Although European security is still the 173rd Airborne Brigade's primary mission, officials expect it to have a growing role in Africa.

Urgent calls for COVID-19 vaccine fairness rang through African countries on Friday as more welcomed or rolled out doses from the global COVAX initiative, with officials acutely aware their continent needs much more.

“Stronger Together” is the new command slogan, replacing the nearly 7-year-old guiding mantra of “Strong Europe,” the Army said.

The consolidation of U.S. Army Europe and Africa headquarters is a “very big advance” that will enable troops to move more rapidly between continents in times of crisis, the general in charge of Army missions on the two continents said Tuesday.

Members of the Navy, Army and Coast Guard aboard the destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill seized weapons in international waters.

AFRICOM said it bombed and destroyed an al-Shabab compound in southern Somalia on Monday, which came after attempts by the militants to target Somalia’s military leaders.

First came the fake medical-grade masks and coronavirus tests. Now, a new threat has emerged, global police organization Interpol warns: fake doses of the coronavirus vaccine.

The most deadly incident for American forces overseas last year was a helicopter crash in the Sinai Peninsula in November, in which five American troops died and one was injured.

U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock demanded Thursday that Eritrean forces fighting alongside Ethiopian government troops in embattled Tigray province leave the country.

President Emmanuel Macron has met with four grandchildren of an Algerian independence fighter to tell them that Ali Boumendjel had been tortured and killed by French soldiers in 1957.

Hundreds of thousands of people are left without basic food or health care and the main roads between Central African Republic and Cameroon closed for almost two months.

Jihadis linked to the Islamic State group attacked the northeastern Nigerian town of Dikwa and humanitarian posts there, security officials said.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said the government's priority is to get all the hostages returned safe and unharmed. Police and the military have begun joint operations to rescue the girls, said Mohammed Shehu, a police spokesman in Zamfara state.

Libyans ousted a dictator, but an ensuing civil war has drawn in Russia, Turkey and others with a thirst for control.

The commandos for hire who landed in Benghazi in June 2019 had arranged to procure every weapon and tool – including drones, inflatable speedboats, night-vision goggles, a mobile command center, gear for jamming enemy communications and AH-1F Cobra helicopters – needed for an assault on Libya's government.

Smugglers often pack desperate families into ill-equipped rubber boats that stall and founder along the perilous Central Mediterranean route.

Soldiers from Eritrea systematically killed "many hundreds" of people, the large majority men, in a massacre late November in the Ethiopian city of Axum in the Tigray region, Amnesty International said Friday.

Ghana received the world's first delivery of coronavirus vaccines from the United Nations-backed COVAX initiative on Wednesday.

Hundreds of Nigerian girls abducted last week from a boarding school in the country’s northwest have been returned to their families amid chaos as security forces opened fire on a gathering outside the school where the reunions were held Wednesday.

A new report by the Geneva-based Insecurity Insight and the University of California, Berkeley's Human Rights Center identified more than 1,100 threats or acts of violence against health care workers and facilities last year.

No foreign country should try to "dictate a sovereign nation's internal affairs," said the Ethiopian statement.

Gallery

Not only must they brave 43 mph winds and 13-foot waves, but also win the race against the Libyan coast guard, which has been trained and equipped by Europe to keep migrants away from its shores.

Italy paid tribute Thursday to its ambassador to Congo and his bodyguard who were killed in an attack on a U.N. convoy, honoring them with a state funeral and prayers for peace in Congo and all nations "torn by war and violence."

A leading rights group on Thursday accused Libyan authorities of failing to bring suspected war criminals to justice for their alleged role in crimes against humanity since 2011.

Hundreds of Nigerian girls abducted last week from a boarding school in the country’s northwest have been released, a state governor said Tuesday, as the West African nation faces a spate of school kidnappings.

The U.S. urged the immediate withdrawal from Tigray of troops from the neighboring country of Eritrea and from Amhara, the Ethiopian region bordering Tigray.

Gunmen abducted 317 girls from a boarding school in northern Nigeria on Friday, police said, the latest in a series of mass kidnappings of students in the West African nation.

Niger State Gov. Abubakar Sani Bello said he received 24 students, six staff and eight relatives on Saturday after they were released early in the morning.

South Africa plans to spend $712 million to vaccinate some 67% of its 60 million people to control the country's COVID-19 battle and get the economy to rebound from its decline of 7.2% last year.

U.S. Africa Command, citing security concerns, declined to say Friday how many troops have already been moved or when the withdrawal will be completed.

Italian Carabinieri experts were joining U.N. and Congolese authorities in investigating the killings of the Italian ambassador, his bodyguard and their driver in eastern Congo amid questions about the dynamics of the attack and security precautions taken for the convoy.

The Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group, which includes an array of support ships, joins the Navy’s USS Hershel “Woody” Williams off the coast of Somalia.

Italy on Wednesday pressed the United Nations for answers about the attack on a U.N. food aid convoy in Congo that left a young ambassador and his paramilitary police bodyguard dead.

Bodies with gunshot wounds lay in the streets for days in Ethiopia's holiest city. At night, residents listened in horror as hyenas fed on the corpses of people they knew. But they were forbidden from burying their dead by the invading Eritrean soldiers.

The twin airstrikes launched in coordination with the Somali government targeted al-Shabab compounds near the town of Qunyo Barrow, AFRICOM said in a statement.

Less than two years after the top Ivory Coast cocoa producer teamed up with neighboring Ghana to force companies from Hershey to Nestle to pay more for their beans, the attempt to exert control over prices is backfiring.

The incoming chief of the World Trade Organization has a reputation for shaking up the guardians of wealth and power that will come in handy in her new role.

More than 11,300 people died in the last outbreak, the deadliest on record, which started in a rural Guinea village before tearing through Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Analysis

Somalia’s leaders failed to reach consensus after a three-day meeting to address obstacles to holding presidential elections next week, raising the prospect of a political crisis in the Horn of Africa country.

The United Arab Emirates called for an urgent renewal of diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Libya on Friday and said it is ready to work with the new U.S. administration and all other members of the U.N. Security Council to restore peace in the oil-rich north African nation.

U.S. Africa Command is slated to get almost $40 million more than the Pentagon sought for it after lawmakers added funds to the headquarters’ budget, citing concerns it lacks casualty evacuation capabilities.

A U.S. deputy commander for Africa on Wednesday welcomed a "new beginning" and a "renewed relationship" between the U.S. and Sudan following the African country's removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

A former Defense Department official was charged in connection with allegations he received $34,000 in illegal gratuity from a private party while serving in a government position, the U.S. Attorney’s central district office in California said.