ON THE MALI-BURKINA BORDER, Burkina Faso: It was the heart of the forest and there, in a marsh, lay a carpet of water lilies, their delicacy unveiled in the dawn light.
But the beauty belied the danger — the Tofa Gala forest, on Mali’s lawless border with Burkina Faso, was a haven for ruthless militants.
Guns in hand, French troops advanced on one side of the marsh, and their counterparts from Burkina Faso on the other.
Their goal: Assert control over an area where no troops had set foot for over a year.
Named Bourgou IV, the mission was the first official joint ground operation between the French army and the so-called G5 Sahel force, which pools troops from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.
In an exercise earlier this month, some 1,400 soldiers, 600 of them French, were deployed in the volatile region.
For militants, “it’s an ideal area to hide and handle logistics,” said Thibauld Lemerle, a French colonel.
Thousands of civilians and soldiers have died in violence across the Sahel which began when armed Islamists revolted in northern Mali in 2012.
The conflict has since swept into the center of Mali and spilled into neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, inflaming ethnic tensions along the way.
Many thousands have fled their homes.
Belonging to a mosaic of groups from Al-Qaeda to Daesh and Ansarul Islam, the militants have exploited ethnic divisions and a feeling of abandonment to enmesh themselves in local communities.
France has some 4,500 troops in the region and the G5 Sahel force has a projected total of 5,000 — a goal clouded by chronic funding, training and equipment problems.
They play a game of cat and mouse in this vast territory with a highly mobile enemy, able to vanish into the desert.
“They are here but hidden, we search for them but can’t find them,” said a non-commissioned officer, assault rifle in hand. “This is an impossible war.”
A detonation occurred — a warning shot from one of the Burkinabe soldiers as a local passed by.
The troops walked on. They discovered two abandoned motorbikes suspected of belonging to militants and impounded them.
They marched for hours and find nothing.
“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, he could be here, he could already be gone. Shooting can start without warning,” said a lieutenant who gave his name as Julien.
The soldiers marched on. Ahead, six huts stood in the blazing sun and women and children clustered beneath an acacia tree. There were no men in sight.
The French troops searched the huts in silence. One cut open a mattress while another shakes mats.
“We’re looking for means of communication and components used to make IEDs,” said Pierrick, the head of the search party, referring to roadside bombs.
The troops found a few phones and set off on their two-hour hike to get back to their vehicles.
“We can’t search like that, cutting up mattresses, see how those people were looking at us,” one private from the search party said later, going over the events of the day.
“But it’s the only way,” another private said. “Imagine if a phone were hidden in the mattress.”
A French officer explained the rationale behind the search missions. In areas under militant influence, he said, “everyone can be a potential enemy.”
Caught between a rock and a hard place, locals pay a tough price.
Malian and Burkinabe forces have several times been accused of alleged human rights abuses. French forces are told to uphold strict rules of engagement.
The French army says there are mechanisms in place during joint operations to prevent incidents.
But a French official, who declined to be named, said that their partners do not always respect the rules.
The French and Sahel armies also differ widely in terms of equipment, which has its upsides and downsides.
One French officer said that French troops trundle slowly in armored vehicles but the Sahel troops zip around on motorbikes.
A Burkinabe officer said the French security measures and loud convoys offer the militants time to escape. “It’s normal that the French never find anything when they arrive,” he said. “With our motorbikes, we’re more mobile.”
But African troops are also far more exposed. Only days earlier, two Burkinabe soldiers riding a motorbike were killed by a roadside bomb.
In total some 170 Sahel soldiers have been killed since September in presumed militant attacks, including about 40 Malian soldiers who died in a single ambush in November.
One French soldier, by comparison, has died.
Despite years of training by French forces, the Sahel armies struggle with many problems.
Captain Wendimanegde Kabore, a Burkinabe unit commander, said that securing food and water was especially difficult. On many evenings, Burkinabe troops go to their French counterparts for a ration pack.
The arduous march is lightened at times.
