Category Archives: Conflict and arms

Aid groups warn Boris Johnson against combining DfID with Foreign Office

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Charities caution that ‘UK aid risks becoming a vehicle for UK foreign policy’ if post-Brexit merger comes to fruition

A coalition of aid groups including the British Red Cross, Cafod and Oxfam GB has warned Boris Johnson that to abolish the Department for International Development would suggest Britain is “turning our backs on the world’s poorest people”.

One climate diplomacy expert said it would be “political suicide” to merge DfID with the Foreign Office in 2020, the same year the UK is hosting the UN climate summit, since the move would tie up senior civil servants when they were most needed to tackle the response to the climate crisis.

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‘We might be next’: families flee as Burkina Faso tips into chaos

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Schools targeted by extremist groups as half a million people are driven from their homes by violence and the climate crisis

Roukiata Sow looks tired. The mother of five has welcomed 26 people under the roof of her small brick house. “What will those kids become? Some haven’t been to school for more than two years … Are they all going to be bandits?” she asks.

She is sitting, her head draped in a long grey veil, with other women and girls in a small courtyard in front of her home in Dori, the capital of the Sahel region of northern Burkina Faso.

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‘I hate Isis’: uprooted survivors of Marawi siege long to return home

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Two years after their city on the Philippine island of Mindanao was liberated, tens of thousands of people driven from their homes remain in limbo

Thousands of survivors of an Islamic State siege in the Philippines are stuck in makeshift dwellings more than two years after their city was liberated, with many forced to drink contaminated water despite the presence of EU-funded aid agencies.

They were among an estimated 350,000 people driven from their homes when Islamist fighters seized control of the city of Marawi, on the island of Mindanao, in May 2017.

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UK still funding Myanmar camps despite UN boycott over conditions

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Humanitarian agencies say Rohingya people displaced by violence in Rakhine state are forced to live in ‘apartheid-like’ facilities

The UK has broken ranks with the UN and is continuing to put money into squalid Rohingya “apartheid-like” camps, despite a policy designed to avoid complicity in Myanmar’s rights abuses, the Guardian has learned.

Internal briefing documents as well as interviews with UN and humanitarian agency officials in Myanmar showed the British government was maintaining a policy of providing aid and other support to displaced people living in camps in Myanmar’s Rakhine state that have been slated for closure since 2017.

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UN peacekeepers intervene after violent clashes in South Sudan

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Nepalese blue helmets deployed in Lakes state after 79 people die in fighting between Gak and Manuer communities

UN peacekeepers have been sent to South Sudan’s northern Lakes region after a series of clashes in which 79 people were killed and more than 100 injured.

With roads impassable due to heavy rains and flooding, the Nepalese blue helmets travelled by helicopter on Tuesday from Rumbek, the state capital, to Maper, about 100km north, according to the UN mission in the country, Unmiss.

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‘I feel constant pain’: drug resistance adds to misery of Gaza gun victims

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The suffering of people wounded in conflict zones is being compounded by what doctors say are ‘horrifying levels’ of antibiotic resistance

When Jihad Nasser arrived at al-Awda trauma clinic in Gaza, he was hoping doctors could finally stop his pain. A gunshot wound in his right leg had not been not healing properly. The news, however, was bad.

The complex bone fracture he had suffered was badly infected with MRSA. Doctors told him it would not respond to treatment and they would need to amputate.

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Japanese aid chief among six dead in Afghanistan attack

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Japanese prime minister among those to pay tribute after Tetsu Nakamura is killed in deadly ambush on car

The head of a Japanese aid agency and five other people have been killed in an ambush in eastern Afghanistan

Among the victims was Tetsu Nakamura, 73, the respected physician and head of Peace Japan Medical Services, who had recently been granted honorary Afghan citizenship for his decades of humanitarian work in the country.

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Central African Republic seeks a salve for the scars of war

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Conflict-ravaged country hopes trials at new court in Bangui will at last punish those responsible for massacres and rape

The moment they entered town, the rebel soldiers started firing on civilians. As terrified crowds fled into nearby woods, a 40-year-old disabled woman called Monique Douma realised she was trapped.

“I told Monique to come with me but she said she couldn’t,” a relative later told investigators. “She said: ‘I don’t have the strength to run.’” Militants set fire to Douma’s home while she hid inside.

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Ebola health workers killed and injured by rebel attack in Congo

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World Health Organization chief warns violence will harm efforts to deal with Ebola outbreak

Four health workers fighting the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been killed and five injured in an attack by rebel militia, the World Health Organization has said.

The attacks occurred early on Thursday morning in the restive east of the vast central African country.

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UN warns Burkina Faso could become ‘another Syria’ as violence soars

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Children bear the brunt as extremism and climate crisis drive almost 500,000 people from their homes

The UN food agency has warned of an “escalating humanitarian crisis” in Burkina Faso, driven by growing extremist violence and the long-term impact of climate crisis in the arid central Sahel region.

A sharp increase in attacks, the result of the west African country becoming embroiled in the jihadist insurgency that began in the region in early 2015, has forced almost half a million people from their homes.

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‘We lay like corpses’: Bangladesh’s 1970s rape camp survivors speak out | Lucy Lamble

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Award-winning documentary Rising Silence preserves the testimony of some of the 200,000 women abducted during the country’s war of independence

In 1971, during the nine-month war that gave Bangladesh its independence from then West Pakistan, four sisters – Amina, Maleka, Mukhlesa and Budhi Begum – were abducted by Pakistani soldiers and local collaborators. They were among the more than 200,000 women held in rape camps and were detained for two and a half months.

