Nabad al Hayat Surgical Hospital in southern Idlib Province served around 200,000 people before being destroyed in a Russian airstrike on May 5. In a Russian Air Force transmission obtained by The Times, a pilot can be heard receiving the hospital’s exact coordinates before bombing it.Credit...Orient News first posted October 13, 2019 By Evan Hill and Christiaan Triebert An analysis of previously unpublished Russian Air Force radio recordings, plane spotter logs and witness accounts allowed The Times to trace bombings of four hospitals in just 12 hours in May and tie Russian pilots to each one. The 12-hour period beginning on May 5 represents a small slice of the air war in Syria, but it is a microcosm of Russia’s four-year military intervention in Syria’s civil war. A new front in the conflict opened this week, when Turkish forces crossed the border as part of a campaign against a Kurdish-led militia. Russia has long been accused of carrying out systematic attacks against hospitals and clinics in rebel-held areas as part of a strategy to help Mr. Assad secure victory in the eight-year-old war. ​​SMLXL For years, Russia has been accused of attacking hospitals and clinics as part of a strategy to help President Bashar al-Assad of Syria secure victory in the civil war. Credit...The New York Times click on image to view video of Russian air strike on hospital from Russian bomber Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group that tracks attacks on medical workers in Syria, has documented at least 583 such attacks since 2011, 266 of them since Russia intervened in September 2015. At least 916 medical workers have been killed since 2011. The Times assembled a large body of evidence to analyze the hospital bombings on May 5 and 6. [Read about how Times reporters used video evidence, flight logs, witness reports and thousands of previously unheard Russian Air Force communications to recreate a day of airstrikes.] Social media posts from Syria, interviews with witnesses, and records from charities that supported the four hospitals provided the approximate time of each strike. The Times obtained logs kept by flight spotters on the ground who warn civilians about incoming airstrikes and crosschecked the time of each strike to confirm that Russian warplanes were overhead. We then listened to and deciphered thousands of Russian Air Force radio transmissions, which recorded months’ worth of pilot activities in the skies above northwestern Syria. The recordings were provided to The Times by a network of observers who insisted on anonymity for their safety. The spotter logs from May 5 and 6 put Russian pilots above each hospital at the time they were struck, and the Air Force audio recordings from that day feature Russian pilots confirming each bombing. Videos obtained from witnesses and verified by The Times confirmed three of the strikes. Recklessly or intentionally bombing hospitals is a war crime, but proving culpability amid a complex civil war is extremely difficult, and until now, Syrian medical workers and human rights groups lacked proof. Russia’s position as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has shielded it from scrutiny and made United Nations agencies reluctant to accuse the Russian Air Force of responsibility. “The attacks on health in Syria, as well as the indiscriminate bombing of civilian facilities, are definitely war crimes, and they should be prosecuted at the level of the International Criminal Court in The Hague,” said Susannah Sirkin, director of policy at Physicians for Human Rights. But Russia and China “shamefully” vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have referred those and other crimes in Syria to the court, she said. The Russian government did not directly respond to questions about the four hospital bombings. Instead, a Foreign Ministry spokesman pointed to past statements saying that the Russian Air Force carries out precision strikes only on “accurately researched targets.” A Russian Su-34 fighter dropping its payload in the skies over Idlib Province in Syria in September 2018. Flight spotters use information like the plane's appearance to log its time and location.Credit...Anas Al-Dyab/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, opened an investigation into the hospital bombings in August. The investigation, still going on, is meant in part to determine why hospitals that voluntarily added their locations to a United Nations-sponsored deconfliction list, which was provided to Russia and other combatants to prevent them from being attacked, nevertheless came under attack. Syrian health care workers said they believed that the United Nations list actually became a target menu for the Russian and Syrian air forces. Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the secretary general, said in September that the investigation — an internal board of inquiry — would not produce a public report or identify “legal responsibility.” Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian permanent representative to the United Nations, cast doubt on the process shortly after it was announced, saying he hoped the inquiry would not investigate perpetrators but rather what he said was the United Nations’ use of false information in its deconfliction process. From April 29 to mid-September, as Russian and Syrian government forces assaulted the last rebel pocket in the northwest, 54 hospitals and clinics in opposition territory were attacked, the United Nations human rights office said. At least seven had tried to protect themselves by adding their location to the deconfliction list, according to the World Health Organization. On May 5 and 6, Russia attacked four. All were on the list. The first was Nabad al Hayat Surgical Hospital, a major underground trauma center in southern Idlib Province serving about 200,000 people. The hospital performed on average around 500 operations and saw more than 5,000 patients a month, according to Syria Relief and Development, the United States-based charity that supported it. Nabad al Hayat Surgical Hospital in southern Idlib Province served around 200,000 people before being destroyed in a Russian airstrike on May 5. In a Russian Air Force transmission obtained by The Times, a pilot can be heard receiving the hospital’s exact coordinates before bombing it.Credit...Orient News Nabad al Hayat had been attacked three times since it opened in 2013 and had recently relocated to an underground complex on agricultural land, hoping to be protected from airstrikes. At 2:32 p.m. on May 5, a Russian ground control officer can be heard in an Air Force transmission providing a pilot with a longitude and latitude that correspond to Nabad al Hayat’s exact location. At 2:38 p.m., the pilot reports that he can see the target and has the “correction,” code for locking the target on a screen in his cockpit. Ground control responds with the green light for the strike, saying, “Three sevens.” At the same moment, a flight spotter on the ground logs a Russian jet circling in the area. At 2:40 p.m., the same time the charity said that Nabad al Hayat was struck, the pilot confirms the release of his weapons, saying, “Worked it.” Seconds later, local journalists filming the hospital in anticipation of an attack record three precision bombs penetrating the roof of the hospital and blowing it out from the inside in geysers of dirt and concrete. The staff of Nabad al Hayat had evacuated three days earlier after receiving warnings and anticipating a bombing, but Kafr Nabl Surgical Hospital, three miles northwest, was not as lucky. Kafr Nabl Surgical Hospital in Syria has been repeatedly hit during the war, leading it to move underground. On May 5, Russian airstrikes caused further damage. Credit...Omar Haj Kadour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A doctor who worked there said that the hospital was struck four times, beginning at 5:30 p.m. The strikes landed about five minutes apart, without warning, he said, killing a man who was standing outside and forcing patients and members of the medical staff to use oxygen tanks to breathe through the choking dust. A spotter logged a Russian jet circling above at the time of the strike, and in another Russian Air Force transmission, a pilot reports that he has “worked” his target at 5:30 p.m., the time of the strike. He then reports three more strikes, each about five minutes apart, matching the doctor’s chronology. Russian pilots bombed two other hospitals in the same 12-hour span: Kafr Zita Cave Hospital and Al Amal Orthopedic Hospital. In both cases, spotters recorded Russian Air Force jets in the skies at the time of the strike, and Russian pilots can be heard in radio transmissions “working” their targets at the times the strikes were reported. Since May 5, at least two dozen hospitals and clinics in the rebel-held northwest have been hit by airstrikes. Syrian medical workers said they expected hospital bombings to continue, given the inability of the United Nations and other countries to find a way to hold Russia to account. “The argument by the Russians or the regime is always that hospitals are run by terrorists,” said Nabad al Hayat’s head nurse, who asked to remain anonymous because he feared being targeted. “Is it really possible that all the people are terrorists?” “The truth is that after hospitals are hit, and in areas like this where there is just one hospital, our houses have become hospitals.” Reporting was contributed by Dmitriy Khavin, Whitney Hurst, Malachy Browne, Quoctrung Bui and John Ismay. Evan Hill is a journalist on the Visual Investigations team, which combines traditional reporting with advanced digital forensics. @evanchill Christiaan Triebert is a journalist on the Visual Investigations team, which combines traditional reporting with advanced digital forensics. @trbrtc A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 13, 2019, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: 12 Hours. 4 Syrian Hospitals Bombed Copyright 2019 The New York Times Company

The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court ('ICC' or 'Court') decided unanimously to authorise the Prosecutor to commence an investigation into alleged crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court in relation to the situation in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The judges of the Appeals Chamber (left to right) Judge Solomy Balungi Bossa, Judge Howard Morrison, Presiding Judge Piotr Hofmański, Judge Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza, and Judge Kimberly Prost on 5 March 2020 at the seat of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. ©ICC-CPI The Appeals Chamber's judgment amended the decision of Pre-Trial Chamber II of 12 April 2019, which had rejected the Prosecutor's request for authorisation of an investigation of 20 November 2017 and had found that the commencement of an investigation would not be in the interests of justice. The Prosecutor had filed an appeal against that decision. Judge Piotr Hofmański, the presiding judge in this appeal, read a summary of the Appeals Chamber's judgment in open court. Having considered the Prosecutor's grounds of appeal against the Pre-Trial Chamber's decision, as well as the observations and submissions of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, representatives of victims and other participants, the Appeals Chamber found that the Pre-Trial Chamber erred in considering the 'interests of justice factor' when examining the Prosecutor's request for authorisation to open an investigation. In the Appeals Chamber's view, the Pre-Trial Chamber should have addressed only whether there was a reasonable factual basis for the Prosecutor to proceed with an investigation, in the sense of whether crimes have been committed, and whether the potential case(s) arising from such investigation would appear to fall within the Court's jurisdiction. Noting that the Pre-Trial Chamber's decision contained all the necessary factual findings and had confirmed that there is a reasonable basis to consider that crimes within the ICC jurisdiction have been committed in Afghanistan, the Appeals Chamber decided to authorise the opening of an investigation itself, rather than to send the matter back to the Pre-Trial Chamber for a new decision. The Appeals Chamber found that the Prosecutor is authorised to investigate, within the parameters identified in the Prosecutor's request of 20 November 2017, the crimes alleged to have been committed on the territory of Afghanistan since 1 May 2003, as well as other alleged crimes that have a nexus to the armed conflict in Afghanistan and are sufficiently linked to the situation in Afghanistan and were committed on the territory of other States Parties to the Rome Statute since 1 July 2002. Judge Ibáñez Carranza filed a separate opinion on the interpretation of article 15 and its relationship with article 53 of the Rome Statute. Judgment on the appeal against the decision on the authorisation of an investigation into the situation in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Separate opinion of Judge Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza Questions and Answers: English, Français Audio-visual materials: YouTube (for viewing): English; French Video MPEG-4 (for download): English; French Audio MPEG-3 (for download): English; French For more information, see: https://www.icc-cpi.int/afghanistan For further information, please contact Fadi El Abdallah, Spokesperson and Head of Public Affairs Unit, International Criminal Court, by telephone at: +31 (0)70 515-9152 or +31 (0)6 46448938 or by e-mail at: fadi.el-abdallah@icc-cpi.int

