Tag: InternationalNews

{White House says plan includes “advice and assistance” as well as “occasional” operations against Taliban forces.}

The White House has announced the expansion of the US military’s role in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, ratcheting up a 15-year conflict President Barack Obama had vowed to end.

Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary, said on Friday that US forces will play a “more proactive” role in helping local troops “be more effective in the battlefield”.

Earnest said US support will come in the form of “advice and assistance” to Afghan military, as well as “occasionally accompanying them in their operations”.

Afghan forces have struggled to contain the Taliban, which has carried out numerous attacks, including in the Afghan capital Kabul.

But Earnest denied that Obama is “restarting” the US combat role there, which ended in 2014.

At least 9,800 US forces have remained in an advisory role in Afghanistan since the start of 2015, and were only authorised to hit Taliban targets for defensive reasons, or to protect Afghan troops.

Defence Secretary Ash Carter said the order was issued to General Sean MacFarland, US commander in Afghanistan.

Al Jazeera’s Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington DC, said the US defence department had wanted to carry out the plan for months.

“The concern about the resurgence of the Taliban has been growing in the Pentagon,” Jordan said.

The plan also includes “strategic strikes” against the Taliban in order to weaken it, while shoring up the Afghan troops’ ability to defend the country, she said.

As the “summer fighting season” comes in high gear, the US wants to make sure the Afghan military “would not be caught short”, Jordan added.

Obama was elected in 2008, promising to end one of America’s longest and most gruelling wars.

Afghan forces have struggled to contain the Taliban, which has carried out numerous attacks, including in the Afghan capital Kabul.

But Earnest denied that Obama is “restarting” the US combat role there, which ended in 2014.

At least 9,800 US forces have remained in an advisory role in Afghanistan since the start of 2015, and were only authorised to hit Taliban targets for defensive reasons, or to protect Afghan troops.

Defence Secretary Ash Carter said the order was issued to General Sean MacFarland, US commander in Afghanistan.

Al Jazeera’s Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington DC, said the US defence department had wanted to carry out the plan for months.

“The concern about the resurgence of the Taliban has been growing in the Pentagon,” Jordan said.

The plan also includes “strategic strikes” against the Taliban in order to weaken it, while shoring up the Afghan troops’ ability to defend the country, she said.

As the “summer fighting season” comes in high gear, the US wants to make sure the Afghan military “would not be caught short”, Jordan added.

Obama was elected in 2008, promising to end one of America’s longest and most gruelling wars.

The first US troops arrived in Afghanistan 15 years ago, after the Taliban government refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and more than 2,000 US personnel have died in the ensuing war.

At the peak of the US deployment in Afghanistan, around 100,000 American soldiers were stationed across the country in March 2011.

The campaign to neutralise the Taliban has suffered multiple setbacks in the twilight of Obama’s presidency.

More than 5,000 Afghan troops died last year alone, prompting Obama to indefinitely postpone the withdrawal of US troops.

Obama’s latest Afghan decision would appear to push any brokered solution well beyond his presidency.

{Killing in northwestern district is latest attack on religious minorities just days after launch of police crackdown.}

Unidentified attackers have hacked to death a 62-year-old Hindu monastery worker in Bangladesh, police say, the latest in a series of such attacks on religious minorities in the mainly Muslim country.

Friday’s killing of Nityaranjan Pande, in the northwestern district of Pabna, follows the murder of a Hindu priest on Tuesday.

“As he was walking, several attackers hacked him in the neck … He died on the spot,” Abdullah Al-Hasan, the local police station chief, told AFP news agency.

“As a diabetic, he used to take a walk early in the morning.

“He had been working at the monastery for around 40 years.

“In recent years he was the head of its office [Shri Shri Thakur Anukulchandra Ashram] staff.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Analysts say a climate of intolerance in Bangladeshi politics has motivated and provided cover for perpetrators of religious hate crimes.

The secular government of Sheikh Hasina blames the growing violence on its political opponents, aiming to create chaos and prevent war crimes trials for incidents that date back to 1971 from going ahead.

The opposition parties deny the accusations.

In the past four days, Bangladesh police have shot dead five suspected attackers, as they step up their hunt for those who have killed at least 30 people in the past 16 months.

Victims of the attacks have included secular bloggers, gay rights activists and followers of minority religions.

Many of the latest attacks have been claimed either by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group or by a South Asian branch of al-Qaeda.

But two groups in particular have been been identified by the authorities as leading the fight against secularism: Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and Ansarullah Bangla Team.

While both are considered possible suspects in the recent killings, neither has been alleged to have direct links to al-Qaeda and ISIL.

At least 10 Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh members have been killed in gun battles since November after the killing of two foreigners, according to the police.

The group had laid low since six of its leaders were hanged in 2007 for attacks that included 500 bomb explosions on a single day in 2005.

Subsequent suicide attacks on courts killed 25 people and wounded hundreds.

Last month, Bangladesh police announced a 1.8m taka ($23,000) reward for information leading to the arrest of six members of Ansarullah Bangla Team, the second outlawed group they believe is behind the violence.

