• #Daesh à Alep
    de #Naji_Al_Jerf

    Dernier reportage de Naji Al Jerf, opposant au régime syrien et à l’organisation Etat islamique (EI) avant son assassinat à Gaziantep (Turquie) le 27 décembre 2015.
    Journaliste originaire de Salamiyeh en Syrie, il était l’auteur de plusieurs documentaires sur la révolution syrienne et avait collaboré avec le groupe Raqqa is being slaughtered silently (Raqqa est massacrée en silence) qui documente depuis avril 2014 les abus et exactions des jihadistes dans la ville de Raqqa au nord de la Syrie, capitale autoproclamée de l’organisation terroriste.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEm7hwjO0YM

    –-

    La page wikipedia de Naji Al Jerf :


    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naji_al-Jerf

    #film #film_documentaire #ISIS #Etat_islmaique #Syrie

  • #Shingal

    En août 2014, L’État islamique attaque le peuple Yézidis dans la région montagneuse de Shingal, et perpétue un véritable massacre dans cette région au nord-ouest de l’Irak. Asmail, son frère Mazlum et leurs familles sont des leurs. Comme nombre d’autres Yézidis, ils vont devoir fuir vers ce refuge ancestral que sont les montagnes de Shingal et lutter pour la survie de leurs familles et de leur peuple...

    Si la crise humanitaire qui a découlé de cette tragédie est relativement connue de tous, de nombreuses zones d’ombre persistent quant aux éléments qui ont conduit au génocide et à l’exode de toute une population.
    Tout au long de cet album, Tore Rørbæk et Mikkel Sommer donnent corps à un peuple méconnu, victime de la barbarie, et tentent de faire la lumière sur ces éléments souvent passés sous silence...

    https://www.la-boite-a-bulles.com/book/618
    #BD #bande_dessinée #livre

    #monts_Shingal #montagne #Yézidis #Irak #Siba #peshmerga #Gerzerik #daesh #territoires_contestés #Kurdistan #Al-Qaïda #yézidisme #Snouni #Sikeniye #massacre #génocide #Ousman_Pacha #conversion_forcée #histoire #viols #exécutions_de_masse #esclavage_sexuel #aide_humanitaire #corridor_humanitaire #réfugiés #camp_de_Newroz #Newroz #Essian #Dohuk #Kurdistan_irakien #Etat_islamique #religion #résistance #ISIS #Etat_islamique

    • La montagna sola. Gli ezidi e l’autonomia democratica di Şengal

      Gli ezidi sono diventati noti a livello internazionale dopo il massacro subito dall’Isis nell’agosto del 2014. Un popolo di cui si è sempre saputo pochissimo – anche per l’assenza di testi scritti dovuta a un ferreo ricorso alla tradizione orale – è stato preso come esempio della brutalità dello Stato islamico e usato per giustificare l’intervento militare occidentale. Relegando gli ezidi al ruolo di vittime senza speranza né capacità di pensiero politico. Questo libro ne ricostruisce la storia millenaria, la cultura e la religione, e ne riporta la voce diretta raccolta dalle autrici nei loro viaggi a Şengal, di cui uno compiuto insieme a Zerocalcare, autore dell’illustrazione in copertina.
      Şengal è l’unica montagna che si staglia nella vasta piana di Ninive, al confine con Siria e Turchia. In Iraq la chiamano «la montagna sola», come solo è sempre stato il popolo ezida che la abita, società divenuta introversa a seguito delle numerose persecuzioni subite. Dalla loro resistenza contro l’Isis e dalla liberazione di Şengal, grazie all’aiuto del Partito dei lavoratori del Kurdistan e delle unità curde del Rojava, è nata un’esperienza di autogoverno ispirata al confederalismo democratico, ancora in fieri e minacciata dalle stesse forze che nel 2014 permisero il massacro.
      Sulla montagna sola si respira la voglia di una vita finalmente libera dalla paura insieme all’entusiasmo di chi ha preso in mano le redini del proprio destino. Una popolazione chiusa al mondo esterno, conservatrice e legata alle proprie pratiche ha saputo costruire una forma di autogestione del proprio territorio secondo un paradigma estremamente moderno e allo stesso tempo adattabile alle peculiari e antiche caratteristiche dei popoli mediorientali – perché è da lì che trae origine e ispirazione.

      https://edizionialegre.it/product/la-montagna-sola

  • Il Comune di #Bologna rimuove la targa in memoria di Lorenzo «Orso» Orsetti

    Il 7 novembre 2019 pubblicavamo il comunicato (https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/2019/11/lorenzo-orsetti-in-cirenaica) col quale il «collettivo di collettivi» Resistenze in Cirenaica rivendicava l’intitolazione dal basso di un giardino pubblico ancora senza nome al compagno Lorenzo Orsetti detto «Orso», nome di battaglia «#Tekosher», caduto in Siria nella lotta contro l’ISIS.

    Oggi, 31 gennaio 2020, la targa è stata rimossa. Ora il giardino ha un altro nome, un nome «con tutti i crismi» burocratici e amministrativi.

    La targa in memoria di Orso sarebbe potuta rimanere, perché no? Tanti luoghi delle nostre città hanno un nome ufficioso e uno ufficiale, coesistenti e mai confusi l’uno con l’altro. Tantopiù che parliamo di un giardino pubblico, senza numeri civici, dove non poteva sorgere alcun equivoco o disguido. E invece no, il nome di Orso lo si è voluto rimuovere ed è stato rimosso, senza alcuna remora.

    RIC ha appena pubblicato sul proprio blog alcune considerazioni sull’episodio: https://resistenzeincirenaica.com/2020/01/31/odomen-omen



    https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/2020/01/rimossa-targa-ilorenzo-orsetti
    #Bologne #toponymie #Lorenzo_Orsetti #mémoire #plaque_commémorative #Italie #toponymie_politique

    #partisans #ISIS #Etat_islamique #nouveaux_partisans #Syrie

    ping @albertocampiphoto @wizo @reka

    • Un nuovo partigiano in Cirenaica: RIC intitola un giardino pubblico a Lorenzo Orsetti

      La sera del 7 novembre 2019 Resistenze In Cirenaica ha reso omaggio al combattente internazionalista Lorenzo Orsetti, caduto in Siria il 18 marzo 2019. Abbiamo dato il suo nome a un giardino ancora privo di intitolazione all’inizio di via Sante Vincenzi. Ora si chiama Giardino Lorenzo Orsetti detto Orso – Partigiano (1986 – 2019).

      Nel rione Cirenaica di Bologna la maggior parte delle vie porta nomi di partigiani caduti per la Liberazione; anche Lorenzo è stato un partigiano ed è così che lo ricordiamo, tra le combattenti e i combattenti di tutte le liberazioni.

      “Orso” stava dando il proprio contributo alla lotta contro l’ISIS e alla rivoluzione del confederalismo democratico, un esempio di società laica, antisessista e antifascista in pieno Medio Oriente.

      In diverse città – Roma, Torino, Palermo, Firenze… – piazze e parchi portano già il nome di questo nostro compagno.

      Dal 2014 Resistenze In Cirenaica lavora per fare dell’intero rione un grande luogo di memoria, raccontando le storie di resistenza al colonialismo e al fascismo incastonate nei nomi delle vie e nel nome stesso del quartiere; organizzando trekking urbani e performance; realizzando murales e curando libri autoprodotti. L’azione che ha tenuto a battesimo il progetto RIC è stata l’intitolazione dal basso al ferroviere anarchico Lorenzo Giusti del giardino pubblico di via Barontini.

      Durante un trekking urbano abbiamo anche reintitolato via Libia alla partigiana Vinka Kitarovic e via De Amicis alla partigiana Tolmina Guazzaloca.

      Le nostre azioni hanno ispirato le ignote che l’8 marzo scorso hanno ribattezzato la piazzetta degli Umarells «piazzetta delle Partigiane», così come molte altre performance nel resto d’Italia.

      Quella di ieri sera non era dunque la prima azione di guerriglia odonomastica e non sarà l’ultima.

      In Siria del Nord si continua a combattere e morire e dopo l’invasione turca la situazione si è fatta ancora più grave. In questi anni migliaia di persone provenienti da tutta la Siria e da tutto il mondo sono cadute per difendere la rivoluzione del Rojava. Questo cartello non è solo per Orso ma per tutte e tutti loro.

      Della situazione in Siria si parlerà questa sera al Vag61 di via Paolo Fabbri 110.

      Alle 19:30 ci sarà una cena a sostegno della Mezzaluna Rossa Kurdistan Italia Onlus.
      Alle 21 si svolgerà l’incontro con il regista Luigi D’Alife, autore del documentario Binxet – Sotto il confine, per un aggiornamento sulla situazione della Siria del Nord.
      A seguire, la proiezione del documentario Radio Kobani di Reber Dosky.

      https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/2019/11/lorenzo-orsetti-in-cirenaica

  • « Les Kurdes nous ont dit "sortez, courez !" » : le témoignage de djihadistes françaises

    Prises sous le feu de l’armée turque, les forces kurdes ouvrent les portes des camps de #prisonniers #djihadistes. Témoignages recueillis par deux journalistes qui les avaient suivies dans le cadre d’un livre.

    Dix Françaises, membres de l’organisation Etat islamique (EI), sont libres en Syrie, après avoir pu sortir du camp d’Aïn Issa, à 50 km au nord de Raqqa. Selon nos informations, les forces kurdes, qui les détenaient, ne pouvaient plus les garder.

    Ces dix Françaises et leurs 25 enfants ont été sortis du camp, dimanche 13 octobre au matin, alors que l’armée turque prenait pour cible Aïn Issa, ville sous contrôle kurde dans le nord de la #Syrie. Dans l’incapacité de gérer ces centaines de femmes djihadistes étrangères retenues dans cette prison, les gardes kurdes ont quitté les lieux, les laissant libres.

    Comme les autres, les dix Françaises sont donc sorties dans la précipitation avec leurs enfants. Toutes sont connues des services de renseignement et sont sous le coup d’un mandat international pour avoir rejoint #Daech.

    http://www.leparisien.fr/international/en-syrie-les-kurdes-laissent-s-echapper-des-djihadistes-francaises-14-10-
    #femmes #camps #Kurdistan #EI #ISIS #Etat_islamique #prison #Aïn_Issa #France #françaises #fuite

  • British orphans found trapped in Syria IS camp

    The war in Syria has been reignited on new fronts by Turkey’s incursion into the north east of the country.

    In camps across the regions are thousands of terrified children whose parents supported the Islamic State group, but most of their countries don’t want them home.

    In one camp, the BBC has discovered three children, believed to be from London, whose parents joined IS five years ago, and were subsequently killed in the fighting.

    The children - Amira, Heba and Hamza - are stranded, in danger and they want to come home.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-50030567/british-orphans-found-trapped-in-syria-is-camp
    #enfants #enfance #ISIS #EI #Etat_islamique #camps #orphelins #Syrie #conflit #guerre #combattants_étrangers

    • Gli svizzeri della Jihad

      Chi sono gli jihadisti elvetici, di che reti facevano parte e cosa li ha spinti a partire? Da Winterthur a Ginevra, dai palazzi popolari ai quartieri borghesi, siamo andati a cercare i giovani che si sono uniti all’ISIS.

      Sono svizzeri e sono partiti per fare la jihad. Molti di loro hanno combattuto per lo stato islamico, altri sono entrati in contatto con gli attentatori che hanno colpito l’Europa. Sono stati catturati in Siria e adesso si trovano nelle prigioni nel nord del paese.Con loro ci sono donne e bambini. Per ora nessun tribunale sta giudicando i loro crimini, tutti quanti sono in attesa che i rispettivi paesi d’origine decidano come procedere nei loro confronti. Uno stallo che sembra però sbloccarsi: secondo alcune indiscrezioni Berna starebbe considerando l’ipotesi di far rientrare le donne e i bambini.Una squadra di Falò è stata nei campi di prigionia che ospitano donne e bambini dell’ISIS; tendopoli al collasso in cui l’ideologia radicale sta risorgendo. Ma ci sono anche svizzeri che hanno fatto parte dello Stato Islamico e sono già rientrati in Svizzera.Chi sono questi jihadisti elvetici, di che reti facevano parte e cosa li ha spinti a partire? Da Winterthur a Ginevra, dai palazzi popolari ai quartieri borghesi, siamo andati a cercare i giovani che si sono uniti all’ISIS. Alcuni si dicono pentiti, altri sembrano aver mantenuto dei legami con gli ambienti radicalizzati. A che punto stanno i processi nei loro confronti? Chi si occupa di sorvegliare le loro attività? Quanto pericolosi li dobbiamo considerare?

      https://www.rsi.ch/play/tv/falo/video/gli-svizzeri-della-jihad----------?id=12256843
      #documentaire #film #suisse #femmes #al-Hol #camps_de_réfugiés #détention #prison

    • UK special forces may help British orphans escape Syria

      Home Office reverses stance and says it will consider repatriating children in camps.
      https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d0a1d88ba6202391e12730afd5aac7dc8694af18/0_235_5616_3370/master/5616.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=204f73a9482a4debc42258

      Britain will consider repatriating orphans and unaccompanied children in north-east Syria if they are alerted to their presence by local military or aid agencies.

      Home Office officials said the UK would assist British orphans trapped in Syria after the Turkish invasion, reversing a previous policy that children had to be taken out of the country before they might get any help.

      Officials would not say exactly how children might be extracted from the country, implying that SAS or other special forces, still understood to be based in the region, could be involved in the repatriations.

      They said children thought to be British would be assessed on a case-by-case basis once removed from Syria and only orphans and unaccompanied children would be eligible to be brought back to the UK.

      The shift in policy comes after a BBC reporting team found three English-speaking orphans aged 10 or under in a Syria camp over the weekend. The children are believed to have been taken by their parents to live under Islamic State five years ago.

      The eldest, Amira, 10, told the film crew that their parents and other immediate adult family members were killed in an air assault on Baghouz, the last Isis stronghold, which fell in March, and she wanted to return to the UK.

      Save the Children, one of the few charities operating in north-east Syria, said the Home Office developments were a step in the right direction but more detail was required.

      “For this to translate into a real change of policy, we need to know that the government is working on how to bring all British children to the UK while we still can, not just those featured in the media,” the charity said.

      It is not clear how many British unaccompanied children remain in the crowded refugee camps in the Kurdish region of Syria. Some unofficial estimates put the figure at around 30.

      Any child born to a Briton – whether inside or outside the UK – is a British citizen. Before the Turkish invasion the government had said it was too risky to try to attempt any rescue children with a legitimate claim.

      When Shamima Begum was deprived of her UK citizenship in February, the British government said her infant son was still British. After the child died at a Syrian refugee camp at the age of three weeks, Jeremy Hunt, then foreign secretary, said it had been too dangerous for British officials to attempt to a rescue.

      Opposition MPs questioned whether the change in stance would lead to more orphaned children getting help. Stephen Gethins, the SNP’s foreign affairs spokesman, said: “We know the UK government’s record on resettling refugees and vulnerable people leaves a lot to be desired. Beyond the rhetoric there is very little substance from the UK government.”

      On Tuesday the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, had hinted at a change of policy when, during an urgent debate on the Syrian crisis, he said: “We are looking at whether orphans and unaccompanied minors who bear UK nationality can be given safe passage to return to the UK.”

      Further details were spelled out on Wednesday by the Home Office, which has been leading on repatriations from Syria.

      The government does not want former Isis fighters and adult supporters to return to the UK, although around 450 are thought to have previously done so, and it is suggesting they could be put on trial in the region.

      https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/16/uk-shifts-stance-on-helping-british-orphans-escape-syria?CMP=Share_iOSA
      #orphelins #rapatriement

  • Syria-Turkey briefing: The fallout of an invasion for civilians

    Humanitarians are warning that a Turkish invasion in northeast Syria could force hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, as confusion reigns over its possible timing, scope, and consequences.

    Panos Moumtzis, the UN’s regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria, told reporters in Geneva on Monday that any military operation must guard against causing further displacement. “We are hoping for the best but preparing for the worst,” he said, noting that an estimated 1.7 million people live in the country’s northeast.

    Some residents close to the Syria-Turkey border are already leaving, one aid worker familiar with the situation on the ground told The New Humanitarian. Most are staying with relatives in nearby villages for the time-being, said the aid worker, who asked to remain anonymous in order to continue their work.

