Africa

An improvised bomb found last week strapped to a teddy bear in the Libyan capital featured a mortar shell produced last year in Serbia. Despite an arms embargo, Serbian weapons are still finding their way to the North African country.

A new report from Burkina Faso shows that rising violence is taking a toll for a generation of children. Welcome to While You Weren’t Looking, Foreign Policy’s weekly newsletter focused on non-coronavirus news.

The Egyptian military said it has killed at least 19 militants in raids and airstrikes against an Islamic insurgency in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, in clashes that also left at least five casualties among its troops.

Al Jazeera published an article last week titled “Hisham Ashmawy…the other side of Al-Ikhtiyar (The Choice)” where the author praised the Egyptian terrorist and sought to clear his name, but later took down the piece due to “contradictions with Al Jazeera publishing policies,” according to the news site.

Spokesman of the Commander-in-Chief of the Libyan Armed Forces, Major General Ahmed Al-Mesmari, has stressed that the blatant Turkish military intervention in Libya and its support for Al-Wefaq government’s militias since 2014 have thwarted all attempts to reach a political solution in Libya.

U.S. Africa Command assesses that Moscow recently deployed military fighter aircraft to Libya in order to support Russian state-sponsored private military contractors (PMCs) operating on the ground there.

Russian media outlets have speculated the sanctions that the US might impose on Egypt in the event that it acquires the Sukhoi Su-35 fighter, as Washington has previously threatened.

Most popular social media network Facebook has appointed Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Yemeni Nobel Prize winner Tawakkol Karman as one of the first 2- oversight board members.

Up to 44 million people in Africa could come down with the coronavirus and 190,000 will die if the virus is not contained, the World Health Organization said.

The European Union is stepping up its efforts to enforce the UN arms embargo on Libya, thereby contributing to the peace process in the country, through the launch of a new CSDP (Common Security and Defence Policy) military operation in the Mediterranean.