Around 90 percent of Bangladesh’s 160 million-strong population is Muslim, with eight percent Hindu.

{Rights advocates and politicians say public inquiry would help prevent similar abuses from happening again.}

Toronto, Canada – Canada must launch a public inquiry into the alleged torture of hundreds of Afghan detainees during the country’s military mission in Afghanistan, a group of human rights advocates, legal experts, politicians and diplomats has said.

Detainees were transferred from the Canadian military to Afghan authorities “notwithstanding very clear and credible risks of torture”, the group said in an open letter, sent to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this week.

“No one knows exactly how many detainees who were in Canadian custody were tortured, disappeared or died under Afghan custody … partly due to the cloud of secrecy the previous government relentlessly maintained over this matter,” the letter said.

Canada’s military involvement in Afghanistan began in 2001 and formally ended in 2014, with more than 40,000 troops deployed – the largest Canadian military operation since World War II.

Canadian diplomats in Afghanistan described instances of detainees beaten with electric cables, rubber hoses and sticks, or threatened with execution or sexual assault among other punishments, the letter’s 41 signatories said.

Alex Neve, head of Amnesty International Canada and one of the letter’s signatories, said a public inquiry would allow Canadians to finally understand what took place in Afghanistan – and prevent a similar situation from happening again.

“We have never understood who made the orders, on what basis, [and] why, even as more evidence came to light that the torture risk was indisputable, the determination to stick with the policy only deepened,” Neve told Al Jazeera.

“Unless we probe and examine why this came to pass … then there’s every possibility this may simply be repeated. And we cannot afford that possibility.”

In response to the report, Jordan Owens, press secretary for Canada’s defence ministry, told Al Jazeera that “when it comes to situations of armed conflict, members of the Canadian Armed Forces receive a rigorous pre-deployment training with respect to the Geneva Convention and international law”.

{{Rideau report}}

Canada transferred detainees into the custody of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), most frequently the National Directorate of Security (NDS), a recent Rideau Institute report on the torture of Afghan detainees said.

The North American country originally had no ability to monitor the detainees’ conditions post-transfer, but a subsequent deal later granted its diplomats the ability to visit detainees.

“After Canadian diplomats started monitoring the conditions of detainees, they started discovering many instances of abuse,” Omar Sabry, the author of the report, told Al Jazeera on Thursday.

“So these were incontrovertible cases of people who were known to have been transferred by Canada and who said themselves in interviews that they were tortured.”

Sabry said that the transfers of detainees continued even after Canadian officials discovered instances of abuse, in violation of international law.

{{‘Complicity in torture’}}

In 2009, whistleblower Richard Colvin, a Canadian diplomat who served in Afghanistan for 17 months, described Canada’s “complicity in torture”, as well as indifference and obstruction from higher-ups when he raised concerns.

“According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure,” Colvin told a parliamentary committee at the time.

Canada’s previous Conservative government, under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, fought efforts to investigate the allegations. At the height of the scandal in 2009, Harper shut down the parliament for two months.

Neve, of Amnesty International, said senior members of the current government in Ottawa showed support for an inquiry when they were in opposition in parliament.

“Our expectation is that the government will agree that this is something that needs to happen.”

The open letter came a few days before Ottawa must respond to a petition calling for an independent commission of inquiry into the events.

That petition, which the government must address by June 16, garnered 727 signatures from people across Canada.

{Saudi Arabia says no threats were used on UN to remove Arab-led coalition fighting in Yemen from child rights blacklist.}

Saudi Arabia has denied threatening a cut-off of humanitarian funding to pressure the United Nations into removing the Arab-led coalition fighting in Yemen from a blacklist of child rights violators.

The UN had blacklisted the coalition after concluding in a report released last Thursday that it was responsible for 60 percent of the 785 children killed in Yemen last year.

“We did not use threats or intimidation and we did not talk about funding,” Saudi Ambassador Abdullah al-Mouallimi said on Thursday.

On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that the coalition would be scratched from the list pending a joint review with the alliance.

“Pending the conclusions of the joint review, the secretary-general removes the listing of the coalition in the report’s annex,” Ban’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.

In his first public remarks after announcing that he removed the coalition from the blacklist, the UN chief said on Thursday that he took the decision after Saudi Arabia, along with other Arab and Muslim countries, threatened to cut off funding to UN humanitarian programmes.

“This was one of the most painful and difficult decisions I have had to make,” Ban told reporters at UN headquarters.

“It is unacceptable for member-states to exert undue pressure,” he said.

Ban said he “had to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would de-fund many UN programmes.”

“I stand by the report,” Ban added, warning that the content of the report will not change.

The UN chief appealed to member states to defend the reporting mechanisms, such as the children in armed conflict annual blacklist, and pointed out that the coalition may be put back on the list as a result of an investigation.

“I don’t think this controversy is going away anytime soon,” Al Jazeera’s James Bays, reporting from the UN headquarters in New York, said.

“Ban Ki-moon is saying that this is a temporary removal of the Saudi-led coalition from this list.

