Dallas Suspect Told Police He Wanted To Kill White Officers

ASSOCIATED PRESS

FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2016

Micah Johnson, who was a suspect in the sniper slayings of five law enforcement officers in Dallas Thursday night, July 7, 2016, during a protest over two recent fatal police shootings of black men. An Army veteran, Johnson tried to take refuge in a parking garage and exchanged gunfire with police, who later killed him with a robot-delivered bomb, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said. (Facebook via AP)

DALLAS (AP) — An Army veteran killed by Dallas police after the sniper slayings of five officers during a protest march told authorities that he was upset about the police shootings of two black men earlier this week and wanted to exterminate whites, "especially white officers," officials said Friday.

The man identified as 25-year-old Micah Johnson was killed by a robot-delivered bomb after the shootings, which marked the deadliest day for U.S. law enforcement since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In all, 12 officers were shot.

In Georgia, Missouri and Tennessee, authorities said gun-wielding civilians also shot officers in individual attacks that came after the two black men died at the hands of police in Louisiana and Minnesota. Two officers were wounded, one critically.

Johnson was a private first class from the Dallas suburb of Mesquite with a specialty in carpentry and masonry. He served in the Army Reserve for six years starting in 2009 and did one tour in Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014, the military said.

After the attack, he tried to take refuge in a parking garage and exchanged gunfire with police, Police Chief David Brown said. The suspect described his motive during negotiations and said he acted alone and was not affiliated with any groups, Brown said.

Brown blamed "snipers" for Thursday's attack, but it was unclear how many shooters were involved. Authorities initially said three suspects were in custody and the fourth dead. Hours later, officials were vague and would not discuss details.

Johnson was black. Law enforcement officials did not disclose the race of the dead officers. The bloodshed unfolded just a few blocks from where President John F. Kennedy was slain in 1963. The shooting began Thursday evening while hundreds of people were gathered to protest the killings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban St. Paul, Minnesota. Brown told reporters that snipers fired "ambush-style" on the officers. Two civilians also were wounded.

Authorities said they were not sure they had located all possible suspects, but attention on Friday quickly turned to the man killed in the parking garage. A Texas law enforcement official identified him as Johnson. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he said he was not authorized to release the information.

Around midday, investigators were seen walking in and out of a home believed to be Johnson's in Mesquite. None of the other suspects was identified, and the police chief said he would not disclose any details about them until authorities were sure everyone involved was in custody.

The nation's top law enforcement official, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, called for calm, saying the recent violence can't be allowed to "precipitate a new normal." Lynch said protesters concerned about killings by police should not be discouraged "by those who use your lawful actions as a cover for their heinous violence."

The other attacks on police included a Georgia man who authorities said called 911 to report a break-in, then ambushed the officer who came to investigate. That sparked a shootout in which both the officer and suspect were wounded but expected to survive.

In suburban St. Louis, a motorist shot an officer at least once as the officer walked back to his car during a traffic stop, police said. The officer was hospitalized in critical condition. And in Tennessee, a man accused of shooting indiscriminately at passing cars and police on a highway told investigators he was angry about police violence against African-Americans, authorities said.

Video from the scene in Dallas showed protesters marching along a downtown street about half a mile from City Hall when shots erupted and the crowd scattered, seeking cover. Officers crouched beside vehicles, armored SWAT team vehicles arrived and a helicopter hovered overhead.

Demonstrations were held in several other U.S. cities Thursday night to protest the police killings of two more black men: A Minnesota officer on Wednesday fatally shot Philando Castile while he was in a car with a woman and a child, and the shooting's aftermath was livestreamed in a widely shared Facebook video. A day earlier, Alton Sterling was shot in Louisiana after being pinned to the pavement by two white officers. That, too, was captured on a cellphone video.

The Dallas shootings occurred in an area of hotels, restaurants, businesses and some residential apartments only a few blocks from Dealey Plaza, the landmark made famous by the Kennedy assassination. The scene was chaotic, with officers with automatic rifles on the street corners.

"Everyone just started running," Devante Odom, 21, told The Dallas Morning News. "We lost touch with two of our friends just trying to get out of there." Carlos Harris, who lives downtown, told the newspaper that the shooters "were strategic. It was tap, tap, pause. Tap, tap, pause," he said.

Video posted on social media appeared to show a gunman at ground level exchanging fire with a police officer who was then felled. Mayor Mike Rawlings said one of wounded officers had a bullet go through his leg as three members of his squad were fatally shot around him.

"He felt that people don't understand the danger of dealing with a protest," said Rawlings, who spoke to the surviving officer. "And that's what I learned from this. We care so much about people protesting, and I think it's their rights. But how we handle it can do a lot of things. One of the things it can do is put our police officers in harm's way, and we have to be very careful about doing that."

Few details about the slain officers were immediately available. Four of the dead were with the Dallas Police Department, a spokesman said. One was a Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer. The agency said in a statement that 43-year-old officer Brent Thompson, a newlywed whose bride also works for the police force, was the first officer killed in the line of duty since the agency formed a police department in 1989.

"Our hearts are broken," the statement said. Theresa Williams said one of the wounded civilians was her sister, 37-year-old Shetamia Taylor, who was shot in the right calf. She threw herself over her four sons, ages 12 to 17, when the shooting began.

Associated Press writers Terry Wallace, Jamie Stengle, Paul Weber and Emily Schmall in Dallas; Amy Shafer, Sarah Rankin and Benjamin Dashley in Chicago; and Kathleen Hennessey in Warsaw, Poland, contributed to this report.

Millions Of Us Knew The Iraq War Would Be A Catastrophe. Why Didn’t Tony Blair?

I composed my album The Blue Notebooks as a protest. And 13 years on, with the costs of the conflict clear, my fury at the man who took us there is unabated

BY MAX RITCHER

THE GUARDIAN

TONY BLAIR

On 15 February 2003, my partner and I packed our two young children into their pushchairs and travelled across London to take part in what has since become recognised as the single largest protest event in human history. Between six and 30 million people (depending on whom you believe) took part in about 600 cities worldwide, united by a belief that the proposed military intervention in Iraq was not justified by the facts. Sir John Chilcot has, in his newly published report, reinforced this view.

In the intervening years a gigantic political disaster, like some sort of all-consuming black hole, has devoured everything in its path including the credibility of our democratic process and any moral capital the west had. The human cost is staggering. The repercussions and aftershocks endless – international law, natural resources, political norms, the UN, religious tolerance, all irrevocably altered or destroyed, while, 13 years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, one of the oldest civilisations on our planet lies a shattered ruin; a destabilising presence in a fragile region, locked in a permanent civil war, with any prospects for a peaceful civil society decades in the future. Somehow, “We told you so” just doesn’t do it justice.

I am not a politician, civil servant, or journalist, and I have no military experience; I am a composer, and I remember thinking at the time: “How can it be blindingly obvious to me, and to millions of other ordinary people like me, that the invasion will be a disaster, while our political leadership fails to see it?” There was no question that Saddam’s brutality needed addressing – but not like this.

Prior to the decision to go to war being made – in the months the debates raged – I did the only thing I knew how which was to put my frustrations into a new piece.The Blue Notebooks would be a protest album about Iraq, a mediation on violence – both the violence that I had personally experienced around me as a child and the violence of war, at the utter futility of so much armed conflict. We recorded it in London about a week after the protests.

I structured the work around a series of readings by Tilda Swinton from the works of Franz Kafka. I think of Kafka as a sort of patron saint of doubt, and his writing spoke to the bleak absurdity of that political moment for me. Balancing the Kafka texts are extracts from Czeslaw Milosz, a sort of anti-Kafka, for whom the universe is redeemed by human creativity and compassion. I wrote the piece to meander through music history – quoting and recontextualising musical texts – the music I had run to as a child to escape my own reality.

Shadow Journal, one of the pieces, includes the following text by Miłosz, who, writing of another war at another time nonetheless seemed all too relevant to 2003:

“How enduring, how we need durability.

The sky before sunrise is soaked by light.

Rosy colour tints buildings, bridges, and the Seine.

