Africa, Islamist | featured news

The military’s Africa Command is making preparations to install unarmed drones as Islamist extremist groups are seen as posing a growing menace to the region.

Islamists in northern Mali have recruited and paid for as many as 1,000 children from rural towns and villages devastated by poverty and hunger. The Associated Press spoke with four children and conducted several dozen interviews with residents and human rights officials. The AP also saw several other children with machine guns half their size strolling down the streets in Timbuktu, where Westerners can no longer go because of the threat of kidnapping.

An al-Qaida-linked Islamist militant group in control of northern Mali stoned to death a couple accused of engaging in extramarital affairs, the group's spokesman said.

Coordinated attacks claimed by a radical Islamist sect killed at least 143 people in north Nigeria's largest city, a hospital official said Saturday, as gunfire still echoed around some areas of the sprawling city....

Men and women are banned from shaking hands or chatting in public in a district of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab.

A Nigerian military official said about 700 people had died in the city of Maiduguri during recent fighting.

An Islamic court in Somalia on Thursday cut off a hand and foot from each of four men convicted of stealing phones and guns, drawing hundreds of onlookers as the weeping men were punished at a military camp.