At least five people, including three children, were killed when a displaced persons camp at Jilib in southern Somalia was bombed yesterday, the charity Doctors Without Border (MSF) says. Now, predictably, the Kenyan army and Shabab rebels are blaming each other. Kenya's military released a statement saying the camp had come under fire by a Shabab "technical battle wagon" mounted with an "anti-aircraft gun." Sheikh Abukar Ali Ada of the Shabab countered: "Kenya has brutally massacred civilians already displaced by hardship. We will ensure that Kenya mourns more than we did." (The Telegraph, BBC News, Capital FM News, Nairobi, Oct. 31)

King Emere Godwin Bebe Okpabi and four other tribal leaders in Nigeria's Ogoniland last week filed a lawsuit in US federal court against Royal Dutch Shell PLC, charing the oil giant polluted local groundwater with benzene at levels 900 times the limits set by the World Health Organization. The lawsuit is based on a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report assessing the impact of oil contamination on the environment and public health in Ogoniland. The report, which was published in August, found high levels of the carcinogen benzene as well as several inches of refined oil floating in groundwater that the village uses for drinking and agriculture. The UN investigators suggested that both Royal Dutch Shell and Nigeria's state oil company (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation—NNPC) were responsible for the pollution, although Shell abandoned the area in 1993. The complaint, filed in US District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan, contends that Shell's actions were willfully negligent in contaminating groundwater. Suing under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), the plaintiffs are seeking $1 billion in damages, an injunction and immediate cleanup.

Kenya's military forces crossed into Somalia Oct. 26 to support transitional government troops in a campaign against Shabab insurgents. The operation follows a wave of kidnappings by suspected Shabab militants that has threatened Kenya's multi-million dollar tourism industry. A Nairobi military spokesman said Kenyan and Somali government troops had killed 73 rebels in fighting, but Shabab denied it had suffered any casualties. Shabab fighters are converging on the Somali border town of Afmado in lower Jubba region to block the advance of Kenyan forces. Nearly the entire population of Afmado has reportedly fled.

US troops have been deployed to back up the forces of Uganda and neighboring nations to fight the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), in what authorities hope will be a final offensive to crush the notoriously brutal guerilla group, known for its campaigns of killing, rape, and use of child soldiers over the past two decades. US troops are landing in Uganda and from there may deploy to the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and southern Sudan, where the LRA's scattered force of some 400 is also operating. The US troops are combat-ready and have instructions to fight if attacked, but Pentagon spokesman Cpt. John Kirby said their mission is limited to helping Ugandan and other regional forces crush the LRA.

President Omar al-Bashir announced Oct. 12 that Sudan will adopt an Islamic constitution. The official creation of an Islamic state, three months after the formal split between Sudan and South Sudan , is intended to more accurately reflect the religious affiliation of its population now that the mainly Christian south is an independent country, Bashir said. "Ninety eight percent of the people are Muslims and the new constitution will reflect this," the president told students in Khartoum in a speech. "The official religion will be Islam and Islamic law the main source [of the constitution]. We call it a Muslim state." Bashir remains wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and genocide in Dafur. The constitutional revision raises grave concerns the more than one million southerners living in Sudan, who have already been given until the spring to leave and are treated as foreigners. They have lost government jobs and now need work and residency permits to stay in the north. (Reuters, Jurist, Oct. 13)

Rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on Aug. 30 said in a joint press release that they have evidence the Sudanese army has committed war crimes in the country's South Kordofan region. Researchers from the two advocacy groups visited the Nuba Mountain region of South Kordofan where they "documented 13 separate bombing incidents in Kauda, Delami and Kurchi towns alone, in which at least 26 civilians were killed and more than 45 others injured since mid-June." The researchers claim bombings occurred on a continuous basis during their time in the region. They argue that the use of unguided bombs dropped from high altitude on nonmilitary targets is a violation of international human rights law. Amnesty International's Erwin van der Borght called for the UN Security Council to "condemn in the strongest possible terms the ongoing human rights violations in the Nuba Mountains, and mandate an independent inquiry to investigate abuses committed by parties to the conflict in Southern Kordofan since 5 June."

The Islamist militant group Boko Haram claimed responsibility for a devastating car bomb attack that killed at least 18 people at a United Nations compound in Nigeria's capital, Abuja, on Aug. 26. Police immediately responded by deploying bulldozers around the city to demolish all "illegal" structures, with the aim of securing better control of the streets. Several makeshift homes and shops have been destroyed.

Twice as many US citizens as previously reported by law enforcement have traveled overseas to join Somalia's supposedly al-Qaeda-linked Shabab insurgents, an investigation by Republican staff on the House Homeland Security Committee determined this week, asserting that more than 40 Americans have traveled to Horn of Africa country to join the rebel group (which is on the State Department list of "Foreign Terrorist Organizations." Publicly, authorities have reported at least 21 men left the Minneapolis area for Somalia since late 2007 and are believed to have joined the Shabab.