I was here when she, with whom I walk, wasn’t born yet

And the cities on a distant plain stood intact

Before they rose in the air with the dust of sepulchral brick

And the people who lived there didn’t know.

Only this moment at dawn is real to me.

The bygone lives are like my own past life, uncertain.

I cast a spell on the city asking it to last.”

So why did he do it? Tony Blair even now attempts to evade responsibility for his actions, commenting on Wednesday on his decision to go to war: “I took it in good faith and in what I believed to be the best interests of country.” So typical of Blair, who increasingly resembles the Mad Hatter; who appears to think that believing a thing to be true is the same as it actually being true.

I’m reminded of something often said about another messianic figure, Steve Jobs, that he had a "reality distortion field" – the ability to invent his own version of reality, and to make others believe it. This points to one of the possible justifications for Blair’s actions, namely that he has a tenuous grip on reality. He convinced himself and then had to convince others. His wild-eyed prewar narrative of imminent direct threats to the civilian UK population (the infamous 45 minutes), supports this.

Blair’s creative way with the facts seems in retrospect to be the beginning of the sort of post-truth politics we have seen in the recent Brexit debate, where fiction and reality were treated by Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and their like as essentially interchangeable. Donald Trump does the same.

A second, less charitable, justification is that Blair deliberately ignored warnings from the Ministry of Defence and joint intelligence committee about the reliability of the intelligence, and in a striking example of confirmation bias, chose to engage with the facts only insofar as they supported the decision to go to war, a decision which we now know had been taken long before the other options to deal with Saddam had been exhausted. Chilcot agrees; Blair withheld information from the cabinet, misled parliament, the public, and the military. Thousands paid with their lives.

Looking more deeply into why he might do this leads inevitably to the peculiar bromance that developed between Bush and Blair, the cowboy and his poodle, united in some sort of shared crusade. Blair’s hubristic view of himself as a moderating influence on the imbecile Bush betrays a spectacular miscalculation of the power dynamics in play. A third scenario is that Blair was simply too dumb to see what was coming down the tracks.

But any of these justifications for Blair’s actions – mad, bad or stupid – disqualify him from political high office, and his pitiful attempts at rebuttal this week (“I took the decisions in good faith”), as well as his efforts to resurrect the long discredited theory that Saddam was in some way responsible for 9/11, insult the memory of those hundreds of thousands whose lives were taken.

When I perform The Blue Notebooks now, it seems at once familiar and strange. Time has passed; I am a different person but the events of 2003 and their aftermath still resonate daily. All of us were changed during that political moment, but I remain convinced that human creativity can influence the world, or at the very least our perception of it, in some small way.

Afenifere, Ohanaeze Disagree As President Says Nigeria’s Unity Not Negotiable

By Olalekan Adetayo, Friday Olokor And Ihuoma Chiedozie

Punch, July 7, 2016

President Muhammadu Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday told militants who have continued to destroy oil installations in the Niger Delta that the unity of the country remained non-negotiable.

Buhari also called on those who had looted the nation’s treasury to approach the government and negotiate how they would return their stolen wealth.

Buhari said these when Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo and the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Muhammed Bello, led residents of the FCT to pay the President Sallah homage at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

But the Igbo socio-cultural organisation, the Ohanaeze Ndigbo, and the pan-Yoruba socio-political body, Afenifere, have faulted the position of the President on the unity of the nation.

The organisations, on Wednesday, told Buhari that the unity of the country was negotiable.

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka had, on Tuesday last week, described the oneness of Nigeria as “very negotiable”.

The President regretted that while the anti-terrorism war was being won, the issue of militancy in the Niger Delta resurfaced.

Buhari said the Federal Government had commenced the process of identifying the number of groups involved in militancy in the region with a view to getting their leaders and appealing to them to give peace a chance.

He said he was in agreement with the slogan made popular by a former military Head of State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, that to keep Nigeria one “is a task” that must be accomplished.

Buhari added, “Please, pass the message to the militants that one Nigeria is not negotiable. They better accept this fact.

“The Nigerian constitution is clear as to what they should get and I assure them that there will be justice.”

The President stated that looters would not know peace if they refused to return stolen funds because his government would continue to be on their trail.

“Please tell those with plenty of money, which does not belong to them, to try and negotiate and return it in peace so that both they and us will be in peace, otherwise we will continue to look for them,” the President said.

On security, the President expressed delight that his government had made a lot of progress in fighting terrorism in the North-East.

Buhari also admitted that despite the change in name and form of the National Electric Power Authority, the power situation in the country had remained unreliable.

“Those who watch television are at the mercy of what is used to be called NEPA. Whichever form it (NEPA) has taken now, it has maintained the tradition of unreliability. It is not every day that the people get the news,” the President said.

Buhari also admitted that there were a lot of problems bedevilling the nation, especially on food production.

He disclosed that the Minister of Agriculture, Chief Audu Ogbeh, and the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, were working hard to address food production problem.

He said the CBN was borrowing the minister money outside the budget so that he could assist states, especially the 13 states that could produce rice.

Osinbajo had stated that it had been a tough journey for the present administration because of the clean-up exercise it embarked on since inception.

He said the Buhari administration inherited what he called a “huge financial mess” from the past administration.

The vice-president, however, expressed joy that things had started looking up, adding that things would soon be better for the nation and Nigerians.

“We will place the country on a strong footing,” Osinbajo assured Nigerians.

Osinbajo prayed for Buhari that as he continued to grow older, he would be stronger in strength, adding that the President would have enough strength to be victorious no matter the challenges facing him and the country.

The Minister of FCT presented a giant season’s card to the President while representatives of the Aso Villa Chapel presented him with a big mirror and a giant season’s card.

Buhari not reading the mood of the nation correctly – Afenifere

The National Publicity Secretary of Afenifere, Yinka Odumakin, believed Buhari might not be reading the mood of the nation correctly.

In an interview with one of our correspondents, Odumakin said, “I think the President is a sincere man but he may not be reading the mood correctly. The country is divided under him than before. Amalgamation and armed dialogue are going on all around us over the unity of Nigeria which many sections perceive has treated them unfairly.

“To continue to insist that the unity is not negotiable is aping that bird which buries its head in the sand and believes, because it is seeing nobody, it has become invisible too.”

Ohanaeze says it’s not calling for secession

The President of the Ohanaeze Youth Council, Mazi Okechukwu Isiguzoro, aligned with Afenifere’s position, saying the unity of Nigeria was negotiable.

In a telephone interview with one of our correspondents, Isiguzoro said the current structure of Nigeria had not favoured all parts of the country.

According to him, Nigeria’s unity should be subjected to periodic review.

The OYC leader noted that the Igbo, as a group, canvassed the restructuring of the country during the last constitutional conference.

Isiguzoro said, “We (Ohanaeze Ndigbo) believe that Nigeria’s unity is negotiable. The principles and structures on the co-existence of the various nationalities that make up the country should be reviewed periodically.

“At the moment, the structure that is in place is not in favour of everybody.

“Those that it is favouring are the ones who want the status quo to be maintained, but those it has not favoured, like the Igbo, are open to a negotiation of the country’s unity.”

He added, “The Igbo demanded restructuring at the last constitutional conference and we are still holding on to that demand. We believe Nigeria’s unity should be subject to periodic review.

“We are not calling for secession, but a periodic review of the terms of the country’s unity is necessary for peaceful coexistence, otherwise agitations for separation would continue to grow.”

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Islamic State Tightens Grip On Captives Held As Sex Slaves

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WEDNESDAY, JULY 6, 2016

An activist documenting Islamic State group crimes against Yazidis arranges the pages of a diary written by a Yazidi girl while in Islamic State militant captivity, in this May 22, 2016, file photo taken in Dahuk, northern Iraq. Some 2,500 Yazidi women and girls have escaped IS slavery through paid smugglers, but the numbers of those reaching freedom is dropping as militants tighten their grip on their sex slaves. About 3,000 are believed to be still be in IS hands.

KHANKE, IRAQ (AP) — The advertisement on the Telegram app is as chilling as it is incongruous: A girl for sale is "Virgin. Beautiful. 12 years old.... Her price has reached $12,500 and she will be sold soon."

