Four Mali soldiers were killed on Friday when their vehicle ran over a road mine in the central town of Dialloube as they returned from an operation against jihadists, military sources told AFP.

"Returning from a successful military operation against the jihadists' main base in Dialloube, where ten terrorists were neutralised, an army vehicle drove over a mine, killing four soldiers," said a military source at the defence ministry.

A foreign military source confirmed the deaths, adding that two other soldiers were seriously injured.

Jihadists have ramped up their activities in central Mali in recent months, targeting domestic and foreign forces in violence once confined to the restive north.

Four UN peacekeepers were killed and four were wounded last week when a mine exploded under their vehicle in central Mali.

During a visit to the region earlier this week Mali's Prime Minister Boubeye Maiga assured that ramped up military operations were beginning to bear fruit.

Islamic extremists linked to Al-Qaeda took control of the desert north of Mali in early 2012, but were largely driven out in a French-led military operation launched in January 2013.

In June 2015, Mali's government signed a peace agreement with coalitions of armed groups. But the jihadists remain active, and large tracts of the country are lawless.

11 killed in minibus blaze in Guinea-Bissau
Bissau (AFP) March 9, 2018 - Eleven people died when a minibus became trapped in a forest fire in rural Guinea-Bissau, police and doctors said on Friday.

The accident happened on Thursday night, after the overcrowded vehicle left the village of Konkoli, near the capital Bissau, on an 80-kilometer (50-mile) trip to a market in Bissora.

"The driver tried to go down a track in a forest which was on fire. There was no visibility because of the smoke and fire," a police official said. "(...) The passengers were trapped and died of suffocation."

Police recovered nine bodies, and two people who were injured later died, the official said. Nine others are being treated for injuries.

The toll was confirmed by sources at the local hospital.

The cause of the fire was not immediately known. At this time of the year, farmers in Guinea-Bissau often set fire to harvest stubble to eliminate weeds, and the blaze can spread from fields to the bush.

On January 5, a head-on collision west of Bissau between an overladen minibus and a truck hauling bricks left 18 dead and 14 injured.

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Tillerson heads to Africa, with China in his sights
Washington (AFP) March 6, 2018
Washington's top diplomat set off for Africa on Tuesday to tour countries that form a new theater for competition with America's ambitious great power rival China. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's trip to Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti, Chad and Nigeria will take him to new battlefields in the United States' long war against Islamist extremism. But looming over the journey will be a different and arguably more important long-term challenge - the rise of China as an economic and diplomatic power to ... read more