    The number of people who have left their homes so far remains relatively small, the aid worker said, but added: “If there is an incursion, people will leave.”

    The International Rescue Committee said “a military offensive could immediately displace at least 300,000 people”, but analysts TNH spoke to cautioned that the actual number would depend on Turkey’s plans, which remain a major unknown.

    As the diplomatic and security communities struggle to get a handle on what’s next, the same goes for humanitarians in northeastern Syria – and the communities they are trying to serve.

    Here’s what we know, and what we don’t:
    What just happened?

    Late on Sunday night, the White House said that following a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria,” adding that US soldiers would not be part of the move, and “will no longer be in the immediate area”.

    The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – the Syrian-Kurdish-led militia that until now had been supported by the United States and played a major role in wresting territory back from the so-called Islamic State (IS) group in Syria – vowed to stand its ground in the northeast.

    An SDF spokesperson tweeted that the group “will not hesitate to turn any unprovoked attack by Turkey into an all-out war on the entire border to DEFEND ourselves and our people”.

    Leading Republicans in the US Congress criticised President Donald Trump’s decision, saying it represents an abandonment of Kurdish allies in Syria, and the Pentagon appeared both caught off-guard and opposed to a Turkish incursion.

    Since then, Trump has tweeted extensively on the subject, threatening to “totally destroy and obliterate the economy of Turkey” if the country does anything he considers to be “off limits”.

    On the ground, US troops have moved out of two key observation posts on the Turkey-Syria border, in relatively small numbers: estimates range from 50 to 150 of the total who would have been shifted, out of around 1,000 US soldiers in the country.
    What is Turkey doing?

    Erdogan has long had his sights on a “safe zone” inside Syria, which he has said could eventually become home to as many as three million Syrian refugees, currently in Turkey.

    Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said in August that only 17 percent of Turkey’s estimated 3.6 million Syrian refugees come from the northeast of the country, which is administered by the SDF and its political wing.

    Turkish and US forces began joint patrols of a small stretch of the border early last month. While Turkey began calling the area a “safe zone”, the United States referred to it as a “security mechanism”. The terms of the deal were either never made public or not hammered out.

    In addition to any desire to resettle refugees, which might only be a secondary motive, Turkey wants control of northeast Syria to rein in the power of the SDF, which it considers to be a terrorist organisation.

    One of the SDF’s main constituent parts are People’s Defense Units – known by their Kurdish acronym YPG.

    The YPG are an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK – a Turkey-based Kurdish separatist organisation that has conducted an insurgency against the Turkish government for decades, leading to a bloody crackdown.

    While rebels fight for the northwest, and Russian-backed Syrian government forces control most of the rest of Syria, the SDF currently rules over almost all of Hassakeh province, most of Raqqa and Deir Ezzor provinces, and a small part of Aleppo province.
    How many civilians are at risk?

    There has not been a census in Syria for years, and numbers shift quickly as people flee different pockets of conflict. This makes estimating the number of civilians in northeast Syria very difficult.

    The IRC said in its statement it is “deeply concerned about the lives and livelihoods of the two million civilians in northeast Syria”; Moumtzis mentioned 1.7 million people; and Save the Children said “there are 1.65 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in this area, including more than 650,000 displaced by war”.

    Of those who have had to leave their homes in Raqqa, Deir Ezzor, and Hassakeh, only 100,000 are living in camps, according to figures from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Others rent houses or apartments, and some live in unfinished buildings or tents.

    “While many commentators are rightly focusing on the security implications of this policy reversal, the humanitarian implications will be equally enormous,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, and a former high-ranking Obama administration aid official.

    “All across Northern Syria, hundreds of thousands of displaced and conflict-affected people who survived the horrors of the… [IS] era will now face the risk of new violence between Turkish and SDF forces.”
    Who will be first in the firing line?

    It’s unlikely all of northeast Syria would be impacted by a Turkish invasion right away, given that so far the United States has only moved its troops away from two border posts, at Tel Abyad (Kurdish name: Gire Spi), and roughly 100 kilometres to the east, at Ras al-Ayn (Kurdish name: Serê Kaniyê).

    Depending on how far into Syria one is counting, aid workers estimate there are between 52,000 to 68,000 people in this 100-kilometre strip, including the towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn themselves. The aid worker in northeast Syria told TNH that if there is an offensive, these people are more likely, at least initially, to stay with family or friends in nearby villages than to end up in camps.

    The aid worker added that while humanitarian operations from more than 70 NGOs are ongoing across the northeast, including in places like Tel Abyad, some locals are avoiding the town itself and, in general, people are “extremely worried”.
    What will happen to al-Hol camp?

    The fate of the rest of northeast Syria’s population may also be at risk.

    Trump tweeted on Monday that the Kurds “must, with Europe and others, watch over the captured ISIS fighters and families”.

    The SDF currently administers al-Hol, a tense camp of more than 68,000 people – mostly women and children – deep in Hassakeh province, where the World Health Organisation recently said people are living “in harsh and deplorable conditions, with limited access to quality basic services, sub-optimal environment and concerns of insecurity.”

    Many of the residents of al-Hol stayed with IS through its last days in Syria, and the camp holds both these supporters and people who fled the group earlier on.

    Last week, Médecins Sans Frontières said security forces shot at women protesting in a part of the camp known as “the annex”, which holds around 10,000 who are not Syrian or Iraqi.

    The SDF also holds more than 10,000 IS detainees in other prisons, and the possible release of these people – plus those at al-Hol – may become a useful bargaining chip for the Kurdish-led group.

    On Monday, an SDF commander said guarding the prisoners had become a “second priority” in the wake of a possible Turkish offensive.

    “All their families are located in the border area,” General Mazloum Kobani Abdi told NBC News of the SDF fighters who had been guarding the prisoners. “So they are forced to defend their families.”

    https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2019/10/08/syria-turkey-briefing-fallout-invasion-civilians
    #Syrie #Turquie #guerre #conflit #civiles #invasion #al-Hol #Kurdistan #Kurdes #camps #camps_de_réfugiés
    ping @isskein

    • Il faut stopper Erdogan

      Les Kurdes de Syrie ont commencé à payer le prix de la trahison de l’Occident. Une pluie de bombes s’est abattue mercredi après-midi sur les villes frontière, précédant de peu une offensive terrestre de l’armée turque et de ses alliés islamistes de Syrie. Le macabre décompte des victimes peut débuter. On imagine l’effroi qui a saisi les habitants du #Rojava déjà durement éprouvés par plusieurs années de guerre contre les djihadistes.

      Le tweet dominical de Donald Trump avait annoncé la trahison ultime des Etats-Unis. Mais l’offensive turque répond à une logique plus profonde. A force de voir l’Union européenne lui manger dans la main, à force de jouer sans trop de heurts la balance géopolitique entre Moscou et Washington au gré de l’opportunisme des deux grandes puissances, Recep Tayyip Erdogan a des raisons de se sentir intouchable. Lorsqu’en 2015 et 2016, il faisait massacrer sa propre population dans les villes kurdes de Cizre, Nusaybin, Silopi ou Sur, le silence était de plomb.

      L’offensive débutée hier, le sultan l’annonce de longue date, sans provoquer de réaction ferme des Européens. La girouette Trump a bon dos : en matière d’allégeance à Ankara, les Européens sont autrement plus constants.

      Il faudra pourtant stopper Erdogan. Laisser le #Kurdistan_syrien tomber aux mains des milices islamistes et de l’armée turque reviendrait à cautionner un crime impardonnable. A abandonner des centaines de milliers de civils, dont de très nombreux réfugiés, et des milliers de combattants de la liberté à leurs bourreaux. Ce serait également la certitude d’une guerre de longue durée entre la Turquie et sa propre minorité kurde, environ un cinquième de sa population.

      Plusieurs pays européens ont réclamé une réunion du Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU. Le signe d’un sursaut ? L’espoir d’un cessez-le-feu rapide ? Ou des jérémiades d’arrière-garde, qui cesseront dès que la Turquie aura atteint ses objectifs ?

      Comme souvent, la superpuissance étasunienne détient les cartes maîtresses. Et Donald Trump n’en est pas à son premier virage intempestif. S’il a donné son feu vert à Erdogan, le républicain se retrouve coincé entre les interventionnistes et les isolationnistes de son propre parti. Hier, le premier camp s’indignait bruyamment. Exerçant une pression redoutable pour un président déjà affaibli par le dossier ukrainien.

      Il faudra qu’elle pèse aussi sur les dirigeants européens. La solidarité avec le Rojava doit devenir une priorité du mouvement social et des consciences.

      https://lecourrier.ch/2019/10/09/il-faut-stopper-erdogan

    • #Al-Hol detainees attack guards and start fires as Turkish assault begins

      Camp holding thousands of Islamic State suspects thrown into ’chaos’, says Kurdish official

      The Turkish assault on northeast Syria has prompted Islamic State group-affiliated women and youth in al-Hol’s camp to attack guards and start fires, a Kurdish official told Middle East Eye.

      Kurdish-held northeastern Syria has been on high alert since the United States announced on Sunday it would leave the area in anticipation of a Turkish offensive.

      Over the three days since the US announcement, chaos has broken out in the teeming al-Hol camp, Mahmoud Kro, an official that oversees internment camps in the Kurdish-run autonomous area, told MEE.

      Some 60,000 people suspected of being affiliated or linked to the Islamic State (IS) group, the majority women and children, are being held in the camp.

      “There are attacks on guards and camp management, in addition to burning tents and preparing explosive devices,” Kro told MEE from Qamishli.

      The status of al-Hol’s detainees has been a major concern since Turkey began making more threats to invade northeast Syria this year.

      In the phone call between Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trump on Sunday that precipitated the United States’ pullout, the US president pressed his Turkish counterpart on the fate of foreign IS suspects in Kurdish custody, MEE revealed.
      ‘Targeting our existence as Kurds’

      Turkey launched its assault on northeastern Syria on Wednesday alongside its Syrian rebel allies, aiming, it says, to push the Kurdish YPG militia at least 32km from the border.

      Ankara views the YPG as an extension of the outlawed PKK militant group.

      However, the YPG is a leading component of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia, which has been Washington’s principal partner on the ground in the fight against IS.

      SDF fighters guard al-Hol, but Kro said the Turkish attack would draw them away to join the battle.

      “Any war in the region will force the present forces guarding the camp to go defend the border,” he said. “This will increase the chance of chaos in the camp.”

      Kro said that the administration in al-Hol has not made any preparations for a war with Turkey because the SDF’s priority is protecting northeast Syria and Kurds.

      “In terms of preparations, our first priority is protecting our region and existence,” he said. “The Turks are targeting our existence as Kurds to the first degree.”

      Some officials from the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the political wing of the SDF, agree with Kro’s assessment that the detainees in al-Hol could get out.

      “If fighting breaks out between the SDF and Turkey, security at prisons will relax and prisoners could escape,” Bassam Ishak, the co-chair of the SDC in the US, told MEE ahead of the offensive.

      Meanwhile, SDC spokesman Amjad Osman said, as other Syrian Kurdish officials have, that a Turkish attack on northeast Syria would negatively affect the continuing war on IS in the country.

      “We are committed to fighting terrorism,” he told MEE. “But now our priority is to, first of all, confront the Turkish threats. And this will have a negative effect on our battle against Daesh,” using the Arabic acronym for IS.

      However, Turkey has bristled at the suggestion that the camps and fight against IS will be endangered by Ankara’s offensive.

      “This blackmail reveals the true face of the YPG and demonstrates how it has no intent of fighting against IS,” a Turkish official told MEE.

      Some residents of northeast Syria are already starting to flee. Many fear yet another war in the country that is still dealing with the conflict between government and rebel forces, and lingering IS attacks.

      Osman stopped short of saying the SDF would pack up and leave al-Hol. However, it will be hard for the group to keep holding the Syrian, Iraqi and international detainees during such a war, he said.

      “We are trying as much as possible to continue protecting the camps,” Osman said. “But any attempt to drag us into a military battle with Turkey will have a dangerous impact.”

      https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/al-hol-detainees-attack-guards-and-start-fires-turkish-assault-begins
      #ISIS #Etat_islamique #EI

  • Guns, Filth and #ISIS: Syrian Camp Is ‘Disaster in the Making’

    In the desert camp in northeastern Syria where tens of thousands of Islamic State fighters’ wives and children have been trapped for months in miserable conditions with no prospects of leaving, ISIS sympathizers regularly torch the tents of women deemed infidels.

    Fights between camp residents have brought smuggled guns into the open, and some women have attacked or threatened others with knives and hammers. Twice, in June and July, women stabbed the Kurdish guards who were escorting them, sending the camp into lockdown.

    Virtually all women wear the niqab, the full-length black veil demanded by ISIS’s rigid interpretation of Islam — some because they still adhere to the group’s ideology, others because they fear running afoul of the true believers.

    The Kurdish-run #Al_Hol camp is struggling to secure and serve nearly 70,000 displaced people, mainly women and children who fled there during the last battle to oust the Islamic State from eastern Syria. Filled with women stripped of hope and children who regularly die before receiving medical care, it has become what aid workers, researchers and American military officials warn is a disaster in the making.
    Image

    The daily ordeals of overcrowded latrines and contaminated water, limited medical care, flaring tensions between residents and guards, and chronic security problems have left the residents embittered and vulnerable. A recent Pentagon report that cautioned that ISIS was regrouping across Iraq and Syria said ISIS ideology has been able to spread “uncontested” at the camp.

    It is impossible to know how many of the women are ISIS believers, and many have publicly disavowed the group. But a stubborn core of followers is menacing the rest with threats, intimidation and, occasionally, violence, aid workers and researchers who have interviewed Al Hol residents said.

    The result is something more like a prison than a camp, a place where security concerns often overwhelm humanitarian ones — which only heightens the danger, according to aid workers and researchers who described conditions there to The New York Times.

    “Living in conditions that are difficult and being surrounded by people who are highly radical — is that conducive to deradicalization?” said Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking who researches Syria and Iraq, and who has visited the camp twice recently.
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    “This is a place that can possibly radicalize someone, but certainly doesn’t help deradicalize anyone,” she added.

    Yet few have been able to leave.

    The Iraqis face being ostracized for their ISIS associations or sent to detention camps if they return to Iraq, which has been executing people accused of being ISIS members in what watchdogs and journalists have called sham trials. The Syrians may not have homes to go back to.

    And the roughly 10,000 foreigners from at least 50 other countries are largely unwanted at home.

    The Kurdish authorities overseeing the camp have pleaded for the non-Syrians to be allowed to return to their own countries, saying they are not equipped to detain them indefinitely. But only a few countries, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, have repatriated their citizens on a large scale, with the occasional exception of a few young children whom Western governments have agreed to take back.

    “They’re in no man’s land. They’re in limbo,” said Sara Kayyali, a Syria researcher at Human Rights Watch who visited the camp earlier this year. “They’re stuck in the desert in a camp that’s not equipped for their needs, with children who grew up in the worst possible conditions, only to get to a place where things are, if possible, even worse.”

    Adding to their frustration, the women have little information about where their ISIS fighter husbands are. Authorities at first told them that they would be reunited with their relatives or at least be allowed to speak to them, but little has come of that promise, partly because contact is seen as a security risk.

    “I’m struggling to reconcile the two things, wanting to look at them as displaced people and human,” said Dareen Khalifa, an International Crisis Group analyst who has visited the camp, but some of the women are “very ideological, and the atmosphere is very ripe for all sorts of indoctrination of little kids and of women who just don’t know what’s going to happen to them or their families.”

    The struggles of daily life have not helped.

    The tents were freezing cold in the winter and have been swelteringly hot this summer, with temperatures rising as high as 122 degrees. Much of the water is contaminated with E. coli. Human Rights Watch researchers saw children drinking water from a tank with worms coming out of the spout, according to a report the group released in July, and the skin of many women and children they saw was pocked with sores caused by a parasite.

    Conditions are especially poor in the so-called annex, where those who are neither Syrian nor Iraqi are housed, including more than 7,000 children — about two-thirds of whom are younger than 12 — and 3,000 women.

    Annex residents are not allowed to leave their section without a guard. The authorities have also restricted aid groups’ access to the annex, making it difficult to provide much more than basics like water and food, aid workers said.

    As a result, children in the annex are going without school and other services. There is not even a playground.

