the Moroccan occupation, the US had not officially recognized Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara until December 2020, when Morocco signed the Abraham Accords to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel.
The first Trump administration, in turn, proclaimed that the US “recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory” and went on to open a consulate in Dakhla, a major city in the occupied region.
The UAE was a step ahead, setting a precedent before the American move by opening its consulate on the occupied land in November 2020, a month before Morocco normalized relations with Israel. The UAE had already normalized relations with Israel that September.
In contrast, Algeria refuses to normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians have secured their statehood. Algerian media often refers to the UAE as an “Israeli vassal”.
“Wherever they set foot, blood flows”
Algeria’s diplomatic break was foreseeable since at least July, when President Tebboune said in a thinly veiled reference to the UAE in a televised interview, “Wherever they set foot, blood flows… We want them to stay away, so that blood does not flow in our country.” He gave the example of Mali, Libya and Sudan.
A month later, in August, the UN confirmed that the USD 50 million transferred to the Al Qaeda-affiliated JNIM in the form of ransom helped fuel its attack across Mali. A Reuters investigation identified the UAE as the source of this payment to JNIM. The group has also attacked its neighbors, Burkina Faso and Niger, both of which have followed in Mali’s footsteps by expelling French troops.
The UAE’s supply of arms and mercenaries to the Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar, who has been fighting Libya’s UN-recognized government, is also well-documented in multiple UN reports since 2017.
Tebboune’s reference to “blood” flowing from Emirati interference is best demonstrated in war-torn Sudan, where the UAE is funding and arming the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), whose depopulation campaign in El Fasher had all the “hallmarks of genocide”, according to the UN.
He added in the July interview that a “diplomatic break” with the UAE “would have happened long ago.” Algeria, he explained, had refrained only to avoid adding to the already existing divisions in the Arabic-speaking world.
When the break finally came on Thursday, the UAE’s foreign ministry said it hoped that it “will be temporary, in a manner that preserves the fraternal ties between the two brotherly peoples.”
In an apparent reference to the absence of explicitly stated reasons in Algeria’s statement, Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic advisor to the UAE’s president, Mohamed bin Zayed, said, “Diplomatic relations are managed through reason, communication, and clarity of interests, not through puzzles and signals that require decoding.”
He went on to preach that “successful diplomacy is built on clarity of positions, sound management of interests and differences.”
Gargash’s statement “is revealing above all for what it carefully conceals. Not a word about the actions of this arsonist, predatory state, which thrives on chaos wherever it sticks its nose in Yemen, Sudan, the DRC, Somaliland, and elsewhere,” retorted former Algerian diplomat, Amar Belani.
Describing the UAE as a “state that has made other nations’ instability its economic model,” Belani concluded his response, saying: “As for the lesson on ‘reason and clarity of interests’, Abu Dhabi would do better to reserve it for its partners in the Abraham Accords, with whom it shares complicity in the face of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide committed against the Palestinian people.”
This sentiment against the UAE is not limited to the government or the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN), which led Algeria’s liberation struggle against French colonialism and has ruled since, except for a few years in the 1990s.
Mass protests erupted in 2019 against corruption and increasing economic capture by the military elite, strangling an economy already suffering under neoliberal austerity. This movement, known as the Hirak, forced the then president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a veteran of the FLN, to resign.
But even in these protests against the government and the ruling FLN, “Down with the UAE” and “No to the UAE in the country of martyrs”, were among the popular placards and slogans.
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