By Danielle Paquette DAKAR, Senegal — Boko Haram asserted responsibility Tuesday for laying siege to a secondary school in northwestern Nigeria and abducting more than 300 boys, marking a striking leap from the extremist group's usual area of operation. Hundreds of gunmen on motorbikes surrounded a boarding school in Katsina state Friday night and opened fire on police, witnesses said, before rounding up students and dragging them into the woods. Abubakar Shekau, the group’s leader, said in an audio message released in the early hours of the morning that militants stormed the school to discourage “Western education,” according to Nigerian media outlets and researchers who reviewed the recording. Boko Haram, which roughly translates to “Western education is forbidden,” has fought since 2009 to rule the country’s northeast with an extreme form of Islam — one that Muslim leaders in the nation condemn. The group has killed more than 36,000 people and displaced millions. “What happened in Katsina was done to promote Islam and discourage un-Islamic practices,” Shekau said in the audio. The Nigerian president and other officials in Africa’s most populous nation initially blamed bandits for the mass kidnapping. Gangs in the area are known to abduct people for ransom. But Friday’s attack bore the hallmarks of a Boko Haram raid, signaling that Shekau’s reach has shifted nearly 500 miles west. The Katsina governor told local reporters Tuesday that he had made contact with the abductors but did not provide details. It was unclear whether gang members had participated in the kidnappings. Shekau — a commander known for bloodthirstiness even among the world’s deadliest extremist organizations — seemed to be sending a message, said Bulama Bukarti, a Boko Haram specialist at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in London. “He wanted to make a big political statement that we are attacking you in the northeast, we are abducting your children in the northeast, and now we are doing it in the northwest,” Bukarti said. “This is a huge announcement — an audacious demonstration of capacity.” The Science School in the town of Kankara is now empty. More than 800 students studied there before the attack — all boys. Now they risk being forced into Shekau’s army. Boko Haram has swollen its ranks over the years by striking towns, kidnapping children and ordering them to join or die. Those who escape often speak of killing people against their will , leaving the children traumatized and subject to state punishment. They tend to face months of military detention after fleeing Boko Haram to return home, as authorities investigate them for signs of loyalty to the group. The extremists set off international outrage in 2014 after abducting more than 270 girls in the northeastern town of Chibok. Then-first lady Michelle Obama drew attention to the horror with a hashtag: #BringBackOurGirls. A similar plea surfaced on social media this weekend as parents in Kankara took to the streets in protest, urging Nigerian leaders to rescue their children: #BringBackOurBoys. The state’s governor said 333 remained missing. The government has shuttered schools across the state, suspending the education of tens of thousands of students, as security forces search for the abducted boys in the region’s dense forests. Although Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari announced that Boko Haram had been “ technically defeated ” in 2015, the group has continued to stage regular attacks, lately on farmers , cutting off crucial food supplies. It has also splintered into two factions. Boko Haram also claimed responsibility for an attack Saturday about 12 miles from the Nigerian border in the Diffa region of Niger. The ambush on the village of Toumour claimed 28 lives, local officials said. The fighters also torched some 800 dwellings. One teenager who escaped the attack in Katsina, speaking anonymously because he feared retaliation, told The Washington Post that gunmen struck the campus after dark. “They split us into groups,” he said, “and led us into different directions in the forest.” The assailants seemed to be taking orders from someone on the phone, the teenager said, and summoned more men on motorbikes to haul off the boys. He managed to flee with a classmate when the kidnappers seemed distracted. The pair ran into what he called a good Samaritan on a motorbike, who returned them to Kankara, he said. “With the way they split us into groups,” he said, “it’s going to be very hard to rescue all of my classmates.” Boko Haram followed the same strategy with the Chibok girls. The girls, who had attended a Christian school, were divided up and taken to remote hideouts, where they were forced to convert to Islam and marry fighters. (Girls as young as 9 are “suitable” for marriage, Shekau has said.) Dozens have been freed over the last four years through government negotiations, activists say, but 112 are believed to remain in captivity . Ismail Alfa in Maiduguri, Nigeria, contributed to this report © The Washington Post 2020

Germany’s Jewish Problem Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Germany. But is Angela Merkel doing anything about it? By Benjamin Weinthal BERLIN — With anti-Semitism on the march, Germany’s politicians and opinion makers are grappling with what went wrong with the country’s seven-decade-long struggle to come to terms with its past, or as they call it, Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Since the Holocaust, Germany has measured its progress by how the country treats Jews. For example, the government provided generous funding to rebuild Jewish communities and allowed Jews from the former Soviet Union to relocate to Germany. But with a rising tide of anti-Semitism in recent months, there are now questions about how significant the culture of Holocaust remembrance has been in preventing hatred of Jews. The wave of modern anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence inundating Germany in recent months jolted Chancellor Angela Merkel and religious and political leaders to participate in a “Stand-Up: Jew-Hatred-Never Again!” rally organized on Sept. 14 by the Central Council of Jews in Germany in the heart of Berlin’s government district, not far the country’s national Holocaust memorial. The list of anti-Semitic incidents between July and early September is long. Protests against Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza led seamlessly to Molotov cocktails tossed at a synagogue in Wuppertal, a city in western Germany, on July 29 — the first torching of a Wuppertal synagogue was during the Hitler era in 1938. Anti-Israel protesters attacked Jews for wearing kippot on the streets of Berlin in a couple of incidents in July. And that’s just a taste. German authorities recorded 184 anti-Semitic incidents in June and July. According to a study by German human rights NGO Amadeu Antonio Foundation, there were 25 anti-Semitic incidents in August. “These are the worst times since the Nazi era. On the streets, you hear things like ‘The Jews should be gassed,’ ‘The Jews should be burned,'” Dieter Graumann, the president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, lamented to the Guardian in August. Merkel, whom Jewish organizations have honored with many awards for her work over the years to cultivate German-Jewish life and foster a robust relationship with Israel, delivered a tough speech at the rally. “It is our national and civic duty to fight anti-Semitism,” the chancellor declared in front of the Brandenburg Gate — a symbol of German unification and democracy. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Germany has had a complicated relationship German Jews — and with Israel. While it was scarcely reported, Merkel did reference the Jewish state at the rally, saying, “I do not accept any kind of anti-Semitic message or attacks at all, not least the ones that were recently seen at the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, disguised as alleged criticism of the policy of the state of Israel.” But, so far, Merkel has done little to combat anti-Semitism in Germany beyond giving a speech. She has offered no policy prescriptions. And yet the chancellor’s anger at her fellow citizens who abuse Jews has long been viewed as sincere. Julius Schoeps, a prominent German Jewish professor and a descendant of the 18th-century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, told me after Merkel’s speech, “I can count on her.” He added, however, that he could not rely on the other people, like Protestant and Catholic church leaders, who also spoke against anti-Semitism at the rally. Organizations affiliated with the Protestant and Catholic churches have hosted events, along with German politicians, over the years that have strained relations between Jews and Germans. In 2010, the Evangelical Academy, an educational center that seeks “to build bridges between people,” invited Bassem Naim, a Hamas minister, to a conference on “Partner for Peace: Talking with Hamas and Fatah.” Naim has argued for “resistance” against Israel, and stated that there is “exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us.” Naim’s