French intelligence intercepted a message from one of the heads of Ansarul Islam just a few kilometers from the Bourgou operation’s positions.
The army sent out 80 French soldiers in a bid to capture him, supported by drones and a Mirage 2000 warplane.
And toward the end of the same day, forces also caught wind of local informants who tip off the militants about army troops.
An armored convoy took off in a cloud of dust, arriving at the village. Three men fled and threw objects into the undergrowth. One was arrested several minutes later.
Dressed in old jogging trousers and a sports vest, he stayed quiet.
“We took a telephone. He ran away when we arrived but the inhabitants stayed put, which is suspicious,” said Julien, the lieutenant. “But we have nothing on him, so we’re going to let him go.”
About a hundred phones were confiscated over two weeks of Bourgou IV operations. Troops withdrew from the area on November 17.
Twenty-four people were killed or captured, according to the French army, and about 60 motorbikes seized.
Despite these seemingly meager returns, military chiefs said they were pleased with the results, arguing that the operation had disrupted the militants and caused many to flee.
“Not every day is a rendezvous with glory,” said Col. Raphael Bernard. “But we work together, we shake things up and we fight.”
French and Sahel soldiers step up campaign against militants
French and Sahel soldiers step up campaign against militants
- Named Bourgou IV, the mission was the first official joint ground operation between the French army and the so-called G5 Sahel force
- In an exercise earlier this month, some 1,400 soldiers, 600 of them French, were deployed in the volatile region
India monsoon floods kill five in northeast
India’s annual monsoon season from June to September offers respite from intense summer heat and is crucial for replenishing water supplies, but also brings widespread death and destruction.
The deaths recorded are among the first of this season, with scores often killed over the course of the rains across India, a country of 1.4 billion people.
The monsoon is a colossal sea breeze that brings South Asia 70-80 percent of its annual rainfall.
Rivers swollen by the lashing rain — including the mighty Brahmaputra and its tributaries — broke their banks across the region.
But the intensity of rain and floods has increased in recent years, with experts saying climate change is exacerbating the problem.
Assam State Disaster Management Authority officials on Saturday confirmed five deaths in the last 24 hours.
A red alert warning had been issued for 12 districts of Assam after non-stop rains over the last three days led to flooding in many urban areas.
The situation was particularly bad in the state capital Guwahati.
City authorities have disconnected the electricity in several districts to cut the risk of electrocution.
Several low-lying areas of Guwahati were flooded, with hundreds of families forced to abandon homes to seek shelter elsewhere.
Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said his government had deployed rescue teams.
“We have been reviewing the impending situation for the last three days,” he said in a statement, saying that supplies of rice had been dispatched as food aid.
South Asia is getting hotter and in recent years has seen shifting weather patterns, but scientists are unclear on how exactly a warming planet is affecting the highly complex monsoon.
On Monday, lashing rains swamped India’s financial capital Mumbai, where the monsoon rains arrived some two weeks earlier than usual, the earliest for nearly a quarter century, according to weather forecasters.
Swiss glacier collapse offers global warning of wider impact
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan: The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts say.
Footage of the May 28 collapse showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside, into the hamlet of Blatten.
Ali Neumann, disaster risk reduction adviser to the Swiss Development Cooperation, noted that while the role of climate change in the specific case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water.
“Climate change and its impact on the cryosphere will have growing repercussions on human societies that live near glaciers, near the cryosphere, and depend on glaciers somehow and live with them,” he said.
The barrage largely destroyed Blatten, but the evacuation of its 300 residents last week averted mass casualties, although one person remains missing.
“It also showed that with the right skills and observation and management of an emergency, you can significantly reduce the magnitude of this type of disaster,” Neumann said at an international UN-backed glacier conference in Tajikistan.
Stefan Uhlenbrook, Director for Hydrology, Water and Cryosphere at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said it showed the need for vulnerable regions like the Himalayas and other parts of Asia to prepare.