    “We fear that the narrative of a radicalized population has played a role in hindering humanitarian access,” said Misty Buswell, a spokeswoman for the International Rescue Committee. “The youngest and most vulnerable are paying the highest price and suffering for the perceived misdeeds of their parents.”

    Aid groups are gradually expanding services to keep up with the camp’s population, which leapt from under 10,000 at the end of 2018, to more than 72,000 as ISIS lost its last territory in March. But donors are wary of supporting a camp perceived to be housing hardened ISIS followers.

    Medical care in the annex is limited to two small clinics, neither of which operates overnight, and women from the annex must clear numerous hurdles to be referred to an outside hospital. Women there regularly give birth in a tent without a doctor or a midwife, aid workers said.

    The number of child deaths — mostly from treatable conditions like severe malnutrition, diarrhea and pneumonia — has nearly tripled since March, Ms. Buswell said. Between December and August, the deaths of 306 children under 5 have been recorded at the camp, she said. Almost a third of them were in the annex, double or sometimes triple the rate of deaths elsewhere in the camp, often because children there cannot get medical care, she said.

    The women’s grievances are on display in the group chat channels where some of them congregate, which simmer with violent videos, sinister rumors and desperation.

    One recurring message in the group-chat app Telegram holds, without evidence, that Kurdish guards are kidnapping children and forcing them to serve in Kurdish militias. Another rumor falsely claims that camp residents’ organs are being sold. Others allege murders, sexual assaults and rapes. Many of the posts are pure ISIS propaganda, including beheading videos and vows to rebuild the so-called caliphate.

    Given that residents are being guarded by the same military force that fought their husbands and sons, the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, the tensions may have been inevitable. The families who arrived between December and March were among the most committed of the group’s followers, Ms. Tsurkov said, choosing to leave only as the last shreds of the caliphate were being bombarded.

    Aid workers and researchers said the guards often raid women’s tents at night, confiscating items or relocating families for what they say are security reasons, and fire into the air to keep order. Guards have confiscated women’s cash and valuables, leaving them without money to buy fresh food for their children, according to Human Rights Watch. Women in the annex are not allowed to have cellphones, though some do anyway.

    A spokesman for the camp did not reply to a request for comment for this article. But the camp authorities, as well as some aid workers and researchers, have said extra security measures were warranted by the frequent outbreaks of bullying, harassment and violence.

    The Pentagon report said local forces did not have enough resources to provide more than “minimal security,” allowing extremist ideology to spread unchecked.

    “It’s a cycle of violence,” said Ms. Kayyali, the Human Rights Watch researcher. “ISIS has committed atrocities against the world. Policymakers don’t want to deal with anyone connected to ISIS. Then they’re re-radicalized by mistreatment, and they go back to what they know.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/world/middleeast/isis-alhol-camp-syria.html
    #réfugiés #asile #migrations #déplacés_internes #IDPs #Syrie #réfugiés_syriens #Etat_islamique #violence #Kurdes #Kurdistan_syrien #radicalisation

    • Dans le nord-est de la Syrie, la mort lente des #prisonniers djihadistes

      « Le Monde » a pu accéder à l’un des centres gérés par les forces kurdes. S’y entassent des centaines de détenus, les derniers irréductibles du « califat » du groupe Etat islamique, souvent blessés ou mourants.

      La mort a une odeur. Le désespoir aussi ; son effluve se mêle à celle de la maladie, de la dysenterie, de la chair humaine que la vie, peu à peu, abandonne. Quand la porte de la cellule réservée aux malades de cette prison pour membres de l’organisation Etat islamique (EI) du nord-est de la Syrie s’ouvre sur d’innombrables détenus en combinaisons orange, entassés les uns sur les autres sur toute la superficie d’une pièce de la taille d’un hangar, c’est bien cette odeur-là qui étreint la poitrine.

      Les responsables de la prison, appartenant aux forces kurdes de sécurité, ne connaissent pas le nombre d’hommes et d’enfants qui gisent là, entre le monde des vivants et celui des morts. « On ne peut pas les compter. Ça change tout le temps. » Certains guérissent et regagnent leurs cellules. D’autres meurent.


      https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/10/31/au-nord-est-de-la-syrie-dans-une-prison-de-djihadistes-de-l-ei-tous-les-jour

  • De violentes attaques au Nigéria poussent des milliers de réfugiés à fuir vers le Niger

    Une récente flambée de violence dans le nord-ouest du Nigéria a forcé près de 20 000 personnes à fuir au Niger en quête de sécurité depuis le mois d’avril.

    Le HCR, l’Agence des Nations Unies pour les réfugiés, est préoccupé par la détérioration croissante de la sécurité au Nigéria et travaille en étroite collaboration avec les autorités nigériennes pour apporter une assistance de base aux nouveaux arrivants et les enregistrer. Plus de 18 000 personnes sont déjà passées par les premières étapes du processus d’enregistrement.

    Ce tout dernier regain de violence n’est pas lié à #Boko_Haram. Il semblerait que les gens fuient pour des raisons multiples, notamment des échauffourées entre des agriculteurs et des éleveurs de différents groupes ethniques, une poussée du vigilantisme ainsi que des enlèvements contre rançon dans les États nigérians de Sokoto et de Zamfara.

    Les personnes qui ont fui le Nigéria disent, après leur arrivée au Niger dans la région de Maradi, avoir assisté à des déchaînements de violence contre des civils, dont des attaques à la machette, des enlèvements et des violences sexuelles. Ces nouveaux arrivants sont en majorité des femmes et des enfants.

    L’insurrection menée par Boko Haram s’est déjà propagée jusqu’au Niger où la région de Diffa en subit les conséquences depuis 2015. À l’heure actuelle, la région accueille près de 250 000 personnes déracinées, dont des réfugiés nigérians et des citoyens nigériens déplacés dans leur propre pays.

    Le Niger continue de donner l’exemple au niveau régional, en offrant la sécurité aux réfugiés qui fuient les conflits et les persécutions dans de nombreux pays. Ce pays conserve ses frontières ouvertes malgré la violence qui continue de sévir dans plusieurs pays voisins au Nigéria, au Mali et, plus récemment, au Burkina Faso.

    Parmi les nouveaux arrivants, beaucoup se sont installés tout près de la frontière avec le Nigéria où le risque d’incursions armées demeure très élevé. Le HCR, les autres agences des Nations Unies et les partenaires étudient avec le gouvernement la possibilité de les transférer dans des villes et des villages situés plus à l’intérieur des terres.

    Outre l’aide apportée aux nouveaux venus du Nigéria, le HCR prévoit de soutenir les familles hôtes qui ont toujours fait preuve de solidarité envers les personnes déracinées et les ont accueillis sous leur toit, malgré l’insuffisance de leurs propres ressources et d’un manque d’accès aux services essentiels.

    Depuis début 2018, les violences perpétrées par des éléments de Boko Haram dans la région de Diffa se sont également intensifiées de façon considérable, avec un très lourd bilan en termes de victimes civiles ainsi que des mouvements secondaires sans précédent dans la région.

    Le Niger accueille actuellement plus de 380 000 réfugiés et demandeurs d’asile originaires du Mali et du Nigéria, sans compter ses propres déplacés internes. Le pays a également offert refuge à 2782 demandeurs d’asile transférés par avion pour les protéger de l’insécurité en Libye, dans l’attente de solutions durables.


    https://www.unhcr.org/fr/news/briefing/2019/5/5cecffeca/violentes-attaques-nigeria-poussent-milliers-refugies-fuir-vers-niger.html
    #réfugiés_nigérians #Niger #Nigeria #migrations #asile #réfugiés #violence #conflit #ISIS #EI

    ping @karine4

  • ’Walls Often Fail; They Have Unintended Consequences’

    Along the Iraq-Syria border, Iraqi patrol forces have swapped their hard tactical helmets for the warmth of beanie caps. The soldiers look out from their observation towers, across a stretch of desert into Syria.

    From this concrete tower on the border, you can almost see the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor, where the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has made its final stand. Over there, Syrian Democratic Forces—a Kurdish-led alliance dedicated to rooting out ISIS and backed by the US—have nearly liberated the city and its suburbs, and American troops are beginning a long-awaited drawdown. A plume of gray-white smoke breaches skyward as an artillery strike reaches the villages and towns near Deir ez-Zor. The horizon is a diaphanous blur of dark smoke.

    Between us and Syria is a fence. It is about 43 miles long, and a guard tower is located every few hundred feet, manned by squadrons from the Iraqi border security forces. The roughly 10-foot-tall chain-link barrier bucks and rattles in the wind. Barbed wire unspools along the top, and about 20 feet beyond the fence, on the Syrian side, there’s a ditch to stop explosive-laden ISIS vehicles that might charge the border. Beyond the ditch is a desiccated stretch of desert now mostly cleared of booby traps.

    The fence divides two villages, both called #Baghouz. The residents of Syrian Baghouz and Iraqi Baghouz once traveled freely between the towns, visiting with family and friends in a place where international borders are as hazy as the smoke between them. “It was normal for us to go to Syrian Baghouz,” says Alaa Husain, an Iraqi shepherd who has lived in this hamlet for 28 years.


    https://www.wired.com/story/the-wall-journey-across-divide-iraq-syria
    #murs #barrières_frontalières #frontières #Irak #Syrie #ISIS #EI #Etat_islamique

  • #Niger, part 3 : Guns won’t win the war

    After an ambush killed four US special forces and five local soldiers in #Tongo_Tongo, a village in the northern part of the #Tillabéri region close to Niger’s border with Mali, Boubacar Diallo’s phone rang constantly.

    That was back in October 2017. Journalists from around the world were suddenly hunting for information on Aboubacar ‘petit’ Chapori, a lieutenant of #Islamic_State_in_the_Greater_Sahara, or #ISGS – the jihadist group that claimed the attack.

    Diallo, an activist who had been representing Fulani herders in peace negotiations with Tuareg rivals, had met Chapori years earlier. He was surprised by his rapid – and violent – ascent.

    But he was also concerned. While it was good that the brewing crisis in the remote Niger-Mali borderlands was receiving some belated attention, Diallo worried that the narrow focus on the jihadist threat – on presumed ISGS leaders Chapori, Dondou Cheffou, and Adnan Abou Walid Al Sahrawi – risked obscuring the real picture.

    Those concerns only grew later in 2017 when the G5 Sahel joint force was launched – the biggest military initiative to tackle jihadist violence in the region, building on France’s existing Operation Barkhane.

    Diallo argues that the military push by France and others is misconceived and “fanning the flames of conflict”. And he says the refusal to hold talks with powerful Tuareg militants in #Mali such as Iyad Ag Ghaly – leader of al-Qaeda-linked JNIM, or the Group for the support of Islam and Muslims – is bad news for the future of the region.

    Dialogue and development

    Niger Defence Minister Kalla Moutari dismissed criticism over the G5 Sahel joint force, speaking from his office in Niamey, in a street protected by police checkpoints and tyre killer barriers.

    More than $470 million has been pledged by global donors to the project, which was sponsored by France with the idea of coordinating the military efforts of Mauritania, Mali, #Burkina_Faso, Niger, and Chad to fight insurgencies in these countries.

    “It’s an enormous task to make armies collaborate, but we’re already conducting proximity patrols in border areas, out of the spotlight, and this works,” he said.

    According to Moutari, however, development opportunities are also paramount if a solution to the conflict is to be found.

    "Five years from now, the whole situation in the Sahel could explode.”

    He recalled a meeting in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, in early December 2018, during which donors pledged $2.7 billion for programmes in the Sahel. “We won’t win the war with guns, but by triggering dynamics of development in these areas,” the minister said.

    A European security advisor, who preferred not to be identified, was far more pessimistic as he sat in one of the many Lebanese cafés in the Plateau, the central Niamey district where Western diplomats cross paths with humanitarian workers and the city’s upper-class youth.

    The advisor, who had trained soldiers in Mali and Burkina Faso, said that too much emphasis remained on a military solution that he believed could not succeed.

    “In Niger, when new attacks happen at one border, they are suddenly labelled as jihadists and a military operation is launched; then another front opens right after… but we can’t militarise all borders,” the advisor said. If the approach doesn’t change, he warned, “in five years from now, the whole situation in the Sahel could explode.”

    Tensions over land

    In his home in east Niamey, Diallo came to a similar conclusion: labelling all these groups “jihadists” and targeting them militarily will only create further problems.

    To explain why, he related the long history of conflict between Tuaregs and Fulanis over grazing lands in north Tillabéri.

    The origins of the conflict, he said, date back to the 1970s, when Fulani cattle herders from Niger settled in the region of Gao, in Mali, in search of greener pastures. Tensions over access to land and wells escalated with the first Tuareg rebellions that hit both Mali and Niger in the early 1990s and led to an increased supply of weapons to Tuareg groups.

    While peace agreements were struck in both countries, Diallo recalled that 55 Fulani were killed by armed Tuareg men in one incident in Gao in 1997.

    After the massacre, some Fulani herders escaped back to Niger and created the North Tillabéri Self-Defence Militia, sparking a cycle of retaliation. More than 100 people were killed in fighting before reconciliation was finally agreed upon in 2011. The Nigerien Fulani militia dissolved and handed its arms to the Nigerien state.

    “But despite promises, our government abandoned these ex-fighters in the bush with nothing to do,” Diallo said. “In the meantime, a new Tuareg rebellion started in Mali in 2012.”

    The Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (known as MUJAO, or MOJWA in English), created by Arab leaders in Mali in 2011, exploited the situation to recruit among Fulanis, who were afraid of violence by Tuareg militias. ISGS split from MUJAO in 2015, pledging obedience to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

    Diallo believes dialogue is the only way out of today’s situation, which is deeply rooted in these old intercommunal rivalries. “I once met those Fulani fighters who are the manpower of MUJAO and now of ISGS, and they didn’t consider themselves as jihadists,” he said. “They just want to have money and weapons to defend themselves.”

    He said the French forces use Tuareg militias, such as GATIA (the Imghad Tuareg Self-Defence Group and Allies) and the MSA (Movement for the Salvation of Azawad), to patrol borderlands between Mali and Niger. Fulani civilians were killed during some of these patrols in Niger in mid-2018, further exacerbating tensions.

    According to a UN report, these militias were excluded from an end of the year operation by French forces in Niger, following government requests.

    ‘An opportunistic terrorism’

    If some kind of reconciliation is the only way out of the conflict in Tillabéri and the neighbouring Nigerien region of Tahoua, Mahamadou Abou Tarka is likely to be at the heart of the Niger government’s efforts.

    The Tuareg general leads the High Authority for the Consolidation of Peace, a government agency launched following the successive Tuareg rebellions, to ensure peace deals are respected.

    “In north Tillabéri, jihadists hijacked Fulani’s grievances,” Abou Tarka, who reports directly to the president, said in his office in central Niamey. “It’s an opportunistic terrorism, and we need to find proper answers.”

    The Authority – whose main financial contributor is the European Union, followed by France, Switzerland, and Denmark – has launched projects to support some of the communities suffering from violence near the Malian border. “Water points, nurseries, and state services helped us establish a dialogue with local chiefs,” the general explained.

    “Fighters with jihadist groups are ready to give up their arms if incursions by Tuareg militias stop, emergency state measures are retired, and some of their colleagues released from prison.”

    Abou Tarka hailed the return to Niger from Mali of 200 Fulani fighters recruited by ISGS in autumn 2018 as the Authority’s biggest success to date. He said increased patrolling on the Malian side of the border by French forces and the Tuareg militias - Gatia and MSA - had put pressure on the Islamist fighters to return home and defect.

    The general said he doesn’t want to replicate the programme for former Boko Haram fighters from the separate insurgency that has long spread across Niger’s southern border with Nigeria – 230 of them are still in a rehabilitation centre in the Diffa region more than two years after the first defected.

    “In Tillabéri, I want things to be faster, so that ex-fighters reintegrate in the local community,” he said.

    Because these jihadist fighters didn’t attack civilians in Niger – only security forces – it makes the process easier than for ex-Boko Haram, who are often rejected by their own communities, the general said. The Fulani ex-fighters are often sent back to their villages, which are governed by local chiefs in regular contact with the Authority, he added.

    A member of the Nigerien security forces who was not authorised to speak publicly and requested anonymity said that since November 2018 some of these Fulani defectors have been assisting Nigerien security forces with border patrols.