visa to travel to Germany was ultimately denied due to the EU’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist entity. Two years later, in 2012, Albrecht Schröter — the Social Democratic mayor of Jena, a town in eastern Germany — signed a petition called “Occupation Tastes Bitter,” organized by the German Catholic peace organization Pax Christi, which urged a boycott of Israeli products. Germany’s Catholic Church did not explicitly disavow the Pax Christi grassroots action; for some critics, the campaign recalled the Nazi-era slogan “Don’t buy from Jews.” This year, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, and a Jerusalem-based watchdog organization, NGO Monitor, sharply criticized German groups for funding anti-Israel activity. NGO Monitor issued an exhaustive report on German government funds funneled to “organizations that contribute to the growing demonization of Israel and BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] campaigns, in direct contradiction to German foreign policy.” (Merkel opposes boycotts of Israel for its settlement policies.) In a joint letter, think tanks affiliated with all of the major German political parties — including Merkel’s — rejected NGO Monitor’s criticisms. High-ranking diplomats from the Israeli embassy in Berlin say that Merkel is the most pro-Israel chancellor in German history. Next year, Israel and the Germany will mark 50 years of diplomatic relations. Grand celebrations are planned. And the chancellor has long matched her strong rhetorical support for Israel with concrete military assistance for the defense of the Jewish state. In a 2008 address to Israel’s Knesset, Merkel declared that Israel’s security is “non-negotiable” for her administration. Germany has provided Israel with four advanced second-strike Dolphin submarines since Merkel began her tenure as chancellor, and a fifth will arrive in six months; these provide a significant nuclear-armed deterrent. In addition, Germany’s intelligence agency BND frequently cooperates with the Mossad. But even as Berlin has delivered vital military assistance to Israel, civil society and others in German political life have done little to curtail the outbreak of anti-Jewish sentiment. “There is a startling indifference in the German public to the current display of anti-Semitism,” said Samuel Salzborn, a leading expert on anti-Semitism at the University of Göttingen in Lower Saxony, in early August. Merkel’s rally on Sept. 14 produced a mere 5,000 people, according to police. The Jewish community, which organized the event, said 8,000 people came. Given that the Central Council of Jews chartered buses from communities across the country, the turnout was lackluster at best. In comparison, after a firebombing of a synagogue in Düsseldorf in 2000, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder called for a nationwide protest against racism and anti-Semitism. Some 200,000 people marched in a procession through Berlin, and tens of thousands protested in other cities across Germany. The apathy of today has many people wondering what’s gone wrong. In a commentary for Deutschlandfunk radio, Kirsten Serup-Bilfeldt, a journalist and author who writes about German-Christian relations, went as far as to argue that the “confrontation with Germany’s National Socialist past has failed.” In a country that takes pride in its ability to confront the Nazis’ crimes, Serup-Bilfeldt issued a death certificate to illusions that remembrance of the Holocaust will alone be enough to stop anti-Semitism. German Jewish leaders have mirrored Serup-Bilfeldt’s lament that Germany’s version of the average Joe, “Otto Normalverbraucher,” made no, or little, objection to the attacks on Jews. The Sept. 14 rally showed that the German government, rather than taking action to organize Germans against anti-Semitism, has outsourced the fight to the Central Council and its more than 100,000 members. Jews in Germany consist merely of 0.1 percent of Germany’s more than 80 million citizens. Most Germans have never met a Jew, a fact exemplified by an exhibit in Berlin’s Jewish Museum last year titled “The Jew in the Box,” to foster more understanding among the public about Judaism and anti-Semitism. In what some critics viewed as a bizarre spectacle, a Jew would sit in an open glass box taking questions from visitors about Jewish life and Israel. Some say that Germany’s memorial culture has soothed guilty consciences without leading to action against current existential threats to Jews, such as Iran’s threats to “wipe Israel off the map.” Henryk M. Broder, a leading expert on German anti-Semitism and columnist for the large daily Die Welt, said in an interview, “The remembrance of Auschwitz has deteriorated into a trite ritual, which is about saving the dead Jews. And this ritual of saving the dead Jews is used as a moral alibi. The remembrance of the Holocaust is an excuse to not have to deal with a potential second Holocaust in the Middle East.” He has long criticized many German intellectuals and politicians for playing down or ignoring the Iranian threat and its hard-core anti-Semitism. In 2009, Iran’s current speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, made a statement about “different perspectives on the Holocaust” at the Munich Security Conference. And in 2008, Larjani’s brother denied the Holocaust and called for the elimination of Israel at a German Foreign Ministry event near the Holocaust memorial. Neither Iranian faced prosecution, though Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany. While prior to Israel’s Operation Protective Edge there was a fine line between anti-Semitism and anti-Israel criticism, the barrier collapsed during the wave of protests. Critics argue that “Israel criticism,” as it is called in Germany, has become a national pastime. There are no similar debates about, for example, Russia criticism. Merkel is the first German chancellor to identify the use of rabidly anti-Israel rhetoric as a cover for anti-Semitism. There were countervailing currents to outbreaks of anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel during Operation Protective Edge among sections of the media and German elites. The country’s largest daily — the mass-circulation Bild — recruited prominent celebrities, dignitaries, and politicians to explain why Germans should raise their voices against anti-Semitism “in a strong sign of solidarity with Israel and our fellow Jewish citizens.” Bild highlighted the July attacks with a front-page headline: “Never Again Jew-hatred.” There has been growing opprobrium against classical anti-Semitism, but contemporary anti-Semitism, largely defined as hostility, continues. As Léon Poliakov, the French historian of anti-Semitism wrote, Israel has become “the Jew among nations.” Anti-hate laws in Germany bar incitement against Jews, but the line between Jews and Israel is thin. Studies over the last decade of German views toward the Jewish state reveal that nearly half (at times more than 50 percent) consider Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to be the equivalent of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry. Germany’s confrontation with its past has entered a new stage. Shrinking the gap between combating contemporary forms of anti-Semitism and societal indifference to those manifestations remains a tall order. Take the example of Hezbollah in Germany. For Jews in Germany, the group represents a sincere threat. Since 1996, Hezbollah has staged a yearly al-Quds Day march in Berlin calling for the destruction of Israel. This year’s march saw chants of “gas Israel” and calls of “Sieg Heil” — an outlawed Nazi slogan. For Jews to feel comfortable in 21st-century Germany, rising anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments will need to be blunted. Merkel’s appearance earlier this month at the rally shows that she understands this. “Young Jewish parents are asking if it safe to raise their children here,” she said to the small crowd in attendance. The pressing question is whether Merkel will match her characteristically tough speech against anti-Semitism with policy prescriptions — and whether Germans are listening. Copyright 2014 Foreign Policy