The cemeteries have become easy targets for vandals in Alsace, a region with an uneasy relationship to a troubled wartime past and a penchant for voting far right. Robert Tornare helps protect the 200-year-old Jewish cemetery in Wintzenheim in eastern France. Credit...Kasia Strek for The New York Times WESTHOFFEN, France — Some of the forgotten tombstones in the old Jewish cemetery look suspiciously whitened. It took vigorous scrubbing to get rid of the swastikas. The defacing in December of gravestones in the cemetery in Westhoffen, a sleepy village in Alsace, was not isolated. In the absence of actual Jews in the Alsace countryside, their tombs have become easy targets in a region with an uneasy relationship to a troubled wartime past and a penchant for voting far right. Last year there were 50 similar incidents targeting Jews in Alsace, a historical cradle of French Judaism, where Jews have lived since the Middle Ages. Cemeteries, schools and village walls were daubed with swastikas or obscure references to the Third Reich. In Westhoffen’s cemetery, 107 tombstones were defaced; in the one in Quatzenheim, a village to the east, 96 were. Eighty years ago, Alsace was incorporated into Nazi Germany, and wartime local officials did the Nazis’ bidding. The swastika was everywhere. Jews were expelled, deported and killed. The daily evening service for Colmar’s Jewish community. Credit...Kasia Strek for The New York Times But today’s local authorities found intolerable the image of old Jewish graves in contemporary France being defaced with the Nazi symbol. So they took an unusual step: organizing volunteers to patrol Alsace’s 67 threatened rural Jewish cemeteries, protecting some of these neglected vestiges of a time when Jews, excluded from the city, were forced to flourish in the Alsatian countryside. There are 20 volunteers — retired teachers, farmers, housewives and students. That none are Jewish heightens the interfaith symbolism. Each is equipped with a big badge that reads “Guardians of Memory.” “In the face of these acts, it’s important for me to not just say something, but to do something, to act concretely to fight this, to try to stop it, and to pass the message that these acts actually reinforce civil society,” said Axel Imhof, a 28-year-old Protestant pastor who has signed up as a guardian in his village, Lauterbourg. Even before the official imprimatur, some of the “Guardians,” a few of them living next to the cemeteries, had already been keeping an eye on them. “I had friends whose parents didn’t come back” after the war, said Lise Tornare, 75, explaining why she and her husband, Robert, are committed to protecting the 200-year-old Jewish cemetery at their doorstep in Wintzenheim, outside the city of Colmar. The old town of Colmar. In 1940, Alsace was incorporated into Nazi Germany, and local officials did the Nazis’ bidding. Credit...Kasia Strek for The New York Times The patrol is a symbolic effort, flecked with ambiguities. Nobody pretends the volunteers will prevent the next “profanation,” as these recurring episodes are referred to by locals. Some of these vulnerable old cemeteries exist isolated in the middle of the Alsatian forest. The authorities have never found the perpetrators of last year’s incidents. “In some sense, there’s a silence in the surrounding population,” said Freddy Raphäel of the University of Strasbourg, the dean of historians of Alsace Judaism. “It isn’t possible that something like this happens in a village, without somebody knowing.” “It’s a silence that I compare, unfortunately, to the silence when the Jews were kicked out in 1940,” Mr. Raphäel added. Initially at least, offers to help were not lacking. “We thought it was going to be complicated,” said Laurent Schilli, who heads the Colmar synagogue’s governing body and organized the volunteers, with the local authorities. “But very quickly we had 20 people.” Sylvain and Thomas Sutter are the “Guardians of Memory” at the Jewish cemetery in Grussenheim, France. Credit...Kasia Strek for The New York Times Still, Mr. Raphäel noted that the pace of new volunteers has slowed, and the network is not yet in place in the Bas-Rhin department, where the majority of incidents have occurred; it’s operational only in the Haut-Rhin, the other Alsatian department. Mr. Schilli worries that the cemeteries are still far from safe. “The real question is not who did it, but which will be the next cemetery touched,” he said. “The best we can do is discourage it. But prevent it from happening again — I don’t see how. “We can slow it. But we can’t stop it.” Officials here say anti-Semitism is no longer a significant menace in Alsace. Jews are not so sure. “Certainly, it is present in Alsace,” said Francine Weill, whose relatives are buried in Westhoffen’s cemetery. She was staring out over the recently cleaned graves, a slope of tombstones stretching to the vineyards beyond the village. The unkempt grass alleys and neglected ranks of markers, their stone casings mottled with moss and lichen, speak to the lost world of Jews here. Ms. Weill recalled that her grandparents were given one hour to leave their house in July 1940. The Jewish Westhoffen cemetery near Strasbourg, France, where 107 graves were found vandalized with swastikas and anti-Semitic inscriptions.Credit...Patrick Hertzog/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Maurice Dahan, president of a Jewish community group in the Strasbourg area, said part of the problem was that “after the war our region didn’t face up to its past,” particularly the role of those who fought for the Germans. Also, surviving Jews who returned after 1945 found that former neighbors didn’t want to give up the apartments and furniture they had seized with the help of the Germans, Mr. Raphäel said. The memories of that history make what is happening in the present all the more painful. In the first round of presidential elections in 2017, the far-right National Front swept rural Alsace, making authorities here particularly sensitive to what Mr. Raphäel called the region’s historically “difficult relationship” with its Jews. Extremist, white supremacist organizations regularly surface here, and there have been far-right gatherings in Strasbourg. Officials organizing the “Guardians of Memory” and the volunteers themselves “don’t want people to think that in Alsace, there is only that,” meaning the cemetery attacks, said Philippe Ichter, a regional official who helped organize the effort. “It’s an act of resistance,” Mr. Ichter said. “The hour is grave. But we can engage ourselves.” In Wintzenheim’s cemetery the other day, the Tornares, retired school employees, wandered the weathered, centuries-old pink-grey headstones with Hebrew lettering — “Here lies a precious man, simple and upright,” reads that of Jacques Wurmser, who died on March, 25, 1840 — as if it were their backyard. A study group at the Jewish Community House in Colmar.Credit...Kasia Strek for The New York Times “It’s out of friendship for the Jewish community,” said Ms. Tornare of their decision to look after the cemetery informally long before they were recruited. “You know, when you take care of a place for 40 years, it becomes like a garden to you,” Ms. Tornare said. But past attitudes and indignities mingle with the present. Not all the stereotypes have disappeared, and the casual expression of anti-Semitic tropes is still widely socially acceptable in France. A large bald patch amid the headstones in the Wintzenheim graveyard is testimony to the day in 1945 when the retreating Germans forced inhabitants of the village to dig up the headstones to be used as an anti-tank barrier against the advancing Americans. The barrier was never used. But the residents of Wintzenheim, where Jews had lived since the 15th century, never put the headstones back. They used them instead in their postwar garden walls, or as paving stones. This still rankles. At the Jewish cemetery in nearby Grussenheim, a lonely spot lost amid the vegetable fields at the edge of town, Sylvain Sutter, a farmer, had already been taking care of the cemetery before the “Guardians of Memory” initiative started, having been recruited years earlier by a merchant with relatives buried there. “So for me, this doesn’t change very much at all,” Mr. Sutter said. Francine Weill, right, visiting her relatives’ grave at the Jewish cemetery in Westhoffen. Credit...Kasia Strek for The New York Times Other Articles: Anti-Semitism in France ‘They Spit When I Walked in the Street’: The ‘New Anti-Semitism’ in France July 27, 2018 Jewish Graves Desecrated in Historic French Cemetery Dec. 4, 2019 Adam Nossiter is the Paris bureau chief. Previously, he was a Paris correspondent, the West Africa bureau chief, and led the team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage of the Ebola epidemic. A version of this article appears in print on March 5, 2020, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Mobilizing to Confront a Wave of Anti-Semitic Vandalism. Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company

The panel condemned tactics they said the Syrian government and Russia were still using in the northwest province of Idlib. ​​SMLXL A Times investigation used cockpit recordings to show for the first time how Russian pilots attacked civilians in Syria this summer, killing dozens.CreditCredit...Macro Media Center. Click on image to view video of Russian bombing attack on Syrian civilians, a war crime. GENEVA — United Nations investigators said on Monday that Russia had committed war crimes in Syria by carrying out indiscriminate airstrikes on civilian targets in 2019, condemning tactics they said the Syrian government and its allies were still using in the northwest province of Idlib. The investigators also said that Syrian rebels allied with Turkey had carried out war crimes during the invasion of Kurdish areas in northern Syria, and that Al Qaeda-linked rebels had inflicted scores of civilian casualties in rocket attacks on government-held areas. Their accusations were made in the latest report of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria, the Geneva-based panel that has been monitoring the nearly decade-old conflict in Syria. The investigators said Russian aircraft had carried out a “double tap” attack on a market last July 22, killing at least 43 civilians, and an airstrike on a camp for displaced civilians in August that killed at least 20 people. In both airstrikes, “the Russian Air Force did not direct the attacks at a specific military objective, amounting to the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas,” the three-person panel said, citing eyewitness accounts, video footage and intercepted communications with pilots conducting the strikes. The findings of the commission, which will present its report to the United Nations Human Rights Council next week, provided an authoritative and independent assessment of Russian conduct in the Syria conflict that corroborated reporting by human rights groups and media, including The New York Times. There was no immediate Russian response to the commission’s findings. Russia has repeatedly denied accusations that its forces have indiscriminately attacked civilians. The report focused on events between July and January but members of the panel made clear they believe pro-government forces have continued to commit war crimes in the offensive underway in northwestern Syria, which has driven nearly a million people from homes toward the Turkish border of Idlib. The panel said the offensive had been punctuated by intensive bombardment inflicting “unprecedented levels of suffering and pain.” Besides attacks on civilian targets, which are protected under international law, the commission also observed a “crime of intentionally terrorizing the population” in order to force civilians to move. “We are seeing that picture emerging very clearly, for example, in Idlib,” Hanny Megally, a member of the panel, told reporters in Geneva. The commission said Turkey should investigate whether it was responsible for an airstrike in October on a convoy of vehicles carrying around 400 people days after a Turkish military assault on Kurdish areas of northern Syria. The attack killed 11 people and wounded 74, and although Turkey has denied any involvement, human rights groups attributed the strike to Turkish aircraft. The commission said it was continuing to investigate the incident. It said it believed a Syrian rebel force allied with Turkey, the Syrian National Army, had committed the war crimes of murder and pillage, citing the killings of the Syrian Kurdish politician Hevrin Khalaf and her driver, who were dragged from their vehicle and executed. Turkish commanders could bear criminal responsibility for those deaths if the fighters responsible were found to have been under their effective command and control, the panel said. Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company Video TRANSCRIPT 0:00/6:53 ‘Sent Candy’: Cockpit Tapes Show Russian Pilots Bombing Syrian Civilians https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/100000006818506/russia-bombs-syria-civlians.