The posting in Arabic appeared on an encrypted conversation along with ads for kittens, weapons and tactical gear. It was shared with The Associated Press by an activist with the minority Yazidi community, whose women and children are being held as sex slaves by the extremists.

While the Islamic State group is losing territory in its self-styled caliphate, it is tightening its grip on the estimated 3,000 women and girls held as sex slaves. In a fusion of ancient barbaric practices and modern technology, IS sells the women like chattel on smart phone apps and shares databases that contain their photographs and the names of their "owners" to prevent their escape through IS checkpoints. The fighters are assassinating smugglers who rescue the captives, just as funds to buy the women out of slavery are drying up.

The thousands of Yazidi women and children were taken prisoner in August 2014, when IS fighters overran their villages in northern Iraq with the aim to eliminate the Kurdish-speaking minority because of its ancient faith. Since then, Arab and Kurdish smugglers managed to free an average of 134 people a month. But by May, an IS crackdown reduced those numbers to just 39 in the last six weeks, according to figures provided by the Kurdistan regional government.

Mirza Danai, founder of the German-Iraqi aid organization Luftbrucke Irak, said in the last two or three months, escape has become more difficult and dangerous. "They register every slave, every person under their owner, and therefore if she escapes, every Daesh control or checkpoint, or security force - they know that this girl ... has escaped from this owner," he said, using the Arabic acronym for the group.

U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told the AP that the U.S. continues "to be appalled by credible reports that Daesh is trafficking in human beings, and sex slavery in particular." "This depravity not only speaks to the degree to which Daesh cheapens life and repudiates the Islamic faith, it also strengthens our resolve to defeat them," he said.

The AP has obtained a batch of 48 head shots of the captives, smuggled out of the IS-controlled region by an escapee, which people familiar with them say are similar to those in the extremists' slave database and the smartphone apps.

Lamiya Aji Bashar tried to flee four times before finally escaping in March, racing to government-controlled territory with Islamic State group fighters in pursuit. A land mine exploded, killing her companions, 8-year-old Almas and Katherine, 20. She never learned their last names.

The explosion left Lamiya blind in her right eye, her face scarred by melted skin. Saved by the man who smuggled her out, she counts herself among the lucky. "I managed in the end, thanks to God, I managed to get away from those infidels," the 18-year-told the AP from a bed at her uncle's home in the northern Iraqi town of Baadre. "Even if I had lost both eyes, it would have been worth it, because I have survived them."

The Sunni extremists view the Yazidis as barely human. The Yazidi faith combines elements of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion. Their pre-war population in Iraq was estimated around 500,000. Their number today is unknown.

Nadia Mourad, an escapee, has appeared before the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament to appeal for international help.

"Daesh is proud of what it's done to the Yazidis," she said to Parliament. "They are being used has human shields. They are not allowed to escape or flee. Probably they will be assassinated. Where is the world in all this? Where is humanity?"

IS relies on encrypted apps to sell the women and girls, according to an activist who is documenting the transactions and asked not to be named for fear of his safety.

The activist showed AP the negotiations for the captives in encrypted conversations as they were occurring in real time.

The postings appear primarily on Telegram and on Facebook and WhatsApp to a lesser degree, he said.

Both Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Telegram use end-to-end encryption to protect users' privacy. Both have said they consider protecting private conversations and data paramount, and that they themselves cannot access users' content.

"Telegram is extremely popular in the Middle East, among other regions," said Telegram spokesman Markus Ra. "This, unfortunately, includes the more marginal elements and the broadest law-abiding masses alike." He added the company is committed to prevent abuse of the service and that it routinely removes public channels used by IS.

In addition to the posting for the 12-year-old in a group with hundreds of members, the AP viewed an ad on WhatsApp for a mother with a 3-year-old and a 7-month old baby, with a price of $3,700. "She wants her owner to sell her," read the posting, followed by a photo.

"We have zero tolerance for this type of behavior and disable accounts when provided with evidence of activity that violates our terms. We encourage people to use our reporting tools if they encounter this type of behavior," said Matt Steinfeld, a spokesman for WhatsApp.

Some passages of the Quran have been interpreted to condone slavery, which was widespread when the Prophet Muhammed lived. The Quran allows men to have sex with both their wives and "those they possess with their right hands," taken by interpreters to refer to female slaves.

By the 19th and early 20th centuries, most Muslim scholars backed the banning of slavery, citing Quranic verses that say freeing them is a blessing. Some hard-liners, however, continued to insist that under Shariah sex slavery must be permitted, though the Islamic State group is the first in the modern era to bring it into organized practice.

In the images obtained by AP, many of the women and girls are dressed in finery, some in heavy makeup. All look directly at the camera, standing in front of overstuffed chairs or brocade curtains in what resembles a shabby hotel ballroom. Some are barely out of elementary school. Not one looks older than 30.

One of them is Nazdar Murat, who was about 16 when she was abducted two years ago — one of more than two dozen young women taken away by the extremists in a single day in August 2014. Her father and uncles were among about 40 people killed when IS took over the Sinjar area, the heart of the Yazidi homeland.

Inside an immaculately kept tent in a displaced persons camp outside the northern Iraqi town of Dahuk, Nazdar's mother said her daughter managed to call once, six months ago.

"We spoke for a few seconds. She said she was in Mosul," said Murat, referring to Iraq's second-largest city. "Every time someone comes back, we ask them what happened to her and no one recognizes her. Some people told me she committed suicide."

The family keeps the file of missing Yazidis on a mobile phone. They show it to those who have escaped the caliphate, to find out if anyone has seen her, and to other families looking for a thread of hope they'll see their own missing relatives again.

The odds of rescue, however, grow slimmer by the day. The smuggling networks that have freed the captives are being targeted by IS leaders, who are fighting to keep the Yazidis at nearly any cost, said Andrew Slater of the non-profit group Yazda, which helps document crimes against the community and organizes refuge for those who have fled.

Kurdistan's regional government had been reimbursing impoverished Yazidi families who paid up to $15,000 in fees to smugglers to rescue their relatives, or the ransoms demanded by individual fighters to give up the captives. But the Kurdish regional government no longer has the funds. For the past year, Kurdistan has been mired in an economic crisis brought on by the collapse of oil prices, a dispute with Iraq's central government over revenues, and the fallout from the war against the Islamic State.

Even when IS retreats from towns like Ramadi or Fallujah, the missing girls are nowhere to be found.

"Rescues are slowing. They're going to stop. People are running out of money, I have dozens of families who are tens of thousands of dollars in debt," Slater said. "There are still thousands of women and kids in captivity but it's getting harder and harder to get them out."

Lamiya was abducted from the village of Kocho, near the town of Sinjar, in the summer of 2014. Her parents are presumed dead. Somewhere, she said, her 9-year-old sister Mayada remains captive. One photo she managed to send to the family shows the little girl standing in front of an IS flag.

Five other sisters all managed to escape and later were relocated to Germany. A younger brother, kept for months in an IS training camp in Mosul, also slipped away and is now staying with other relatives in Dahuk, a city in the Iraqi Kurdish region.

Sitting very still and speaking in a monotone, Lamiya recounted her captivity, describing how she was passed from one IS follower to another, all of whom beat and violated her. She was determined to escape.

She said her first "owner" was an Iraqi IS commander who went by the name Abu Mansour in the city of Raqqa, the de-facto IS capital deep in Syria. He brutalized her, often keeping her handcuffed.

She tried to run away twice but was caught, beaten and raped repeatedly. After a month, she said, she was sold to another IS extremist in Mosul. After she spent two months with him, she was sold again, this time to an IS bomb-maker who Lamiya said forced her to help him make suicide vests and car bombs.

"I tried to escape from him," she said. "And he captured me, too, and he beat me."

When the bomb-maker grew bored with her, she was handed over to an IS doctor in Hawija, a small IS-controlled Iraqi town. She said the doctor, who was the IS head of the town hospital, also abused her.

From there, after more than a year, she managed to contact her relatives in secret.

Her uncle said the family paid local smugglers $800 to arrange Lamiya's escape. She will be reunited with her siblings in Germany, but despite everything, her heart remains in Iraq.