“From monitoring, to data sharing, to numerical simulation models, to hazard assessment and to communicating that, the whole chain needs to be strengthened,” Uhlenbrook said.
“But in many Asian countries, this is weak, the data is not sufficiently connected.”
Swiss geologists use various methods, including sensors and satellite images, to monitor their glaciers.
Asia was the world’s most disaster-hit region from climate and weather hazards in 2023, the United Nations said last year, with floods and storms the chief cause of casualties and economic losses.
But many Asian nations, particularly in the Himalayas, lack the resources to monitor their vast glaciers to the same degree as the Swiss.
According to a 2024 UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction report, two-thirds of countries in the Asia and Pacific region have early warning systems.
But the least developed countries, many of whom are in the frontlines of climate change, have the worst coverage.
“Monitoring is not absent, but it is not enough,” said geologist Sudan Bikash Maharjan of the Nepal-based International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).
“Our terrains and climatic conditions are challenging, but also we lack that level of resources for intensive data generation.”
That gap is reflected in the number of disaster-related fatalities for each event.
While the average number of fatalities per disaster was 189 globally, in Asia and the Pacific it was much higher at 338, according to the Belgium-based Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters’ Emergency Events Database.
Geoscientist Jakob Steiner, who works in climate adaptation in Nepal and Bhutan, said it is not as simple as just exporting the Swiss technological solutions.
“These are complex disasters, working together with the communities is actually just as, if not much more, important,” he said.
Himalayan glaciers, providing critical water to nearly two billion people, are melting faster than ever before due to climate change, exposing communities to unpredictable and costly disasters, scientists warn.
Hundreds of lakes formed from glacial meltwater have appeared in recent decades. They can be deadly when they burst and rush down the valley.
The softening of permafrost increases the chances of landslides.
Declan Magee, from the Asian Development Bank’s Climate Change and Sustainable Development Department, said that monitoring and early warnings alone are not enough.
“We have to think... about where we build, where people build infrastructure and homes, and how we can decrease their vulnerability if it is exposed,” he said.
Nepali climate activist and filmmaker Tashi Lhazom described how the village of Til, near to her home, was devastated by a landslide earlier in May.
The 21 families escaped — but only just.
“In Switzerland they were evacuated days before, here we did not even get seconds,” said Lhazom.
“The disparity makes me sad but also angry. This has to change.”
Russian attacks kill two in Ukraine
- Diplomatic efforts to end the war have accelerated in recent weeks, with both sides meeting earlier this month for their first round of direct talks in more than three years
KYIV: Russian shelling and air strikes on southern Ukraine overnight killed a man and a nine-year-old girl in separate attacks, Ukrainian officials said on Saturday.
In the Zaporizhzhia region, “Russians hit a residential area with guided aerial bombs,” killing the girl and wounding a 16-year-old boy, Ivan Fedorov, head of the regional military administration, said on the Telegram platform.
One house was destroyed and several others damaged by the blast, he added.
In a separate assault on the city of Kherson, a “66-year-old man sustained fatal injuries” from Russian shelling, Oleksandr Prokudin, Kherson region’s governor, wrote on Telegram.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, tens of thousands of people have been killed, swaths of eastern and southern Ukraine destroyed, and millions forced to flee their homes.
One person was wounded in a Russian drone strike in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, its mayor said.
In Russia, Ukrainian drone attacks wounded 10 people in the Kursk region overnight, acting governor Alexander Khinshtein said.
Diplomatic efforts to end the war have accelerated in recent weeks, with both sides meeting earlier this month for their first round of direct talks in more than three years.
But the negotiations in Istanbul yielded only a prisoner exchange and promises to stay in touch.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that his government did not expect results from further talks with Russia unless Moscow provided its peace terms in advance, accusing the Kremlin of doing “everything” it could to sabotage a potential meeting.
“There must be a ceasefire to continue moving toward peace. We need to stop the killing of people,” Zelensky added in a statement on Telegram.