    However, Amadou Moussa, another Fulani activist, dismissed Abou Tarka’s claims that hundreds of fighters had defected. Peace terms put forward by Fulani militants in northern Tillabéri hadn’t even been considered by the government, he said.

    “Fighters with jihadist groups are ready to give up their arms if incursions by Tuareg militias stop, emergency state measures are retired, and some of their colleagues released from prison,” Moussa said. The government, he added, has shown no real will to negotiate.

    Meanwhile, the unrest continues to spread, with the French embassy releasing new warnings for travellers in the border areas near Burkina Faso, where the first movements of Burkinabe refugees and displaced people were registered in March.

    https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/special-report/2019/04/15/niger-part-3-guns-conflict-militancy
    #foulani #ISIS #Etat_islamique #EI #Tuareg #terrorisme #anti-terrorisme #terres #conflit #armes #armement #North_Tillabéri_Self-Defence_Militia #MUJAO #MOJWA #Movement_for_Oneness_and_Jihad_in_West_Africa #Mauritanie #Tchad

    @reka : pour mettre à jour la carte sur l’Etat islamique ?
    https://visionscarto.net/djihadisme-international

  • #Shamima_Begum: Isis Briton faces move to revoke citizenship

    The Guardian understands the home secretary thinks section 40(2) of the British Nationality Act 1981 gives him the power to strip Begum of her UK citizenship.

    He wrote to her family informing them he had made such an order, believing the fact her parents are of Bangladeshi heritage means she can apply for citizenship of that country – though Begum says she has never visited it.

    This is crucial because, while the law bars him from making a person stateless, it allows him to remove citizenship if he can show Begum has behaved “in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK” and he has “reasonable grounds for believing that the person is able, under the law of a country or territory outside the UK, to become a national of such a country or territory”.


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/19/isis-briton-shamima-begum-to-have-uk-citizenship-revoked?CMP=Share_Andr
    #citoyenneté #UK #Angleterre #apatridie #révocation #terrorisme #ISIS #EI #Etat_islamique #nationalité #déchéance_de_nationalité

    • What do we know about citizenship stripping?

      The Bureau began investigating the Government’s powers to deprive individuals of their British citizenship two years ago.

      The project has involved countless hours spent in court, deep and detailed use of the freedom of information act and the input of respected academics, lawyers and politicians.

      The Counter-Terrorism Bill was presented to Parliament two weeks ago. New powers to remove passports from terror suspects and temporarily exclude suspected jihadists from the UK have focused attention on the Government’s citizenship stripping powers, which have been part of the government’s counter-terrorism tools for nearly a decade.

      A deprivation order can be made where the home secretary believes that it is ‘not conducive’ to the public good for the individual to remain in the country, or where citizenship is believed to have been obtained fraudulently. The Bureau focuses on cases based on ‘not conducive’ grounds, which are related to national security and suspected terrorist activity.

      Until earlier this year, the Government was only able to remove the citizenship of British nationals where doing so wouldn’t leave them stateless. However, in July an amendment to the British Nationality Act (BNA) came into force and powers to deprive a person of their citizenship were expanded. Foreign-born, naturalised individuals can now be stripped of their UK citizenship on national security grounds even if it renders them stateless, a practice described by a former director of public prosecutions as being “beloved of the world’s worst regimes during the 20th century”.

      So what do we know about how these powers are used?
      The numbers

      53 people have been stripped of their British citizenship since 2002 – this includes both people who were considered to have gained their citizenship fraudulently, as well as those who have lost it for national security reasons.
      48 of these were under the Coalition government.
      Since 2006, 27 people have lost their citizenship on national security grounds; 24 of these were under the current Coalition government.
      In 2013, home secretary Theresa May stripped 20 individuals of their British citizenship – more than in all the preceding years of the Coalition put together.
      The Bureau has identified 18 of the 53 cases, 17 of which were deprived of their citizenship on national security grounds.
      15 of the individuals identified by the Bureau who lost their citizenship on national security grounds were abroad at the time of the deprivation order.
      At least five of those who have lost their nationality were born in the UK.
      The previous Labour government used deprivation orders just five times in four years.
      Hilal Al-Jedda was the first individual whose deprivation of citizenship case made it to the Supreme Court. The home secretary lost her appeal as the Supreme Court justices unanimously ruled her deprivation order against Al-Jedda had made him illegally stateless. Instead of returning his passport, just three weeks later the home secretary issued a second deprivation order against him.
      This was one of two deprivation of citizenship cases to have made it to the Supreme Court, Britain’s uppermost court, to date.
      In November 2014 deprivation of citizenship case number two reached the Supreme Court, with the appellant, Minh Pham, also arguing that the deprivation order against him made him unlawfully stateless.
      Two of those stripped of their British citizenship by Theresa May in 2010, London-born Mohamed Sakr and his childhood friend Bilal al Berjawi, were later killed by US drone strikes in Somalia.
      One of the individuals identified by the Bureau, Mahdi Hashi, was the subject of rendition to the US, where he was held in secret for over a month and now faces terror charges.
      Only one individual, Iraqi-born Hilal al-Jedda, is currently known to have been stripped of his British citizenship twice.
      Number of Bureau Q&As on deprivation of citizenship: one.

      https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2014-12-10/what-do-we-know-about-citizenship-stripping
      #statistiques #chiffres

    • ‘My British citizenship was everything to me. Now I am nobody’ – A former British citizen speaks out

      When a British man took a holiday to visit relatives in Pakistan in January 2012 he had every reason to look forward to returning home. He worked full time at the mobile phone shop beneath his flat in southeast London, he had a busy social life and preparations for his family’s visit to the UK were in full flow.

      Two years later, the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is stranded in Pakistan, and claims he is under threat from the Taliban and unable to find work to support his wife and three children.

      He is one of 27 British nationals since 2006 who have had their citizenship removed under secretive government orders on the grounds that their presence in the UK is ‘not conducive to the public good’. He is the first to speak publicly about his ordeal.

      ‘My British citizenship was everything to me. I could travel around the world freely,’ he told the Bureau. ‘That was my identity but now I am nobody.’

      Under current legislation, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, has the power to strip dual nationals of their British citizenship if she deems their presence in the UK ‘not conducive to the public good’, or if their nationality was gained on fraudulent grounds. May recently won a Commons vote paving the way to allow her to strip the citizenship of foreign-born or naturalised UK nationals even if it rendered them stateless. Amendments to the Immigration Bill – including the controversial Article 60 concerning statelessness – are being tabled this week in the House of Lords.

      A Bureau investigation in December 2013 revealed 20 British nationals were stripped of their citizenship last year – more than in all previous years under the Coalition combined. Twelve of these were later revealed to have been cases where an individual had gained citizenship by fraud; the remaining eight are on ‘conducive’ grounds.

      Since 2006 when the current laws entered force, 27 orders have been made on ‘conducive’ grounds, issued in practice against individuals suspected of involvement in extremist activities. The Home Secretary often makes her decision when the individual concerned is outside the UK, and, in at least one case, deliberately waited for a British national to go on holiday before revoking his citizenship.

      The only legal recourse to these decisions, which are taken without judicial approval, is for the individual affected to submit a formal appeal to the Special Immigration and Asylum Committee (Siac), where evidence can be heard in secret, within 28 days of the order being given. These appeals can take years to conclude, leaving individuals – the vast majority of whom have never been charged with an offence – stranded abroad.

      The process has been compared to ‘medieval exile’ by leading human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

      The man, who is referred to in court documents as E2, was born in Afghanistan and still holds Afghan citizenship. He claimed asylum in Britain in 1999 after fleeing the Taliban regime in Kabul, and was granted indefinite leave to remain. In 2009 he became a British citizen.

      While his immediate family remained in Pakistan, E2 came to London, where he worked and integrated in the local community. Although this interview was conducted in his native Pashto, E2 can speak some English.

      ‘I worked and I learned English,’ he says. ‘Even now I see myself as a British. If anyone asks me, I tell them that I am British.’

      But, as of March 28 2012, E2 is no longer a British citizen. After E2 boarded a flight to Kabul in January 2012 to visit relatives in Afghanistan and his wife and children in Pakistan, a letter containing May’s signature was sent to his southeast London address from the UK Border Agency, stating he had been deprived of his British nationality. In evidence that remains secret even from him, E2 was accused of involvement in ‘Islamist extremism’ and deemed a national security threat. He denies the allegation and says he has never participated in extremist activity.

      In the letter the Home Secretary wrote: ‘My decision has been taken in part reliance on information which, in my opinion should not be made public in the interest of national security and because disclosure would be contrary to the public interest.’

      E2 says he had no way of knowing his citizenship had been removed and that the first he heard of the decision was when he was met by a British embassy official at Dubai airport on May 25 2012, when he was on his way back to the UK and well after his appeal window shut.

      E2’s lawyer appealed anyway, and submitted to Siac that: ‘Save for written correspondence to the Appellant’s last known address in the UK expressly stating that he has 28 days to appeal, i.e. acknowledging that he was not in the UK, no steps were taken to contact the Appellant by email, telephone or in person until an official from the British Embassy met him at Dubai airport and took his passport from him.’

      The submission noted that ‘it is clear from this [decision] that the [Home Secretary] knew that the Appellant [E2] is out of the country as the deadline referred to is 28 days.’

      The Home Office disputed that E2 was unaware of the order against him, and a judge ruled that he was satisfied ‘on the balance of probabilities’ that E2 did know about the removal of his citizenship. ‘[W]e do not believe his statement,’ the judge added.

      His British passport was confiscated and, after spending 18 hours in an airport cell, E2 was made to board a flight back to Kabul. He has remained in Afghanistan and Pakistan ever since. It is from Pakistan that he agreed to speak to the Bureau last month.

      Daniel Carey, who is representing E2 in a fresh appeal to Siac, says: ‘The practice of waiting until a citizen leaves the UK before depriving them of citizenship, and then opposing them when they appeal out of time, is an intentional attack on citizens’ due process rights.

      ‘By bending an unfair system to its will the government is getting worryingly close to a system of citizenship by executive fiat.’

      While rules governing hearings at Siac mean some evidence against E2 cannot be disclosed on grounds of national security, the Bureau has been able to corroborate key aspects of E2’s version of events, including his best guess as to why his citizenship was stripped. His story revolves around an incident that occurred thousands of miles away from his London home and several years before he saw it for the last time.

      In November 2008, Afghan national Zia ul-Haq Ahadi was kidnapped as he left the home of his infirmed mother in Peshawar, Pakistan. The event might have gone unnoticed were he not the brother of Afghanistan’s then finance minister and former presidential hopeful Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi. Anwar intervened, and after 13 months of tortuous negotiations with the kidnappers, a ransom was paid and Zia was released. E2 claims to have been the man who drove a key negotiator to Zia’s kidnappers.

      While the Bureau has not yet been able to confirm whether E2 had played the role he claimed in the release, a source with detailed knowledge of the kidnapping told the Bureau he was ‘willing to give [E2] some benefit of the doubt because there are elements of truth [in his version of events].’

      The source confirmed a man matching E2’s description was involved in the negotiations.

      ‘We didn’t know officially who the group was, but they were the kidnappers. I didn’t know whether they were with the Pakistani or Afghan Taliban,’ E2 says. ‘After releasing the abducted person I came back to London.’

      E2 guesses – since not even his lawyers have seen specific evidence against him – that it was this activity that brought him to the attention of British intelligence services. After this point, he was repeatedly stopped as he travelled to and from London and Afghanistan and Pakistan to visit relatives four times between the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2012.

      ‘MI5 questioned me for three or four hours each time I came to London at Heathrow airport,’ he says. ‘They said people like me [Pashtun Afghans] go to Waziristan and from there you start fighting with British and US soldiers.

      ‘The very last time [I was questioned] was years after the [kidnapping]. I was asked to a Metropolitan Police station in London. They showed me pictures of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar [former Afghan prime minister and militant with links to the Pakistani Taliban (TTP)] along with other leaders and Taliban commanders. They said: ‘You know these guys.’

      He claims he was shown a photo of his wife – a highly intrusive action in conservative Pashtun culture – as well as one of someone he was told was Sirajuddin Haqqani, commander of the Haqqani Network, one of the most lethal TTP-allied groups.

      ‘They said I met him, that I was talking to him and I have connections with him. I said that’s wrong. I told [my interrogator] that you can call [Anwar al-Ahady] and he will explain that he sent me to Waziristan and that I found and released his brother,’ E2 says.

      ‘I don’t know Sirajuddin Haqqani and I didn’t meet him.’

      The Haqqani Network, which operates in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and across the border in Afghanistan, was designated as a terrorist organisation by the United States in September 2012. It has claimed responsibility for a score of attacks against Afghan, Pakistani and NATO security forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The UN accuses Sirajuddin Haqqani of being ‘actively involved in the planning and execution of attacks targeting International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF), Afghan officials and civilians.’

      E2 says he has no idea whether Haqqani was involved in Zia’s kidnapping, but he believes the security services may have started investigating him when he met the imam of a mosque he visited in North Waziristan.

      ‘The imam had lunch with us and he was with me while I was waiting for my father-in-law. I didn’t take his number but I gave him mine. That imam often called me on my shop’s BT telephone line [in London]. These calls put me in trouble,’ he says.

      If E2’s version of events is accurate, it would mean he gained his British citizenship while he was negotiating Zia’s release. He lost it less than three years later.

      The Home Office offered a boilerplate response to the Bureau’s questions: ‘The Home Secretary will remove British citizenship from individuals where she feels it is conducive to the public good to do so.’

      When challenged specifically on allegations made by E2, the spokesman said the Home Office does not comment on individual cases.

      E2 says he now lives in fear for his safety in Pakistan. Since word has spread that he lost his UK nationality, locals assume he is guilty, which he says puts him at risk of attack from the Pakistani security forces. In addition, he says his family has received threats from the Taliban for his interaction with MI5.

      ‘People back in Afghanistan know that my British passport was revoked because I was accused of working with the Taliban. I can’t visit my relatives and I am an easy target to others,’ he said. ‘Without the British passport here, whether [by] the government or Taliban, we can be executed easily.’

      E2 is not alone in fearing for his life after being exiled from Britain. Two British nationals stripped of their citizenship in 2010 were killed a year later by a US drone strike in Somalia. A third Briton, Mahdi Hashi, disappeared from east Africa after having his citizenship revoked in June 2012 only to appear in a US court after being rendered from Djibouti.

      E2 says if the government was so certain of his involvement in extremism they should allow him to stand trial in a criminal court.

      ‘When somebody’s citizenship is revoked if he is criminal he should be put in jail, otherwise he should be free and should have his passport returned,’ he says.

      ‘My message [to Theresa May] is that my citizenship was revoked illegally. It’s wrong that only by sending a letter that your citizenship is revoked. What kind of democracy is it that?’

      https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2014-03-17/my-british-citizenship-was-everything-to-me-now-i-am-nobody-a

  • Iraq: Isis sconfitto, ma dopo un anno ci sono 2 milioni di sfollati

    Dall’inizio del conflitto con l’Isis in Iraq, nel 2014, sono stati sfollati oltre 5,8 milioni di iracheni. Oggi, che l’Isis è sconfitto, ne restano ancora quasi 2 milioni. Lo rivela un report dell’agenzia Onu per le migrazioni-Missione in Iraq, che ha fornito aiuti a milioni di persone in tutti i 18 governatorati del Paese.

    Quasi 2 milioni di sfollati. È questa l’eredità lasciata dal cessato conflitto con l’Isis in Iraq. La guerra civile in Iraq è iniziata nel 2014, quando l’Isis aveva lanciato un’offensiva in Siria e Iraq, occupando gran parte del territorio iracheno, dove a giugno prese poi il controllo di Mosul, seconda città del paese, fino a proclamare la costituzione del Califfato e la designazione del suo califfo, Al-Baghdadi, come capo dei musulmani nel mondo.

    Tre anni di conflitto, concluso a dicembre 2017, che lascia oggi milioni di sfollati che non sono ancora in grado di ridurre la propria vulnerabilità, l’impoverimento e l’emarginazione causati dagli spostamenti forzati durante il conflitto.

    A rivelarlo è l’Oim (Organizzazione internazionale per le migrazioni) – Missione in Iraq, che ha fornito aiuti a milioni di persone in tutti i 18 governatorati dell’Iraq e ancora continua a monitorare – oggi, nel post-conflitto – la situazione.

