Armed Groups

Kinshasa welcomed the sanctions while Kigali said the US move ‘unjustly’ targets Rwanda.

The United States has imposed sanctions on Rwanda’s military and four of its top officials for “direct operational support” of the M23 rebel group that has seized large swaths of territory in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Rwanda has long rejected allegations from DRC, the United Nations and ⁠Western powers that it backs M23 and its affiliated Congo River Alliance (AFC), which captured key cities in the mineral-rich east, including the capitals of North and South Kivu provinces last year.

The US Department of the Treasury said on Monday that the rebels’ gains would not have been possible without Rwandan backing.

The US State Department separately added that M23 continued to capture territory even late last year “in clear violation” of a US-mediated agreement.

US President Donald Trump in December brought together the leaders of Rwanda and the DRC to sign a peace deal, predicting a “great miracle”.

But just days afterwards, the State Department noted, the M23 captured the key Congolese city of Uvira.

The Treasury Department said those included in Monday’s sanctions are Vincent Nyakarundi, the Rwandan Defence Force (RDF) army chief of staff; Ruki Karusisi, a major-general; Mubarakh Muganga, chief of defence staff; and Stanislas Gashugi, special operations force commander.

The US said they were critical to M23’s gains.

“M23, a US- and UN-sanctioned entity, is responsible for horrific human rights abuses, including summary executions and violence against civilians, including women and children,” State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said in a statement.

“The continued backing from the RDF and its senior leadership has enabled M23 to capture DRC sovereign territory and continue these grave abuses,” he added.

‘A strong signal’

Rwandan government spokesperson Yolande Makolo said in a statement that the sanctions “unjustly” target Rwanda and “misrepresent the reality and distort the facts of the conflict” in eastern DRC.

She accused DRC of violating the peace agreement by allegedly conducting “indiscriminate” drone attacks and ground offensives.

Rwanda’s government also told the Reuters news agency that Kigali was “fully committed to disengagement of its forces in tandem with the DRC implementing their obligations” under US-led mediation, but accused DRC of failing to keep promises such as ending support for militias.

The Congolese government, however, said it welcomed the sanctions, describing them as “a strong signal in support of respect” for its territorial integrity and ⁠sovereignty.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement that the department “will use all tools at its disposal to ensure that the parties to the Washington Accords uphold their obligations”.

“We expect the immediate withdrawal of Rwanda Defence Force troops, weapons and equipment,” Bessent said.

Fighting continues in eastern DRC on several fronts, despite the accord signed between Kigali and Kinshasa in Washington, and a separate peace deal signed between M23 and the Congolese government in Qatar last year.

Though M23 later pulled out of Uvira under US pressure, the rebels still hold other key Congolese cities, including Goma and Bukavu. The US Treasury Department said on Monday that M23’s continued presence near Burundi’s border “carries the risk of escalating the conflict ‌into a broader regional war”.

M23 is the most prominent of about 100 armed factions vying for control in eastern DRC, near the border with Rwanda. The conflict has created one of the world’s most significant humanitarian crises, with more than seven million people displaced, according to the UN agency for refugees.

M23 are already under US sanctions since 2013.

Cape Town, South Africa – Two ominous letters are spray-painted on a wall at the entrance to Tafelsig, a township in Mitchells Plain on the outskirts of Cape Town: HL – the insignia of the Hard Livings gang, which has threatened communities there for five decades.

It’s a February day soon after the president’s state of the nation address, in which Cyril Ramaphosa boldly announced he’d be deploying the army to communities across South Africa to tackle the growing crisis of crime, drugs and gangs. But in Tafelsig, which will likely be part of the new military operation, most people seem unbothered by the news.

Mitchells Plain is on the Cape Flats – a series of densely populated, impoverished townships about 30km (19 miles) southeast of the wealthy city centre where the president made his speech. While the city boasts hordes of tourists and some of the most expensive real estate on the continent, the Cape Flats accounts for the highest rate of gang-related killings in the country.

“When it was at its worst, [there was a shooting] almost every day,” said Michael Jacobs, the chairperson of a local community police forum.

“Whether it’s day or whether it’s night, they’re shooting somewhere on the Cape Flats,” he added on a drive through the settlement of run-down houses and corrugated iron shacks.

Around him, residents made their way to a home-grown tuck shop, known as a spaza, or sat on street corners while toddlers ran about.

“How is this conducive to raising children?” he asked, recounting the horrors of life in Mitchells Plain.

In the past week, four people, including a nine-month-old, had been shot and killed in a drug den in Athlone, about 17km (10 miles) away.

