Rohingyas: The Most Persecuted People on Earth

Rohingya refugees wait to receive aid in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh on September 24, 2017 (Photo: Cathal McNaughton/ Reuters); Background: Rohingya refugee Azida Begum, 11, was shot twice, under her arm and her leg, by the Burmese military when they killed her mother as she was fleeing her village in Burma. This photograph was taken in Palongkhali, Bangladesh on October 10, 2017 (Photo: Paula Bronstein / Getty).

Background
The Rohingya trace their origins in the region to the fifteenth century, when thousands of Muslims came to the former Arakan Kingdom. Many others arrived during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Rakhine was governed by colonial rule as part of British India. Since independence in 1948, successive governments in Burma, renamed Myanmar in 1989, have refuted the Rohingya’s historical claims and denied the group recognition as one of the country’s 135 ethnic groups. The Rohingya are largely considered illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even though many trace their roots in Myanmar back centuries.

Neither the central government nor Rakhine’s dominant ethnic Buddhist group, known as the Rakhine, recognize the label “Rohingya,” a self-identifying term [PDF] that surfaced in the 1950s, which experts say provides the group with a collective political identity. Though the etymological root of the word is disputed, the most widely accepted theory is that Rohang derives from the word “Arakan” in the Rohingya dialect and ga or gya means “from.” By identifying as Rohingya, the ethnic Muslim group asserts its ties to land that was once under the control of the Arakan Kingdom, according to Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, a Thailand-based advocacy group.

The Legal Status of Rhonigya
The government refuses to grant the Rohingya citizenship, and as a result the vast majority of the group’s members have no legal documentation, effectively making them stateless. Myanmar’s 1948 citizenship law was already exclusionary, and the military junta, which seized power in 1962, introduced a law twenty years later stripping the Rohingya of access to full citizenship. Until recently, the Rohingya had been able to register as temporary residents with identification cards, known as white cards, that the junta began issuing to many Muslims, both Rohingya and non-Rohingya, in the 1990s. The white cards conferred [PDF] limited rights but were not recognized as proof of citizenship. Still, Lewa says that they did provide some recognition of temporary stay for the Rohingya in Myanmar.

In 2014 the government held a UN-backed national census, its first in thirty years. The Muslim minority group was initially permitted to identify as Rohingya, but after Buddhist nationalists threatened to boycott the census, the government decided the Rohingya could only register if they identified as Bengali instead.

Similarly, under pressure from Buddhist nationalists protesting the Rohingya’s right to vote in a 2015 constitutional referendum, then-President Thein Sein canceled the temporary identity cards in February 2015, effectively revoking their newly gained right to vote. (White card holders were allowed to vote in Myanmar’s 2008 constitutional referendum and 2010 general elections.) In the 2015 elections, which were widely touted by international monitors as free and fair, no parliamentary candidate was of the Muslim faith. “Country-wide anti-Muslim sentiment [PDF] makes it politically difficult for the government to take steps seen as supportive of Muslim rights,” writes the International Crisis Group.

Muslim minorities continue to “consolidate under one Rohingya identity,” says Lewa, despite documentation by rights groups and researchers of systematic disenfranchisement, violence, and instances of anti-Muslim campaigns.

Watch The Rohingya: Silent Abuse: Part II | Al Jazeera World (aired 8.13.2017).

Fleeing in Fear
The Myanmar government has effectively institutionalized discrimination against the ethnic group through restrictions on marriage, family planning, employment, education, religious choice, and freedom of movement. For example, Rohingya couples in the northern towns of Maungdaw and Buthidaung are only allowed to have two children [PDF]. Rohingya must also seek permission to marry, which may require them to bribe authorities and provide photographs of the bride without a headscarf and the groom with a clean-shaven face, practices that conflict with Muslim customs. To move to a new home or travel outside their townships, Rohingya must gain government approval.

Moreover, Rakhine State is Myanmar’s least developed state, with a poverty rate of 78 percent, compared to the 37.5 percent national average, according to World Bank estimates. Widespread poverty, poor infrastructure, and a lack of employment opportunities in Rakhine have exacerbated the cleavage between Buddhists and Muslim Rohingya. This tension is deepened by religious differences that have at times erupted into conflict.

