Clashes erupted after a dispute over the rebuilding of houses damaged by similar fighting in 2008

Clashes between Muslim and Christian gangs have broken out again in the capital of central Nigeria’s Plateau state, Jos, causing dozens of deaths and forcing police to impose a 24-hour curfew.

A police official said on Tuesday that as many as 60 people might have been killed since Sunday when clashes started.

Mohammed Shittu, an employee at Jos central mosque, where he said bodies were being taken, told the AFP news agency around 150 people had been killed in fighting, with around 800 wounded.

“On Sunday evening, we buried 19 corpses and 52 yesterday. As of right now, there are 78 at the mosque yet to be buried,” Shittu said.

The figures could not be independently confirmed.

Residents said sporadic gunfire could be heard in many neighbourhoods and several houses were on fire, but the violence had not spread beyond the city itself.

Security forces are trying to prevent a repetition of clashes in November 2008, in which hundreds of residents were killed in the country’s worst fighting between Muslim and Christian gangs in years.

Curfew imposed

Earlier on Tuesday, Gregory Anyating, the state’s police commissioner, said: “In view of this situation in town, I hereby declare a 24-hour curfew starting from now.”

Goodluck Jonathan, the Nigerian vice-president, who has taken over ceremonial duties from Umaru Yar’Adua, the ailing president, has directed the national security adviser and senior police officials to take the necessary action to restore calm to the city.

Ima Niboro, the vice-president’s spokesman, said: “I assure you that the federal government is on top of the situation in Jos and the situation is under control.”

This week’s violence started after an argument between Muslim and Christian neighbours over the rebuilding of homes destroyed in the 2008 clashes.

Nigeria has roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims, although traditional animist beliefs underpin many people’s faiths.

More than 200 ethnic groups generally live peacefully side by side in the West African country, although one million people were killed in a civil war between 1967 and 1970 and there have been outbreaks of religious unrest since then.

At least 40 people were killed last month in clashes between Nigerian security forces and members of an Islamic sect in the northern city of Bauchi.

"The natural wealth that lies beneath Congo’s soil is the fuel that keeps the conflict burning and a reason why the killings, rape and forced displacement continue at such an appalling rate,"

Government troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), helped by UN peacekeepers, have launched an operation to pacify the mountain region in the east of the country.

The aim of the security operation Amani Leo, or Peace Today, is to eradicate armed groups in the volatile region, which is at the centre of one of the world’s deadliest conflicts.

Less than a week after it begun, the offensive in South and North Kivu has already resulted in attacks on civilians and people have been forced from their homes.

Tuisenye Saisengaa, a woman taking shelter in a displaced people’s camp, fled with her children after their village became a battlefield.

“The government forces came to attack the bandits who terrorised us every night. The fighting was very heavy. We then decided to flee for our lives,” she said.

The three-month-long campaign is facing a daunting task in battling fighters roaming the forests.

Rwandan rebels, ethnic militias and deserters from the government army are taking advantage of the hilly terrain, using the area as a hideout.

Reprisal attacks against civilians by the armed groups are common.

Bandu Kaberuka, a displaced farmer, says: “There is no peace. We are getting tired of being attacked daily. We used to flee to the forest before but now there is nowhere to escape. The conflict is everywhere.”

Natural wealth

Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Adow, reporting from Masisi district, says the conflict is not about power or politics.

“The natural wealth that lies beneath Congo’s soil is the fuel that keeps the conflict burning and a reason why the killings, rape and forced displacement continue at such an appalling rate,” he says.

“The rebels use income from the mineral to fund the conflict.”

The Amani Leo operation comes after a controversial UN mission, trying to defeat the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), ended at the end of last year.

The mission had been criticised for lending too much support to the Congolese army which is accused of widespread rape and killings. Such crimes are allegedly also committed by the FDLR.

UN troops were first deployed following the 1998-2003 civil war in which millions of people are said to have died.

The FDLR are thought to have up to 7,000 fighters. They say they are fighting to defend fellow Rwandan Hutus, a minority tribe in the area.

They are sometimes backed by an unknown number of rebels from Uganda, including the Lord’s Resistance Army. Plenty of deserters from the national army have also joined the cause.

More than one million civilians have been displaced by the fighting over the last year.

Rival tribes have clashed for years in disputes caused by cattle rustling and feuds

At least 139 people have been killed in tribal clashes following a cattle raid in southern Sudan, local government officials said.

Armed attackers from the Nuer tribe raided Dinka cattle herders in the remote Tonj area in Warrap state on Saturday, seizing 5,000 animals, officials said on Thursday.

“They killed 139 people and wounded 54,” Sabino Makana, the deputy governor of Warrap state, told the Reuters news agency.

“Nobody knows how many attackers were killed. But it may be many as a lot of people came to fight.”

A UN official confirmed the deaths, saying the clashes occurred some time since the beginning of the year.

Rise in violence

But reports of the clash surfaced only after a UN security team visited the area this week, the AFP news agency reported.

“Local sources on the ground said that at least 140 people had been killed, 90 wounded and 30,000 head of cattle had been stolen,” Lise Grande, the UN deputy resident and humanitarian coordinator in south Sudan, told AFP.

“This is a matter of deep concern.”

A sharp rise in tribal violence in recent months has killed more than 2,000 people, including many women and children, and displaced another 250,000 people, the United Nations has said.

