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The Guardian
27-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘They told me that they'd hunt me down': journalists on how they survive working in war zones
Stephen*, 39, is a journalist in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The war between the DRC's army and the military faction known as M23 is one of Africa's longest conflicts [a potential truce was announced last month]. The escalation of violence has meant Stephen now forgoes bylines and a presence on social media. I've covered pretty much all the conflicts in North Kivu [in the eastern part of the country] where I work as a reporter. The worst time was in 2013 [during the DRC's offensive against M23]. The bombardment was intense. I saw so many people – civilians and soldiers – injured and killed. I remember looking at the government soldiers' eyes: they were filled with death. Death was everywhere. I returned home after the fighting and I too had only death in my eyes. I've been embedded alongside the government forces in the main conflict zones and this is why I've been targeted by the M23 rebels. I was at home in Goma [a city in the North Kivu region in eastern DRC] when I received anonymous phone calls from members of M23 who told me that they knew I had been reporting alongside the government forces. They told me that they'd hunt me down. I spent five days without leaving the house. They were passing my house, they were so close, we [my family] were terrified they'd find us. The whole experience left us psychologically traumatised. It got to the point that my wife begged to be evacuated to a safe zone controlled by the government forces. I couldn't leave my family, I'd rather die than be separated from them. But trying to leave came to nothing anyway. In Goma, the media landscape has been decimated. Since the rebels took over the local radio and TV stations, there are no journalists working with them. I know journalists who stay in their homes because they are so terrified for their personal security. The M23 forces also have a digital army that disseminate propaganda and attack anyone who contradicts their view of the world. Journalism has become a clandestine activity. I've had to erase old articles that I published and hide my online presence. We cannot report publicly, post on social media or voice our opinion in public in any way. It's against the nature of a journalist. It's very, very frustrating. Even though this war has severely impacted my life, journalism is a real passion. After university it's the only work I've ever done; I don't know how to do anything else. It's a vocation for me. I really hope for peace and the return of the rule of law and that we journalists can write about things other than told to Elizia Volkmann Daniel* has been a journalist for more than a decade in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa – home to an ongoing and bloody drug war. The state is the heartland of one of the world's most powerful drug trafficking organisations, the Sinaloa cartel. Mexico is already one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists, but it has got particularly awful in the last six months. Seven or eight people are being 'disappeared' a day here, including women and children. I do my best to tell the honest story of the hundreds of people each year who are displaced, tortured or disappeared in the cartel wars. I have asked myself why I keep doing what I do despite the risk, but it's complicated. I am still not entirely sure. It's not some pride thing. I don't think danger is cool. I actually find it really, really difficult and am still processing several incidents that have happened to me. On one occasion, I was in Culiacán reporting on the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán, the son of the Sinaloa cartel drug lord El Chapo in January 2023. Armed men stopped me in my car, threatened me and confiscated everything I had. Knowing I was a journalist, they took photos and videos of me while pointing a gun to my head. I never saw my laptop and car again. I suppose they burned them. After that last incident, I sought refuge in a hotel under the watch of the cartel until eventually a kind man helped me leave in the back of his truck. After a week at home, I decided to leave the state for the Yucatán peninsula under the advice of the national unit for the protection of journalists. They told me to lie low for a while. I had to hug my wife and children – now three and six years old – and walk out the door in tears not knowing when I could go back. I spent three months away from them. It was brutal. It is really painful being told you have to leave your life behind because someone doesn't like what you are doing. My family and friends pleaded with me to do something safer and more economically stable and I reflected on it a lot while I was away. In recent years I have moved away from covering narcos to their victims instead, as it's safer. The incident in Culiacán accelerated this change, but really the catalyst was the birth of my first child six years ago. I want to be around to spend time with my children, wife and parents and for us all to be together for my kids' birthdays and to have BBQs and eat seafood together. At the same time I think it's very important to keep telling the truth. I believe in the power of memory and although it doesn't happen quickly, journalism helps bring about told to Luke Taylor Ammar Awad has been working as a fixer and reporter for international media outlets in Sudan since fighting broke out between the Sudanese armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary in April 2023. I was visiting a camp for displaced people in Port