The 2017 Exodus
Clashes in Rakhine broke out in August 2017, killing more than five hundred people after a militant group known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) claimed responsibility for attacks on police and army posts. As many as 18,500 Rohingya Muslims fled their homes in less than one week, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The government declared ARSA a terrorist organization and the military mounted a brutal campaign that destroyed hundreds of Rohingya villages and forced more than six hundred thousand Rohingya to leave Myanmar, more than half of the estimated Rohingya population in the country. Myanmar’s security forces allegedly opened fire on fleeing civilians and planted land mines near border crossings used by Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh.

Rights groups and UN leaders have condemned the escalating violence and atrocities, which have been described by a number of observers as ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The clashes and exodus have created what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls a “humanitarian and human rights nightmare.” At an emergency UN Security Council meeting, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said Myanmar authorities have carried out “brutal, sustained campaign to cleanse the country of an ethnic minority,” and she called on members to suspend weapons provisions to the military. Other Security Council members, like Russia and China, have resisted increasing pressure on Myanmar’s government because they say it is trying to restore stability.

Sectarian violence is not new to Rakhine State. Security campaigns in the past five years, notably in 2012 and 2016, also resulted in the flight of tens of thousands of Rohingya from their homes.

The Rohingyas: The World’s Fastest-Growing Refugee Crisis | 40 Photos
Click images  to enlarge or read caption. Newsletter recipients should visit website for better viewing experience.

Rohingya refugees wait to receive aid in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on September 21, 2017. More than 420,000 people have fled the violence in Burma since August 24, according to the United Nations. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

Rohingya Muslims, who crossed over from Burma into Bangladesh, wait during distribution of food items near the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh on September 19, 2017. (Photo: Dar Yasin / AP)

A Rohingya refugee who claims he was shot, stabbed and left for dead by Myanmar military, poses for a picture in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 21, 2017. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

Rohingya Muslims, who crossed over recently from Myanmar into Bangladesh, stand in a queue to receive food being distributed near Balukhali refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2017. More than 500,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to neighboring Bangladesh in the past year, most of them in the last three weeks, after security forces and allied mobs retaliated to a series of attacks by Muslim militants last month by burning down thousands of Rohingya homes in the predominantly Buddhist nation. (Photo: Bernat Armangue/ AP)

A Rohingya Muslim man, Mohammad Zakaria, who sustained bullet injuries to his left leg when Burmese monks and soldiers attacked his village, waits for food aid outside the Balukhali refugee camp in Bangladesh on September 17, 2017. (Photo: Dar Yasin / AP)

Rohingya refugees are seen on a boat as they are crossing border through the Naf river in Teknaf, Bangladesh, September 7, 2017. (Photo: Mohammad Ponir Hossain / Reuters)

A Rohingya refugee child poses for a photo in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 21, 2017. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

A Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 19, 2017. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

A Rohingya refugee child crawls through mud in Cox’s Bazar on September 21, 2017. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

Desperate Rohingya grab for aid handouts of clothing and food on September 15, 2017, in Tankhali, Bangladesh. (Photo: Paula Bronstein / Getty)

Shaheda, 40, a Rohingya refugee woman who said her body was burnt when the Myanmar army set fire to her house, receives treatment at the Cox’s Bazar District Sadar Hospital in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 19, 2017. (Photo: Mohammad Ponir Hossain / Reuters)

A Rohingya Muslim woman Lalmoti is carried to hospital by her son and grandson in Kutupalong refugee camp, Bangladesh, Monday, Sept. 18, 2017. Bangladesh has been overwhelmed with more than 400,000 Rohingya who fled their homes in the last three weeks amid a crisis the U.N. describes as ethnic cleansing. Refugee camps were already beyond capacity and new arrivals were staying in schools or huddling in makeshift settlements with no toilets along roadsides and in open fields. (Photo: Dar Yasin/ AP)

A Rohingya refugee arrives at a camp in Cox’s Bazar on September 18, 2017. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

A Rohingya refugee girl drinks rain water in a camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 20, 2017. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

Shunwara Begum waits for aid in the Balukhali Rohingya refugee camp on September 21, 2017 in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. (Photo: Allison Joyce/ Getty Images)

Rohingya Muslim women, who crossed over from Burma into Bangladesh, stretch their arms out to collect sanitary products distributed by aid agencies near the Balukhali refugee camp in Bangladesh, on September 17, 2017. (Photo: Dar Yasin / AP)

Rahima Khatun, 30, stands next to her makeshift shelter in the overcrowded Balukhali camp on September 17, 2017, in Balukhali, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Rahima was hiding in the forest in Burma, then walked four days to reach Bangladesh. (Photo: Paula Bronstein / Getty)