    Secondo il report redatto dall’Oim, dal 2014, a causa del conflitto, sono stati sfollati oltre 5,8 milioni di iracheni: il picco di 570 mila famiglie circa (3,42 milioni di individui) si è toccato ad aprile 2016, per poi scendere a quota 317 mila famiglie (1,9 milioni di persone) a settembre di quest’anno, a quasi un anno di distanza dalla fine del conflitto, dichiarata a dicembre 2017.
    Popolazione e territorio colpiti dal conflitto con l’Isis

    Benché sia difficile individuare cause e spostamenti reali degli iracheni, dal conflitto ad oggi, l’Oim classifica alcune macro-ragioni di quello che definisce come “dislocamento prolungato“, ovvero la condizione degli sfollati interni che non sono in grado di “sanare” la propria situazione e tornare nella propria terra da almeno tre anni. In due terzi dei paesi monitorati per sfollamenti indotti da conflitti nel 2014, almeno il 50% degli sfollati interni è rimasto nella condizione di sfollato per oltre tre anni.

    Gli ostacoli vanno dagli alloggi, dopo la distruzione delle proprie abitazioni, alla mancanza dei servizi, ma non mancano problemi psico-emotivi dovuti al cosiddetto stress post-traumatico, in particolare per ciò che riguarda la fascia di popolazione infantile.

    A farne le spese maggiori sono le fasce più deboli della popolazione, come anziani, famiglie di donne e bambini, malati cronici, individui traumatizzati e appartenenti a gruppi etno-religiosi che sono stati storicamente emarginati o esclusi all’interno di una società più ampia.

    «Il fatto che questi problemi persistano molto tempo dopo la fine del conflitto – si legge nel report dell’Oim – è un’indicazione che il dislocamento provocato dal conflitto si protrae in parte perché lo status quo ante era di per sé ingiusto e che affrontare questi problemi richiede un approccio trasversale che abbraccia gli aspetti umanitari, lo sviluppo, la costruzione della pace e i settori della sicurezza».

    Sfollati interni: dati e composizione dal 2014 al 2018

    Il report dell’Oim fornisce una disamina dettagliata degli sfollati iracheni. Il 60% proviene dal governatorato di Ninewa, seguito dal governatorato di Salah al-Din (13%) e Anbar (12%). Kirkuk, Diyala e, in misura minore, Baghdad e Babilonia, completano l’elenco dei governatorati da cui le persone si sono trasferite con la forza durante la crisi.

    A partire da settembre 2018, tuttavia, la maggior parte delle persone sfollate da Anbar sono tornate ai luoghi di origine, mentre i tassi di ritorno per gli sfollati di Ninewa rimangono bassi.

    Una possibile ragione per questo diverso modello probabilmente si riferisce a quando, in particolare, i distretti all’interno di questi governatorati sono stati riconquistati dalle forze irachene. Grandi porzioni di Anbar sono state riconquistate dall’Isis nel 2015.

    In contrasto, le aree urbane di Ninewa non erano facilmente accessibili agli sfollati interni fino a un anno fa, inclusa la città di Mosul, la seconda più grande città in Iraq. Al culmine del fenomeno, nell’aprile 2016, i campi istituiti per questa crisi hanno protetto solo il 12% degli sfollati interni.

    Questo rapporto è aumentato al 30% a partire da settembre 2018, a causa di un significativo afflusso di sfollati interni ai campi fino alla fine del 2017 durante le ultime fasi del conflitto. In termini di aree di sfollamento, la regione del Kurdistan in Iraq e i governatorati di Baghdad, Anbar e Ninewa hanno storicamente ospitato un gran numero di sfollati durante questa crisi.

    A settembre 2018, la regione del Kurdistan in Iraq rimane l’area che ospita il maggior numero di sfollati, seguito dal Governatorato di Ninewa. Popolazioni che comprendono più dei due terzi di tutti gli sfollati interni. In base ai dati raccolti nell’agosto 2018, quasi i due terzi degli sfollati, nel complesso, hanno intenzione di rimanere nei loro luoghi di dislocamento per i prossimi 12 mesi.
    Case distrutte e nessuna sicurezza dopo gli attentati Isis

    Case distrutte, mancanza di attività generatrici di reddito, mancanza di servizi di base, discriminazione e scarsa percezione di sicurezza. Sono alcune delle ragioni che portano gli sfollati a non tornare nei propri luoghi di origine, nonostante la fine del conflitto. La distribuzione di queste motivazioni definisce i contorni del fenomeno.

    Quando viene chiesto di elencare i tre principali motivi per cui non hanno intenzione di tornare ai loro luoghi di origine all’interno il prossimo anno, il 41% degli sfollati interni elenca la propria casa distrutta o danneggiata come un fattore determinante in questa decisione.
    isis iraq

    Ma non solo: la mancanza di attività generatrici di reddito nel luogo di origine è stata citata dal 21% degli sfollati intervistati. Siamo a quota 9%, invece, per quanto riguarda la fornitura di servizi di base; si sale al 17% per la paura di discriminazione. Circa il 14% degli sfollati interni potrebbe essere involontariamente bloccato nello spostamento perché le autorità non permetterebbero i ritorni nei loro luoghi di origine a causa di problemi di sicurezza, mentre il 26% cita una mancanza di forze di sicurezza nelle loro aree di origine.
    L’isis è sconfitto, ma resta lo stress post-traumatico

    Le violenze estreme perpetrate dall’Isis, e le conseguenti operazioni militari per eliminarle, hanno avuto un forte impatto su grandi fasce della popolazione ed è probabile che in alcuni continuino a verificarsi sintomi di trauma e disagio psicologico, compreso il disturbo post-traumatico da stress.

    Un recente studio sui bambini sfollati e le loro famiglie ha rivelato che i bambini colpiti da questo conflitto hanno vissuto qualche forma di trauma e sofferenza psicologica. I sintomi più gravi sono stati riscontrati in bambini che vivevano sotto l’Isis per lunghi periodi rispetto a quelli che erano stati sfollati ancora prima nel conflitto. Inoltre, i genitori hanno riferito di essere preoccupati per il benessere dei loro figli e per gli effetti che il trauma potrebbe avere su di loro.

    Il 31% degli sfollati interni indica la paura o il trauma come motivo per non tornare ai loro luoghi di origine entro il prossimo anno. Questo è più diffuso tra gli sfollati interni dal governatorato di Diyala. Inoltre, il 13% degli sfollati segnala che i loro bambini (di età inferiore a 18 anni) mostrano segni di disagio psicologico. Gli sfollati originari di Kirkuk denunciano l’angoscia tra i loro figli due volte più frequentemente rispetto ad altri governatorati.
    Guerra civile in Iraq: il Califfo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

    Il conflitto in Iraq ebbe i suoi esordi nell’estate del 2014, quando l’Isis lanciò un’offensiva in Siria e Iraq, occupando gran parte del territorio iracheno, dove a giugno prese il controllo di Mosul, seconda città del paese. L’improvvisa offensiva al Nord dell’Iraq rafforzò notevolmente l’esercito dello Stato islamico dell’Iraq e del Levante, che riversò uomini e mezzi dal confine siriano. Benché, infatti, le forze armate irachene fossero più numerose dei miliziani islamisti, l’offensiva dell’Isis costrinse il governo iracheno a dichiarare lo stato di emergenza. Da quel momento la guerra divenne regionale, coinvolgendo Siria e Iraq, ormai privi di una reale frontiera tra i due paesi.

    Il 29 giugno 2014, Da’esh proclamò la nascita del Califfato tra Siria e Iraq. In un audio postato su internet, l’Isis designa il suo capo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “califfo”, ovvero il capo dei musulmani nel mondo.

    «In una riunione, la shura (consiglio di Stato islamico) ha deciso di annunciare l’istituzione del Califfato islamico e di designare un Califfo per lo Stato dei musulmani – ha detto nel messaggio audio su internet Abu Mohammad Al-Adnani, portavoce dell’Isis – Lo sceicco jihadista al-Baghdadi è stato designato califfo dei musulmani».

    Dalla presa di Mosul all’annuncio della vittoria sull’Isis

    L’avanzata dell’Isis nel paese iracheno proseguì, fino a quando – nell’ottobre del 2016 – ebbe inizio l’offensiva irachena per riprendere Mosul, che determinò di fatto l’avvio delle operazioni decisive per liberare totalmente lo stato iracheno dall’Isis.

    La guerra civile terminò nel dicembre del 2017 con la caduta di Abu Kamal, ultima grande roccaforte dell’Isis sul confine Siria-Iraq. L’annuncio ufficiale è del 9 dicembre del 2017.

    «Le nostre forze controllano completamente la frontiera Iraq-Siria e annuncio dunque la fine della guerra contro Daesh – sono le parole del primo ministro iracheno Al-Abadi – Le nostre forze hanno assunto il pieno controllo dei confini con la Siria».

    È con il recupero degli ultimi territori controllati dagli jihadisti, le province occidentali di Ninive e Al Anbar, che si dichiara chiusa la guerra contro l’Isis.

    «È avvenuta la liberazione di tutti i territori dell’Iraq dalle bande di Daesh – afferma il vice comandante delle forze irachene congiunte, Abdelamir Yarala – e le nostre forze controllano le frontiere fra Iraq e Siria dal varco di frontiera di Al Walid a quello di Rabia».

    https://www.osservatoriodiritti.it/2018/12/06/isis-iraq-sconfitto-sfollati
    #Irak #asile #migrations #réfugiés #déplacés_internes #IDPs #ISIS #EI #Etat_islamique #trauma #traumatisme #statistiques #chiffres

    • Reasons to Remain: Categorizing Protracted Displacement in Iraq

      As the ISIL conflict ceased across Iraq, conflict-affected areas in the country experienced an uptick in returns of their internally displaced populations. The pace of this return, however, appears to be slowing, leaving the populations who still remain behind either in, or at risk of, protracted internal displacement.

      The result of this kind of displacement is the inability of internally displaced persons to progress toward finding a resolution to their displacement, whether it is eventual return, integration, relocation or some combination thereof.

      At present, there is limited consensus on what exactly these reasons for displacement are and roughly how many people are affected by each of these reasons. Having such knowledge, though, is a key step in developing a comprehensive strategy for durable solutions for Iraq.

      As such, the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) Unit, the Returns Working Group (RWG), and Social Inquiry, with input and support from the Ministry of Migration and Displacement (MoMD) within the Federal Government of Iraq, have conducted an in-depth analysis of existing large-scale datasets as well as other geographically targeted surveys and qualitative studies.

      The report provides a brief overview of the theoretical underpinnings of protracted displacement and their implications in the Iraq context, the methodology for this desk review and analysis, a time series of IDP movements, the categorization of reasons IDPs may still be displaced, and a discussion of findings.

      https://www.osservatoriodiritti.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Isis-Iraq.pdf


      https://www.osservatoriodiritti.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Isis-Iraq.pdf
      #rapport

  • Ex-defense minister says IS ’apologized’ to Israel for November clash | The Times of Israel
    https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-defense-minister-says-is-apologized-to-israel-for-november-clash

    Former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon on Saturday said the Islamic State terrorist group in the Syrian Golan Heights “apologized” for attacking an Israeli unit.

    “There was one case recently where Daesh opened fire and apologized,” Ya’alon said, using the terror group’s Arabic nickname.

    Comme l’écrit Angry Arab qui passe l’info, difficile après cela de ne pas donner crédit aux thèses conspirationnistes : (كيف لا نركن لنظريّة المؤامرة عندما نتذكّر أن وزير حرب العدوّ الاسرائيلي اعترف بتواصل بين دولة الاحتلال وبين « داعش » وكيف أن الأخيرة اعتذرت للأولى في عام ٢٠١٧ عن اشتباك طفيف بينهما؟)

    #israel #isis #daech #syrie

  • L’importanza di chiamarsi Stato (Islamico)

    Qualunque studente abbia anche solo distrattamente frequentato temi di geografia politica sa che uno Stato, per ritenersi tale, deve avere tre caratteristiche: territorio, popolazione e sovranità. In particolare quest’ultima ha due dimensioni: una “interna”, nel senso che l’autorità dello stato deve essere riconosciuta dai suoi cittadini, e una esterna, poiché lo stato deve ottenere il riconoscimento degli altri stati o, quantomeno, di quelli che hanno maggior peso nella comunità internazionale (su questo un approfondimento sulla recente approvazione di una mozione della Camera dei Comuni britannica, QUI). Questo elemento è particolarmente importante perché la comunità degli stati è – almeno in linea teorica – una comunità di pari; chi ne fa parte non può tollerare ingerenze nei propri affari interni e contribuisce, tramite lo stabilirsi di consuetudini e accordi, a dare corpo al diritto internazionale. Il riconoscimento della qualità statuale avviene, generalmente, a seguito di periodi di conflitto o, assai più raramente, come esito di processi pacifici (come nel caso della divisione in due stati della ex Cecoslovacchia) ed è un momento determinante per la definizione del nuovo status quo.

    Se si tiene conto di questi elementi, certamente ben noti alle cancellerie di tutto il mondo (essendo l’ABC dei rapporti internazionali), appare assolutamente sorprendente (e perfino irresponsabile) il fatto che sia divenuta di uso comune la denominazione ISIS (o IS), condensata in «Stato Islamico», per denominare non tanto un gruppo che contemporaneamente si definisce terroristico, ma un vasto territorio che questo gruppo tende a controllare militarmente. Ciò non avviene soltanto in ambito giornalistico, ma anche ufficiale: se Obama generalmente utilizza la formula “gruppo che chiama se stesso Islamic State” (QUI, minuto 1.38), ormai generalmente non si usa più neanche questa blanda cautela. Tra gli innumerevoli esempi possibili, prendiamo la trascrizione della conferenza stampa del Segretario Generale delle Nazioni Unite Ban Ki-moon (16 settembre 2014) pubblicata sul sito web delle Nazioni Unite (QUI): questa riporta, nella domanda rivolta al Segretario dalla giornalista Pamela Falk (CBS news): “My question is about the very difficult question of foreign terrorist fighters and ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and the Shams]”. Le parentesi quadre indicano una precisazione redazionale inserita dallo staff delle Nazioni Unite, che traduce l’acronimo riportando senza remore (né perifrasi, come “il sedicente”) la dicitura di “Stato Islamico dell’Iraq e della Siria”. Nello stesso testo l’uso dell’acronimo viene attribuito direttamente al Segretario Generale in una sua risposta a una domanda sull’Iraq (“This is all the more important when it comes to critical posts related to security in view of the threat the country is now facing, particularly by ISIL [Islamic State in Iraq and the Shams]”). Curioso notare come, in questo caso, ci sia anche una incongruenza “geografica”: l’acronimo usato da Ban Ki-moon terminava con la lettera L (per “Levant”: ISIL, Islamic State in Iraq and Levant è infatti uno degli acronimi usati in particolare dagli anglosassoni), ma evidentemente lo staff che trascrive le conferenze stampa ha avuto indicazioni di adottare “the Sham”, che in arabo sta per Siria, in luogo del più vasto e indistinto “Levant”. Così fa anche in questo caso, “correggendo” addirittura il Segretario Generale.

    Quella sollevata sin qui potrebbe apparire una questione di secondo piano o di dettaglio, soprattutto di fronte ai disastri della guerra e alle atroci decapitazioni divenute ormai drammaticamente abituali nelle immagini dei media; in realtà è ben evidente come in questa guerra si stia puntando molto sull’uso dei media per la propaganda, ed esattamente quello dell’affermazione dell’esistenza di un soggetto statuale (lo Stato Islamico) appare tra i principali obiettivi – peraltro acquisiti – dei combattenti jhadisti.

