By Andrew E. Kramer Ilya and Nohcho, gay men from Chechnya, sought refuge at a house outside the Caucasus region in southern Russia. Both were arrested in a pogrom and tortured. Credit: James Hill for The New York Times GROZNY, Russia — It was supposed to be a night out. But for the young man who calls himself Maksim, as for scores of other gay men arrested in a pogrom this month in Russia’s Chechnya region, it pivoted into nearly two weeks of beatings and torture. Maksim said it had started with a chat room conversation with “a very good old friend who is also gay,” and who suggested that they meet at an apartment. When Maksim arrived, however, he was greeted not by his friend but by agents who beat him. Later, they strapped him to a chair, attached electrical wires to his hands with alligator clips and began an interrogation. “They yelled, ‘Who else do you know?’” Maksim said, and zapped him with current from time to time. “It was unbearably painful; I was hanging on with my last strength,” he added. “But I didn’t tell them anything.” Gay men have never had an easy life in Chechnya. But the targeted, collective punishment of gays that began last month under its pro-Kremlin leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, is a new turn in the region’s long history of rights abuses. Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper, first reported the pogrom, saying that at least 100 gay men had been arrested and three killed in the roundup. Human Rights Watch corroborated those findings. The sweep has been widely condemned by Western governments, the United Nations and rights groups. Activists in Russia have set up an underground network to spirit the victims out of Chechnya and to protect them from potentially violent reprisals from their families and others. The victims use assumed names in their everyday dealings. The following account is based on interviews with Maksim, who is in his 20s, and two other gay men who were detained by Chechen security agents. Homosexuality is taboo in Chechnya and the mostly Muslim surrounding areas of the Caucasus region in southern Russia. “This society is highly homophobic,” said Ekaterina L. Sokiryanskaya, Russia project director for the International Crisis Group and an authority on Chechnya. “Homosexuality is condemned. It is believed Islam considers it a great sin.” Nevertheless, before the crackdown, gay men in Chechnya could at least lead social lives, if heavily closeted ones, Maksim said. They met largely in private chat rooms on social networking sites with names like the Village or What the Mountains Are Silent About. “When two gay men meet, they don’t tell one another their true names,” Maksim said. Men met at cafes or at apartments rented for a night, he said. “Nobody suspected my sexual orientation, not even my best friends.” The crackdown began after GayRussia, a rights group based in Moscow, applied for permits for gay pride parades in the Caucasus region, prompting counter protests by religious groups, the men said. In Chechnya, it became something even worse — a mass “prophylactic” cleansing of homosexuals, the security service agents told the gay men as they rounded them up. The men were held for as little as a day or as long as several weeks, according to Human Rights Watch and to interviews with gay men who later escaped the region. Some “returned to their families barely alive from beatings,” said Tanya Lokshina, Russia program director for Human Rights Watch. Among the fatalities documented by the organization were one man who succumbed during torture and two others who died in “honor killings” by relatives after the police released them. “Human Rights Watch has been getting numerous reports about attacks by security services under Ramzan Kadyrov’s control, and those reports are extremely disturbing,” Ms. Lokshina said. “This is another opportunity to reinforce the culture of fear.” The Chechen authorities’ response to the global outrage over the pogrom has provoked new incredulity. In a telephone interview, Mr. Kadyrov’s spokesman, Alvi Karimov, said the reports of an anti-gay pogrom had to be false because such men did not exist in Chechnya. “In Grozny, have you ever noticed people who, by their appearance or manners, resemble people who are oriented in the wrong way?” Mr. Karimov asked. “A policy is developed for a problem,” he said, referring to a report that said the arrests were official policy. “I can officially say there is no policy because there is no problem. If there were a problem, there would be a policy.” In a televised meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday, Mr. Kadyrov characterized as “libelous” news reports that the security services in Chechnya had been persecuting gay men. And on Thursday, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told journalists that the Russian authorities had found no evidence that the Chechen police had arrested gay men. But it quickly became clear to Maksim and the other men that the Chechen authorities were applying the same tactics used by Russia and by Mr. Kadyrov to suppress an Islamist insurgency in the region over the past decade. Security service agents took to posing as gay men looking for dates on the Village and in other chat rooms, or persuaded those they had already captured to lure acquaintances, those arrested said in interviews. Fear spread among gay Chechens. “If they caught him, they will get to me,” said a 20-year-old student who identified himself as Ilya and who was interviewed at a safe location outside Chechnya. Ilya fled days before the police showed up at his home, he learned later. The authorities briefly detained another young man, who identified himself as Nohcho, after a friend informed on him during an interrogation. “I don’t blame him,” Nohcho said of the friend. “We are not heroes. We’re just gay guys. They starve you. They shock you.” That, it seems, is essentially what happened to Maksim, who had been corresponding with his gay acquaintance for some time. “One day, he suggested we meet for a drink,” Maksim said. “And because we knew each other a long time, I did not suspect he would be capable of something like this.” When Maksim entered the apartment where they had agreed to meet, security officers roughed him up. Five other men were already in the apartment, lured by the same ruse, he said. His account of the deception used to detain him was consistent with others documented by Human Rights Watch and with the accounts of the two other gay men interviewed separately for this article. All six of the men in the apartment were transferred to a makeshift cell in an abandoned building, where they were tortured with electricity one by one, Maksim said. After 11 days, he was released to a male relative, who was told that Maksim was gay. The security officers told the captives’ male relatives that, if they had any honor, they would kill the young men, Maksim and Ilya said. Maksim’s father threatened to beat him but refrained when his son showed him the bruises he already had. Instead his father said, “I should kill you.” Fearing for his life, Maksim turned to a gay rights group, the Russian LGBT Network, based in St. Petersburg, which has established an emergency, round-the-clock volunteer group to help gay men escape the region. To reassure the victims they are trying to help, the activists have taken extraordinary precautions, operating virtually as a partisan cell behind enemy lines, though they have done nothing illegal under Russian law. “These people don’t trust anybody,” said Olga Baranova, director of the Moscow Community Center, a support group for gays that is part of the volunteer network helping gay men flee Chechnya. After arriving at the safe location outside Chechnya, several young men said they had suspected that the volunteer group was also a trap but had no other option but to accept the help, Ms. Baranova said. “They say, ‘We didn’t believe you were real,’” she said. “‘We thought this was the last effort to round up whoever was left.’” The network bought airplane tickets for Chechen gay men, found safe houses and arranged for doctors to treat those who had been badly beaten. “Gays in Chechnya and the North Caucasus are in lethal danger,” Igor Kochetkov, director of the Russian LGBT Network, said in a telephone interview. “People whose partners are detained have every reason to believe they will be arrested. It is very hard not to name the names under torture.” __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

