The United States warned Friday that the string of military takeovers in Africa’s Sahel region will hamper the fight against terrorism and demanded that Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers deny safe haven to terrorist groups including al-Qaida and the Islamic State.
With little more than, say, a five-second social video clip of a refugee lying in a farmer’s field, you can find out what government was responsible for a civilian killing. In this case from 2020, investigators at Bellingcat used the direction of crop furrows beneath the man’s body, the length of the shadows, and the gap between the “crack” and “bang” of the gunshot to link the shooting of a Pakistani refugee to Greek security forces near the Turkish border.
In 2018, as regime troops crushed the rebel-held city of Douma in Syria, the videos emerging from the ground were apocalyptic in nature. Fire rained down from above as heavy shelling forced the civilian population underground and into basements, where yellow-green chlorine gas dropped by helicopters suffocated victims in darkness.
I still recall the first time I saw a defendant accused of crimes against humanity admit guilt in court. It was 2008. I had been a journalist for a few years and had covered trials at the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague and at the Bosnian War Crimes Chamber. But this was different.
Saudi border guards have killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report. If committed as part of a Saudi government policy to murder migrants, these killings, which appear to continue, would be a crime against humanity.
It was easier to approach Moscow in June than to leave it in August. Wagner Group mercenary leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who staged a short-lived mutiny against the Russian military two months ago, was reportedly killed in a plane crash along with nine other passengers on Wednesday while traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg, according to Russian authorities and Wagner-affiliated Telegram groups. Some reports have indicated that the plane was downed by Russian air defenses. Just hours earlier, General Sergei Surovikin, who allegedly had advance knowledge of the Wagner mutiny and had not been seen in public since it occurred, was removed from his post as head of Russia’s air force.
In an astonishing turn of events starNng 23 June 2023, the Wagner Group’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin declared all-out war on the Russian state, leading a convoy of mercenaries to march straight toward Moscow. The muNny, which embarrassed Russian President Vladimir PuNn and caught the Russian military and security services completely off guard, developed at lightning speed and ended just as quickly, leading to widespread confusion and chaos. Ager storming through towns and ciNes in southern Russia, largely unopposed and in many cases welcomed by locals, Wagner troops announced a sudden return to their field camps, following a deal cut by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Under the terms of the deal, Prigozhin accepted exile in Belarus, leaving the future of Wagner very much in quesNon. This special report puts the Wagner Group into perspecNve and foreshadows the factors that will shape what happens next.
The junta in Niger claimed deteriorating security was a justification for their taking over, but attacks by jihadist groups affiliated with both Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State on civilians and military targets have continued since the military takeover.
The Iranian regime is advancing its ideology and increasing its influence in Shia mosques throughout the United States, while the Biden administration is sitting idly by, presumably still seeking to return to a disastrous nuclear deal, lift sanctions against Iran, and fund the regime to launch more terrorist attacks, further repress its own citizens, and pave the way for it legally to obtain an unlimited supply of nuclear weapons.
A leader of the jihadist group Islamic State (EI), the “planner and sponsor” of three deadly attacks in 2018 in the capital Tripoli, has been captured, the head of Libya’s Government of National Unity announced on Thursday evening.