“Twenty-two of us would lie like corpses in that room,” says Maleka as she explains how her elder sister Buhdi, “unable to bear the pain”, died before they were released.

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Nobel peace prize winners launch fund for wartime rape survivors

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Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad set $100m fundraising goal as they spearhead push to provide money, healthcare and education

Nobel laureates Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad have launched a fund to provide reparations for survivors of wartime rape.

The Global Survivors Fund will provide tailored support to help people recover from the emotional and physical trauma they have experienced. This could be in the form of financial compensation, support to access healthcare services or return to education, or assistance with getting somewhere to live.

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‘Be afraid’: one woman’s fight to hold Liberia’s warlords to account

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Faced by a ‘rising chorus of voices’, not least that of legislator Rustonlyn Dennis, President George Weah is considering setting up a long-awaited tribunal into decades-old war crimes

As a child in Liberia’s first civil war, Rustonlyn Dennis remembers seeing dead bodies in the street. In 1991, her immediate family managed to get out of the shattered capital, Monrovia, and survived, but a dozen relatives starved to death.

Civilians were attacked, child soldiers recruited and ethnic groups were targeted in that war, setting a pattern for many of the wars that were to follow on the African continent. Hundreds of thousands of people died.

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Lake Chad shrinking? It’s a story that masks serious failures of governance | Oli Brown and Janani Vivekananda

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Our two-year study shows the lake has been stable since the 1990s. Costly ‘solutions’ shift focus from the complex causes of the region’s deadly crisis

Lake Chad is a hydrological miracle – a life-giving, freshwater lake in the Sahara desert. But the region around the lake has been engulfed in a violent crisis for more than a decade, which has left nearly 10 million people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

Military crackdowns on insurgent groups such as Boko Haram have failed to end the violence. Bringing durable peace to the region requires unpicking a Gordian knot of many interlinked factors: poverty, sectarian mistrust, political marginalisation and corruption. The risks posed by the climate crisis to the rainfall-dependent livelihoods of the people of Lake Chad are an important strand of this challenge.

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‘Whistles, warnings, kaboom!’: a day with a landmine clearance team | Jamie Fullerton

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Aki Ra was a child soldier for Pol Pot, laying mines around Siem Reap. Now he is using his expertise to clear land in rural Cambodia and make it safe again

The rusty tailfin of the mortar round can be seen poking through the roots and mud of a small dirt patch, next to a skull and crossbones sign.

Aki Ra thinks the bomb could have been lying in rural Siem Reap, Cambodia, for 40 years. If it hadn’t been found, it may have added another death to the approximately 20,000 people killed by explosives laid in the country from the late 1960s to the 1990s.

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Orphans thought to be British rescued from Isis camp after Turkish attacks

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Children taken to safety in Raqqa after hundreds of people fled camp holding Islamic State affiliates in northern Syria

Three orphans believed to be British citizens have been evacuated from an area in northern Syria that was the focus of recent attacks by Turkish troops and their allies.

The Guardian understands that the three children, Amira, 10, her sister, Hiba, eight, and their brother, Hamza, were evacuated from a camp for people associated with Islamic State in Ain Issa on Sunday. They were part of a group of 24 children taken to safety by the UN refugee organisation.

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‘They were all killed in front of my eyes’: the brutal cost of war in Afghanistan

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In a country where decades of conflict have taken a profound toll on mental health, professional support is scarce

Human Rights Watch has raised alarms over the lack of mental health support in wartorn Afghanistan, where more than half of the population is experiencing psychological distress.

The advocacy group said that, despite the high prevalence of psychological and mental health conditions, the Afghan government is failing to provide adequate help, with fewer than 10% of the country’s population receiving assistance.

HRW cited a 2018 EU survey that said the overwhelming majority of the country’s population (85%) have seen or been involved in at least one traumatic event in their lives.

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Syria: Erdoğan’s eyes more likely to be on Putin than Trump

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Russia and Iran have troops in Syria and will see opportunities amid chaos of US impulsiveness

Donald Trump’s decision to give the green light – now seemingly turning amber – for Turkey to enter northern Syria has produced a torrent of criticism from European capitals to Washington Republicans, all pointing out that Ankara’s move will revive Islamic State, cause untold civilian deaths and land the US with an indelible reputation across the Middle East as an unreliable ally.

But the west has been losing traction in Syria over the past two years, and it may be the reaction of Russia and Iran, who have forces on the ground in Syria, that will most concern the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Their reaction may also reveal more about the long-term future of Syria’s eight-year civil war.

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Tens of thousands of civilians flee Turkish offensive in Syria

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Aid workers also join exodus amid warnings that campaign against Kurdish forces will put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk

Tens of thousands of civilians have taken flight in an effort to escape fighting after Turkish troops began a military operation against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, the UN refugee agency has said.

According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 60,000 people have fled their homes since Wednesday.

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I thought I’d seen all the horrors possible here in Idlib – until now | Raed Al Saleh

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The terror being unleashed from the sky is the worst it’s ever been in my eight years of leading White Helmet rescue workers

Most of my country is in ruins. But the worst crisis of Syria’s conflict is unfolding now. Beautiful cities have become ghost towns, their inhabitants forced to flee the country or pushed into one of the last remaining areas outside of Assad’s control. More than 3 million people, half of whom are children, are trapped in Idlib, where a tyrant is unleashing horror from the sky. It’s the largest displacement crisis of the 21st century and yet Idlib’s people have been abandoned by the world.

After eight years leading teams of volunteer rescue workers, the White Helmets, I thought I had seen all the horrors possible. But looking at the state of Idlib today, I can honestly say it’s the worst my country has been.

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