The U.S. religious watchdog is appealing for the rights of a Pakistani woman, a members of the country's minority Ahmadis, who has been jailed on blasphemy charges. Via AP news wire Pakistan Minority Persecution (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.) The U.S. religious watchdog appealed Friday for the rights of a Pakistani woman from the country’s minority Ahmadis who has been jailed on blasphemy charges, declaring her a prisoner of conscience and urging Prime Minister Imran Khan's government to immediately set her free. The statement by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said 55-year-old Ramazan Bibi was jailed last April under Pakistan's draconian blasphemy law that carries the death penalty. Under the law, anyone accused of insulting Islam can be sentenced to death if found guilty. While authorities have yet to carry out a death sentence for blasphemy, just the accusation of blasphemy can incite mobs in Pakistan. “The Pakistani government must immediately release Ramzan Bibi, and all others detained for blasphemy,” said commission head James W. Carr. Domestic and international human rights groups say blasphemy allegations have often been used to intimidate religious minorities in Pakistan and to settle personal scores. “Authorities allowing these laws to be used for personal gain or vendetta are only enabling systematic discrimination based on religious belief,” Carr added. The Ahmadi faith was established on the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, whose followers believe he was the messiah that was promised by the Prophet Muhammad. Pakistan’s parliament declared Ahmadis non-Muslims in 1974. Since then, they have repeatedly been targeted by Islamic extremists in the Muslim-majority nation. Bibi was jailed after a dispute over a donation she tried to make to a non-Ahmadi mosque in her village in Punjab province. The donation was rejected and when she sought an explanation from her non-Ahmadi relatives, a quarrel erupted followed by an assault on Bibi, according to members of her community. Mainstream Muslim clerics later alleged she was blasphemous and brought out an alleged witness to corroborate their allegations. “She is facing imprisonment simply because of her Ahmadi faith,” said the U.S. commission. The Pakistani prime minister's special adviser on religious affairs and religious harmony, Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, said he was not aware of the case but would investigate and promised “justice" for the woman. “No Muslims will be allowed to hurt the sentiments of people belonging to other religions and no non-Muslim should insult Islam,” said Ashrafi. Blasphemy has been a contentious issue in Pakistan. A Punjab governor was killed by his own guard in 2011 after he defended a Christian woman, Aasia Bibi, who was accused of blasphemy. She was acquitted after spending eight years on death row and later left Pakistan for Canada to join her family after receiving threats. In just the last year, more than 24 Ahmadis, including their senior leadership have been charged with blasphemy and for referring to themselves as Muslims. Scores of Ahmadis are in jail simply for reciting Islamic prayers or greeting others with a traditional Muslim greeting. Last year, five Ahmadis were killed in targeted killings in Pakistan, according to an Ahmadi official who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing for his life. According to a report last month by the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedoms, Pakistan recorded the most cases of blasphemy in the world, even though 84 countries have criminal blasphemy laws. On Friday, an anti-terrorism court in Islamabad sentenced three people — two Sunni Muslims and an Ahmadi — to death in connection with charges that they shared blasphemous content on social media in 2017. A fourth man, a Shiite Muslim college professor, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for insulting God during a college lecture. The U.S. commission described the conditions for religious freedoms in Pakistan as continuing to “trend negatively” and urged the government to repeal the blasphemy law. Pakistan has rejected the commission's assessment. _____ Associated Press writers Munir Ahmed in Islamabad and Asim Tanvir in Multan, Pakistan, contributed to this report. See article here. © The Independent 2021

The sweeping ban, which was based on concerns about forced labor in the region, could compel companies to reorganize their multinational supply chains. By Ana Swanson Cotton fields in the Xinjiang region of China. A new ban on imports of cotton from the area could have sweeping implications for apparel makers. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a ban on imports of cotton and tomatoes from the Xinjiang area of China, as well as all products made with those materials, citing human rights violations and the widespread use of forced labor in the region. The measure could have sweeping implications for makers of apparel and food products, many of whom have sought to distance themselves from atrocities in Xinjiang but have struggled to ensure their supply chains are free of all raw materials from the region. The area is a major source of cotton, coal, chemicals, sugar, tomatoes and polysilicon, a component in solar panels, that are then fed into factories around China and the world. The ban allows customs officials to stop imports that they suspect are made with raw materials from Xinjiang, regardless of whether they travel into the United States directly from China or through another country. China has carried out a vast crackdown on predominantly Muslim minority groups in the far west Xinjiang region, including detaining a million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs and other groups in camps and closely surveilling the rest of the population, human rights groups say. Forced labor also appears to be widespread in the region. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection said an investigation found numerous indicators of forced labor in Xinjiang, including debt bondage, restriction of movement, withheld wages, and abusive living and working conditions. The Chinese government denies the existence of forced labor in Xinjiang, saying all arrangements are voluntary. Scott Nova, the executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, a labor rights group, called the ban “a high-decibel wake-up call to any apparel brand that continues to deny the prevalence and problem of forced-labor-produced cotton” in the region. “This ban will redefine how the apparel industry — from Amazon to Nike to Zara — sources its materials and labor,” Mr. Nova said. “Any global apparel brand that is not either out of Xinjiang already or plotting a very swift exit is courting legal and reputational disaster.” The Workers Rights Consortium estimates that American brands and retailers import more than 1.5 billion garments that use Xinjiang materials every year, representing more than $20 billion in retail sales. China is also the world’s largest tomato producer, with Xinjiang accounting for most of that production, the group says. Independent researchers and media reports have linked dozens of the world’s most prominent multinational companies to workers or products from Xinjiang, including Apple, Nike, Kraft Heinz and Campbell Soup. Campbell said it no longer sources products from the Xinjiang region. Some textile and apparel companies that used cotton or yarn from Xinjiang have announced that they are severing ties, including Patagonia, Marks and Spencer and H&M. But many firms have found it difficult to trace the origins of all the products used by their Chinese suppliers, especially given the lack of access for independent auditors to facilities in Xinjiang. The order will “send a crystal-clear message to the trade community: know your supply chains,” said Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Importers are required to ensure that their own supply chains are free from forced labor, he added. “It’s the law.” The Trump administration has added increasingly restrictive measures on Xinjiang, including placing sanctions on dozens of companies and individuals over alleged human rights violations. In December, customs officials announced a ban on cotton products made by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, an economic and paramilitary group that produces much of the region’s cotton. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has already detained 43 shipments valued at more than $2 million under that ban, officials said Wednesday. Congress is also considering sweeping legislation that would block imports from Xinjiang, unless companies are able to prove that supply chains that run through the region are free of forced labor. While the United States has taken the most forceful action on this front, both Canada and Britain introduced rules this week to limit goods linked to Xinjiang from entering their countries. Despite growing concerns over Chinese practices in the region, exports from Xinjiang to the United States and Europe grew significantly from 2019 to 2020, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But trade experts say the new measures will raise questions about whether customs officials are equipped to fully enforce such a wide ban, which will require tracing Xinjiang materials through supply chains around the world. A report published in October by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that customs suffered from staff shortages and other issues despite a new division and resources devoted to blocking goods made with forced labor. In a call with reporters on Wednesday, Brenda Smith, the executive assistant commissioner at Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Trade, said it was “a challenge to be able to link what we see arriving in a port of entry back to the raw materials produced in Xinjiang.” The department is applying new tracking methods to uncover products made with forced labor, she said. The department is increasingly making use of new technologies, like pollen analysis, to try to identify cotton and other materials from Xinjiang in foreign products, officials said. © 2021 The New York Times Company

