West Africa, Horn, MENA: Links for 2/6/2026

News and analysis from Dakar to Riyadh.

Last week’s links can be read here.

Sahel and West Africa

In Guinea, where military ruler Mamadi Doumbouya cemented his power by winning a questionable election in December 2025, his post-election government has a lot of continuity - but also a new Justice Minister, Ibrahima Sory II Tounkara. As a judge, Tounkara oversaw a trial of accused perpetrators of a 2009 military-led massacre of civilians; his appointment has earned praise from Guinean civil society, but also questions about how he will relate to authorities who have overseen numerous disappearances and arrests.

Segun Adeyemi for Business Insider: “Burkina Faso Hits Record 94 Tonnes of Gold Output as Mining Reforms Gain Traction.” Forty-two tons of that came from artisinal mining. Mines Minister Yacouba Zabré Gouba attributed the overall increase in output to, Adeyemi writes, “the operationalisation of the state-owned Burkina Faso Mining Participation Company, SOPAMIB, as well as tighter oversight of the country’s 15 industrial mines.” Authorities also say they have suppressed some of the illegal trading. For more background, see this Reuters article from June 2025 about the nationalization of five sites.

Meanwhile, from Sophie Douce, Philip Kleinfeld and an anonymous Burkinabè journalist at the New Humanitarian: “Arrests and Red Tape: How Burkina Faso’s Junta Is Throttling Humanitarian Aid.”

The Africa Report’s Kent Mensah looks at Ghanaian oligarchs, “the business titans whose influence survives elections, scandals and probes by straddling both political divides.”

At Africa Is a Country, Omole Ibukun writes that following Donald Trump’s airstrikes on Nigeria in December, the ensuing debate has “reduce[d] the question of security to a false binary: reliance either on the state’s formal security apparatus or on foreign military force.” Ibukun argues that there is a path - however narrow and fraught - to a kind of community-led and -anchored, democratically oriented, bottom-up security. “The work begins in the streets, neighborhoods, and villages where security must become a common project of the people, not a gift to be given to us by [Nigerian President Bola] Tinubu or a performance staged by Donald Trump.”

Horn of Africa

The United States and the United Arab Emirates have pledged, respectively, $200 million and $500 million in humanitarian aid to Sudan. The AP reports:

“Today we are signaling that the international community will work together to bring this suffering to an end, and to ensure lifesaving aid reaches communities in such desperate, desperate need,” said U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, who heads the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA. Fletcher co-hosted the fundraising event in Washington on Tuesday with U.S. senior adviser for Arab and African affairs Massad Boulos.

Boulos has said he expects to raise $1.5 billion total. Alongside the fundraising meeting was a meeting of the Quad - the U.S., the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt - to discuss efforts to mediate a truce in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. All of the members of the Quad are, in different ways, participants in the war as well.

At Geeska, Aya Rajab Abu Al-Yazeed has a fascinating and important piece about how both the SAF and the RSF have targeted communications infrastructure in Sudan - opening the door to Starlink, “not simply as an alternative internet service, but as a technology that would gradually entangle itself in the political economy of the war.”

Jay Bahadur for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime:

Milxo is a tiny mining settlement in a remote and contested region of north-eastern Somalia that, over the past decade, has become the site of one of Africa’s least-known gold booms. What was little more than a cluster of structures housing a few hundred people in 2016 has expanded into a sprawling settlement of an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 residents, drawing prospectors from across Somalia and from abroad, including Sudan, Yemen, Tanzania and Ethiopia. This rapid growth has brought new livelihoods to a neglected region, but it has unfolded in a legal and political vacuum marked by contested sovereignty, weak governance and insecurity.

Duncan Miriri and George Obulutsa for Reuters: “Ethiopia Investors Plan Legal Action as Row Over $1 Billion Bond Overhaul Escalates.” The Ethiopian economy is growing fast (again), but there are still numerous forms of economic crisis in the country, including an affordability crisis for ordinary people. In any case, Ethiopia defaulted on bond repayment in 2023, and announced in January that a restructured bond of $850 million would mature in 2029. But “the Official Creditors Committee, chaired by China and France, said the draft deal did not meet the Comparability of Treatment principle under the G20 restructuring initiative.” As a side note, having dug into this story for a few minutes, it is difficult on first pass for me to figure out who makes up the ad hoc committee of bondholders - another indication of how proliferating paywalls and declining quality of search results combine to make it quite difficult to follow and understand the news these days.

Middle East and North Africa

Floods in Morocco are causing tremendous displacement and damage, including in the important economic zone of Ksar El Kébir in the northwest of the country.

RFI’s Lilia Blaise covers whether and how, in Tunisian universities, it is still possible to debate issues of democracy in the country.

Omar Shakir, longtime head of Israel-Palestine research at Human Rights Watch, has resigned along with assistant researcher Milena Ansari. Jewish Currents interviewed Shakir and covered the resignation, which was sparked by a disagreement with HRW’s new Executive Director Philippe Bolopion. The disagreement turned on how a draft report dealt with the right of Palestinian refugees to return home. An excerpt from the JC article:

Shakir and Ansari completed a draft of their report in August 2025, at which time they say it went through HRW’s usual edit process, ultimately being reviewed by eight separate departments. Some colleagues raised concerns to Shakir along the way. In an October 21st email, chief advocacy officer Bruno Stagno Ugarte said he was concerned with the wide scope of the report, which in his view implicated all diaspora Palestinians, and he suggested that a report on the recent forced displacements from Gaza and the West Bank might “resonate better.” He further said he worried that the findings “will be misread by many, our detractors first and foremost, as a call to demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.” Concerns about reputational damage were also voiced by Tom Porteous, HRW’s acting program director at the time. He wrote Shakir that the report was well-argued, but “the question is how we are going to deploy this argument in our advocacy without this coming off as HRW rejecting the state of Israel and without it undermining our credibility as a neutral, impartial monitor of events.”

The AP:

Syria ’s state-owned petroleum company signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. and Qatar on Wednesday for the development of the country’s first offshore oil and gas field.

Syrian Petroleum Company’s deal with U.S. energy giant Chevron and the Qatar-based Power International Holding was signed in Damascus in the presence of the U.S.’s special envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack.

The Trump administration publicly weighed in to oppose the possibility of Iraqi ex-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki returning to that role amid the long-running negotiations following Iraq’s parliamentary elections last November.

Vivian Nereim for the New York Times on the emergent Saudi Arabian-Emirati rivalry. Among the key lines in the piece is a quotation from International Crisis Group’s Alan Boswell: “We expect this to escalate the war in Sudan and further divide Somalia.”