"We had a nice house with a big farm ... I was going to school," she said. "It was beautiful."

Salar Salim in Khanke, Lee Keath in Cairo and Desmond Butler in Washington contributed to this report.

Read AP's occasional series "Islamic State: A Savage Legacy" at www.ap.org/explore/a-savage-legacy

Nigeria: Deadly Nomad-Versus-Farmer Conflict Escalates

Roaming Fulani cattle herdsman accused of launching deadly raids against farming communities and targeting Christians. 

BY CHIKA ODUAH
AL JAZEERA

 

John Oriajaka sits amid the debris from a morning raid on his church by suspected Fulani herdsmen in Nimbo, southeastern Nigeria [Chika Oduah/Al Jazeera]

Akwanga, Nigeria - On the heels of an insurgency launched seven years ago by the armed group Boko Haram, Nigeria is embroiled in another conflict that has divided people across ethnic and religious lines with thousands killed over the past few years.

It's a conflict that 16-year-old Haruna Mohammed and his cow-herding family know all too well.

Not only are they at the centre of it, but they are also being blamed for it.

"They call us killers," he says. "But we don't kill. We are peaceful."

In a wide-open field in Akwanga, central Nigeria, Haruna guides his father's flock of nearly 2,000 cows to a stream in a forest. The cattle hustle past him in a mad dash for the cool, freshwater. Haruna touches them fondly. He knows each cow by name. He knows when each cow was born. He knows the lazy cows and he knows the playful ones. He knows which ones produce the best milk, and which ones produce the most dung.

"The cows are special to us Fulani," Haruna says. "They are part of our family."

Every weekend, Haruna walks several kilometres through pastures and roads with the cows as they chomp on grass.

He says that he enjoys this chore. It's a break from his secondary school studies and a way for him to preserve his culture. His family hails from a generations-old cow-breeding tradition.

West Africa's cattle herders

The pastoral Fulani people - also called Peul, Fulbe, Fula and believed to be the world's largest semi-nomadic ethnic group - follow their cows today as they have done for centuries across the West African Sahel, from Senegal to central Africa.

In the past, farmers welcomed the seasonal migration of the Fulani and their cattle. The cows fertilised the farmers' fields with dung and the farmers reserved land for the cows to graze. It was somewhat of a mutual relationship, dented every now and then by conflicts, particularly when the cattle would trample the farmers' crops.

But today, the relationship between Fulani cattle-herders and farmers in Nigeria has taken a deadly turn.

Haruna and his family are viewed with suspicion.

As the last of the cows finish drinking water from the stream, a woman runs towards Haruna and his younger brothers. She shoos them away with her hands. Speaking Hausa, she tells the boys to get away from her field.

Haruna beckons his two younger brothers. They direct the cows towards another route.

In the past five years, fights over land and water between Fulani herders and farmers across Nigeria have left thousands of people dead. The farmers accuse the herdsmen of instigating the violence because the roaming herdsmen end up in communities where farmers have already settled for decades, even centuries.

"This is our ancestral land and we have been living here. Then these Fulani people come here once or twice a year with their cows and they are killing us," says Ngozi Ugwu.

Dozens of people were killed in her town of Nimbo in southeastern Nigeria when masked gunmen descended in an early morning raid.

The residents blamed the Fulani herdsmen. Last month, Nigerian police officials released photos of the assailants.

"For years now, the Fulanis have been coming here to fight us and on April 29 they did their worst attack yet," she says in tears. She is consumed in a fit of rage that makes it difficult to understand what she's saying.

Her brother was among those killed in the April attack and she hasn't yet recovered from his death. Her neighbours fear she may now be mentally unstable.

She and others have seen horrendous killings allegedly committed by Fulani herdsmen.

Pieces of bodies laid in a pile after the April raid. Chopped-off hands and severed feet aroused terror among the people in Nimbo.

"They were slaughtered like bush meat," says John Orajiaka. He saw the assailants as they entered his church compound, shouting and shooting with Kalashnikov assault rifles. He said that he saw tesbih, prayer beads, dangling from their hands.

Every few weeks, more Nigerian communities join the growing list of those attacked by suspected Fulani herdsmen: Agatu, Nimbo, Galadima, Obiaruku, Abraka, Tarka, Buruku, Ngodo and Biogbolo.

A new brand of criminals tagged by security analysts as "Fulani militant herdsmen", has emerged to describe people travelling with large flocks of cows and raiding communities.

The 2015 Global Terrorism Index reported that "Fulani militants" are the fourth most deadly terrorist group in the world, responsible for the deaths of 1,229 people in 2014 - up from 63 in 2013.

"They now pose a serious threat to stability," the report says.

In 2010, survivors of an incident that left 500 people dead in the central Nigerian state of Plateau said their attackers shouted at them in Fulani language, according to Human Rights Watch.

This year, suspected herdsmen have killed more people in Nigeria than Boko Haram has, according to statistics from the Council on Foreign Relation's Nigeria Security Tracker.

In May, exiled Nigerian human rights lawyer Emmanuel Ogebe testified before a Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the US House of Representatives to tell American politicians that "the atrocities perpetrated by Muslim herdsmen of the Fulani tribe" is "a clear and present danger to national peace" for many Nigerians.

Ogebe describes details of a fact-finding mission to the farming community of Agatu in central Nigeria where soldiers were deployed after suspected Fulani herdsmen allegedly killed about 300 Agatu residents in February. Corpses and bloodied pieces of bodies were left at the scene of the violent attack, which happened in a locality too remote for even local journalists to venture.

"The sight was unnerving," Ogebe's claims in his testimony. "The tales of victims could not possibly capture the extent of the devastation. Travelling on end, mile after mile on bumpy dirt roads, there were no humans to be seen in village after burned down village."

Mohammed Husseini, a Fulani leader, explained that in Agatu, young men were stealing the Fulani's cows and that cattle theft is a crime that frequently goes unpunished.

Husseini is the head of one of the state chapters of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association. He claims that the constant thieving of Fulanis' cows puts the Fulani people at risk, and that they deserve to protect themselves.

Apart from the cow thefts, analysts also attribute the rise in violence to climate change. The landscape of northern Nigeria - where many of the Fulani in Nigeria originate - is changing as desertification from the Sahara encroaches. Fulani cow herders are staying longer in the south, where the rainy season lasts longer and produces rich, dense greenery. But in the south, they are trespassing on farmers' lands.

But not everyone supports this theory.

"It's nonsense. It's just Western propaganda by people who don't know what is really happening in Nigeria," says a prominent Fulani politician, who asked to remain anonymous. He says that the rise in criminality among Fulani cattle-herders began in the 1980s, the same time that organised crime - drug trafficking and gang violence - increased across Nigeria.

"Nigeria should be very alarmed. These Fulani boys are armed with dangerous weapons and they know how to use them. I am Fulani, so I know what is happening," he tells Al Jazeera. He is working behind the scenes with Fulani community leaders to find a solution to the criminality. He suggests that the perpetrators must be disarmed.

The Nigerian government is yet to find an effective means of tackling arms proliferation, and even the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has admitted the free flow of arms trafficking that surged in the region after the fall of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi compounded Nigeria's security challenges.

Furthermore, the ignition of religious hostilities has sparked a furious flame.

Religious tensions

"The Fulanis are against Christians. They see us as slaves," says 51-year-old Paul Odiegwu. He is an elder at the church in Nimbo where most of the destruction took place during the recent assault.

He is among many Nigerians who believe that this wave of violence by herdsmen is a continuation of the Fulani uprising of 1804. The historic raids, led by Sheikh Usman Dan Fodio, shaped the political and cultural landscape of what was to become the nation of Nigeria more than 100 years later.

A cavalry of Fulani fighters - some on horseback, others on foot - took over communities across north and central Nigeria and parts of Cameroon with the aim of propagating a purer version of Islam.

They subjected people from other ethnic groups as slaves, established an empire, dethroned local leaders, and set themselves up as the ruling aristocracy. Their rule continues in many communities today. Many of the most revered Muslim leaders in Nigeria are from Fulani families.

