Russian forces are now operating inside an air base in Niger where U.S. troops also are positioned, but they pose little risk to American personnel there, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this week.

A humanitarian crisis is worsening in northeastern Mali where armed groups linked to Islamic State have besieged towns leaving residents including some 80,000 children vulnerable to disease and malnutrition.

The commander of U.S. Africa Command says the U.S. military plans to return to Chad for talks about revising an agreement that allows it to keep troops based there. In April, the U.S. said it was pulling its troops from Chad, an announcement which followed Niger’s decision to order all U.S. troops out of its country.

Tourists have been evacuated by air from Kenya’s Maasai Mara national reserve after more than a dozen hotels, lodges and camps were flooded as heavy rains continue to batter the country. More than 170 people have died across Kenya since mid-March when the rainy season started.

A Rwandan official says a man, whose nationality was not disclosed and who was unsuccessful in getting asylum in the U.K., has arrived in Rwanda but not under a controversial deal to deport to Rwanda migrants who enter the U.K. illegally.

Mali’s army says Abu Huzeifa, a senior Islamic State group commander believed to have helped carry out an attack in 2017 on U.S. and Nigerien forces that resulted in the deaths of four Americans and four Nigerien troops, has been killed in an operation by Malian state forces.

The United States on implored all countries supplying weapons to Sudan’s warring parties to halt arms sales, warning that history in the vast western Darfur region where there was a genocide 20 years ago “is repeating itself.”

Flash floods and a landslide swept through houses and cut off a major road in Kenya, killing at least 45 people and leaving dozens missing on Monday, the Interior Ministry said.

Five people have been killed in a bomb attack in northern Kenya, the interior ministry said Monday.

Flooding and heavy rains in Kenya have killed at least 70 people since mid-March, a government spokesperson, twice as many as were reported earlier this week.