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article A Times investigation used cockpit recordings to show for the first time how Russian pilots attacked civilians in Syria this summer, killing dozens. It’s the morning of July 22, 2019. A neighborhood in the Syrian city of Maaret al Numan has just been hit by an airstrike. Rescuers are rushing to the scene when warnings of another attack come over the radio. As the camera tilts upward, it captures a small speck in the sky. This is a Russian plane, and it’s about to strike the city again. For years, Russia has been suspected of recklessly bombing civilians in Syria as they try to break the remaining pockets of resistance to President Assad. They’ve strongly denied it, and proving their role has been all but impossible. But now we have evidence. [Sirens blaring] Earlier Times investigations established that the Russian air force repeatedly bombed hospitals in Syria, and this latest investigation traces how Russian pilots also launched some of the deadliest attacks on civilians in 2019. [Shouting and sirens] At the core of our investigations are intercepted cockpit recordings of Russian pilots and air controllers. Combined with video and photo data and warplane sightings, these recordings provide a critical missing link that show how, in two recent airstrikes, Russian pilots killed dozens of civilians. First, we’ll take a look at this settlement for displaced people in Syria’s last rebel-held area. It’s called Qaryat al Rahma, or “Village of Mercy.” This isolated complex was located near the city of Hass, around 8 miles from the nearest front line, and was home to over 100 families uprooted by years of war. One resident told us that families use the evening time to sit outside and cool off. Near sunset on Aug. 16, he heard planes flying overhead. It was a devastating strike. And here’s how the evidence shows that Russia was responsible. This photo, taken by a local journalist immediately after impact, is a crucial piece of the puzzle. We know it was taken in Hass because the features match earlier drone footage of the town. The buildings and pylons are all the same. And shrouded in smoke is the settlement for displaced people. We know because these windows and the mast on the roof also match the drone footage of the camp. Using the picture’s file data, we verified it was taken at 7:17 p.m. on Aug. 16, pinpointing the exact time of the attack. What was happening in the skies around this time? Five minutes before the strike, observers spotted and logged a Russian warplane over a nearby town. And at precisely 7:17, we hear a Russian pilot, with a call sign 464, launch an attack. The weapon landed in the middle of a courtyard where families had gathered. The blast leveled buildings, and the scene is carnage. [Shouting] The dead include a pregnant woman, her husband and their 2-year-old child. In all, 19 residents of the camp are killed, and 13 more are wounded. Another deadly attack this summer occurred just 4 miles away in Maarat al Numan — a densely populated city in the heart of opposition-controlled territory. On Monday morning, July 22, the city was hit repeatedly by airstrikes. The attack sparked so much outrage that Russia was forced to respond. They denied involvement. But the combined evidence of witness videos, flight logs and cockpit recordings contradict this and show how Russian Pilot 17 killed over 20 people in just half an hour. We’ve retraced what happened minute by minute. It’s 8:31 a.m. Pilot 17 receives a target, and four minutes later he launches a weapon, calling it “candy,” and prepares a second attack. The strike levels an entire building in a busy commercial area in the city. Local journalist Mohamed Sharawi films his rush to the scene. As the dust clears, he joins first responders who try to reach victims through the rear of an adjacent building. Above them, the Russian pilot is preparing to launch again, in two minutes, at 44 minutes past the hour. Mohammad and the others take cover, as flight spotters warn of another attack. He looks up and films a Russian fighter jet overhead. The pilot launches his weapon. Then the explosion. [Explosion] It’s what’s known as a double tap. It hits almost exactly the same location and kills a rescue worker. At 8:54, Pilot 17 confirms his third strike in the city, hitting a building around 800 yards away. [Explosion] Minutes later, he calculates his fourth and final round — and strikes another building on the outskirts of the town. [Explosion] The number killed is estimated at between 23 and 42 people, including two children — making it one of the worst attacks on a civilian area this year. The Russians are by no means alone in this. Combined with Syrian attacks, the U.N. says, over 1,000 civilians in northwest Syria have been killed or injured since April — hundreds of them children. So why is Russia attacking civilians? Experts tell us it’s the same reason they’re bombing hospitals. It’s all part of a strategy to break the will of the people, force them to flee, and to help the Syrian government retake the last opposition stronghold. And after more than eight years of war and very little in the way of consequences, Russia shows no signs of slowing down. A Times investigation used cockpit recordings to show for the first time how Russian pilots attacked civilians in Syria this summer, killing dozens. Credit...Macro Media Center

For the first time, an Iraqi court has held the Islamic State accountable for its atrocities against the Yazidi religious minority. Ashwaq Haji Hamid Talo visiting a temple near Sinjar in 2018 to pay tribute to ISIS victims from her village. Credit...Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images BAGHDAD — Iraq has held thousands of trials for members of the Islamic State, but until Monday none had sought to bring justice specifically to the thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority who were kidnapped, raped and killed. A soft-spoken 20-year old Yazidi woman changed that when she decided to testify in open court. The witness, Ashwaq Haji Hamid Talo, gave a restrained but searing account to judges and before the public — in the presence of the ISIS militant to whom she was once given as a gift, and who raped her repeatedly. The defendant, Mohammed Rashid Sahab, 36, who is an Iraqi, was found guilty of participating in a terrorist organization and in the rape and abduction of Yazidi women. He was given the death penalty. “The most important thing to me is that my dream came true and I was watching the one who raped me being sentenced to death,” Ms. Haji Hamid said afterward. The trial, which ended on Monday, was the first in Iraq to specifically address the Islamic State’s crimes against the Yazidis — or at least one militant’s crimes. It was also the first in which a Yazidi victim personally confronted her attacker. “I want my story to reach the whole world, so my message is heard by my friends and gives them the courage to do the same thing that I did, so that they can get revenge on Daesh,” she said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. The chief judge in the case expressed a similar wish. “We hope that if people hear about this case, others will come forward,” said Judge Haider Jalil Khalil of the Kharkh Criminal Court in Baghdad. He said the judiciary had been hampered in bringing this kind of case by the reluctance of victims to testify in public. In Iraqi society, it is especially difficult for women to speak out in public about rape, as Ms. Haji Hamid did, for fear that they will be accused of having allowed the men to rape them and that they will tarnish their family name. “But perhaps if they see that the judiciary will give them their rights, they will come forward now if they hear about this case,” Judge Khalil said. The international human rights community has criticized the Iraqi judiciary for holding rapid-fire trials against large numbers of ISIS members without detailing their individual crimes. “A vague charge of terrorism just does not do justice to the act committed,” said Belkis Wille, the senior Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch. Ms. Wille said this prosecution appeared different. “This would be the first case I have come across in the last four years where a victim has had any meaningful role in the proceedings,” she said. “And it would be first case where the charge of rape was added and addressed by the court, which is significant.” She explained that the rape charge seemed to show that the Iraqi judiciary recognized how important it is for individual ISIS victims to have their day in court. Ms. Haji Hamid grew up in Khana Sor, a small town in the Sinjar mountain region of northern Iraq near the Syrian border, which is entirely populated by people of the Yazidi faith. She had six sisters and 12 brothers; her father had two wives. “We had a stable life there,” she told the court. “I was happy with being with all my cousins.” Then armed members of the Islamic State rolled into town on Aug. 3, 2014. “They told us we were infidels and that our sect needed to become Islamic,” Ms. Haji Hamid testified. The Yazidi religion is shaped by a variety of faiths, including Zoroastrianism, Islam and Judeo-Christian practices. Her father declared that they were committed to their faith. The militants gave him a day to decide whether to convert. After that, they warned, those who did not would be “slaughtered, except for the women,” Ms. Haji Hamid said. A THEOLOGY OF RAPE Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State imposed sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and used it as a recruiting tool. The family resolved to escape by night and loaded up their cars. More than 70 of them piled in, but before they could leave, a group of ISIS members intercepted them. They separated men from women, and then young girls from their mothers. Ms. Haji Hamid was with a group of nine girls who were sold to Islamic State fighters for “$100 or $200,” she said. “Four of my sisters were sold in Syria, and me and my younger sister were sold in Nineveh Province in Iraq,” she said. Later, she was held in a place with about 50 girls. “We were forced to change our clothes,” she said, “and they kept us almost naked, like dancers, and they told us to do prayers in the Islamic way five times a day.” Eventually, Ms. Haji Hamid was given to Mr. Sahab, who at the time was about 30, and had escaped from prison with the help of the Islamic State. In court on Monday, the judge asked if she recognized her captor in the room, where he was now wearing prison yellow. Ms. Haji Hamid looked at the defendant directly and nodded. “I know him better than I know myself,” she said. She said it was just one day after she was given to Mr. Sahab that he “forcibly raped me.” At the time, she said, she was a virgin. He asked her to marry him, and when she refused, he went to an Islamic judge and had a ceremony anyway. Under Iraqi law, marital rape does not exist. “He raped me every day, sometimes two or three times a day,” Ms. Haji Hamid said. The only reason she did not become pregnant, she said, was because she got her captor to take her to the doctor on the pretext that she was ill. When she was alone with the doctor, she begged for birth control pills, and then took them secretly, she said. During her captivity, Ms. Haji Hamid testified, she tried to cut herself with the idea of committing suicide. Finally, she went to the doctor and asked for sleeping pills, saying she needed them to get some rest. Instead, Ms. Haji Hamid and the other Yazidi girls prepared a meal for the ISIS fighters, and put the sleeping pills into their food. While the fighters were sleeping, the young women escaped to Sinjar mountain. When the Islamic State took control of northern Iraq in 2014, it singled out Shiites and Yazidis for the worst treatment, killing or enslaving many and sending the Yazidis fleeing from their homes around Sinjar. Many of the atrocities came to light after the Iraqi army, backed by the American forces, retook the north. Mr. Sahab is originally from Anbar Province, an overwhelmingly Sunni area of western Iraq. When he was 19, he killed a taxi driver and stole his car, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. When ISIS broke into the prison, freeing the prisoners, Mr. Sahab quickly swore allegiance to the group. At his trial, Mr. Sahab expressed neither regret nor a sense that he had done anything wrong. In court, he described himself as “a Quran teacher,” and said, “I also did spiritual things like driving demons out of people.” Mr. Sahab said that he had been told by the Islamic State leadership to participate in the attack on the Yazidis, and that he had been injured, spending a few weeks in the hospital. “They came to me and said they had a captive, a sabiha, for me,” he testified. He said, “She was given to me as a gift.” Mr. Sahab insisted he could not tell if his “gift” had been happy or unhappy. “I did not see her crying or laughing,” he said. Although Ms. Haji Hamid is now back with her family, not all of her brothers and sisters were able to do the same. “My father bought five of my sisters from Daesh,” she said. “He paid $15,000. They were all forcibly raped many times.” “We have them all back except Reham — we do not know her destiny,” she said. Then she paused: “And five of my brothers went with Daesh, and they are lost.” Falih Hassan contributed reporting. Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company