A beloved Muslim cleric who is rumoured to have angered a gang leader over a personal dispute was also shot dead on the first day of Ramadan as he was leaving the Salaamudien Mosque on a nearby street.

As Jacobs spoke, reports of other shootings filtered through on the many crime groups he is part of on WhatsApp. A few days later, he shared with Al Jazeera a video of two schoolgirls and a taxi driver shot outside a school in Atlantis, about 40km (25 miles) north of Cape Town. One of the girls died.

Tafelsig residents now await the probable arrival of uniformed soldiers and armed vehicles in their neighbourhood, but have little hope that it will make a difference.

Despite his weariness with the violence, Jacobs is far from enthusiastic about a decision to deploy the army.

Other critics of the government’s decision said it is window dressing more than a real solution while some question the wisdom of such a drastic step in a country where the military has a history of brutality and where recent explosive allegations about police corruption at the highest levels have surfaced.

‘Do our lives not matter?’

In his speech on February 12, Ramaphosa said he would deploy the army to the Western Cape, the province that includes the Cape Flats, and Gauteng, home to the country’s largest city, Johannesburg, to tackle gang violence and illegal mining. On February 17, Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia announced that the Eastern Cape would be added to the list and a deployment would take place in 10 days – although no soldiers have so far been deployed.

The president’s decision followed pressure from civil society groups and the Democratic Alliance (DA) party, which runs the Western Cape, to take drastic action to curb widespread gang-related violence in the three provinces.

A day before its province was added to the deployment schedule, the DA joined residents in Gqeberha, the largest city in the Eastern Cape, for a “Do Our Lives Not Matter?” protest to demand that Ramaphosa take urgent action.

In Gauteng, neighbourhoods surrounding the province’s once-lucrative abandoned mines have often been turned into battlegrounds, resulting in shootouts between police and illegal artisanal miners, known as zama zamas.

Gauteng and the Western Cape frequently appear at the top of the country’s organised crime lists while the Eastern Cape made headlines last year for a series of killings linked to extortion syndicates.

In the latest crime statistics, police announced the arrests of 15,846 suspects nationwide and the seizure of 173 firearms and 2,628 rounds of ammunition from February 16 to Sunday alone.

Gauteng took up the most space in the police’s crime highlights, which included a 16-year-old arrested in Roodepoort for possession and distribution of explosives and the seizure of counterfeit clothing and shoes worth 98 million rand ($6.1m).

Overall, South Africa has some of the world’s most violent crime with an average of 64 people killed every day, according to official statistics.

The three provinces selected for military deployments have a turbulent history with the armed forces, not least during the apartheid era when the regime used soldiers to unleash deadly crackdowns on antiapartheid activists.

“They were the enemy,” Jacobs said, recalling his own arrest in September 1987 during a student protest on the Cape Flats opposing the racist government, which was replaced in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.

Today after three decades of democracy, poverty, unemployment and violent crime remain a major challenge in the area.

But Jacobs, like other critics of the military police, believes the new move will do little to cure the ills that he said gangs exploit to increase their influence. Children as young as eight years old are recruited into their ranks.

The Town Centre, a shopping mall that was once a hub of economic activity, has been reduced to a ghost town where the drug trade thrives despite the fact that it is right next to a police station, according to Jacobs.

For him, there is a direct link between the country’s economic decline and the flourishing of gang activity over the past decade on the Cape Flats, where working-class people have seen their livelihoods stripped away as the manufacturing sector shrank.

On an average weekday when children should be at school, he said, you see children and even women in their 60s in Mitchells Plain digging through rubbish bins to find glass, plastic or other things they can recycle and turn into income. “At least it will put something on the table.”

Plugging a ‘haemorrhage’

Social issues and not simply military intervention should be put at the heart of government anticrime efforts, analysts say.

“There’s no other way to describe it other than plugging a hole that is haemorrhaging at the moment with regards to these forms of organised crime,” said Ryan Cummings, director of analysis at Signal Risk, an Africa-focused risk management firm.

Irvin Kinnes, an associate professor with the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Criminology, pointed out that constitutionally the army is limited in the duties its members may perform among the civilian population. Their role will be largely to support police, who will retain control of all operations.

He fears the government has not learned lessons from previous army deployments in South Africa’s democratic era.

The army was dispatched to the Western Cape in 2019 during a previous spike in gang violence and was again sent in to help with the enforcement of COVID-19 restrictions the following year.

“It’s a very dangerous thing to bring the army because there’s an impatience with the fact that the police are not doing their job. And so they come in with that mentality and want to beat up everybody and break people’s bones,” Kinnes said.