12-year-old Kurshida holds a drawing she made at a CODEC and UNICEF “child friendly space” on September 21, 2017, in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Kurshida fled to Bangladesh from Bourashidapara village in Burma almost a month ago. Her drawing depicts a scene that she witnessed while fleeing her village; the military shooting everywhere, lighting her home on fire, cutting her niece’s throat with a machete while she slept, her newborn sister being shot, aircraft dropping bombs, and her neighbors being shot while they tried to flee. Over 230,000 child refugees have fled into Bangladesh since late August during the outbreak of violence in Rakhine state and are now in urgent need of help, according to UNICEF. With children making up around 60 percent of the 420,000 Rohingya that have fled into Bangladesh, many arrived in the makeshift tents highly traumatized after seeing family members killed and homes set on fire. Aid agencies like UNICEF are offering counseling for Rohingya children and have set up spaces for them to play and relax. They have so far counted more than 1,400 children who have crossed the border with no parents at all, and many children are displaying signs of trauma, such as shaking and the inability to interact with other people. (Photo: Allison Joyce / Getty)

A Rohingya refugee perspires while waiting to receive aid in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on September 27, 2017. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

A Rohingya refugee girl in a camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on September 28, 2017. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

Rohingya refugee Azida Begum, 11, was shot twice, under her arm and her leg, by the Burmese military when they killed her mother as she was fleeing her village in Burma. Azida now lives with her grandmother, her father having died years ago. This photograph was taken in Palongkhali, Bangladesh, on October 10, 2017. Well over a half a million Rohingya refugees have fled into Bangladesh since late August during the outbreak of violence in Rakhine state causing a humanitarian crisis in the region with continued challenges for aid agencies. (Photo: Paula Bronstein / Getty)

Rohingya refugees react as aid is distributed in a camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 19, 2017. (Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

A young Rohingya Muslim refugee collects wood among graves at Kutupalong refugee Camp in Bangladesh’s Ukhia district on October 7, 2017. A top UN official said Saturday Bangladesh’s plan to build the world’s biggest refugee camp for 800,000+ Rohingya Muslims was dangerous because overcrowding could heighten the risks of deadly diseases spreading quickly. (Photo: Fred Dufour / AFP / Getty)

A Rohingya girl cries as refugees fleeing from Burma cross a stream in the hot sun on a muddy rice field on October 16, 2017, near Palang Khali, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. (Photo: Paula Bronstein / Getty)

A Rohingya man on the Bangladeshi side of the Naf River, after crossing the border from Burma, near Palang Khali, Bangladesh, on October 16, 2017. (Photo: Jorge Silva / Reuters)

Khalida, a Rohingya refugee and mother of three children, wades across a canal near the no-man’s-land area between Bangladesh and Burma, in the Palongkhali area next to Ukhia, on October 18, 2017. (Photo: Tauseef Mustafa / AFP / Getty)

Rohingya Muslim children, who crossed over from Burma, wait to receive handouts near Balukhali refugee camp, Bangladesh, on September 25, 2017. (Photo: Dar Yasin / AP)

Rohingya refugees who were stranded after leaving Burma walk from the no-man’s-land between Burma and Bangladesh into the Bangladeshi district of Ukhia on October 19, 2017. (Photo: Tauseef Mustafa / AFP / Getty)

Rohingya refugee Ali Hussain is restrained by his sister with a metal chain in the Balukhali refugee camp in the Bangladeshi district of Ukhia on October 15, 2017. Hussein’s older sister Mairam Khatoon keeps her brother chained up, she says, for his own safety, and to keep him from wandering off and getting lost in the vast refugee camp. Khatoon says Hussain, a former schoolteacher in Burma’s Rakhine province, has become mentally unstable since he witnessed his wife and three sons being killed by Burmese soldiers who slit their throats. (Photo: Indranil Mukherjee / AFP / Getty)

The foot of a newborn Rohingya baby, photographed at a medical center in the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar on October 15, 2017. (Photo: Zohra Bensemra / Reuters)

Rohingya refugees react before the funeral of a family member, whose family says he succumbed to injuries inflicted by the Burmese Army before their arrival, in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on September 29, 2017. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

A young Rohingya Muslim boy, Sheikh Ahmad, center, recites verses from the Quran in a crowded little tent that serves as a madrasa or religious school in the Kutupalong refugee camp, Bangladesh, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2017. As he lifted his hands in prayer, tears began to roll down his face and he prayed for those killed in the violence that his family escaped. Later, in his family’s little shack, the Associated Press photographer asked him “why did you cry?” tears seeped through again and he said, “I’m crying for my motherland.” (Photo: Dar Yasin / AP)

