Tag Archives: Boys

Scores killed in Kabul blast as Afghanistan reels from attacks

Afghan policemen arrive at the site of a suicide bomb attack in Kabul, Afghanistan August 15, 2018. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

By Abdul Qadir Sediqi and Sayed Hassib

KABUL (Reuters) – A suicide blast in a mainly Shi’ite area of Kabul killed at least 48 people on Wednesday, the latest in a wave of attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians, soldiers and policemen over recent days.

The explosion, targeting an educational center in the west of the Afghan capital, tore through a large tent set up as a classroom in the courtyard, killing dozens of teenagers studying for a university entrance examination. The blast, which shattered weeks of relative calm in Kabul, also wounded at least 67, including both male and female students.

“Most of the boys at the educational center have been killed,” said Sayed Ali, who witnessed the blast. “It was horrific and many of the students were torn to pieces.”

Doctors at city hospitals, where people had gathered to try to find relatives who had been studying at the center, said many of the victims were severely burned.

Afghan men mourn after a blast in a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan August 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail

Afghan men mourn after a blast in a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan August 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail

“My brother was studying at the center and he was killed. I’m here to get his body,” said Abdul Khaliq, waiting outside the Isteqlal hospital.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the Kabul blast but the attack bore the hallmark of Islamic State, which has conducted many previous attacks on Shi’ite targets. The Taliban issued a statement denying it was involved.

The explosion, which came as the central city of Ghazni struggles to recover from five days of intense fighting between the Taliban and government forces, underlined how badly security in Afghanistan has degenerated, some two months before parliamentary elections scheduled for October.

Earlier on Wednesday, local officials said at least nine policemen and 35 soldiers were killed in an attack on their base in the northern province of Baghlan, the latest of a series that has killed dozens of members of the security forces nationwide.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan called for the fighting to stop, saying up to 150 civilians are estimated to have been killed in Ghazni, where the public hospital was overwhelmed and water and electricity supplies cut.

“The extreme human suffering caused by the fighting in Ghazni highlights the urgent need for the war in Afghanistan to end,” the top U.N. official in Afghanistan, Tadamichi Yamamoto, said in a statement.

Afghan policemen arrive at the site of a suicide bomb attack in Kabul, Afghanistan August 15, 2018. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

Afghan policemen arrive at the site of a suicide bomb attack in Kabul, Afghanistan August 15, 2018. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

TALIBAN PULLBACK

The Taliban, who launched their Ghazni assault last Friday and battled Afghan forces backed by U.S. airstrikes in the middle of the city for days, said their fighters had been pulled out to prevent further harm to the city’s population.

“They were facing severe shortages of food and drinking water as the power supply was also suspended two days ago,” a Taliban commander, who declined to be identified, said by telephone.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was providing dressing packages and oral and intravenous medicine to treat the wounded, along with electricity generators and fresh water for about 18,000 people.

The Ghazni attack, one of the Taliban’s most devastating in years, has clouded hopes for peace talks that had been prompted by an unprecedented ceasefire during the Eid celebration in June and a meeting last month between Taliban officials and a senior U.S. diplomat.

Two senior Taliban leaders told Reuters this week the group was considering announcing a ceasefire for the feast of Eid-al Adha, which begins next week, but the future of any peace process remained uncertain.

With parliamentary elections due on Oct. 20, authorities had been bracing for more attacks in Kabul and other cities, but even so, the scale of the violence has come as a shock to a government facing bitter criticism over its handling of the war.

In the southern province of Zabul, Taliban insurgents clashed with soldiers on Tuesday, forcing the government to send reinforcements from neighboring provinces to retain control of two checkposts.

The clashes killed 11 soldiers and one policeman, with three soldiers wounded, said Haji Atta Jan Haqbayan, a Zabul provincial council member.

Separately, six girls younger than 10 were killed when an unexploded mortar they picked up to play with suddenly exploded on Wednesday, officials in the eastern province of Laghman said.

(Additonal reporting by Jibran Ahmad, in PESHAWAR; Editing by Robert Birsel and Gareth Jones)

Rape used as wide-scale weapon of war in Syria: U.N. report

Paulo Pinheiro, Chairperson of the Commission of Inquiry on Syria (R), arrives with Karen Abuzayd, member of the Commission before the launch of their report on sexual and gender-based violence in Syria at the United Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland March 15, 2018. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Syrian government forces and allied militias have raped and sexually assaulted women, girls and men in a campaign of war to punish opposition communities – acts that constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, U.N. investigators said on Thursday.