Sudan [a city in eastern Sudan by the Red Sea] recently when a little girl clung to my leg and called me by my family name, Uncle Ammar. She brought me to her mother, who was a neighbour and a family friend from Omdurman, the city where I used to live. The camp was in a dreadful condition. She and her family had no housing or tent to protect them from the sun's heat. I remembered their condition before the war; they were not rich, but they had enough to make them always smiling and kind. The life of the women and children I meet in the areas where we are allowed to work continues to convince my family, who now live in Egypt, that I should carry on returning to Sudan despite their fears and calls for me not to travel to war zones. If we did not take these risks, no one would hear about this war and the atrocities taking place in it. The free world would not move to save and aid the people of Sudan due to its preoccupation with the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. One of the most terrifying moments for me was when I entered the only hospital in Omdurman, which was crowded with wounded and sick people due to the random shelling carried out by the RSF on the city. I will never forget as long as I live how one of the wounded took his last breath in front of us while he was lying on the ground waiting to enter the operating room. We were trying to understand from his relatives how and where he was injured, but he left, and I don't think I will ever forget this tragic departure. The gradual improvements in the conditions of my neighbour's family in the Port Sudan camp make me feel that what we are doing has a value – especially when that little girl comes up to me to tell me happily they finally have a tent to live in, or got food rations from international organisations. But it pains me that I am unable to answer her constant question, 'When will we return to our home and get our lives back?'By Ammar Awad Rar Ra* is a journalist working in Mayanmar's Kachin state. The country has been engulfed by a brutal civil war since its transition towards democracy was cut short when the military seized power in a coup in 2021. After the coup, the military put our outlet – a TV channel based in Yangon – on a blacklist. Some of my colleagues went straight to the border to escape to other countries, but I returned to my birthplace in Kachin state. I wanted to continue to report the news as much as I could, writing about war crimes committed by the military, airstrikes that kill children and on conditions for displaced people. I am currently living in a military-controlled town. I have to keep a low profile when I'm out and cannot keep a record of any of my notes, deleting everything after I send my reports to my editor, because the military often check our phones and laptops. As I'm known as a journalist, I'm monitored and checked because they suspect me of reporting news against them. So I have to stay alert all the time. I have to always be thinking about how to escape and where to, if necessary. On one occasion recently I only narrowly escaped after the military were going house-to-house in my neighbourhood searching for a journalist. I fled as soon as I could. It is hard to get information about what is going on in Myanmar. There is no safe place, so often it can be hard to get to war-affected areas. For the past year, the military has cut the internet lines, which makes it difficult for us to talk to sources or get information from distant areas. Our job has also been made more difficult recently by the US aid cuts, which have affected media here and forced many of my colleagues to quit being journalists. I continue with this job because of the news all around me. The war crimes being committed will not reach the world if I stop working. I am doing my best through all the challenges of danger and access to raise awareness of the people being killed every told to Kaamil Ahmed
Asharq Al-Awsat
18-05-2025
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Mogadishu Suicide Bomber Kills at Least 10 at Army Recruitment Drive
At least 10 people were killed on Sunday after a suicide bomber targeted a queue of young recruits registering at the Damanyo military base in the Somali capital Mogadishu, witnesses told Reuters. Teenagers were lining up at the base's gate when the attacker detonated their explosives, they said. A military captain who gave his name as Suleiman described the attack as he had seen it unfold. "I was on the other side of the road. A speeding tuk-tuk stopped, a man alighted, ran into the queue, and then blew himself up. I saw 10 people dead, including recruits and passers-by. The death toll may rise," he said. Dozens of abandoned shoes and the remains of the suicide bomber were visible at the scene. Another witness, Abdisalan Mohamed, said he had seen "hundreds of teenagers at the gate as we passed by in a bus". "Abruptly, a deafening blast occurred, and the area was covered by dense smoke. We could not see the details of casualties," he said. Medical staff at the military hospital told Reuters they had received 30 injured people from the blast and that six of them had died immediately. Government forces quickly cordoned off the entire area. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack and government officials could not immediately be reached for comment. The attack echoed a similar incident in 2023 when a suicide bomber killed 25 soldiers at the Jale Siyad base, located opposite the Damanyo facility. Sunday's attack followed the assassination on Saturday of Colonel Abdirahmaan Hujaale, commander of battalion 26, in the Hiiran region, amid local reports of al-Shabaab militant infiltration into government and security forces.
