First Independent Mena Newspaper
Morocco’s Phosphates group, OCP, is about to complete the construction of a fertilizer plant in Jorf Lasfar (110 km south of Casablanca) whose entire output will be destined to the African market. The plant, costing about $ 600 million, is expected to produce one million tons of fertilizers per year that will be wholly exported […]
First Paris and then Brussels announced last Friday (14 February) that they would boost their peace-keeping forces in the strife-torn Central African Republic. Following a meeting of the national Defence Council at the Elysée Palace, France announced it would deploy 400 more soldiers and gendarmes, bringing its total forces in its former colony to 2,000. […]
King Mohammed VI of Morocco who started on Tuesday a visit to Mali, first step of a four-stop Africa trip that will also take him to Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and Gabon will undoubtedly try to give a new momentum to dialog between the Bamako government and the Tuareg rebels, part of his ceaseless efforts and […]
A Red Cross team working in northern Mali has been kidnapped by an al Qaeda-linked Islamist group known as the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), a spokesperson for the militants said earlier this week. The MUJAO official also told the media by telephone fromm the country’s capital, Bamako, that the members […]
Muslims in the Central African Republic (CAR) were facing “ethno-religious cleansing” as French troops struggle to contain the Christian ‘anti-balaka. militias, warned UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, in an interview with FRANCE 24 earlier this week. This warning comes after an alarming discovery by French troops on patrol in a rural region west […]
Spain’s minister of state for security, Francisco Martinez Vázquez, recently completed his visit to Mauritania and Senegal that started on 4 February. The aim of his tour of the region was to bolster Sahel ties and discuss ways to tackle imminent threats to the region such as clandestine immigration, crime, drug trafficking, and cross-border terrorism. […]
France on Monday made an announcement refusing Niger’s appeal, last week, for western military action against Islamist fighters who have established bases in Southern Libya since the 2011 overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Niger’s call for help is a desperate one as Islamist attacks and kidnappings on its mineral-rich soil have posed a threat to […]
A resolution authorising European Union troops to use force in the Central African Republic (CAR), which has been torn apart by inter-religious violence over the past few months, was approved in a crucial UN Security Council earlier this week. This follows the EU’s own approval of a military operation, in which up to 600 soldiers […]
European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday (20 January) agreed to dispatch a battalion-sized force counting up to 1,000 soldiers to Central African Republic (CAR) to help to stabilize the war-torn African country. Being effectively the EU’s first major army operation in six years, the intervention by the 28-nation bloc comes after UN […]
While South Sudan is witnessing a rebellion and possibly the onset of a civil war, Western nations have airlifted their citizens from Africa’s youngest country. At the same time, French soldiers are patrolling the streets of the Central African Republic (CAR) along with African peacekeepers flown in from Burundi and Cameroon among others. 3700 African […]