Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Africa Watch by email every week. Three weeks after President Idriss Deby was killed in battle in late April, the transitional military council that seized control of Chad in the wake of his death moved to solidify its hold on power this week, naming a new government filled with holdovers from Deby’s regime. The move by the council, which is headed by the former president’s son, Mahamat Idriss Deby, threatens to fuel tensions in [...]
Even with its physical “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria in tatters, the Islamic State is still managing to wage a global insurgency, maintaining an operational presence in at least 20 separate countries. The organization’s global diffusion recently led a group of leading terrorism experts to describe ISIS as an “adhocracy,” better understood as a group of “structurally fluid organizations in which ‘interacting project teams’ work towards a shared purpose and/or identity.” By maintaining this structure, the group’s leaders seek to harness the benefits of a transnational network spanning multiple regions and continents. “All politics is local,” as the famous saying [...]
On Tuesday, just one day after Chad’s incumbent president, Idriss Deby, was declared the winner of the country’s April 11 presidential election, a military spokesperson announced that Deby had been killed on the battlefield while overseeing fighting with rebels known as the Front for Change and Concord in Chad, or FACT, in the country’s northern region. Deby, 68, had been poised to claim a sixth term in office, having won almost 80 percent of the vote in an election victory most observers considered to be guaranteed in advance. He had led Chad since seizing power in a 1990 rebellion, making [...]