By Anne Barnard and Michael R. Gordon The body of a child after a reported gas attack on Tuesday in the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province. Credit: Ammar Abdullah/Reuters BEIRUT, Lebanon — One of the worst chemical bombings in Syria turned a northern rebel-held area into a toxic kill zone on Tuesday, inciting international outrage over the ever-increasing government impunity shown in the country’s six-year war. Western leaders including President Trump blamed the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and called on its patrons, Russia and Iran, to prevent a recurrence of what many described as a war crime. Dozens of people, including children, died — some writhing, choking, gasping or foaming at the mouth — after breathing in poison that possibly contained a nerve agent or other banned chemicals, according to witnesses, doctors and rescue workers. They said the toxic substance spread after warplanes dropped bombs in the early morning hours. Some rescue workers grew ill and collapsed from proximity to the dead. The opposition-run Health Department in Idlib Province, where the attack took place, said 69 people had died, providing a list of their names. The dead were still being identified, and some humanitarian groups said as many as 100 had died. The government of Mr. Assad, who renounced chemical weapons nearly four years ago after a large chemical attack that American intelligence agencies concluded was carried out by his forces, denied that his military had been responsible, as he has done every time chemical munitions have been used in Syria. A statement from the Syrian military accused insurgents of responsibility and said they had accused the army of using toxic weapons “every time they fail to achieve the goals of their sponsors.” But only the Syrian military had the ability and the motive to carry out an aerial attack like the one that struck the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. Russia offered another explanation. A spokesman for its Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said Syrian warplanes had struck an insurgent storehouse containing toxic substances to be used in chemical weapons. Witnesses to the attack said it began before 7 a.m. Numerous photographs and graphic videos posted online by activists and residents showed children and older adults gasping and struggling to breathe, or lying motionless in the mud as rescue workers ripped off victims’ clothes and hosed them down. The bodies of at least 10 children lay lined up on the ground or under a quilt. A few hours later, according to several witnesses, another airstrike hit one of the clinics treating victims, who had been sent to smaller hospitals and maternity wards because the area’s largest hospital was severely damaged by an airstrike two days earlier. The scale and brazenness of the assault threatened to further subvert a nominal and often violated cease-fire that had taken hold in parts of the country since Mr. Assad’s forces retook the northern city of Aleppo in December with Russian help, emboldening the Syrian leader to think he could win the war. The attack also seemed likely to dampen peace talks that have been overseen by the United Nations in Geneva and by Russia and Turkey in Astana, Kazakhstan. Incredulous over the chemical assault, humanitarian groups demanded action from the United Nations Security Council, where partisan divides over who is to blame for the Syrian war have paralyzed its members almost since the conflict began in 2011. On Tuesday night, Britain, France and the United States were pushing the Security Council to adopt a resolution that condemns the attack and orders the Syrian government to provide all flight logs, flight plans and names of commanders in charge of air operations, including those for Tuesday, to international investigators. The draft resolution, negotiated among diplomats from the three countries on Tuesday, was later circulated to all 15 members of the Council. It could come up for a vote as early as Wednesday. For Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly blamed what he has called President Barack Obama’s failures for the Syria crisis, the chemical weapons assault posed a potential policy dilemma and exposed some glaring contradictions in his own evolving positions on Syria. The White House called the attack a “reprehensible” act against innocent people “that cannot be ignored by the civilized world.” At the same time, Mr. Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, denounced Mr. Obama for having failed to make good on his famous “red line” statement in 2012, suggesting he would intervene militarily in Syria if Mr. Assad used chemical weapons. But in August 2013, Mr. Trump exhorted Mr. Obama not to intervene after a chemical weapons attack near Damascus that American intelligence attributed to the Syrian military killed more than 1,400 civilians, including hundreds of children, according to United States government estimates at the time. “President Obama, do not attack Syria,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter. “There is no upside and tremendous downside.” Mr. Trump’s administration, which would like to shift the focus in Syria entirely to fighting the Islamic State, has in recent days described Mr. Assad’s hold on his office as a political reality — an assertion that has drawn strong condemnation from influential Republicans who say Mr. Assad must leave power. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, who had said that Mr. Assad’s fate “will be decided by the Syrian people,” struck a sharply different tone on Tuesday, urging Mr. Assad’s allies Russia and Iran “to exercise their influence over the Syrian regime and to guarantee that this sort of horrific attack never happens again.” Mr. Tillerson added that “Russia and Iran also bear great moral responsibility for these deaths.” Russia has insisted that it had no military role in the strike. But a State Department official who briefed reporters in Washington said Russian officials were trying to evade their responsibility because Russia and Iran were guarantors of the Assad government’s commitment to adhere to a cease-fire in the peace talks that the Kremlin had helped organize in Astana. Rescue workers from the White Helmets civil defense organization said that many children were among the dead and wounded. Radi Saad, who writes incident reports for the group, said that volunteers had reached the site not knowing a chemical was present and that five of them had suffered from exposure to the substance. While chlorine gas attacks have become almost routine in northern Syria, this one was different, medical workers and witnesses said. Chlorine attacks usually kill just a few people, often those trapped in an enclosed space, and the gas dissipates quickly. This time, people collapsed outdoors, and in much larger numbers. The symptoms were different: They included the pinpoint pupils of victims that characterize nerve agents and other banned poisons. One doctor posted a video of a patient’s eye, showing the pupil reduced to a dot. Several people were sickened simply by coming into contact with victims. The opposition minister of health, Mohamad Firas al-Jundi, said in a video that he had been in a field hospital at 7:30 a.m. when more than 100 people arrived wounded or sickened. “The patients are in the corridors and on the floors of the operation rooms, the E.R.s and in the patient rooms,” he said. “I saw more than 10 deaths due to this attack.” Symptoms included suffocation; fluid in the lungs, with foam coming from the mouth; unconsciousness; spasms; and paralysis, he said. “It’s a shocking act,” he said. “The world knows and is aware of what’s happening in Syria, and we are ready to submit evidence to criminal laboratories to prove the use of these gases.” A 14-year-old resident of the attacked town, Mariam Abu Khalil, said she had left home for her examination on the Quran — scheduled for early morning because fewer bombings were expected then — when the attack took place. On the way, she saw an aircraft drop a bomb on a one-story building a few dozen yards away. In a telephone interview Tuesday night, she described an explosion like a yellow mushroom cloud that stung her eyes. “It was like a winter fog,” she said. Sheltering in her home nearby, she saw several residents arrive by car to help the wounded. “When they got out, they inhaled the gas and died,” she said. The attack appeared to be the deadliest chemical attack in Syria since the August 2013 assault. Under threat of United States retaliation, Mr. Assad agreed to a Russian-American deal to eliminate his country’s chemical weapons program, which until that time it had denied having, and to join an international treaty banning chemical weapons. But the operation took far longer than expected and raised questions about whether all the materials were accounted for. The head of the international monitoring body, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, complained in an internal report about misleading statements from Damascus and expressed concern about possible undeclared chemical weapons. Since then, the organization, working with the United Nations, has found that the Syrian government used chlorine gas as a weapon three times in 2014 and 2015, violating the treaty. Rebel fighters, doctors and antigovernment activists say there have been numerous other chlorine attacks, including at least two in the past week, in one case killing a doctor as he worked. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has also accused the Islamic State of using banned mustard gas in Iraq and Syria. The area around Khan Sheikhoun is not held by the Islamic State, but by other insurgents: Qaeda-linked militants and a variety of other rebel groups. A chemical weapons attack, if carried out by the government, would be a brazen statement of impunity, coming during a major international meeting in Brussels where officials are debating whether the European Union and other countries will contribute billions of dollars for reconstructing Syria if it is presided over by a government run by Mr. Assad. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

By Anna Killen, Holly Scala, and Sehnaz Güven Genocide Watch staff have published the twentieth Timestream in a series of critical genocides in the world. This Timestream tracks the historical, political, social, and military events that led to one of the most horrendous mass killings in history, the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. The genocide in Rwanda lasted only 100 days but left roughly 800,000 Tutsis, moderate Hutus, and Twa dead. Findings suggest that extremist media, ongoing civil war, an existing authoritarian regime, and meek international political will were the primary culprits in allowing this genocide to unfold. See the full Timestream here and view our other Timestreams here.

