The African Union says it has suspended Burkina Faso and will impose sanctions on coup leaders if they do not restore the interim government and release its senior officials.

The AU statement, issued on Friday, followed a meeting of the Peace and Security Council in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Soldiers from the elite presidential guard (RSP) stormed into a cabinet meeting on Wednesday and abducted President Michel Kafando and Isaac Zida, the prime minister, disrupting a transition period due to end with polls next month.

General Gilbert Diendere, a former spy chief and close ally of Blaise Compaore, the former long-term president, was named junta head the next day.

The AU gave coup leaders 96 hours, or until September 22, to restore the transitional government or face travel bans and asset freezes.

“Council decides to suspend, with immediate effect, the participation of Burkina Faso in all AU activities,” the statement said, adding that members of the RSP linked to the kidnappings would be held legally accountable for their actions.

Burkina Faso, whose citizens toppled Compaore last year as he sought to extend his 27-year rule, had been seen as a model by pro-democracy campaigners across sub-Saharan Africa.

The coup has been condemned by the US, former colonial power France and the UN.

‘Lack of dialogue’

For his part, Senegal’s President Macky Sall deplored a “lack of dialogue” as mediators entered a second day of talks between the interim and coup leader.

“There is a critical lack of dialogue among actors, and this will negatively affect national unity and cohesion,” Sall said in remarks late on Friday night after a full day of meetings in the capital, Ouagadougou.

Diendere, a former top Compaore aide, said he met some members of the international community and was “considering meeting the different political parties very soon”.

But transition officials have insisted that the junta needs to leave.

“The mediators are here to help us find a compromise, but there are things that are non-negotiable,” Jean Hobert Bazie, a transitional legislator, who joined others in calling for the return of Kafando.

Islamist militant group al Shabaab has retaken another town in Somalia from African troops, adding to a string of settlements it has seized this month, the group and an official said, according to Reuters.

Al Shabaab retook the town of Janale, about 90 km (55 miles) south of the capital Mogadishu, on Thursday, September 17.

This month, the group attacked a base of Africa Union forces in Janale area, killing at least 12 Uganda troops, and has retaken at least three other towns in southern and central Somalia.

The government has dismissed the gains by al Shabaab, saying the areas retaken are not of strategic value.

But the recent Islamist offensive has highlighted the group’s ability to keep up the pressure on the Western-backed government it wants to topple, using both its military force alongside its more frequent suicide bomb and gun attacks.

Al Shabaab’s military operations spokesman Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab said Janale was retaken when the African troops left.

“Now it is fully under our control,” he told Reuters.

The fall of the town was confirmed by Ali Nur, the acting governor of Lower Shabelle region.

UNICEF says attacks by armed extremist group Boko Haram have forced 500,000 children to flee their homes in the last five months.

The U.N.’s children agency says 1.4 million children overall are “on the run” in Nigeria and neighboring countries where the group has sown terror in recent months. More than half of the 1.2 million children who have fled northern Nigeria alone are under 5 years old.

Spokesman Christophe Boulierac says the agency is in “full operational mode” in the region but has received less than one-third of the $50 million funding it has sought for the Lake Chad region.

Speaking Friday at a U.N. news conference in Geneva, Boulierac also appealed for renewed attention on the 219 girls abducted in April 2014 from a school in Chibok.

Residents in northern Cameroon say suspected Boko Haram fighters have killed eight people and kidnapped an unknown number of others for collaborating with Cameroon security forces in the nation’s border village of Aisaharde near a military base in Mora.

Pia Robert, a resident of Aisaharde village, near a military base in Mora, said in a telephone interview that about 30 assailants stormed the village early Thursday and moved from door to door reading the names of people from a list. He said when someone’s name was read he was accused of collaborating with Cameroonian soldiers and immediately killed or taken away.

He says three women and five men were slaughtered and their houses were burned. He says Cameroon soldiers arrived three hours after the incident, saw the corpses and started investigations, but it is still early to say how many were kidnapped.

Official confirmation

Midjiyawa Bakary, the governor of Far North Cameroon, confirmed the attack, saying a few houses were burned and the military is combing the hills on the border with Nigeria to track the assailants.

Aisaharde is some 10 kilometers from Mora, where there is a base of the joint task force to fight the insurgents. More than two thousand Cameroonian soldiers are at the base.

Fighting erupted between rival armed groups near Mali’s desert border with Algeria on Thursday, reportedly taking at least 15 lives in a fresh violation of a U.N.-backed peace deal.

