By Caitlin Dickerson On Feb. 20, a young woman named Mirian arrived at the Texas border carrying her 18-month-old son. They had fled their home in Honduras through a cloud of tear gas, she told border agents, and needed protection from the political violence there. She had hoped she and her son would find refuge together. Instead, the agents ordered her to place her son in the back seat of a government vehicle, she said later in a sworn declaration to a federal court. They both cried as the boy was driven away. For months, members of Congress have been demanding answers about how many families are being separated as they are processed at stations along the southwest border, in part because the Trump administration has in the past said it was considering taking children from their parents as a way to deter migrants from coming here. Officials have repeatedly declined to provide data on how many families have been separated, but suggested that the number was relatively low. But new data reviewed by The New York Times shows that more than 700 children have been taken from adults claiming to be their parents since October, including more than 100 children under the age of 4. The data was prepared by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services that takes custody of children who have been removed from migrant parents. Senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which processes migrants at the border, initially denied that the numbers were so high. But after they were confirmed to The Times by three federal officials who work closely with these cases, a spokesman for the health and human services department on Friday acknowledged in a statement that there were “approximately 700.” Homeland security officials said the agency does not separate families at the border for deterrence purposes. “As required by law, D.H.S. must protect the best interests of minor children crossing our borders, and occasionally this results in separating children from an adult they are traveling with if we cannot ascertain the parental relationship, or if we think the child is otherwise in danger,” a spokesman for the agency said in a statement. But Trump administration officials have suggested publicly in the past that they were, indeed, considering a deterrence policy. Last year, John F. Kelly, President Trump’s chief of staff, floated the idea while he was serving as homeland security secretary. If approved, the plan would have closed detention facilities that are designed to house families and replaced them with separate shelters for adults and children. The White House supported the move and convened a group of officials from several federal agencies to consider its merits. But the Department of Homeland Security has said the policy was never adopted. Children removed from their families are taken to shelters run by nongovernmental organizations. There, workers seek to identify a relative or guardian in the United States who can take over the child’s care. But if no such adult is available, the children can languish in custody indefinitely. Operators of these facilities say they are often unable to locate the parents of separated children because the children arrive without proper records. A woman was reunited with her 7-year-old daughter in Chicago in March after they had been separated for four months in immigration detention. Credit Hope Hall/Aclu Once a child has entered the shelter system, there is no firm process to determine whether they have been separated from someone who was legitimately their parent, or for reuniting parents and children who had been mistakenly separated, said a Border Patrol official, who was not authorized to discuss the agency’s policies publicly. “The idea of punishing parents who are trying to save their children’s lives, and punishing children for being brought to safety by their parents by separating them, is fundamentally cruel and un-American,” said Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group that conducts interviews and monitoring at immigration detention centers, including those that house children. “It really to me is just a horrific ‘Sophie’s Choice’ for a mom.” Mirian has pinballed across Texas, held at various times in three other detention centers. She is part of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of many immigrant parents seeking to prohibit family separations at the border. Her son’s name, along with Mirian’s surname, are being withheld for their safety. But in a declaration she filed in that case, she said she was never told why her son was being taken away from her. Since February, the only word she has received about him has come from a case manager at the facility in San Antonio where he is being held. Her son asked about her and “cried all the time” in the days after he arrived at the facility, the case worker said, adding that the boy had developed an ear infection and a cough. “I had no idea that I would be separated from my child for seeking help,” Mirian said in her sworn statement. “I am so anxious to be reunited with him.” Protecting children at the border is complicated because there have, indeed, been instances of fraud. Tens of thousands of migrants arrive there every year, and those with children in tow are often released into the United States more quickly than adults who come alone, because of restrictions on the amount of time that minors can be held in custody. Some migrants have admitted they brought their children not only to remove them from danger in such places as Central America and Africa, but because they believed it would cause the authorities to release them from custody sooner. Others have admitted to posing falsely with children who are not their own, and Border Patrol officials say that such instances of fraud are increasing. As the debate carries on, pressure from the White House to enact a separation policy has continued. In conversations this month with Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, Mr. Trump has repeatedly expressed frustration that the agency has not been aggressive enough in policing the border, according to a person at the White House who is familiar with the discussions. Officials presented Mr. Trump with a list of proposals, including the plan to routinely separate immigrant adults from their children. The president urged Ms. Nielsen to move forward with the policies, the person said. But even groups that support stricter immigration policies have stopped short of endorsing a family separation policy. Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, one such group, said that family separation should only be used as a “last resort.” However, she said that some migrants were using children as “human shields” in order to get out of immigration custody faster. “It makes no sense at all for the government to just accept these attempts at fraud,” Ms. Vaughan said. “If it appears that the child is being used in this way, it is in the best interest of the child to be kept separately from the parent, for the parent to be prosecuted, because it’s a crime and it’s one that has to be deterred and prosecuted.” Ron Nixon and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting. (c) 2018 The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/us/immigrant-children-separation-ice.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Associated Press | The Guardian Mon 1 Nov 2021, 02.29 EDT Eight pro-democracy activists including the prominent businessman had been charged under national security laws Democracy advocate Jimmy Lai Photograph: Vincent Yu/AP The trial of eight pro-democracy activists, including Apple Daily newspaper founder Jimmy Lai, who were charged over their roles in an unauthorised Tiananmen vigil last year began on Monday. Lai and the seven others, including Lee Cheuk-yan, the former chairman of the now defunct Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, face charges of organising, participating and inciting others to take part in the unauthorised candlelight vigil commemorating the bloody 1989 crackdown on protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The trial for eight pro-democracy activists, including Lee Cheuk-Yan (centre) began on Monday. They are charged with inciting others to take part in last year’s unauthorised Tiananmen vigil, amid a crackdown on political dissent in Hong Kong. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP On Monday five of the group, including Lee, pleaded guilty, according to the South China Morning Post. Lai, activist Gwyneth Ho, and former alliance vice-chair, Chow Hang-tun, pleaded not guilty. Chow told the court she understood “every word being uttered” in the reading of the charges against her, “but I do not understand why it constitutes an offence”. “That is why I plead not guilty,” she said. The eight previously pleaded not guilty. The trial is expected to last 10 days. Police last year banned the annual vigil for the first time in three decades, citing public health risks from the coronavirus pandemic. Critics believe the ban is part of the crackdown on opposition in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory after months of anti-government protests in 2019. More than a dozen activists turned up at the 4 June vigil in 2020 despite the ban, and thousands followed suit, breaking through barriers in spite of police warnings. They set up around Victoria Park to light candles and sing songs. Police later arrested and charged 26 activists over the vigil, including members of the Hong Kong Alliance that organises the annual vigil. The Hong Kong Alliance disbanded in September, amid accusations from the government that the organisation was working for foreign interests. Leaders of the alliance categorically denied the accusations. Of the 26 activists arrested, 16 of them including prominent Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong have pleaded guilty and were handed jail sentences ranging between four and 10 months. Three were given suspended sentences. Two other activists in the case, Nathan Law and Sunny Cheung, have fled the city. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