Many Indians believed it was only a matter of time before Hindu nationalism provoked the kind of bloodshed that exploded in New Delhi. A shop owner on Sunday looking at the remains of his shop after it was destroyed by riots in northeast New Delhi. Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times The New York Times NEW DELHI — This past week, as neighborhoods in India’s capital burned and religiously driven bloodletting consumed more than 40 lives, most of them Muslim, India’s government was quick to say that the violence was spontaneous. But as reality has settled in, critics say the killings were neither spontaneous nor without warning: They were inevitable. Step by step, they argue, policies enacted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi have entrenched impunity, captured institutions and fanned religious hatred — methodically building a dangerous Hindu-nationalist ecosystem. It was only a matter of time till something blew up. “Supporters of the government feel enabled to commit all kinds of crimes, because they feel they have political protection,’’ said Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. Mr. Modi and his party, she said, “have allowed a culture of hate and bigotry to prevail.’’ Neighborhoods in the capital that for generations had been integrated between Hindus, who make up the vast majority of India’s population, and Muslims, who compose less than 15 percent, are tearing apart along religious lines. Many Muslims are now leaving, hoisting their unburned things on their heads and trudging away from streets that still smell of smoke. Families displaced by the violence and arson in New Delhi took shelter in a different neighborhood on Sunday. Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times The question before the nation is whether the bloodshed will change the direction of Mr. Modi — who first ran for prime minister in 2014 under the slogan “Together for all, development for all.” In that campaign, Mr. Modi presented himself as a strong nationalist leader and economic reformer, playing down his Bharatiya Janata Party’s history of Hindu-nationalist aims and vilification of Muslims. Some doubt clung to him personally as well. Despite his having been cleared by a court, accusations remained that he was complicit in the massacre of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, when he was the state’s chief minister. But many moderate Indians were so sick of the corruption of previous governments, led by the rival Congress party, that they voted Mr. Modi in, hoping that he had changed. And in public, Mr. Modi’s language was mostly free of the Hindu nationalist rhetoric that would have set off more worry. Then things started changing. Lynch mobs who said they were protecting cows, a holy animal in Hinduism, popped up across the landscape. They have gone on to kill scores of people, mostly Muslims and lower-caste Dalits. Mr. Modi tapped Hindu extremists for top government posts, including Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, who has called Muslims a “crop of two-legged animals” and promised to wage a “religious war.” Mr. Modi placed other Hindu nationalist allies at the heads of important universities and cultural institutions. Place names were changed — so, too, were textbooks — to de-emphasize Muslims’ contribution to India and play up Hindu teachings. Many Muslim Indians, who make up one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, at 200 million, said they had never felt so marginalized. And impunity flourished. Members of mobs who had been filmed in broad daylight beating the life out of someone went unpunished, or, if they were caught, they were often hailed by party leaders as heroes. That violence did not appear to hurt Mr. Modi with his most ardent supporters in a country that is 80 percent Hindu. And he was given a boost before elections last year by a wave of nationalist sentiment over clashes between India and Pakistan. He and his party won resoundingly, and the pace of his Hindu nationalist policies accelerated. In August, the Modi administration unilaterally scrapped the statehood of what had been India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, and locked up virtually its entire political class. In November, his party celebrated the win of a flash point legal case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Hindu nationalists could build a temple over the ruins of a centuries-old mosque that had been razed by a Hindu mob. But the move that really put India on edge, and cleaved it even more deeply between Hindus and Muslims, came in December when Mr. Modi’s government passed a new citizenship law that paves a special path to Indian citizenship for migrants of nearly every prominent South Asian faith, bar one: Islam. Protests flared, and Muslims weren’t the only ones marching. Many progressive Indians saw this as Mr. Modi’s most blatantly anti-Muslim initiative yet and a grave threat to India’s founding as a secular and inclusive nation. A protest outside Srinagar in August turned violent after the police fired tear gas. Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times This wasn’t a crisis Mr. Modi inherited — he had created it — and the citizenship law was widely seen as part of his far-reaching agenda to turn India into a Hindu heartland, come what may. The protests provoked a brutal crackdown, especially in areas where security forces were controlled by his political party, commonly known as the B.J.P. In Uttar Pradesh, witnesses said that police officers tortured Muslim boys and shot Muslim men. At a predominantly Muslim university in New Delhi, the police beat unarmed students. Much of this was caught on video and widely shared. But few have been punished. The message that many people took away, just as they had from the impunity enjoyed by the lynch mobs, was that when it came to targeting Muslims, the state would look the other way or maybe even join in. Tensions with the police have risen in New Delhi neighborhoods where sectarian violence unfolded last week. Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times Mr. Modi usually tries to stay above the fray, but he slipped up in December when he said that arsonists could be identified by “their clothes” — widely seen as a dig at India’s Muslims, who sometimes dress differently from Hindus. Other B.J.P. leaders took it further. They vilified the protesters as agents of Pakistan, India’s archrival. One minister, Anurag Thakur, even led a chant at a political rally in which the audience yelled, “Shoot the traitors!” “I honestly don’t know how you go from ‘Together for all, development for all,’ to chanting ‘Shoot the traitors,’” said Alyssa Ayres, a senior South Asia fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations. “A lot of Indians are wondering how this came to be.” In the working-class, religiously mixed neighborhoods of northeastern Delhi, the tensions became combustible. On Feb. 23, a member of Mr. Modi’s party lit the spark. That afternoon, Kapil Mishra, a B.J.P. politician who had just lost a state Assembly election and seemed to be trying to rejuvenate his career, threatened to clear out a group of peaceful Muslim protesters, mostly women, who had been blocking a road. Hindus and Muslims then started throwing rocks at each other, and the unruly crowd grew. Police intelligence agents called for reinforcements. But Mr. Modi’s government failed to react quickly. Some speculated that was because the Modi administration, which control’s New Delhi’s police force, was preoccupied with a whirlwind visit to India by President Trump. A 16-year-old who said he was among more than a dozen minors detained and abused by the police in Uttar Pradesh in December. Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times But witnesses to the violence saw something different. As mobs swept through neighborhoods, burning homes and killing people, the police often stepped back if the crowd was Hindu. But when it was Muslims, witnesses said, the police could be vicious. In one especially disturbing incident filmed on video, police officers beat a group of badly wounded Muslim men and ordered them to sing the national anthem as they begged for mercy. One man later died. “This is not a couple of bad apples,” said Saket Gokhale, a civil rights activist in Mumbai. Instead, he said, the abuse was “institutionalized.” Indian newspapers and television news channels have come under withering pressure in recent years to hew to Mr. Modi’s line. But on this story, many journalists let their outrage show. “‘Heartbroken. Helpless. Enraged. Shocked,’” read one headline this past week. “Mob, courtesy Delhi Police,” read another. Hindu nationalist leaders deny accusations that their policies fueled the violence. “The government was too lenient with these protesters earlier, and that is why the anger built up over the last week and exploded, unfortunately. But you can’t blame the government,” said Raghav Awasthi, a lawyer and member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the B.J.P. “In fact, it is a testament to the ‘Together for all, development for all,’ slogan that the protests were allowed to continue.” On the fourth day of the violence, after more than 20 people had been killed, Mr. Modi broke his silence and urged “my sisters and brothers of Delhi to maintain peace.” But many observers said all that Mr. Modi has done in recent years made that peace difficult to deliver. And it is unclear whether there will be enough of a backlash, either domestically or internationally, to make the prime minister change course significantly. While moderates may be disturbed, his Hindu nationalist base could be invigorated. “It may not work in Delhi, but incidents like this do work in some places in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar,” said Mr. Gokhale, the Mumbai activist, mentioning two other states. “Tomorrow Modi might reap political dividends, but people are going to be dead.” There could be other costs, as well. These days, Mr. Modi speaks less about the development and reforms he once promised. The economy is reeling, with unemployment at a 45-year high and growth slowing to the lowest rate seen in nearly a decade. Privately, some officials say that Mr. Modi’s government is so focused on its ideological aspirations that it is losing sight of the economy. And as the country’s economic malaise deepens, there is worry that Mr. Modi and his allies will again look to Hindu nationalist sentiment for a boost, and a distraction. “To build that Hindu nation, control is everything,” said Shivshankar Menon, a former national security adviser. “We may see them continue to inflame tensions domestically,” he said. “They need the violence as a distraction from those failures.” Mourning a 22-year-old who was killed in the violence in Delhi last week. Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times Kai Schultz, Suhasini Raj and Sameer Yasir contributed reporting. Jeffrey Gettleman is the South Asia bureau chief, based in New Delhi. He was the winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for international reporting. @gettleman • Facebook Maria Abi-Habib is a South Asia correspondent, based in Delhi. Before joining The Times in 2017, she was a roving Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. @abihabib A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2020, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Modi’s Anti-Muslim Policies, and His Silence, Lit a Powder Keg. Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company

Did the police fail to act as the country descended into its worst spasm of religious violence in years? Mr. Musharraf’s wife, Mallika, being consoled by their daughter Muskaan in New Delhi on Thursday. Photographs by Atul Loke. NEW DELHI — The mob smashed through the gate and cut the electricity. The men stormed up the steps, chanting the name of a Hindu god and brandishing knives, chains, iron bars and pieces of pipe. The Musharraf family, who are Muslim, locked themselves in a dark room. The breadwinner, a 30-something rickshaw driver, threw himself under the bed and curled up in a wooden box. But the mob of more than 25 men found him. “Please, I’m also your brother,’’ he pleaded and folded his hands in front of his chest, a gesture for mercy, according to several survivors. “I also have young kids, like you.” They clubbed him in the face and dragged him out. Family members, in hiding around the neighborhood, frantically called the police. No one came. Mr. Musharraf’s wife, Mallika, waited in the darkness for the mob to leave her home and then tried to escape her besieged neighborhood with a band of Muslim children. She ran to the nearby house of a Hindu and put a bindi, a colored dot traditionally worn by Hindus, on her forehead. When another mob, armed with sticks, bats and iron bars, halted her and demanded an identification card, she pretended she was Hindu. The men even stopped a 2-year-old child, pressing to see if he had been circumcised (which Muslims tend to do, but many Hindus do not). Luckily, it had not yet been performed. “We were surrounded, they were killing us,’’ said Shakir, Mr. Musharraf’s brother-in-law. He and other relatives called the police dozens of times, he said, but either there was no answer or they were told that officers were busy. “Nobody came to help,’’ he said. Mr. Musharraf’s family received a call on Wednesday morning, after he had been dragged away the previous night. His wife, Mallika, said she had never given up on her husband coming back. “He’s the only person I have in this world,’’ she said. A neighbor saw his corpse being lifted out of a ditch, along with six others, she said. His face was smashed. The Musharraf family’s ordeal, which unfolded Tuesday night, is just one of many disturbing accounts of how pointed this violence has become. As India’s worst spasm of religious violence in years entered its sixth day, with the death toll climbing to at least 38, questions are intensifying about why the New Delhi police failed to quell the bloodletting. Since Sunday, gangs of Hindus and Muslims have clashed with crude weapons and homemade guns. Scores of homes, shops and cars have been set aflame. Many once-integrated communities are ripping apart along sectarian lines, with more accounts emerging of brazen religious targeting. Police officers patrolling the streets of Jaffrabad in eastern New Delhi on Wednesday. Witnesses have said that police officers, under the command of a Hindu nationalist governing party that has a long history of vilifying Muslims, intentionally stood back and let Hindu mobs slaughter Muslim civilians. There are also growing concerns that President Trump’s visit this week, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi had touted for weeks, drew away high-level attention and personnel, leaving neighborhoods completely exposed at a time of life or death. Intelligence agents within the police services sent several alerts on Sunday asking for more forces to be deployed, but the chaos only grew, according to the Indian media. Delhi was preparing for Mr. Trump’s arrival and thousands of police officers were deployed to line the roads on Monday as Mr. Trump’s motorcade cruised into town. “The whole city knew that riots were impending,’’ said Harsh Mander, a human-rights activist who is pressing the courts to investigate the ringleaders. “Why didn’t the police act?” At a court hearing on Thursday, in which Mr. Mander accused several members of the governing party of engaging in hate speech and inciting the killings, the government asked for more time