Last week in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber reportedly killed and wounded around 40 people in Jalalabad. Most of the victims belong to Afghanistan’s Sikh and Hindu minority groups and included the only Sikh electoral candidate in the upcoming general election. Additionally, the arrest of a district militia leader and close aide of Vice President Dostum…
Key political violence highlights from the first week of July 2018 in Africa include the cross-border incidents between Uganda and the DRC, Ethiopia and Sudan, and Burundi and Rwanda; the targeting of French officials and troops in Cameroon and Mali; and the signs of political tensions in Algeria and Ivory Coast. There were notable episodes…
Demonstrations dominated the events reported last week in several countries across the region including in Bahrain, Iran, and Turkey. In Syria, intense activity was reported in Dar’a governorate last week as the government and its allies continued their offensive against rebel and Islamist factions, while parallel offensives in Idleb and northern Hama governorates also continued.…
Over 250 additional events were added to the ACLED Vietnam dataset, nearly tripling the number of political violence, protest, and non-violent events in Vietnam coded by ACLED. The new data supplements pre-released data by reporting underrepresented event types, in particular violence against civilians, and increasing ACLED coverage of previously under-reported areas, particularly in the north…
The period of ACLED’s coverage of Sri Lanka, 2010-2014, was bookended by the country’s sixth and seventh presidential elections, each marking major political events in the country’s political violence and protest landscape. During Sri Lanka’s January 2010 presidential election, supporters of multiple major political parties engaged in election-related violence, resulting in a high number of…
Over 3700 political violence, protests, and other non-violent events have been added to ACLED’s Bangladesh dataset. This new release represents the addition of two major years in Bangladesh’s political history (2013 and 2014), and more than doubles the number of events contained in ACLED’s Bangladesh dataset. The coverage period of ACLED’s Bangladesh dataset spans from…
Recorded political violence, protests, and other non-violent events drastically increased in the Philippines after President Duterte assumed office (June 30, 2016) and declared a ‘War on Drugs’ (July 1, 2016). In particular, Duterte’s drug war has resulted in violence against civilians increasing from around 50 recorded events to nearly 300 from June to August 2016,…
A low-level insurgency in Tunisia’s western mountains is taking an increasing toll on civilians, particularly shepherds, in the first half of 2018. Beginning in the wake of the 2010 Revolution, there has been an ongoing insurgency of intermittent intensity in Tunisia. In 2015, there were several high-profile terror attacks against tourist sites and security personnel,…
On 4 February, the Nigerian government declared that it had defeated Boko Haram (see ACLED, 12 April 2018 for further detail). However, although air and land forces continue to conduct successful raids against the remaining Boko Haram positions in the Lake Chad region, the sect has proved remarkably difficult to rout. There have been minimal…
Following the protracted Battle for Mosul between October 2016 and July 2017, the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq was subsequently pushed out of its other major strongholds in Telafar and Haweeja. With the further loss of the border town of Al-Qaim, its last bastion in the Anbar Province, the proto-state in Iraq came to an…