A supporter holds a banner showing the Bosnian Serb member of the tripartite Presidency of Bosnia Milorad Dodik that reads: "Never Again!" during a protest against the government in Banja Luka, in the Serb-dominated part of Bosnia, in October. Radivoje Pavicic/AP file photo He was once described in Washington as an anti-nationalist "breath of fresh air" in the murderous, genocide-scarred Balkan morass of ethnically divided Bosnia. How times change. This week Bosnian Serb political leader Milorad Dodik, now a genocide-denying secessionist, was slapped with new U.S. sanctions for alleged corruption. He responded in typical style, saying the days when the United States and other Western democracies "modeled Bosnia to their taste" are long gone. Accusations he corruptly amassed vast wealth for himself, his relatives and associates, are "monstrous lies," Dodik claimed. "The U.S. is a great power, but they are also big liars," he said. Dodik maintains the West is punishing him for championing the rights of ethnic Serbs in Bosnia — a dysfunctional country of 3.3 million that's never truly recovered from a fratricidal war in the 1990s that became a byname for ethnic cleansing and genocide. The sanctions, Dodik boasted, will just help the Serbs break free of Bosnia into the eager embrace of their "true friends" — Russia, China, the champions of illiberal democracy within the European Union, and neighboring Serbia. The 63-year-old political science graduate first came to prominence in 1998, as a moderate reformist narrowly elected regional prime minister of Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia's two postwar administrative units. NATO-led peacekeepers surrounded key buildings held by police loyal to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic — later convicted of wartime genocide and crimes against humanity — to ensure Dodik could take control. Shortly after he was elected regional prime minister of Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia's two postwar administrative units, then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said she "felt like a breath of fresh air had blown through the room." Al Behrman/AP file photo Shortly after, then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met him and "felt like a breath of fresh air had blown through the room," according to her spokesman at the time. But in 2001, after losing a presidential election in Republika Srpska, Dodik changed course, refashioning himself as a nationalist hardliner and secessionist. He gradually gained control of all levels of Republika Srpska's government, and in 2009 managed to expel foreign judges and prosecutors from Bosnia's court system — amid reports he was under investigation for corruption and erosion of democracy. The 1995, U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Accords, which ended Bosnia's more than 3 1/2 years of bloodshed, established two separate governing entities — Republika Srpska and one dominated by mostly Muslim Bosniaks, over half of Bosnia's population, and Catholic Croats. They're linked by shared, state-wide institutions, and all actions at a national level require consensus from all three ethnic groups. In the immediate postwar years, the international community kept Bosnia on a reform course, pressuring its leaders to abandon hate speech and accept painful compromises in return for financial and other support. But over a decade ago the international focus shifted to other global crises. Only 600 of the 60,000 international peacekeepers deployed in 1995 now remain. Bosnia was mostly left to its own devices, exposed to the growing influence of Russia, China and Turkey, and to widespread corruption and economic decline. Over the years, Dodik weathered countless accusations by national and international rights and media freedom groups of curbing media independence and popularizing vile rhetoric against political opponents of all ethnic stripes. He notoriously defended the 2008 approval, by a regional development bank, of a favorable $2 million loan to a firm co-owned by his son, saying that "was better than letting (the young man) get addicted to drugs." His family's net worth is hard to estimate, but in 2019 Dodik reported annual income and assets worth over 1.2 million euros ($1.36 million), including an 800,000-euro villa in Serbia's capital, Belgrade. Dodik says claims about his children's wealth are maliciously overblown by his political opponents. One of the fiercest of them, Drasko Stanivukovic, mayor of Banja Luka, Republika Srpska's biggest city, retorted that the family has stakes in at least 70 companies — including ones owned by their "relatives, friends and business associates." Dodik regularly downplays the 1995 massacre, by Bosnian Serbs, of over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica, even dismissing it as "a fabricated myth." In recent months he has repeatedly voiced hope that Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Hungary's populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban will serve as his bulwark against the "tyranny" of Western democracies, warmly welcoming Orban's December contention that the EU's main challenge on Bosnia is "how to manage the security of a state in which 2 million Muslims live." After serving for 15 years as Republika Srpska's president or prime minister, in the fall of 2019 Dodik was elected to Bosnia's multi-ethnic presidency that also includes a Bosniak and a Croat official. Last summer, with tacit support from Moscow and Belgrade, Dodik spearheaded the Serb walkout from Bosnia's multi-ethnic institutions — thus blocking decision-making — to protest the international High Representative in Bosnia's move to outlaw genocide denial. Dodik and Serb officials under his control say they will no longer respect decisions by the High Representative, a post created under the Dayton agreement with broad powers, including to impose laws or dismiss officials who undermine the fragile postwar ethnic balance. This winter, Dodik intensified his secessionist campaign, pledging to form an exclusively Serb army, judiciary and tax system. He described Bosniaks as "second-rate people" and "treacherous converts" who sold their "original (Orthodox Christian faith) for dinner." U.S., British, German and other western officials recently started accusing Dodik of stoking ethnic tensions to distract from his and his cronies' corrupt practices. But Dodik says sanctions won't discourage him from "fighting for the rights of Republika Srpska." "Regardless of what they do, they cannot stop me," he said. © 2022 npr

Detention campaign 'the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today' Omir Bekali talks about the psychological stress he endured in a Chinese internment camp during an interview in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Since 2016, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese in mass internment camps. (Ng Han Guan/Associated Press) Day after day, Omir Bekali and other detainees in far western China's new indoctrination camps had to disavow their Islamic beliefs, criticize themselves and their loved ones and give thanks to the ruling Communist Party. When Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, refused, he was forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time. A week later, he was sent to solitary confinement and deprived of food for 24 hours. After 20 days, he wanted to kill himself. A policeman guards a security post leading into a centre locals say is used for political indoctrination in Korla in western China's Xinjiang region. (Ng Han Guan/Associated Press) "The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group," said Bekali, 42, who broke down in tears while describing the camp. "I still think about it every night, until the sun rises." Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a U.S. commission on China last month said is "the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today." 'Cultural cleansing' The internment program tries to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. Chinese officials have largely avoided comment, but some have said in state media that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uighurs killed hundreds in China in years past. Three other former internees and a former instructor in different centres corroborated Bekali's depiction. Taken together, the recollections offer the most detailed account yet of life inside so-called re-education. The program is a hallmark of China's emboldened state security apparatus under the deeply nationalistic, hard-line rule of President Xi Jinping. It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in transformation through education — taken once before to terrifying extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader sometimes channeled by Xi. "Cultural cleansing is Beijing's attempt to find a final solution to the Xinjiang problem," said James Millward, a China historian at Georgetown University. 