Reuters photographers Hannah McKay and Adnan Abidi help a Rohingya refugee to climb out of the Nad River as they cross the Burma-Bangladesh border in Palong Khali, near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on November 1, 2017. (Photo: Hannah McKay / Reuters)

Ali Johar, 35, holds the hand of his daughter Minara, 4, who died after a boat with Rohingya refugees fleeing from Myanmar capsized, at a hospital in Shamlapur near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh October 31, 2017. (Photo: Adnan Abidi / Reuters)

Hosne Ara, 4, a Rohingya refugee who fled Myanmar two-months ago listens to children singing at a children’s centre in the Kutupalong refugee camp near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, November 5, 2017. REUTERS/Hannah McKay – RC1C8534EF70

7-year-old Ismot Ara, a sick Rohingya refugee girl, sits in the doorway of her makeshift shelter at the Kutupalong refugee camp near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on November 12, 2017. (Photo: Navesh Chitrakar / Reuters)

A Rohingya refugee child gets an oral cholera vaccine, distributed by the World Health Organization with the help of volunteers and local NGOs, in a refugee camp near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on October 11, 2017. (Photo: Jorge Silva / Reuters)

​Rohingya refugees wait to receive aid in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh on September 24, 2017. (Photo: Cathal McNaughton / Reuters)

Rohingya men praying before burying Mohammed Hosain, 2, in Bangladesh. (Photo: Tomas Munita for The New York Times)

A drawing by a Rohingya boy about his experiences while fleeing Myanmar (Photo: Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times)​

40 Photos | Click images above to enlarge or read caption.  

MSF: At Least 67,000 Killed in a Single Month
On December 14, Doctors Without Borders estimated that at least 6,700 members of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority, including 730 children below age 5, had met violent deaths there in the month after a military crackdown on their villages. Survivors who fled to neighboring Bangladesh gave consistent accounts of executions, gang rapes and burned homes. But with Myanmar’s government blocking international access to the area of western Myanmar where the Rohingya once lived, estimates of the toll have been hard to ascertain. Doctors Without Borders, the international medical charity also known as Médecins Sans Frontières, said that nearly 70 percent of the victims it had tallied died of gunshot and that 9 percent were burned to death in their homes. The group said its mortality figure was almost certainly an underestimate. The estimate was a summary of findings from six surveys carried out last month with refugees who had fled Myanmar for Bangladesh.

Forced Marriages, Child Brides & Sex Trafficking
In Malaysia, the demographics of the Rohingya population skews heavily male. The situation created a troubling demand for young Rohingya women in places like Ampang—a suburban neighborhood on the edge of Kuala Lumpur, with a large population of Rohingya men. Human traffickers quickly targeted young girls in Rohingya camps in Myanmar, often offering them safe journey to Malaysia for a fraction of the normal cost. But once they set sail, the terms of the agreement would often change. Suddenly, the girls owed more than $1,000 and those who couldn’t pay would be held in jungle camps. Many were raped by their traffickers. Others were sold into marriages in Malaysia.

“We know women have been recruited by brokers in Rakhine State either for free or at a very reduced cost because their traffickers were anticipating that they could charge men in Malaysia a lot higher fee,” explained Amy Smith, of Fortify Rights—a nonprofit that documents human rights abuses in Southeast Asia.

It’s difficult to determine exactly how many women have been sold into forced marriages, experts say.  Arranged marriages are common in Rohingya society. The custom of a man paying his bride’s way to Malaysia is frequently practiced. It’s a tradition that feels similar to a forced marriage, but while the women set up on arranged marriages have had some previous connection with their spouse and the approval of their families, the victims of forced marriages have had no prior contact with their husband and no intentions of getting married when they set out from Myanmar.  An investigation by the International Organization for Migration recently uncovered documented accounts of Rohingya girls as young as 11 getting married, and families at refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar are forcing their girls to marry early to reduce the number of mouths to feed and secure more food for themselves.

Sharifah Shakirah, a Rohingya woman who works with the victims of forced marriages in Malaysia, said the situation is the symptom of a cruel system. And for the women who refuse to accept the marriages, their future can look even worse: “The agents, they sell them into prostitution and then they have to work in bars and clubs. Some traffickers use these girls as beggars. They cut their hands or gouge their eyes out to incite sympathy. I’ve seen it happen so many times. I cannot explain to you how difficult life is for these girls,” sighed Shakirah.