This history is what many Nigerians fear is playing out again.

So communities in the predominantly Christian southeastern region are employing local defence strategies to protect themselves against the herdsmen.

In the southeastern state of Abia, the governor congregated men of a vigilante group known as the Bakassi Boys to train youth to assist in community policing.

At the federal government level, President Buhari - who is also a Fulani who owns many cows - has ordered a crackdown on herdsmen. After a backlash from outraged Nigerians who went on social media to complain about what they perceived as silence and ethnic bias from Buhari, the president came out to declare his administration will not tolerate violence and ordered security officials to "secure all communities under attack by herdsmen".

But despite this order, attacks continue. Recently, a community in the southern state of Bayelsa reported an attack by herdsmen and concerns over a possible link between Fulani and Boko Haram. But details of ties are unclear.

Ballama Mustapha, a civil society activist based in the northeastern city of Maiduguri, where Boko Haram began, says there are elements of Boko Haram within the herdsmen.

"The issue is that some Fulani herdsmen have joined Boko Haram and also some Boko Haram members have stolen cows that belong to Fulani and are now moving with those cows disguising as Fulani," Mustapha tells Al Jazeera.

Mike Ejiofor, a security analyst and former senior official at the Nigerian Department of State Security, says Boko Haram members have infiltrated Fulani communities in an attempt to flee Nigerian soldiers who have advanced on them.

Nigeria's chief of army staff, Tukur Buratai, said last month that herdsmen might have ties with Boko Haram.

Ejiofor and Mustapha fear the violence may be a more fatal security threat than Boko Haram because the herdsmen roam across the country.

While escalating tensions threaten to destroy any semblance of national unity, Haruna is just trying to live a normal teenager's life. He watches locally produced Kannywood movies, but he says he prefers American action films. Rambo is his favourite.

"Sylvester Stallone is cool," he says.

Just before the mosquitoes come out in droves in the evening, Haruna walks the cows back home. He plays with his younger siblings. He lies out on the grass and listens to news on the radio, hoping to one day be a journalist.

When his mother calls him, he goes inside to eat dinner. This night, it's soup made of moringa leaves scooped on top of white rice.

Educated And Well-Off, Dhaka Attackers Defy Usual Profile

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Coffins bearing the bodies of victims of the attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery – one draped in both the Bangladesh and U.S. flags – are laid out for people to pay their last respects, at a stadium in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Monday, July 4, 2016. The brutality of the attack, the worst convulsion of violence yet in the recent series of deadly attacks to hit Bangladesh, has stunned the traditionally moderate Muslim nation and raised global concerns about whether it can cope with the increasingly strident Islamist militants.



NEW DELHI (AP) — The young men had been missing for months. Their families sensed something was wrong. Some had come from privileged backgrounds, had grown up loved and were educated in top schools. They had bright futures.

It wasn't until the horror of the weekend hostage crisis in Bangladesh's capital unfolded that they learned their sons had become radicalized as religious extremists and launched one of the country's deadliest attacks in recent years.

The young men, armed with knives, bombs and automatic firearms, engaged in a gun battle with police, killing two and wounding more, then seized a popular restaurant in a Dhaka neighborhood on Friday night and held some 35 people hostage. Over the next few hours, they would kill 20 of their captives — including nine Italians, seven Japanese, an Indian teenager and three students at American universities. A witness said some victims were tortured when they could not recite verses from the Quran.

"This is very painful. He killed innocent people," said the aunt of one of the attackers, Rohan Imtiaz, whose father is a leader in Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's governing Awami League party. "We sensed that Rohan was changing and his behavior increasingly became different," she told the Associated Press in disbelief.

When Imtiaz went missing on Dec. 31, as his mother and father were in India for medical treatment, the family asked the police to help find him. "My brother went to everybody: police, ministers and higher authorities after he went missing," said Rohan's aunt, who refused to be identified by name. "He became just crazy after his son went missing. But nobody could help us."

As details emerged of the men who laid siege to the Holey Artisan Bakery, it became clear that the attackers did not fit the typical profile for religious radicals coming from economically deprived backgrounds and latching onto extremist groups that promised a new future.

Some analysts said that's what made them attractive as recruits; their backgrounds meant they would not raise suspicions. "They do not fit the usual stereotype of the madrassa-educated youth," said Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, a former Indian diplomat and policy expert on Bangladesh for the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think tank. "My suspicion is that these young men were roped in by spotters or recruiters."

He said their defiance of the usual militant profile gave credibility to claims the attackers were part of a campaign waged by extremist groups abroad. "This is a conscious decision on their part that they will get this kind of people," Chakravarty said. "The shock value for the radical groups of recruiting educated, affluent people is huge. The government will never suspect them. The intelligence agencies will never suspect them. Because these boys were never under any kind of surveillance."

Police released photographs of the bodies of five attackers killed by paramilitary forces who ended the hostage siege. They also released names — Akash, Badhon, Bikash, Don and Ripon — which did not match those given by family members. Police said only that militants often go by many names to obscure their identities. Another suspected attacker was captured and was being interrogated.

The men, all younger than 30, belonged to the banned domestic group Jumatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, or JMB, according to police. Asked whether they might also have had Islamic State ties, police said authorities were investigating that possibility.

"It is difficult to imagine how they were radicalized. At least four come from very wealthy backgrounds," said Benazir Ahmed, head of the country's paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion, according to Indian broadcaster NDTV.

Describing them as "flamboyant young men," he said some had also been frequent visitors to the same restaurant they attacked. The Islamic State, in claiming responsibility for the attack, had also published photos of the five smiling young men, each holding what appear to be assault rifles and posing in front of a black IS flag. The men in those photographs released by the Amaq news agency, affiliated with IS, also appear to match the police images of the dead assailants in the restaurant after the hostage crisis ended.

Another attacker identified as Khairul Islam went missing six months ago, according to Bogra district police chief Mohammed Asaduzzman. "The family is poor, and did not report his disappearance to police," Asaduzzman said.

But while Islam's background seemed to fit the stereotype, his upbringing suggested otherwise. Islam was educated, having studied in a madrassa before enrolling in a public university in Dhaka. The family identified Islam as one of the attackers after seeing a photograph of his body on Facebook, he said. Authorities have detained his parents, sister and brother-in-law for questioning.

At least some of the attackers had also known each other for years. Imtiaz had studied at the same English-language school as Meer Sameeh Mobashwer, whose family said he went missing on Feb. 29. Mobashwer's father, a businessman, and mother, an economics teacher, had planned to send their son to join his brother studying in Canada.

"I understood that my son had changed, something was wrong with him," his father, Meer Hayat Kabir, told the AP. "I was worried and tried to make him understand. But suddenly he went missing. I felt like the whole world crumbled around me."

Police, contacted by Mobashwer's family for help, were unable to track him down. "They told me maybe your son has gone somewhere with friends. He will come back. But he never came," Kabir said. He only found his son once police invited him to identify the body of one of the weekend attackers.

"We had lot of dreams," his father said. "I cannot believe my son was inside that restaurant, he was part of that. But that's the reality now." "My everything is over."

Associated Press writer Nirmala George contributed to this report.

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NIGERIA: The President Has No Constitutional Mandate To Probe Corruption

BY OBI NWAKANMA

VANGUARD, JULY 3, 2016

OBI NWAKANMA

Let us think of the Deputy President of the Nigerian Senate as, like a co-pilot. His hands are on the same lever with the president of the senate, navigating the nation through the storms of nation-build. That is right: nation-building does not happen at the executive office, it happens in the chambers of the nation’s legislative houses. This is a fairly clear axiom of democracy: without the parliament,

there is no republic. It is the parliament that legitimizes a free democratic state. It is the very source of all powers of governance. The parliament of the land is the most powerful institution of state, not the office of president, as most Nigerians, still steeped in military-era mentality tend to think. The President is a servant of the elected, and constituted National Assembly.

 While the National Assembly is both the voice, the ears, and the eyes of the public in the system of democratic rule. They do not answer to any other person – neither to the courts nor to the president – but to the people. That is why, whenever there is a coup, the first institution that is abolished is the parliament of the land. For as long as the parliament is in session, the nation exists. But wherever a parliament is abolished, the nation goes into a hiatus. In that instance, the president answers to no one. That is the meaning of absolutism. 