'Transformation through education' The internment system is shrouded in secrecy, with no publicly available data. The U.S. State Department estimates those being held are "at the very least in the tens of thousands." A Turkey-based TV station run by Xinjiang exiles said almost 900,000 were detained, citing leaked government documents. Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology, puts the number between several hundreds of thousands and just over 1 million, and government bids suggest construction is ongoing. Asked to comment on the camps, China's foreign ministry said it "had not heard" of the situation. Chinese officials in Xinjiang did not respond to requests for comment. However, China's top prosecutor, Zhang Jun, urged Xinjiang's authorities this month to extensively expand what the government calls "transformation through education" in an "all-out effort" to fight extremism. Residents walk past a statue showing Mao Zedong near billboards with the words for "Patriotism" and "Democracy" near a square in Kashgar in western China's Xinjiang region. Chinese officials say ideological changes are needed to fight Islamic extremism. (Ng Han Guan/Associated Press) China-born Bekali moved to Kazakhstan in 2006 and received citizenship three years later. On March 25 last year, Bekali visited his parents in Xinjiang. The next day, police took him away. 'I haven't committed any crimes!' They strapped him into a "tiger chair" that clamped down his wrists and ankles. They hung him by his wrists against a barred wall. They interrogated him about his work inviting Chinese to apply for Kazakh tourist visas. "I haven't committed any crimes!" Bekali yelled. Bekali demonstrates how he was strung up by his arms in Chinese detention. (Ng Han Guan/Associated Press) Seven months later, Bekali was taken out of his cell and handed a release paper. But he was not free. Bekali was driven to a fenced compound in Karamay, where three buildings held more than 1,000 internees. 'Thank President Xi!' They would wake up together before dawn, sing the Chinese national anthem, and raise the Chinese flag at 7:30 a.m. They sang songs praising the party and studied Chinese language and history. They were told that the indigenous sheep-herding Central Asian people of Xinjiang were backward before they were "liberated" by the Communist Party in the 1950s. When they ate meals of vegetable soup and buns, they first had to chant: "Thank the Party! Thank the Motherland! Thank President Xi!" Bekali was kept in a locked room almost around the clock with eight other internees, who shared beds and a wretched toilet. Cameras were installed in toilets and outhouses. Baths were rare, as was washing of hands and feet, equated with Islamic ablution. In four-hour sessions, instructors lectured about the dangers of Islam and drilled internees with quizzes that they had to answer correctly or be sent to stand near a wall for hours on end. Self-criticisms of their religious history "Do you obey Chinese law or Sharia?" instructors asked. "Do you understand why religion is dangerous?" The detainees had to criticize and be criticized by their peers. One by one, they would also stand up before 60 classmates to present self-criticisms of their religious history. Uighur security personnel patrol near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar in western China's Xinjiang region. The area's mass internment program appears to be an attempt to rewire its detainees' political thinking, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. (Ng Han Guan/Associated Press) "I was taught the Holy Qur'an by my father and I learned it because I didn't know better," Bekali heard one say. "I travelled outside China without knowing that I could be exposed to extremist thoughts abroad," another said. "Now I know." Family detained After a week, Bekali went to his first stint in solitary confinement. He yelled out to a visiting official. "Take me in the back and kill me, or send me back to prison," he shouted. "I can't be here anymore." He was again hauled off to solitary confinement. It lasted 24 hours, ending late afternoon on Nov. 24, when Bekali was suddenly released. Bekali holds up a mobile phone showing a photo of his parents whom he believes have been detained in China. (Ng Han Guan/Associated Press) At first, Bekali did not want the AP to publish his account for fear his sister and mother in China would be detained. But on March 10, the police took his sister, Adila Bekali. A week later, they took his mother, Amina Sadik. And on April 24, his father, Ebrayem. Bekali changed his mind and said he wanted to tell his story. "Things have already come this far," he said. "I have nothing left to lose." (c) 2018 CBC http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/china-internment-camps-1.4666686

By Chinedu Asadu Map of Nigeria ABUJA, NIGERIA — Gunmen attacked two churches in rural northwestern Nigeria on Sunday, killing three people, witnesses and a state official said, weeks after a similar attack in the West African nation left 40 worshippers dead. The attack in Kajuru area of Kaduna state targeted four villages, resulting in the abduction of an unspecified number of residents and the destruction of houses before the assailants escaped, locals said. It wasn't clear who was behind the attack on the Kaduna churches. Much of Nigeria has struggled with security issues, with Kaduna as one of the worst-hit states. At least 32 people were killed in the Kajuru area last week in an attack that lasted for hours across four villages. Worshippers were attending the church service at the Maranatha Baptist Church and at St. Moses Catholic Church in Rubu community of Kaduna on Sunday morning when assailants "just came and surrounded the churches," both located in the same area, said Usman Danladi, who lives nearby. "Before they [worshippers] noticed, they were already terrorizing them; some began attacking inside the church, then others proceeded to other areas," Danladi said. He added that "most of the victims kidnapped are from the Baptist [church], while the three killed were Catholics." The Kaduna state government confirmed the three deaths by bandits who "stormed the villages on motorcycles, beginning from Ungwan Fada, and moving into Ungwan Turawa, before Ungwan Makama and then Rubu. Security patrols are being conducted in the general area" as investigations proceed, according to Samuel Aruwan, Kaduna commissioner for security. The Christian Association of Nigeria condemned Sunday's attacks and said churches in Nigeria have become "targets" of armed groups. "It is very unfortunate that when we are yet to come out of the mourning of those killed in Owo two Sundays ago, another one has happened in Kaduna," Pastor Adebayo Oladeji, the association's spokesman, told The Associated Press. Many of the attacks targeting rural areas in Nigeria's troubled northern region are similar. The motorcycle-riding gunmen often arrive in hundreds in areas where Nigeria's security forces are outnumbered and outgunned. It usually takes months for the police to make arrests. Authorities have identified the attackers as mostly young herdsmen from the Fulani tribe caught up in Nigeria's pastoral conflict between host communities and herdsmen over limited access to water and land. All contents © copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Link to source: https://apnews.com/article/politics-nigeria-west-africa-religion-93a0b12ecb42dfd2807ebd7046b62301

By YURAS KARMANAU and FRANCESCA EBEL In this image made from video provided by Ukrainian State Emergency Service, firefighters work to extinguish a fire at a shopping center burned after a rocket attack in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, on Monday. Ukrainian State Emergency Service via AP KREMENCHUK, Ukraine (AP) — Russian long-range bombers struck a crowded shopping mall in Ukraine’s central city of Kremenchuk with a missile on Monday, raising fears of what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called an “unimaginable” number of victims in “one of the most daring terrorist attacks in European history.” Zelenskky said that many of the more than 1,000 civilians inside the mall managed to escape. Giant plumes of black smoke, dust and orange flames emanated from the wreckage, with emergency crews rushing in to search broken metal and concrete for victims and put out fires. Onlookers watched in distress at the sight of how an everyday activity such as shopping could turn into a horror. The casualty figures were difficult to determine as rescuers searched the smoldering rubble. The regional governor, Dmytro Lunin, said at least 15 people were dead and more than 40 wounded. The Unian news agency reported 16 dead. Soldiers worked into the night to lug sheets of twisted metal and broken concrete, as one drilled into what remained of the shopping center’s roof. Drones whirred above, clouds of dark smoke still emanating from the ruins several hours after the fire had been put out. “We are working to dismantle the construction so that it is possible to get machinery in there since the metal elements are very heavy and big, and disassembling them by hand is impossible,” said