Human rights advocates and politicians in Central African Republic claim soldiers who disappeared after being detained last month were kidnapped by mercenaries backed by Russia. The Kremlin has in recent years deepened ties with the gold- and diamond-rich country’s military and government.

The US has delegated its representation at a Group of 20 foreign ministers meeting in Johannesburg next week to a locally based official after Secretary of State Marco Rubio snubbed the event.

The M23 rebels entered the city’s Kazingu and Bagira zone and were advancing towards the center of the city of about 1.3 million people. Hours earlier, the rebels had claimed to have seized a second airport in the region. The rebels are the most prominent of more than 100 armed groups vying for control of Congo’s mineral-rich east.

The Pentagon chief, on his first international trip in his new job, met with rank-and-file troops and two combatant commanders for high-level briefings on threats ranging from militants in Africa to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The dead Islamic State fighter was sprawled out on the ridge, bloodstains darkening in the sun, as a line of heavily armed Somali soldiers snaked down the mountainside to a fortified cave — their camouflage uniforms marking a new front line in the fight against the global terrorist group.

A Utah National Guard officer deployed to Djibouti recently received a six-month jail sentence after pleading guilty to sexual harassment during a court-martial at Caserma Ederle in Vicenza.

Libya authorities have uncovered nearly 50 bodies from two mass graves in the country’s southeastern desert, officials said Sunday, in the latest tragedy involving people seeking to reach Europe through the chaos-stricken North African country.

Leaders from eastern and southern Africa on Saturday called for an immediate ceasefire in eastern Congo, where rebels are threatening to overthrow the Congolese government, but also urged Congo’s president to directly negotiate with them.

In the past two weeks alone, more than 3,000 people were killed as Rwanda-backed rebels wrested control of Goma city from the Congolese army and peacekeepers deployed by the UN and the Southern African Development Community.

The U.S. government said eight months ago that around 150,000 people have died in the Sudan conflict. Washington has accused both sides of committing war crimes, and the RSF rebels of committing ethnic cleansing and genocide.