Accompanied by their livestock, hundreds tried to flee the Wakhan Corridor, a mountainous region of Afghanistan now threatened by the Taliban. But they were turned back by northern neighbors. 29 July 2021 | By Andrew E. Kramer Kyrgyz nomad families traveling with yaks in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan in 2017.Credit...Gohar Abbas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images They set out at night with their camels, yaks and yurts in search of safety from a war finally arriving in their mountain homeland. In one of the more peculiar disruptions touched off by the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan, about 350 ethnic Kyrgyz nomads tried to flee the country this month into Tajikistan. Traveling with about 4,000 head of livestock, the herders spent nearly two days traversing a roughly 15-mile mountain pass. Ultimately, they were forced to return after their appeal for asylum fell through — but not before touching off a diplomatic dispute and illustrating how the turmoil in Afghanistan is unnerving northern neighbors worried about the sudden arrival of refugees and the prospect of cross-border violence. The caravan of Kyrgyz fleeing the Wakhan Corridor in northeastern Afghanistan is a case in point. The corridor, a high-altitude panhandle wedged between Tajikistan, China and Pakistan, had remained peaceful throughout the two-decade-long U.S. military presence. But this summer the settled areas of its province, Badakhshan, largely fell to a Taliban advance, setting off fears among the nomadic herders that their home would be next. “The Kyrgyz do not believe the Afghan government can protect them,” said Bunyamin Toker, director of the World Association of Pamir Kyrgyz, named for the herders’ home in the Pamir Mountain range. Mr. Toker, who has been in touch with the migrants sporadically via cellphone, said the Taliban have already sent envoys into the Wakhan Corridor. The envoys told the Kyrgyz they could continue their pastoral lifestyle, he said, but they also made a point of counting the animals, raising concern that they intended to tax or confiscate the livestock. The Taliban have not yet entered the area with force, Mr. Toker said, but the Kyrgyz believe a newly constructed road makes a military operation there possible — one that could bring Taliban control to Afghanistan’s 28-mile-long border with China for the first time. The Kyrgyz are one of Afghanistan’s smallest minorities, about 2,500 largely illiterate herders who eke out a living raising sheep, yaks, horses and camels on the high-altitude pastures near the Chinese border. A remnant of centuries-old population movements in Central Asia, the group is separated from its ethnic brethren in the nation of Kyrgyzstan by the country of Tajikistan. The Kyrgyz adhere to a moderate form of Islam and, like other ethnic minorities, risk repression if the Taliban regain power. They had long benefited from the security of the American military deployment, Mr. Toker said. A Kyrgyz settlement in the Wakhan Corridor in 2018.Credit...Tom McShane/Loop Images, via UIG, via Getty Images But the U.S. military presence has shrunk to a small garrison to protect the embassy in Kabul, and the Biden administration has said it will be pulled out altogether before the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. And with that, the safety of the Kyrgyz nomads is unclear. The Taliban now threaten most of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals and even Kabul, the national capital. The insurgents have overrun more than half of the country’s 400 districts and many important border crossing points, including ones leading to the former Soviet nations in Central Asia. As a main focus of their offensive that began in May, the Taliban have been sweeping through northern Afghanistan, home to many ethnic minorities who fear persecution. Unfortunately for the Kyrgyz herders, isolated for centuries in their mountain redoubts, China just this year pushed ahead with construction of a road through the Wakhan Corridor as part of its ambitious Belt and Road infrastructure and investment project. The Wakhan Corridor road, partially completed, now opens a route for a possible Taliban advance, Mr. Toker said. “The elders decided the Taliban would come to the Pamir Mountains,” and decided to get out before that happened, he said. They left at night to avoid tipping off Taliban scouts. “If the Americans were still in Afghanistan, the Kyrgyz would be safe,” Mr. Toker said. “It was not right that they decided to leave in a hurry. If the Americans decided to leave, they should have set up stability first. Now it’s just chaos.” Students reciting Islamic prayers in a makeshift outdoor classroom in the remote Wakhan Corridor in 2007.Credit...Paula Bronstein/Getty Images When the Kyrgyz showed up at the Tajikistan border on July 13 and 14 with their herd, including Bactrian two-humped camels laden with bundles, the Tajik border patrol initially let them enter. The herders said they wanted to either remain in Tajikistan or travel on to Kyrgyzstan, according to a video interview by local reporters. And the Kyrgyz government offered the entire group asylum, seemingly opening a path. But within a week, the Tajik government rejected the herders’ appeal and sent them back into Afghanistan, saying the central government in Kabul had guaranteed their safety. Though the government of Kyrgyzstan issued a statement of complaint, saying its diplomats had conveyed “concern and corresponding requests” for asylum to the Tajik authorities, the pleas were ignored. Tajikistan’s decision reflects its growing wariness of refugee arrivals. Starting in June, Afghan government soldiers have taken to fleeing into Tajikistan as the Taliban have overrun their positions. Arriving in trickles and pell-mell retreats, several hundred soldiers have crossed the border, prompting Tajikistan to put them on flights back to Kabul. Uzbekistan, which also shares a border with Afghanistan, is bracing for instability by planning military exercises together with Russia along the frontier. The Biden administration has asked Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to accept as many as 9,000 asylum seekers. The Russian government has been adjusting, too. Its military this month deployed tanks to the Tajik border with Afghanistan and has overflown the region with ground-attack jets, ostensibly on training exercises. Tajikistan is in a military alliance with Russia, the Collective Security Treaty Organization. “With the United States and its allies departing from the country,” wrote Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, “Afghanistan becomes a problem for the neighboring states.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

By Asim Tanveer This frame grab image from video, shows a Hindu temple cordoned off by local authorities after it was stormed by a Muslim mob, in Bhong, in Rahim Yar Khan district, Pakistan, Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021. Pakistan on Thursday deployed paramilitary troops in a conservative town in the country's eastern Punjab province to avoid any communal violence after a Muslim mob badly damaged a Hindu temple there. Wednesday's attack happened after a court granted bail to an eight-year-old Hindu boy who allegedly desecrated a madrassa, or religious school, earlier this week. (AP Photo) Pakistan on Thursday deployed paramilitary troops in a conservative town in the country’s eastern Punjab province, a day after a Muslim mob attacked and badly damaged a Hindu temple there. In New Delhi, India’s foreign ministry summoned a Pakistani diplomat to protest the attack and demand protection for Hindus living in the predominantly Muslim Pakistan. Wednesday’s attack took place in the town of Bhong in Rahim Yar Khan district after a court granted bail to an eight-year-old Hindu boy who allegedly desecrated a madrassa, or religious school, earlier this week. The mob damaged statues, burned down the temple’s main door and briefly