The only power parliament accounts to is the people. I need to emphasize this again. Which is why I was both startled and personally horrified this past week on reading the silly letter to the US Congress, the EU, the UK, and the UN, by the Deputy president of senate, Mr. Ike Ekweremadu, complaining that Nigeria’s democracy is threatened. I am horrified that the Nigerian press that consented to dignify such a middling letter by publishing it, did not go, as part of its obligation to the public, to ask Mr. Ekweremadu what he expected the UN, the US Congress, the UK, and the EU to do with his letter of complaint. 

I do not especially recall that the Speaker of the UK Parliament wrote to Nigeria, or the AU, or the US Congress, or the UN when the “Yes” vote carried on the Brexit referendum, or whenever the Labour Opposition fought with the ruling Conservative party in the Commons. Nor have I even heard, or seen any self-respecting African nation misusing its sovereign mandate so much as Nigerians in making such silly appeals to the “international community.” 

Yes, Africans now call Nigeria: “the big fool.” It is such a remarkable transition, from the “giant of Africa” to the “big fool of Africa” because Nigerian public officials are colonized, sanitized, hypnotized, and perhaps in fact, lobotomized so much that they misconstrue their place on the world stage. 

Nigeria is currently an inferior nation because she is run by inferior men and women. Many of us feel utterly ashamed by the quality of individuals that we have managed to hand over the sovereign mandate, and it is my view that the full measure of Ike Ekweremadu as a legislator and politician can be taken in the weight and significance of his letter. 

The US Congress or the UK government or the UN does not have voting rights in Nigeria. Ike Ekweremadu did not write to his constituents whom he represents in Enugu, nor to the Nigerian people, whose views and actions, and interests, matter in this question. He did not write a straight and unambiguous letter to the president to back off. He did not write to his legislative colleagues to drive home the necessity of protecting the republic from the intrusion of a rampaging elephant in a China shop. 

He wrote to some alien powers whose opinions are really inconsequential to whatever might become of this rapidly evolving situation. And I’m sorry to say that Ekweremadu’s letter only proves that he has no business wearing the shoes of mighty men. 

He has also proved the average Nigerian politicians utter disrespect of the Nigerian electorate from whom they derive their mandates. He has also demonstrated that he lacks a basic grasp of the nature of his own mandate as a senator of the republic. Perhaps I should outline this basically by saying that the president’s actions, for instance, in these anti-corruption probes, usurps the power of the legislature. President Buhari has no mandate to probe corruption or misuse of public funds. 

The only institution mandated by the constitution to probe any person or any institution of government is the National Assembly and the various Houses of Assembly. Here is what the Nigerian constitution says without ambiguity: “ 85. (1) There shall be an Auditor-General for the Federation who shall be appointed in accordance with the provisions of section 86 of this Constitution.

 (2) The public accounts of the Federation and of all offices and courts of the Federation shall be audited and reported on to the Auditor-General who shall submit his reports to the National Assembly; and for that purpose, the Auditor-General or any person authorised by him in that behalf shall have access to all the books, records, returns and other documents relating to those accounts. 

(3) Nothing in subsection (2) of this section shall be construed as authorising the Auditor-General to audit the accounts of or appoint auditors for government statutory corporations, commissions, authorities, agencies, including all persons and bodies established by an Act of the National Assembly, but the Auditor-General shall – (a) provide such bodies with – (i) a list of auditors qualified to be appointed by them as external auditors and from which the bodies shall appoint their external auditors, and (ii) guidelines on the level of fees to be paid to external auditors; and (b) comment on their annual accounts and auditor’s reports thereon.

 (4) The Auditor-General shall have power to conduct checks of all government statutory corporations, commissions, authorities, agencies, including all persons and bodies established by an Act of the National Assembly.

 (5) The Auditor-General shall, within ninety days of receipt of the Accountant-General’s financial statement, submit his reports under this section to each House of the National Assembly and each House shall cause the reports to be considered by a committee of the House of the National Assembly responsible for public accounts. 

(6) In the exercise of his functions under this Constitution, the Auditor-General shall not be subject to the direction or control of any other authority or person.”

 The National Assembly can also summon anybody before it, including the president of the republic, as well as cause the removal of anybody from office by impeachment, including the president or his Attorney General. The National Assembly can mandate the Attorney General to try the president for treason, if it finds the president to be a threat to the republic. The National Assembly can defund the office of the Attorney General, the EFCC or any statutory office of government, or cause it to go into abeyance.

 The National Assembly can stop the functions of the federal government by de-authorizing any presidential expenditure. That is the extent of the power of the legislature. With regards to the current distraction of trial for “forgery” of the president and deputy president of senate, one is thoroughly shocked that these gentlemen consented to appear in court! No court of the land has the authority to summon any legislator to court on questions around procedures, discussions, or actions carried out within the chambers of the National Assembly. This is the practice all over the world. 

The allegation of “forgery” of senate rules is a distraction because the rules of senate are subject to change, and is what it is, when a sitting senate votes to use, amend, or discard it as the case may be, as its guiding frame. It is not subject to the intrusion of any court, much less the presumption of crime by the Attorney General. 

This, Mr. Ekweremadu and Dr.Saraki ought to know, and should be properly advised, as an act honoring their mandate, to desist from appearing any further before any courts on this matter, and take charge of their legislative duties.

Libyan Forces Battle Islamic State Street-To-Street In Sirte

BY PATRICK MACKEY

REUTERS

A sniper from forces aligned with Libya's new unity government shoots while his comrade uses binoculars to scan the area looking for an Islamic State position in the Zaafran area in Sirte June 30, 2016. Ismail Zetouny/Reuters

SIRTE, LIBYA (REUTERS) -- Crouching on a rooftop, Libyan truck driver Riyad Swaid takes aim through breeze blocks at positions held by Islamic State fighters a few hundred meters away in the city of Sirte.

He and his fellow gunmen, aligned with Libya's unity government, are battling street-to-street for the strategically important coastal city on the edge the Western war against Islamic State.

Nearly two months into the battle, the militant group has lost control of Sirte's harbor and some of the residential areas near the center of what was late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's hometown.

The sides exchange sniper rounds and mortar shells, at times only 200 meters apart, and fight house-by-house.

"This war was forced on us. It was a war we could not avoid, so many lost their lives to these people," Swaid said.

Islamic State started expanding into Libya in 2014 as political chaos deepened and conflict worsened, three years after the civil war that ousted Gaddafi.

Sirte, 450 km (280 miles) east of Tripoli, became Islamic State's largest outpost beyond its Iraq and Syria territory. It was taken last year by militants who profited from Libya's war among rival factions to gain control of territory and impose their hardline vision on the city.

Losing Sirte would be a major setback for the group and a big blow to morale as it also struggles to hold ground in Iraq, where it has lost the city of Falluja and other territory to forces backed by U.S.-led air strikes.

SNIPERS

Islamic State are being squeezed by a tightening ring of separate fronts around a 5-km central area where earthen berms crisscross roads, cutting off escape routes. Tanks and howitzers lob occasional shells into areas held by Islamic State.

Many of those fighting Islamic State are from the nearby port city of Misrata.

Wearing mixed camouflage uniforms and jeans, some in flip-flops and others in flak jackets, they are trying to clear out snipers and landmines and booby-traps strapped to corpses in the street and in houses. They have positioned gun-mounted vehicles behind earthen roadblocks and fire aging anti-tank canons from villa rooftops.

The Misratan Commanders are reluctant to advance rapidly because of the risk of high casualties. Already, more than 200 fighters have been killed in the battle for Sirte.

A week ago, more than 40 Misrata troops were killed in a surge on one front. At a field hospital outside Sirte, doctors say most of the recent victims among troops were killed by gunshot wounds to the head and upper body.

A Russian-made tank spray-painted with the name of its Misrata brigade overlooks Sirte from a hill, occasionally blasting a shell into Islamic State-held territory.