Militias in the border region signed a long-awaited peace accord in June after months of negotiations, but mediators are struggling to make them abide by its terms.

The two sides, led by Tuareg warlords from opposing clans, clashed in August near the town of Anefis, leaving 20 dead.

“Fighting resumed this morning in Inafarak where pro-government militias arrived recently to prepare an offensive against the CMA,” said Attaye Ag Mohamed, a representative of the separatist Coordination of Azawad Movements.

He said 15 fighters died, including 13 from pro-government militias. Around 70 pickups from the Platform pro-government alliance remained in the area and there was a risk of new violence on Friday, he added.

Medhi Ag Almoubareck, spokesman for Platform’s largest group GATIA, said its fighters were assaulted by the CMA early on Thursday and had fought back. He said 17 fighters died of which 14 were from CMA.

“We received reports that an exchange of fire took place there but ceased shortly after,” said Radhia Achouri, spokeswoman for the U.N. mission to Mali. None of its troops were nearby to verify the reports directly.

The renewed fighting has dashed mediators’ hopes that the peace deal would bring a measure of stability and allow the government and supporting regional and Western powers to focus on combating Islamist militants also active in the area.

Security forces say that the battle for positions among armed groups is motivated partly by competition for control of smuggling routes through the desert to Algeria and Niger, used cocaine and arms dealers as well as traditional traders.

Algerian media reported a large arms seizure in Inafarak including heavy machine guns, ammunition and grenades on Wednesday.

Mali’s Tuaregs have risen up four times since Mali’s independence from France in 1960 and are seeking more autonomy for the northern region they call Azawad.

Islamist militants briefly seized the north alongside Tuaregs in 2012, but were forced to retreat by an offensive led by French troops.

At least three off-duty Somali soldiers were killed by a bomb blast as they collected their pay in the city of Kismayu on Thursday, in an attack that Islamist al Shabaab militants claimed responsibility for, police and the group said.

Al Shabaab, which seeks to overthrow the Western-backed government and impose its strict version of Islamic law, has remained a potent threat in Somalia even after being forced out of the capital Mogadishu in 2011.

The blast came weeks after al Shabaab retook the central Somali town of Buqda and two other settlements this month once African peacekeepers had left the area. In August, a raid on their base killed at least 12 people.

“So far, three officers who were handing out salaries have died and 10 others collecting it have been wounded,” police major Abdirahman Nur told Reuters. “The bomb was planted inside the camp.”

Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab’s spokesman for military operations, said his group was behind Thursday’s explosion inside the barracks.

“We had planted a bomb in a military camp in Kismayu. It exploded as the forces lined up for their salaries this morning,” he told Reuters.

A car bomb at a university that was being used as a base for government troops in the same city killed 16 soldiers late last month.

As well a raids on troops, al Shabaab frequently carries out bombings and gun attacks on officials at offices, hotels or restaurants in Mogadishu and elsewhere.

In an interview with Reuters, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said late on Wednesday the settlements retaken by al Shabaab had no strategic value and do not signal a resurgence of the group.

Western diplomats say the group can still pack a punch despite weakening, and it threatens Somalia’s gradual reconstruction.

The army and rebels have repeatedly traded blame accusing each other of breaking an August 29 ceasefire deal, the eighth such agreement to have been signed since civil war broke out in December 2013.

Monitors from the regional East Africa bloc IGAD, which led efforts to negotiate the peace deal, said that on September 2, government helicopters attacked rebel positions outside Malakal, capital of the battleground oil-state of Upper Nile.

Monitors “witnessed the helicopter gunships flying towards and engaging” rebel forces on the west bank of the Nile, according to the report, which details violations up to September 9.

The army later fired on the rebel positions, with reports troops then crossed the river to stage a ground attack, the monitors added.

They recommended the government be condemned “in the strongest terms possible.”

Malakal is under government control but has swapped hands many times in the nearly two-year-old war, and rebels are based just outside the town.

Despite the fighting, both sides say the political deal remains in place, and on Tuesday, President Salva Kiir said he was “fully committed” to ending the war.

But monitors warned continued fighting threatened the agreement.

“Any violation will negatively impact… the ongoing implementation of the compromise agreement signed by the warring parties,” the report added.

The IGAD monitors also detailed attacks by rebel forces in Unity state, but which took place before the ceasefire was signed.

The world’s youngest nation, South Sudan descended into bloodshed in December 2013 when Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of planning a coup.

The violence has left tens of thousands of people dead and the impoverished country split along ethnic lines.