    Interessante in proposito il fatto che la denominazione sia nel tempo mutata, a rappresentare il salto di scala che i combattenti vogliono raggiungere. Se inizialmente si puntava all’Iraq e alla Siria o all’Iraq e al Levante (ISIS o ISIL), successivamente la connotazione geografica specifica è stata rimossa, passando a un più generico Islamic State (IS). In questo modo, puntando sull’elemento religioso, la denominazione può risultare più attrattiva (o insultante, a seconda del punto di vista, come si vedrà più oltre) su scala globale. Il risultato è anche quello di “occupare” l’immaginario collettivo: sui non-musulmani il continuo tam tam mediatico che mette in relazione “Stato Islamico” con efferatezza, inusitata violenza e terrore potrebbe provocare, nel breve quanto nel medio termine, effetti tanto gravi quanto facilmente prevedibili. D’altro canto è sufficiente un esperimento mentale per comprendere meglio la situazione. Immaginiamo che il gruppo estremista fosse stato cristiano. Al di là dell’auto-denominazione scelta, si sarebbe ugualmente diffusa a livello mondiale la definizione “Stato Cristiano”? Se mentalmente il primo pensiero che ci viene in mente fosse “i cristiani non fanno mica quelle cose”, l’”occupazione dell’immaginario” cui si faceva riferimento poco sopra diverrebbe ancor più chiara.

    Se in molti casi la categoria di Stato può generare imponenti tensioni e persino crisi internazionali (è di ieri il riconoscimento della Palestina in quanto Stato da parte della Svezia, e la conseguente durissima reazione di Israele: vedi QUI e QUI), sembra che i portatori delle bandiere nere abbiano ottenuto uno dei risultati più notevoli con ferocissima semplicità, e viene allora da chiedersi se vi fosse una (più o meno inconscia) predisposizione all’accettazione dell’accostamento tra il concetto di Stato Islamico e quello di inusitata violenza.

    La riflessione sulla denominazione non è però stata del tutto ignorata. In Francia, ad esempio, la direttrice dell’Associated France Press ha spiegato, in un editoriale (QUI) la scelta della prestigiosa agenzia di stampa di non utilizzare più la denominazione “Stato Islamico” (scelta per la verità contraddetta da alcuni titoli e didascalie dell’editoriale stesso). Michèle Lérindon motiva così la decisione: “Nous jugeons que l’expression « Etat islamique » est inappropriée pour deux raisons : un, il ne s’agit pas d’un véritable Etat, avec des frontières et une reconnaissance internationale. Et deux, pour de nombreux musulmans, les valeurs dont se réclame cette organisation ne sont en rien « islamiques ». Le nom « Etat islamique » est donc susceptible d’induire le public en erreur”. In sintesi: non si tratta di uno vero Stato e, per molti musulmani, i valori di questa organizzazione non hanno nulla di “islamico”; per questo la denominazione “Stato Islamico” potrebbe indurre il pubblico in errore e non la useremo. Lo Stato francese utilizza la denominazione “Daesh”; in questo articolo Lettera 43 dà credito all’ipotesi in base alla quale questo termine avrebbe un carattere peggiorativo per assonanza con “dèche” (rotto); France 24 riporta invece, come origine, una denominazione in arabo (QUI).

    La riflessione sulla denominazione non si limita alla sola Francia: le autorità religiose egiziane suggeriscono l’uso di QSIS, che sta per “Al-Qaeda Separatists in Iraq and Syria”. A parte il riferimento ad Al-Qaeda, in questo caso appare evidente come la denominazione avrebbe un senso diametralmente opposto: definendo il gruppo come “separatista”, rafforzerebbe il concetto delle entità statuali di Siria e Iraq. Il che è perfettamente coerente con i possibili timori dell’Egitto, che, uscendo a fatica da anni di fortissime tensioni interne, può temere il fattore d’attrazione propagandistica che l’idea di uno “Stato Islamico” potrebbe rappresentare. Come riporta The Guardian (QUI) anche un gruppo di Imam e organizzazioni di musulmani britannici premono affinché il loro governo rigetti la denominazione di “Stato Islamico”. Pure in Italia sono stati ripresi spunti di questo dibattito (tra gli altri, ad esempio La Stampa - ed Il Post), ma non sembra che la discussione si sia realmente focalizzata sulle questioni di fondo né che abbia avuto particolari esiti. Proprio per questo come LuogoeSpazio abbiamo deciso di occuparcene, considerando che alcune comuni nozioni di geografia politica, purtroppo, appaiano in Italia scarsamente diffuse. Il danno che potrebbe derivarne, anche nella prospettiva della convivenza tra culture differenti e considerata l’inerzia dell’immgainario collettivo, non è da sottovalutare.

    http://nuke.luogoespazio.info/HOMEDILUOGOESPAZIOINFO/tabid/466/EntryID/299/Default.aspx
    #Etat #Etat_islamique #ISIS #EI #terminologie #vocabulaire #mots

  • The Vulnerability Contest

    Traumatized Afghan child soldiers who were forced to fight in Syria struggle to find protection in Europe’s asylum lottery.

    Mosa did not choose to come forward. Word had spread among the thousands of asylum seekers huddled inside Moria that social workers were looking for lone children among the general population. High up on the hillside, in the Afghan area of the chaotic refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, some residents knew someone they suspected was still a minor. They led the aid workers to Mosa.

    The boy, whose broad and beardless face mark him out as a member of the Hazara ethnic group, had little reason to trust strangers. It was hard to persuade him just to sit with them and listen. Like many lone children, Mosa had slipped through the age assessment carried out on first arrival at Moria: He was registered as 27 years old. With the help of a translator, the social worker explained that there was still time to challenge his classification as an adult. But Mosa did not seem to be able to engage with what he was being told. It would take weeks to establish trust and reveal his real age and background.

    Most new arrivals experience shock when their hopes of a new life in Europe collide with Moria, the refugee camp most synonymous with the miserable consequences of Europe’s efforts to contain the flow of refugees and migrants across the Aegean. When it was built, the camp was meant to provide temporary shelter for fewer than 2,000 people. Since the European Union struck a deal in March 2016 with Turkey under which new arrivals are confined to Greece’s islands, Moria’s population has swollen to 9,000. It has become notorious for overcrowding, snowbound tents, freezing winter deaths, violent protests and suicides by adults and children alike.

    While all asylum systems are subjective, he said that the situation on Greece’s islands has turned the search for protection into a “lottery.”

    Stathis Poularakis is a lawyer who previously served for two years on an appeal committee dealing with asylum cases in Greece and has worked extensively on Lesbos. While all asylum systems are subjective, he said that the situation on Greece’s islands has turned the search for protection into a “lottery.”

    Asylum claims on Lesbos can take anywhere between six months and more than two years to be resolved. In the second quarter of 2018, Greece faced nearly four times as many asylum claims per capita as Germany. The E.U. has responded by increasing the presence of the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and broadening its remit so that EASO officials can conduct asylum interviews. But the promises that EASO will bring Dutch-style efficiency conceal the fact that the vast majority of its hires are not seconded from other member states but drawn from the same pool of Greeks as the national asylum service.

    Asylum caseworkers at Moria face an overwhelming backlog and plummeting morale. A serving EASO official describes extraordinary “pressure to go faster” and said there was “so much subjectivity in the system.” The official also said that it was human nature to reject more claims “when you see every other country is closing its borders.”

    Meanwhile, the only way to escape Moria while your claim is being processed is to be recognized as a “vulnerable” case. Vulnerables get permission to move to the mainland or to more humane accommodation elsewhere on the island. The term is elastic and can apply to lone children and women, families or severely physically or mentally ill people. In all cases the onus is on the asylum seeker ultimately to persuade the asylum service, Greek doctors or the United Nations Refugee Agency that they are especially vulnerable.

    The ensuing scramble to get out of Moria has turned the camp into a vast “vulnerability contest,” said Poularakis. It is a ruthless competition that the most heavily traumatized are often in no condition to understand, let alone win.

    Twice a Refugee

    Mosa arrived at Moria in October 2017 and spent his first night in Europe sleeping rough outside the arrivals tent. While he slept someone stole his phone. When he awoke he was more worried about the lost phone than disputing the decision of the Frontex officer who registered him as an adult. Poularakis said age assessors are on the lookout for adults claiming to be children, but “if you say you’re an adult, no one is going to object.”

    Being a child has never afforded Mosa any protection in the past: He did not understand that his entire future could be at stake. Smugglers often warn refugee children not to reveal their real age, telling them that they will be prevented from traveling further if they do not pretend to be over 18 years old.

    Like many other Hazara of his generation, Mosa was born in Iran, the child of refugees who fled Afghanistan. Sometimes called “the cursed people,” the Hazara are followers of Shia Islam and an ethnic and religious minority in Afghanistan, a country whose wars are usually won by larger ethnic groups and followers of Sunni Islam. Their ancestry, traced by some historians to Genghis Khan, also means they are highly visible and have been targets for persecution by Afghan warlords from 19th-century Pashtun kings to today’s Taliban.

    In recent decades, millions of Hazara have fled Afghanistan, many of them to Iran, where their language, Dari, is a dialect of Persian Farsi, the country’s main language.

    “We had a life where we went from work to home, which were both underground in a basement,” he said. “There was nothing (for us) like strolling the streets. I was trying not to be seen by anyone. I ran from the police like I would from a street dog.”

    Iran hosts 950,000 Afghan refugees who are registered with the U.N. and another 1.5 million undocumented Afghans. There are no official refugee camps, making displaced Afghans one of the largest urban refugee populations in the world. For those without the money to pay bribes, there is no route to permanent residency or citizenship. Most refugees survive without papers on the outskirts of cities such as the capital, Tehran. Those who received permits, before Iran stopped issuing them altogether in 2007, must renew them annually. The charges are unpredictable and high. Mostly, the Afghan Hazara survive as an underclass, providing cheap labor in workshops and constructions sites. This was how Mosa grew up.

    “We had a life where we went from work to home, which were both underground in a basement,” he said. “There was nothing (for us) like strolling the streets. I was trying not to be seen by anyone. I ran from the police like I would from a street dog.”

    But he could not remain invisible forever and one day in October 2016, on his way home from work, he was detained by police for not having papers.

    Sitting in one of the cantinas opposite the entrance to Moria, Mosa haltingly explained what happened next. How he was threatened with prison in Iran or deportation to Afghanistan, a country in which he has never set foot. How he was told that that the only way out was to agree to fight in Syria – for which they would pay him and reward him with legal residence in Iran.

    “In Iran, you have to pay for papers,” said Mosa. “If you don’t pay, you don’t have papers. I do not know Afghanistan. I did not have a choice.”

    As he talked, Mosa spread out a sheaf of papers from a battered plastic wallet. Along with asylum documents was a small notepad decorated with pink and mauve elephants where he keeps the phone numbers of friends and family. It also contains a passport-sized green booklet with the crest of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is a temporary residence permit. Inside its shiny cover is the photograph of a scared-looking boy, whom the document claims was born 27 years ago. It is the only I.D. he has ever owned and the date of birth has been faked to hide the fact that the country that issues it has been sending children to war.

    Mosa is not alone among the Hazara boys who have arrived in Greece seeking protection, carrying identification papers with inflated ages. Refugees Deeply has documented the cases of three Hazara child soldiers and corroborated their accounts with testimony from two other underage survivors. Their stories are of childhoods twice denied: once in Syria, where they were forced to fight, and then again after fleeing to Europe, where they are caught up in a system more focused on hard borders than on identifying the most damaged and vulnerable refugees.

    From Teenage Kicks to Adult Nightmares

    Karim’s descent into hell began with a prank. Together with a couple of friends, he recorded an angsty song riffing on growing up as a Hazara teenager in Tehran. Made when he was 16 years old, the song was meant to be funny. His band did not even have a name. The boys uploaded the track on a local file-sharing platform in 2014 and were as surprised as anyone when it was downloaded thousands of times. But after the surprise came a creeping sense of fear. Undocumented Afghan refugee families living in Tehran usually try to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Karim tried to have the song deleted, but after two months there was a knock on the door. It was the police.

    “I asked them how they found me,” he said. “I had no documents but they knew where I lived.”

    Already estranged from his family, the teenager was transported from his life of working in a pharmacy and staying with friends to life in a prison outside the capital. After two weeks inside, he was given three choices: to serve a five-year sentence; to be deported to Afghanistan; or to redeem himself by joining the Fatemiyoun.

    According to Iranian propaganda, the Fatemiyoun are Afghan volunteers deployed to Syria to protect the tomb of Zainab, the granddaughter of the Prophet Mohammad. In reality, the Fatemiyoun Brigade is a unit of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard, drawn overwhelmingly from Hazara communities, and it has fought in Iraq and Yemen, as well as Syria. Some estimates put its full strength at 15,000, which would make it the second-largest foreign force in support of the Assad regime, behind the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah.

    Karim was told he would be paid and given a one-year residence permit during leave back in Iran. Conscripts are promised that if they are “martyred,” their family will receive a pension and permanent status. “I wasn’t going to Afghanistan and I wasn’t going to prison,” said Karim. So he found himself forced to serve in the #Fatemiyoun.

    His first taste of the new life came when he was transferred to a training base outside Tehran, where the recruits, including other children, were given basic weapons training and religious indoctrination. They marched, crawled and prayed under the brigade’s yellow flag with a green arch, crossed by assault rifles and a Koranic phrase: “With the Help of God.”

    “Imagine me at 16,” said Karim. “I have no idea how to kill a bird. They got us to slaughter animals to get us ready. First, they prepare your brain to kill.”

    The 16-year-old’s first deployment was to Mosul in Iraq, where he served four months. When he was given leave back in Iran, Karim was told that to qualify for his residence permit he would need to serve a second term, this time in Syria. They were first sent into the fight against the so-called Islamic State in Raqqa. Because of his age and physique, Karim and some of the other underage soldiers were moved to the medical corps. He said that there were boys as young as 14 and he remembers a 15-year-old who fought using a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

    “One prisoner was killed by being hung by his hair from a tree. They cut off his fingers one by one and cauterized the wounds with gunpowder.”

    “I knew nothing about Syria. I was just trying to survive. They were making us hate ISIS, dehumanizing them. Telling us not to leave one of them alive.” Since media reports revealed the existence of the Fatemiyoun, the brigade has set up a page on Facebook. Among pictures of “proud volunteers,” it shows stories of captured ISIS prisoners being fed and cared for. Karim recalls a different story.

    “One prisoner was killed by being hung by his hair from a tree. They cut off his fingers one by one and cauterized the wounds with gunpowder.”

    The casualties on both sides were overwhelming. At the al-Razi hospital in Aleppo, the young medic saw the morgue overwhelmed with bodies being stored two or three to a compartment. Despite promises to reward the families of martyrs, Karim said many of the bodies were not sent back to Iran.

    Mosa’s basic training passed in a blur. A shy boy whose parents had divorced when he was young and whose father became an opium addict, he had always shrunk from violence. He never wanted to touch the toy guns that other boys played with. Now he was being taught to break down, clean and fire an assault rifle.

    The trainees were taken three times a day to the imam, who preached to them about their holy duty and the iniquities of ISIS, often referred to as Daesh.

    “They told us that Daesh was the same but worse than the Taliban,” said Mosa. “I didn’t listen to them. I didn’t go to Syria by choice. They forced me to. I just needed the paper.”

    Mosa was born in 2001. Before being deployed to Syria, the recruits were given I.D. tags and papers that deliberately overstated their age: In 2017, Human Rights Watch released photographs of the tombstones of eight Afghan children who had died in Syria and whose families identified them as having been under 18 years old. The clerk who filled out Mosa’s forms did not trouble himself with complex math: He just changed 2001 to 1991. Mosa was one of four underage soldiers in his group. The boys were scared – their hands shook so hard they kept dropping their weapons. Two of them were dead within days of reaching the front lines.

    “I didn’t even know where we were exactly, somewhere in the mountains in a foreign country. I was scared all the time. Every time I saw a friend dying in front of my eyes I was thinking I would be next,” said Mosa.

    He has flashbacks of a friend who died next to him after being shot in the face by a sniper. After the incident, he could not sleep for four nights. The worst, he said, were the sudden raids by ISIS when they would capture Fatemiyoun fighters: “God knows what happened to them.”

    Iran does not release figures on the number of Fatemiyoun casualties. In a rare interview earlier this year, a senior officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard suggested as many as 1,500 Fatemiyoun had been killed in Syria. In Mashhad, an Iranian city near the border with Afghanistan where the brigade was first recruited, video footage has emerged of families demanding the bodies of their young men believed to have died in Syria. Mosa recalls patrols in Syria where 150 men and boys would go out and only 120 would return.

    Escaping Syria

    Abbas had two weeks left in Syria before going back to Iran on leave. After 10 weeks in what he describes as a “living hell,” he had begun to believe he might make it out alive. It was his second stint in Syria and, still only 17 years old, he had been chosen to be a paramedic, riding in the back of a 2008 Chevrolet truck converted into a makeshift ambulance.