Volodymyr Hychkan, an emergency services official. At Ukraine’s request, the U.N. Security Council scheduled an emergency meeting in New York on Tuesday to discuss the attack. In the first Russian government comment on the missile strike, the country’s first deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyansky, alleged multiple inconsistencies that he didn’t specify, claiming on Twitter that the incident was a provocation by Ukraine. Russia has repeatedly denied it targets civilian infrastructure, even though Russian attacks have hit other shopping malls, theaters, hospitals, kindergartens and apartment buildings. The missile strike unfolded as Western leaders pledged continued support for Ukraine, and the world’s major economies prepared new sanctions against Russia, including a price cap on oil and higher tariffs on goods. Meanwhile, the U.S. appeared ready to respond to Zelenskyy’s call for more air defense systems, and NATO planned to increase the size of its rapid-reaction forces nearly eightfold — to 300,000 troops. Zelenskyy said the mall presented “no threat to the Russian army” and had “no strategic value.” He accused Russia of sabotaging “people’s attempts to live a normal life, which make the occupiers so angry.” In his nightly address, he said it appeared Russian forces had intentionally targeted the shopping center and added, “Today’s Russian strike at a shopping mall in Kremenchuk is one of the most daring terrorist attacks in European history.” He said Russia “has become the largest terrorist organization in the world.” Russia has increasingly used long-range bombers in the war. Ukrainian officials said Russian Tu-22M3 long-range bombers flying over Russia’s western Kursk region fired the missile that hit the shopping center, as well as another that hit a sports arena in Kremenchuk. The Russian strike carried echoes of attacks earlier in the war that caused large numbers of civilian casualties — such as one in March on a Mariupol theater where many civilians had holed up, killing an estimated 600, and another in April on a train station in eastern Kramatorsk that left at least 59 people dead. “Russia continues to take out its impotence on ordinary civilians. It is useless to hope for decency and humanity on its part,” Zelenskyy said. Kremenchuk Mayor Vitaliy Maletskiy wrote on Facebook that the attack “hit a very crowded area, which is 100% certain not to have any links to the armed forces.” The United Nations called the strike “deplorable,” stressing that civilian infrastructure “should never ever be targeted,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. Group of Seven leaders issued a statement late Monday condemning the attack and saying that “indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians constitute a war crime. Russian President Putin and those responsible will be held to account.” The attack coincided with Russia’s all-out assault on the last Ukrainian stronghold in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk province, “pouring fire” on the city of Lysychansk from the ground and air, according to the local governor. At least eight people were killed and more than 20 wounded in Lysychansk when Russian rockets hit an area where a crowd gathered to obtain water from a tank, Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said. The eastern barrage was part of Russian forces’ intensified offensive aimed at wresting the eastern Donbas region from Ukraine. Over the weekend, the Russian military and their local separatist allies forced Ukrainian government troops out of Lysychansk’s neighboring city, Sievierodonetsk. To the west of Lysychansk on Monday, the mayor of the city of Sloviansk — potentially the next major battleground — said Russian forces fired cluster munitions, including one that hit a residential neighborhood. Authorities said the number of victims had yet to be confirmed. The Associated Press saw one fatality: A man’s body lay hunched over a car door frame, his blood pooling onto the ground from chest and head wounds. The blast blew out most windows in the surrounding apartment blocks and the cars parked below, littering the ground with broken glass. “Everything is now destroyed,” said resident Valentina Vitkovska, in tears as she spoke about the blast. “We are the only people left living in this part of the building. There is no power. I can’t even call to tell others what had happened to us.” Before Monday’s attacks, at least six civilians were killed and 31 others wounded as part of intense Russian shelling against various Ukrainian cities over the past 24 hours — including Kyiv and major cities in the country’s south and east, according to Zelenskyy’s office. Shelling on Monday in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, killed at least five people and wounded 15. Russian forces continued to target the key southern Black Sea port of Odesa. A missile attack destroyed residential buildings and wounded six people, including a child, Ukrainian authorities said. In Lysychansk, at least five high-rise buildings and the last road bridge were damaged over the past day, Haidai said. A crucial highway linking the city to government-held territory to the south was rendered impassable. The city’s prewar population of around 100,000 has dwindled to fewer than 10,000. Analysts say that Lysychansk’s location high on the banks of the Siverskiy Donets River gives a major advantage to Ukrainian defenders. “It’s a very hard nut to crack. The Russians could spend many months and much effort storming Lysychansk,” said military analyst Oleh Zhdanov. In other developments, in Germany’s Bavarian Alps, leaders of the G7 countries unveiled plans to seek new sanctions and pledged to continue supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” In a joint statement Monday after they held a session by video link with Zelenskyy, the leaders underlined their “unwavering commitment to support the government and people of Ukraine in their courageous defense of their country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Elsewhere, Washington was expected to announce the purchase of an advanced surface-to-air missile system for Ukraine. In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced plans to greatly expand the alliance’s rapid-reaction forces as part of its response to an “era of strategic competition.” The NATO response force currently has about 40,000 soldiers. NATO will agree to deliver further military support to Ukraine — including secure communication and anti-drone systems — when its leaders convene in Spain for a summit later this week, Stoltenberg said. Britain’s defense ministry said Russia is likely to rely increasingly on reserve forces in the coming weeks. Analysts have said a call-up of reservists by Russia could vastly alter the balance in the war but could also come with negative political consequences for President Vladimir Putin’s government. All contents © copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

By Carol Rosenberg Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi has been a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2007. Prosecutors accuse him of having been Osama bin Laden’s liaison to the Taliban. Credit: NY Times Commander of Afghan Insurgency Pleads Guilty at Guantánamo Bay Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi agreed that his subordinates committed war crimes in attacks in 2003 and 2004 on allied forces that invaded Afghanistan. [Genocide Watch comment: Mr. Hadi's participation in genocidal massacres of 8000 Hazaras in 1998 was ignored in his plea bargain, as well as his involvement in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and his involvement in the murders of troops from at least four countries.] The New York Times June 13, 2022 By Carol Rosenberg GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — An Iraqi prisoner who commanded al Qaeda terrorists during the U.S. war in Afghanistan pleaded guilty on Monday to war crimes charges related to lethal attacks on allied soldiers in 2003 and 2004, in a deal that could hand him off to the custody of another country by 2024. Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, now in his 60s, spent much of the daylong hearing responding, “Yes, your honor,” to the questions of the military judge, Lt. Col. Mark F. Rosenow, about a secret account of his activities in Afghanistan as a co-conspirator with Osama bin Laden and other top Qaeda leaders between 1996 and 2003. The account included more than 100 items. He could be sentenced to 10 years in prison, much of it to be served in the custody of another country, under a plea agreement that has yet to be made public. He pleaded guilty to the war crimes of attacking protected property — a U.S. military medevac helicopter that insurgents who answered to him failed to shoot down in Afghanistan in 2003 — and of treachery and conspiracy connected to insurgent bombings that killed at least three allied troops, one each from Canada, Britain and Germany. Those allied soldiers were killed by car bombs or suicide bombers posing as civilians, the judge said. If Mr. Hadi had known in advance about the plans, he had a duty to stop them. If he had possessed no prior knowledge, the judge said, Mr. Hadi had a duty to punish the perpetrators. The plea deal represented a drastic scaling back of the government’s charges against him. None of the crimes to which he pleaded guilty made him directly or indirectly responsible for some of the most serious allegations made by military prosecutors when they charged him in 2014. [Genocide Watch comment: Mr. Hadi was also directly involved in the genocide of over 8000 Hazaras in Mazar I Sharif in 1998. Hazara eyewitnesses were present at his trial to prove those charges against him, but they never got to testify because of the plea bargain. To this day no one has ever been tried for the genocidal massacres in Mazar I Sharif and Bamiyan. The voices of the Hazaras have been silenced.] Gone from his case were allegations that he was part of the sweeping al Qaeda conspiracy to rid the Arabian Peninsula of non-Muslims. Nor was there any claim of responsibility or knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, which prompted the creation of the Guantánamo prison and the war court. Erased were the charges that held him responsible for the destruction by the Taliban of monumental Buddha statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage site, in March 2001. [Genocide Watch comment: Hazara eyewitnesses were present at the trial who were in Bamiyan during the destruction of the Buddhas and the slaughter of hundreds of Hazaras by the Taliban and al Qaeda. They could have linked Mr. Hadi to that massacre. But they were not allowed to testify because of the plea bargain.] Nor did the charges tie him to the 2003 assassination by insurgents of a French worker for the United Nations relief agency. [Genocide Watch comment: Even though there was evidence tying Mr. Hadi to that murder as well, it was never heard due to the plea bargain.] Mr. Hadi, who says his real name is Nashwan al-Tamir, was captured in Turkey in 2006 and brought to Guantánamo Bay the next year. Efforts to bring him to trial have been slowed by the coronavirus pandemic and by his health. He has a degenerative spinal disease that has left him paralyzed at times. Plea talks in the case started this year under a new Biden-era push to close the Guantánamo prison, which has an aging detainee population and limited capacity to provide health care without airlifting in specialists and equipment. Under Mr. Hadi’s plea agreement, which was reached in May and refined over the weekend, a military jury will hear the evidence against him and be asked to choose within a range of 25 to 30 years of confinement, starting with his plea. Once that is done, according to the deal, the senior Pentagon official responsible for overseeing the war court will reduce it to 10 years. The agreement postpones sentencing for two years, providing time his lawyers hope will be sufficient to find a sympathetic nation to receive him and provide him with lifelong medical care. His spinal disease has required five operations in less than a year at Guantánamo and has left him relying on a wheelchair and walker — and in need of more surgery to address his periodic paralysis. “He pleaded guilty for his role as a frontline commander in Afghanistan,” said his lawyer, Susan Hensler, who is compensated by the Pentagon. “He has been in custody for 16 years, including the six months he spent in a C.I.A. black site. We hope the United States makes good on its promise to transfer him as soon as possible for the medical care he desperately needs.” [Comment by Genocide Watch: This plea bargain again silenced the voices of the Hazaras whom Ms. Rosenberg refuses to mention by name in any of her reports. The plea bargain was designed to facilitate the closure of Guantanamo.] Carol Rosenberg has been covering the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, including detention operations and military commissions, since the first prisoners were brought there from Afghanistan in January 2002. She worked as a metro, national and foreign correspondent with a focus on coverage of conflict in the Middle East for The Miami Herald from 1990 to 2019. @carolrosenberg • Facebook [Genocide Watch comment: Ms. Rosenberg is the New York Times reporter in residence in Guantanamo. She has campaigned for closure of the prison since it was opened.] A version of this article appears in print on June 15, 2022, Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Iraqi Prisoner Held by U.S. Pleads Guilty Copyright 2022 The New York Times Company

By: Gabriela Selser July 21, 2022 MEXICO CITY -- One of Nicaragua’s leading national newspapers announced Thursday on its website that its staff had been forced to flee the country and would continue working from outside Nicaragua. Nicaraguan authorities took control of La Prensa’s offices in August and arrested two of its employees earlier this month. Those arrests came after La Prensa reported on the expulsion nuns from the Missionaries of Charity established by Mother Teresa. The government of President Daniel Ortega has moved repeatedly against independent press outlets, as well as shutting down more than 1,000 civil society organizations. “The persecution by the Daniel Ortega regime intensified this month against the personnel of La Prensa newspaper and forced the outlet’s personnel flee the country,” the paper wrote. “Reporters, editors, photographers and other personnel were obliged to flee Nicaragua in an irregular manner in the past two weeks for their safety and freedom.” Even though members of the newspaper’s staff were not in their homes in recent days, police and civilians arrived repeatedly and harassed their families, La Prensa said. The paper said its people had to sneak across the border because they feared being arrested at formal border crossings. It did not say how many of its staff had left the country. La Prensa, founded in 1926, is Nicaragua’s oldest newspaper. It was also forced to stop publishing a print edition last year after the government repeatedly held shipments of its newsprint. The government did not immediately comment. Rosario Murrillo, Nicaragua’s vice president and first lady, as well as the government’s spokeswoman, did not make direct mention of the newspaper during an address Thursday. When the government seized the newspaper’s offices last August, it also arrested general manager Juan Lorenzo Holmann Chamorro, who remains jailed. Two of Holmann’s cousins — journalists Cristiana Chamorro and Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Barrios — have also been under house arrest, while their brother Carlos Fernando Chamorro was forced into exile last year. The government seized the offices of Carlos Fernando Chamorro’s independent news site Confidencial in December 2018. Cristiana, Pedro Joaquín and Carlos Fernando are the children of former President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro and Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, the former director of La Prensa who was assassinated in 1978. “The forced exile of La Prensa personnel is another step toward closing any possibility of freedom of expression and the press,” the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights said via Twitter Thursday. The government seized that organization’s offices in 2018. Since massive street protests erupted in April 2018 and were eventually violently put down by government forces, Ortega’s administration has pursued any organizations it views as a threat. Ortega said the protests were an attempt to overthrow him with support from abroad. La Prensa suffered censorship and temporary closures during the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza and persecution during the Sandinista revolution that ousted Somoza. ©️AssociatedPress2022

People gather at the sight of a missile attack at a busy market in the opposition-held city of al-Bab, on the border with Turkey in Syria's northern Aleppo province, on August 19, 2022. [Bakr Alkasem/AFP] BEIRUT (AP) — A rocket attack on a crowded market in a town held by Turkey-backed opposition fighters in northern Syria killed 15 people on Friday and wounded dozens, an opposition war monitor and a paramedic group said. The attack on the town of al-Bab came days after a Turkish airstrike killed at least 11 Syrian troops and U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, blamed Syrian government forces for Friday’s shelling, saying it was in apparent retaliation for the Turkish airstrike. The Observatory said three children were among the 15 killed, and that there were more than 30 wounded. The opposition’s Syrian Civil Defense, also known as White Helmets, had the same death toll but said 28 people were wounded. The paramedic group said its members evacuated some of the wounded and the dead bodies. “This is the worst massacre committed by regime forces since the battles stopped between the regime and the opposition,” said the Observatory’s chief Rami Abdurrahman, referring to a cease-fire in March 2020 that ended a wide Syrian government offensive on rebel-held areas. The U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said in a statement that its fighters did not shell al-Bab. There was no comment from the government. Turkey has launched three major cross-border operations into Syria since 2016 and controls some Syrian territory in the north. Although the fighting has waned over the past few years, shelling and airstrikes are not uncommon in northern Syria — the last major rebel stronghold in the country. Syria’s conflict, which began in March 2011, has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of 23 million. President Bashar Assad’s forces have regained control of most parts of Syria over the past few years, with the help of their allies, Russia and Iran. In other developments, the Observatory and the U.S. military said a drone strike late on Thursday night in northeastern Syria killed four women and wounded several others. The Observatory blamed Turkey for the strike, saying it targeted a facility where Syrian Kurdish women were doing sports. A female Syrian Kurdish commander with the U.S.-backed forces was visiting at the time of the attack, the Observatory said. A U.S. military commander, Maj. Gen. John Brennan, condemned the attack and said the drone struck a group of teenage girls playing volleyball under a U.N. education and outreach program. “Such acts are contrary to the laws of armed conflict, which require the protection of civilians,” Brennan, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force, said in a statement. Brennan also said the “increase in military hostilities in northern Syria is creating chaos in a fragile region” and called for immediate de-escalation from all sides in the conflict, citing the still-present threat of the Islamic State group in the area. © copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Link to article: https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-syria-turkey-b4ce7f48c32c9e416374469d2041e32a