The Ukrainian leader also said he had discussed with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “a possible next meeting in Istanbul and under what conditions Ukraine is ready to participate,” with both agreeing that the next round of talks with Moscow “cannot and should not be a waste of time.”
Russia has said it will send a team of negotiators to Istanbul for a second round of talks on Monday, but Kyiv has yet to confirm if it will attend.
Australia’s defense minister urges greater military openness from China
- Richard Marles says that while China remains an important strategic partner to Australia, more open communication between the two nations is key for a "productive" relationship
SINGAPORE: Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles on Saturday urged greater transparency from China over its military modernization and deployments as Pacific nations brace for a more assertive Chinese presence.
Speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue defense meeting in Singapore, Marles said that while China remains an important strategic partner to Australia, more open communication between the two nations is key for a “productive” relationship.
“When you look at the growth in the Chinese military that has happened without a strategic reassurance, or a strategic transparency....we would like to have a greater transparency in what China is seeking to do in not only its build up, but in the exercises that it undertakes,” said Marles.
“We want to have the most productive relationship with China that we can have ... we hope that in the context of that productive relationship, we can see greater transparency and greater communication between our two countries in respect of our defense.”
Both Australia and New Zealand raised concerns in February after three Chinese warships conducted unprecedented live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea.
Both nations complained of late notice over the drills by China, which led to the diversion of 49 commercial flights.
Marles said that while the drills were in accordance with international law, China should have been less disruptive.
He also said Australia was able to closely scrutinize the Chinese task-force.
“It’s fair to say that this was done in a bigger way than they have done before, but equally, that was meant from our point of view, by a much greater degree of surveillance than we’ve ever done,” he said.
“From the moment that Chinese warships came within the vicinity of Australia, they were being tailed and tracked by Australian assets ... we were very clear about what exercises China was undertaking and what capability they were seeking to exercise and to build.”
Chinese officials have signalled that more such exercises could be expected as it was routine naval activity in international waters. Defense analysts say the exercises underscore Beijing’s ambition to develop a global navy that will be able to project power into the region more frequently.
Australia has in recent times pledged to boost its missile defense capability amid China’s nuclear weapons buildup and its blue-water naval expansion, as the country targets to increase its defense spending from roughly 2 percent of GDP currently to 2.4 percent by the early 2030s.
The nation is scheduled to pay the United States $2 billion by the end of 2025 to assist its submarine shipyards, in order to buy three Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines starting in 2032 — its biggest ever defense project.
Germany hopes for EU deal on sending failed asylum seekers to third countries, minister says
- The EU’s executive Commission proposed a scheme that would let member states reject asylum applications from migrants who passed through a “safe” third country on their way to the bloc
BERLIN: Germany’s interior minister is hoping the European Union can reach a bloc-wide agreement on sending failed asylum seekers who cannot go home to safe countries near their original homelands.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives won February’s national election on a promise to bring down immigration levels, which opinion polls showed many voters regarded as being out of control, although numbers have been falling for over a year.
In an interview with the Welt am Sonntag newspaper published on Saturday, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the approach of using third countries could work only if there was a Europe-wide consensus.
“We need third countries that are prepared to take migrants who are objectively unable to return to their home countries,” he told the newspaper.
Earlier this month, the EU’s executive Commission proposed a scheme that would let member states reject asylum applications from migrants who passed through a “safe” third country on their way to the bloc. The proposals, criticized by rights groups, have yet to be adopted by national governments or the European Parliament.
“No individual EU member state can create this model on its own: it will have to happen on an EU level,” Dobrindt said. “We are preparing the foundations for that right now.”
Dobrindt’s initial promises to tighten border controls on taking office angered neighbors who protested at plans to return to their territory those migrants found not to have a right to enter Germany.
An Italian plan to process asylum seekers picked up at sea in Albania has stalled amid Italian court challenges.
A scheme by Britain, which is not an EU member, under its previous Conservative government to send asylum seekers who arrived in Britain without permission to Rwanda was scrapped by Prime Minister Keir Starmer when he took office last year.
