The extremist group’s enduring influence in Mogadishu makes the Somali capital a dangerous place to live and work
Once every other month, journalist Hassan Dahir, 28, leaves his hostel in central Mogadishu under the cover of darkness to visit his mother in Yaqshid district, north-east of the capital.
He will spend the night with her and return to his rented room before dawn.
Continue reading...In rebuke of Trump’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, resolution would force administration to withdraw US troops
Asserting congressional authority over war-making powers, the US House of Representatives approved a resolution Wednesday that would force the Trump administration to withdraw US troops from involvement in Yemen, in a rebuke of Donald Trump’s alliance with the Saudi-led coalition behind the military intervention.
Lawmakers in both parties are increasingly uneasy over the humanitarian crisis in Yemen and are skeptical of the US partnership with that coalition, especially in light of Saudi Arabia’s role in the killing of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the royal family.
Continue reading...Shamima Begum, 19, in refugee camp in Syria after fleeing last territory held by Islamic State
An east London schoolgirl who left the UK in 2015 to join Islamic State has been tracked down in Syria where she said has no regrets about joining the group, but now wants to come home as she is nine months pregnant.
Shamima Begum, 19, said she fled the jihadists’ last remaining enclave in Baghuz, eastern Syria, as she was tired of life on a battlefield and feared for her unborn child after her two other children died.
Continue reading...Youssef heard the shots that killed his boyfriend. Resettled in Australia, his is one of four stories told in a new documentary
“I tried to escape, and then one of them hit me. Hazem never allowed anyone to lay a hand on me.”
Youssef’s breath shortens with each word, his face disguised from the camera as he relives the moment his partner sought to shield him from a group of men on a Baghdad street.
Continue reading...Monica Witt, who defected in 2013, worked as a cryptologist and a counter-intelligence investigator for more than 10 years
A former US air force intelligence officer who defected to Iran in 2013 has been charged with espionage, giving away the identity of a US agent and other secrets.
Monica Witt, aged 39, was a cryptologist and a counter-intelligence investigator for the US air force for more than 10 years before working as an intelligence analyst for the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton for five months in 2008 and doing other private sector work.
Continue reading...Plaintiff’s lawyers wanted to suspend case after argument about his identity came unstuck in Canberra high court
The high court has rejected an attempt to reopen a controversial ruling which effectively enabled indefinite immigration detention in Australia.
The full bench in Canberra took the highly unusual step of delivering an immediate judgement, after a tumultuous day which saw the plaintiff’s lawyers seek to stop them hearing the case and have it sent back to a single judge for reassessment.
Continue reading...Small enclave of extremists holds out in Syria against intensive bombardment
Clamouring up dirt berms, clutching babies and blankets, the newest refugees of the Islamic State could well be the last.
Inside the nearby enclave they fled are perhaps no more than 500 people – nearly all of them fighters who are refusing to leave a two square kilometre corner of eastern Syria that is all that remains of the group’s so-called caliphate.
Continue reading...Lack of participation at Middle East event reflects anger over US policy on Iran and Syria
Key European powers will offer only limited participation in a high-profile Trump administration summit on the Middle East starting on Wednesday, reflecting their growing anger over unilateral US policymaking on Iran and Syria.
The UK foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, will leave the Warsaw summit early, pleading Brexit Commons business, while France is sending a civil servant and Germany its junior foreign minister.
Continue reading...Hundreds of thousands of Iranians march through capital to mark 40th anniversary of Islamic revolution
Iran’s president has insisted “enemy” plots against the country will fail and called President Donald Trump an “idiot” as vast crowds marked 40 years since the Islamic revolution.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including soldiers, students, clerics and chador-clad women holding small children, marched through the capital in freezing rain on Monday to mark the anniversary.
Continue reading...Hundreds of thousands of students, clerics, soldiers and black-clad women holding small children thronged streets across Iran to mark the toppling of the shah – many carrying portraits of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who died in 1989, and Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Continue reading...A Commons committee is scrutinising UK arms export controls – yet the Yemen conflict isn’t even on the agenda
Seated in front of a tapestry embroidered with words from the lexicon of “British values” – freedom, equality, tolerance, liberty – ten MPs spent an hour last week taking evidence from NGOs on an issue that calls these values into question: UK arms export policy.
This is the Parliamentary committees on arms export controls (CAEC) in action: a body responsible for scrutinising government policy and holding it to account.
Continue reading...Refugee Bahraini footballer returning to Melbourne after extradition case dropped
The refugee Bahraini footballer Hakeem al-Araibi has boarded a flight to Australia after Thai authorities withdrew an extradition case against him.