    He remembers thinking that the ambulance and the hospital would have to be better than the bitter cold of the front line. His abiding memory from then was the sound of incoming 120mm shells. “They had a special voice,” Abbas said. “And when you hear it, you must lie down.”

    Following 15 days of nursing training, during which he was taught how to find a vein and administer injections, he was now an ambulance man, collecting the dead and wounded from the battlefields on which the Fatemiyoun were fighting ISIS.

    Abbas grew up in Ghazni in Afghanistan, but his childhood ended when his father died from cancer in 2013. Now the provider for the family, he traveled with smugglers across the border into Iran, to work for a tailor in Tehran who had known his father. He worked without documents and faced the same threats as the undocumented Hazara children born in Iran. Even more dangerous were the few attempts he made to return to Ghazni. The third time he attempted to hop the border he was captured by Iranian police.

    Abbas was packed onto a transport, along with 23 other children, and sent to Ordugah-i Muhaceran, a camplike detention center outside Mashhad. When they got there the Shia Hazara boys were separated from Sunni Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, who were pushed back across the border. Abbas was given the same choice as Karim and Mosa before him: Afghanistan or Syria. Many of the other forced recruits Abbas met in training, and later fought alongside in Syria, were addicts with a history of substance abuse.

    Testimony from three Fatemiyoun child soldiers confirmed that Tramadol was routinely used by recruits to deaden their senses, leaving them “feeling nothing” even in combat situations but, nonetheless, able to stay awake for days at a time.

    The Fatemiyoun officers dealt with withdrawal symptoms by handing out Tramadol, an opioid painkiller that is used to treat back pain but sometimes abused as a cheap alternative to methadone. The drug is a slow-release analgesic. Testimony from three Fatemiyoun child soldiers confirmed that it was routinely used by recruits to deaden their senses, leaving them “feeling nothing” even in combat situations but, nonetheless, able to stay awake for days at a time. One of the children reiterated that the painkiller meant he felt nothing. Users describe feeling intensely thirsty but say they avoid drinking water because it triggers serious nausea and vomiting. Tramadol is addictive and prolonged use can lead to insomnia and seizures.

    Life in the ambulance had not met Abbas’ expectations. He was still sent to the front line, only now it was to collect the dead and mutilated. Some soldiers shot themselves in the feet to escape the conflict.

    “We picked up people with no feet and no hands. Some of them were my friends,” Abbas said. “One man was in small, small pieces. We collected body parts I could not recognize and I didn’t know if they were Syrian or Iranian or Afghan. We just put them in bags.”

    Abbas did not make it to the 12th week. One morning, driving along a rubble-strewn road, his ambulance collided with an anti-tank mine. Abbas’ last memory of Syria is seeing the back doors of the vehicle blasted outward as he was thrown onto the road.

    When he awoke he was in a hospital bed in Iran. He would later learn that the Syrian ambulance driver had been killed and that the other Afghan medic in the vehicle had lost both his legs. At the time, his only thought was to escape.

    The Toll on Child Soldiers

    Alice Roorda first came into contact with child soldiers in 2001 in the refugee camps of Sierra Leone in West Africa. A child psychologist, she was sent there by the United Kingdom-based charity War Child. She was one of three psychologists for a camp of more than 5,000 heavily traumatized survivors of one of West Africa’s more brutal conflicts.

    “There was almost nothing we could do,” she admitted.

    The experience, together with later work in Uganda, has given her a deep grounding in the effects of war and post-conflict trauma on children. She said prolonged exposure to conflict zones has physical as well as psychological effects.

    “If you are chronically stressed, as in a war zone, you have consistently high levels of the two basic stress hormones: adrenaline and cortisol.”

    Even after reaching a calmer situation, the “stress baseline” remains high, she said. This impacts everything from the immune system to bowel movements. Veterans often suffer from complications related to the continual engagement of the psoas, or “fear muscle” – the deepest muscles in the body’s core, which connect the spine, through the pelvis, to the femurs.

    “With prolonged stress you start to see the world around you as more dangerous.” The medial prefrontal cortex, the section of the brain that interprets threat levels, is also affected, said Roorda. This part of the brain is sometimes called the “watchtower.”

    “When your watchtower isn’t functioning well you see everything as more dangerous. You are on high alert. This is not a conscious response; it is because the stress is already so close to the surface.”

    Psychological conditions that can be expected to develop include post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Left untreated, these stress levels can lead to physical symptoms ranging from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS or ME) to high blood pressure or irritable bowel syndrome. Also common are heightened sensitivity to noise and insomnia.

    The trauma of war can also leave children frozen at the point when they were traumatized. “Their life is organized as if the trauma is still ongoing,” said Roorda. “It is difficult for them to take care of themselves, to make rational well informed choices, and to trust people.”

    The starting point for any treatment of child soldiers, said Roorda, is a calm environment. They need to release the tension with support groups and physical therapy, she said, and “a normal bedtime.”

    The Dutch psychologist, who is now based in Athens, acknowledged that what she is describing is the exact opposite of the conditions at #Moria.

    Endgame

    Karim is convinced that his facility for English has saved his life. While most Hazara boys arrive in Europe speaking only Farsi, Karim had taught himself some basic English before reaching Greece. As a boy in Tehran he had spent hours every day trying to pick up words and phrases from movies that he watched with subtitles on his phone. His favorite was The Godfather, which he said he must have seen 25 times. He now calls English his “safe zone” and said he prefers it to Farsi.

    When Karim reached Greece in March 2016, new arrivals were not yet confined to the islands. No one asked him if he was a child or an adult. He paid smugglers to help him escape Iran while on leave from Syria and after crossing through Turkey landed on Chios. Within a day and a half, he had passed through the port of Piraeus and reached Greece’s northern border with Macedonia, at Idomeni.

    When he realized the border was closed, he talked to some of the international aid workers who had come to help at the makeshift encampment where tens of thousands of refugees and migrants waited for a border that would not reopen. They ended up hiring him as a translator. Two years on, his English is now much improved and Karim has worked for a string of international NGOs and a branch of the Greek armed forces, where he was helped to successfully apply for asylum.

    The same job has also brought him to Moria. He earns an above-average salary for Greece and at first he said that his work on Lesbos is positive: “I’m not the only one who has a shitty background. It balances my mind to know that I’m not the only one.”

    But then he admits that it is difficult hearing and interpreting versions of his own life story from Afghan asylum seekers every day at work. He has had problems with depression and suffered flashbacks, “even though I’m in a safe country now.”

    Abbas got the help he needed to win the vulnerability contest. After he was initially registered as an adult, his age assessment was overturned and he was transferred from Moria to a shelter for children on Lesbos. He has since been moved again to a shelter in mainland Greece. While he waits to hear the decision on his protection status, Abbas – like other asylum seekers in Greece – receives 150 euros ($170) a month. This amount needs to cover all his expenses, from food and clothing to phone credit. The money is not enough to cover a regular course of the antidepressant Prozac and the sleeping pills he was prescribed by the psychiatrist he was able to see on Lesbos.

    “I save them for when it gets really bad,” he said.

    Since moving to the mainland he has been hospitalized once with convulsions, but his main worry is the pain in his groin. Abbas underwent a hernia operation in Iran, the result of injuries sustained as a child lifting adult bodies into the ambulance. He has been told that he will need to wait for four months to see a doctor in Greece who can tell him if he needs another operation.

    “I would like to go back to school,” he said. But in reality, Abbas knows that he will need to work and there is little future for an Afghan boy who can no longer lift heavy weights.

    Walking into an Afghan restaurant in downtown Athens – near Victoria Square, where the people smugglers do business – Abbas is thrilled to see Farsi singers performing on the television above the door. “I haven’t been in an Afghan restaurant for maybe three years,” he said to explain his excitement. His face brightens again when he catches sight of Ghormeh sabzi, a herb stew popular in Afghanistan and Iran that reminds him of his mother. “I miss being with them,” he said, “being among my family.”

    When the dish arrives he pauses before eating, taking out his phone and carefully photographing the plate from every angle.

    Mosa is about to mark the end of a full year in Moria. He remains in the same drab tent that reminds him every day of Syria. Serious weight loss has made his long limbs – the ones that made it easier for adults to pretend he was not a child – almost comically thin. His skin is laced with scars, but he refuses to go into detail about how he got them. Mosa has now turned 18 and seems to realize that his best chance of getting help may have gone.

    “Those people who don’t have problems, they give them vulnerability (status),” he said with evident anger. “If you tell them the truth, they don’t help you.”

    Then he apologises for the flash of temper. “I get upset and angry and my body shakes,” he said.

    Mosa explained that now when he gets angry he has learned to remove himself: “Sometimes I stuff my ears with toilet paper to make it quiet.”

    It is 10 months since Mosa had his asylum interview. The questions he expected about his time in the Fatemiyoun never came up. Instead, the interviewers asked him why he had not stayed in Turkey after reaching that country, having run away while on leave in Iran.

    The questions they did ask him point to his likely rejection and deportation. Why, he was asked, was his fear of being persecuted in Afghanistan credible? He told them that he has heard from other Afghan boys that police and security services in the capital, Kabul, were arresting ex-combatants from Syria.

    Like teenagers everywhere, many of the younger Fatemiyoun conscripts took selfies in Syria and posted them on Facebook or shared them on WhatsApp. The images, which include uniforms and insignia, can make him a target for Sunni reprisals. These pictures now haunt him as much as the faces of his dead comrades.

    Meanwhile, the fate he suffered two tours in Syria to avoid now seems to be the most that Europe can offer him. Without any of his earlier anger, he said, “I prefer to kill myself here than go to Afghanistan.”

    #enfants-soldats #syrie #réfugiés #asile #migrations #guerre #conflit #réfugiés_afghans #Afghanistan #ISIS #EI #Etat_islamique #trauma #traumatisme #vulnérabilité

    ping @isskein

  • C.I.A. Drone Mission, Curtailed by Obama, Is Expanded in Africa Under Trump

    The C.I.A. is poised to conduct secret drone strikes against Qaeda and Islamic State insurgents from a newly expanded air base deep in the Sahara, making aggressive use of powers that were scaled back during the Obama administration and restored by President Trump.

    Late in his presidency, Barack Obama sought to put the military in charge of drone attacks after a backlash arose over a series of highly visible strikes, some of which killed civilians. The move was intended, in part, to bring greater transparency to attacks that the United States often refused to acknowledge its role in.

    But now the C.I.A. is broadening its drone operations, moving aircraft to northeastern Niger to hunt Islamist militants in southern Libya. The expansion adds to the agency’s limited covert missions in eastern Afghanistan for strikes in Pakistan, and in southern Saudi Arabia for attacks in Yemen.

    Nigerien and American officials said the C.I.A. had been flying drones on surveillance missions for several months from a corner of a small commercial airport in Dirkou. Satellite imagery shows that the airport has grown significantly since February to include a new taxiway, walls and security posts.

    One American official said the drones had not yet been used in lethal missions, but would almost certainly be in the near future, given the growing threat in southern Libya. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the secretive operations.

    A C.I.A. spokesman, Timothy Barrett, declined to comment. A Defense Department spokeswoman, Maj. Sheryll Klinkel, said the military had maintained a base at the Dirkou airfield for several months but did not fly drone missions from there.

    The drones take off from Dirkou at night — typically between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. — buzzing in the clear, starlit desert sky. A New York Times reporter saw the gray aircraft — about the size of Predator drones, which are 27 feet long — flying at least three times over six days in early August. Unlike small passenger planes that land occasionally at the airport, the drones have no blinking lights signaling their presence.

    “All I know is they’re American,” Niger’s interior minister, Mohamed Bazoum, said in an interview. He offered few other details about the drones.

    Dirkou’s mayor, Boubakar Jerome, said the drones had helped improve the town’s security. “It’s always good. If people see things like that, they’ll be scared,” Mr. Jerome said.

    Mr. Obama had curtailed the C.I.A.’s lethal role by limiting its drone flights, notably in Yemen. Some strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere that accidentally killed civilians, stirring outrage among foreign diplomats and military officials, were shielded because of the C.I.A.’s secrecy.

    As part of the shift, the Pentagon was given the unambiguous lead for such operations. The move sought, in part, to end an often awkward charade in which the United States would not concede its responsibility for strikes that were abundantly covered by news organizations and tallied by watchdog groups. However, the C.I.A. program was not fully shut down worldwide, as the agency and its supporters in Congress balked.

    The drone policy was changed last year, after Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director at the time, made a forceful case to President Trump that the agency’s broader counterterrorism efforts were being needlessly constrained. The Dirkou base was already up and running by the time Mr. Pompeo stepped down as head of the C.I.A. in April to become Mr. Trump’s secretary of state.

    The Pentagon’s Africa Command has carried out five drone strikes against Qaeda and Islamic State militants in Libya this year, including one two weeks ago. The military launches its MQ-9 Reaper drones from bases in Sicily and in Niamey, Niger’s capital, 800 miles southwest of Dirkou.

    But the C.I.A. base is hundreds of miles closer to southwestern Libya, a notorious haven for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups that also operate in the Sahel region of Niger, Chad, Mali and Algeria. It is also closer to southern Libya than a new $110 million drone base in Agadez, Niger, 350 miles west of Dirkou, where the Pentagon plans to operate armed Reaper drone missions by early next year.

    Another American official said the C.I.A. began setting up the base in January to improve surveillance of the region, partly in response to an ambush last fall in another part of Niger that killed four American troops. The Dirkou airfield was labeled a United States Air Force base as a cover, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential operational matters.

    The C.I.A. operation in Dirkou is burdened by few, if any, of the political sensitivities that the United States military confronts at its locations, said one former American official involved with the project.

    Even so, security analysts said, it is not clear why the United States needs both military and C.I.A. drone operations in the same general vicinity to combat insurgents in Libya. France also flies Reaper drones from Niamey, but only on unarmed reconnaissance missions.

    “I would be surprised that the C.I.A. would open its own base,” said Bill Roggio, editor of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Long War Journal, which tracks military strikes against militant groups.

    Despite American denials, a Nigerien security official said he had concluded that the C.I.A. launched an armed drone from the Dirkou base to strike a target in Ubari, in southern Libya, on July 25. The Nigerien security official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program.

    A spokesman for the Africa Command, Maj. Karl Wiest, said the military did not carry out the Ubari strike.

    #Ubari is in the same region where the American military in March launched its first-ever drone attack against Qaeda militants in southern Libya. It is at the intersection of the powerful criminal and jihadist currents that have washed across Libya in recent years. Roughly equidistant from Libya’s borders with Niger, Chad and Algeria, the area’s seminomadic residents are heavily involved in the smuggling of weapons, drugs and migrants through the lawless deserts of southern Libya.

    Some of the residents have allied with Islamist militias, including Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which operates across Algeria, Mali, Niger and Libya.

    Dirkou, in northeast Niger, is an oasis town of a few thousand people in the open desert, bordered by a small mountain range. For centuries, it has been a key transit point for travelers crossing the Sahara. It helped facilitate the rise of Islam in West Africa in the 9th century, and welcomed salt caravans from the neighboring town of Bilma.

    The town has a handful of narrow, sandy roads. Small trees dot the horizon. Date and neem trees line the streets, providing shelter for people escaping the oppressive midday heat. There is a small market, where goods for sale include spaghetti imported from Libya. Gasoline is also imported from Libya and is cheaper than elsewhere in the country.

    The drones based in Dirkou are loud, and their humming and buzzing drowns out the bleats of goats and crows of roosters.

    “It stops me from sleeping,” said Ajimi Koddo, 45, a former migrant smuggler. “They need to go. They go in our village, and it annoys us too much.”

    Satellite imagery shows that construction started in February on a new compound at the Dirkou airstrip. Since then, the facility has been extended to include a larger paved taxiway and a clamshell tent connected to the airstrip — all features that are consistent with the deployment of small aircraft, possibly drones.

    Five defensive positions were set up around the airport, and there appear to be new security gates and checkpoints both to the compound and the broader airport.

    It’s not the first time that Washington has eyed with interest Dirkou’s tiny base. In the late 1980s, the United States spent $3.2 million renovating the airstrip in an effort to bolster Niger’s government against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, then the leader of Libya.

