Life began returning to the Central African Republic capital Bangui on Saturday, two days after deadly clashes, but witnesses said an order for troops to return to barracks had gone largely unheeded.

Bangui's terrified inhabitants had been confined to their homes since an explosion of sectarian violence early Thursday that the Red Cross said claimed at least 300 lives.

French President Francois Hollande told some 40 African leaders at a Paris summit Friday that the continent must "ensure its own security" in order to "take charge of its destiny".

He also promised that France would help with the potential creation of a special African rapid reaction force and would train up to 20,000 soldiers each year.

Britain is contributing a C-17 transport plane to help the French U.N.-backed mission in the Central African Republic, which is due to arrive there shortly, the Foreign Office said Friday.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said Britain was "determined to play our part in helping to address the violence" following a new bloodbath that left dozens of bodies strewn in the streets of the capital Bangui.

The widow of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat pledged Friday to challenge a French inquiry which found his death to have been from natural causes, rather than poison as Palestinians suspect.

"A request for further expert opinion will be submitted in the next few days to investigating judges in (the Paris suburb of) Nanterre," Suha Arafat's French lawyer Pierre-Olivier Sur told Agence France Presse.

France's defense chief said military operations began overnight in Central African Republic, with patrols and a helicopter detachment arriving to quell violence in the streets of the capital.

Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told Radio France Internationale that the streets of Bangui were calm on Friday, after a spasm of bloodshed that began before dawn Thursday and left nearly 100 people dead.

French Ambassador to Lebanon Patrice Paoli warned on Friday against the ongoing cabinet crisis in Lebanon, urging officials to assume their responsibilities and end the political standstill.

“The Lebanese must be aware of the imminent danger and resolve their booming political and economic woos,” Paoli said in an interview with As Safir newspaper.

America's first black president Barack Obama Thursday mourned Nelson Mandela as a "profoundly good" man who "took history in his hands and bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice."

Obama -- who met the former South African president briefly only once in 2005, but was inspired to enter politics by the anti-apartheid hero's example -- paid a somber heartfelt tribute within 45 minutes of Mandela's death being announced.

A proposal to dispatch an EU force to the Central African Republic to help African and French troops has failed to convince defense heavyweights Britain and France, diplomats said Thursday.

Under the proposal, a unit of up to 1,500 troops known as the EU "Battle Group" -- a force designed for quick intervention abroad and currently led by Britain -- would have gone into the strife-torn country for up to four months to give a larger African force time to fan out and organize.

A French report ruling out poisoning in Yasser Arafat's 2004 death has a glaring inconsistency, the co-author of a Swiss probe said Thursday, sticking by his team's conclusion that the Palestinian leader was likely killed.

"Our data lean more towards the thesis of poisoning than in the opposite direction," Professor Francois Bochud, head of the Lausanne Institute of Applied Radiophysics, told AFP.

The growing number of young Europeans joining al-Qaida-linked rebels in Syria pose a "potential threat" for the European Union and its allies, France and Belgium warned Thursday.

"The phenomenon is particularly worrying," French Interior Minister Manuel Valls said alongside his Belgian counterpart Joelle Milquet.