Google ‘is unhappy’ with Holocaust denial beating the truth in its search results – but it probably makes more money that way By Carole Cadwalladr Prisoners being transported to Auschwitz, 1944. Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images The Holocaust did not happen. At least not in the world of Google, it seems. One week ago, I typed “did the hol” into a Google search box and clicked on its autocomplete suggestion, “Did the Holocaust happen?” And there, at the top of the list, was a link to Stormfront, a neo-Nazi white supremacist website and an article entitled “Top 10 reasons why the Holocaust didn’t happen”. On Monday, Google confirmed it would not remove the result: “We are saddened to see that hate organisations still exist. The fact that hate sites appear in search results does not mean that Google endorses these views.” The Independent ran the story. As did Fortune. And the Daily Mail. And the Jerusalem Post. And the Drudge Report. But Google held firm. David Duke, former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted his support for the decision. And over on Stormfront – the website where Anders Breivik nurtured his ideas – members celebrated. And still, anyone searching for information about the Holocaust – if it was real, if it happened, if it was a hoax, if it was fake – was being served up neo-Nazi propaganda as the top result. Until Friday. When I gamed Google’s algorithm. I succeeded in doing what Google said was impossible. I, a journalist with almost zero computer knowhow, succeeded in changing the search order of Google’s results for “did the Holocaust happen” and “was the Holocaust a hoax”. I knocked Stormfront off the top of the list. I inserted Wikipedia’s entry on the Holocaust as the number one result. I displaced a lie with a fact. Google search screengrab. Photograph: Google How did I achieve this impossible feat? Not through writing articles. Or shaming the company into action. I did it with the only language that Google understands: money. Google has shown that it will not respond to outrage or public sentiment or any sense of morality or ethics. It does not accept that leading people with a genuine inquiry about whether the Holocaust happened to a neo-Nazi website is grossly irresponsible or that it demeans the memory of the six million Jews who died. But it was prepared to take my cold, hard cash. A Google spokesman said: “We never want to make money from searches for Holocaust denial, and we don’t allow regular advertising on those terms.” And yet, it has already made £24.01 out of me. (This was the initial cost – it has since risen to £289.) Because this is what I did: I paid to place a Google advert at the top of its search results. “The Holocaust really happened,” I wrote as the headline to my advert. And below it: “6 million Jews really did die. These search results are propagating lies. Please take action.” I did this via Google’s AdSense programme. This is the bedrock of everything that Google does, its core business: selling ads against search results. It’s this that contributes the bulk of the $21.5bn (£17.2bn) profit that Google makes per quarter. AdSense helpfully suggested possible “Ad group ideas” and search terms that included: “holocaust hoax”, “was the holocaust fake” and “did the holocaust happen”. And it told me how many searches a month are made for these terms: all in, 9,480. Or 113,760 a year. Or the population of Cambridge. All of whom are being informed by Google that the Holocaust didn’t happen. And are being directed to Stormfront, the website where Anders Breivik used to hang out online and whose members celebrated the death of Jo Cox. Jewish children, survivors of Auschwitz, Poland, February 1945. Photograph: Getty Images Lilian Black, chair of The Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association, and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, called it appalling. “I’m so shocked. Google has a responsibility for its actions. It’s almost like saying we know that the trains are running into Birkenau, but we’re not responsible for what’s happening at the end of it. They shape people’s thinking and are disparaging the memory of people like my grandparents who were gassed. “More than that, it’s where this leads. It’s about its relevance today as much as the past. Our learning centre is in Kirklees, where Jo Cox was murdered. What is the matter with people? Can’t they see where this leads? And to have a huge worldwide organisation refusing to acknowledge this. That’s what they think their role is? To be a bystander? To just stand by? They’re committing a hate crime, in my view.” A Google spokesman said: “The goal of search is to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users. Clearly, we don’t always get it right, but we continually work to improve our algorithms. “This is a challenging problem, and something we’re thinking deeply about in terms of how we can do a better job. Search is a reflection of the content that exists on the web. The fact that hate sites appear in search results in no way means that Google endorses these views.” Frank Pasquale, professor of law at Maryland University, a leading expert on “algorithmic accountability”, called it “gross hypocrisy”. “They frequently say that Google search is not just about giving you a list of sources, but rather to answer your question. And empirically speaking, people tend to treat Google like an authority. So this is an appalling shirking of responsibility. It’s about money. It always is. The commercial imperative trumps all other aims at the company, including moral ones.” The issue is not that Google is refusing to “edit” the results about the Holocaust, the deeper question is about why Stormfront is number one. Google said: “We handle billions of queries every day and our goal is to give you the most relevant answer to your query as quickly as possible. The issue you have raised is one where we are very unhappy with the quality of the results. “While it might seem tempting to fix the results of an individual query by hand, that approach does not scale to the many different variants of that query and the queries that we have not yet seen. So we prefer to take a scaleable algorithmic approach to fix problems, rather than removing these one by one.” But Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, and a leading expert on search, in an article that was largely sympathetic to the challenge facing Google, still noted: “It’s bizarre that something like that Holocaust denial post is showing tops in Google. It has no great number of links pointing at it, according to a Moz tool I used [a method of examining where a website links to]. The Wikipedia page below it should carry far more authority.” And he suggests a reason why it doesn’t: that Google has changed its algorithm to reward popular results over authoritative ones. For the reason that it makes Google more money. If Stormfront is back at number one when you read this, it’s because I’ve run out of funds. Each click through costs £1.12 and I have a £200 per day limit. @carolecadwalla on Twitter for more information. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

By Cara Anna JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The United Nations has formally received Gambia's notice reversing its withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, a spokesman said Tuesday. The world body received the letter from the tiny West African nation on Friday, said Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general. Gambia was one of three African countries that informed the U.N. chief last year they were withdrawing from the court that presses charges against alleged perpetrators of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The others were South Africa and Burundi. Actual withdrawal from the ICC comes a year after notification. Gambia's new president, Adama Barrow, has vowed to reverse other actions taken by his predecessor, Yahya Jammeh, who has been accused by rights groups of leading a government that tortured and killed opponents during his rule of more than 22 years. Jammeh, who mockingly called the ICC the "International Caucasian Court," flew into exile last month under international pressure after losing to Barrow in the December election. He went to Equatorial Guinea, which is not an ICC member state. Many African nations have accused the ICC of unfairly targeting the continent. Last month, leaders from the 55-nation African Union adopted a non-binding strategy calling for a collective withdrawal from the court, saying it had focused too narrowly on prosecuting African leaders. "As one of his first acts in office, President Barrow's notification to the U.N. secretary-general of The Gambia's decision to reverse withdrawal from the ICC is a crucial victory for victims of grave crimes and the rule of law," Clément Capo-Chichi, Africa regional coordinator with the Coalition for the International Criminal Court. "We urge South Africa and Burundi to follow The Gambia's lead in returning to the ICC fold and putting victims first." ___ Associated Press writer Mike Corder in The Hague contributed. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Associated Press