to investigate. Critics saw this as a stall tactic by Mr. Modi’s government to protect its own. The court gave the government four more weeks. Alok Kumar, a senior police commander, said he was not aware that Mr. Trump’s visit had affected deployments. But two other government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said that there had been a shortage of officers because so many had been assigned to provide security for Mr. Trump. New Delhi, a city of about 20 million people, has about 80,000 police officers. Since it is the capital, they fall under the command of Mr. Modi’s central government. It was only after Mr. Trump left, on Tuesday night, that forces were shifted, the two officials said. When Raveesh Kumar, a top government spokesman, was asked Thursday if Mr. Trump’s visit affected the way the riots were handled, he declined to answer. “Frankly, what led to this and why this happened, I think this of course will be a matter of investigation,” he said. He added that law enforcement agencies were “working to bring the situation back to normal.” It is not there yet. The violence was triggered by dueling protests for and against India’s new citizenship law, which is widely seen as anti-Muslim. Many people have blamed Kapil Mishra, an ambitious politician in Mr. Modi’s party known for making anti-Muslim statements, for instigating the violence. He is among those accused of hate speech. India is about 80 percent Hindu, 14 percent Muslim, and the areas hardest hit this week have been a string of hardscrabble, religiously mixed neighborhoods in eastern Delhi, about a half-hour drive from Mr. Modi’s office. The immensity of India is revealed out here. Mile after mile of two-, three- and four-story apartment buildings stretch to the smoggy horizon. The buildings are constructed from the same drab concrete blocks, packed close together, and figures in bright clothes stand on the rooftops, stringing up laundry or simply looking out across the endless city. Out here, the violence refuses to quit. A Muslim family who fled their home this week and dared to come back to collect their things on Thursday was nearly lynched. Smoke still rises in some places. Bodies are still being found. A mosque burned by rioters in the Mustafabad area of New Delhi on Wednesday. The family of Mr. Musharraf (he had used one name) was instructed to go to the Guru Teg Bahadur mortuary, the nearest big one. But the authorities delayed releasing his body, prolonging the family’s grief. Nobody was giving any answers. And his was hardly the only body locked behind steel gates. The growing crowd at the mortuary is becoming more suspicious. Some whisper that the government is intentionally delaying the funerals, as a way to lower tensions. But the stories being passed around aren’t helping matters. “That guy in the white kurta,’’ someone pointed out, “His brother was burned alive.’’ “And that person over there,’’ another man chimed in, “his 80-year-old mother got trapped in a burning house and the police didn’t come.’’ Though both Hindus and Muslims have died, the killings and property destruction have been lopsidedly against Muslims. Many people believe this is because the state security services are controlled by Hindu nationalists and that police officers abetted the Hindu mobs. Witnesses say officers stood by when Hindu mobs attacked Muslims. Near the mortuary gates, Mallika leaned against a wall. She closed her eyes. She looked exhausted. But she wasn’t going anywhere. A funeral on Thursday for a 22-year-old who died in the riots this week. Sameer Yasir, Kai Schultz and Hari Kumar contributed reporting. Jeffrey Gettleman is the South Asia bureau chief, based in New Delhi. He was the winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for international reporting. @gettleman • Facebook Suhasini Raj has worked for over a decade as an investigative journalist with Indian and international news outlets. Based in the New Delhi bureau, she joined The Times in 2014. A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 28, 2020, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: As New Delhi Reels, Questions Swirl About Police Response. Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company

Boko Haram has killed more than 27,000 civilians in Nigeria. This is greater than the number of civilians ISIS killed in Iraq and Syria combined. Children sheltered in an orphanage, Lagos, Nigeria. (Shutterstock) Just recently, we commemorated the fifth anniversary of the deaths of the 21 Coptic martyrs of Libya. These brave men refused to renounce their faith in Jesus Christ, even unto death. The world looked on in horror as the hooded Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists recorded their crime against humanity in a scarring message to the “nation of the cross.” The incident validated that the genocide ISIS was committing against Christians was not limited to Iraq and Syria. Boko Haram has killed more than 27,000 civilians in Nigeria. This is greater than the number of civilians ISIS killed in Iraq and Syria combined. The Global Terrorism Index states that Nigeria is the third most dangerous country after Afghanistan and Iraq. Open Doors estimates that more than 7,000 Nigerian Christians have been killed because of their faith over the last three years. The international mission to persecuted Christians estimates that 1,350 Christians were killed by Islamic militant groups in 2019. The Christian Association of Nigeria reports that 900 churches in northern Nigeria have been destroyed in their campaign. Greg Stanton of Genocide Watch states that Boko Haram is committing a genocide against Christians and crimes against humanity against the wider population. In central Nigeria, Fulani militants are also committing genocidal massacres against Christians. Stanton says that what is mistaken as a conflict between herders and farmers is actually “a genocidal war between ethnic groups that previously co-existed, ignited by Islamic extremists with modern weapons.” In 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 Christian schoolgirls, and people around the world took part in the #bringbackourgirls campaign. Although the hashtag is no longer trending, more than 100 of those girls remain missing, and the world has all but forgotten. Two years ago, Boko Haram kidnapped more than100 girls and released all but one: Leah Sharibu. Why have they kept Leah in captivity? Leah, who is a Christian, was the only girl who refused to renounce her faith. She is now being held by the group as a “slave for life.” The situation on the ground has continued to worsen since her initial kidnapping. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) notes the group has killed those, including religious leaders, it considers to be “nonbelievers.” USCIRF notes they have committed civilian abductions, forced marriages, forced conversions, sexual abuse and torture. Furthermore, they have begun using women and children to commit suicide attacks. In addition to committing a genocide against Christians, they are also terrorizing Nigeria’s Muslim community. Boko Haram is believed to have committed twin suicide bombings at a mosque and market in the city of Mubi, which resulted in 27 deaths. The Christian community is struggling to respond to this genocide. Open Doors, which ranks Nigeria as the 12th highest country of Christian persecution in the world, reports that Christians “who see their mothers and sisters raped and their fathers and brothers killed” would be unwise to fight back because Boko Haram and the Fulani herdsmen militias are not street gangs: They possess military-grade weaponry. How have these groups come to obtain military-grade weaponry? Strong evidence suggests that foreign powers have smuggled arms to these groups. A leaked recording in 2014 indicates that Turkey has previously used Turkish Airlines for weapons smuggling to Nigeria. The Nigerian government must take action to ensure that it closes all smuggling routes and channels between foreign suppliers of weapons and the terrorist organizations and militias that operate within its borders. These groups are not only armed; they have been committing increasingly disturbing attacks against Christians in recent months. Shortly after Christmas, Boko Haram executed 11 Nigerian Christians, one of whom was shot and 10 of whom were beheaded, who had originally been kidnapped in Borno State. On Jan. 8, Aid to the Church in Need announced the murder of a Catholic seminarian who had been kidnapped from Kaduna State. Also in January, the Islamic State’s official propaganda channel released a video of a child soldier, approximately 8 years old, executing Ropvil Daciya Dalep, a Christian college student. That same month also witnessed the martyrdom of evangelical Protestant minister Lawan Andimi, whose preaching of the Gospel in his own hostage video went viral. The Register, to its credit, has called on the Nigerian government to take action. As the editors highlighted, Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto has charged that the government has “created the conditions to make it possible for Boko Haram to behave the way they are behaving.” Bishop Kukah is right. President Muhammed Buhari has been, at the very least, a bystander to the genocidal massacres committed by Fulani militias in central Nigeria. The international community must pressure him to enact serious reforms to Nigeria’s security apparatus. While the Nigerian population is almost evenly divided amongst Christians and Muslims, all of the federal security chiefs, including the office of national security adviser and the minister of defense, are Muslims. On a similar note, Archbishop Augustine Obiora Akubeze of Benin City, the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria, told Catholic News Agency that there is a “lack of significant prosecution” of the Fulani herdsmen who attack Christians, especially in Nigeria’s north. He echoes Bishop Kukah by noting that almost all of the president’s advisers, like the President, are from the Hausa-Fulani ethnic group and are Muslims. David Curry of Open Doors has warned that the crimes Boko Haram and Fulani militias are committing against Christians qualify as genocide because “[Y]ou have a group of people who are saying they’re going to eliminate Christians in the North; they’re largely pushing people out and or killing them.” He added that genocide is “rarely [called] genocide until it’s too late.” Today, we are calling this genocide. We are also calling on the government of Nigeria, the government of the United States and the international community to do the same and take immediate action to stop it. Frank Wolf is a former member of Congress from Virginia and the author of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. He now focuses exclusively on human rights and international religious freedom. Toufic Baaklini is the president and chairman of the board of directors for In Defense of Christians, a nonprofit and nonpartisan advocacy organization for Christians in Africa and the Middle East. Copyright 2020 National Catholic Register

Ahmad Yassin Leila and his infant daughter Iman, who froze to death. The Syrian government’s assault on a rebel-held province has created one of the worst humanitarian emergencies of a brutal nine-year war. REYHANLI, Turkey — The baby wasn’t moving. Her body had gone hot, then cold. Her father rushed her to a hospital, going on foot when he could not find a car, but it was too late. At 18 months, Iman Leila had frozen to death. In the half-finished concrete shell that had been home since they ran for their lives across northwest Syria, the Leila family had spent three weeks enduring nighttime temperatures that barely rose above 20. “I dream about being warm,” Iman’s father, Ahmad Yassin Leila, said a few days later by phone. “I just want my children to feel warm. I don’t want to lose them to the cold. I don’t want anything except a house with windows that keeps out the cold and the wind.” Syria’s uprising began in a flare of hope almost exactly nine years ago. Now, amid one of the worst humanitarian emergencies of the war, some of those who chanted for freedom and dignity in 2011 want only to ward off the winter cold. Already the effective winner of Syria’s civil war, President Bashar al-Assad is closer than ever to retaking Syria’s last rebel-held territory, Idlib Province in northwest Syria, a milestone that will clinch his victory even as it deepens his people’s suffering. Over the past three months, his forces, backed by Russian airstrikes, have intensified their assault on the province, driving nearly a million residents toward the border with Turkey. Many are living in tents or sleeping out in the open in the freezing cold. Iman Leila was just one of nine children who died of exposure in recent weeks. The exodus is the largest of a war that has displaced 13 million people and taken hundreds of thousands of lives, and ranks among the largest in recent history, second only to the flight of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar in 2017. With about three million residents trapped between a sealed Turkish border to the north and bombs and shells thundering up from the south and east, the crisis has the potential to grow far worse as the government battles to reclaim all of Syria. “These are people who are trying to take the hardest decisions of their lives in conditions that are out of their hands,” said Max Baldwin, the North Syria program director for Mercy Corps. “The level of intensity, the fact that you’ve got the Turkish military here, the front line moving there, they’re continuing to target hospitals — it’s creating a level of fear and uncertainty that’s been a huge challenge for everyone. And this could get worse.” Nearly a million Syrians have fled toward the border with Turkey over the past three months. Many are living in makeshift tents or in the open. Credit...Muhammed