Government audit alleges that poor west African country lost at least $137m over eight years
More than $100m of public money in Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries and a key regional recipient of western aid, was wasted in a series of potentially corrupt international arms deals, a leaked official document alleges.
A confidential government audit of defence spending found that at least $137m had been lost due to malpractice over an eight-year period ending in 2019.
Continue reading...Amnesty calls for action to help victims overcome trauma, as families return home to landscape littered with landmines
Child survivors of Islamic State captivity and their families have been left to fend for themselves when dealing with lasting trauma and health complications, Amnesty International said on Thursday.
Almost 2,000 Yazidi children living in the Kurdish regional government area have been “effectively abandoned”, according to a new report highlighting their struggles to recover from the violence inflicted by Isis.
Continue reading...Twenty-year-old has won right to return to UK from Syria to challenge citizenship decision
The case of Shamima Begum, the now 20-year-old woman who fled to Syria to join Islamic State as a child, has sparked fierce debate over how the UK should deal with “foreign fighters”.
Opponents of her return say she is a threat to the country’s security and must live with the consequences of her actions, while critics of her exile say greater human rights principles are at play, and the UK must not shirk its responsibility to administer justice for any alleged crimes she may have committed.
Continue reading...Appeal court partially overturns earlier ruling that backed Home Office
Shamima Begum, the 20-year-old woman who left east London as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State, should be allowed to return to the UK to challenge the Home Office’s decision to revoke her British citizenship in person.
The court of appeal partially overturned an earlier ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) this year, which held that she had not been illegally rendered stateless while she was in Syria because she was entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship.
Continue reading...A British student who ran away to join the Islamic State group in Syria has died while being held in prison in the country, according to reports.
Ishak Mostefaoui, 27, who travelled to Syria in 2014 and had his British citizenship revoked, is said to have died either trying to escape custody or amid serious disorder in a jail in Hassakeh, which holds Isis prisoners from across the world.
Continue reading...Human Rights Watch suggests involvement of security forces in deaths over recent months
At least 180 civilians have been killed in recent months in a single town in Burkina Faso, with evidence pointing towards the country’s often-accused security forces, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Between November 2019 and June this year, groups of dozens of dead bodies were found often tied and blindfolded, strewn along major highways, beneath bridges and across fields in the rural region, the report published on Thursday said. Most of the bodies were buried by residents while the remains of others were left unclaimed.
Continue reading...Hisham al-Hashimi backed action to tackle Iraq’s powerful militias, despite knowing risks
As Hisham al-Hashimi pulled up outside his Baghdad home on Monday night, a gunman strode purposefully towards the Iraqi official’s white four-wheel drive, drew a pistol and fired four shots through the driver’s window.
Each jolting flash was captured by security footage from a camera on Hashimi’s roof. So was the hitman’s escape on the back of a motorbike, and the helpless vigil of his three young children as their father’s body was dragged on to the driveway.
Continue reading...Isis planted mines across Sinjar and displaced the Yazidi community. Now a group of women are clearing the way for the return of their people
Behind Hana Khider is a large grey wall map, with the minefields her team have been clearing marked in green. “This is the place where Yazidis lived together,” she says. “It’s where I lived in my childhood; I have so many memories here, it’s very important to me.”
The place is Sinjar, or Shingal as Yazidis know it, on Iraq’s north-western border with Syria. Khider, 28, is speaking via video call from her office in the region.
Continue reading...The Afghan government is facing hard decisions over the futures of hundreds of detained radicalised women and their children
The “Daesh wives” from the Afghan branch of Islamic State look very young. Most are already mothers.
Hundreds of them have fled combat, airstrikes and near-starvation in eastern Afghanistan where the faction of Isis known as Islamic State in Khorasan (ISK) has been under fierce bombardment from Afghan and US special forces, as well as involved in violent clashes with rival militants the Taliban.
Continue reading...Amnesty records 200 state killings and forced disappearances in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, state members of internationally-backed G5 group
Hundreds of civilians have been killed by their own governments in Africa’s Sahel region since countries pledged a surge against militant groups at a regional meeting held by France in January.
Amnesty International said on Wednesday that it had documented 200 cases of unlawful state killings and forced disappearances in February and March in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, which are members of the internationally backed G5 force set up to fight militants in the Sahel.