Investigators have uncovered widespread evidence of abuse by Moscow’s forces, including rape and forced nudity. By Carlotta Gall Olha, a 26-year-old Ukrainian, faced sexual violence by Russian soldiers when she was detained in Kherson. New York Times Jan. 5, 2023 By Carlotta Gall Photographs by Laura Boushnak KHERSON, Ukraine — On her eighth or ninth day in Russian detention, Olha, a 26-year-old Ukrainian, was tied to a table, naked to the waist. For 15 minutes, her interrogator leveled obscenities at her, then threw a jacket over her and let seven other men into the room. “It was to frighten,” she remembered. “I did not know what would come next.” Sitting in Olha’s cramped kitchen weeks later in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, Anna Sosonska, an investigator with the prosecutor general’s office, listened to her recount the ordeal — an account of forced nudity that, prosecutors say, added to an accumulation of evidence that Russian forces had used sexual crimes as a weapon of war in the places they once ruled. “We are finding this problem of sexual violence in every place that Russia occupied,” said Ms. Sosonska, 33. “Every place: Kyiv region, Chernihiv region, Kharkiv region, Donetsk region and also here in Kherson region.” A village in the Kherson region where Anna Sosonska, the deputy head of a department in the prosecutor general’s office responsible for investigating conflict-related sexual crimes, went looking for rape victims. A woman in a village in the Kherson region explaining last month to Ms. Sosonska, left, how her brother was beaten by Russian troops. After months of bureaucratic and political delays, Ukrainian officials are gathering pace in documenting sexual crimes, which are prevalent and devastating in times of war but often remain hidden under layers of shame, stigma and fear. “We found all types of cases of war crimes: rape, forced nudity, sexual torture” inflicted on men, women and children, Ms. Sosonska said. A pattern to the crimes is emerging, she added. “Now we see there is a line of war crimes in the Russian Army and among Russian commanders.” Russian officials have repeatedly denied accusations of human rights abuses, despite widespread evidence and accounts collected by Ukrainian and international investigators. A spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, recently dismissed a report by the U.N. Human Rights Commission as unsubstantiated testimonies and no more than “rumors and gossip.” After investigating some areas Russia retreated from, an independent international commission reported to the United Nations in October that “an array of war crimes committed in Ukraine” included cases of sexual violence against women and girls. Victims ranged from older than 80 to as young as a 4-year-old girl forced to perform oral sex on a soldier, which is rape, the report said. It detailed more than a dozen cases involving gang rapes, family members forced to watch a relative being sexually assaulted and sexual violence against detainees. Iryna Didenko, who leads the prosecutor’s department investigating such crimes, has already opened 154 cases of conflict-related sexual violence. The real number, she said, is “much, much more.” Iryna Didenko, who leads the prosecutor’s department investigating such crimes, says the real number of cases of conflict-related sexual violence is “much, much more” than the 154 cases she has opened. “Oh God, give strength,” says a message near a carving of a cross in a basement used by Russian soldiers to detain people in Kherson. Bottles in the basement used by detainees to urinate in. In one formerly occupied village in the Kyiv region, psychologists found one in nine women had experienced sexual violence, she said. Hundreds of people suffered sexual violence and torture in Russian detention, she added. The trauma is raw and inhibiting. Viktoriya, a 42-year-old woman in the Kyiv region, shakes when she describes how, in early March, Russian soldiers shot dead her neighbor and then hauled her and her neighbor’s wife off to be raped. “The fear still remains,” she said. “Sometimes when the electricity is out, I am seized by fear and I feel they could come back.” Viktoriya was one of the few survivors willing to talk publicly. She asked that only her first name be used and that her face not be photographed, as did several other women, for fear of reprisals by Russian forces. But the stigma and judgment of neighbors and acquaintances were also an abiding pain, she said. “They are gossiping about me, and I mostly stay at home,” she said. The grief was such that her neighbor Nataliia, who was also raped and whose husband was killed, was given refuge abroad. Her 15-year-old son was suicidal in the weeks after the attack, said Ms. Didenko. A psychologist and lawyer, Ms. Didenko met Nataliia when she visited their village after Russian troops withdrew. Before the war, her department had handled domestic violence crimes, and she knew well the difficulties women faced in reporting crimes, she said. Much of that has to do with the stigma of rape in a conservative religious society, but there is also a deep-seated distrust of the authorities in a post-Soviet system that has rarely focused on victims’ needs and often blamed them instead. “From our experience with domestic violence, we realized victims do not talk about it in principle,” Ms. Didenko said. It is even harder in a war when they could be accused of fraternizing with the enemy, she said. Viktoriya, a 42-year-old woman in the Kyiv region, described how, in early March, Russian soldiers shot dead her neighbor and then hauled off her and her neighbor’s wife to be raped. Ukrainians who lived in the Kherson region during the Russian occupation lining up to register for aid last month. “No one will come running to apply to us,” she said. “That’s why we decided that we have to go to them.” The need to help Ukraine’s survivors of sexual violence is immense, activists say. The nation’s few women’s shelters have started taking in war victims. Aid organizations such as Women for Women International and the Andreev Foundation started providing mobile gynecological clinics and counseling sessions. Of more than 800 woman and girls that the foundation has counseled since the invasion began, 22 have acknowledged experiencing sexual violence in the war. Eight were younger than 18. Some survivors have expressed suicidal thoughts, said Anna Orel, an assistant project manager at the foundation. “One girl said that she wanted to cut off her own skin,” she said. “She could not bear the smell of men’s perfume.” Others were scared of military uniforms, even of Ukrainian soldiers, and of men in general. “Many of them don’t want to continue to live,” Ms. Orel said. “It’s very, very important for some professional person to hold their hand and to go through this with them.” A volunteer doctor with the Andreev Foundation preparing a room in the Kyiv region for a mobile gynecological clinic. The playground at a shelter in the Kyiv region. Humanitarian organizations and women’s shelters have started to realize that the scale of sexual violence in the war is immense, as is the need to help victims. From the accounts of those who have come forward, there is evidence that Russian commanders knew about rape or even encouraged it, officials said. Wayne Jordash, a British lawyer advising Ukrainian prosecutors, said he had seen signs of acquiescence by commanders among 30 cases he had reviewed. Ms. Didenko said there was a clear pattern of behavior when Russian troops seized an area: “Ground forces arrive, and rapes start on the second or third day.” Witnesses reported commanders ordering rape or giving instructions that suggested they condoned it, like telling soldiers to find some relaxation. In one case Ms. Didenko described, a commander told his men, “OK, go,” as he waited outside a house. One soldier was heard saying, “We’ll just beat her,” about one woman, and “This one we’ll rape.” In another case, eight Russian soldiers raped and assaulted a man who was stopped at a checkpoint. “These are not single cases,” Ms. Didenko said. There is an even clearer pattern, she said, of