Said/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images The fleeing Syrians scrabble for safety in camps in the rural countryside near the Turkish border or in towns that may be bombed at any moment. The luckiest shelter in rented or abandoned buildings, many of which lack doors or windows. The less fortunate sleep in tents. Tens of thousands huddle on sidewalks or under olive trees, the branches draped with plastic tarps, blankets or nothing. The town of Ariha, in Idlib Province, was hit by 27 airstrikes in one day, a former resident said. Credit...Muhammed Said/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images Those who can afford it buy fuel for heaters, if any fuel is to be had. Those who cannot wrap their children in plastic sheets and fill any bag they can find with hot water to thaw their children’s beds at night. When they run out of wood, they burn clothes and shoes. Some fled hauling pieces of their old homes — like doors and window frames — hoping to improve their temporary shelters or to rebuild someday. Now those, too, go into the fire. One family that tried to keep a small fire in their tent this month ended up burning it down as they slept, killing two children. “There are a lot of other people dying,” Mr. Leila said. “Nobody cares.” Like hundreds of thousands of others, the Leilas had already fled from elsewhere and ended up in Idlib as a last resort. Nine years ago, Mr. Leila joined the peaceful protests against the brutal authoritarianism of President Bashar al-Assad, which erupted into armed uprising and war. When Mr. Assad’s forces recaptured the Leilas’ hometown, the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta, two years ago, the family accepted the government’s offer of safe passage to Idlib rather than face retribution. More than a million civilians from all parts of Syria have done the same thing, many having already moved multiple times. They have doubled Idlib’s population, turning it into a crowded stew of transplanted dissidents and their families and an array of jihadist and rebel groups who exploited the chaos to seize political control. These groups — dominated by the Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — have given the Syrian government cover to justify its onslaught in the name of counterterrorism. The displaced Syrians depend on international aid, but with much of Idlib under fire, aid workers have found it difficult to reach those in need. Credit...Burak Kara/Getty Images People who evacuated when the Idlib offensive began last spring filled up the available buildings near the Turkish border, leaving those who fled in recent weeks to cram into overcrowded camps that flood with every rain. Even those with money cannot find tents now. Some have stitched together plastic tarps. Others have built huts out of grapevines. With much of the area under fire, aid organizations cannot reach civilians, or take hours to deliver supplies to camps just a few miles away because the roads are so jammed. Aid workers, volunteers and contractors who supply water, blankets and food are fleeing their own homes as they try to help others, leaving the humanitarian response mired in chaos. Aid groups have long ago run out of tents, and lack the funding to buy more. “People don’t have high standards for shelter,” said Fouad Sayed Issa, 25, the founder of Violet, a Syrian nonprofit relief organization based just across Turkish border. “They just want to have a place to stay. They call us asking for tents, and we don’t have any to give.” Cut off from countries that once sent military aid to the rebels, they plead for a rescue no one is offering. “We are alone, for sure,” Mr. Issa said. “This is the end.” Until the government offensive began last spring, Idlib had maintained a fragile stability under a cease-fire brokered by Russia, which backs Mr. Assad, and Turkey, which supported opposition forces. Turkey has protested the violation of the agreement and held talks with Russia, to little avail. Russia has promised to reinstate the cease-fire even as its planes bomb civilian hospitals. Turkey has now launched a modest counteroffensive, though few expect it to end the carnage. The United States, which has 500 troops in southern and eastern Syria, has ruled out military involvement in the northwest. Displaced Syrians carried all the possessions they could to a new tent camp. Most aid groups have run out of tents. Credit...Burak Kara/Getty Images The Trump administration has sided with Turkey, expressing support for its counterattack and a proposed Turkish-enforced safe zone for displaced civilians at the border. “Turkey alone cannot deal with suddenly three million refugees coming across its borders,” James F. Jeffrey, the top American diplomat overseeing Syria issues, told a Turkish television interviewer in Istanbul this month. “It has every right to ensure that that does not happen, and we’re here to see how we can help the Turks carry out that right.” On the Turkish side of the border, Syrian refugees watch in agony as their phones overflow with pleas from their relatives in Idlib, asking where they can go. “They don’t want to leave and be humiliated — to stay in the street, to not be able to feed their kids, to see them shake from cold,” said Abdulhamid Sallat, 31, a Syrian activist who escaped to the small Turkish border town of Reyhanli in 2014. His family remains in his Syrian home village, Binnish. “I’m not sleeping,” said his cousin, Turki Sallat, 32, a blacksmith in Reyhanli whose parents and brothers are also in Binnish. “I can’t do anything.” Under Idlib’s new calculus of risk, a few shells or bombs are not enough to dislodge many residents. In the town of Ariha, it was only after counting 27 airstrikes in one day that Inaya Aloush’s family decided to leave, even though there was nowhere safe to run. “There was no bakery, no water,” said Ms. Aloush, 47. “Life had stopped.” She was in Reyhanli, where she was allowed to go for chemotherapy for colon cancer, but her family remains in an unfinished concrete building in Idlib, just 30 miles away. “I wish I could bring my family here,” she said. “In Syria, I’m always dreaming about the warplanes. There, silver planes mean bombing. Here, they’re just … normal planes.” She worries about her husband, her four sons and their families. She thought she would return to her home in Ariha after treatment, a prospect that now seems unlikely. “I never thought I wouldn’t be going back to that house,” she said, tearing up. “Sometimes we ask God, ‘When will this be over?’” From some of the camps, the displaced can see Turkey, green and orderly beyond the border fence. On the Turkish side of the Reyhanli crossing, olive trees grow in tidy rows. Nothing sleeps beneath them but a stray dog. But Turkey already hosts more than three million Syrian refugees, and it refuses to accept any more. That does not stop Khadija Mohsen Shaker, 34, from hoping. She and one of her four sons crossed several days ago to Reyhanli, also for medical care — he is being treated for kidney problems. But soon they will have to return to their tent in Idlib, where her elderly parents and two other children are living. “I wish I could live in Syria the way people live here,” she said. “There, there’s fear everywhere. We’re surrounded by fear.” Ms. Shaker, a widow who works as a farmhand, was among the last to leave the city of Maarat al Noaman after pro-government forces attacked in January, fleeing on foot with her family in one panicked hour. Once near the border, they slept for 10 days under an olive tree draped with a tarp until someone gave them his tent. In the tent, their toilet is a bucket, she said. There is no school. They spend each day praying, trying to soothe the children — one cries from cold, another from hunger — and waiting for aid groups to deliver food. Every day, one son goes to a nearby mountain to collect firewood. But it is still so cold that they cannot sleep. Boys in a cemetery in Sarmada where they and their families are living in the cemetery’s prayer hall. Credit...Aaref Watad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Her eldest son, 13, was smuggled to Istanbul at 11 to work, which seemed better than staying in Idlib. She does not know when she will see him again, if ever. After nearly a decade of heartbreak and death, conversations about Syria tend to circle the same painful question, of what it was all for. Some, like Abdulhamid Sallat, say the revolt was worth it. “It’s about dignity and freedom,” he said. “The revolution still exists in our hearts.” But to Ms. Shaker, the talk of political ideals feels almost cruel, if not irrelevant. “In Syria, you can no longer distinguish between right and wrong,” she said. “They say the regime is bad and the rebels are good. Sometimes they say the regime is good and the rebels are bad. I can’t tell anymore. They’ve both ruined my life.” Vivian Yee is an international correspondent covering the Middle East. She is based in Beirut. Previously, she wrote about immigration policy and immigrants in the United States during the Trump administration and reported on New York politics. @VivianHYee A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 27, 2020, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Children Freeze to Death. Bombs Rain Down. And ‘Nobody Cares.’. Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company The Humanitarian Crisis in Idlib ‘ It’s Like the End of the World’ Feb. 18, 2020 800,000 Syrians Have Fled in Three Months. This Is What it Looks Like. Feb. 14, 2020 VIDEO ‘Sent Candy’: Cockpit Tapes Show Russian Pilots Bombing Syrian Civilians Dec. 1, 2019 What ‘Victory’ Looks Like: A Journey Through Shattered Syria Aug. 20, 2019

The Pentagon and the State Department are sending mixed messages about reducing America’s presence in a region bloodied by terrorist violence. Spanish Special Forces training Mauritanian soldiers during a counterterrorism exercise in Mauritania this month. Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania — The Trump administration is split over how to combat terrorists, support allies and thwart global competitors in West Africa. And the mixed messages out of Washington are confusing allies in Europe, who are deeply committed to security in Africa, as well as to military partners on the continent. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just wrapped up a major trip to Africa, including a stop in Senegal, pledging more security support and warning against growing Chinese influence. But back in Washington, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper is weighing deep U.S. troop cuts on the continent, closing a new $110 million drone base and ending aid to French forces battling militants who are surging in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. The muddled administration policy comes at a time when skyrocketing waves of terrorism and violence have seized Africa’s Sahel region, a vast sub-Saharan scrubland that stretches from Senegal to Sudan, and is threatening to spread. Cutting American aid could not only weaken French-led counterterrorism efforts, analysts say. It could also open the door to China and Russia, which are ready to seize any foothold the United States cedes on the continent, dangling deals for new ports and railroads as well as arms and mercenaries, and overall influence. China now has more embassies in Africa than the United States, 52 to 49. A Mauritanian mechanic conducting a preflight check on a plane used to provide reconnaissance video.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times “The U.S. is losing the competition in Africa against China, Russia, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State,” said Katherine Zimmerman, an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “It’s not losing militarily, but in the soft-power space.” African troops are voicing concern about a reduced American commitment to fighting violent extremism, expressions heard during a two-week, Pentagon-sponsored counterterrorism exercise in Mauritania and Senegal this month that drew 1,500 military personnel from 30 African and Western countries. “It would degrade the standard of training if the U.S. left,” said a 30-year-old Nigerian Special Forces officer, who under the exercise’s ground rules could be identified only as Captain Samuel. Violence is escalating over a growing swath of West Africa. The proposed U.S. troop cuts in West Africa come amid a growing torrent of attacks by Islamic State and Qaeda affiliates — often working together in a rare reversal of their bitter rivalry in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world — especially in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Armed groups have attacked bridges, military convoys and government buildings. Three thousand schools have closed because of terrorist threats, and militants have assassinated mayors and other local leaders suspected of collaborating with the authorities. The United Nations envoy for West Africa and the Sahel, Mohamed Ibn Chambas, said last month that attacks in the three countries had increased fivefold since 2016, with more than 4,000 deaths reported in 2019 compared with an estimated 770 deaths three years before. The threat is pushing south from the Sahel into areas previously untouched by extremist violence, including the Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo and Ghana, where the Pentagon has a logistics hub. Security has deteriorated so badly that the Pentagon’s Africa Command told the Defense Department’s inspector general this month that it had abandoned for the moment a strategy of weakening the Islamist militants, and instead was mainly trying to contain the threat. Portuguese Special Forces providing medical training on how to stop hemorrhages with tourniquets for the Cabo Verde military. Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times Military officials and independent analysts stressed that American and other Western military aid may at best buy time for African allies to address poverty, lack of education, government corruption and other grievances that extremist groups seek to exploit. But there is little confidence that these daunting, endemic problems will be resolved soon. That leaves the United States and its European allies to keep the threat from spreading. The State Department has in the past two years provided $323 million in training and other security assistance to the so-called G5 Sahel countries — Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad and Mauritania. But the G5 force, ultimately set to grow to 5,000 troops, has been slow to halt the militants’ advance. Small U.S. assistance is crucial to a larger French mission. The American military has a relatively light footprint across Africa, relying on European and African partners to carry out most counterterrorism missions from the Sahel to Somalia, with the Pentagon providing air power when needed. About 5,200 U.S. troops and 1,000 Defense Department civilians or contractors work throughout Africa, mainly training and conducting exercises with local forces. About 1,400 of those troops are in West Africa, a force that could shrink to 300 under one of Mr. Esper’s options. “We can have a large effect with a very small force,” Brig. Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson, the top American Special Operations officer in Africa, said in an interview in Nouakchott on the sideline of the counterterrorism exercise. European allies — and President Trump’s own advisers — have advocated continuing these American security measures on the continent, arguing that this relatively small investment has an outsize effect in helping keep terrorists and global competitors at bay. In a phone call last week, President Emmanuel Macron of France urged Mr. Trump to keep providing American assistance — intelligence, aerial refueling and logistics at a cost of about $45 million a year, barely a rounding error in the Pentagon’s nearly $800 billion annual budget — until France fills its counterterrorism gaps. To show its resolve and stave off deep immediate American cuts, France, the former colonial power in West Africa, is rushing 600 additional troops to the region, for a total of 5,100. It also says 400 more Special Operations forces from other European nations will arrive by late summer. Italian Special Forces observing Chadian soldiers executing a live firing range. Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times French officials say they are moving to be more self-sufficient — buying more American-made C-130 transport planes and Reaper drones. But without the American aid to tide them over, French officials say they will sharply shrink their operations, which could unravel security even more. Muddled policy results in mixed messages. The administration’s Africa policy is complicated, at best. Mr. Trump last month added six countries to his list of nations facing stringent travel restrictions, a move that will virtually block immigration from Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria. Three other African countries, Eritrea, Sudan and Tanzania, will face varying degrees of restrictions. Mr. Trump has made disparaging comments about African nations in the past, complaining that Nigerians who entered the United States on visas would never “go back to their huts.” Mauritanian military personnel, assisted by U.S. Army officers, conducted community leader engagements in a village near Atar. Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times For his part, Mr. Pompeo dismisses any policy differences with Mr. Esper, a West Point classmate. Even so, Mr. Esper has said his mission is to realign American forces worldwide — beginning here in Africa — away from post-9/11 missions battling terrorist groups and instead refocus Pentagon priorities on confronting so-called great powers like Russia and China. “We’ll get it right,” Mr. Pompeo said in Dakar this month before flying on to Angola and Ethiopia. “The people of Senegal should know that collectively Senegalese forces in the region, European partners, the French and the United States of America, we have an obligation to get security right here in the region.” But Mr. Pompeo’s visit only served to underscore that as the Pentagon is seeking to shrink its security presence on the continent, the State Department and other government agencies are increasing their posture and presence — without the military’s rich coffers. Mr. Pompeo’s top policy aide, David Hale, visited four West African nations this month to bolster regional partnerships. The State Department has a new initiative to combat a resurgent Islamic State that includes creating a special task force to focus specifically on deteriorating security in the Sahel. The department and the F.B.I. announced this month the establishment in Kenya of the first joint terrorism task force outside the United States. At the C.I.A., officials have also privately pushed back on Mr. Esper’s proposed cuts on the continent, fearing they could jeopardize intelligence collection and other activities. Even the top American officer overseeing military operations in Africa, Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, told senators last month that fighting terrorists also countered Chinese and Russian influence on the continent. “Our experience, training, equipment, advice and other unique capabilities,” General Townsend said, “is a distinct U.S. advantage that our competitors cannot match.” Senior lawmakers from both parties have blasted the Pentagon’s proposed cuts. “Any reduction in U.S. military presence in West Africa would have real and lasting negative consequences for our African partners,” Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement last week during a trip to Africa that included a brief stop in Nouakchott, Mauritania’s seaside capital. Mr. Esper, battered by the criticism of his proposal since The New York Times first reported it in December, seems to have backtracked from the most drastic plans, including a complete withdrawal. He has asked aides for more options, most likely forestalling any decisions until March. “There are no plans to completely withdraw all forces from Africa,” Mr. Esper told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. African partners fear a U.S. withdrawal. The Pentagon’s proposed cuts to U.S. troop levels and aid to French forces have unnerved senior African leaders facing a growing jihadist threat. “We have talked about the need to be present in the area,” Amadou Ba, Senegal’s foreign minister, said at a news conference in Dakar, the nation’s capital, alongside Mr. Pompeo on Feb. 16. “We hope that they will continue to support us in training and intelligence.” For now, African troops and their Western allies are racing to establish security. In Mauritania — a vast, parched nation of about 4.5 million people at the western end of the Sahara that straddles the divide between largely Arab North Africa and black West Africa — playing host to this year’s exercise underscored its commitment to combat Al Qaeda, diplomats and commanders said. Senegalese soldiers training at the camp. Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times After a string of attacks in the late 2000s, the nation’s army doubled in size, fielded new counterterrorism units, tightened border security and surveillance, and engaged with religious leaders to help counter Al Qaeda’s ideological appeals, said Maj. Sidi Mohamed Hadid, an army spokesman. As part of the exercise this month, African troops also trained at a sprawling army encampment in Thies, Senegal, 35 miles outside Dakar that is also home to Senegal’s military academy. On several shooting ranges, dotted with massive baobab trees and spiky thorn bushes, British, Dutch and Austrian trainers worked with soldiers from Nigeria, Senegal and Burkina Faso. With temperatures nearing 100 degrees under a blazing sun, the African troops also practiced how to thwart roadside bombs and clear militant-infested buildings. At one range, Austrian trainers divided their nearly two dozen Burkinabe troops into two groups. As one group charged across a stretch of rocky scrubland toward a mock terrorist hide-out, the other provided covering fire with its AK-47 rifles (shouting “bang, bang” in the simulation). “It will be harder if the U.S. leaves,” Lt. Daouda Ilboudo, 28, the Burkinabe squad leader, said during a water break after the drill. “But we still will keep struggling against the terrorists.” A Senegalese soldier praying during a break. Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes. @EricSchmittNYT Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company

Shams, 11, center, holds her brother in a cave near Idlib where she and her family found shelter after fleeing the Aleppo countryside about a month ago. (Emin Ozmen/Magnum Photos) IDLIB, Syria — The market bombing had driven Ahmed and his family from their town in southern Idlib province and onto the road, to join hundreds of thousands of other people searching for safety, the teen recalled. A Russian plane had circled overhead, and then the bombs fell, obliterating a car, its driver and other people who were passing by on motorcycles. The attack a few weeks ago was terrible but hardly the worst he had seen. Five years ago, an airstrike had killed dozens of people in the town square. Now, at 13, Ahmed is living in the clammy basement of a sports stadium in Idlib city, with hundreds of other displaced people who have crowded in over recent weeks. As he spoke, warplanes could be heard circling overhead again. Guards warned people to stay indoors. But Ahmed — the stoic survivor of a war and no longer a child — didn’t flinch. “Safety comes from God,” he said. The last month has been especially brutal in Idlib province, with a Syrian government offensive producing a humanitarian crisis almost unparalleled during nearly a decade of war in Syria. As the government seeks to recapture rebel-held Idlib, where children make up a majority of the population, the fighting has chased about 1 million people from their homes. Many had previously fled to the province from elsewhere in the country, and they are now trapped between the approaching battlefront and a sealed Turkish border to the north. The offensive, waged during some of the worst winter weather in years, has offered a lesson in the endless ways young people can be made to suffer — as victims of the violence, as war refugees or because of the awful things they have witnessed. Infants have died in the cold or suffocated in their tents as their parents try to keep them warm. Children have withered away because of severe malnutrition as their parents desperately search for food. In bedrooms or schoolyards, they have been blasted by airstrikes or artillery shells. Parents who spoke to reporters during a rare visit to Idlib this week said their children have also struggled with the mental toll of the violence and have become withdrawn or alarmingly aggressive. A refu­gee camp expanding outside the Idlib stadium this week. (Emin Ozmen/Magnum Photos) Everywhere in Idlib province there are children — cleaning their tent encampments, picking through trash for food and, when there is time, stealing a few moments to play. Children account for more than half of the province’s 3 million people, according to the group Save the Children, making them frequent targets of what human rights activists have said are indiscriminate attacks on civilians carried out by the Syrian government and its Russian allies. The government of President Bashar al-Assad has justified its offensive in part by saying the campaign is aimed at defeating Islamist extremists who largely control Idlib province and nearby areas. Russia is trying to help its ally recapture all of Syria, nine years after a revolt erupted against Assad’s rule. Assad’s forces have directly targeted children, including on Tuesday, when they attacked at least 10 schools in Idlib, according to the Syrian American Medical Society, or SAMS, which supports hospitals in the province. At least 20 civilians were killed in attacks throughout the day. Half were children, the group said. Surrounded by death “It feels like death is around us, everywhere,” said Ikrem, a doctor at a maternal hospital in Idlib city supported by SAMS. “There is no food. There are no houses. There is no good mental structure,” she added. She asked that her last name not be published, because she expects Assad’s forces will control Idlib province soon. At least two newborns have frozen to death in recent weeks, she said. “Every day, there are large numbers of child injuries.” Mothers arrive at the hospital after spending long periods in displacement camps, in “a very poor maternal condition,” she said. Low birth weight and preterm babies are common. A month-old baby at an Idlib hospital this week. He was living with his father in a camp and nearly froze to death, doctors said. His mother died in childbirth, along with his twin sister, according to the hospital. (Emin Ozmen/Magnum Photos) In one of the hospital’s incubators, an infant was recovering from severe hypothermia, doctors said. The boy’s forehead was scarred with black splotches, as if he had been burned. The skin on his chest was peeling. The infant had no name, or none that the doctors were aware of. His mother, named Dima, had died during childbirth about a month ago, along with the boy’s twin sister. His father was displaced by fighting and had failed to find a warm place to shelter what remained of his family. Ikrem said she had been struggling to reassure her own children that their house would not be bombed. “I’m in a bad mental condition,” she said. Just as she spoke, warning alarms sounded in the hospital, indicating that warplanes were overhead. Other doctors rushed indoors. Barely livable conditions Dozens of children have been sheltering for weeks with their families in two caves in Idlib’s western countryside. When the families