Continue reading...Woman who fled as schoolgirl to join Isis cannot fight fair appeal from Syria, lawyers say
Shamima Begum, the woman who left Britain as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State, cannot effectively challenge the government’s decision to deprive her of British citizenship while she is in a detention camp in northern Syria, the court of appeal has been told.
At the start of a two-day online hearing, her lawyers challenged a ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) this year that she has not been rendered stateless because she is entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship.
Continue reading...Nineteen-year-old Soraya Ameri had just given birth when gunmen stormed the ward. She recounts her escape – and the desperate search for her daughter
Soraya Ameri’s premature baby daughter had been whisked off to an incubator and the new mother was lying down, exhausted and sore from her stitches, when the shooting started.
Gunmen – dressed in police uniforms – had stormed the maternity ward of a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, where Ameri had just given birth. She was bundled into a safe room with others, one woman next to her in labour, but her baby was outside.
Continue reading...Attack still unclaimed, but US defies Afghan government, blames Isis and says negotiations with Taliban must continue
Gunmen who attacked a maternity hospital in Kabul came “with the purpose of killing mothers in cold blood”, systematically shooting every woman in labour and new mothers they came across, the charity Médecins Sans Frontières has said.
The attack on Tuesday morning, aimed at the youngest of children and most vulnerable of women, shocked even a country that has endured decades of bloodshed and tens of thousands of civilian deaths.
Continue reading...Ashraf Ghani orders resumption of anti-Taliban offensive after attacks in Kabul and Nangarhar
Gunmen attacked a hospital that houses a maternity clinic in Kabul, killing at least 16 people including two newborn babies, and a suicide bomber killed at least 24 others at a funeral on a morning of double tragedy for Afghanistan.
In the capital, soldiers raced out of the hospital carrying infants wrapped in bloodstained blankets to waiting ambulances, after the attackers rampaged their way through the wards.
Continue reading...‘Profoundly radicalised’ man was apparently scouting for targets to attack, police say
Spanish police working with the FBI and the Moroccan intelligence officers say they have arrested a “profoundly radicalised” Islamic State follower who was apparently scouting for targets to attack in Barcelona during the country’s strict coronavirus lockdown.
The Guardia Civil said the man, a Moroccan citizen, was arrested in the Catalan capital following a surveillance operation.
Continue reading...Series of recent attacks raises concern the group is staging a comeback in the country
Islamic State militants have killed at least 10 Iraqi militia members in a coordinated overnight assault near the central city of Samarra, adding to concerns that the group, which once controlled large areas of the country, is staging a comeback.
The Iraqi military and the Popular Mobilisation Forces, an umbrella group of mostly Shia militias allied with the government, confirmed the attack in separate statements. It was the deadliest in a series of attacks in recent weeks that come as the country’s economic crisis deepens and the authorities try to contain the coronavirus outbreak.
Continue reading...Police say villagers were killed, most beheaded or shot, after some refused to join extremists
An Islamist extremist group in northern Mozambique has killed dozens of villagers in its most bloody attack.
More than 50 people were massacred in an attack in Xitaxi in Muidumbe district after locals refused to be recruited to its ranks, according to police cited by local media. Most were either shot dead or beheaded.
Continue reading...Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, from Maida Vale, was one of most wanted militants in Europe
Spanish police have arrested a former British rapper turned Islamic State extremist, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, one of the most wanted militants in Europe, in a counter-terrorism swoop on Tuesday.
British and other sources confirmed his identity a few hours after the national police agency in Madrid said it had arrested an Egyptian national and two other men in a flat in the southern Spanish city of Almeria.
Continue reading...Fresh calls for Australia to repatriate its citizens amid fears the camp is vulnerable to a Covid-19 outbreak
Forty-seven Australian children remain trapped in the abject al-Hawl camp in north-east Syria, as the region braces for a potential Covid-19 outbreak.
Syria has reported only a handful of cases, and there are none confirmed in the camp housing 68,000 women and children, most of them family of Islamic State fighters, but there has been little Covid-19 testing across the war-torn country.
Continue reading...Local communities flee as boundaries with Lake Chad become a war zone following ambush in which almost 100 soldiers died
The Chadian army that lost nearly 100 soldiers to a Boko Haram ambush a week ago has declared the Lake Chad borderlands a war zone, heightening fears that civilians will suffer an escalation in violence.
President Idriss Déby travelled to the region to announce the Wrath of Boma operation, named after the island where Boko Haram launched a seven-hour assault that Déby said was the worst the country’s military had ever suffered.
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