By Carley Petesch Nearly a week after Congo's government announced the kidnapping of two United Nations experts along with their translator and drivers, no trace of them has been found. Their abduction in a region of the country where kidnappings are rare, and where the experts were investigating abuses by state and militia forces, has raised alarm as political tensions spread over an election crisis. Michael Sharp of the United States and Zaida Catalan of Sweden were abducted with three Congolese colleagues while traveling by motorcycle through Central Kasai province. It was not clear when exactly the kidnapping occurred. It is the first recorded abduction of international workers in the province, a region far from the usual turmoil in eastern Congo where multiple armed groups roam. A new report by the U.N. secretary-general has warned that violence and threats to civilians have spread to new parts of the vast country because of Congo's prolonged political crisis. President Joseph Kabila's mandate ended in December, but he has stayed on as presidential elections once set for last year have been delayed. A political agreement reached between the ruling party and opposition after weeks of deadly protests promises an election by the end of this year and that Kabila will not run. But the new report by U.N. chief Antonio Guterres says the agreement is in peril as the sides engage in "brinksmanship." Further delays in implementing the deal "will only serve to inflame tensions and fuel the violence that is now spreading across the country," the report says. Parts of Congo have experienced insecurity for more than two decades since the end of the Rwandan genocide led to the presence of local and foreign armed militias, all vying for control of mineral-rich land. But the Central Kasai province where the U.N. experts were abducted represents the new expansion of tensions. Sharp and Catalan had been looking into recent large-scale violence and alleged human rights violations by the Congolese army and local militia groups. Hundreds of people have been killed in an upsurge of violence since July in the province, according to the U.N. Joint Human Rights Office. While the violence is linked to local power struggles, there are also clear ties to the national political crisis, according to experts who say Congo's security forces have been known to back local leaders seen to be loyal to Kabila. Meanwhile, militia groups support those who are believed to support the opposition. Just days after the U.N. expressed grave concern about reports of more than 100 people killed in Central Kasai region during clashes between soldiers and Kamwina Nsapu militia fighters, a video posted online appeared to show men in Congolese uniforms fatally shooting more than a dozen alleged militia members armed with little more than sticks. International governments and rights groups have called for investigations into the shootings, which followed months of alleged violence by the militia after its leader was killed in a police operation in August. Seven soldiers have been arrested in connection with the killings in the video, Congo's armed forces auditor general, Maj. Gen. Joseph Ponde, said Saturday. They are charged with various war crimes including murder, mutilation and inhumane treatment, he said. Ponde also promised investigations into allegations of mass graves in the area. Also Saturday, the U.N. mission in Congo reported renewed violence in the past week, with credible reports of a "high number of deaths" as Congolese security forces clashed with local Kamwina Nsapu militia members in the capital of Central Kasai province, Kananga. In a statement, the mission said it was concerned about the targeting of civilians, including women and children. The U.N. mission also said security forces had restricted its movement in the area in recent days. The U.N. secretary-general's special envoy for Congo, Maman Sambo Sidikou, called for an investigation by authorities into the violence. Though little is known yet about the kidnapping of the U.N. experts, one motive might be an effort to silence independent investigators, said Ida Sawyer, Central Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "We can't rule out the possibility of involvement by the militia groups active in the area, and/or the Congolese army or government," Sawyer said. She added: "The disappearance ... likely will have a dramatic deterrent effect on other independent investigators looking into violence in the region." The spokesman for the U.N. mission in Congo, Charles Bambara, said the mission had intensified its searches for the missing experts and their colleagues. While the U.N. experts aren't humanitarian workers, Congo is the fourth worst country in the world in terms of security incidents targeting aid workers, according to Elodie Sabau, advocacy officer with the local U.N. humanitarian office. Some aid groups have suspended work in the insecure east after multiple kidnappings. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 ABC News

By Brian Rohan In this Friday, April 14, 2006 file photo, Egyptian Copts cross their wrists in defiance outside the Saints Church in the Sidi Bishr district of Alexandria in Egypt. Egypt’s Coptic Christians have become the preferred target of Islamic State radicals operating in the Arab world’s most populous nation, seeking to sow discord, undermine President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, and split the country. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File) They trace their founding to the voyage to Alexandria of St. Mark, the apostle of Jesus and New Testament author. Just a decade or two after the original Easter, which Christians celebrate around the world, tradition states that Mark founded their church, one of the earliest in the Middle East and the first in Africa. It was to become a pillar of early Christendom. Some two thousand years later, Egypt's Coptic Christians have become the preferred target of the Islamic State group, an apocalyptic cult seeking religious war. Inside the Arab world's most populous country, IS seeks to sow discord, undermine President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and split the country. It's a strategy the group has used before in Iraq, undermining trust in the government and inciting Shiites against Sunnis to provoke a backlash. That strategy looks unlikely to work in Egypt, where Sunnis vastly outnumber the Coptic minority, who make up some 10 percent of the population of 92 million and who are overwhelmingly dedicated supporters of el-Sissi. But it does whittle away at the Christians' sense of security. A look at Egypt's Coptic community, its traditions and challenges in the Middle East: What Copts Believe Like Catholics, Copts believe in the Ten Commandments, practice sacraments such as baptism, confession and confirmation and the intercession of the saints. But the Coptic Orthodox Church split from other Christians in 451 A.D. over a dispute about the nature of Christ. Unlike Roman Catholics, they do not believe in the infallibility of the Pope or in purgatory. They believe in the immaculate conception of Jesus, but not of the Virgin Mary. Their priests can marry. Copts celebrate Christmas according to the Julian calendar, meaning it falls on Jan. 7. The run-up to the holiday is marked by a 40-day period of fasting when red meat, poultry and dairy products are forbidden. Copts break the fast with feasting and celebrations after a Christmas Eve liturgy that ends near midnight. Easter is preceded by a 55-day fast where no meat, fish or dairy is eaten. Persecution in Modern Times In modern times, relations with Muslims have been generally good, although changes started to come about since the hyper-nationalism of the 1950s stoked by military strongman Gamal Abdel-Nasser. In Nasser's drive to liberate the country from Western influence and purify the Arab nation, Christians — whose religion is more often practiced in the West — began to take on a less favorable light among the majority Muslim masses. Many Copts consider themselves to be descendants of the ancient Egyptians, with a direct connection to pre-Arab times — hardly a view that made them popular in the days of pan-Arabism. As conditions in Egypt worsened following a series of Middle East wars, the Copts began an exodus. President Anwar Sadat's overtures to Islamists and his addition of references to Islamic Law, or Shariah, to the constitution spurred on the departures and millions of Copts live as expatriates today. Although generally allowed to practice their religion inside Egypt, Copts face restrictions on inter-religious marriage, and church building, and converting Muslims. Activists say Copts are discriminated against and kept from high office, and have thus campaigned to have religions removed from Egyptian ID cards. Coptic Christians Targeted by Extremists While sectarian killings did happen as early as the 1970s, they have been mostly sporadic over the years, with the exception of the 1990s, when the state battled an Islamic insurgency and Copts faced some retaliation. On New Years' eve 2011, a bomb in an Alexandria church killed over 20 people — the first major assault with a high death toll in living memory and a crime still unsolved to this day. Attacks picked up in the aftermath of the Egypt's Arab Spring uprising that began weeks later, then more so after the army overthrew an elected but divisive Islamist president in 2013. The next major milestone came in December 2016, when an IS suicide bomber killed 30 people at Cairo's Coptic Cathedral. The group subsequently called for more attacks on the minority and pledged more of its own. In February, a series of murders and killings claimed by IS in northern Sinai led hundreds of families to evacuate the area, fleeing west. The most recent major attack came on Palm Sunday. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Associated Press