After another miss, the driver adjusts the barrel and jumps out to pull on a long cord to fire from outside the tank -- staying inside is too risky with old, unstable ammunition.

"We've been trying to hit snipers in the top of a building," said Hamsa, a commander in the military engineering unit. "It's just trial and error, it's a simple way."

They lack night-vision equipment, helmets and flak jackets to reduce the casualties from snipers. Most feel let down by their Western partners and by the Tripoli government in the fight against Islamic State.

"Everyone knows we are fighting here with basic weapons, it was a lie that they said they would help us," said Mustafa, a local commander on a frontline in Sirte's 700 district. "But we can finish this war ourselves."

Western powers say they are ready for Prime Minister Fayaz Seraj's government to request assistance. But the U.N.-backed unity government is struggling to exert its influence, and political infighting delays decisions.

A specific request for exemptions to a U.N. arms embargo is yet to emerge, and a broader proposal for Western training programs is still in the planning stages.



BIG PRIZE

Western officials earlier this year estimated that 6,000 militant fighters had massed in Sirte, many of them foreign recruits from Tunisia and sub-Saharan Africa, increasing concerns about Islamic State expansion into North Africa.

Misratan forces said that figure was too high, and put it closer to 2,000. They say as few as 600 fighters may now be left inside Sirte, including some foreign recruits.

Misratan fighters battled side by side with other rebel brigades against Gaddafi in their 2011 uprising. They are now just one force in the complex network of military and political rivalries among Libya's various factions vying for power.

Sirte would be a big prize for the Misratan forces, who back the fragile U.N.-backed government of unity based in the capital Tripoli. But it could embolden them against rival forces led by a former Gaddafi official, General Khalifa Haftar.

Islamic State slowly established their hold on Sirte, carrying out punishments, crucifixions, public beheadings and floggings for those who resisted.

Militants took over city institutions and banks, forced merchants and shopkeepers to pay a tax, and set up an Islamic court. Local residents who fled say barbers were banned from shaving off beards and they stopped smoking in cafes.

The Zafran roundabout where crucifixions were carried out now has an empty frame where Islamic State's black flag was displayed. A spray-painted logo remains on merchant stores showing those who paid tax.

Misrata military commanders say the militant group is now holed up in the area around the Ouagadougou conference hall built by Gaddafi to host African summits, and around a nearby hospital, though some leaders may have fled to the south.

"We know this is not just a fight against the group in Sirte. After Sirte other pockets will appear," Mohamed Gnaidy, intelligence chief for the Misrata forces. "We know they could stage suicide attacks, bombs on other cities."

(Editing by Timothy Heritage)

Angry Tweets Won't Help African Lions

BY RICHARD CONNIFF

NEW YORK TIMES

The killing of Zimbabwe’s celebrated Cecil the Lion by a Minnesota dentist, on July 1 of last year unleashed a storm of moral fulmination against trophy hunting. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals issued an official statement calling for the hunter, Walter J. Palmer to be hanged, and an odd bedfellow, Newt Gingrich, tweeted that Dr. Palmer and the entire team involved in the killing of Cecil should go to jail. The television personality Sharon Osbourne thought merely losing “his home, his practice and his money” would do, adding, “He has already lost his soul.”

More than one million people signed a petition demanding “justice for Cecil,” and three major American airlines announced that they would no longer transport hunting trophies. A few months later, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service listed lions from West and Central Africa and also India as endangered, shutting down the major markets for trophies from that region. Australia, France and the Netherlands banned lion trophy imports outright.

Unfortunately, the furor did almost nothing to slow the catastrophic decline in lion populations, down 43 percent over the past two decades. That’s because trophy hunting was never really the main problem. Lions are disappearing in Africa for a reason far more complicated and less susceptible to either moral grandstanding or easy solutions: Impoverished Africans are eating the lions’ prey and killing the lions themselves — at a rate estimated at five to 10 times the take from trophy hunting.


In West and Central Africa in particular, the killing now takes place almost entirely within national parks and other ostensibly protected areas. Poachers and bushmeat hunters have already stripped wildlife from the remaining unprotected habitat, leaving empty forests. Now many protected areas have also lost the buffalo, antelope and other large animals that lions would normally feed on, according to Philipp Henschel, a lion specialist with the cat conservation group Panthera. In many habitats, only warthogs and baboons survive, because of Muslim rules against eating them. Herders also capture and kill lions, using leghold traps made from old car springs. They do this not just to protect livestock, but also to sell lion bones to the Asian traditional medicine trade.

As a result, lions are now effectively extinct across much of West and Central Africa; two populations, totaling about 400, remain. Continentwide, only about 20,000 lions survive, according to a new report, “Beyond Cecil: Africa's Lions in Crisis,” just issued by Panthera and another conservation group, WildAid. That’s down from 200,000 in the mid-20th century, and the number is likely to drop to 10,000 over the next decade.

Africa without lions? It is unthinkable. But angry tweets are not really much of an answer. So where do we go with our outrage?

Forests and other natural habitats produce oxygen, help prevent both drought and flooding, refill aquifers and serve as a living gene bank for agricultural improvement, among many other benefits. They can become the basis for jobs in tourism economies and provide essential resources, including a sustainable harvest of firewood, medicine and even meat for nearby communities — but only if somebody is protecting the habitat from the heedless human urge to consume everything right now.

And that’s not happening. For example, Zambia’s Kafue National Park, an area the size of Massachusetts, loses much of its wildlife to snaring — and generates just $2.3 million a year from tourism. With adequate anti-poaching patrols and upgraded facilities, a recent analysis by conservation and development consultant Rowan Martin suggests, the park could be making $39 million a year instead, along with jobs and benefits for its neighbors — and support four times as many lions.

Unfortunately, only a few countries in Africa have the tax base or the political will to maintain and patrol protected areas effectively. According to a report published in January by a team of Panthera scientists, many allocate just $100 per square kilometer, a fraction of the $500 to $2,000 required. Properly managed trophy hunting can help in some areas, but generates only $138 to $1,100 per square kilometer — and much less after the hunting guide takes a share. Tourism might close the gap, but it tends to concentrate on a few spectacular sites like the Serengeti and Kruger National Park.

The “Beyond Cecil” report argues that, moving past the disproportionate focus on trophy hunting after Cecil’s death, the single most important step in securing the future of the lion in Africa “is mobilizing massive support” for Africa’s parks and protected areas. That is, we should be lobbying the United Nations, the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, the European Union, the International Development Bank and other international bodies to take on the park management shortfall, estimated at $700 million to $3 billion a year.

This money needs to go to anti-poaching patrols in protected areas, but with the transparency and policing to insure it does not dwindle like past funding efforts under the guidance of Western consultants and corrupt African governments.

Some of that money should also go to develop alternatives to bushmeat, to reduce conflict with wildlife (for instance, by building better nighttime corrals) and to compensate livestock herders for the burden of living with lions and other dangerous animals. In one area, outside a national park in Niger, where per capita income is under $500, the loss of livestock to lions costs $138 per person every year — hardly a recipe for tolerance. People living around protected areas need to see practical benefits to living with wildlife.

This ought to be a campaign that unites animal rights activists and trophy hunters alike. Both have a material and emotional interest when, as the “Beyond Cecil” report notes, more than 1,400 prey animals have suffered slow, painful deaths in snares and been left to rot in just one Zimbabwe conservancy. Their scent attracts lions and other predators, which also end up snared, to be “choked, succumb to injuries, or die of thirst.”

In truth, it is a campaign that ought to unite all of us who want some vestige of wild Africa — one with lions, elephants, rhinos — to survive beyond our meager lifetimes. Never mind Walter Palmer’s soul. If we do nothing but point fingers, it is our own souls we should be worrying about.


Richard Conniff is the author of “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth” and a contributing opinion writer.

Morocco: First Islamic Banks To Open Doors In 2017

NORTH AFRICAN POST

FRIDAY, JULY 01, 2016

Morocco’s central bank will start very soon granting permits to Islamic banks due to start operations in the North African Kingdom in 2017. So far several applications have been submitted to the Moroccan financial authorities for approval to open local branches.