organized sexual abuse in the detention facilities run by Russian troops, police officers and security forces. Investigators have found at least four large detention facilities in Kherson City, with graphic evidence of systemic torture under Russian occupiers. In a business center’s basement, detainees slept on pieces of cardboard in complete darkness and carved tallies to count the days and messages into the wall. “Oh God, give strength,” one read. “This was the torture room,” said Yaroslav Manko, 30, a prosecutor from the region. The police found a rubber baton, metal handcuffs and an electric grill that Mr. Manko said was used to burn detainees’ fingers. They also found a list naming Russian officers who had worked there. There was extensive sexual abuse in the detention centers, including rape with batons and electric shocks to genitals, prosecutors and city officials said. Olha, the Kherson woman, said that over 14 days in detention this fall she was threatened with rape and was punched and kicked in the head and chest, breaking a rib. Russians put clamps on her legs, arms and earlobes to send an electric current through her body, she said, and doused her in water to worsen the shocks. Her interrogators knew she worked with volunteers bringing aid from Ukrainian-held territory to civilians in Kherson. They demanded she film a propaganda video and distribute supplies in the name of United Russia, President Vladimir V. Putin’s governing political party. Ms. Sosonska, right, speaking to a family in Kherson region during her investigation. Andriy Nazarenko, left, was one of thousands who suffered violence during detention under Russian occupation. Andriy, 35, who was held for five days in August, speaking with a psychologist after giving testimony to a prosecutor in Kherson. Another activist, Andriy, 35, was held for five days in August. Russian occupiers accused him of helping underground partisans and demanded he give up his friends and acquaintances. “They give you electric shocks, then you’re given a rest,” he said. “As you are recovering, they beat you with batons or fists.” The bruises on his back were shaped in a Z, a symbol of Russian fighters in Ukraine, he said. The electrical shocks to his earlobes knocked him unconscious. The shocks to his genitals still cause pain four months later. The similarity of the evidence and accounts across cities, describing torture methods, interrogations and officers from Russia’s main intelligence agency, the F.S.B., has convinced Ukrainian prosecutors that abuses can be traced to the Russian leadership. “It cannot be that a soldier did this without an order,” Ms. Didenko said. The F.S.B. “came efficiently, knowing their job, tortured everyone on the genitals,” she said. “It’s surely a system.” Many Ukrainians and their supporters say they believe Russia aims to crush Ukraine’s spirit of resistance and destroy its society. “It’s part of a genocide,” Ms. Didenko said, “but for us to prove it, we need time.” Kateryna Lachina contributed reporting from Kherson, Ukraine, and Oleksandr Chubko from Kyiv, Ukraine. Carlotta Gall is a senior correspondent currently covering the war in Ukraine. She previously was Istanbul bureau chief, covered the aftershocks of the Arab Spring from Tunisia, and reported from the Balkans during the war in Kosovo and Serbia, and from Afghanistan and Pakistan after 2001. She was on a team that won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan. @carlottagall • Facebook A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 6, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ukraine Finds Evidence of Sex Crimes in Areas Russia Occupied. Copyright 2023 The New York Times Company

Originally published by AP News, on January 14, 2023 Malians demonstrate against France and in support of Russia on the 60th anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Mali in 1960, in Bamako, Mali, Sept. 22, 2020. The banner in French reads: "Putin, the road to the future". Western officials say violence against civilians in Mali has risen in the year since hundreds of Russian mercenaries have started working alongside the West African country's armed forces to stem a decade-long insurgency by Islamic extremists. Diplomats, analysts and human rights groups say extremists linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group have only gotten stronger and there's concern the Russian presence will further destabilize the already-troubled region. (AP Photo/File) By: Sam Mednick DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Alou Diallo says he was drinking tea with his family one morning last month when groups of “white soldiers” invaded his village in central Mali, setting fire to houses and gunning down people suspected of being Islamic extremists. He scrambled to safety in the bush, but his son was shot and wounded while fleeing, then was finished off as he lay on the ground. “I watched my 16-year-old son die,” Diallo told The Associated Press in Mali’s capital, Bamako, where he lives in a makeshift camp for displaced people. As he recounted that awful Saturday in his village of Bamguel, the 47-year-old former cattle breeder made no attempt to hide the anger toward the troops, which he believed to be Russian mercenaries, who turned his world upside down. “I really want peace to return and things to go back to normal,” he said. “Here in Bamako, I live a life I didn’t choose.” It’s been more than a year since hundreds of fighters from the Wagner Group, a shadowy Russian military contractor, began working alongside Mali’s armed forces to try to stem a decade-long insurgency by Islamic extremists in the West African country, Western officials say. But since the mercenaries arrived, diplomats, analysts and human rights groups say indiscriminate violence against civilians has grown, the extremists linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group have only gotten stronger, and there’s concern the Russian presence will further destabilize the already-troubled region. More than 2,000 civilians have been killed since December 2021, compared with about 500 in the previous 12 months, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a nongovernmental organization. At least a third of those deaths recorded last year were from attacks involving the Wagner Group, according to the data compiled by ACLED. “They are killing civilians, and by their very presence, giving Malian security forces a green light to act on their worst inclinations,” said Michael Shurkin, senior fellow at Atlantic Council and director of global programs at the consultancy group 14 North Strategies. Military contractors from Wagner, which was founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a millionaire businessman with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, have been bolstering Moscow’s forces during its invasion of Ukraine. But experts say they also operate in a handful of African countries. Ever since Mali’s military seized power in two coups starting in 2020, a junta led by Col. Assimi Goita has had tense relations with the international community. France sent troops to Mali in 2013 to help its former colony drive Islamic militants from northern areas of the country but withdrew them in August as relations frayed and anti-French sentiment grew in the population. The West says Mali is increasingly looking to Moscow for security, although the junta says it has only invited in military trainers. Alassane Maiga, head of communications for the junta, insisted that Wagner was not operating in the country. Asked about the attacks on civilians, Maiga said Mali’s government protects its citizens and their property. “The army’s protection and security missions are carried out with respect for human rights and international humanitarian law,” he said. The Wagner Group did not respond to requests for comment. At a U.N. Security Council debate on Tuesday, Russia’s deputy ambassador Anna Evstigneeva rejected attempts from abroad “to besmirch Russian assistance to Mali,” where Moscow has a bilateral agreement to assist the transitional government. She did not mention the Wagner Group. Up to 1,000 mercenaries have been deployed and the Wagner Group is being paid nearly $11 million a month to provide security and training, according to a report by the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, which studies extremist violence. The report said Wagner’s forces are struggling to make significant gains, with jihadi violence increasing. During the rainy season between June and September when fighting usually subsides, there were over 90 attacks against civilians and the military by an al-Qaida linked extremist group, compared with six in the same period a year earlier, it said, and an August assault on a barracks by an Islamic State-linked group killed at least 42 Malian soldiers. In the bloodiest attack, Human Rights Watch said Mali’s army and foreign troops suspected to be Russian rounded up and killed an estimated 300 men in the town of Moura in March. Some were believed to be Islamic extremists but most were civilians. The investigation cited 27 people, including witnesses, traders, community leaders, diplomats and security analysts. Mali’s Defense Ministry reported a similar incident at the time but said it had killed 203 “terrorists” and arrested 51 others. “There are broad reports of human rights abuses across the region where they are