The United States on Tuesday requested that UN sanctions including a global travel ban and assets freeze be imposed on South Sudan’s army chief Paul Malong and rebel commander Johnson Olony for their role in the continued fighting. Russia and Angola blocked that request.

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President Muhammadu Buhari has said that one of the conditions given by Boko Haram for the release of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls was for the Nigerian government to release one of the sect members with expertise in making Improvised Explosives Devices (IEDs).

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the President stated this on Tuesday in Paris while responding to questions from members of the Nigerian community in France under the auspices of Nigerians in Diaspora Organization (NIDO).

Mr. Buhari however said his government would not accept such a demand.

“They wanted us to release one of their leaders who is a strategic person in developing and making Improvised IEDs that is causing a lot of havoc in the country by blowing people in Churches, Mosques, market places, motor parks and other places,” Mr. Buhari said.

He reiterated the administration’s readiness to negotiate – on certain conditions – with the terrorists for the release of the schoolgirls abducted since April 2014.

“The issue of Chibok girls has occupied our minds and because of the international attention it drew and the sympathy throughout the country and the world. The government is (looking into possibility of) negotiating with some of the Boko Haram leadership,” the president said.

Mr. Buhari, however, stated that government must first establish genuine members of the sect so that it would not make the mistake of engaging the wrong persons.

“It is a very sensitive development in the sense that first we have to establish, are they genuine leaders of the Boko Haram. That is number one.

“Number two, what are their terms, the first impression we had was not very encouraging,’’ the president said.

He expressed his administration’s worries over the continued stay of the Chibok schoolgirls in the hands of their captors, saying he was working tirelessly to get them released.

Mr. Buhari noted that the unfortunate incident had attracted global attention and sympathy within and outside Nigeria and government could not fold its alms over the issue.

“But, it is very important that if we are going to talk to anybody, we have to know how much he is worth.

“Let them bring all the girls and then, we will be prepared to negotiate; I will allow them to come back to Nigeria or to be absorbed in the community.

“We have to be very careful; the concern we have for the Chibok girls, one only imagines if they got a daughter there between 14 and 18 and for more than one and a half year, a lot of the parents who have died would rather see the graves of their daughters rather than the condition they imagine they are in.

“This has drawn a lot of sympathy throughout the world; that is why this government is working very hard in negotiating and getting the balance of those who are alive,” he said.

Mr. Buhari assured the diasporans that his administration was doing everything possible to improve on the state of the economy through provision of infrastructure in critical sectors.

The president’s Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina had, in July, confirmed the willingness of government to engage the sect in negotiations if they were ready.

The Nigerian Army spokesman, Sani Usman, was quoted in the media as saying that members of the terror group were surrendering “en masse” and that the regional offensive was recording fruitful results against the militants.

Some Nigerians, who fielded questions during the interaction with President Buhari, requested to know what government was doing to guarantee the plight of the disabled.

Questions were also asked about the possibility of diaspora Nigerians to vote during elections.

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Mali’s pro-government militias have withdrawn from the flashpoint town of Anefis but are pushing northwards to another settlement, the United Nations mission (MINUSMA) said on Tuesday.

Mediators are struggling to make armed groups in Mali’s desert north abide by the terms of a U.N.-backed June peace deal which seeks to turn the page on decades of Tuareg rebellions since independence from France in 1960.

The departure of the Platform coalition from Anefis comes after weeks of pressure from Western donors, MINUSMA and even from the Malian government following a series of clashes there last month that killed at least 20 people.

“MINUSMA congratulates itself on the retreat yesterday of members of Platform from Anefis and its surroundings,” MINUSMA said in a statement. “However, MINUSMA is extremely concerned about the northerly movement of Platform towards Aguelhok.”

It added that the Tuareg separatist alliance known as Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA) were also moving into new territory and urged both sides to revert to June positions.

Security sources say that the battle for positions among the groups led by rival Tuareg leaders is motivated partly by competition for desert trafficking corridors for both cocaine and legal goods like food and cigarettes.

Expansion may also benefit armed groups if the peace deal proceeds as key army posts and development funding are expected to be distributed to local communities.

Medhi Ag Almoubareck, spokesman for Platform’s largest group GATIA, said troops were heading towards the town of Aguelhok to visit family members. He said they had been instructed not to touch the CMA stronghold of Kidal, a move likely to trigger a major riposte from separatists.

CMA spokesman Attaye Ag Mohamed said they did not yet have confirmation of the departure of Platform troops from Anefis and condemned their spread further north.