arrived, they had to excavate mounds of soil and rock to make the caves livable. The caves are barely that. For weeks, there has been no heat. The moisture has given everyone chest infections. The conditions have been especially difficult for Shams, an 11-year-old girl with a heart defect that left her short of breath, even in the best conditions. Shams, 11, center, holds her brother in a cave near Idlib where she and her family found shelter after fleeing the Aleppo countryside about a month ago. (Emin Ozmen/Magnum Photos) “It hurts here, when I walk,” she said, placing her hand on her chest. She talked about school; her favorite subjects had been Arabic and math. But there was no time for school now. There had not been for years. She had reached only the third grade. “Their favorite subject now is bread,” said Kamal Wilfi, a father in the cave who cradled his 5-year-old son, Mohammed. The boy suffers from a blood condition, and his growth has been stunted. In his father’s arms, swaddled in a blanket, he looked no older than 2. “His situation is not good,” the father said. They had just returned from a clinic, but Wilfi said he had not been able to afford the medicine that prevented his son’s seizures. Outside the caves, laundry was suspended from a long line strung between olive trees. There was one toilet. There were snakes and scorpions in the fields. “We have killed many,” said Nazim, a 14-year-old boy. “Nothing here is good.” No one thought they would be able to return home soon. “Our hope is very weak,” said Ahmed Hassan, 16, who moved to one of the caves after spending weeks in a basement with his family. Before they had fled their town of Saraqeb, a shell landed behind his house, destroying a neighboring dwelling. “Thank God that family was displaced,” he said, as other children huddled around him to listen. The sounds of war Walkie-talkies, carried by guards at the cave camp, crackle with the latest warning of an air attack. “Don’t gather, children. Don’t gather,” a man urged, a warning as effective as telling the youngsters not to breathe. Everywhere and always in Idlib, there is the thunderclap of shelling or the menacing roar of the jets. The sounds of shelling rise above the din in the courtyard of the Future Generations orphanage in Idlib city, where workers try to distract children who have lost parents with songs and games. Booms echo in the basement of the Idlib stadium, shaking Ibtisam Hamoudia, who survived an airstrike a few weeks ago and worries that her children will never be the same. “It’s a kind of psychological injury,” she said as Hassan, her 8-year-old son, began shoving one of his sisters, again and again, until the sister began to cry. “They became aggressors,” their mother said. A family that recently took refuge at the stadium in Idlib city. They fled from Jebel Zawiya and were the last family to leave their village. (Emin Ozmen/Magnum Photos) The sounds of war also haunt the family of 2-year-old Mohamed Hassan Agha and his infant sister, Najjah Hassan Agha, who both died in an air attack on their home three weeks ago, according to Mouwaia Hassan Agha, a cousin. A portion of the house, in the town of Sarmin, was still standing. The rest was reduced to nothing. In a video of the aftermath kept by Agha on his phone, grief-stricken family members and volunteers dart around the grounds, unsure where to look for the bodies. Seven members of the family were eventually pulled out, along with a neighbor. Najjah was found in her mother’s arms, said her father, Fidaa Hassan Agha, who had been in another town when the bombs fell, trying to find temporary shelter for his family. Two of his siblings — a 10-year-old sister and a 13-year-old brother — were also among the dead, he said in a voice message sent from his tent. Mohamed’s body, he added, was dismembered. His son had been terrified of the planes, his father recalled. When they circled, “he would run to me and try to hide.” “In other things,” the father added, “he was courageous.” Saeed Eido contributed to this report. Copyright 2020 The Washington Post Kareem Fahim is the Istanbul bureau chief and a Middle East correspondent for The Washington Post. He previously spent 11 years at the New York Times, covering the Arab world as a Cairo-based correspondent, among other assignments. Kareem also worked as a reporter at the Village Voice.

A local Hindu politician told the police to evict a group of Muslim protesters or he and his men would. Now, 25 have died in some of the worst violence in years. Delhi Fire Brigade personnel at the Gokulpuri tire market in East Delhi on Wednesday.Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times NEW DELHI — To many in the eastern Delhi neighborhood where a convulsion of religious violence erupted this week, it all began with one man. Kapil Mishra, a local politician with India’s leading Hindu nationalist party, had just lost an election. Acquaintances in the area, which now feels like a war zone, said he had been looking for a way to bounce back. Mr. Mishra, 39, is known for his outspoken views and flexible politics. As an upper caste Hindu from a political family, he had worked for Amnesty International and Greenpeace, and risen in the ranks of one of India’s most progressive political organizations. But several years ago he shifted allegiance across the political spectrum to the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s current governing party, which has deep roots in Hindu supremacist ideology. On Sunday, he appeared at a rally against a group of protesters (most of them women) who were objecting to a new citizenship law widely seen as discriminatory toward Muslims. There he vented his anger in a fiery speech in which he issued an ultimatum to the police: either clear out the demonstrators, who were blocking a main road, or he and his followers would do it themselves. Kapil Mishra addressed a rally in New Delhi last year. Credit...Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times Within hours, the worst Hindu-Muslim violence in India in years was exploding. Gangs of Hindus and Muslims fought each other with swords and bats, shops burst into flames, chunks of bricks sailed through the air, and mobs rained blows on cornered men. “Kapil Mishra should be in jail,” said Rupesh Bathla, a businessman who says he has known Mr. Mishra since they were teenagers. “He started communal riots. He planted hatred in other people’s hearts.” By Wednesday, at least 25 people had died, hospital officials said, most from gunshot wounds. Several witnesses said that the live fire came from the direction of the police officers, and the dead included Hindus as well as Muslims. Though property belonging to Hindus was burned, the destruction was much heavier on the Muslim side. In Muslim areas, shop after shop was destroyed and entire markets were burned down. Dozens of Muslim residents have accused police officers of standing passively by while the destruction was underway. On Wednesday, the few people out on the streets walked quietly past the blackened car hulks and smashed homes. The whiff of charred materials still hung in the air, in what some scholars said was an eerie echo of previous religious bloodletting in India. “On the whole, the Delhi riots of this week are now beginning to look like a pogrom, à la Gujarat 2002 and Delhi 1984,” said Ashutosh Varshney, the director of the Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University. While the death toll is nowhere near that of those earlier bouts, the episodes shared a disturbing similarity, Mr. Varshney said, with “mobs unleashing savage violence while the cops look away, or join the mob, instead of neutrally intervening to crush the riot.” Security personnel guard a burned mosque in Mustafabad. Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times With the violence cooling down for the moment, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who hosted President Trump as the fighting raged, broke his silence on Wednesday after Mr. Trump had departed, urging people in a Twitter post to “maintain peace and brotherhood at all times.” He added: “Peace and harmony are central to our ethos.” But concerns lingered among many Indians, including Hindus, that Mr. Mishra and his Hindu nationalist supporters have weaponized a very dangerous mood. In a Hindu majority nation, with a Hindu nationalist government that has allowed the killers of Muslims to go unpunished, fear has been growing that violent Hindu extremism could spin out of control. On Wednesday, a few sporadic attacks were reported, but no large scale mayhem. The police, armed now with assault rifles, had been reinforced with paramilitary troops. In the area that suffered the worst in the fighting, many residents laid blame on Mr. Mishra, who declined a request for an interview. But in a Twitter post, he said “It’s not a crime to ask for blocked roads to be opened. It’s not a crime to tell the truth. I don’t fear this massive hate campaign against me.” Mr. Mishra had said in his speech that he did not want to create trouble before Mr. Trump left the country on Tuesday night. But as Sunday evening approached, gangs of Hindu and Muslim men began throwing rocks at one another, and that quickly spawned far greater violence. At a court hearing on the riots on Wednesday, a judge pressed police officials about why they had not watched videos of Mr. Mishra’s incendiary speech — an indication, the judge implied, that they had not seriously investigated the sources of the violence. “This is really concerning,” said the judge, S. Muralidhar, according to LiveLaw, a legal news website. “There are so many TVs in your office, how can a police officer say that he hasn’t watched the videos? I’m really appalled by the state of affairs of the Delhi Police.” Mr. Mishra’s supporters said the majority of people in the community had backed his effort to evict the protesters. “How could our kids get to school with those protesters blocking the road?” said Alok Kumar Gupta, a retired military officer who lives near the protest area. “Kapil Mishra was only trying to help.” But others wonder if Mr. Mishra was trying to make a name for himself in Hindu nationalist circles. He had been elected to the local assembly in Delhi in 2015 from the progressive Aam Aadmi Party, but eventually fell out with his colleagues and defected to Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. He then started espousing Hindu nationalist views and vilifying Muslims, more out of political expediency than true belief, argued Mr. Bathla, who claims to have known Mr. Mishra for 30 years. “When he was younger he wasn’t like that,” he said. “He was chill.” Just a few weeks before the Feb. 8 local assembly elections, Mr. Mishra posted what was widely viewed as an incendiary Twitter message, framing the contest as “India vs Pakistan.” After he lost the race, several people said he took the hard line against the mostly Muslim protesters as a way to improve his standing in the B.J.P. “He wasn’t getting much attention from the higher ups,” said Hasrat Ali, a legal officer who lives the same area where Mr. Mishra’s family lived for many years. “This was all a plan to get a firmer position.” At least one other politician in Mr. Modi’s party is now distancing himself from Mr. Mishra. “Whoever has done this, strict action must be taken,” said the politician, Gautam Gambhir, a member of Parliament from the area. “Kapil Mishra’s speech is not acceptable.” A woman collects pages of a Quran in the mosque of Mustafabad, burned by rioters in East Delhi. Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times Protests against the new citizenship law, which makes it easier for non-Muslim migrants to become full-fledged Indian citizens, have flared intermittently since December. There has been a subtext of religious differences, with most of India’s Muslims objecting to the law and many Hindus supporting it. But this past week was the first time the protests turned large numbers of Hindus and Muslims violently against one another. Most of India’s Muslims distrust the B.J.P. and point to the sectarian killing frenzy that claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people, almost 800 of them Muslims, in Gujarat State in 2002 when Mr. Modi was its chief minister. Mr. Modi and his state government were accused of quietly ordering the police to stand by as the violence raged. He has denied those accusations, and in 2012, an investigative panel for the Supreme Court found no evidence to support them. But until he became prime minister in 2014, Mr. Modi was banned from entering the United States. And since he came to power, violence against Muslims, including mob lynchings, has increased sharply. Muslim families in northeast Delhi are now abandoning their homes. Several said in interviews that they no longer felt safe. Asgar Ali, whose grocery shop was burned to the ground on Tuesday, said there was no difference between police officers and Hindu mobs. He said he was fleeing his home, where he had lived for 20 years, knowing that he might never return. “I built this house with my blood and sweat,” Mr. Ali said. “Now, I have been reduced to a homeless pauper. I have lost everything.” Shalini Venugopal contributed reporting. Jeffrey Gettleman is the South Asia bureau chief, based in New Delhi. He was the winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for international reporting. @gettleman • Facebook Suhasini Raj has worked for over a decade as an investigative journalist with Indian and international news outlets. Based in the New Delhi bureau, she joined The Times in 2014. Published in The New York Times February 26, 2020: The Roots of the Delhi Religious Riots: A Fiery Speech and an Ultimatum Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company Related Stories: Murders of Religious Minorities in India Go Unpunished, Report Finds Feb. 18, 2019 New Delhi Streets Turn Into Battleground, Hindus vs. Muslims Feb. 25, 2020