Myanmar’s Civilian Response…or Lack Thereof
In 2016, Myanmar’s first democratically elected government in a generation came to power, but critics say it has been reluctant to advocate for Rohingya and other Muslims for fear of alienating Buddhist nationalists and threatening the power-sharing agreement the civilian government maintains with the military. Some observers saw the establishment in August 2016 of an advisory commission on ethnic strife led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as a positive development, but subsequent outbreaks of violence have curbed this optimism.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader, has denied that ethnic cleansing is taking place and dismissed international criticism of her handling of the crisis, accusing critics of fueling resentment between Buddhists and Muslims in the country. In September 2017, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said her government had “already started defending all the people in Rakhine in the best way possible.”

Regional Response
Protesters have at times gathered in cities in Pakistan, India, Thailand, Indonesia, and Bangladesh to condemn the killing and persecution of Rohingya. Bangladesh’s foreign minister condemned the violence in Rakhine as “genocide” in September 2017 and Indonesia called on the Myanmar authorities to halt their campaign and bring an end to the violence. Yet governments in Southeast Asia lack established legal frameworks to protect refugees’ rights, and the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have not coordinated a response to the deepening crisis.

Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand—all ASEAN members—have yet to ratify the UN Refugee Convention or its protocol. ASEAN itself has been silent on the plight of the Rohingya and on the growing numbers of asylum seekers in member countries, largely because of its members’ commitment to the principle of noninterference in each other’s internal affairs.

International Response
In December 2016, U.S. President Barack Obama lifted sanctions against Myanmar, saying that the country had made strides in improving human rights. The move came amid a crackdown on Rohingya and was criticized by some as premature. In September 2017, the United States committed $32 million to supply food, medical care, water, and shelter for Rohingya who have fled. Yet, while U.S. lawmakers have proposed new measures targeting Myanmar military members and the State Department has withdrawn military assistance, no sanctions have been reimposed.

Advocacy groups including Human Rights Watch, the Arakan Project, and Fortify Rights continue to appeal to major international players to exert pressure on Myanmar’s government. Others, such as Priscilla Clapp, a former U.S. diplomat in Myanmar, say that placing sole blame on Myanmar oversimplifies and misrepresents the complexities of the country’s historical ethnic diversity. “An international response that consists primarily of assigning blame for this humanitarian tragedy is no longer tenable. It is time for the international community to organize a realistic, workable solution,” writes Clapp.

Annan’s advisory commission published its findings in late August 2017, after a year of investigation. It recommended that Myanmar lift restrictions on movement and citizenship. “Tensions remain high and they risk becoming worse. Violence will not bring lasting solutions to the acute problems that afflict the Rakhine State,” Annan said.

Resentment of the minority group has run deep for generations. Without overhauling “a culture of pervasive prejudice” and ensuring that Rohingya are treated as human beings, the situation in Rakhine State is unlikely to improve, says journalist and author Francis Wade.

Sources
❉ The Rhonigya Crisis -Eleanor Albert | Council on Foreign Relations
❉ The Misunderstood Roots of Burma’s Rohingya Crisis -By Krishnadev Calamur | The Atlantic
❉ At Least 6,700 Rohingya Died in Myanmar Crackdown, Aid Group Says -By Hannah Beech | The New York Times
❉ U.S. Says Myanmar’s Rohingya Assault Appears to Be Ethnic Cleansing -By Farnaz Fassihi | The Wall Street Journal
❉ What It’s Like to Be a Rohingya Child Bride -By Jonathan Vit | VICE
❉ Child Marriage in the Rohingya Camps in Bangladesh -By Photographer Allison Joyce | The Atlantic (Photos)
❉ Rape of Rohingya Sweeping, Methodical | AP Investigation via ABC News

---

Recommended….
❉ Free Detained Journalists in Myanmar | NY Times Editorial Board
❉ The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide | Azeem Ibrahim (Book)
❉ Aung San Suu Kyi’s Clearest Act of Complicity | New York Times Editorial Board
❉ Rohingya Recount Atrocities: ‘They Threw My Baby Into a Fire’ -By Jeffrey Gettlemen | The New York Times
❉ Satellite Images Show More Than 200 Rohingya Villages Burned in Myanmar -By Sergio Peçanha & Jeremy White | The New York Times
❉ Rohingya Activist: ‘Rohingya Are Not Safe Anywhere’-By Ashley Westerman | NPR

Yemen: The World’s Worst Humanitarian Disaster ⚱️

Buthaina is the only member of her family not killed in a Saudi-led airstrike in August 2017. (Photo: Khaled Abdullah/ Reuters)

After two and a half years of war, little is functioning in Yemen.