blocked a nearby road. The boy was earlier arrested on charges of intentionally urinating on a carpet in the madrassa’s library that housed religious books. The mob alleges he committed blasphemy, an act punishable by the death sentence in Pakistan, where mere accusations of blasphemy have in the past incited mobs to violence and deadly attacks. Prime Minister Imran Khan condemning the attack on Twitter, saying he has ordered the provincial police chief to take action against any officers whose negligence may have contributed to the attack. Khan also promised the government would restore the temple. Punjab police official Asif Raza said the police have a list of 50 suspects and promised speedy arrests. He said troops were now guarding the temple and that security has been provided to members of the Hindu community. In New Delhi, India’s External Affairs Ministry spokesman Arindam Bagchi said such “incidents are occurring at an alarming rate while the state and security institutions in Pakistan have stood by idly and completely failed in preventing these attacks.” Muslims and Hindus have mostly lived peacefully in Pakistan, but there have been attacks on Hindu temples in recent years. Most of Pakistan’s minority Hindus migrated to India in 1947 when India was divided by Britain’s government. © copyright 2021 The Associated Press.

By Andrew E. Kramer MOSCOW — First, two television reporters vanished. Then a waiter went missing. Over the past week, men ranging in age from 16 to 50 have disappeared from the streets of Chechnya. On Saturday, a leading Russian opposition newspaper confirmed a story already circulating among human rights activists: The Chechen authorities were arresting and killing gay men. While abuses by security services in the region, where Russia fought a two-decade war against Islamic insurgents, have long been a stain on President Vladimir V. Putin’s human rights record, gay people had not previously been targeted on a wide scale. The men were detained “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such,” the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported, citing Russian federal law enforcement officials, who blamed the local authorities. By Saturday, the paper reported, and an analyst of the region with her own sources confirmed, that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The newspaper had the names of three murder victims, and suspected many others had died in extrajudicial killings. A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.” “You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency. “If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said. The sweep, like so much else in Russian politics today, was entangled in the country’s troubled politics of street activism. It began, Novaya Gazeta reported, after a Moscow-based gay rights group, GayRussia.ru, applied for permits to stage gay pride parades in four cities in Russia’s predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region, of which Chechnya is a part. The group had not focused on the Muslim areas. It had been applying for permits for gay parades in provincial cities around Russia, and collecting the inevitable denials, in order to build a case about gay rights and freedom of assembly with the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France. It had applied to more than 90 municipal governments. Nikolai Alekseev, a gay rights activist coordinating this effort, told Novaya Gazeta he had chosen this tactic rather than staging risky, unsanctioned gay parades. The group had not applied for a permit in Chechnya, but in another Muslim region in southern Russia, Kabardino-Balkaria. The mere application there — denied, as usual — had prompted an anti-gay counter-demonstration. In the restive Muslim regions, Mr. Putin has empowered local leaders to press agendas of traditional Muslim values, to co-opt an Islamist underground. The gay pride parade applications became a galvanizing issue. “In Chechnya, the command was given for a ‘prophylactic sweep’ and it went as far as real murders,” Novaya Gazeta reported. According to the report, the authorities set to finding and arresting closeted gay men, partly by posing as men looking for dates on social networking sites. “Of course, none of these people in any way demonstrated their sexual orientation publicly — in the Caucasus, this is equal to a death sentence,” the newspaper wrote of those detained in the sweep. “I got numerous, numerous signals,” about the sweep of gay men, said Ekaterina L. Sokiryanskaya,, Russia project coordinator for the International Crisis Group, and an authority on the North Caucasus. “It came from too many sources not to be true.” Gay men have begun deleting online accounts, or fleeing the region. One user of Vkontakte, a Russian social networking site, wrote that a 16-year-old boy had been detained in a village in Chechnya. He returned days later, according to the post, “all beaten, just a sack with bones.” The newspaper published contact information to aid men wanting to leave Chechnya for relatively more tolerant parts of Russia. But reaching communities of closeted gay men in the remote mountain region poses challenges. “Even delivering the information is very difficult,” Ms. Sokiryanskaya, who is familiar with the aid effort, said. “They are just small islands, isolated.” __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

By Alison Williams It started out as a normal Monday morning in Pajok in South Sudan - children walking to school, shopkeepers raising their shutters and hawkers laying out their wares in the market, where a shower had just dampened down the dust. Then, in the distance, came the rattle of machine gun fire as government soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) clashed with rebel SPLA-IO (SPLA-In Opposition) militiamen lurking in the bush. Fearing the worst after three years of civil war in the world’s youngest nation, Pajok’s residents – most of them from the minority Acholi tribe - started to head for the safety of home. None of them made it. Before they could hide, Land Cruisers and pick-up trucks carrying heavily armed SPLA troops stormed into the town from the north, east and west, blocking escape routes. According to the accounts of dozens of Pajok residents who made it 24 hours later to the safety of Uganda, 15 km (10 miles) to the south, they then unleashed four hours of slaughter on the trapped civilians. Shocking in its brutality, such attacks have nevertheless become normal in a civil war marked increasingly by ethnic confrontation and reprisals against civilians. The United Nations said in December it had evidence of ethnic cleansing by both sides as the conflict slid toward genocide, the ultimate nightmare for a nation that six years ago – heavily backed by the West - realized its dream of independence from Sudan. Most of the SPLA is made up of members of the Dinka tribe, South Sudan’s largest and most dominant. President Salva Kiir is a Dinka. Given the confusion and trauma among the more than 3,000 refugees sitting under trees and huts at the Ugandan border, it was impossible to piece together an accurate death toll. It is likely to be well into double figures. One survivor, 17-year-old Oriem Pol, said a group of men including his father, Torencio, were arrested before being lined up against a wall and shot. Torencio was only spared so he could dig the graves of his fellow townsmen. Once his job was done, he too was killed. “They slaughtered him the next morning,” Oriem said, drawing his index finger across his throat as tears streamed down his dust-stained cheeks. Beside him, his mother lay in the dirt beside the road, 15 meters from the Ugandan military checkpoint, too distraught to speak. Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) soldiers receive South Sudanese refugees crossing into Uganda at the Ngomoromo border post in Lamwo district, northern Uganda, April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer "FLUSH OUT" REBELS In the capital, the government denied attacking civilians in Pajok, saying its forces were merely conducting an operation against SPLM-IO guerrillas. “We decided to flush the SPLM-IO force out and as a result 16 soldiers were left on the ground with some number of individual weapons,” deputy SPLA spokesman Colonel Santo Domic Chol said. “We have decided to deploy a detachment at Pajok permanently in order to take care of the civil population there.” The rebels denied this account, saying the government forces had simply decided “to take the fight to civilians in Pajok center”. Ugandan intelligence officials on the border told Reuters rebel militiamen had been in the area, but said the attack on Pajok was unquestionably SPLA. South Sudanese refugees gather with their belongings after crossing into Uganda at the Ngomoromo border post in Lamwo district, northern Uganda, April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer The refugees said the entire town, which refugees estimated as having a normal population of as many as 10,000, was now empty, a similar fate to many other ravaged communities across Equatoria, the fertile region bordering Uganda that is increasingly bearing the brunt of the fighting. Around 1.5 million people have fled the fighting, more than 10 percent of the population. Nearly a million of those have gone to Uganda, which is struggling to cope with the influx. “There is nobody there now. It is completely empty. If they catch anybody, they will kill them,” said a Pajok pastor, who identified himself only as Mondaa. Others spoke of the terror the moment they realized they had been ambushed. “If you ran, you got shot; if you got arrested, you got slaughtered,” said 35-year-old Lokang Jacky. “There were women who got shot. We just slept in the bush and then at 6 this morning we started walking.” Tony Aborra, a 42-year-old peasant farmer, had to be carried to Uganda on the back of a bicycle due to a bullet lodged in his right heel. “It was a stray bullet, maybe a kilometer away,” he said, grimacing as he unwound the handkerchief bandage around the wound. Nurse Margaret Alloyo said the SPLA forces attacked the town’s hospital, ransacking wards and medical supplies while taking staff hostage. “We just ran,” Alloyo said. “I spoke to a colleague at the hospital, but she said she had been detained. I don’t know what has happened to her. Now the calls do not go through.” A South Sudanese refugee carries his belongings as he enters Uganda at the Ngomoromo border post in Lamwo district, northern Uganda, April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Retuers

By Alan Cowell Afonso Dhlakama, the head of Mozambique’s main opposition party, Renamo, addressed an election rally in 2009. Credit: Grant Neuenburg/Reuters 5/6/2018 -Afonso Dhlakama, the leader of Mozambique’s main opposition group, who was held responsible for exceptional brutality by its often young soldiers during a civil war th at claimed up to a million lives, died on Thursday at his hide-out in the Gorongosa mountains in southeast Africa. He was 65. The Mozambican authorities confirmed the death but did not specify the cause. News reports said it was either diabetes or a heart attack. President Filipe Nyusi, who had been negotiating a rapprochement with Mr. Dhlakama, a former guerrilla commander, said he had tried to have him evacuated by helicopter for medical treatment. “I could not, because he was in a place where I could not help,” the president said. The impact of Mr. Dhlakama’s death on a frail truce, negotiated in advance of elections scheduled for 2019, was not immediately clear. Mr. Dhlakama had headed the opposition Renamo movement for almost four decades in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony. In Portuguese, the group’s initials stand for Mozambique National Resistance. Mr. Dhlakama had fought briefly with the Soviet-backed and avowedly Marxist insurgents who took power when Mozambique gained independence in June 1975. But he defected soon afterward and joined a dissident group opposed to the dominant movement, Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front), led by Samora Machel, the first president of independent Mozambique. During the civil war against the leftist government in Maputo, which began in 1977 and ended in 1992, Renamo was cast as an international pariah, little more than a pawn in the Cold War-era conflicts that ended white minority rule across southern Africa. The group was established with the support of white intelligence officers in neighboring Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe; they saw Renamo as a means of undermining Mozambique’s role as a base for Zimbabwean nationalist guerrillas led by Robert Mugabe. With Zimbabwean independence in 1980, white-ruled South Africa took over as the chief covert backer and arms supplier to Renamo, using it once more as a force of destabilization — this time against President Machel’s support for the anti-apartheid African National Congress, which was operating in exile from Mozambique and elsewhere. In 1984, President Machel was forced to sign a treaty with South Africa — named the Nkomati Accord for the area where it was signed — in which he offered to withdraw support for the A.N.C. in return for South Africa’s ending its sponsorship of Renamo. The agreement was broken often by both sides, and it was not until South Africa’s white rulers finally pledged to abandon apartheid that Renamo opened peace talks with the leadership in Maputo. By that stage, the two sides had fought to a stalemate in a bush war characterized by massacres, rape and looting. At the same time, the distant world beyond the conflict was changing fundamentally as the Cold War drew to a close. Mr. Dhlakama casting his ballot in the presidential elections in 2004. Credit: Associated Press In 1988, the United States State Department sponsored a report accusing Renamo of widespread atrocities, including forced labor and arbitrary executions. The report, likening Renamo to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, accused Mr. Dhlakama’s troops — some of them child soldiers — of a string of massacres, including one at Homoine, in which more than 400 civilians died. Mr. Dhlakama denied the accusations, insisting that government forces had staged atrocities to discredit the dissidents. “If we were just a bunch of bandits, we would have been caught and been handed over to government forces long ago,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1988. “Our aim is not to win the war militarily but to force the Frelimo government to accept our conditions” for establishing democracy. Afonso Dhlakama was born on Jan. 1, 1953, in the Sofala Province of central Mozambique, the son of a traditional ruler. He was educated by Roman Catholic seminarians in the Indian Ocean port city of Beira, according to “The Battle for Mozambique,” a study by Stephen A. Emerson, an American analyst of African affairs. Mr. Dhlakama was conscripted into the Portuguese colonial army but deserted to join Frelimo. When he defected to Renamo, Mr. Emerson wrote, the Frelimo authorities said Mr. Dhlakama had been dismissed for corruption and misconduct — allegations he denied. Mr. Dhlakama rose rapidly through the Renamo ranks, and when its leader, André Matsangaissa, was killed in action in 1979, he took over the organization and presided over the expansion of its ragtag army into a force numbering up to 20,000 guerrillas. In his 1988 interview, Mr. Dhlakama said the guerrillas’ hit-and-run strikes against towns held by the Mozambican Army were designed “to demoralize and lower the profile of the enemy” rather than hold territory. “It serves no purpose to hold towns that are empty,” he said. His forces also struck at vital regional transport links. Renamo was always hostage to events beyond its control. As South Africa’s support for the dissidents dwindled, the Frelimo government drew on backing from Zimbabwean, Tanzanian and Zambian troops, and persuaded a key supporter, Malawi, to cease aiding the rebels in 