Thai authorities said the Bahraini government had decided to end its pursuit of Al-Araibi, who fled Bahrain in 2014 before being granted permanent residence in Australia, where he has lived since.
Continue reading...Foreign fighters reportedly executed after launching attack against Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Fresh details have emerged of the coup attempt against Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, with witnesses claiming foreign members of the terror group lost a two-day battle with his bodyguards before being rounded up and executed.
A witness who spoke to the Guardian after being smuggled from the last hamlet in eastern Syria held by Isis, said the clash took place in al Keshma, a village next to Baghouz in September, three months earlier than regional intelligence officials believed it had taken place.
Continue reading...Simon Tisdall’s denunciation of the US-led western involvement in Afghanistan as “17 or so years of ultimately pointless, criminal mayhem” (The US ruined Afghanistan. It can’t simply walk away now, Opinion, 8 February) is about as far wide of the mark as it is possible to be, unless you are Donald Trump. Even more curious, Tisdall then enjoins the US, presumably the “criminals” in this enterprise, not to scuttle away.
I served in Iraq and Afghanistan and am not naive enough to believe that one was the “good war”, while the other one wasn’t. But Tisdall seems to forget why we intervened in Afghanistan in the first place: to remove a monstrous regime, the Taliban, that had allowed the perpetrators of 9/11 to set up camp in their country and also terrorised its own people. Destroying the Taliban regime was the right thing to do.
Continue reading...Hind Mohammed al-Bolooki could be sent home after North Macedonia rejected her claim
An Emirati woman who fled her family and is now trapped in a detention centre in North Macedonia is begging to be allowed to claim asylum elsewhere instead of being deported back home, the Guardian has learned.
Hind Mohammed al-Bolooki, 43, says she was locked in a room at her home in Dubai in October last year by family members after she asked for a divorce, but she managed to escape and leave the country.
Continue reading...Tory strategist’s pitch detailed how CTF Partners would spread negative stories and press Fifa to ‘restart bidding process’
Sir Lynton Crosby offered to work on a campaign to cancel the 2022 Qatar World Cup and get it awarded to another country in return for £5.5m, according to a leaked plan that gives a rare insight into the activities of one of the world’s best-known political operatives.
The detailed pitch document – “a proposal for a campaign to expose the truth of the Qatar regime and bring about the termination of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar” – was written in April last year and personally signed by Crosby.
Continue reading...Wearing a baseball hat and smoking a shisha pipe in a cafe in Cairo, Dawitt tells me he is 19, but looks years younger. He explains that he escaped Eritrea aged 13 to avoid forced, indefinite conscription into military service.
His family helped him pay smugglers to travel via Sudan to Egypt. Struggling with debt and desperate to make the sea crossing to Europe, he looked in vain for regular work. Then he met a Sudanese man who suggested a “safe and easy way” to raise the cash – selling a kidney.
Continue reading...The divers, who were named 2019 Australians of the Year, have written to the Thai prime minister to free the refugee
The Thailand cave rescue diving heroes and Australians of the Year, Dr Richard Harris and Dr Craig Challen, have joined the campaign to save the refugee footballer Hakeem-al Arabi, a Bahraini refugee and resident of Australia who is being detained in Bangkok.
Harris, an anaesthetist and diver from Adelaide, and Challen, a champion diver from Wangara, Western Australia, were part of the global team that freed the trapped Wild Boars football team in July 2018. They have been friends and cave diving partners for years.
Continue reading...Fighting between UN-backed GNA and Libyan National Army over field closed since December
Fighting has broken out over the future of Libya’s largest oil field, as forces loyal to the UN-recognised Tripoli-based government battle Libyan National Army (LNA) forces led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the leading figure in fractured Libya’s east.
Al-Sharara field, 560 miles south of Tripoli, is capable of producing 315,000 barrels of crude a day – about a third of Libya’s total current output. But it has been closed by the Libyan National Oil Corporation (NOC) since December when the installation was seized by local tribes demanding the Tripoli government did more to lift the area out of poverty.
Continue reading...US media quotes intelligence sources who intercepted a conversation between Mohammed bin Salman and an aide in 2017
Saudi Arabia’s crown prince told a senior aide he would go after Jamal Khashoggi “with a bullet” a year before the dissident journalist was killed inside the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate, according to a US media report.
US intelligence understood that Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s 33-year-old de facto ruler, was ready to kill the journalist, although he may not have literally meant he planned to shoot him, according to the New York Times ($).
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