The United States announced Wednesday an initial plan for adjusting its military presence in Africa amid concerns the country will reduce forces fighting radical jihadists on the continent.

The first change will see part of one infantry unit, around 800 troops, replaced with a similar number of military trainers and advisors to support local forces in "spotlight African countries," Defense Department officials said.

"The message I'm relaying to my (African) partners is we are not walking away," US Army Africa commander Major General Roger Cloutier told reporters.

"We are still engaged."

The move is the first resulting from a sweeping Pentagon review of the presence of US forces around the world in an effort to better align that presence with US defense priorities — which list China and Russia as the principle threats to the country.

That could mean reducing US deployments meant to confront Islamic militant threats, including in Africa.

But the Pentagon is also wary of leaving a vacuum in certain areas, like in Africa, for the Chinese and Russians to fill, which could give them strategically valuable footholds.

The United States has about 6,000 military personnel throughout Africa, including 800 in West Africa, 500 Special Forces in Somalia and an unspecified number at an air base in Niger.

The US depends especially on French and various African partner forces in West Africa in field operations, but the US strategy has moved to mostly seeking to "contain" the extremist groups rather than degrade them.

"The terrorist threat in Africa remains persistent and, in many places, is growing," said the Pentagon's inspector general in a recent report on US counterterrorism operations in Africa.

DR Congo forces capture 40 ADF militia fighters in east:UN
Goma, Dr Congo (AFP) Feb 12, 2020 –

DR Congo troops have captured 40 fighters from a militia blamed for killing hundreds in massacres across the restive eastern part of the country, the UN mission MONUSCO said Wednesday.

The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) is the main militia force operating in eastern DR Congo and has been carrying out reprisal attacks on civilians in response to a crackdown by the military, known as FARDC.

"A joint operation against ADF has allowed the FARDC to capture 40 fighters close to Makeke," Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Raoul Djehoungo, a MONUSCO spokesman said.

The operation in the Beni region on February 9 came after at least seven civilians were killed in the latest suspected ADF massacre in the area.

More than 300 people have been killed in ADF attacks in eastern DR Congo since the end of October when the army began its operations against the militia group.

Senior Congolese army officials neither denied nor confirmed the capture or detention of 40 ADF combatants by the regular forces.

The ADF, blamed for the deaths of more than 1,000 civilians in Beni since October 2014, began as an Islamist-rooted rebel group in Uganda that opposed President Yoweri Museveni.

It is one of several local militias operating in the area — a legacy of the two 1990s Congo wars that dragged in DR Congo's neighbours into a regional conflict.