France has set up a military base in Niger, just south of the Libyan border, hoping to cut off trafficking and supply routes, on which militant groups like Islamic State rely to spread their influence around the region, as Thomas Fessy reports.

Security forces affiliated with Libya’s Tripoli-based “salvation” government have secured the release 47 Arab and African workers earlier taken hostage by a militant group, a government security official said Monday.

Various armed groups in Libya have violently attacked, kidnapped, intimidated, threatened, and killed Libyan journalists with impunity over the past two years, causing many to flee the country or impose self-censorship, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. At the same time, courts are prosecuting journalists and others …

New border security operations by the Algerian army led to the arrest of Libyan smugglers and the seizure of illegal arms.

There were no fewer than 231 recorded assassinations or assassination attempts in the eastern city of Benghazi in 2014, one independent source reports.

Thirteen Egyptian Christians seized in Sirte are now in the hands of the local council and being protected by the local Ferjan tribe. They were abducted two days ago by unknown gunmen.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry has urged Egyptians living and working in Libya to stay indoors and take extra precautions in the aftermath of the last week’s abductions of Egyptian Coptic Christians in Sirte.  However, it is  also looking at ways that Egyptians  can leave the country.

An Iraqi professor Iraqi at the University of Sirte was kidnapped this morning. His three sons were also seized from their home in the town with him.

Army General David Rodriguez says Isil has set up training camps in eastern Libya, intensifying fears jihadists are extending their reach through North Africa.

Country is riven by violence amid growing extremist threats some three years after the removal of Muammar Gaddafi in a popular uprising.