Rival tribes from Sudan’s south have clashed for years in disputes often caused by cattle rustling and long-running feuds, but violence has soared this year.

The Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) has blamed at least some of the inter-tribal fighting on interference by Khartoum, which they say is arming civilians and militias to cause unrest ahead of elections and a 2011 referendum on southern independence.

Others have said the blame should be partly put on rivalry between southern leaders, complicated by the 20-year war that often pitched southern ethnic groups against each other.

Al-Shabab fighters and their allies control much of southern and central Somalia

The UN food agency has suspended aid distribution to about one million people in southern Somalia following threats of violence against its staff, officials said.

World Food Programme (WFP) officials said on Tuesday that attacks on aid operations and demands imposed by armed groups have made it “virtually impossible” to continue delivering food to people in the region.

“WFP’s humanitarian operations in southern Somalia have been under escalating attacks from armed groups, leading to this virtual suspension of humanitarian food distribution in much of southern Somalia,” the agency said in a statement.

“Staff safety is a key concern for WFP and recent attacks, threats, harassment and demands for payments by armed groups have decimated the humanitarian food lifeline.”

‘Threats and harassment’

Peter Smerdon, a WFP spokesman, said the agency hopes to resume operations as soon as possible.

“We are the biggest humanitarian agency operating in Somalia and we’ve been doing so for many years, but finally the threats and attacks on our operations and harassment of our staff was getting too much,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We are obviously deeply concerned about the welfare of the people of Somalia but the security of our staff is critical and thats why we’ve taken this step, which is very unfortunate.”

Somalia has not had an effective government since 1991, when Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown by armed groups who then turned on each other.

Members of Somalia’s al-Shabab group and its allies, who are fighting to topple the UN-backed government, control much of southern and central Somalia.

Smerdon said al-Shabab fighters control 95 per cent of the territory where aid operations are now suspended.

“In November of last year, they set out 11 conditions for aid agencies to work in southern Somalia and these included such things as removing women from their jobs … and demands for payment of $20,000 every six months for security.

“So there have been these unacceptable demands and at the same time we’ve had an escalating series of threats, which has forced us to pull out.”

The Lord's Resistance Army has been fighting the Ugandan army since 1988

A senior commander of a Ugandan rebel group has been killed in Central African Republic, Ugandan officials have said.

Brigadier Bok Abudema of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) was killed in the town of Djema on Friday amid an ongoing operation against the group by Ugandan forces across several countries in the region.

Lieutenant Colonel Felix Kulayige, Uganda’s defence and army spokesman, said Abudema was the only casualty of the raid that killed him but troops also recovered two women who had been with him.

“He was a notorious commander but his life has come to an end,” he said.

Okello Oryem, Uganda’s foreign affairs minister, repeated the military’s claims that it had carried out a successful operation against the LRA commander.

“Abudema is absolutely dead, he will never recover from his death and his body is due to be buried any time now because his body is fermenting,” he told Al Jazeera from Kampala, the Ugandan capital.

“This is a massive triumph,” he said. “Abudema was a killer, he was a rapist and he committed massacres in northern Uganda on a number of occasions.”

LRA resistance

Intelligence officials have said that Abudema was effectively the second most senior commander of the outfit, led by Joseph Kony, following the wounding about a year ago of deputy commander Okot Odhiambo.

However, Obonyo Olweny, a spokesman for the LRA, played down Abudema’s role in the group and said he was unable to confirm the Ugandan army’s claims.

“I cannot say for sure that Brigadier Bok Abudema is dead,” he said by telephone from Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.

“This is not the end of the LRA. The LRA resistance will continue as long as the problems which started the war in northern Uganda are not solved.

“The LRA is still very much effective and there are many field commanders who are capable of conducting operations against the government of Uganda, who are capable of leading the resistance.”

The LRA has been waging a brutal fight against Ugandan government targets in the north of the country since 1988, but Ugandan army operations have forced the group to move east into Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and the Central African Republic.

In November, Kulayige said Ugandan special forces had killed another senior LRA commander, Okello Kutti, in Central African Republic, near its eastern border with Sudan.

A senior bodyguard of Kony was also recently reported to have been captured in the country.

Hunting the LRA

Ugandan foreign afairs minister Oryem said the Ugandan military would target Kony and other LRA leaders wherever they might be hiding.

“We are determined to pursue the LRA commanders … wherever they go, even if they move into the deserts of the Middle East we will pursue them,” he said.

“The UPDF [Ugandan People's Defence Force] is on the ground pursuing [Kony] on a daily basis, day and night we are pursuing Joseph Kony.”

Kony has said that the LRA is fighting to defend the Biblical Ten Commandments, but the group has also stated its desire to topple Yoweri Museveni, the Ugandan president, and has complained of a number of local grieveances.

The LRA declared a unilateral ceasefire in August 2006 and a truce was agreed later the same month.

However, as negotiations for a lasting peace dragged on LRA fighters began to drift away from two designated assembly points and the talks broke down.

Another possible breakthrough came in February 2008, when the Ugandan government and LRA signed a deal stipulating that Kampala would set up special courts to handle accusations of war crimes against LRA leaders, rather than handing them over to the International Criminal Court.

But Kony repeatedly failed to show up to sign a final peace deal.