1986. For all that, Renamo’s control of so-called liberated rural areas turned many remote towns into islands of government control, reachable only by air. In 1992, Mr. Dhlakama signed a peace treaty with the Mozambican president, Joaquim Chissano; after a blanket amnesty, Renamo became a legal political party but retained its guerrilla force. In successive presidential elections — Mr. Dhlakama contested all of them — the government’s candidates won every vote, and in 2013, Renamo said it was abandoning the 1992 peace accord. Mr. Dhlakama left Maputo and returned to his wartime hide-outs in Gorongosa, losing yet another presidential election in 2014 and facing a string of assassination attempts. He announced a truce in 2016 and a year later held talks with President Nyusi aiming at a reconciliation with Frelimo, which has held power without interruption since Mozambique’s independence. Following the death of Mr. Dhlakama, President Nyusi called him “a citizen who always worked for Mozambique,” news reports said. “I hope,” he added, “that we as Mozambicans can continue to do everything so things do not go down.” (c) 2018 The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/06/obituaries/afonso-dhlakama-dead-mozambique.html

Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has gradually established policies that threaten Uighur culture and identity. My family’s forced assimilation is a part of that story. By Amelia Pang Leonardo Santamaria The first time I truly realized I was Uighur was just three years ago, when I saw the now-infamous viral photo of rows of Turkic men in dark blue uniforms, sitting in a concentration camp in Hotan, Xinjiang, a so-called Uighur autonomous region in China. Scanning the prisoners’ despondent faces, I was startled by their familiar features. Prominent cheekbones, round eyes, aquiline noses. My face was in theirs. This photo forced me to come to terms with an unsettling truth. Although I have lived in the United States my entire life, China’s forced assimilation policies still reached me. I’ve always known that my maternal grandmother was half Uighur, but my family has only ever identified as Chinese. The reason no one in my family speaks Uighur, or celebrates any Uighur holidays, is because we are the fruitful result of China’s decades-long forced assimilation campaigns to create what a Chinese official described as a single state-race. Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has been gradually rolling out policies that threaten Uighur culture and identity. There are financial incentives for interethnic marriages between Uighur and Han Chinese couples. There are laws that ban schools from teaching in Uighur. And there is, well, racism. Turkic minorities suffer from high unemployment rates in China, as “Uighurs need not apply” signs frequently crop up at job fairs. If a Uighur family wants a chance to survive, it has to become Chinese. Hostile policies like these convinced my family that it was too risky to embrace our Central Asian background. But now it’s no longer a matter of risk: In recent years, identifying as Uighur has become a matter of life and death. What started as a cultural genocide has progressed into a literal one, as defined by the United Nations. Between 2015 and 2018, forced sterilizations and abortions contributed to an 84 percent decrease in the natural population growth rate in two of the largest Uighur prefectures, according to the researcher Adrian Zenz, an expert on China’s ethnic policies. And this drop was not steep enough for the Chinese state. The local government of one Uighur region set a “family planning” goal of lowering the birthrate to nearly zero in 2020. Meanwhile, millions of Uighurs are languishing in concentration camps. In some of these facilities, the Muslim detainees are forced to make a range of products for American consumers: Covid-19 masks, baby pajamas and human hair extensions. The U.S. government estimates that there are currently one million to three million Uighurs and other Turkic minorities in China’s camps. The Uighur population in Xinjiang is only around 11 million. There is a high probability that at least some of my distant full-blooded Uighur relatives, who could not fully assimilate, are in camps right now. Fearing that my family members in Xinjiang might not have much longer to live, I began searching for my roots in 2019. I asked my family if anyone knew our grandmother’s siblings and their descendants. But no one had ever visited Xinjiang apart from my mother and one aunt, and neither of them had stayed in touch with the relatives they met. Searching for alternative ways to contact my family in Xinjiang, I consulted a Uighur human rights group. But I learned I was too late. If I did not already know their situations, I would only do more harm by reaching out now: Communicating with a person from abroad is one of 48 violations — along with abstaining from alcohol and telling people not to curse — that could land a Uighur in a concentration camp. If any of my relatives were not already in camps, my contact with them would surely fling them toward one. To my Uighur family in Xinjiang, I’m sorry I never knew you. I’m sorry I never tried to search for you when I had the chance. I’m sorry it took a full-fledged genocide for me to remember I am Uighur. Fueled by the realization that my family’s assimilation as Chinese is, by extension, complicity in ethnic cleansing, I tried to learn everything I could about Uighurs. I purchased books about our history and culture. I signed up for a language class online. But it wasn’t until I met other Uighurs that I was able to really understand what it means to be Uighur. In 2018, a Uighur immigrant named Gairatjan Rozi opened Marco & Polo, a Uighur restaurant near my hometown in Hyattsville, Md. I couldn’t believe my luck. After living in Europe for 15 years, Mr. Rozi, 50, moved to America in 2015 to seek better economic opportunities. The first time I went to his restaurant was with my mother. Seeing that we were part Han Chinese, he was friendly but guarded. He didn’t feel comfortable discussing the situation in China when we brought it up. So we limited the conversation to food. (He makes exquisite traditional hand-pulled laghman noodles steeped in aromatic sauces.) From then on I visited him as often as I could, to practice speaking Uighur. “Yaxshimusiz?” How are you? “Mening chong apam Urumchide tughuluptiken.” My grandmother is from Urumqi. Slowly, Mr. Rozi let down his guard. I learned more about his painful past each time I saw him. He told me about life in China — how taxi drivers do not stop to pick up Uighur passengers and hotel owners refuse to book Uighurs as guests. Mr. Rozi once organized a handful of Uighurs to petition the Chinese government to enforce anti-discrimination laws. This landed him in prison for 10 months. It happened in 1994, long before China imposed draconian measures to detain Uighurs en masse. But in some sense, his experience was not so different from Uighurs in camps today. In that Xinjiang prison, Mr. Rozi processed cotton without pay for more than 15 hours a day. When he grew so tired that he lost focus, the machinery ripped off two of his nails. Numb and depressed, he watched his blood splatter on the pristine cotton. Mr. Rozi’s fingers eventually became so infected that it slowed down his work. That’s when the guards took him to see a doctor, who extracted the fragments of nails off Mr. Rozi’s swollen fingers without warning or anesthetics. After the procedure, the prison gave him three days to heal before assigning him to load cotton onto freight trucks. Although Mr. Rozi did not know which manufacturers the trucks were heading to, he knew that the cotton he carried with his inflamed hands would very likely turn into fabrics for people around the world to wear. China is one of the world’s largest cotton producers. It was painful for Mr. Rozi to revisit these memories. It grew difficult for him to speak in English. Unable to find the right words, he reverted to Chinese to finish his thoughts. I responded reluctantly in Mandarin; it was still the only language we could both speak fluently. My heart dropped. Even in Hyattsville, the Communist Party’s forced assimilation policy still held an iron grip on Uighurs. As our heritage vanishes in the homeland, each laghman dish that Mr. Rozi makes is a small act of resistance. © 2021 The New York Times Company