Among the applicants, two are from the Gulf region bidding to set up their own Islamic bank branches in Morocco, while the other four banks want to establish joint financial institutions with local banks.

Three other applications are seeking approval to sell Islamic banking products to Moroccan clients. The move comes after the Moroccan Parliament had approved a bill to allow the creation of sharia-compliant banks and let private firms issue Islamic debt.

By launching Islamic banking services, Morocco, a tolerant country, seeks to attract investment to fund its rapid sustained growth, socioeconomic development and boost savings.

“We will start licensing shortly Islamic banks,” said central bank officials, noting that these banks would be required to report periodically to authorities on their activities.

According to some experts, Islamic banking has started looking more attractive than those of conventional financial services. The last decade has seen a sharp rise in Islamic banking services.

Across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, Islamic banking has grown to become a prominent means of financial management, while it is also emerging in Western economies that have not typically been associated with it in the past.

The size of the Islamic finance market ranges from $1.66 Trillion to $2.1 Trillion with expectations of market size to be $3.4 Trillion by end of 2018. The Islamic funds and sukuk grow annually 14 pc and 11 pc respectively. Other key sectors of the Islamic economy have experienced success too.

Islamic banking, which embraces risk-sharing, offers a plethora of products for customers or investors looking to participate. Sharia law prohibits engaging in activities or transactions that are considered harmful to people, society or the environment.

This ethical approach is at the core of Islamic banking and avoids transactions involving usury, interest, speculation, gambling, or industries contrary to Islamic values. Islamic banking’s emphasis on shared responsibility and community also creates a more inclusive economy.

OBAMA LEGACY: Immigration Stands As Most Glaring Failure

File-pool photo, detainees walk in a line at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville,Texas. Hours after the Supreme Court sent his immigration policy into legal limbo, President Barack Obama huddled around a long conference table in the Roosevelt Room with disappointed activists. The president looked out at familiar faces, some teary. It had been a long and tough fight, Obama said, and he had taken some beatings, even from supporters who “whupped on me good.”


WASHINGTON (AP) — Hours after the Supreme Court sent his immigration policy into legal limbo, President Barack Obama huddled around a long conference table in the Roosevelt Room with disappointed activists. The president looked out at familiar faces, some teary. It had been a long and tough fight, Obama said, and he had taken some beatings — even from supporters who "whupped on me good."

He believed his policies would prevail, according to participants in the meeting, but said it was now up to voters and the next president to take up the baton. And with that, Obama delivered his version of a concession speech on a fight that has frustrated him like few others, roiled the campaign to replace him and is certain to test his successor.

When Obama leaves office in January, immigration overhaul will stand as the most glaring failure in his 7 ½-year effort to enact a vision of social change. Despite two campaigns full of promises and multiple strategies, Obama imposed only incremental, largely temporary changes on the immigration system. He leaves behind an outdated and overwhelmed system, with some 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally.

Behind that failure, Obama's legacy will be judged by a sometimes contradictory mix of policies — some aimed at bringing immigrants "out of the shadows," others at removing them from the U.S. He will be remembered for protecting 730,000 young people, a generation of so-called Dreamers, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Advocates and allies will credit him with embracing a newly aggressive assertion of executive power that, despite the court deadlock and political opposition, remains a legal pathway for the next president. And he will go down as a leader who consistently defended the importance of immigrants in American life, as anti-immigrant sentiment swelled up in parts of the U.S. and abroad.

"Immigration is not something to fear," Obama said last week. "We don't have to wall ourselves off from those who may not look like us right now or pray like we do, or have a different last name." "What makes us Americans," he proclaimed, "is our shared commitment to an ideal that all of us are created equal, all of us have a chance to make of our lives what we will."

But Obama also will be remembered as a president who prioritized other issues, missing perhaps the best chance to pass sweeping legislation and only reluctantly adjusting his strategy in the face of firm opposition.

And his administration aggressively enforced current laws, deporting more than 2.4 million people. The total is nearly as many as his two predecessors combined. "His strategy early on was to prove his enforcement bona fides," said Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, an immigration advocacy group, who once labeled Obama the "deporter-in-chief."

"He was facing an unprecedented, highly personalized opposition from Congress," she said. "We fault him, I believe correctly, for failing to recognize soon enough this intransigence by Congress and failing to use his authority sooner."

__ Evaluating Obama's record is a matter of tallying two columns. One is the number of people he protected from removal. The other is the number deported. The Supreme Court went a long way last week toward tipping the ledger toward the latter.

With its 4-4 tie, it thwarted Obama's last chance to shield up to 4 million people from deportation. The decision left in place an injunction freezing his 2014 executive action, which expanded his protection of Dreamers and temporarily protected some parents of people with legal status.

The deadlock, resulting from a Republican blockade against Obama's Supreme Court nominee, left the constitutionality of the action unsettled. But it had a significant impact on Obama's legacy. "If the Supreme Court had ruled in his favor, he'd probably be remembered as the person who helped to protect half of the undocumented population in the country, which probably would have been a turning point toward reform sooner rather than later," said Frank Sharry, founder of the immigration reform group America's Voice. Instead, he said Obama will be most remembered for his administration's "record number of deportations."

The White House rejects a by-the-numbers analysis. Work to modernize the border and bring new order to a chaotic deportation system isn't necessarily conveyed in the calculation, officials argue. The administration overhauled the role of local law enforcement. In 2014, the president declared the administration's limited resources would be focused on removing threats to national security and public safety and recent arrivals. Deportation has decreased since. Last year, the administration deported the fewest people since 2006.

"Devising that approach and implementing it has fundamentally changed the way laws are enforced and has had a real impact on communities," said Cecilia Munoz, the president's chief adviser on immigration. "That's a very, very big change. That's a large piece of the legacy."

It is a piece of the legacy that remains controversial. Prioritizing recent arrivals inevitably means targeting some of the women and children who have been fleeing violence in Central America. A series of Christmastime raids last year revived complaints about the policy from Democrats and immigrant advocates. The White House has shown no sign of backing down.

__ Could Obama have charted a different course on immigration? Entering office during an economic crisis, Obama focused on stimulating growth and reforming the financial sector. Then there was his massive health care legislation. Along the way, he broke a campaign promise to back overhaul legislation on immigration in his first year.

It was 2011 before Obama endorsed a set of reform principles. By then, Democrats had lost control of the House and the best window for passing a bill had closed. With Latinos, a key political constituency, restless ahead of his re-election bid, Obama announced his first executive action to shield Dreamers in June 2012. He made a new law a top priority of his second term. Although the Senate passed legislation, the GOP-led House refused to vote on it.

"Republicans never gave him credit for the actions that were taken both in terms of security on the border and deportations that did occur," said Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona who backed the Senate bill but opposed Obama's executive actions. "It was a more robust program than Republicans ever gave him credit for. But no good deed goes unpunished in this political environment. The narrative was kind of set and it was furthered by the actions that he took."

After claiming he did not have the authority, Obama bowed to intense pressure from advocates and announced a second executive action in November 2014. He'd waited until after midterm elections, concerned he would damage prospects for senators in tough races. Democrats lost the Senate anyway and the move revived Republican charges of unconstitutional overreach. More than two dozen states eventually signed on to a court challenge that froze the program.

Still, allies cast Obama's about-turn as a game-changer. Future presidents almost certainly will try to flex similar authority to work around gridlock on Capitol Hill. Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has promised to go further than Obama.

"He has rewritten the playbook and added several pages to it on what the executive can and should do. There's a lot of room there," said Angela Kelley, an immigration expert at the Center for America Progress. "Is that necessarily the best way? No. But it is legal, and it is smart and strategic."

Whether the courts agree will help shape Obama's legacy. Resolution isn't likely until after he leaves office. Clinton would likely pick up where Obama left off in pushing to address the status of the millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.

If Republican Donald Trump prevails, Obama's effort could end up as another painful, close-but-not-quite moment. Trump has proposed building a wall along the border with Mexico and barring Muslims from the U.S.

"The finish line has been in sight for a very, very long time," said Munoz, a veteran of legislative battles over immigration."It is only a matter of political will," __ Associated Press reporter Alicia A. Caldwell contributed to this report.