In a major report, they found that opposition groups in Syria’s protracted civil war had also committed crimes of sexual violence and torture although these were “considerably less common”.

The report also said Islamic State (IS) and other armed extremist groups have executed women, men and children on charges of adultery, forced girls into marriage and persecuted homosexuals.

The 29-page report by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry, issued as Syria enters its eighth year of war, is based on 454 interviews with survivors, relatives, eyewitnesses, defectors, lawyers and medical staff.

Government forces raped civilians of both sexes during house searches and ground operations in the early stages of the conflict, and later at checkpoints and detention facilities, it said. The youngest known victim was a nine-year-old girl.

“Rape of women and girls was documented in 20 government political and military intelligence branches, and rape of men and boys was documented in 15 branches,” the report by the U.N. war crimes investigators said.

The independent experts led by Paulo Pinheiro – who have compiled confidential lists of suspects since 2011 – did not name individual perpetrators but said they had documented “numerous” cases of rapes by high-level officers.

Branches where rapes took place included Aleppo, Deraa, Homs, Hama and Damascus, as well as Sednaya military prison and the air force intelligence branch at Mezzeh military airport, both near the capital, the report said.

“Sexual violence against females and males is used to force confessions, to extract information, as punishment as well as to terrorize opposition communities,” the report said.

Victims suffered shame, depression, incontinence, impotence and miscarriages, and rejection by their families, it said.

The investigators found “no evidence of a systematic practice” on the part of armed groups to use sexual and gender-based violence to instill fear, but said that incidents had occurred in the context of sectarianism or revenge attacks.

Throughout Syria’s conflict, U.N. investigators had received allegations of extremist and terrorist groups imposing “mediaeval punishments on men accused of homosexuality”.

Women accused of adultery have been killed by stoning by the Islamist Jabhat Fateh al-Sham group, while homosexual men were thrown off a building by Jabhat al-Nusra jihadists, according to the report.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Islamic State using online ‘headhunters’ to recruit young Germans

A 3D printed logo of Twitter and an Islamic State flag are seen in this picture illustration taken February 18, 2016.

By Andrea Shalal

BERLIN (Reuters) – Islamic State is using “headhunters” on social media and instant messaging sites to recruit disaffected young people in Germany, some as young as 13 or 14, the head of the country’s domestic intelligence agency said on Thursday.

Hans-Georg Maassen also drew parallels between the militant Islamist group and past radical movements such as communism and Adolf Hitler’s Nationalist Socialists which also tried to lure young people keen to rebel against their parents and society.

“On social media networks there are practically headhunters who approach young people and get them interested in this (Islamist) ideology,” Maassen told foreign reporters in Berlin.

Maassen cited the case of a teenage German-Moroccan girl identified as Safia S., who is accused of stabbing a policeman at a train station in Hanover last February, and a 12-year-old German-Iraqi boy who tried to detonate two explosive devices in the western town of Ludwigshafen in December.

About 20 percent of an estimated 900 people from Germany who have been recruited by Islamic State to join the fight in Iraq and Syria are women, some as young as 13 or 14, he said.

German authorities are monitoring 548 Islamists deemed to be a security risk, but German law does not allow for their arrest until they have committed a crime, Maassen said.

He said he was satisfied that police and security officials had communicated well over the case of the failed Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri, who killed 12 people on Dec. 19 by ramming a truck through a Berlin Christmas market.

The case sparked criticism because German authorities had identified Amri, who was imprisoned in Italy for four years, as a security risk and had investigated him for various reasons, but he was never taken into custody.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said on Wednesday the cases of all those deemed a security risk in the aftermath of the Berlin attack would be reviewed.

Maassen said European intelligence agencies were also seeing the radicalization of other segments of society through social media, with growing numbers of people who were not previously politically active attracted to far-right groups.

Such people had their views reinforced in so-called “echo chambers” on the Internet, Maassen said.

“We’ve seen this with Islamic State, but now we’re seeing this with so-called ‘good citizens’ who are being radicalized, and we worry that this radicalization could be transformed into a willingness to commit violent acts,” Maassen said.

Support for far-right groups has grown in Germany following the arrival of more than a million migrants and asylum seekers over the past two years, many of them young Muslim men fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Gareth Jones)