A new wave of violence and a growing uncertainty about the country’s future have left Afghans in the capital with a constant sense of fear. By Adam Nossiter KABUL, Afghanistan — In Kabul’s uncertain present, fear and dread intertwine in a vise. Fear has become a way of life. “When you’re in the car you feel fear, when you are walking you feel fear, and when you are in the shop you feel fear,” said Shamsullah Amini, a 22-year-old shopkeeper, while watching over his vats of dried grains and beans in the Taimani neighborhood. “If there was any security at all, we wouldn’t all be thinking about leaving the country.” “Fear is omnipresent,” said Muqaddesa Yourish, an executive at a leading communications firm. “It’s gone from a state of fear to a state of being.” Fear has long been part of life in Kabul, with the possibility of sudden death from a Taliban strike. But these days — even as the Afghan government tries to negotiate peace with the Taliban — there is a heightened sense that life is fragile here. With the Taliban active in most of the country and almost daily reports of government forces beaten back, there are new questions about whether a grim return to extremist rule is on the near horizon. On Sunday morning gunmen killed two female judges on a street in a central Kabul neighborhood. The women worked for Afghanistan’s Supreme Court. Shaharzad Akbar, the chairwoman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, wrote on Twitter afterward that the country is suffering “what seems to be a systematic massacre & the world seems to be just watching.” In the first two weeks of January, bombs went off in several Kabul neighborhoods; a car bomb killed a government spokesman and two others; and a police officer, a military pilot, a soldier and a member of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency were all gunned down, according to a New York Times report. The list is not exhaustive. “Right now, I can’t be sure of my own security,” said Omar Sadr, a political scientist at the American University of Afghanistan. “But it’s not just about being targeted. It’s about an atmosphere of fear. If it continues, you won’t have the space needed for a democracy.” The assassination campaign, aimed mostly at government workers, activists, journalists and members of the military, is thought to be the Taliban’s attempt to pressure the Afghan government during the halting peace talks, though the group has denied responsibility for the attacks. It is also a means of silencing critical voices, now and in the future. More than 300 people were killed in targeted attacks last year, including at least six journalists over the last seven months, according to a New York Times tally. Some who are able to get visas have left. “It is pretty morose,” said Farahnaz Forotan, a leading television journalist, who fled to Paris in November after her name turned up on a hit list. In the capital, a veneer of normality masks the dread. In the early evening, storefronts are brightly lit against the darkened streets, and a frenetic bustle of shoppers and street vendors, darting through the perpetual traffic jam, is undamped by the coronavirus. But even these last shreds of routine could disappear if the Taliban return or Afghanistan descends again into civil war. The latest wave of violence evokes memories of the early 1990s strife that destroyed the capital. The internal war has already begun, some here say; the near-daily bombings and shootings, many unclaimed, foreshadow it. At night, the occasional burst of automatic gunfire has become familiar. “There is no safe area,” said Mina Rezaee, who runs the Simple Café in the bustling Karte Seh neighborhood, packed with inexpensive clothing stores. “People are killed at the mosque, they are killed in the street, they are killed at work. And this is something that’s always with me.” Portraits of Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt and Virginia Woolf hang on one of the cafe’s walls next to a quotation from Michel Foucault about love and sensuality. How many explosions has Ms. Rezaee witnessed up close? “It’s common for me,” she shrugged, noting that she was near a massive truck bombing outside the German Embassy that killed 90 in 2017. In a photograph on her Facebook page, taken after the 2016 Islamic State bombing in Kabul that killed over 80, she clutches her hands to a face contorted with anguish. “Nobody wants to die young,” said Saib Nissar, 25, who runs one of the glassed-in storefront bakeries that dot the capital. “But here in Afghanistan, no one can think of anything but the insecurity.” The most banal aspects of daily life have become a torment. “Every morning on the way to work I’m waiting for an explosion,” said Zahra Fayazi, a customer at the Simple Café and a former top national women’s volleyball player who now works at the state electricity company. “If it doesn’t happen in this square, it will happen in the next one.” “When we get to the office, everyone is talking about the latest explosions,” she said. “I can only breathe again when my daughters return home from school.” The consequences of the violence are both psychological and practical — especially for the government workers, academics and activists who are the biggest targets. Ms. Akbar, the chairwoman of the country’s human rights commission, said, “If you are spending your mental energy thinking about how to survive, inevitably all your days are tense and stressful.” Mr. Sadr, the political scientist, said he sold his car, worried it would be a target. “I’m trying to use taxis instead,” he said. “I’m trying to be cautious and move less.” He also said he worried about whether something he said would attract unwanted notice from the Taliban. “We’re all cautious about speaking, about the implications of speaking,” he said. Ms. Yourish, the communications executive, who is also a former deputy minister, said she no longer has a routine. “I change my routes, I change vehicles,” she said. “I need to be on extra alert about my surroundings. You do get these thoughts of, ‘What if this is my last moment?’ It’s like, taking every day as it comes.” “But I can’t,” she added. There is little confidence that the government can hold out against the Taliban, either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table. Some here who have met with them say Taliban negotiators don’t hide their contempt for the Afghan government, regarding it as a puppet of the Americans. There is deep unease about what will happen when the last American troops withdraw, tentatively scheduled for May. “What will they think of our rights, our women’s rights?” said Ms. Rezaee, the cafe owner, who has all the more reason to fear as a member of the ethnic minority most persecuted by the Taliban, the Hazara, like many of her customers. An Afghan rapper and his musician friends, sitting together at the cafe, were not optimistic. “I sing of a life that doesn’t exist,” Mustafa Saher, 27, raps in his music video. Mr. Saher put his tattooed arm on the table. “If they see this, they will cut my arm off,” he said. “They say, this is the opposite of Islam.” After he posted his video online, he received a threatening phone call saying: “What you are doing? It is against Islam. You are an infidel!” “I am scared of my own people,” Mr. Saher said. “This fear is depressing people and forcing them to isolate themselves,” he said, adding that it had become impossible, already, to hold concerts in many parts of Kabul. “All we want is freedom, and justice, and maybe a little bit of peace,” he said. Fatima Faizi and Najim Rahim contributed reporting. © The New York Times 2021