    Compared with other parts of Africa, the C.I.A.’s presence in the continent’s northwest is relatively light, according to a former State Department official who served in the region. In this part of Niger, the C.I.A. is also providing training and sharing intelligence, according to a Nigerien military intelligence document reviewed by The Times.

    The Nigerien security official said about a dozen American Green Berets were stationed earlier this year in #Dirkou — in a base separate from the C.I.A.’s — to train a special counterterrorism battalion of local forces. Those trainers left about three months ago, the official said.

    It is unlikely that they will return anytime soon. The Pentagon is considering withdrawing nearly all American commandos from Niger in the wake of the deadly October ambush that killed four United States soldiers.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/world/africa/cia-drones-africa-military.html
    #CIA #drones #Niger #Sahel #USA #Etats-Unis #EI #ISIS #Etat_islamique #sécurité #terrorisme #base_militaire

    • Le Sahel est-il une zone de #non-droit ?

      La CIA a posé ses valises dans la bande sahélo-saharienne. Le New-York Times l’a annoncé, le 9 septembre dernier. Le quotidien US, a révélé l’existence d’une #base_de_drones secrète non loin de la commune de Dirkou, dans le nord-est du Niger. Cette localité, enclavée, la première grande ville la plus proche est Agadez située à 570 km, est le terrain de tir parfait. Elle est éloignée de tous les regards, y compris des autres forces armées étrangères : France, Allemagne, Italie, présentes sur le sol nigérien. Selon un responsable américain anonyme interrogé par ce journal, les drones déployés à Dirkou n’avaient « pas encore été utilisés dans des missions meurtrières, mais qu’ils le seraient certainement dans un proche avenir, compte tenu de la menace croissante qui pèse sur le sud de la Libye. » Or, d’après les renseignements recueillis par l’IVERIS, ces assertions sont fausses, la CIA a déjà mené des opérations à partir de cette base. Ces informations apportent un nouvel éclairage et expliquent le refus catégorique et systématique de l’administration américaine de placer la force conjointe du G5 Sahel (Tchad, Mauritanie, Burkina-Faso, Niger, Mali) sous le chapitre VII de la charte des Nations Unies.
      L’installation d’une base de drones n’est pas une bonne nouvelle pour les peuples du Sahel, et plus largement de l’Afrique de l’Ouest, qui pourraient connaître les mêmes malheurs que les Afghans et les Pakistanais confrontés à la guerre des drones avec sa cohorte de victimes civiles, appelées pudiquement « dégâts collatéraux ».

      D’après le journaliste du NYT, qui s’est rendu sur place, les drones présents à Dirkou ressembleraient à des Predator, des aéronefs d’ancienne génération qui ont un rayon d’action de 1250 km. Il serait assez étonnant que l’agence de Langley soit équipée de vieux modèles alors que l’US Air Force dispose à Niamey et bientôt à Agadez des derniers modèles MQ-9 Reaper, qui, eux, volent sur une distance de 1850 km. A partir de cette base, la CIA dispose donc d’un terrain de tir étendu qui va de la Libye, au sud de l’Algérie, en passant par le Tchad, jusqu’au centre du Mali, au Nord du Burkina et du Nigéria…

      Selon deux sources militaires de pays d’Afrique de l’Ouest, ces drones ont déjà réalisé des frappes à partir de la base de Dirkou. Ces bombardements ont eu lieu en Libye. Il paraît important de préciser que le chaos existant dans ce pays depuis la guerre de 2011, ne rend pas ces frappes plus légales. Par ailleurs, ces mêmes sources suspectent la CIA d’utiliser Dirkou comme une prison secrète « si des drones peuvent se poser des avions aussi. Rien ne les empêche de transporter des terroristes de Libye exfiltrés. Dirkou un Guantanamo bis ? »

      En outre, il n’est pas impossible que ces drones tueurs aient été en action dans d’autres Etats limitrophes. Qui peut le savoir ? « Cette base est irrégulière, illégale, la CIA peut faire absolument tout ce qu’elle veut là-bas » rapporte un officier. De plus, comment faire la différence entre un MQ-9 Reaper de la CIA ou encore un de l’US Air Force, qui, elle, a obtenu l’autorisation d’armer ses drones (1). Encore que…

      En novembre 2017, le président Mahamadou Issoufou a autorisé les drones de l’US Air Force basés à Niamey, à frapper leurs cibles sur le territoire nigérien (2). Mais pour que cet agrément soit légal, il aurait fallu qu’il soit présenté devant le parlement, ce qui n’a pas été le cas. Même s’il l’avait été, d’une part, il le serait seulement pour l’armée US et pas pour la CIA, d’autre part, il ne serait valable que sur le sol nigérien et pas sur les territoires des pays voisins…

      Pour rappel, cette autorisation a été accordée à peine un mois après les événements de Tongo Tongo, où neuf militaires avaient été tués, cinq soldats nigériens et quatre américains. Cette autorisation est souvent présentée comme la conséquence de cette attaque. Or, les pourparlers ont eu lieu bien avant. En effet, l’AFRICOM a planifié la construction de la base de drone d’Agadez, la seconde la plus importante de l’US Air Force en Afrique après Djibouti, dès 2016, sous le mandat de Barack Obama. Une nouvelle preuve que la politique africaine du Pentagone n’a pas changée avec l’arrivée de Donald Trump (3-4-5).

      Les USA seuls maîtres à bord dans le Sahel

      Dès lors, le véto catégorique des Etats-Unis de placer la force G5 Sahel sous chapitre VII se comprend mieux. Il s’agit de mener une guerre non-officielle sans mandat international des Nations-Unies et sans se soucier du droit international. Ce n’était donc pas utile qu’Emmanuel Macron, fer de lance du G5, force qui aurait permis à l’opération Barkhane de sortir du bourbier dans lequel elle se trouve, plaide à de nombreuses reprises cette cause auprès de Donald Trump. Tous les présidents du G5 Sahel s’y sont essayés également, en vain. Ils ont fini par comprendre, quatre chefs d’Etats ont boudé la dernière Assemblée générale des Nations Unies. Seul, le Président malien, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, est monté à la tribune pour réitérer la demande de mise sous chapitre VII, unique solution pour que cette force obtienne un financement pérenne. Alors qu’en décembre 2017, Emmanuel Macron y croyait encore dur comme fer et exigeait des victoires au premier semestre 2018, faute de budget, le G5 Sahel n’est toujours pas opérationnel ! (6-7) Néanmoins, la Chine a promis de le soutenir financièrement. Magnanime, le secrétaire d’Etat à la défense, Jim Mattis a lui assuré à son homologue, Florence Parly, que les Etats-Unis apporteraient à la force conjointe une aide très significativement augmentée. Mais toujours pas de chapitre VII en vue... Ainsi, l’administration Trump joue coup double. Non seulement elle ne s’embarrasse pas avec le Conseil de Sécurité et le droit international mais sous couvert de lutte antiterroriste, elle incruste ses bottes dans ce qui est, (ce qui fut ?), la zone d’influence française.

      Far West

      Cerise sur le gâteau, en août dernier le patron de l’AFRICOM, le général Thomas D. Waldhauser, a annoncé une réduction drastique de ses troupes en Afrique (9). Les sociétés militaires privées, dont celle d’Erik Prince, anciennement Blackwater, ont bien compris le message et sont dans les starting-blocks prêtes à s’installer au Sahel (10).


      https://www.iveris.eu/list/notes_danalyse/371-le_sahel_estil_une_zone_de_nondroit__

  • On the Ground News ( OGNreports) – Twitter
    https://mobile.twitter.com/OGNreports

    Media/News Company consisting of a group of Journalists working in Syria delivering accurate, confirmed & up to date news. We document Assad/Putin warcrimes.

    Twitter
    https://mobile.twitter.com/walid970721/status/1045807793809367040/photo/1

    Cette scène montrant clairement des hommes arborant des drapeaux #isis
    correspondrait à une « manifestation de civils » selon « On the Ground News », qui a vite fait d’effacer son tweet après qu’on lui ait mis son énormité devant le nez.

  • #Dawla

    Dawla in arabo significa Stato ed è uno dei modi in cui gli affiliati dello Stato islamico chiamano la propria organizzazione. Gabriele Del Grande è andato a incontrarli in un avventuroso viaggio partito nel Kurdistan iracheno e terminato con il suo arresto in Turchia. Questo libro è il racconto delle loro storie intrecciate alla storia più grande dell’ascesa e della caduta dello Stato islamico.

    Un racconto che parte nel 2005 nei sotterranei del carcere di massima sicurezza di Saydnaya, in Siria, e che passa per la rivoluzione fallita del 2011, la guerra per procura contro al-Asad, il ritorno del Califfato e gli attentati che hanno sconvolto l’Europa.

    Senza mai cedere ai toni della saggistica, Del Grande mette in scena una galleria di personaggi le cui vicende si snodano in un intreccio di storytelling e geopolitica. Un manifestante siriano spinto da un’autentica sete di giustizia a prendere le armi e che, davanti alla corruzione dell’Esercito Libero, sceglie di arruolarsi nel Dawla, dove farà carriera come agente dei servizi segreti interni ed emiro della polizia morale, hisba. Un hacker giordano in fissa con l’esoterismo giunto in Siria seguendo le profezie sulla fine del mondo e finito nel braccio dei condannati a morte in una prigione segreta del Dawla. E un avventuriero iracheno ingaggiato da un ex colonnello dell’Anbar che grazie alla propria intraprendenza si addentrerà nel livello più oscuro dei servizi segreti del Dawla, quello responsabile della pianificazione degli attentati in Europa.

    Asciutto e spietato come una tragedia classica, avvincente come un action movie, questo libro straordinario ci racconta storie forti, piene di colpi di scena, avventure, sentimenti, rabbia, amore, vita, morte, punti di vista opposti sulla guerra e sul mondo.

    https://www.librimondadori.it/libri/dawla-gabriele-del-grande
    #EI #Etat_islamique #Syrie #djihad #daech #ISIS #Gabriele_del_Grande #livre

  • Au #Sahel, #sécheresse et #jihad créent une « #crise_pastorale » explosive

    Au Sahel, la sécheresse chasse les troupeaux et leurs bergers vers des contrées plus accueillantes, déclenchant une « crise pastorale » qui risque d’aggraver l’insécurité alimentaire dans une région déjà fragilisée par la présence de groupes jihadistes, alertent les spécialistes.

    Traditionnelles, les migrations transfrontalières de troupeaux en #Afrique_de_l'ouest ont été cette semaine au centre d’une réunion de trois jours des membres du Réseau de prévention des crises alimentaires (RPCA), au siège de l’OCDE à Paris.

    Dans plusieurs pays, « il n’y a pas assez de fourrage, et les troupeaux sont partis plus tôt que prévu, en octobre au lieu de janvier, car ils n’avaient plus rien à manger », explique à l’AFP Maty Ba Dio, coordinatrice régionale du projet régional d’appui au pastoralisme au Sahel, basée à Ouagadougou.

    « La difficulté, c’est qu’ils sont arrivés alors que les populations agricoles du sud n’avaient pas complètement fini les récoltes, les animaux ont envahi et détruit les parcelles de culture (...), cela a créé des conflits énormes », regrette-t-elle. Les investissements en semences et engrais ont été anéantis.

    Dans les pays côtiers qui reçoivent les migrations de troupeaux, « comme le #Nigeria, le #Ghana, ou le #Togo », les conflits « ont abouti à des morts d’hommes, avec des images difficiles à regarder », souligne aussi Mme Ba Dio.


    https://afrique.tv5monde.com/information/au-sahel-secheresse-et-jihad-creent-une-crise-pastorale-explosive
    #pastoralisme #élevage #EI #Etat_islamique #ISIS #djihadisme

  • The Emergence of Violent Extremism in Northern #Mozambique

    The emergence of a new militant Islamist group in northern Mozambique raises a host of concerns over the influence of international jihadist ideology, social and economic marginalization of local Muslim communities, and a heavy-handed security response.

    https://africacenter.org/spotlight/the-emergence-of-violent-extremism-in-northern-mozambique
    #djihadisme #ISIS #EI #islamisme

    @reka : faut mettre à jour la carte ?

  • Raytheon-Jordan Border Defense Against ISIS Enters Final Phase

    A US-funded partnership between Jordan and #Raytheon is entering the final phase of a nearly $100 million program to guard the Hashemite Kingdom against infiltrators from the Islamic State group and other extremist organizations operating beyond its border with Syria and Iraq.


    https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2016/05/26/raytheon-jordan-border-defense-against-isis-enters-final-phase
    #Jordanie #Syrie #Irak #murs #frontières #barrières_frontalières #ISIS #EI #Etat_islamique

    • [...]

      Seit zwei Jahren arbeitet Adiba für internationale Journalisten, übersetzt, organisiert, vermittelt Gesprächspartner. Ohne ihre Hilfe käme Mohammed nicht weit. Sie kennt die Gegend und hat die Genehmigungen der kurdischen Autonomiebehörde besorgt, um die unzähligen Checkpoints auf dem Weg nach Sindschar zu passieren, jene Stadt, die zum Symbol für den Massenmord an den Jesiden geworden ist. Seit November 2015 ist Sindschar zwar befreit. Doch der IS kontrolliert noch immer Dörfer und Weiler im wenige Kilometer entfernten Umkreis. Adiba stammt aus dem Nachbarort Khanasor, aus dem sie im August 2014 wenige Minuten vor dem Eintreffen der Milizen des IS entkommen konnte. Sie hat sofort zugesagt, mit Khamis zu arbeiten, als sie hörte, was er für seine Freundin Tamara tun möchte.

      Am nächsten Morgen geht es los. Vorerst ist der Abstecher in das irakische Krisengebiet, zweihundert Kilometer nördlich von Erbil, nur ein ungeschriebenes Kapitel des Buches, das er nach dieser Reise veröffentlichen möchte. Was erwartet Mohammed Khamis von den kommenden Tagen? Hat er Angst, als Muslim diskriminiert zu werden? Dass ihn die Opfer des IS wegen seines Glaubens in moralische Sippenhaft nehmen? Wie wird er auf das, was im Namen seiner Religion angerichtet wurde, reagieren, auf die Zerstörungen, das Leid, die Flüchtlinge? Mohammed Khamis zuckt mit den Schultern und sagt: »Was mir sehr wichtig ist, ist zu zeigen, dass das, was hier passiert ist, nicht im Namen meiner Religion passiert ist. Ich möchte dem jesidischem Volk sagen, dass die Art meiner Auslegung meiner Religion nicht erlaubt, einen Menschen zu unterdrücken, zu töten, zwangszuverheiraten oder zu vergewaltigen.« Adiba schlägt vor, dass er sich Michael anstatt Mohammed nennen könnte, um sich eventuellen Ärger zu ersparen. »Nein. Ich verleugne mich nicht.« Schließlich sei er hier, um zu verstehen.

      »Der IS ist mit zwei Wagen in Sinjar einmarschiert«, widerspricht Adiba und streckt Mohammed zwei Finger entgegen. »Nur mit zwei Wagen!«

      Das mit dem Verstehen ist jedoch so eine Sache. Ihm ist bewusst, dass es nach den Massakern des IS nicht einfach werden könnte, die Jesiden davon zu überzeugen, dass der Islam eigentlich nur eines lehrt: Frieden. Mohammed möchte auf der Fahrt nach Sindschar von Adiba wissen, was ihr im Sommer 2014, als der IS den Nordirak überrannte, zugestoßen ist. Die junge Frau holt tief Luft und beginnt zu erzählen. »Am 3. August 2014 habe ich siebzig Familienmitglieder verloren. Wir wissen nicht, was aus ihnen geworden ist, wo sie sind. Vor dem Krieg war ich ein kleines Mädchen, ein Jahr später eine alte Frau. Ich habe viel verloren, aber ich kann nicht hassen.«

      Mohammed hört zu, nickt und sagt dann: »Das war keine religiöse Sache, was hier passiert ist. Meine Religion erlaubt das nicht. Wo auch immer du hinsiehst, Moslems sind so nicht.«

      »Ich weiß, Mohammed.«

      »Verurteilst Du uns?«, fragt er misstrauisch.

      »Ich sage nicht, dass alle Moslems verantwortlich sind. Die IS-Kämpfer kamen nicht aus Saudi-Arabien. Es waren Iraker. Es waren unsere Nachbarn«, antwortet Adiba.

      [...]

      #auf_deutsch