By Cara Buckley If history was any guide, the director Terry George figured there’d be weirdness around his new film, “The Promise,” about the Armenian genocide. Sure enough, he was right. One of the actors, Daniel Giménez Cacho, said he was contacted before filming by a Turkish ambassador. In line with Turkey’s official stance, the diplomat insisted that the genocide, in which nearly 1.5 million Armenians were killed, had never occurred. After the movie’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, it racked up 55,000 lowly one-star votes on the Internet Movie Database, which is quite something, considering only a few thousand people had actually seen it at the three public screenings. And then, six weeks before “The Promise” hit theaters this weekend came another film that shared uncanny parallels. Like “The Promise,” “The Ottoman Lieutenant” hinges on a love triangle set in Turkey during the early days of World War I. Unlike “The Promise,” “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” which stars Michiel Huisman and Josh Hartnett, was backed by Turkish investors and has been pilloried by critics for whitewashing historical events. The battle over these two new films represents just the latest front in Turkey’s quest to control the historical narrative. In 1915, Ottoman Turks, fearful that the restive Christian Armenian population would side against them in the war, began massacring Armenians and force-marching them to their deaths. The United Nations, the Roman Catholic Church, the European Parliament, historians and scholars have roundly recognized the atrocities as a genocide, the 20th century’s first. But Turkey has insisted that many people, both Turkish and Armenian, carried out — and bore the brunt of — wartime horrors, and that no concerted extermination effort existed. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, acknowledged in 2014 that Armenians had “lost their lives” and sent condolences to their descendants. But he implied that they were victims of a war in which all Ottoman citizens had suffered — rather than the victims of a genocide. “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” which tells of a dashing Turkish officer who helps save imperiled Armenians — while carrying on with an American nurse — reinforces that debunked Turkish narrative, detractors say. The American Hellenic Council, calling for a boycott, said the film was plainly aimed at undercutting “The Promise,” and falsely painted the genocide as two-sided. “It’s a sort of mirror image of our film, but with a totally denialist perspective,” said Mr. George, adding that he suspected that the Erdogan government had a hand in the rival film. Yet as it turns out, there was bitter division among key players on “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” both during production and after. According to several people familiar with the project, Turkish producers oversaw the final cut, without the director’s knowledge. The people familiar with the project said that tensions emerged on the “Ottoman” set after producers pushed to minimize depictions of Turkish violence against Armenians. Several people who worked on the project felt that the final version butchered the film artistically, and smacked of denialism: Dialogue that explicitly referred to systematic mass killing had been stripped out. The director, Joseph Ruben, who refused to comment for this article, ended up doing no publicity for the film. “As we were making the film, he always knew they could control the editing room, so this was a tightrope that he had to walk,” said Michael Steele, a first assistant director and producer on the film, referring to the Turkish producers. “Joe was so enraged by their version of events he attempted to take his name off the film, but he realized contractually he was obliged to remain silent.” The producers, distributor and lead actors in “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” which according to BoxOfficeMojo.com has taken in just $241,000 since its release in March, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The struggles over the two films are the latest in a series of attempts by Turkish interests to absolve their country of responsibility for the genocide, efforts that go back decades and have extended to Hollywood. In the 1930s, MGM scuttled a plan to make a movie about the killings after Turkey exerted intense pressure on the State Department and the studio itself. When the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who is of Armenian descent, was making “Ararat,” his 2002 film about the genocide, he was deluged with threats and told that Armenians in Turkey might be harmed as a result. An ultranationalist group later threatened Turkish theaters planning to show the film, resulting in canceled screenings. “The Promise,” which stars Oscar Isaac as an Armenian medical student and Christian Bale as an American journalist, was unfettered by studio pressures. The film’s financier was Kirk Kerkorian, the colorful Hollywood mogul and casino magnate, and the son of poor Armenian immigrants, who before his death in 2015 at 98, pledged $100 million toward the film, making it the biggest budget picture about the genocide yet. “He felt if we don’t shine a light, we’re doomed,” said Eric Esrailian, a lead producer with Survival Pictures, Mr. Kerkorian’s production company. Still, precautions were taken. Mr. George, whose credits include “Hotel Rwanda” (2004), said he ensured that “The Promise” was made under the radar, with no publicity. Production took place in Portugal, Malta and Spain, and there was tight security on the set. Joe Berlinger, who embedded with the “Promise” production to shoot a documentary about the genocide, said everyone on the set was concerned about safety. “A lot of that is overblown — I think we’ve gone from historical assassinations to digital assassinations,” he said. “But we all had this nebulous fear.” Mr. Berlinger said he repeatedly reached out to Turkish officials for his documentary, “Intent to Destroy,” and was eventually invited to Ankara for meetings on the condition that he not bring recording devices or his crew. The Turks also refused to say with whom he’d be speaking. He demurred. (The film is to play the Tribeca Film Festival next week.) “I felt like it would be a useless trip and one that was potentially dangerous, frankly,” Mr. Berlinger said. It was in “Intent to Destroy” that the actor Mr. Giménez Cacho revealed that a Turkish ambassador had bombarded him with denialist propaganda, which Mr. Berlinger believes is part of a Turkish campaign to discourage people from tackling projects related to the genocide. Whether “The Promise” does well or not at the box office this weekend, it continues to garner attention. In the week leading up to its release, it racked up thousands more votes on IMDB.com. It’s at 126,000 votes and counting, largely split between one-star and 10-star ratings. And last week, Kim Kardashian West, arguably the world’s most famous Armenian-American, tweeted her support of the film, having visited Armenia in 2015 to highlight the genocide. There are no plans yet to release “The Promise” in Turkey. (“The Ottoman Lieutenant” will open there May 19.) Either way, Taner Akcam, a leading historian on the genocide and a professor at Clark University, said that officials there might characterize it as Armenian propaganda made with Armenian money, if they say anything at all. “Silence, this is their usual strategy,” he said. “The Promise” opens this weekend by design. Monday is the 102nd anniversary of the first stage of the genocide, when hundreds of Armenian intellectuals were arrested in Istanbul, a date Armenians worldwide commemorate each year. “The genocide is burned into the soul of the Armenian diaspora,” Mr. George said. “And until they get some kind of recognition, it’s not going to go away.” __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