“But the Saudi ambassador has a very different view of things; he believes that the coalition is off the list permanently.”

The Arab-led coalition began a military campaign in Yemen in March last year with the aim of preventing Iran-allied Houthi rebels and forces loyal to Yemen’s ex-President Ali Abdullah Saleh from taking power.

Some 6,000 people, about half of them civilians, have been killed in Yemen since last March, according to the UN.

The Houthis, Yemen government forces and pro-government groups have been on the UN blacklist for at least five years and are considered “persistent perpetrators”. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula also reappeared on the list.

{Amnesty report highlights institutional racism in public administration in addition to racist violence against migrants.}

Germany is failing to deal with a surge in hate crimes and signs of “institutional racism” among law-enforcement agencies, according to Amnesty International.

The report released by the UK-based group on Thursday says that even before the influx of more than a million refugees and migrants to Germany last year, authorities had not adequately investigated, prosecuted or sentenced people for racist crimes.

It pointed to the discovery in 2011 of a small neo-Nazi cell, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which murdered nine immigrants and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007.

“With hate crimes on the rise in Germany, long-standing and well-documented shortcomings in the response of law-enforcement agencies to racist violence must be addressed,” Marco Perolini, Amnesty International researcher, said.

The number of racially motivated attacks has never been as high as now in the history of post-World War II Germany, according to Selmin Caliskan, Amnesty International’s director in Berlin.

In addition to racist violence against migrants, there are signs of institutional racism in public administration, Caliskan said.

Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice mininister, said his ministry would carefully evaluate Amnesty International’s report and examine whether action needed to be taken.

“One thing is clear – a state under the rule of law can never accept racist violence. We need to do everything we can to quickly catch the perpetrators and rigorously punish them,” he said in an emailed statement.

Bungled investigations

After a 19-month inquiry into the NSU, a parliamentary committee said a combination of bungled investigations and prejudice enabled the NSU to go undetected for more than a decade.

The Amnesty International report said German

y should set up an independent public inquiry to look over the NSU investigations as well as how the nation classifies and investigates hate crimes.

The group said part of the problem was that there was a high bar on considering a crime racist in Germany and treating it as such.

Attacks on asylum shelters surged to 1,031 in 2015, up from 199 in the prior year and 69 in 2013, data from the interior ministry shows.

Thomas de Maiziere, Germany’s interior minister, has said the number is likely to rise again this year, with 347 such attacks registered in the first quarter of 2016 alone.

While refugees who arrived in Munich last September were applauded and handed sweets, the mood has since soured, with concerns about integration and security rife.

About six anti-refugee protests took place every week in 2015 and support for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) is rising, Amnesty International said.

{Civilians who escaped ISIL stronghold near Baghdad tell UN there may be thousands more inside the besieged city.}

The United Nations has significantly revised the number of civilians believed to still be inside the besieged Iraqi town of Fallujah, a stronghold of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS), to up to 90,000 – compared with a previous estimate of 50,000.

The offensive by the Iraqi army, backed by Shia militias, to dislodge ISIL from Fallujah began on May 23, but the city has been under a de facto siege for about six months.

In a telephone interview with the Reuters news agency in Baghdad, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Lise Grande said on Wednesday that civilians could face a “harrowing” situation in the city 50km west of the Iraqi capital.
“We have underestimated how many civilians are in Fallujah,” Grande said.

“People who are coming out are giving us the strong impression that we could be talking about maybe 80,000 to 90,000 civilians that are inside.”

Thousands of civilians are caught in the crossfire in and around Fallujah, close to the capital Baghdad, as government forces and allied militias are trying to recapture the city.

Grande said that more than 20,000 people have managed to flee the city in extremely difficult conditions, having walked for days and faced ISIL fire to reach government-held areas.

“A number of them unfortunately didn’t make it. We know that more than 10 people have drowned when they tried to cross the river,” she said, also reporting cases where families lost their children while fleeing.

People fleeing Fallujah have been using anything that floats to help them get across the Euphrates, which is about 250 to 300 metres wide at the crossing point in farmland just south of the city.

Fleeing Fallujah
The UN’s upward revision came a day after an international aid group told Al Jazeera that civilians fleeing the city of Fallujah had been shot at by ISIL fighters holed up in the besieged city.

Nasr Muflahi, country director of the Norwegian Refugee Council, confirmed several such incidents based on testimonies from civilians who were directly targeted by ISIL gunmen on Sunday.

Also on Tuesday, the UN human rights chief said there were “extremely distressing, credible reports” that Iraqis fleeing the fighting in Fallujah were facing extreme abuse, and even death, at the hands of Shia armed groups allied with the government troops.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, citing witness testimonies, said on Tuesday that allegations of abuse included reports of multiple executions of men and boys, who were trying to escape the ISIL-held city.

“Eyewitnesses have described how armed groups operating in support of the Iraqi security forces are detaining the males for ‘security screening’,” Zeid said.

“[This] in some cases degenerates into physical violations and other forms of abuse, apparently in order to elicit forced confessions.”