working,” U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said of the Wagner mercenaries. “And we worry that these forces are not interested in the safety and security of the people of Mali but, instead, are interested in enriching themselves and strip-mining the country and are making the terrorism situation worse.” Samuel Ramani, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security think tank, said Russia is not very credible at counterterrorism in Africa or more broadly. “What we’ve seen repeatedly is that Russia and the Wagner Group forces are much better at strengthening the hold of authoritarian regimes in power than actually combating rebels and terrorist groups,” Ramani said, citing their limited knowledge of the terrain, strained relationships with low-ranking officers and a rigid command and control structure. Many Malians accuse the military and the white soldiers working with them of arbitrary arrests of civilians herding cattle, farming or going to market. Most of them are ethnic Fulani who are increasingly targeted by security forces suspecting them of supporting the Islamic militants. Rights groups say these alleged abuses aid the extremists, who capitalize on public grievances for use as a recruiting tool. A 29-year-old cattle herder named Hamidou said he was arrested at his home in Douentza village in central Mali with two other people in November and accused of being an Islamic militant. He was locked in a tiny room where he was bound, beaten and interrogated by “white soldiers.” “We were severely beaten daily. We didn’t think we’d survive,” said Hamidou, who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of reprisal, adding that most of those detained were ethnic Fulani, like him. “From the day Wagner came to Mali until today, arbitrary arrests and killings of Fulani civilians have been increasing tremendously.” The AP was unable to verify all of his account independently but a human rights researcher who also asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal said he saw the scars on Hamidou’s back and forehead after his release. Thousands of United Nations peacekeeping troops have been in Mali for nearly a decade to protect civilians from violence, but Mali’s government has constrained their ability to operate, and countries such as Benin, Germany, Sweden, Ivory Coast and the United Kingdom have announced troop withdrawals, according to the International Crisis Group. Nuland, the U.S. diplomat, said the Wagner Group has encouraged the junta to deny the peacekeepers access to areas where it has a mandate to investigate abuses. Security is “becoming more difficult as Wagner forces and others take on a larger role in the country and squeeze out U.N. peacekeepers,” she said. While many locals say they detest Wagner, they fear nothing will change until there is a new government following elections scheduled for February 2024. “It is up to the Malians to decide what steps to follow for the return of peace in Mali,” said Seydou Diawara, head of a political opposition group. “Force and pressure by the international community on the military can only worsen the security and humanitarian situation.” All contents © copyright 2023 The Associated Press.All rights reserved.

By Bono I’VE recently returned from the Middle East and East Africa, where I visited a number of refugee camps — car parks of humanity. I went as an activist and as a European. Because Europeans have come to realize — quite painfully in the past year or two — that the mass exodus from collapsed countries like Syria is not just a Middle Eastern or African problem, it’s a European problem. It’s an American one, too. It affects us all. My countryman Peter Sutherland, a senior United Nations official for international migration, has made clear that we’re living through the worst crisis of forced displacement since World War II. In 2010, some 10,000 people worldwide fled their homes every day, on average. Which sounds like a lot — until you consider that four years later, that number had quadrupled. And when people are driven out of their homes by violence, poverty and instability, they take themselves and their despair elsewhere. And “elsewhere” can be anywhere. But with their despair some of them also have hope. It seems insane or naïve to speak of hope in this context, and I may be both of these things. But in most of the places where refugees live, hope has not left the building: hope to go home someday, hope to find work and a better life. I left Kenya, Jordan and Turkey feeling a little hopeful myself. For as hard as it is to truly imagine what life as a refugee is like, we have a chance to reimagine that reality — and reinvent our relationship with the people and countries consumed now by conflict, or hosting those who have fled it. That needs to start, as it has for me, by parting with a couple of wrong ideas about the refugee crisis. One is that the Syrian refugees are concentrated in camps. They aren’t. These arid encampments are so huge that it’s hard to fathom that only a small percentage of those refugees actually live in one; in many places, a majority live in the communities of their host countries. In Jordan and Lebanon, for example, most refugees are in urban centers rather than in camps. This is a problem that knows no perimeter. Another fallacy is that the crisis is temporary. I guess it depends on your definition of “temporary,” but I didn’t meet many refugees, some of whom have been displaced for decades, who felt that they were just passing through. Some families have spent two generations — and some young people their entire lives — as refugees. They have been exiled by their home countries only to face a second exile in the countries that have accepted their presence but not their right to move or to work. You hear the term “permanent temporary solution” thrown around by officials, but not with the irony you’d think it deserves. Those understandings should shape our response. The United States and other developed nations have a chance to act smarter, think bigger and move faster in addressing this crisis and preventing the next one. Having talked with refugees, and having talked to countless officials and representatives of civil society along the way, I see three areas where the world should act. First, the refugees, and the countries where they’re living, need more humanitarian support. You see this most vividly in a place like the Dadaab complex in Kenya, near the border of Somalia, a place patched together (or not) with sticks and plastic sheets. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is doing noble and exceedingly hard work. But it can’t do everything it needs to do when it is chronically underfunded by the very governments that expect it to handle this global problem. Second, we can help host countries see refugees not just as a burden, but as a benefit. The international community could be doing much more, through development assistance and trade deals, to encourage businesses and states hosting refugees to see the upside of people’s hands being occupied and not idle (the World Bank and the Scriptures agree on this). The refugees want to work. They were shopkeepers, teachers and musicians at home, and want to be these things again, or maybe become new things — if they can get education, training and access to the labor market. In other words, they need development. Development that invests in them and empowers them — that treats them not as passive recipients but as leaders and partners. The world tends to give humanitarian efforts and development efforts their own separate bureaucracies and unlisted phone numbers, as if they’re wholly separate concerns. But to be effective they need to be better coordinated; we have to link the two and fund them both. Refugees living in camps need food and shelter right away, but they also need the long-term benefits of education, training, jobs and financial security. Third, the world needs to shore up the development assistance it gives to those countries that have not collapsed but are racked by conflict, corruption and weak governance. These countries may yet spiral into anarchy. Lately some Western governments have been cutting overseas aid to spend money instead on asylum-seekers within their borders. But it is less expensive to invest in stability than to confront instability. Transparency, respect for rule of law, and a free and independent media are also crucial to the survival of countries on the periphery of chaos. Because chaos, as we know all too well, is contagious. What we don’t want and can’t afford is to have important countries in the Sahel, the band of countries just south of the Sahara, going the same way as Syria. If Nigeria, a country many times larger than Syria, were to fracture as a result of groups like Boko Haram, we are going to wish we had been thinking bigger before the storm. Actually, some people are thinking bigger. I keep hearing calls from a real gathering of forces — Africans and Europeans, army generals and World Bank and International Monetary Fund officials — to emulate that most genius of American ideas, the Marshall Plan. That plan delivered trade and development in service of security — in places where institutions were broken and hope had been lost. Well, hope is not lost in the Middle East and North Africa, not yet, not even where it’s held together by string. But hope is getting impatient. We should be, too. © 2016 The New York Times Company