By Patricia Torres and Nicholas Casey An antigovernment protester threw back a tear-gas canister fired by the National Police. Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Caracas and other cities demanding elections in Venezuela. CARACAS, Venezuela — The bikers thundered up in a phalanx of red jackets and dark clothes, some with faces covered, revving motorcycles before a thousand protesters in Caracas. They threw tear gas canisters to disperse the crowd. Then, witnesses say, they pulled pistols and fired. Someone fell. Carlos Moreno, 17, lay sprawled on the ground, a pool of blood around his head. “His brain matter was coming out,” recalled Carlos Julio Rojas, a community leader who witnessed the fatal shooting in Venezuela’s capital on Wednesday. The uniformed men who shot Mr. Moreno were not government security forces, witnesses say. Rather, they were members of armed bands who have become key enforcers for President Nicolás Maduro as he attempts to crush a growing protest movement against his rule. The groups, called collectives or colectivos in Spanish, originated as pro-government community organizations that have long been a part of the landscape of leftist Venezuelan politics. Civilians with police training, colectivo members are armed by the government, say experts who have studied them. Colectivos control vast territory across Venezuela, financed in some cases by extortion, black-market food and parts of the drug trade as the government turns a blind eye in exchange for loyalty. Now they appear to be playing a key role in repressing dissent. Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Caracas and other cities demanding elections in Venezuela. Galvanized by a ruinous economy that has left basic foods and medicines scarce — as well as a botched attempt by leftists to dissolve the country’s congress last month — they present the largest threat to the country’s rulers since a coup that briefly ousted Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, in 2002. Mr. Maduro has responded by sending National Guardsmen armed with water cannons and rubber bullets to disperse the crowds. But alongside the security forces, experts and witnesses say, are the enforcers from the colectivos, who engage in fiercer and often deadly intimidation. “These are the true paramilitary groups of Venezuela,” said Roberto Briceño-León, director of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a nonprofit group that tracks crime. The presence of the colectivos hardly ends with demonstrations on the streets. As rising foreign debt and falling world oil prices have depleted the Venezuelan government’s coffers, it has increasingly turned to colectivos as enforcers. From labor disputes with unions to student demonstrations on university campuses, colectivos are appearing almost anywhere the government sees citizens getting out of line, Venezuelans say. Eladio Mata, a hospital union leader, says he was shot last year by colectivo members when negotiations deadlocked with the University Hospital of Caracas. Mr. Mata said he had arrived to the front door of the hospital to find colectivo members blocking it. They were called, he said, by the hospital management. Staff members tried to help him force his way through, he said, but a colectivo member shot him in the back. He was then dragged into an operating room for emergency surgery. “In this country, it’s prohibited to dissent,” Mr. Mata said. Dr. Oscar Noya, a tropical infectious disease researcher, said his laboratory had been vandalized almost 30 times by colectivo members, who had destroyed equipment and taken electrical cables. Dr. Noya said he believed the vandalism was ordered because he publishes information on infectious disease epidemics that the government does not report, particularly the spread of malaria. Dr. Noya said his repeated complaints to the authorities had been met largely with silence and that the colectivos had “reached a level of total impunity.” Experts say the colectivos date to the early days of Mr. Chávez, who originally conceived them as social organizations to advance his vision of a Socialist revolution to transform Venezuela’s poor neighborhoods. Many had their own names, flags and uniforms. The government eventually handed them arms and security training as well, deploying them as a separate militia. As the groups became more powerful, they exerted their own influence independent of the government, most notably in controlling organized crime like drug trafficking in Caracas barrios. Their power was so great that some even clashed with the police in 2014, part of an effort to oust an interior minister who had sought to curb them. More recently, others have fought deadly shootouts with soldiers in military operations to stop organized crime. Today, the groups control 10 percent of towns and cities in Venezuela, according to Fermín Mármol, a criminologist at the University of Santa María in Caracas. Mr. Mármol said the deep left-wing ideological bent of the groups means they will defend Mr. Maduro at any cost. “If tomorrow the revolution loses the presidency, the colectivos will immediately change to urban guerrilla warfare,” the criminologist said. The colectivo bands have been accused of repeated attacks on journalists covering their activities in the streets. However, in rare interviews in the past, group leaders have denied criminal activity and said they primarily defended the leftist cause. Despite their attacks against dissenters, for some poor Venezuelans, the colectivos are a source of order that people have come to accept. On Thursday, in the neighborhood of La Vega, a working-class Caracas area roiled by protests, residents looked on as a band that they identified as members of a local colectivo stopped at a traffic circle during a patrol. Haide Lira, 58, an administrative assistant who lives on the edge of the neighborhood, said clashes between protesters and the colectivos had startled residents. Her sympathies were drifting away from the protesters. “You don’t push out a government this way,” she said. Of the colectivos, she said: “They put order where there is disorder. It’s true, they are armed civilians, but what can you do in this upside-down world of ours?” But their attacks on protesters have traumatized many demonstrators in Caracas, like Mr. Rojas, who witnessed the death of Carlos Moreno, the teenager. The demonstrators, he said, had tried in vain to save Carlos, pushing his limp body onto a motorcycle to be taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Some of the crowd tried to pursue the assailants, but were restrained by others who said it would be useless, witnesses said. Mr. Rojas, who works with opposition politicians, said he had become used to the attacks, which have long been a fixture of his activism. “They attack your neighbors when they are in food lines and are identified as opposition members, they attack store owners by making them pay extortions, they attack bakers by taking away part of their production which they later sell on the black market,” he said. “They are not true collectives, or political actors — they are criminals.” (c) 2017 The New York Times

By Carley Petesch Congo military “elements” are responsible for digging at least 42 mass graves in three Kasai provinces after clashes with alleged militia members in recent months, the United Nations said as experts were appointed Wednesday to look into a growing crisis that has killed hundreds and displaced more than a million people. Human rights have deteriorated alarmingly due to the “brutal and disproportionate repression against the Kamwina Nsapu militia by the Congolese defense forces,” the U.N. Joint Human Rights Office in Congo said in a new report. Congolese soldiers have killed more than 428 people, including women and 140 children, in the once-calm Kasai provinces as of June, the office said. The militia has killed at least 37 people during that time, it said. The U.N. said it regrets the “lack of efforts” to ensure independent investigations into violations that have included sexual violence and the use of child soldiers. The U.N. human rights chief appointed a three-member panel to investigate. In a separate statement, the U.N. Security Council said such abuses “might constitute war crimes under international law.” The council also urged Congo’s government not to use excessive force. The Catholic church has estimated that more than 3,300 people have died in the fighting in the Kasai provinces since the military killed the militia’s traditional chief in August. Government spokesman Lambert Mende said Congo was surprised at the U.N. report’s conclusions, especially before a team was deployed for joint investigations with Congo. He said the report came too early and called its credibility into question. The government has blamed the Kamwina Nsapu militia for the mass graves, which the U.N. says number at least 80. The new report also says allegations have come forth since April that a self-defense group, the Bana Mura, may be supported by Congo’s military and that it reportedly has executed a number of civilians associated with the militia __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Washington Post

By Campbell MacDiarmid Residents of this shattered city initially welcomed the Islamic State, but the honeymoon was short. The damage left behind will take generations to heal. Ordinary imams dress in white and speak with a silver tongue. The man standing at the pulpit of Mosul’s Grand al-Nuri Mosque on a sweltering Friday in July 2014 was different, spitting fire and brimstone. “He was all in black, wearing a black robe, a black turban, and [had] a black beard,” Yasir Samir Ahmed remembered. “You could barely see his face behind all the black.” The dark figure was Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Yasir is one of the few people willing to speak publicly of having seen him with his own eyes. Yasir was present at the Friday prayers in 2014 at which Baghdadi made his sole public appearance, declaring himself leader of a restored caliphate. That moment, which came weeks after the Islamic State took control of Mosul and a broad swath of the rest of Iraq, would become a turning point for the city — a sign of the Islamic State’s rise to power. Nearly three years later, Yasir and his extended family would find themselves creeping past the rubble of the destroyed mosque as they fled the final brutal fighting for Mosul’s Old City, where Islamic State die-hards were making their last stand. By then he was starved, bereaved, and expecting a bullet at every turn, so traumatized that he didn’t much care whether it was death or an escape to freedom that would deliver him from the jihadis. Yasir’s journey offers insight into how the Islamic State found — and then squandered — support in Mosul, ruthlessly manipulating and then exploiting an aggrieved population. As the Iraqi government now faces the monumental task of rebuilding the shattered city, his journey also serves as a warning on how the Iraqi security forces have a narrow window of opportunity to rebuild their relationship with Mosul’s citizenry. A week after Yasir and a group of relatives, including his father, Samir Ahmed Sofi, fled through deserted streets at dawn to reach Iraqi military lines, they sit on straw mats in an empty apartment in east Mosul. They have bought new clothes, cut their beards, and begun eating again, but the privations of the past few years still show. A quiet and angular 25-year-old, Yasir is now clean-shaven but for a patch of hair under his lip. A black singlet hangs off his body, revealing his shriveled biceps. His 55-year-old father wears a white robe; his stubbled cheeks appear to hollow further with every drag on his slim cigarette. Absent are Yasir’s brothers, Mohamed and Ahmed. Both were killed by a mortar blast as they fetched water from a well back in May. “I don’t have any memories left from before this time. Daesh wiped everything,” Yasir said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, when asked to recall the events that led to their deaths. “When I lost my brothers, I lost all my good memories.” But when prompted further, Yasir’s mind returns to al-Nuri Mosque. It was July 5, 2014, and the Islamic State had taken over the city weeks earlier. Six days prior, at the start of the holy month of Ramadan, Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani had declared the caliphate. The first thing the citizens of Mosul noticed was that with the Iraqi Army gone, they were able to move freely through the city for the first time in years. Yasir and two friends had taken advantage of this, passing abandoned checkpoints to cross the Tigris River and walk in the Old City. Outside al-Nuri Mosque, a crowd of excited Islamic State apparatchiks had gathered. Curious, the three friends decided to go in. “The security was very intense,” Yasir said. “The cell-phone reception even went out.” The ancient mosque was a fixture of Mosul. Its leaning minaret, nicknamed al-Hadba (“The Hunchback”), had become a symbol of the city, even appearing on the Iraqi 10,000 dinar bill. “Al-Hadba was like a character, a person,” Samir, Yasir’s father, recalled. Entering the mosque, Yasir beheld a tightly choreographed scene. An estimated 400 Islamic State members packed inside, in addition to curious bystanders like himself. Ascending the minbar, where the imam delivers the sermon, Baghdadi began to speak. “He told us: ‘You guys have no life here,’” Yasir recalled. “‘The government is pushing you to the edge. We’re going to free you.’” Many in the crowded mosque responded enthusiastically to an ebullient Baghdadi’s exhortations to wage jihad. And the message resonated in Mosul more broadly. “When they first came, it felt like heaven,” Yasir’s father recalled. “The people welcomed Daesh because they suffered so much when the army was here.” In the decade following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Mosul had become an insurgent hotbed. Random detention, harassment, and extortion of citizens by harried and suspicious Iraqi security forces had become routine. Yasir’s 14-year-old cousin had been detained while sitting in a coffee shop doing nothing but smoking a water pipe and was thrown in a jail cell for eight months. But listening to Baghdadi, Yasir said he felt sick to his stomach. The self-anointed “caliph” was not only saying the army and police were bad — he was saying they were infidels and marked for death. “I stayed 10 minutes, then I left. I couldn’t handle it,” he said. “I pretended to faint.” However bad the army had been, the next three years under the Islamic State would be unimaginably worse. Today, the caliphate has crumbled in Iraq, and many of those present at Baghdadi’s sermon are now dead. Few are willing to speak publicly about having attended. In the climate of fear that pervades liberated Mosul, many worry that an association with the Islamic State, however tenuous, could be grounds for detention, torture, and even summary execution. Foreign Policy contacted two other men who saw Baghdadi speak, but they declined to be interviewed. An imam from al-Nuri Mosque who gave an interview expressing somewhat favorable views toward the Islamic State’s ideology has, according to a local sheikh, been fired from his job and is now wanted in Baghdad. Even early on, there were signs that life under the Islamic State would not be easy. The jihadis first removed Mosul’s cell-phone towers and satellite dishes, curbing communication with the outside world. As the city became isolated, most people stopped working. While some civic institutions such as garbage collection and medical care remained operational, Samir’s government salary as a dormitory supervisor at the university dried up. Religious police began enforcing Islamic dress codes, banning smoking, and erasing images of the human form. “Then people began to understand who they really were,” Samir said, who estimated that the honeymoon period lasted less than six months. By then it was too late. A year after the Islamic State conquered Mosul, the coalition air campaign began striking targets within the city en masse. Electricity and other services became irregular. Civilians were executed by the Islamic State for infractions as minor as possessing a SIM card and were killed mistakenly in airstrikes. As the air campaign escalated in early 2016, Samir decided to move his family from east Mosul to the west. “When the coalition bombed the university, at least 300 people died,” he said. “We thought we would be safe in the Old City.” Instead the family became trapped in west Mosul, unable to cross the Tigris back to the east. As Iraqi security forces advanced toward Mosul last October, Islamic State fighters began preparing to make their last stand in the Old City’s tightly packed houses and narrow alleyways. “Daesh wouldn’t let us leave,” Samir said. As Iraqi security forces liberated districts in west Mosul, the siege of the Old City began, and supplies ran low. When his brothers were killed by a mortar blast, Yasir and his father buried their bodies in a hole in the garden of the house in which they were staying. There wasn’t time or space to dig two graves. As the fighting crept closer, the family moved again. A few days later, the house with the grave was destroyed, likely by an airstrike or indirect fire from Iraqi forces. “A lot of the time, I wished we could all die together,” Samir said. “Otherwise it was like dying all the time.” Finally, one morning, the whole family fled. “By the time they got out of the Old City, I felt like my eyes were about to pop out I was so emaciated,” Samir said. “We hadn’t eaten in days — we had no water. In this state, you consider yourself dead.” Walking out through the rubble, they saw that al-Nuri Mosque had been destroyed. In late June, as Iraqi special forces battled their way to within 50 yards of the mosque, Islamic State fighters detonated the structure to deny the Iraqi government a powerful propaganda backdrop. “A lot of people had hoped that the mosque and minaret would survive,” Yasir said.“It was the last piece of Mosul, the last part of its heritage.” For his father, seeing the mosque destroyed was nearly as poignant as the death of his sons. “When we walked past the ruins, even after all this tragedy, it still affected me,” he said. “When we lost the minaret, Mosul was gone.” Soon they will start to rebuild their lives, and both hope that the security services will rebuild their relationship with the city. “No one has resentment for the army now,” Samir said. “I lost two sons, and that didn’t happen to just me. But sometimes you have to sacrifice for the greater good.” The question now is how long that goodwill might remain. “That depends on the army — if they go back to hurting people,” Samir said. There are already worrying indicators. As Iraqi security forces completed liberating the Old City, nearly every man of fighting age was treated as a potential suspect. Amid restrictions on allowing foreign media to cover the last days of fighting, a series of disturbing videos were publishedonline, showing Islamic State suspects being beaten and executed by members of the security forces. Other images published online showedhundreds of emaciated-looking men crammed into crowded detention centers. As Samir spoke, Yasir went to look for photos of his brothers — their only tangible links to the past, the only possessions they have held on to from before. He returned with two photos showing his brothers, both in their early 20s, dressed for formal portraits. He sat down and stirred a tulip-shaped glass of tea. “I never went back [to al-Nuri] after that speech by Baghdadi,” Yasir recalled. “A lot of people stopped going to mosques.” But before they can resume their lives, they will have to return once more. The grave of Mohamed and Ahmed is nearby, and the family wants to give them a proper burial. “I want to bury my sons in the east,” Samir said. “I haven’t mourned for them yet.” ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Foreign Policy

By Avi Selk The official celebration of Poland’s 99th independence day proceeded innocuously, with ceremonies in the capital. There was even a visit from the European Council’s internationalist president, who insisted to Politico that Saturday’s festivities would proceed “with a smile on our face and with joy in our hearts.” But for blocks and blocks and blocks beyond the central towers of Warsaw, a much larger crowd swelled beneath a cloud of red smoke. The tens of thousands of people came from across Poland and beyond, and reporters documented their signs: “Clean Blood,” as seen by Politico. “Pray for an Islamic Holocaust,” per CNN. “White Europe” streaked across another banner, the Associated Press reported — as about 60,000 people chanted and marched through Warsaw in an annual gathering of Europe’s far-right movements, which have by now grown to dwarf the official version of Poland's independence day. [How Poland became a breeding ground for Europe’s far right] (Agencja Gazeta/Adam Stepien via Reuters) Nov. 11 marks Poland's celebration of its freedom from imperial rule in 1918. That freedom was interrupted over the following century by brutal occupations, first by Nazis, then communists. In the 21st century, a group called All-Polish Youth, which the AP reported is named after a radical anti-Semitic group from the 1930s, began hosting a competing Nov. 11 celebration in Warsaw. It began as a small thing, Politico reported. No more than a few hundred people showed up to the march in 2010, though the numbers soon grew into the thousands. In some years, the spectacle turned bloody — as when masked marchers threw rocks, flares and paving slabs at police in 2014, according to the BBC. But in 2015, the conservative Law and Justice Party took power in Poland, fueled in part by anti-immigration politics that helped put other right-wing parties in power throughout much of Europe. By all accounts, the Nov. 11 rallies since then have been very large and fairly peaceful. (Leszek Szymanski/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock) There was some violence Saturday, the AP reported, when nationalists pushed and kicked a group of women holding a banner that said “Stop Fascism.” But that was the only such report. A heavy police force kept the small assembly of counterprotesters separated from the far-right march. Far-right leaders from Britain and Italy were welcomed by the crowd, according to the AP. (Though the U.S. alt-right leader Richard Spencer had been deemed too extreme by the Polish government, and he canceled his plans to attend.) After the rally ended in the evening, a reporter asked Poland’s interior minister — a member of the right-wing government — what he thought of the banners and chants. Of “white Europe” and “pure blood.” “It’s only your opinion, because you behave like a political activist,” he replied, Politico reported. According to the AP, the same minister called that swollen, crimson-fogged march across Warsaw “a beautiful sight.” _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Washington Post

By Azeem Ibrahim In recent months, international media coverage of Myanmar has focused on the plight of the Rohingya people in the west of the country. And for good reason: Since August 2017, brutal army attacks on this Muslim ethnic minority have sent more than 750,000 people — 90 percent of the Rohingya population living in Rakhine state — fleeing over the border to Bangladesh, in what can only be described as a coordinated campaign of genocide. The numbers are staggering, but the hate isn’t new: The Rohingya, one of the world’s largest stateless groups, have long been a favorite target for persecution by the country’s Buddhist central authorities. The Rohingya have a different religion, a different skin color, and speak a different language than most of their neighbors. Yet their well-publicized tragedy has obscured a darker truth about Myanmar: The country is in the midst of one of the longest multi-front civil wars in the world. Each facet of this conflict cleaves along ethnic or religious lines — often both. The assault on the Rohingya is thus far from Myanmar’s only active military campaign against a minority group. And as soon as the Rohingya are completely removed from the country, the military will be free to redeploy its resources elsewhere. When that time comes, Myanmar’s remaining minorities are likely to experience similar treatment. Many of these groups have been in the military’s crosshairs for more than half a century. Yet the persecution to come will far exceed anything they’ve suffered before. The campaign against the Rohingya has radically expanded the military’s capacity for ethnic cleansing and, perhaps more importantly, seems to have emboldened it, as the bulk of the population appears to support the army’s aggression toward the group. To understand why all these conflicts have endured for as long as they have and why they are accelerating now, consider Myanmar’s demographic and political dynamics. Sixty-eight percent of the country’s population is Bamar (ethnic Burmese). The Bamar are primarily concentrated around the Irrawaddy Valley, the country’s heartland. Myanmar is also 88 percent Buddhist, and the majority of that group adheres to the conservative Theravada doctrine. Surrounding the Irrawaddy Valley are a range of border areas home to a plethora of ethnic and religious minorities — almost all of which have sought independence from the central government at one time or another since 1948, when Myanmar, then known as Burma, gained independence from the British. These secessionist movements stem from the fact that, soon after independence, Bamar Theravada Buddhists won overwhelming control of the government and the military and soon stamped theirs as the official identity of the state. In the years that followed, as a succession of military dictatorships attempted to build a unified nation, they systematically marginalized and repressed religious and ethnic minorities using a variety of extremely heavy-handed measures. Numerous groups were denied citizenship, saw their villages demolished, and had their marriage rights curtailed. Authorities in Rakhine state have limited the number of children Rohingya Muslims are allowed to have — typically a maximum of two, just below the population replacement rate. In the past few years, skirmishes between the army and the secessionist movements have intensified once again as the federal army has found new resolve. In 2011, battles between Myanmar’s military and the separatist Kachin Independence Army in the country’s north displaced nearly 100,000 Kachin people. Seven years later, the displaced are still living in internal refugee camps, with few prospects for rebuilding their lives. And in the last two years, the army has increasingly taken to shelling targets in or near the civilian camps and villages. In nearby northern Shan state, the military and the Taang National Liberation Army recently reopened hostilities — a continuation of a conflict that dates back to 1963. Over the last nine years, fighting between the army and the nearby ethnic Kokang Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army has sent tens of thousands of refugees over the border to China. To the south, the army has targeted Christians among the Karen people, driving more than 100,000 refugee into Thailand over the last couple of decades. It’s not just such displacements that darkly echo the Rohingya situation. Kachin and Karen women have reported that the military has used rape against them as a form of repression, much like the mass rapes reported by Rohingya refugees. Perhaps the most lamentable aspect of the current violence in Myanmar is that it is occurring during the country’s process of democratic transition. When the country elected a civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi in 2015, Western diplomats hoped she would curb the army’s excesses. Yet the opposite has happened: The violence has only accelerated. The problem, it turns out, is that decades of government propaganda have inculcated deep prejudices among Myanmar’s voting public against non-Buddhists and non-Bamar people. Radical Buddhist monks, and others who champion the so-called purity of the Buddhist state, dominate social media. Buddhist civil society groups advocating for Rohingya rights or the rights of Christian minorities are virtually nonexistent. (c) 2018 Foreign Policy http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/09/first-they-came-for-the-rohingya-myanmar-genocide-war-human-rights/