Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Mali’s junta-led government retaliates against insurgents, U.S. and Nigerian forces kill a major Islamic State figure, and the World Health Organization sounds the alarm about an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
A few weeks after coordinated rebel attacks rocked Mali, threatening the junta government’s grip on power in the country’s north and marking a new phase of its security crisis, the Malian military is retaliating with drone strikes, some of which have killed civilians.
Mali launched air strikes for several days late last week in the northern city of Kidal, which was seized in late April by the Tuareg separatist Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and al-Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM).
Military drone strikes also hit Tene, a town in the central San region, on Sunday. The strikes, which reportedly targeted a motorbike procession, killed at least 10 civilians, including children preparing for a wedding.