“We saw what happened in COVID. They killed people as the army. It’s not as if the police don’t kill people, but the point is, you don’t need the army to do that.”

To the government’s detractors, summoning the army is nothing more than an attempt at political heroics before local elections due to be held this year or in early 2027.

Kinnes pointed out that, according to police statistics, crime has been decreasing without the help of the army.

“It’s very much political. It’s to show that the political leaders have kind of heard the public. But the call for the army hasn’t come from the community. It’s come from politicians,” he said.

‘The military is ready’

Ramaphosa, who has yet to reveal details of the military deployment, has defended his decision. On Monday in his weekly newsletter, the president sought to separate the South African armed forces from their troubling past, listing several operations that benefitted communities, such as disaster relief efforts and law enforcement operations at the border.

He made it clear that the army’s role would merely be a supporting one “with clear rules of engagement and for specific time-limited objectives”.

Its presence may free up officers to focus on police work and would take place alongside other measures, such as strengthening antigang units and illegal mining teams, he said.

“Given our history, where the apartheid state sent the army into townships to violently suppress opposition, it is important that we do not deploy the [military] inside the country to deal with domestic threats without good reason,” Ramaphosa wrote.

Cummings said it was clear the president’s hand was forced amid an unrelenting wave of violence. “The rhetoric of the president up until now suggests that this was a directive that he was not necessarily too keen on implementing.”

On the ground, soldiers appear equally reluctant about their pending engagement.

Ntsiki Shongo is a soldier who was deployed in 2019 and during the COVID-19 pandemic. He told Al Jazeera, using a pseudonym, that any operation involving the police was almost certainly doomed.

“We [in the army] become so negative when we are working with them [the police] because always we don’t get what we need,” he said.

“We know how easy it is to get these gangsters, to get these drug lords, but unfortunately, the police, they are not cooperating with us because some of them are in cooperation with these criminals,” he charged. “Maybe they are scared for their lives because they are staying in the same areas with them.”

Shongo referred to an ongoing commission investigating police corruption that has implicated senior government officials and led to the suspension of national Police Minister Senzo Mchunu.

“So this operation, … is it going to be a success? I don’t know. It all depends on the police,” he said, adding that he and his fellow soldiers long for the day the government lets the military solve the problem on its own.

“Even when we are just sitting having lunch as soldiers, we talk about the police. We pray that one day the state can say, ‘Let’s take the military inside the country and clean out all these weapons, all these guns, all these gangsters,’” he said.

“The military is ready, and they want to prove a point because we’ve been hungry for these things.”

Nigerian lawmaker reports ‘at least 50 people dead’ after attack as list of missing is still being compiled.

Gunmen killed at least 50 people and abducted women and children in an overnight assault on a village in northwestern Nigeria’s Zamfara State, authorities and residents said.

The attack started late on Thursday night and continued into Friday morning in Tungan Dutse village in the Bukkuyum area of Zamfara when armed men arrived on motorcycles and began setting fire to buildings and abducting residents.

“They have been moving from one village to another … leaving at least 50 people dead,” said Hamisu A Faru, a lawmaker representing Bukkuyum South.

Faru, speaking to the Reuters news agency by phone on Friday, said the number of people abducted remained unclear as local officials were still compiling lists of the missing.

Residents say warning signs were visible before the attack.

Abdullahi Sani, 41, said villagers alerted security forces after spotting more than 150 motorcycles carrying armed men a day earlier, but no action was taken.

“No one slept yesterday; we are all in pain,” Sani said, adding that three members of his family were killed in the attack.

Areas of Nigeria’s north and west continue to grapple with overlapping security threats, including armed criminal gangs and rebel fighters.

Just last week, at least 46 people were killed in raids in the Borgu area of northwest Niger State. The deadliest assault occurred in the village of Konkoso, where at least 38 residents were shot or had their throats cut, according to reports.

The crisis has drawn increased international involvement.

Nigeria recently expanded security cooperation with the United States after President Donald Trump accused the country of failing to halt the killing of Christians and threatened military intervention.

On December 25, the US launched air strikes on the northern state of Sokoto, conducted in coordination with Nigerian authorities.

Earlier this week, Nigeria’s military confirmed the arrival of 100 US soldiers tasked with training local forces.

Samaila Uba, spokesperson for Nigeria’s Defence Headquarters, said the US troops would offer “technical support” and “intelligence sharing” to help combat “terrorist organisations”, along with “associated equipment”.

He stressed the US personnel would not engage directly in combat and would share technical expertise under Nigerian command.