Washington Post
18-05-2025
- Washington Post
PHOTO ESSAY: Congo coltan miners dig for world's tech — and struggle regardless of who is in charge
RUBAYA, Congo — Nestled in the green hills of Masisi territory in Congo, at the artisanal Rubaya mining site, hundreds of men labor by hand to extract coltan, a key mineral crucial for producing modern electronics and defense technology. Rubaya lies in the heart of eastern Congo, a mineral-rich part of the Central African nation which for decades has been ripped apart by violence from government forces and various armed groups.
Associated Press
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
Africa's youngest leader, a friend of Russia, is celebrated by some and criticized by others
ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — As news emerged this week about hundreds of Burkina Faso citizens killed separately by both jihadi groups and government forces, images of Burkina Faso's junta leader Capt. Ibrahim Traore were plastered over Russian state media speaking about pan-Africanism and liberating the minds of the continent's youths. Traore, who was in Moscow for the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, is Africa's youngest leader at 37, a strong appeal for the continent's young population that is used to much older leaders. Since coming to power in September 2022 after the country's second coup that year, he has dwelt on a rhetoric of self-reliance and independence from the West, particularly former colonial ruler France — a message that often resonates with young Africans and the diaspora. Why is Traore trending The latest Traore frenzy reached a new peak late April with a solidarity march in the country's capital, Ouagadougou, following an alleged coup attempt and comments by Gen. Michael Langley, the head of U.S. military in Africa, accusing the Burkina Faso leader of misusing the country's gold reserves. Following the 2022 coup that brought him to power, Traore promised to end the country's decadeslong deadly security crisis and leverage its rich mineral resources for the benefit of its 24 million citizens. Alongside the coup-hit nations of Niger and Mali, Burkina Faso has since severed ties with the regional bloc of ECOWAS — criticized by many young Africans as representing the interest of leaders and not the citizens — as well as longstanding Western allies such as France, whose military provided security support to the government for many years to help its security crisis. Analysts and locals suggest that these factors, combined with his youth, have contributed to Traore's appeal among young Africans. 'There is a growing consciousness among African youth at home and abroad that they need to do something about the continent's lack of progress,' said Richard Alandu, a Ghanaian living near the border with Burkina Faso. 'It appears Traore has become the face of that consciousness.' How has Traore fared as Burkina Faso's junta leader The security crisis that Traore vowed to resolve has worsened instead, slowing the country's overall economic development and preventing most citizens from benefiting from its mineral wealth, according to analysts and researchers' data. 'There has been no real progress on the ground' in Burkina Faso, said Gbara Awanen, a professor of international relations and security studies at Nigeria's Baze University, who specializes in West Africa. 'A lot of it is just sleek propaganda.' Data from the U.S.-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, or ACLED, shows that while 2,894 people were killed by both government and armed groups during the year before the 2022 coup, the number has more than doubled to at least 7,200 in the last year. Analysts say the attacks have worsened to the point that Ouagadougou is now increasingly threatened, with more than 60% of the country outside of government control. At least 2.1 million people have lost their homes as a result of the violence, and almost 6.5 million need humanitarian aid to survive, conservative estimates show. Propaganda rhythms Babacar Ndiaye, a senior fellow at the Senegal-based Timbuktu Institute for Peace Studies, attributes the current frenzy surrounding Traore primarily to his popularity — and Russia-driven propaganda Despite Burkina Faso's worsening security crisis, Traore still has 'so much resonance and interest simply because of propaganda,' Ndiaye said. 'In Africa, there is deep frustration with the traditional leadership, so there is polarized anger towards a scapegoat that is the west.' West Africa, meanwhile, has a history of young men seizing power as exemplified by John Jerry Rawlings in Ghana, Samuel Doe in Liberia and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, all in the 1980s. That history, placed against the perceived failure of Western-style democracy in Africa, has helped to create conditions for idolizing the likes of Traore. Still, allegations of propaganda do not adequately explain the excitement that has built up around Africa's youngest ruler, according to Chidi Odinkalu, an Africa analyst and professor at Tufts University. 'Traore articulates a revolutionary message that is appealing to a young population frustrated by the thievery of what passes for 'democracy' in their own countries,' said Odinkalu. ____ Follow AP's Africa coverage at:
