By Shaun Walker Poland’s defence, interior and foreign ministers lined up in front of a tall, metal wall topped with barbed wire. Speaking to assembled television cameras, the three men warned of a terrible plot against Poland, orchestrated in the Kremlin. The weapons in this “special operation” were not tanks or bombs, suggested the foreign minister, Zbigniew Rau, but people from the Middle East and Africa. It was only the decision of the patriotic Polish government to construct the wall behind him that had foiled this Russian plan to sow discord and chaos in Poland, he said. “Otherwise, we would have become Lampedusa, but a Lampedusa filled with migrants who had been given military training. Ninety per cent of them, then and now, have been recruited by the Russian special services,” Rau claimed, falsely. Job done, the three ministers headed back to Warsaw. Their speeches were fed into the daily churn of migration scare-stories on pro-government television. The temperature rises each week, as Poland enters the final phase of a closely contested election campaign. A section of Poland’s border wall with Belarus, reinforced with barbed wire at the top and bottom. Photograph: Kasia Strek That same evening in late August, on the other side of the border wall, the health of 20-year-old Sadia Mohamed Mohamud was deteriorating. By then, Sadia had been stuck in the thin strip of land between the two border fences, Polish and Belarusian, for almost a month, together with a few fellow Somalis also trying to get to the EU. Sadia told the others she had left her conflict-torn home country in the hope of earning money in Europe to provide a decent life for her two young children, who remained in Mogadishu. Speaking by telephone from Belarus, another man from the group said that on one occasion some of them had made it on to Polish territory through a hole cut in the border fence. Border guards materialised almost instantly. One of the guards beat Sadia on the shoulders, shouting at her in English: “Why did you come here?” The Polish guards unlocked a gate in the wall and shoved Sadia and the others back to the other side. The group retreated through no man’s land, only to reach another fence. There, Belarusian border guards threatened them with dogs and batons, ordering them to turn back towards Poland. Sadia later made it into Poland a second time, but was again swiftly apprehended by Polish border guards and pushed back. Barred from entering the EU but also blocked from returning to Belarus, the group was stuck in the grey zone in between, with minimal food and shelter and no clean water. Everyone was weak, but Sadia was in the worst state. A video taken by one of the group in the forest shows her wrapped in a sleeping bag, barely conscious. On 10 September, the group again begged the Belarusian guards to let them out, telling them that Sadia was dying. Finally, the guards relented. Another Somali woman took Sadia, wrapped in a white blanket, by car to a house outside Minsk they had been told was safe. An ambulance was called. By now, Sadia was unable to speak, barely able to open her eyes and gurgling up blood. By the time the paramedics arrived, she was dead. The background The crisis on the border began in autumn 2021. A year earlier, the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, had crushed mass protests against his rule with brutal violence, leading to a collapse in relations with the EU and the imposition of sanctions on his regime. In return, Lukashenko threatened to flood Europe with “drugs and migrants”. He soon made good on his promise. Flights sprung up from Middle Eastern cities to Minsk, bringing vulnerable people who had been sold the idea of an easy path to Europe. Instead, they found themselves stuck in one of Europe’s last primeval forests, which became a hellish no man’s land between a dictator bent on using them as political pawns and a government determined to keep them out. Soldiers from the Polish Armed Forces patrol the Belarus-Polish border on November 11, 2021 in Kuźnica, Poland. Photograph: Irek Dorożański/Polish Ministry of National Defence/Getty Image In response to the initial crisis, the Polish government announced the construction of the border barrier, 5.5 metres high and stretching for 186km. It was completed last summer. Poland’s government frequently points to the catastrophic situation in the Mediterranean and claims it has solved its own migration issue with the wall. In fact, humanitarian organisations say the structure has only increased suffering while doing little to stop the movement of people. On 15 October, Poles will vote in a knife-edge parliamentary election. The ruling Law and Justice party – whose chair once accused migrants of bringing “parasites and protozoa” to Europe – has been upping the anti-migration rhetoric once again, in the hope of boosting support among its core base and winning another term. In the days after Sadia died, the evening news on Poland’s government-controlled television again featured tales of invading hordes of migrants laying siege to Europe. One Law and Justice campaign advert interspersed footage of burning cars and violence in western Europe with the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki taking selfies alongside smiling Poles. Thanks to Law and Justice, said Morawiecki, in Poland there were “no districts full of illegal immigrants … No horror districts”. The activists The emergency call came shortly before dusk, only a few hours after the three ministers had recorded their speeches at the border. At a base in a secret forest location, a group of humanitarian workers crammed hot soup, tea, clothes and medical supplies into backpacks. Dominika Ożyńska, a Polish humanitarian worker and Liz, a German doctor taking a break from her hospital job back home, set off amid the fading light by car, towards the GPS location pin they had received. They parked at the nearest point to the pin and continued on foot through the darkening forest, clambering over fallen trunks and protruding branches until they reached the spot. They used no light, so as not to attract the attention of border guards, police or soldiers. Eventually, they found the eight Syrian men who had summoned their help, exhausted and disoriented. Dominika Ożyńska, a Polish humanitarian worker, in a storage room in a village near Białowieża where basic supplies are kept for people who call for help from the forest. Photograph: Kasia Strek One of the men apologised for the group’s appearance in Europe, as if pre-empting judgement. “We want to work, we will work,” he said. Dominika assured them they had nothing to apologise for as she handed out cups of tea. The men had been stranded in the forest for weeks, and this was the fifth time they had crossed into Poland, after four pushbacks to Belarus. This time, though, the group had managed to evade the heat sensors and soldiers stationed on the border, and had made it deeper into Poland. Finally, they were able to send a pin to an SOS number to summon help from Polish activists. These forest missions are known by the activists as “interventions”, and they began two years ago as an ad hoc response to the emerging crisis. These days, the procedures for interventions are more formalised, but major international NGOs are still absent from the border area. Instead, the burden falls on small Polish rights organisations, big-hearted locals and volunteers. By now, many of them are exhausted and burned out. Every intervention is different: some people need food or new shoes; others are moments away from dying. Since the wall was constructed, there are more frequent serious injuries that require hospitalisation: broken pelvises and legs, or severe concussion. Often, psychological trauma and panic attacks are added to the mix. People have been warned the journey will be hard before setting out. But little can prepare them for what it’s really like to be stuck in a forest for weeks on end, drinking from swamps and sleeping on cold, mossy ground amid the bugs and ticks. It can send the toughest person into a spiral. Most people who are still capable of walking do not want official medical help, because they know that with the ambulance comes the border guards, who might push them back to Belarus again, or throw them into one of Poland’s closed detention centres. So the activists do what they can to patch them up on the spot and send them on their way. On this particular evening, Liz, who did not want her surname to be published, got to work evaluating the Syrian group’s medical needs. She found a fairly standard collection of ailments. One man had extreme pain in his ribs, probably a fracture from a beating administered by border guards. Another had a deep cut on his leg, sliced open when he fell from the border fence on to barbed wire, recently placed at the bottom as well as the top of the wall by Polish border guards. A third had an abscess the size of an egg on his knee, from a small cut that had become infected during weeks in the forest. In a hospital setting, Liz would have ordered scans, stitches and surgery. In the forest gloom, she could only offer bandages, painkillers and antibiotics. It is legal in Poland to give food and medical help to those in need, but against the law to offer transport to people who authorities say have crossed the border illegally. So after a couple of hours, Liz and Dominika wished the eight Syrian men the best of luck on their onward journey, and left them alone in the eerie forest night. The aid workers never know if the people they have helped will make it out of the forest alive. “It’s all a bit abstract when you read an article at home. And then you come here and this crisis gets a face,” said Liz, in an interview at the base two days later. “I feel a lot of rage and anger towards the whole situation. Towards Poland, towards Europe.” The dictator Lukashenko’s regime continues to exacerbate the crisis, allowing people to enter Belarus and then giving them equipment to help them get into Poland. “The Belarusian soldiers give people special tools for cutting the barbed wire, and things to dig a hole under the fence,” said Katarzyna Zdanowicz, the spokesperson for the regional border guard service, in an interview in her office in a fortified compound in the city of Białystok. By mid-August this year, the electronic sensors on the wall had logged more than 20,000 crossing attempts for 2023 so far, up from 16,000 total attempts in 2022, said Zdanowicz. Katarzyna Zdanowicz, the spokesperson for the regional border guard service on the Polish side of the border, says more than 20,000 people have attempted to cross the border so far this year, up from 16,000 attempts last year. Photograph: Kasia Strek Lukashenko’s role as a supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine has further escalated tension. After the failed mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin, troops from his Wagner group relocated to Belarus over the summer. Lukashenko “joked” about the Wagner fighters planning to invade Poland. In late July, three Belarusian military helicopters flew over the border town of Białowieża. In response, Poland ordered an extra 10,000 troops to the border region. So far, Wagner troops have not come close to the border, but the additional soldiers make it even harder for people who make it over the wall to pass further into Poland undetected. Most roads close to the border have police checkpoints, where officers stop cars and scan the skin colour of the passengers. This has led to more pushbacks, as well as much more testimony of violence from Polish border guards. Zdanowicz said border guards would not push back a person who had claimed asylum in Poland, and also denied there had been any case of unprovoked violence from border guards. Activists say both of these claims are untrue. Members of a Kurdish family from Dohuk in Iraq are seen in a forest near the Polish-Belarus border while waiting for the border guard patrol, near Narewka, Poland, on November 9, 2021. Photograph: Wojtek Radwański/AFP/Getty Images For the people pushed back to Belarus, or stranded between the two walls, there is almost no one to turn to for help. Belarusian border guards frequently set dogs on people trying to return to Belarus after failed crossings; many people return to Minsk with leg wounds from dog bites. The election Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, Poland has welcomed millions of Ukrainian refugees. Authorities and the general population came together in a response filled with compassion and generosity to offer shelter and support to fleeing Ukrainians. For the much smaller numbers of people coming from further away, and with a different skin colour, the message remains very different. “From the beginning the whole thing has been portrayed as a security threat instead of a human story,” said Ala Qandil, of Grupa Granica, the largest umbrella group of activists and humanitarian workers at the border. “We just want the people crossing the border to be seen as human beings.” Volunteers and activists from Grupa Granica organise supplies including water bottles to give to people in the forest. Photograph: Kasia Strek Instead, the dehumanisation is increasing. On the same day as the parliamentary election, Poles will be asked to vote in a referendum. One question will ask if they wish to remove the border wall. Another asks: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa?” In recent days, the news on government-controlled TVP has been presented live from Lampedusa, where correspondents explain the difference between Europe’s general migration policy and Poland’s tough stance at the border. The ticker headline to a migration story on the television news one recent evening comprised a single word: “Invasion”. Government ministers have denounced filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, who made a recent feature film documenting the cruel treatment of people trying to cross the border, comparing her to a Nazi propagandist. It is an unsubtle attempt by the Law and Justice party to mobilise its base for an election that is likely to be so close that it could turn on a tiny number of voters. Keen not to appear soft on migration, the main opposition coalition, led by former European Council president Donald Tusk, has decided to extend one foot onto the government’s turf. “Never in history have Poland’s borders been so open to legal and illegal migrants,” said Tusk, accusing the ruling party of talking tough while stealthily letting in migrants. Kamil Syller, an activist who lives in a small village close to the border, said he was particularly disheartened by Tusk’s dabbling in the rhetoric of the right. “We were disappointed and terrified by their change of language. The politicians look at this crisis as a political goldmine and all of them try to use it,” he said in an interview at his home, a contemporary farmhouse set amid bucolic fields. In border communities like Syller’s, many people have shown solidarity to people passing through. In 2021, Syller and his wife set up the “green light” movement, in which a network of sympathetic locals installed green lights outside their homes to indicate places where people on the move could seek help. Some locals were initially scared, said Syller, but after interactions with people seeking help realised they were not evil invaders but merely vulnerable people in need of support. Kamil Syller lives close to the border with Belarus and set up the ‘green light’ movement to help people passing through his village after crossing into Poland. Photograph: Kasia Strek “Many of my neighbours used to be aggressive, but over time they understood the sadistic nature of the border guards, they started wanting to help. Now, if they find people who need help, some of them call me instead of calling the border guards,” he said. But after two years of the crisis, many in the border region have grown weary of the increased military presence, and frustrated at the decrease in the number of tourists visiting the forest. Syller fears attitudes might change soon, especially with the daily election propaganda targeting migrants. “We see disgusting, dehumanising propaganda every evening, it’s pure propaganda from the darkest moments of the twentieth century,” said Franek Sterczewski, an opposition MP who has supported activists at the border. “Unfortunately, the propaganda of fear often works.” The missing On a sultry afternoon in late August, Mariusz Kurnyta, a wiry 36-year-old with a fortnight of stubble, set out to look for a body. Mariusz, who goes by the nickname “Man of the Forest”, crowdfunds the work he does at the border. In recent months, he has patched up injuries, fitted intravenous fluid drips in forest clearings, hauled dying people out of swamps and helped hundreds more on their way with water, soup and a change of clothes. “For the last two years, my life is the forest. I don’t have another life,” he said, puffing on a cigarette as he prepared to leave from his base. He has fallen out with some of the other activists working at the border. He chain smokes. He looks permanently exhausted. Mariusz last saw Ibrahim Eltony, a 37-year-old Egyptian man, a year ago, when Ibrahim summoned help after crossing from Belarus. Mariusz gave him food, water and a distinctive blue coat to stave off the rain. Ibrahim was never seen again. The blue coat believed to be the one Mariusz Kurnyta gave to to Ibrahim Eltony, who called for help after crossing from Belarus. Photograph: Kasia Strek In June this year, during a search in swampy terrain not far from the border, a backpack that appeared to have been Ibrahim’s was found. Its contents: some sodden documents, a power bank, a mud-caked thermos flask and an electric razor. Two months later, the same blue coat was found in a spot not far from where the backpack had been. Mariusz decided to return to the spot a third time, to see if the body was nearby. Mariusz and two other activists walked past hikers and bikers enjoying the late summer on the forest paths. An army pick-up truck crept along an adjacent track, its passengers wearing balaclavas, apparently on the hunt for people who have crossed the border. Leaving the path and picking through a section of dense forest, Mariusz emerged into a boggy clearing. The ground was uneven, every step a potential twisted ankle. Mariusz forged a path through chest-high grass towards the section of stagnant swamp where the anorak had been found. There was a pristine silence save for the whirring of insects. Mariusz Kurnyta searching for the body of Ibrahim Eltony, who crossed from Belarus and has not been seen since last year. Photograph: Kasia Strek He and the others donned waterproof overalls, picked up chunky sticks, and began slowly wading through the bog, prodding the ground as they went. After a few hours of methodical probing, they gave up. Ibrahim Eltony, missing since last summer, would not be found that day. Ibrahim is one of more than 200 people who are still missing since the crisis at the border started. At least 49 deaths have been documented. The real figures are almost certainly much higher, especially as there is so little information about what happens on the Belarusian side of the border. Many of these deaths were preventable. Often, people died within a hundred metres of a village, a police patrol or a road where help could have been given. On the Belarusian side, people have died within days of being pushed back by Polish border guards. This month alone, there have been credible reports of four people dying on the Belarusian side after they were pushed back from Poland. People have died of thirst and exhaustion when Polish territory is visible just a few metres away. It is illegal for activists to come within 15 metres of the border wall, meaning they cannot throw provisions over. Małgorzata Rycharska, an activist in Poland who fields calls from those stuck in the grey zone between the border fences, said it can be unbearably hard to explain to people that no help can reach them, even though they can see the EU with their own eyes. She referred to her work as “hopelessness management”. Often, all she can do is try to connect them with other stranded groups. “It’s always the same. They call and say: ‘We are here, we have no water, no food and our battery is going to die. Can you help us?’ And then we have to explain to them that no one will come.” © 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited

By Eve Brennan, CNN October 5, 2023 Armed actors continue to commit atrocities in parts of Ethiopia's Tigray region almost a year after warring parties agreed to a truce. | EDUARDO SOTERAS/AFP/AFP via Getty Images (CNN) — A UN-mandated investigation into human rights abuses in Ethiopia will come to an end next week despite ongoing atrocities in the region. None of the parties to the mandate asked for it to be extended by Wednesday’s deadline, according to UN Human Rights Council spokesperson Pascal Sim. The mandate of the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia was created in 2021 after a motion submitted by the European Union. It will now officially conclude after October 13, 2023, Sim told CNN. It comes after the commission released a report on Tuesday, warning of the continued risk of human rights atrocities in Ethiopia and emphasizing the urgent need for ongoing independent investigations into the country’s human rights situation. Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region was plunged into war in November 2020 as government forces clashed with rebels, resulting in widespread atrocities perpetrated by all sides. The Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front signed a peace agreement, known as the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement, in November last year and seemed to end the brutal conflict. But a year later, atrocities continue in parts of the Tigray region, the commission’s report says. Proponents of another mandate appear to have been put off by opposition from African states, diplomats said, according to Reuters. The mandate was renewed last year only by a small margin, Reuters said. ‘A devastating blow’ Human Rights Watch said Wednesday that the European Union and its members have backtracked on their support for scrutiny of the human rights situation in Ethiopia. Tirana Hassan, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement: “For the numerous victims of atrocities in Ethiopia who placed their hopes in the commission, this is a devastating blow.” An EU spokesperson told CNN on Thursday that “justice and accountability are clear conditions for gradual normalization of relations with Ethiopia,” adding that European nations had not reached a consensus on bringing forward a resolution for a new mandate. Ethiopia has always opposed the UN-mandated investigation and has tried to curtail in the past, arguing that its own national justice policies provided sufficient avenues to conduct any inquiry, Reuters reported. The UN commission says this approach was “deeply flawed,” Reuters said. Asked for comment on Wednesday, Ethiopian government spokesperson Legesse Tulu responded by text message: “This is the end of (ICHREE’s) history (in) Ethiopia.” He later added: “There is no need to talk about a dead end.” © 2023 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved.

By Mark Trevelyan Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov attends a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in Moscow, Russia April 27, 2023. Sputnik/Alexander Astafyev/Pool via REUTERS /File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights Sept 25 (Reuters) - The leader of Russia's Chechnya region, Ramzan Kadyrov, said on Monday he was proud of his teenage son Adam for beating up a prisoner accused of burning the Koran. Kadyrov posted the comments on Telegram, accompanied by a clip in which a young man in khaki clothing is seen punching and kicking another man cowering in a chair before wrestling him to the floor and slapping him on the head. The Chechen leader, who styles himself as a ruthless ally of President Vladimir Putin, said he was releasing the video to settle any doubts about whether the incident, first reported last month, had really taken place. "He beat him, and he did the right thing," Kadyrov said. "Without exaggeration, yes, I am proud of Adam's action," he said, adding that he respected the boy for acquiring "adult ideals of honour, dignity and defence of his religion." The prisoner, Nikita Zhuravel, had complained about the attack to Russia's human rights ombudswoman, who said last month she had referred the issue to her counterpart in Chechnya. Kadyrov, 46, has ruled Chechnya with an iron hand since becoming president in 2007, following in the footsteps of his father Akhmat who was killed in a bomb blast in 2004. He has enjoyed generous funding from Putin to rebuild the mainly Muslim region which suffered devastation in two wars following the collapse of the Soviet Union when it tried to break away from Moscow's control. Kadyrov has been giving increasing publicity to his three teenage sons, whom he said last year he was sending off to fight for Russia in the Ukraine war. The extent of their actual involvement in any combat action is not clear. The eldest, Akhmat, was pictured with Putin in the Kremlin in March, fuelling rumours he was being groomed as Kadyrov's successor. Kadyrov's health has been the subject of intense speculation, with rumours swirling this month that he was dead or in a coma. Last week he published a post on Telegram saying that he was fine, and that his reason for travelling to a Moscow hospital was to visit the bedside of a sick uncle. © 2023 Reuters. All rights reserved

A family walk along the road from Nagorno-Karabakh to the Armenian border town of Kornidzor, September 26, 2023. Genocide and Forced Deportation: Nagorno-Karabakh by Aline Keledjian and Ani Tonoyan September 30, 2023 Two years after President Biden formally recognized the 1915 Armenian Genocide, the world is standing by as another Armenian genocide and forced deportation unfolds. Genocide Watch , The Lemkin Institute, The Save Karabakh Coalition, former ICC Prosecutor Ocampo, and Armenian organizations warned that genocide has been underway in Nagorno-Karabakh since 2022. By January 1, 2024 the independent Armenian Republic of Artsakh will cease to exist. The forced deportation and genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh, is the culmination of a decades-long conflict. Artsakh is the homeland of 120,000 Armenians, who have lived there since the Fifth Century. On September 19, Azerbaijan began bombardment of Nagorno-Karabakh. In Vanq the shelling killed 16-year-old Sergey Hovoyan. His critically injured 13-year-old brother, Mkrtich, recounts that as he and his mother begin packing their bags to leave, Azerbaijani forces shelled their house and backyard, killing Sergey and 67-year-old neighbor Melsik. Azerbaijan intentionally shells civilian towns. This is a war crime (ICC Statute (Art.8 (2b(i). When the shelling began, a group of women and children were housed in Sarnaghbyur. Their house was bombed, killing five civilians including three children. Two children are missing, and their parents cannot find their bodies. Seven-year-old Ruzan Hayrapetyan and her brother and sister were wounded. Sarnaghbyur is a village surrounded by forest and is far from any military targets. The EU’s policy chief Josep Borrell said, “This military escalation should not be used as a pretext to force the exodus of the local population.” But forced deportation is exactly what is happening. Forced deportation is a crime against humanity (ICC Statute (Art.7 (1d). Over 100,000 people have already fled from Nagorno-Karabakh and the entire remaining Armenian population is trying to leave. Azerbaijani propaganda dehumanizes Armenians. Azerbaijan schoolchildrens' textbooks portray Armenians as evil, aggressive enemies. Tofig Veliyev, head of the department of History of Slavic Countries at Baku State University, claims that negative expressions are required to portray Armenians "accurately." Azerbaijan is erasing Armenia's ancient history. Azerbaijani historians and state-run media falsely claim that Armenia and Artsakh are historically Turkic lands. Azerbaijan systematically destroys Armenian Christian churches and holy sites. In a victory speech, Azerbaijani President Aliyev claimed that Armenians would be guaranteed rights in Azerbaijan. In reality, Azerbaijani military have already begun sharing videos of themselves shooting and killing Armenians. Hundreds of documented Azerbaijani war crimes prove that Armenians will not be safe under an Azerbaijani government. Azerbaijani forces are detaining evacuees and have already arrested former Artsakh leader Ruben Vardanyan. The U.S. and European Union cannot feign ignorance about Azerbaijan's forced deportation and genocide in Artsakh. This is not the first time that the U.S. and Europe failed to act to stop an Armenian genocide, as they did during the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The U.S. and E.U. were also bystanders in 1994 during the Rwandan Genocide. Unfortunately, Sergey is not the only child who died from the attacks this week. A fuel depot exploded and killed 68 people as they lined up to refuel their cars so they could flee from Artsakh. The Armenians of Artsakh have endured ten months of blockade and starvation. USAID Administrator Samantha Power traveled to Armenia this week to show support for Armenia’s sovereignty. But she arrived too late to begin the airlift of supplies into Artsakh that Genocide Watch and The Save Karabakh Coalition have demanded since 2022. The people of Artsakh now need emergency airlifts to transport Armenian refugees out of Artsakh. Armenia needs massive aid to cope with over 100,000 Artsakh refugees. Armenia needs a U.S., E.U., and Russian guarantee that they will be safe from more Azerbaijani aggression.

Attacks on civic and democratic space in Venezuela are increasing through policies aimed at silencing opposition and criticism of the Government, the head of a UN-appointed human rights body said on Monday. © UNICEF/Velasquez. Children walk past street graffiti in Caracas, Venezuela. (file) 25 September 2023 Marta Valiñas, Chair of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, presented its latest report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, which covers the period from January 2020 to August this year. The report, which was published last week, focused on two areas: the various “repression mechanisms” used by the State, and the need to monitor a new security force whose members include officers who allegedly were involved in crimes against humanity. ‘Repressive tactics’ “What we are witnessing is the accumulated impact of these repressive tactics which have given rise to a predominant environment of fear, mistrust and self-censorship. As a consequence, the fundamental pillars of civic and democratic fora have been seriously eroded in Venezuela,” said Mr. Valiñas, speaking in Spanish. She warned that repressive measures are likely to increase in the run-up to the presidential elections next year. During the reporting period, at least 58 persons were arbitrarily detained, according to the report. They included trade union leaders, human rights defenders, members of non-governmental organizations, journalists, opposition party members, and others who voiced criticism of the Government of President Nicholas Maduro. Arbitrary killings and torture The Mission investigated nine deaths to determine if they were linked to detention, finding reasonable grounds to believe that five were arbitrary killings that could be attributed to the State authorities. Furthermore, at least 14 individuals were forcibly disappeared for periods ranging from several hours up to 10 days. The Mission documented 28 cases of torture or degrading treatment in official or clandestine places of detention, with sexual and gender-based violence being most prevalent. Ms. Valiñas said these incidents represent a decrease over previous reporting periods, reflecting a shift in the political and human rights crisis in Venezuela. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the end of opposition protests, and subsequent mass arrests, torture and large-scale reprisals. Freedoms under attack “Our conclusion is that in Venezuela, serious human rights violations continue, and that these violations are not isolated events. Rather, they reflect a policy of repressing dissent,” she said. The Mission also investigated attempts against the freedoms of expression, assembly and peaceful association, and the right to participate in public life. “Numerous cases” of selective repression were documented, including against trade unionists, journalists, human rights defenders, political leaders, and their relatives. Key civil society institutions, political parties and the media have also been targeted. New strategic force The report also expressed concern over a new police body, the Directorate of Strategic and Tactical Actions (DAET), created in July 2022. The Mission concluded that the DAET is a continuation of the disbanded Special Action Forces (FAES), which it had identified as one of the structures most involved in extrajudicial executions, among other gross human rights violations, in the context of fighting crime. Ms. Valiñas said 10 of the 15 top positions are held by former FAES leaders, “and these were already people who were named in former reports of our Mission because we believe that they have been involved in international crimes.” She cited allegations around the new force’s involvement in operations last year that were linked to multiple assassinations and over 300 detentions. “These actions were very similar to the strategies used by the Special Forces when they existed, including extrajudicial killings,” she said, calling for further investigation. © United Nations News 2023

By Niha Masih, Anant Gupta and Gerry Shih Prabir Purkayastha, founder and editor in chief of NewsClick, is taken away by the Delhi police's “special cell” in New Delhi on Tuesday. (Dinesh Joshi/AP) Citing a draconian anti-terrorism legal provision, Indian police on Tuesday raided the homes and seized the phones and laptops of 46 journalists and contributors associated with NewsClick, a left-leaning news outlet critical of the Indian government, amid an intensifying crackdown on media under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For years, the Modi government has accused NewsClick of financial impropriety, but it sharply escalated its scrutiny of the organization in August by alleging that it had received funding from China, a geopolitical rival. The New Delhi police said in a statement that its “special cell” carried out the search, seizure and detentions of 46 people in a case filed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a controversial anti-terrorism law. Two people, NewsClick’s founder and its human resources chief, were formally arrested. The police seizures and raids, which unfolded simultaneously at more than 30 locations across India early Tuesday, rattled Indian media and drew criticism from the political opposition and professional journalist organizations. New Delhi police did not immediately release details about their case, but many Indian news outlets, citing unnamed government sources, pointed to an August report by the New York Times alleging that NewsClick was on a list of news organizations that have received money from a Shanghai-based American businessman who supports the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda efforts. NewsClick has consistently denied charges of financial misconduct and of promoting Chinese propaganda. Its defenders have criticized the persistent government scrutiny it has faced as motivated, at least partly, by a desire to squash a critical voice. Investigators not only interrogated NewsClick journalists Tuesday but also cast a broader net, targeting a long list of the publication’s former employees, freelance contributors and even friends of staff members. “The investigation of specific offences must not create a general atmosphere of intimidation under the shadow of draconian laws, or impinge on the freedom of expression and the raising of dissenting and critical voices,” the Editors Guild of India said in a statement. The Press Club of India asked the government to release more information about why the organization was targeted. Founded in 2009, the scrappy news organization highlights stories of social injustices and discontent against the government. Video commentaries broadcast on YouTube and other social media platforms in English and Hindi make up much of its content. Security officers carry boxes of material confiscated after a raid Tuesday at the office of NewsClick in New Delhi. (Dinesh Joshi/AP) Tuesday’s raids are only the latest action against journalists in India, where press freedom has shrunk dramatically. This year, the country was ranked 161 out of 180 places in the World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. Independent media outlets in India battle censorship and harassment, and face arrests and economic pressures in doing their work. Indian authorities have increasingly alleged financial impropriety to carry out raids against media outlets critical of the government. International news organizations have been swept up as well. In February, authorities raided and seized phones of BBC journalists over alleged tax evasion weeks after the organization aired a documentary critical of Modi’s handling of 2002 riots in his home state of Gujarat. The country’s leading Hindi-language newspaper, Dainik Bhaskar, was raided by tax authorities in 2021 in the wake of a critical series of reports challenging the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, highlighting dead bodies floating in the river Ganges. Those detained for questioning Tuesday included several prominent Indian journalists. Prabir Purkayastha, the editor in chief of NewsClick, was taken away by police officials from his office and formally arrested. Some described the seizure of their electronic devices. “Delhi police landed at my home. Taking away my laptop and Phone …” another well-known journalist who has hosted video shows on NewsClick, Abhisar Sharma, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Finally [the] last tweet from this phone. Delhi police [has seized] my phone,” Bhasha Singh, another reporter who has written for NewsClick, said in a tweet. Others swept up in the crackdown include satirist Sanjay Rajoura. The police reached Rajoura’s home between 6:30 and 7 a.m. and took him away for interrogation soon after, his lawyer Ilin Saraswat told The Washington Post. Rajoura’s iPhone, laptop, several DVDs and some documents were seized by the police, Saraswat said, adding that he was being questioned over his previous work for NewsClick. Rajoura last worked for NewsClick nearly two years ago, according to his lawyer. Historian Sohail Hashmi, who has not written or contributed to the outlet, was among those whose homes were raided. Hashmi, who is in his 70s, said he had recently appeared as a guest on two NewsClick programs and is friends with senior journalists at the outlet. “The idea is to terrorize independent press and attack diverse voices which define democracy,” he said, adding that the police had also seized his electronic devices. He was reached on a family member’s phone. NewsClick has previously faced raids from authorities over alleged financial impropriety, and it has been frequently lambasted by officials in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party who say its steady drumbeat of government criticism reflected its “anti-India” agenda. In August, days after the New York Times published an investigation that named NewsClick as among the recipients of funding from Neville Roy Singham, an American tech baron and a Shanghai-based Chinese Communist Party supporter, the Delhi police filed a case against NewsClick under the anti-terror law, the Indian Express reported. BJP leaders, who often attack the Times for its critical coverage of India, praised the report in Parliament and said it confirmed their long-standing suspicions about NewsClick’s loyalties. At the time, NewsClick issued a statement denying it was “a mouth-piece of the Communist Party of China” and said it always adhered to Indian law. Indian opposition parties on Tuesday condemned the raids, calling the moves an attempt to distract from several national controversies facing the ruling BJP. The Modi government has attempted to “convert the media into a mouthpiece for its partisan and ideological interests” and acted against those who speak truth to power, said INDIA, a coalition of opposition parties. Late Tuesday, as NewsClick’s editor fielded police questions, its homepage featured a smattering of hot-button national issues: details of a state caste census resisted by the central government; a piece about the government’s attempt to appropriate the nonviolent legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi; and opposition allegations about the opaque nature of the BJP’s own political funding. By Niha Masih Niha Masih is a reporter at The Washington Post's Seoul hub, where she covers breaking news in the United States and across the world. Previously, she was The Post's correspondent in India, where she covered the rise of majoritarian nationalism, conflict in Kashmir, the covid crisis and digital surveillance of citizens. Twitter By Anant Gupta Anant Gupta is a researcher with the India bureau of the Washington Post. He is based in New Delhi. Twitter By Gerry Shih Gerry Shih is the India Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, covering India and neighboring countries. Twitter © 1996-2023 The Washington Post

© UNICEF Ethiopia/Mulugeta Ayen | A mother and a child walk together in a camp for displaced people in Ethiopia. 3 October 2023 | UN Affairs Independent UN human rights experts are warning that there is “an overwhelming risk” atrocity crimes “will continue” in Ethiopia. in a new report released on Tuesday. The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia said it was vital independent investigators continue to review the country’s dire human rights situation.” “We are gravely concerned about the situation in Ethiopia and the potential for future atrocities,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, Chairperson of the Commission. Risk factors remain “Our report shows that the overwhelming majority of risk factors for future atrocity crimes are present in Ethiopia, including ongoing serious violations, widespread violence and instability, and deeply entrenched impunity.” The warning follows another Commission report, presented to the UN Human Rights Council last month, which concluded that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in Ethiopia since 3 November 2020. That was the date that hostilities began between Government forces and forces of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, which spread to much of northern Ethiopia. A ceasefire was agreed in November 2022. According to the commission, “the latest detailed findings are based on an assessment of the risk factors for atrocity crimes, which are the most serious crimes against humankind,” highlighting that “these crimes - including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity – are identified in the UN Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes.” The Commission’s report found that all eight of the common risk factors are now present in Ethiopia. “There is a very real and imminent risk that the situation will deteriorate further, and it is incumbent upon the international community to ensure that investigations persist so human rights violations can be addressed, and the worst tragedies averted,” said Steven Ratner, one of the independent experts. Atrocities against civilians Despite the signing of the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement, the Commission has determined that serious violations are continuing in the Tigray region. It has confirmed the ongoing presence of Eritrean forces in Ethiopia, and continuing atrocities against civilians, in particular rape and other forms of sexual violence. The Commission has also expressed alarm about the deteriorating situation in the Amhara region, including emerging reports of extrajudicial killings and mass arrests. Most, if not all, of the structural drivers of violence and conflict remain unaddressed. Human rights violations “One of the Human Rights Council’s most important roles is to help prevent human rights violations and respond to human rights emergencies,” said commission member Radhika Coomaraswamy. “The situation in Ethiopia clearly merits such attention and it is vital that this continues.” Copyright © United Nations

By Lucy Craymer [1/4] Anti co-governance protesters march on New Zealand's parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, September 28, 2023. REUTERS/Lucy Craymer [2/4] Anti co-governance protesters march on New Zealand's parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, September 28, 2023. REUTERS/Lucy Craymer [3/4] Counter-protesters sing songs to try to drown out anti co-governance protesters in Wellington, New Zealand, September 28, 2023. REUTERS/Lucy Craymer [4/4] A view of a placard as anti co-governance protesters march on New Zealand's parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, September 28, 2023. REUTERS/Lucy Craymer WELLINGTON, Oct 3 (Reuters) - Race and relations with the indigenous Maori population have emerged as issues in New Zealand's election as right-wing parties likely to be pivotal in forming a government face accusations of stoking racial division. When Jacinda Ardern led her Labour party to a landslide victory in 2020, New Zealand stood out with progressive policies at a time when many countries had elected right-wing governments. Three years on, New Zealand is seeing a growing populist movement that could hold sway over a coalition government and push to remove programs that were designed to address inequality and boost the presence of Maori. This election, the "racism is more overt," said Naida Glavish, a Maori community leader and president of Te Pati Maori. She was one of a group of high profile elders who wrote an open letter last week condemning what they called unacceptable levels of racism from political candidates running in the Oct. 14 election. Both the right-wing ACT Party and populist New Zealand First are promoting policies that would rewind changes that occurred in New Zealand under the Labour government to better acknowledge Maori as the country’s first people. ACT has railed against "co-governance" or the sharing of some management between the state and indigenous people, and has vowed to wind back the use of Maori language in everyday life and dismantle the Maori Health Authority, which was set up to counter systemic disadvantage. Both ACT and New Zealand First say their policies are not racist but instead are promoting the equal rights of all New Zealanders, with the argument that non-Indigenous citizens are losing out because of policies designed for Maori. "The public service is meant to serve all New Zealanders, but even administration and service delivery has become focussed on race. This isn't a true focus on equity, serving citizens based on their measured need rather than their ancestry is," ACT leader David Seymour said in a fund-raising message to voters. Seymour has also said he would shut the ministry set up for the advancement of Pacific People. "I think some of our politicians are certainly playing the race card in this election," Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said at a leaders debate in late September. Polls indicate the centre-right National Party will win the most seats in the election but will have to co-align with one, if not two, minor parties. It has said its preferred partner is ACT but is prepared to discuss partnering with NZ First. Neighbouring Australia is facing similar issues, with a referendum on Oct. 14 to recognise the country's first inhabitants and enshrine an Indigenous advisory body in the constitution looking unlikely to pass. RUPTURED RACE RELATIONS New Zealand has historically done better managing race relations than many other formerly colonised countries. It has had separate Maori seats in parliament for more than 100 years, the language has been revitalised and is used widely, and the government has set about financially compensating tribes for land stolen or misappropriated during British colonisation. However, Maori still have high levels of deprivation and incarceration and worse health outcomes than the broader population. The National Party is not on board with many of the ACT and New Zealand First's policies but has not ruled out winding back some Indigenous resources such as the Maori Health Authority. The rhetoric is engaging with at least some voters. Both the ACT and New Zealand First are up in the polls, and according to a 1News-Verian Poll on Sept. 27 the two parties hold 18% of the vote. Ben Thomas, a political commentator and former National Party staff member, said race had grown as an issue partly because the government had failed to counter a conspiracy theory that co-governance stood for "a Maori takeover of New Zealand". At the same time, the softer economy and a fall in real wages meant more people were starting to see things as a zero-sum game, believing if one part of society was getting something then maybe they were missing out. "There is always a constituency for race baiting," he said. Reporting by Lucy Craymer; Editing by Sonali Paul © 2023 Reuters. All rights reserved

(Illustration by Shubhadeep Mukherjee for The Washington Post; Enrico Fabian for The Washington Post; Burhaan Kinu/Hindustan Times/Getty Images; Video screenshot from Instagram account of Monu Manesar) HUSSAINPUR, India — The Hyundai hatchback barreled down the country road past darkened fields. A white SUV followed in hot pursuit, shattering the pre-dawn quiet with its screaming siren. The three young Muslim men in the first car were desperately trying to outrun one of the most notorious Hindu vigilantes in north India when they lost control, veered into a vegetable truck and came to a screeching halt. Now, they were in the clutches of Monu Manesar. The three men were immediately pulled out of their wrecked vehicle by Manesar’s gun-toting gang, then interrogated and beaten, according to surveillance footage and witness accounts. But the events of that fateful morning were recorded and then flaunted by another, unusual source: Manesar’s own Facebook page. The violence on display was carried out in the name of protecting cows. The spot where three Muslim men were seized by vigilantes on Jan. 28 after their car crashed into a vegetable truck near Hussainpur, Haryana. (Supranav Dash for The Washington Post) Since 2020, the self-styled “cow protection” squad led by Manesar had repeatedly live-streamed its late-night missions to intercept drivers suspected of transporting and slaughtering cows — a job often done by Muslims in India. Manesar would film himself exchanging gunfire with moving cattle trucks and ramming them with his SUV. He chased cow transporters on foot and beat them on camera. In return, his fans on YouTube and Facebook left comments full of heart emojis, praising him for doing the work of God. For a century, vigilantes in north India have worked discreetly in a legal gray zone to protect cows, an animal worshiped by Hindus. But these enforcers have become more extreme and flamboyant in the past decade, thanks to American social media companies that reward them with online followings, and officials from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who offer them political protection and champion their militant brand of Hindu nationalism. The emerging phenomenon of cow vigilante streamers exemplifies how the BJP and allied right-wing groups have used U.S. social media platforms — including YouTube, a Google subsidiary, and Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta — to polarize India, rally their political base and assert Hindu dominance, sometimes brutally, in one of the world’s most digitally connected countries. This effort is part of a broader campaign by Hindu nationalists aligned with Modi to use technology to advance their ideology and consolidate their control. Despite repeated warnings from Indian activists, Silicon Valley companies gave Manesar a platform to broadcast violence — and propelled his rise to fame. Last October, Manesar received a “Silver Creator” award from YouTube for reaching 100,000 subscribers and posed with his plaque next to a cow. A cycle of soaring viewership and increasing violence followed. In January and February, according to complaints filed with police and the courts, Manesar and his followers were involved in several shootings and killings. In April, Instagram granted Manesar’s account a “verified” badge reserved for public figures and celebrities. In July, Manesar was widely accused of inciting a sectarian riot that left six dead outside New Delhi, the nation’s capital, after he taunted Muslims in a WhatsApp video. The family of Waris, one of the three men seized by vigilantes on Jan. 28. From left are his mother, Hajra, holding Waris's daughter, Ridha; his older brother Imran, holding a photo of Waris; and his father, Fauz. (Supranav Dash for The Washington Post) In a call with The Washington Post, Manesar said several weeks ago that he was “staying underground” and avoiding the media. He declined to comment on the allegations against him. Speaking with Indian media earlier this year, he denied any criminal wrongdoing in connection with the series of violent incidents. A YouTube spokesman said the platform terminated Manesar’s channel four months ago following a review of his videos. Meta said that in general the company removes from its platforms accounts that repeatedly violate a ban on violent content. In an image posted to his Instagram account, Monu Manesar shows the award he received from YouTube. (Instagram account of Monu Manesar) Earlier this year, The Post began tracking Manesar’s social media and downloaded 25 gigabytes of his videos before YouTube closed the account amid a probe of his network by police in Rajasthan state. A review of these videos and other posts published by Manesar’s supporters, along with interviews with his associates and their victims and an examination of hundreds of pages of police documents and court filings, tells the story of a gang leader who terrorized minority Muslim communities in two Indian states. One of Manesar’s most chilling videos was published on Jan. 28. Shortly before 5 a.m., his Facebook page went live with a video showing the three Muslim men — Nafis, Shokeen and Waris, all known by single names — being led away from their wrecked Hyundai. In the 21-minute stream, Manesar asks the men, their faces bloodied, for their names and hometowns. The three are pressed to the ground while Manesar and his gang stand over them like trophy hunters, clutching rifles and smiling for photos. Around sunrise, Waris’s older brother Imran received an anonymous call demanding a payment of 100,000 rupees ($1,200) to set Waris free, Imran recalled. He said no and hung up. Unlike younger Muslims in the region who feared Manesar, Imran, 32, never used much social media. He never followed Manesar’s videos boasting of shootings and beatings. He never anticipated that Waris would be dead by noon. Rise of the vigilante streamer Since ancient times, Hindus have revered the cow as the embodiment of a multitude of gods, the Mother whose milk sustains life and Earth itself. Today in north India, most states strictly prohibit cattle slaughter, and cracking down on the black market in cows — through whatever means necessary — is a rallying cry for Hindu nationalist organizations and their political wing, the BJP. In the last decade, the ascent of the BJP coincided with the arrival of U.S. social media services, setting the stage for vigilante streamers. The Post reviewed more than 140 accounts of cow protectors on Facebook, who often uploaded bucolic videos of injured or abandoned cows being nurtured and fed. But roughly 30 percent of the accounts resembled a hardcore, extrajudicial version of “Cops,” replete with posts of car chases, arrests and beatings. Raqib Hameed Naik, the Washington-based founder of HindutvaWatch, which monitors far-right Indian social media, said violent cow vigilante videos began to surface in 2018 but skyrocketed during the pandemic, when online video consumption boomed. “We also observed that the more violent the content, the more reach and engagement it would get,” Naik said. “For the most part, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have provided them an unrestricted space.” Hindu farmhands sing hymns in praise of cows and Lord Krishna as others dance at Vijay Indoriya's cow rehabilitation farm in Bansur, Rajasthan. Married farmhands veil their faces to protect their modesty and honor. (Supranav Dash for The Washington Post) The YouTube cache reviewed by The Post contained 10 violent videos that Manesar posted between 2020 and 2022. His social media reach, however, was much wider because he maintained several accounts on different social media platforms and his associates also disseminated videos in which he featured. YouTube spokesman Jack Malon said that the company suspended Manesar’s ability to make money off ads on his channel in February after Indian police made serious allegations against him, and that the channel was terminated in late May after repeated violations of the company’s harassment policy. Asked why YouTube did not act sooner, Malon said it uses a combination of software and human review to identify problematic videos, but “our systems sometimes don’t detect potential violations.” If they had, he said, Manesar “would have been ineligible to receive a Creator Award.” Meta spokeswoman Erin McPike said, “We have clear rules prohibiting particularly violent or graphic material on our platform. We removed content that broke those rules and disabled accounts for repeated violations.” Several Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with Manesar were taken down by the company this year. McPike said Manesar’s verified Instagram account was “restored in error and has since been disabled.” X, formerly known as Twitter, declined to comment, saying it was too busy. Animals being treated at a rehabilitation center in Haryana. Cows are often injured in the confrontations between vigilantes and smugglers. Here, one animal has lost part of a leg; the other, an eye. (Supranav Dash for The Washington Post) Human rights activists say they sounded warnings about Manesar long before the companies took action. Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of the civil rights group Equality Labs, said she warned YouTube and Meta “as early as 2021 and 2022” through internal reporting mechanisms that Manesar’s accounts were hateful and posed a risk to society. She said the companies told her they would look into the accounts, but no action was taken. Representatives from YouTube and Meta also told her they worried that removing hateful influencers would physically endanger the firms’ employees in India, she said. In response, Malon said, the “notion that we’d allow violative content to remain on YouTube due to employee concerns is false.” Ritumbra Manuvie, director of the London Story, a Hague-based group that investigates online propaganda that fuels hate crimes, said she has flagged hundreds of hateful Indian influencers to Meta using its internal reporting mechanism, often with no success. In April 2022, Manuvie’s group reported Manesar’s account to Meta but received no response, she said. The group reported another account it said was associated with him this June again with no result. Village seniors join Vijay Indoriya in a hookah smoking session at his cow rehabilitation farm in Bansur, Rajasthan. (Supranav Dash for The Washington Post) Climbing the influence ladder Among cow vigilante influencers, no star shone brighter than Manesar, a 30-year-old from Haryana state who uploaded YouTube videos with catchy titles like “Watch Live Raid!” and “Clash with Cow Smugglers!” Sporting a bowl cut and a collection of assault rifles, Manesar’s on-camera persona was both boyish and hardened. He would dance and force his captives to eat cow dung. He would beat a cattle driver kneeling on the ground, zoom in on the boy’s swollen face — and plug his Instagram handle in a cartoonish font. At his peak, Manesar boasted more than 210,000 YouTube subscribers and 83,000 Facebook followers. Akash Banerjee, a former media executive who now hosts Deshbakht, one of the biggest YouTube channels in India, estimated that Manesar could make hundreds of dollars a month, depending on his videos’ view count. view-source:https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/26/india-monu-manesar-viligante-social-media/ Monu Manesar's Instagram page shows a video of him on a night raid to intercept alleged cow smugglers. (Video: Monu Manesar via Instagram) Sitting in a dirt parking lot illuminated by the moon, a vigilante named Sonu Bhiwadi recalled the night in 2014 when a chubby new kid from a poor but deeply religious Hindu family came along on his first car chase, excitedly yelling into a walkie-talkie. Manesar had already created his YouTube account a year earlier. “He was always into social media,” said Bhiwadi, a brawny 27-year-old with a thick beard and a wooden cow-shaped pendant dangling from his neck. “But you couldn’t imagine him being the star he is today.” Soon, Manesar and Bhiwadi became a team. They set out to make a name for themselves by targeting Mewat, a nearby stretch of impoverished, majority-Muslim villages straddling Haryana and Rajasthan states. The state line was invisible but crucial: Cow vigilantes had to move cautiously in Rajasthan, where the opposition Congress party controlled the police. But the BJP won control of Haryana in 2014, and the state police afforded vigilantes free rein, even working alongside them. In the early days, Bhiwadi recalled, their gang lacked cars, guns and recognition. They chased cattle trucks on motorcycles, with barely any money for gas. Muslim drivers were often armed and fought back. In a region where hundreds of vigilantes competed for clout, Manesar and Bhiwadi could stand out only by becoming more extreme. Bhiwadi dragged on a cigarette, then pulled out a photo of Manesar recovering from a bullet to the chest in 2020. Bhiwadi himself was arrested for attempted murder last year but released from jail after a few months, with some serious charges dropped. The case won him attention and demonstrated his political clout, Bhiwadi said. “Right now,” he said proudly, “we’re the main men.” Crucially, the gang rose because Manesar pioneered something new: videos that put viewers inside the action. The videos showed how “Monu puts his life on the line every time he leaves home,” said Vijay Tauru, another Haryana cow protector. “All kinds of people wanted to associate with Monu.” Vijay Indoriya, in striped shirt, and others help a cow to stand on its feet at Indoriya's rehabilitation farm. (Supranav Dash for The Washington Post) An arm of the state Over the years, Manesar’s social media feeds often showed Haryana police officers asking him to pose for photos. In 2021, Haryana formed a civilian cow-protection task force, and Manesar posted Instagram photos of himself in a khaki uniform issued by Haryana police. Manesar uploaded a selfie with Amit Shah, who is India’s home minister overseeing domestic security and a Modi confidant seen as a driving force in executing the BJP’s Hindu-first agenda. Manesar also posted a YouTube video of BJP Minister of Information Anurag Thakur placing a hand on Manesar’s shoulder and giving a fiery speech exhorting right-wing activists to use social media. (Raj Kumar, a spokesman for Shah’s Home Ministry, did not respond to a request for comment about the Manesar selfie. Kanchan Gupta, senior advisor in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, said Thakur, who heads the ministry, encounters many people in public life and rejects violence of any kind.) All of that made Manesar seem not just a freelancer but an arm of the BJP-led state. On the dusty plains outside New Delhi, the Monu Manesar effect could already be seen among a new generation of vigilantes. Two hours south of Bhiwadi, Savinay Gaud, a 25-year-old with bulging biceps, said he diligently studies YouTube audience-growth strategies. Gaud’s younger brother Harshit practices video-editing. A couple of nights a week, the Gauds’ crew goes out to ambush trucks. When they see one coming on the highway, they toss out a “kaanta” — a 50-pound metal frame with rusty six-inch spikes — to deflate its tires. Then they accost the drivers and seize the cows. Beatings are meted out if the smugglers are repeat offenders, Gaud said. Gaud said he was considering escalating to torture and killings. He mulled the question of how best to publicize it. “We’ll upload a video of us stopping a truck,” he said, “and then let reporters find out later that the men were killed.” Neighbors and family members gather around Sajida, at right in dark pink hijab, whose husband, Junaid, and another man were allegedly kidnapped by vigilantes and then beaten and burned to death in Rajasthan state. (Supranav Dash for The Washington Post) A fatal encounter Nothing seemed out of the ordinary when Waris left home at 7 p.m., telling his family he had a job to do. The rail-thin, painfully shy 22-year-old mechanic often went out at odd hours, his brother Imran said. When Waris wasn’t working at a Hyundai showroom, he would get calls from car owners to fix vehicles all over Mewat. Whatever money he made, he used it to support his wife, Taslima, and 1-month-old daughter, Ridha. But when Imran rose for morning prayers on Jan. 28, Waris wasn’t back. As the sun rose over fields of pearl millet, word filtered through social media: Waris had been nabbed by Manesar on National Highway 919. Closed-circuit TV footage that was recorded at a nearby auto mechanic shop and reviewed by The Post shows Waris’s hatchback racing down the road at 4:56 a.m. when it loses control and smashes into a vegetable truck traveling the other direction. Vigilantes rush out of a Mahindra SUV and immediately start punching the men who stumble out of the crashed vehicle. Then, one of Manesar’s associates takes out a phone and begins to film. view-source:https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/26/india-monu-manesar-viligante-social-media/ Monu Manesar interrogates the three Muslim men after seizing them early on Jan. 28. Waris, seated in the middle, died after being held. (Video: Monu Manesar via Facebook) That video, streamed to Manesar’s more than 83,000 Facebook followers, shows glimpses of what happened next: The vigilantes drag their captives into the back seat of their SUV, and Manesar begins to interrogate them. Waris, meek but still alert, answers as Shokeen and Nafis try to hide their bloody faces. The camera pans to show vigilantes pulling a small cow out of the hatchback. They celebrate with chants of “Hail Mother Cow!” and “Hail Lord Ram!” Over the next hour, according to the CCTV footage, more than a dozen vigilantes take turns entering the SUV and disappearing inside. view-source:https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/26/india-monu-manesar-viligante-social-media/ Hours after Waris's death, Nafis tells Waris's brother Imran from a hospital bed that he, Waris and Shokeen were captured that morning by Manesar. (Video: Courtesy of Imran Khan) In a court petition that Imran filed, Nafis and Shokeen allege that Manesar’s men took turns beating them inside the SUV and used a rifle butt to pummel Waris, who sat in the middle seat. Witnesses interviewed by The Post described a similar scene. Abdul Hamid, a day laborer who lives next to the crash site, recalled seeing Waris keeled over vomiting and hearing vigilantes say that Waris was pleading for water. The family of Nasir, the man who was seized along with Junaid. From left are his son Anvesh, 6, wife Parmina and daughter Ansum, 8, who is holding a photo of her father. (Supranav Dash for The Washington Post) The official account unravels About 90 minutes after the crash, Haryana police arrived at the scene but did not interfere, CCTV footage shows. About 7:30 a.m., police drove the three captured men to a local clinic, where records show Waris complained of severe abdominal pain but was turned away and referred to a surgeon. Police then drove the three to a nearby college hospital. By the time they arrived at 10:30 a.m., Waris was dead. An autopsy determined that he died from severe internal bleeding due to a ruptured liver. His face was cut and he had eight large bruises around his knee. Haryana police and vigilantes would tell a different story. They alleged that the three Muslims were smuggling a cow when they crashed into a vegetable seller, who filed a reckless-driving complaint against them. Manesar’s vigilantes tried to save the men, Haryana police said, but Waris died of injuries sustained in the collision. But the official account soon began to fray. The vegetable seller said in a subsequent court affidavit that police had coerced him to file a fake report. Doctors told Imran that Waris didn’t suffer the head and upper-chest injuries usually seen in car crash victims. And Imran recorded a video of Nafis at the hospital with his head bandaged, recounting how Manesar’s men had beaten them. Bhiwadi, who was present and could be seen clutching a rifle in Manesar’s video, said Waris died because the car’s steering wheel struck his abdomen during the collision. No vigilantes “laid a finger” on the cow smugglers, Bhiwadi said. A few hours after Waris was pronounced dead, Manesar removed his video from Facebook. By then, a screenshot showed, it had garnered 164 likes. A truck driver from a village in Rajasthan. Many drivers are out of work because they fear for their lives if they take assignments delivering cattle. (Supranav Dash for The Washington Post) Reign of fear On Feb. 6, nine days after Waris’s death, a fresh Facebook video of Manesar firing a rifle in what looked like a gang war started circulating online. Manesar had led his men in a clash against local Muslims in a dispute over an interfaith marriage, and the gunfight wounded a Muslim bystander, local residents alleged in a police complaint. A week after that, two Muslims named Junaid and Nasir were allegedly kidnapped, then beaten and burned to death. This time, the kidnapping took place a few miles inside Rajasthan state lines, and a young police officer named Ram Naresh Meena decided to investigate. Meena arrested and charged three men within days, but he said he found they were part of a much larger, interstate network of cow vigilantes who may have been accomplices in the double killing. In a 4,000-page indictment, Meena listed 27 additional suspects. Most-wanted: Monu Manesar. But Meena’s attempts to arrest Manesar sputtered. Police in BJP-controlled Haryana blocked his efforts, he said, and Hindu nationalist groups held huge street protests demanding that Rajasthan authorities back off. A few miles away from Meena’s modest police station, the neighbors of Junaid and Nasir saw their hopes for justice dwindle. In a Muslim-dominated village where almost every man worked as a truck driver, villagers said their livelihoods were also at risk. Rather than face punishment, vigilantes were taunting Muslims on social media daily and stopping their trucks at will. A few jobless drivers recently gathered one morning in front of the corner store, too fearful to ply the highways. Junaid’s brother Hamid spoke up, saying he couldn’t bear the constant stream of vigilante videos. “Every time they put out a video threatening us, it makes it fresh, like it happened yesterday,” Hamid said, referring to Junaid’s killing. “The reason they make videos is to put fear in our hearts.” His uncle Ismail, an older man with a wispy white beard, shook his head. “No,” Ismail told the younger men. “Within this regime, people who do criminal activity are rewarded. If his popularity continues to grow. I think he could contest for elections.” Another truck driver from a village in Rajasthan. (Supranav Dash for The Washington Post) Sparking a riot Manesar continued to post. In July, he teased on social media that he and his team would attend a yearly parade organized by Hindu nationalists through Muslim-dominated Mewat. The post set off a firestorm. Muslim YouTubers responded by vowing they would teach Manesar a “lesson” if he showed up. In the end, he didn’t show — but his job was done. As the parade wound through Haryana on July 31, Muslim gangs showered stones on Hindu gangs armed with swords, sparking an all-out riot. Homes, shops and cars were torched. A mosque was burned to the ground, its young imam stabbed 13 times. Facing national outrage, the BJP chief minister of Haryana said the state would not obstruct Rajasthan police if they wanted to detain Manesar. But the vigilante was defiant. In a local TV interview, he seemed preoccupied with social media as he lashed out at Muslim YouTubers who accused him of inciting the turmoil. “I’m tired of these small YouTubers who cannot understand anything,” he said dismissively. “They don’t even get 10 likes but think of themselves as big YouTubers making all kinds of videos about me.” On Sept. 12, Manesar was finally detained by Haryana authorities for spreading “inflammatory posts” before the riot erupted, and handed over to Rajasthan police. Today, Imran is still petitioning the Haryana high court to launch an independent inquiry into the death of his brother, Waris. Court records show that Haryana officials are indeed pursuing a criminal case arising from the fateful morning of Jan. 28. They have charged two men, Nafis and Shokeen, with animal cruelty and recklessly driving a Hyundai hatchback into a vegetable truck. Waris, though dead, was initially named as the third suspect. Manesar’s reach still extends far across social media. The Post counted 40 fan pages on Instagram that continue to disseminate his videos. And in the weeks leading up to his arrest, he began to increasingly post on X, formerly known as Twitter. Just last month, he secured a “verified” blue check mark for his X account. Anant Gupta in New Delhi contributed to this article. CLARIFICATION from the Washington Post This article has been updated to include a statement provided after publication by a YouTube spokesman, who challenged an assertion by an activist quoted in the story. The YouTube statement said it was not true that the social media company would allow content that violated its standards to remain on the platform in deference to employee concerns. About this story Design by Anna Lefkowitz. Visual editing by Chloe Meister, Joe Moore and Jennifer Samuel. Copy editing by Brian French and Martha Murdock. Story editing by Alan Sipress. Project editing by Jay Wang. By Gerry Shih Gerry Shih is the India Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, covering India and neighboring countries. By Pranshu Verma Pranshu Verma is a reporter on The Washington Post's technology team. Before joining The Post in 2022, he covered technology at the Boston Globe. Before that, he was a reporting fellow at the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. © 1996-2023 The Washington Post

On Facebook in India hate speech thrives The Washington Post September 26, 2023, published October 2, 2023 By Joseph Menn and Gerry Shih (Shubhadeep Mukherjee for The Washington Post; Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images, Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images) SAN FRANCISCO — Nearly three years ago, Facebook’s propaganda hunters uncovered a vast social media influence operation that used hundreds of fake accounts to praise the Indian army’s crackdown in the restive border region of Kashmir and accuse Kashmiri journalists of separatism and sedition. What they found next was explosive: The network was operated by the Indian army’s Chinar Corps, a storied unit garrisoned in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, the heart of Indian Kashmir and one of the most militarized regions in the world. But when the U.S.-based supervisor of Facebook’s Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) unit told colleagues in India that the unit wanted to delete the network’s pages, executives in the New Delhi office pushed back. They warned against antagonizing the government of a sovereign nation over actions in territory it controls. They said they needed to consult local lawyers. They worried they could be imprisoned for treason. Those objections staved off action for a full year while the Indian army unit continued to spread disinformation that put Kashmiri journalists in danger. The deadlock was resolved only when top Facebook executives intervened and ordered the fake accounts deleted. “It was open-and-shut” that the Chinar Corps had violated Facebook’s rules against using fictional personas to surreptitiously promote a narrative, said an employee who worked on the Kashmir project. “That was the moment that almost broke CIB and almost made a bunch of us quit.” Indian soldiers in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir, take part in an October 2021 reenactment of the army's landing there at the start of the 1947-1948 Indo-Pakistani War. (Faisal Khan/NurPhoto/AP) Three others who were involved confirmed the previously unreported internal battle. Most of those who spoke to The Washington Post discussed company matters on the condition of anonymity. Facebook did not dispute their account. The Kashmir case is just one example of how Facebook has fallen short of its professed ideals in India under pressure from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). India, a country with a population that is 80 percent Hindu and 14 percent Muslim, has long wrestled with religious strife. But in the past decade, the Hindu nationalist BJP has been accused of abetting violence and fanning incendiary speech against Muslims to stoke support from its political base. And often, when harmful content is spread by BJP politicians or their allies on Facebook, the platform has been reluctant to take action. The company denied acting to favor the BJP. The rise of Modi and his Hindu-first state India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept into power nearly a decade ago. Since then, he has repeatedly rallied voters in this vast democracy and entrenched his party’s power by exploiting differences between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority. Religious tensions have existed in India since independence in 1947, and Modi’s right-wing followers in his Bharatiya Janata Party and beyond turned to inflammatory rhetoric and violence against Muslims to secure support from Hindus. The BJP and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups have been in the global vanguard of using technology to advance political aims, tightening their grip with an ideology that imperils India’s traditional secularism and equality among religious faiths. Disinformation and divisive, often bigoted online posts and videos are rampant. Government censorship of critical views has been on the rise. Social media platforms and other Big Tech firms, protective of their position in one of the world’s largest markets, have often given Modi and his allies what they want. Despite concerns over repression and accelerating autocracy, the Biden administration has been actively courting Modi, hoping that India can help contain Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific region. Canada’s explosive announcement on Sept. 18 that Indian government agents may have assassinated a Sikh separatist leader on Canadian soil underscores the uncomfortable choices the United States and other Western countries face in moving closer to Modi’s India. For Silicon Valley, which has seen user numbers in the United States plateau and international growth become critical to Wall Street shareholders, India is the biggest remaining prize and an ideal market. It is substantially English-speaking and rapidly growing, a tech-savvy democracy that is being wooed by the Biden administration to counter China. The number of Facebook users in India is greater than the entire U.S. population; India is also one of the biggest markets for X, formerly known as Twitter. That has meant special treatment for content that otherwise would violate both platforms’ terms of service. Facebook’s cautious approach to moderating pro-government content in India was often exacerbated by a long-standing dynamic: Employees responsible for rooting out hackers and propagandists — often based in the United States — frequently clashed with executives in India who were hired for their political experience or relationships with the government, and who held political views that aligned with the BJP’s. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg at a September 2015 town hall meeting at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images) Interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and a review of newly obtained internal Facebook documents illustrate how executives repeatedly shied away from punishing the BJP or associated accounts. The interviews and documents show that local Facebook executives failed to take down videos and posts of Hindu nationalist leaders, even when they openly called for killing Indian Muslims. In 2019, after damning media reports and whistleblower disclosures, Facebook’s parent company, now named Meta, bowed to pressure and hired an outside law firm to examine its handling of human rights in India. That probe found that Facebook did not stop hate speech or calls for action ahead of violence, including a bloody religious riot in Delhi in 2020 that was incited by Hindu nationalist leaders and left more than 50 people, mostly Muslims, dead. Meta never published the document, strictly limited which executives saw it and issued a public summary that emphasized the culpability of “third parties.” Social media companies today do not lose much when they call out the Russian or Chinese governments for propaganda or dismantle networks of fake accounts tied to those countries. Most U.S. social media platforms are banned in those countries, or they do not generate significant revenue there. But India is at the forefront of a worrying trend, according to Silicon Valley executives from multiple companies who have dealt with the issues. The Modi administration is setting an example for how authoritarian governments can dictate to American social media platforms what content they must preserve and what they must remove, regardless of the companies’ rules. Countries including Brazil, Nigeria and Turkey are following the India model, executives say. In 2021, Brazil’s president at the time, Jair Bolsonaro, sought to prohibit social networks from removing posts, including his own, that questioned whether Brazil’s elections would be rigged. In Nigeria, then-President Muhammadu Buhari banned Twitter after it removed one of his tweets threatening a severe crackdown against rebels. The day before May’s tight election in Turkey, Twitter agreed to ban accounts at the direction of the administration of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, including that of investigative journalist Cevheri Guven, an Erdogan critic. A man carrying a child runs amid clashes that erupted in Srinagar after New Delhi revoked the semiautonomous status of Indian Kashmir in August 2019 and placed the region under direct Indian rule. (Faisal Khan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) “Nigeria very much took Modi’s playbook, and it exacerbated existing tensions in Turkey,” a former Twitter policy lead said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “All of the hard questions around tech come to a head in India. It is a huge market, it is a democracy, but it is a democracy with weak judicial protections, and it’s really geopolitically important,” said Brian Fishman, a former U.S. Army counterterrorism expert who led efforts to fight extremism and hate groups for Facebook until 2021. U.S. officials depend on nuclear-armed India as a strategic counterweight to neighboring China. And they have been willing to overlook human rights abuses and other problems in India because the officials deem the geopolitics a higher priority, former U.S. officials say. India’s success against the internet companies has inspired many imitators, Fishman added. “We’re moving into an era around the globe where governments have gotten off their hands and built legal frameworks, and in some cases extralegal frameworks, that allow them to directly pressure the companies,” he said. Muslims in Srinagar shout anti-Indian slogans during an August 2019 protest of New Delhi's change in the status of Indian Kashmir. (Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images) A covert campaign When Facebook’s U.S. investigators first saw the posts from accounts that purported to be residents in Kashmir, it wasn’t hard to find evidence of a central organization. Posts from different accounts came in bursts, using similar words. Often, they praised the Indian military or criticized India’s regional rivals — Pakistan and its closest ally, China. The technical information about some of the accounts overlapped, and the geolocation data associated with some accounts led directly to a building belonging to the Indian army. The disinformation hunters also found that the fake accounts often tagged the official account of the Chinar Corps, India’s main military force in Kashmir, showing that they were not putting great effort into disguising themselves. For a couple of months, employees said, the Facebook team mapped out the network in preparation for rooting out the whole operation, a standard procedure for combating coordinated inauthentic behavior. Members of the Indian Border Security Force participate in a March 2023 parade on the outskirts of Srinagar. (Kabli Yawar/NurPhoto/Getty Images) Often, the accounts promoted YouTube videos about problems in Pakistan. Some featured a channel run by Amjad Ayub Mirza, a writer from the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir who has declared that Muslims are treated well in India and has called on minorities in Pakistan to rise up against the government. “The reality is that the people being persecuted inside India and also outside the country are actually the Hindus,” Mirza once told an interviewer. “One has to ponder over the question — where did terrorism start from? Terrorism started from Pakistan.” In just 32 minutes on May 24, 2021, a Post review found, 28 accounts from the covert Chinar Corps network on Twitter shared a post criticizing Pakistan’s treatment of Muslim Uyghurs who had fled oppression in China. Some made the point in English or Hindi that “Pakistan is not a safe place for Muslim minorities.” Twitter released its database of network account activity to researchers last year, and The Post obtained it. Though the database did not attribute the accounts to any entity, employees at Twitter and Facebook told The Post they were from the Chinar Corps. A research team at the Stanford Internet Observatory pointed to circumstantial evidence of a connection between the accounts and the military unit. Facebook said it did not preserve its accounts, making research more difficult. At least 43 tweets contained some version of: “My religion is Islam, but my culture is Hinduism.” Another dozen said the account holders were Muslim but “Indian first.” The campaign was unfolding at a sensitive time in Kashmir, claimed in its entirety by both India and Pakistan and divided into Indian- and Pakistani-controlled sections. For decades, India administered its portion as a semiautonomous region while its army fought a separatist insurgency that was supported by many Muslims there and often backed by Pakistan. Indian security personnel patrol Srinagar in August 2019 after New Delhi ordered restrictions on movement and a telecommunications blackout in Indian Kashmir. (AFP/Getty Images) In 2019, the Modi government stunned the world by announcing a constitutional change that revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status and transferred it to New Delhi’s direct rule. The move triggered protests as well as the army crackdown in Kashmir, which included alleged torture and widespread internet shutdowns. With popular anger reaching a boiling point in Kashmir, the Indian government felt pressed to respond. In public, Indian officials argued that Kashmir’s Muslims would benefit from closer integration with India. Meanwhile, the Chinar Corps covertly spread its messaging. Jibran Nazir, a Kashmiri journalist working in central India, said he was “shocked” to one day find his photo adopted as the avatar of two anonymous Twitter accounts spreading the #NayaKashmir, or “New Kashmir” hashtag, which touted Kashmir’s prosperity under New Delhi’s control. “They were recently created accounts that had more than 1,000 followers each,” Nazir recalled. “The accounts wanted to show Kashmiris are doing well, which they’re not.” Journalists gather in Srinagar 60 days after the change in governing status to protest New Delhi's communications blockade. (Faisal Khan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) The Chinar Corps’s stealth operation kept pushing that line — but also went further. It called out independent Kashmiri journalists by name, disclosing their personal information and attacking them using the anonymous Twitter accounts @KashmirTraitors and @KashmirTraitor1, according to Stanford’s analysis and The Post’s review. One target was journalist Qazi Shibli and his publication, the Kashmiriyat. “@TheKashmiriyat posts #fake news on the various operations conducted by the #IndianArmy causing hate amongst people for the #Army,” @KashmirTraitors wrote in a series of tweets. “Even the positive things like ration distribution that are happening in #Kashmir are shown in a negative prospect in posts of @TheKashmiriyat.” Qazi Shibli, editor of the Kashmiriyat, works on his laptop. He was arrested in July 2019 as part of a crackdown on the press in Indian Kashmir. (Mehran Firdous for The Washington Post) “The #traitor behind this account and website is @QaziShibli (born in 1993) who has been detained numerous times under various charges for cybercrimes and posting content against national security.” Shibli’s home was raided, and he was jailed repeatedly on charges including violation of the Public Safety Act, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The pressure online was crippling, Shibli said. “A lot of people left work at the Kashmiriyat” because of the attacks, he told The Post. “It got to the point that a lot of people were not willing to work with us.” Shibli said that sources dried up and that even personal friends grew afraid to speak with him. Fahad Shah, right, editor of Kashmir Walla, at work in his publication's Srinagar newsroom in January 2022. Targeted online and arrested, he remains in prison today. (Dar Yasin/AP) The @KashmirTraitors tweet with the most “likes” targeted journalist Fahad Shah in early 2021, saying the founder of the Kashmir Walla magazine “rigorously publishes content on anti-#India sentiments.” Shah’s coverage of Kashmir had been published by the Guardian, Foreign Affairs and Time. He was later arrested and accused of “frequently glorifying terrorism, spreading fake news, and instigating people” under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. He remains in prison today. A security official recently based in Kashmir with knowledge of the matter confirmed the existence of the Chinar network, saying it was a failed attempt to counter narratives from Pakistan. A couple of months into its investigation, Facebook’s Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior team handed its findings to supervisors and security policy chief Nathaniel Gleicher, who then informed Facebook’s team in India. Executives there began raising objections. It wasn’t the first time they had. A relative tends to the grave of an insurgent in late 2022 at a cemetery in Indian Kashmir near the de facto border between India and Pakistan. (Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images) Turning a blind eye Even before Modi’s rise in 2014, the major U.S. social media companies were overwhelmed by the sheer number of languages and cultures that make up India, according to current and former employees. Inflammatory speech was often coded with slang or references that eluded those unfamiliar with India’s political history, culture or latest memes. But the problem wasn’t just about resources. Employees described broad reluctance to take down posts of any kind from Modi’s BJP or its affiliates or to make designations that would cast India in a negative light. Indian content moderation “was always a hands-off situation because of the political pushback,” said a former employee familiar with the India team. During internal discussions with executives in California and elsewhere, the India office argued in effect that “this is our area; don’t touch it,” the employee said. India-related content policy employees “would use a case-law-setting tone, instead of what human harm was being done.” Kashmiri villagers mourn an Indian soldier who was killed in a clash with insurgents this year as Indian Kashmir marked the fourth anniversary of its change in status. (Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images) After U.S. Facebook employees in 2020 warned that Indian Hindu nationalist groups were spreading the hashtag #coronajihad, implying that Indian Muslims were intentionally spreading the coronavirus in a conspiracy to wage holy war, a content policy staffer for the region pushed back, arguing that the meme didn’t amount to hate speech because it wasn’t explicitly targeting a people, two former employees recalled. (Facebook eventually barred searches for that hashtag, but searching for just “coronajihad” returns accusatory posts.) In late 2019, Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang tried to remove an inauthentic network that she said included the page of a BJP member of Parliament. She was repeatedly stymied by the company’s special treatment of politicians and partners, known as Xcheck, or “cross check.” Facebook later said many of the accounts were taken down though it could not establish that the BJP parliamentary member ’s page had been part of the network. The following year, documents obtained by Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen show, Kashmiris were deluged with violent images and hate speech after military and police operations there. Facebook said it subsequently removed some “borderline content and civic and political Groups from our recommendation systems.” In one internal case study on India seen by The Post, Facebook found that pages with ties to the Hindu nationalist umbrella organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) compared Muslims to “pigs” and falsely claimed that the Quran calls for men to rape female family members. But Facebook employees did not internally nominate the RSS — with which the BJP is affiliated — for a hate group designation given “political sensitivities,” the case study found. The mother of an Indian soldier helps carry his coffin after he was killed in a clash that broke out during a fall 2021 anti-insurgency operation in Indian Kashmir. (Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images) In a slide deck about political influence on content policy from December 2020, Facebook employees wrote that the company “routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors when enforcing content policy,” citing India as an example. A key roadblock was Facebook’s top policy person and lobbyist in the region, Ankhi Das, who told employees it would hurt the company’s business prospects to take down posts such as one by a prominent BJP official that called for shooting Muslims. She also shared commentary on her personal page in which a former official described Muslims as a traditionally degenerate community. After an August 2020 Wall Street Journal story spotlighted her interventions, Das resigned that October. But the pro-government leanings extended beyond Das and reflected a long-standing culture within Facebook to treat India — and its powerful BJP government — with a light touch, according to current and former employees in India and the United States. After Das’s departure in 2020, Meta appointed Shivnath Thukral, a former public-relations executive who had been head of public policy at Meta’s WhatsApp subsidiary since 2017, to oversee public policy for Meta in India on an interim basis. He assumed the position on a permanent basis in November 2022. Thukral was closer to the BJP than Das: He had worked on Modi’s national campaign in 2014 and had collaborated with Hiren Joshi, a longtime Modi aide who is today the prime minister’s head of communications, on a pro-Modi website called Modi Bharosa, or “Modi is Trust,” recalled a former Modi staffer who worked with both men. The site churned out glowing articles about Modi’s economic record and accused his political rivals of fomenting riots or misgoverning the country. Around the time of Das’s departure, the BJP’s head of social media, Amit Malviya, kept the pressure on Facebook by sharing, in interviews with news outlets and on Twitter, the employment and personal backgrounds of Facebook employees and calling out those who had previously worked for liberal politicians or causes. Soon after, Facebook India’s head, Ajit Mohan, addressed the staff at an all-hands meeting. His message: He didn’t want Facebook employees to become the focus of external attention. In response to inquiries for this story, Facebook said it has hired more staff, now reviews content in 20 Indian languages and has partners that can fact-check in 15 languages. “We prohibit coordinated inauthentic behavior, hate speech and content that incites violence, and we enforce these policies globally,” Facebook spokesperson Margarita Franklin said in the company’s only direct comment. “As a global company, we operate in an increasingly complex regulatory environment and are focused on keeping people safe when they use our services and ensuring the safety of our employees in a manner consistent with applicable laws and human rights principles.” Facebook declined to make any of the employees named in this article available for interviews. Kashmiri villagers, inspecting a building south of Srinagar that was damaged in an August 2021 gunfight, flee after rumors of incoming Indian soldiers. (Dar Yasin/AP) Report buried As the controversy over its handling of hate in India grew in 2019, Facebook hired the law firm Foley Hoag to study and write about its performance there in what is called a human rights impact assessment. Some rights groups worried that the firm would go easy on Facebook because one of its human rights lawyers at the time, Brittan Heller, was married to Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy. But the firm interviewed outside experts and Facebook employees and found that dozens of pages that were calling Muslims rapists and terrorists and describing them as an enemy to be eliminated had not been removed, even after being reported. Foley Hoag cited multiple underlying issues, including the lack of local experts in hate speech, the application of U.S. speech standards when Indian laws called for greater restriction of attacks on religion, and a legalistic approach that, for example, withheld action if a subject of threats was not explicitly targeted for their ethnicity or religion. Foley Hoag found that the company allowed incendiary hate speech to spread in the lead-up to deadly riots in Delhi in 2020 and violence elsewhere, according to people briefed on its lengthy document. It recommended that the company publish the report, name a vice president for human rights and hire more people versed in Indian cultures. Instead of releasing the findings, Facebook wrote a mostly positive four-page summary and buried it toward the end of an 83-page global human rights report in July 2022. That readout said the law firm “noted the potential for Meta’s platforms to be connected to salient human rights risks caused by third parties.” It said the actual report had made undisclosed recommendations, which the company was “studying.” Foley Hoag partner Gare Smith said by email that the firm’s human rights impact assessment “was conducted in accordance with the highest ethical standards and pursuant to guidance provided by the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Inasmuch as it was conducted under privilege, we cannot comment on specific elements of the Assessment or on our client’s summary of it.” Facebook said that it discloses more on its human rights performance than any other social media company and that it withheld the full report because of concerns about employee safety. Facebook executives similarly downplayed problems reported by outside groups. The London Story, a Netherlands-based human rights group, reported hundreds of posts that it said violated the company’s rules. Facebook asked for more information, and then asked for it in a different format, then said it would work to improve things if the group stayed quiet. When nothing happened, the group succeeded in getting a meeting with the company’s Oversight Board, created to handle a small number of high-profile content disputes. It took more than a year to remove a 2019 video with 32 million views, according to the London Story’s executive director, Ritumbra Manuvie. In the video, Yati Narsinghanand, a right-wing cleric, says in Hindi to a crowd: “I want to eliminate Muslims and Islam from the face of earth.” Facebook took it down just before the London Story released a report on the issue in 2022. Versions were then posted again. One remained visible as of Monday, but on Tuesday, after Facebook was asked for comment, it was no longer available. A Kashmiri man tending to his cattle walks on a hillock in Tosamaidan, southwest of Srinagar, in June 2021. The meadow was once an artillery firing range for the Indian army. (Dar Yasin/AP) Mounting fears When Facebook’s investigators brought their Kashmir findings to the India office, they expected a chilly response. The India team frequently argued that Facebook policies didn’t apply to a particular case. Sometimes, it argued that they didn’t apply to sovereign governments. But this time, their rejection was strident. “They said they could be arrested and charged with treason,” said a person involved in the dispute. Facebook’s India team, including policy chief Thukral and communications head Bipasha Chakrabarti, was especially nervous after police raids on Twitter, two people recalled. In 2021, the Indian government was feuding with Twitter over its refusal to take down tweets from protesting farmers. Officials dispatched police to the home of Twitter’s India head and anti-terrorism units to two Twitter offices. Some officials publicly threatened Twitter executives with jail time. Two former Facebook executives said they had believed that their colleagues’ fears were genuine, though no legal action was ever taken against them. “I’m not angry at Facebook,” one said. “I’m angry at the Indian government for putting the people who worked on this in a position where they couldn’t address the harms that they found.” Blocked by their own colleagues, Facebook’s U.S. threat team passed the Chinar Corps information to their counterparts at Twitter. Facebook employees said they had been hoping that Twitter would follow the leads and root out the parallel operation on that platform. The team’s members also hoped that Twitter would do the first takedown, giving Facebook political cover so it wouldn’t have to face government retribution alone and its internal dispute could be resolved. Twitter, which had been more forceful in pushing back against the Indian government, took no action. It told Facebook staff members that it was having technical issues. In truth, the San Francisco company was changing direction. The Indian police raids and public comments from government officials criticizing the company had scared off firms that Twitter had planned to use for promotion, former Twitter employees said. “We saw a very obvious slowdown in user growth,” one former policy leader said. “The government is very influential there.” The former executive added: “We had just promised [Wall] Street 3x user growth, and the only way that was going to be possible was with India.” Another former policy staffer said Twitter’s bigger problem was physical threats to employees, while former safety chief Yoel Roth wrote in the New York Times this month that Twitter’s lawyers had warned that workers in India might be charged with sedition, which carries a death penalty. In any case, Twitter was tired of leading the way with takedowns, and it changed how it treated the government overall. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Fishman, the former senior Facebook executive, said the U.S. tech companies will not respond more forcefully to Indian government pressure unless they receive help from the U.S. State Department, where onetime cybersecurity executive Nate Fick has been named the first cyber ambassador and has built out a team focused on internet freedom and security issues. “If we want free speech, [if] we want free elections, while these companies are not the most popular institutions in the world, we need U.S. policy to have their backs at times,” Fishman said. Fick did not respond to requests for comment. But while Indian activist groups and international democracy monitors have warned about the erosion of democratic norms under the Modi government, the Biden administration has largely refrained from publicly criticizing a country seen as a crucial strategic counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific. After meetings with Modi in Washington and New Delhi this year, Biden offered no criticism. Uzra Zeya, U.S. undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, visited India in July. She did not publicly comment about India’s human rights or its democracy after meeting Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra but said in a Twitter post: “Grateful for the vital #USIndia partnership & shared efforts to advance a free & open Indo-Pacific, regional stability, and civilian security.” A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that despite the lack of public comment, American diplomats are engaged with India on censorship and propaganda. “These are precisely the kinds of issues that we raise on a bilateral basis at both the working and senior levels of government,” he said. “The U.S. is committed to ensuring that tech is a force for empowerment, innovation and well-being, and working to ensure that the world’s largest democracy is aligned with us on this vision is a top policy priority.” Continued silence As Facebook’s India team delayed acting on the Chinar inauthentic network, the propaganda investigators in Washington and California worked on less controversial subjects. “You have only so much time in the day, and if you know you are going to run into political challenges, you might spend your time investigating in Azerbaijan or somewhere else that won’t be an issue. Call it a chilling effect. That dynamic is real,” said Fishman, the former senior Facebook executive. The impasse continued until the U.S. team demanded action from Nick Clegg, then Meta’s powerful vice president of global affairs, who had been put in charge of India public policy. Clegg was later named president of global affairs. Finally, after discussions with Facebook’s top lawyers, Clegg ruled in favor of the threat team, employees said. But the India executives had a request: They asked that Facebook at least break with past practice and not disclose the takedown. Since coming under fire for failing to spot Russian propagandists using its platform during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Facebook has routinely announced significant removals of disinformation. It often describes what the campaign was trying to do and how it did it, and there is frequently direct attribution to a national government or enough detail for readers to guess. The idea is to increase transparency that could help disinformation hunters and deter its spreaders from trying again. Smaller takedowns are described more briefly in quarterly summaries. This time, the India side argued that it would be unwise to embarrass the Indian military and that doing so would increase the likelihood of legal action. Clegg and Facebook chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead agreed, staffers said. At their direction, Facebook changed its policy to state that it would disclose takedowns unless doing so would endanger employees. Following standard practice, Facebook removed the fake accounts, and the official Chinar Corps pages they had been working with on Facebook and Instagram, on Jan. 28, 2022. (After the Indian army publicly complained about the takedown of the official pages, they were reinstated.) That March, Twitter followed Facebook and quietly removed the Chinar Corps’s parallel network on its platform and shared it with researchers. In private meetings with Facebook and Twitter executives, the army defended its fake accounts and said they were necessary to combat Pakistani disinformation. Facebook didn’t disclose the takedown, and Twitter hasn’t issued what had been twice-yearly summaries of its enforcement actions since one for the period that ended in December 2021. A month later, Facebook issued a quarterly “adversarial threat report” that listed takedowns of inauthentic networks targeting users in Iran, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador and the Philippines. It said nothing about India. Shih reported from New Delhi. Jeremy B. Merrill in Atlanta and Karishma Mehrotra in New Delhi contributed to this report. Design by Anna Lefkowitz. Visual editing by Chloe Meister, Joe Moore and Jennifer Samuel. Copy editing by Feroze Dhanoa and Martha Murdock. Story editing by Mark Seibel. Project editing by Jay Wang. Share By Joseph Menn Joseph Menn joined The Post in 2022 after two decades covering technology for Reuters, the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times. His books include "Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World" (2019) and "Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords who are Bringing Down the Internet" (2010). By Gerry Shih Gerry Shih is the India Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, covering India and neighboring countries. Twitter What this series reveals Part 1: Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its Hindu nationalist allies have built a massive propaganda machine, with tens of thousands of activists spreading disinformation and religiously divisive posts via WhatsApp. Parent company Meta says WhatsApp cannot monitor content, no matter how inflammatory. Inside the vast digital campaign by Hindu nationalists to inflame India Part 2: Social media giants have been reluctant to police Indian content that violates their terms of service. After Facebook discovered a vast influence operation using fake accounts secretly operated by the Indian army, some company employees moved to shut it down, but executives in the New Delhi office stalled the action. Under India’s pressure, Facebook let propaganda and hate speech thrive Part 3: A new generation of Hindu vigilantes frequently stream their armed attacks against Muslims on platforms like YouTube and Facebook, amassing large followings and winning BJP protection. While rights activists have repeatedly flagged hateful influencers to social media companies, the accounts are rarely removed. The Indian government has become increasingly aggressive in restricting online criticism and dissent, frequently ordering social media companies to take down posts and blocking the internet altogether in areas with significant dissension. More stories to come. He live-streamed his attacks on Indian Muslims. YouTube gave him an award. Copyright 2023 The Washington Post

© WFP/Anastasiia Honcharuk| The UN says there is evidence that civilians in Ukraine are being targeted by Russia. Members of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that they have documented attacks with explosive weapons on residential buildings, civilian infrastructure and medical institutions, as well as torture and sexual and gender-based violence. Rape allegations Commission Chair Erik Møse provided harrowing details on the findings to the Council, noting that in the Kherson region, “Russian soldiers raped and committed sexual violence against women of ages ranging from 19 to 83 years”, often together with threats or commission of other violations. “Frequently, family members were kept in an adjacent room, thereby forced to hear the violations taking place,” Mr. Møse said. ‘Widespread’ torture The Commission said that its investigations in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia indicate the “widespread and systematic” use of torture by Russian armed forces against persons accused of being informants of the Ukrainian military, which in some cases led to death. Mr. Møse quoted a victim of torture as saying, “Every time I answered that I didn’t know or didn’t remember something, they gave me electric shocks… I don’t know how long it lasted. It felt like an eternity.” Probe into child transfers a ‘priority’ The Commissioners also indicated that they have continued to investigate individual situations of alleged transfers of unaccompanied children by Russian authorities to the Russian Federation. “This item remains very high on our priority list,” Mr. Møse assured the Council. Possible ‘incitement to genocide’ The Commission expressed concern about allegations of genocide in Ukraine, warning that “some of the rhetoric transmitted in Russian state and other media may constitute incitement to genocide” Mr. Møse said that the Commission was “continuing its investigations on such issues”. Call for accountability The UN-appointed independent rights investigators emphasized the need for accountability and expressed regret about the fact that all of their communications addressed to the Russian Federation “remain unanswered”. In their report, the Commissioners also urged the Ukrainian authorities to “expeditiously and thoroughly” investigate the few cases of violations by its own forces. No equivalence Replying to questions from reporters in Geneva on Monday, the UN-appointed independent rights investigators strongly refuted any suggestions of an equivalence in the violations committed by both sides. Mr. Møse stressed that on the Russian side, the Commission had found a “wide spectrum” and “large number of violations”. On the Ukrainian side, there were “a few examples” related to indiscriminate attacks as well as “ill-treatment of Russians in Ukrainian captivity”, he said. More in-depth investigations The latest update reflects the Commission’s ongoing investigations during its second mandate, which started in April this year. Mr. Møse said that it was now undertaking “more in-depth investigations” regarding unlawful attacks with explosive weapons, attacks affecting civilians, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, and attacks on energy infrastructure. “This may also clarify whether torture and attacks on energy infrastructure amount to crimes against humanity,” the Commissioners said. The Commission The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine was established by the Human Rights Council on 4 March 2022 to investigate all alleged violations and abuses of human rights, violations of international humanitarian law and related crimes in the context of the aggression against Ukraine by Russia. Its three members are Chair Erik Møse, Pablo de Greiff and Vrinda Grover. They are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. The mandate of the Commission of Inquiry was extended by the Council last April for a further period of one year. Its next report to the General Assembly is due in October. Copyright © United Nations

The ongoing conflict between the SAF and RSF has led to a concentration of hostilities around strategic locations in Khartoum as well as South and Central Darfur. Both actors have raced to secure key military positions while fortifying defenses since the early stages of the conflict. In August, each side strategically launched offensive operations targeting enemy strongholds. While the RSF managed to take control of substantial portions of Khartoum, Nyala, and Zalingei, the SAF relied on airstrikes that inflicted significant damage on RSF facilities and weapon warehouses. These developments occurred amid a sustained period of clashes contesting the control of bases, bridges, and critical supply routes of both the SAF and RSF in Khartoum and Darfur. Developments have varied across Darfur, with clashes involving ethnic militias and self-defense-driven conflicts, as well as the deployment of armed groups to protect civilians. This report breaks down key trends over the past month, focusing on the battle for strategic strongholds in Khartoum and Darfur and its effect on local communities. The Battle for Khartoum Batters Civilians Since August, the Khartoum tri-city metropolitan area has been home to a new round of heavy fighting between the SAF and RSF. This escalation has been particularly concentrated in the residential areas adjacent to the SAF’s Armored Corps base in Khartoum, as well as the neighborhoods of Old Omdurman surrounding the Shambat bridge (see map below). The control of key routes has significantly influenced the dynamics and strategic considerations of both parties in this urban theater. The Shambat bridge, for example, is a key location due to its pivotal role as the sole conduit for RSF’s movement of troops and equipment across the Nile river from Omdurman to Khartoum via Bahri.2 The RSF controls both ends of the Shambat bridge, thus maintaining control over this critical position. Reinforcements for the RSF are predominantly channeled from Darfur and Kordofan regions to Omdurman through the Bara road, given that the alternative route linking Kosti and Jebel Awlia is presently under SAF control.3 If the SAF seized control of Shambat bridge, RSF forces in Omdurman would be isolated from their fellow soldiers in Khartoum and Bahri, losing the ability to bring reinforcements from Darfur and remaining vulnerable to the SAF. The loss of the Shambat bridge could eventually mean that the RSF is doomed to lose the battle for Khartoum. Conversely, if the RSF overtakes the Armored Corps base, SAF forces would likely be unable to advance in Khartoum and their forces would be trapped in their last stronghold, the General Command Headquarters. The relentless pursuit of these regions, seen as potential paradigm-shifting elements by both warring factions, has driven them into heavy conflict, inflicting a dire toll upon civilians. In Khartoum city, the clashes centered in the neighborhoods around the SAF’s Armored Corps base. Armored Corps cadres are notorious for their involvement in many military coups in Sudan. Major General Nasr al-Din Abd al-Fattah – the current commander who resumed duty shortly before the conflict broke out in April – is an associate of former President Omar al-Bashir and was involved in the coup attempt of September 2021.4 Moreover, most of Sudan’s military coups either included or were spearheaded by officers from the Armored Corps.5 From the beginning of August, the SAF took measures to break the siege on the base, which fell under RSF control at the beginning of the conflict.6 The SAF targeted RSF positions around the base, reportedly succeeding in thwarting RSF attacks. South of the Armored Corps base, the RSF managed to repel SAF’s attacks to breach the siege on the al-Yarmouk Complex – a military weapons factory that the RSF overtook on 8 June – claiming the capturing of dozens of SAF soldiers and destroying tanks and military vehicles. The fighting intensified on 20 August when the RSF effectively broke through SAF defenses around the Armored Corps base. This marked the first instance of breaching the base since the start of the war. The RSF launched simultaneous multi-front attacks on the SAF from neighborhoods in southwestern Khartoum. However, the SAF managed to repulse RSF forces from the base the same day. The SAF claimed that hundreds of RSF soldiers were killed, and a large number of combat vehicles were destroyed or captured. After the RSF forces broke down the wall on the eastern side of the base, they were able to seize control of that eastern portion the following day. The Armored Corps base, a critical infrastructure for the SAF’s infantry, holds high strategic importance for both sides.7 Its capture would grant the RSF control over the base, as well as a vital Khartoum-Omdurman al-Fitahab bridge, thus bolstering its military power and transport routes and significantly shaping the conflict’s dynamics. In Omdurman, fighting reached a peak on 8 August, with ACLED recording an estimated 160 fatalities that day – nearly as high as during the entire month of July. In fact, August records the most reported fatalities per event in Omdurman, making it the most lethal month for the region since the war began, and was characterized by reports of widespread airstrikes and intense artillery shelling across all contested areas. On 5 August, the RSF forcefully occupied numerous civilian residences in several neighborhoods in Omdurman to fortify its defense positions. Two days later, both the SAF and RSF issued evacuation orders to the residents of Abu Rouf, a neighborhood near the Shambat bridge – thus designating it as a fully operational military zone.8 The next day, on 8 August, the SAF undertook an offensive operation against RSF troops in Old Omdurman neighborhoods to gain control of the Shambat bridge, attacking from both the southern and northern adjacent areas. SAF units stationed at the Karrari SAF bases attempted a southward advance, culminating in confrontations with RSF forces at key locations in northern Old Omdurman, including the Central Reserve Police Headquarters. Other SAF forces moved northward from the Engineers Corps base towards southern Old Omdurman, where they encountered RSF defenses. The clashes also extended to the western areas of Omdurman, with reported SAF airstrikes in the Libya market. The operation aimed to hinder the RSF’s capacity to effectively fortify its forces using the Shambat bridge. The consequences of these confrontations have been dire, resulting in over 300 deaths, including at least 20 civilians caught in the crossfire.9 Dozens of people killed during the clashes were reportedly buried in a mass grave located in al-Sarha in Omdurman.10 The fighting continued in the locality during the month of August without any significant territorial shifts. SAF airstrikes remained concentrated on RSF forces stationed in southern and western Omdurman. In response, the RSF has instituted measures like obstructing medical supplies, closing markets, and imposing blockades on civilians residing in these neighborhoods to cut SAF’s access to food and medical supplies.11 The intense clashes within the Khartoum metropolitan area in August underscores the escalating dynamics of the conflict, with both sides fiercely contesting control over critical strategic military bases and routes. The SAF and RSF Clash Amid Escalating Inter-Ethnic Disputes in Darfur In the Darfur region, the SAF and RSF continued to clash over the control of key towns, such as Nyala and Zalingei where the SAF retains its bases. The region, and South Darfur in particular, experienced escalating tensions and heightened inter-ethnic violence due to disputes over alleged support to the RSF (see map below). This ongoing struggle for dominance coupled with the inter-ethnic dispute, has had a profound and devastating impact on civilians. Clashes between Arab militias were rarely reported before the conflict between the SAF and RSF; however, these militia groups have since been clashing over inter-ethnic disputes. Some indications suggest that implicit allegiance with either side of the conflict has also impacted the violence. In South Darfur, the city of Nyala experienced almost daily clashes between the SAF and RSF around the SAF’s 16th Infantry base. On 18 August, the RSF launched a multi-front offensive from four directions on the SAF base, using airstrikes and artillery shelling. The SAF, however, managed to ambush RSF forces around the base and captured many RSF soldiers, as well as over a dozen military vehicles. A few days later, the commander of the SAF’s 16th Infantry Division was assassinated by one of his soldiers inside the base, as he refused to surrender to the RSF.12 Additionally, between 11 to 17 August, the RSF successfully took control of strategic locations in the city, including the Mekkah bridge, the Radio Station, and the Guest House Buildings. Hundreds of civilian casualties were reported, while over 50,000 were displaced from their houses.13 Outside Nyala, a series of clashes between Arab militias in South Darfur drove another round of escalation of violence during the second week of August. Clashes involving the Salamat, Beni Halba, and Habbaniya communities reignited again after a spate of fighting in June, when tensions rose due to a looting incident between the militias in May. Clashes broke out in Kubbum on 7 August and continued for multiple days, expanding to other locations south of the region. Fighting originally began over a looting incident in Kubbum, where a Salamat militia reportedly looted a Beni Halba leader; as of writing this report, the reasons for this attack are still unclear.14 Separately, the Salamat tribe refused to announce its support for the RSF15 amid pledges of allegiance to the RSF from the Beni Halba and other South Darfur communities in July.16 An estimated 120 people were killed in multiple locations during the clashes, while dozens of people were reportedly wounded, and hundreds were displaced.17 Militias also looted the Markondi market and obstructed the road between Nyala and Buram. Notably, both Salamat and Beni Halba militias deployed reinforcements from Khartoum, as many of their members are RSF soldiers. The tensions remained high in the area on 18 August as hundreds of Habbaniyah militiamen mobilized in Buram, while large numbers of Salamat forces mobilized in Nadif. Additionally, a considerable number of Masalist militia elements mobilized in the Greida region, indicating the potential for a renewal of clashes and heightened violence. Meanwhile, in Central Darfur, the SAF successfully regained control of the capital, Zalingei – which was overtaken by the RSF on 4 August – following a series of strategic advancements. The initial progress of the SAF days earlier allowed it to establish checkpoints in the western part of the city, thereby gaining control over several areas where reports mentioned that the RSF was backed by affiliated militias. The SAF reportedly inflicted significant casualties on the RSF in Zalingei, as it remains the highly contested location of the SAF’s 21st Infantry Division. Finally, in North Darfur, clashes erupted between the SAF and RSF in multiple locations, including in the vicinity of the Abu Shouk camp and al-Takamul neighborhood in El Fasher, with both sides using artillery shelling and light weaponry. Notably, the Joint Forces of the Juba Peace Agreement signatories, which include the Minni Minnawi faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A), Justice and Equality Movement, and others, intervened on 18 August and clashed with RSF units who broke the ceasefire agreement in the city.18 In the ongoing conflict, Darfur region remains a fiercely contested battleground. The RSF has built a strong support base in Darfur, recruiting fighters among ethnic Arab communities who make a higher income than the average Sudanese soldier.19 Yet, the SAF retains its infantry divisions in Darfur, making the region a high prize for all conflict parties. The struggle for control over this region poses a decisive goal that can determine the nationwide war landscape, underscoring the complex and enduring nature of the conflict’s trajectory. The intensification of hostilities around critical strategic locations in Khartoum and South and Central Darfur has inflicted severe and enduring suffering upon the local civilian populations. The protracted conflict has revealed the vulnerabilities of both the SAF and RSF, raising questions about their ability to secure a decisive victory. Meanwhile, civilians continue to be caught in the crossfire, trapped within the volatile battlegrounds of urban warfare and inter-ethnic violence. As the war continues, various actors are compelled to forge alliances with the warring parties or undertake measures to safeguard their presence in Sudan, illustrating the persistent complexity and instability of the situation. © 2023 ACLED. All Rights Reserved.