Seven million Yemenis — nearly a third of the population — are at risk of starving. Millions more need emergency food aid. Repeated bombings have  crippled bridges, hospitals and factories. Many doctors and civil servants have gone unpaid for more than a year. Malnutrition and poor sanitation have made the Middle Eastern country vulnerable to diseases that most of the world has confined to the history books. In just three months, cholera has killed nearly 2,000 people and infected more than a half million, one of the world’s largest outbreaks in the past 50 years.

“It’s a slow death,” said Yakoub al-Jayefi, a Yemeni soldier who has not collected a salary in eight months, and whose 6-year-old daughter, Shaima, was being treated for malnutrition at a clinic in the Yemeni capital, Sana (aka Sanaa, Sana’a).

Since the family’s savings ran out, they had lived mostly off milk and yogurt from neighbors. But that was not enough to keep his daughter healthy, and her skin went pale as she grew thin. Like more than half of Yemenis, the family did not have immediate access to a working medical center, so Mr. Jayefi borrowed money from friends and relatives to take his daughter to the capital. “We’re just waiting for doom or for a breakthrough from heaven,” he said.

How did a country in a region with such great wealth fall so far and so fast into crisis? And what does the future hold for the fragile state?

A Nation Split in Two
A picture taken on December 5, 2017, shows the damage after a reported air strike carried out by the Saudi-led coalition targeted the presidential palace in Yemen’s Huthi rebel-held capital Sana​​.​ ​(Photo: Mohammed Huwais / AFP/ Getty)

Yemen has long been the Arab world’s poorest country and suffered from frequent local armed conflicts. The most recent trouble started in 2014, when the Houthis, rebels from the north, allied with parts of the Yemeni military and stormed the capital, forcing the internationally recognized government into exile.

In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Arab nations launched a military campaign aimed at pushing back the Houthis and restoring the government. The campaign has so far failed to do so, and the country remains split between Houthi-controlled territory in the west and land controlled by the government and its Arab backers in the south and east.

A Collapsed State
Children sit amidst the rubble of a house hit by Saudi-led coalition air strikes two days earlier on the outskirts of the Yemeni capital Sana. (Photo: Mohammed Huwais / AFP/ Getty)

Many coalition airstrikes have killed and wounded civilians. The bombings have also heavily damaged Yemen’s infrastructure, including a crucial seaport and important bridges as well as hospitals, sewage facilities and civilian factories. Services that Yemenis have depended on are gone, and the destruction has undermined the country’s already weak economy. It has also made it harder for humanitarian organizations to bring in and distribute aid. The Saudi-led coalition has also kept Sana’s international airport closed to civilian air traffic for more than a year, meaning that merchants cannot fly goods in, and sick and wounded Yemenis cannot fly abroad for treatment. Many of them have died.

Neither of Yemen’s two competing administrations has paid regular salaries to many civil servants in over a year, impoverishing their families as there is little other work to be found. Among those affected are professionals whose work is essential to dealing with the crisis, like doctors, nurses and sewage system technicians, leading to the near collapse of their sectors.

The Devastation of Cholera
Yemeni children suspected of being infected with cholera received treatment at a makeshift hospital in Sana in June 5, 2017. (Photo: Mohammed Huwais/Agence France-Presse/ Getty)

Damage from the war has turned Yemen into a fertile environment for cholera, a bacterial infection spread by water contaminated with feces. As garbage has piled up and sewage systems have failed, more Yemenis are relying on easily polluted wells for drinking water. Heavy rains since April accelerated the wells’ contamination. In developed countries, cholera is not life-threatening and can be easily treated, with antibiotics if severe. But in Yemen, rampant malnutrition has made many people, particularly children, especially vulnerable to the disease.

In June, Oxfam’s country director in Yemen, Sajjad Mohamed Sajid, called for a “massive aid effort” to address the epidemic, which by then was already killing one person every hour. By the end of the month, UNICEF and the World Bank responded to increased demand, delivering enough medical and water purification supplies to treat 10,000 people. While cholera is relatively simple to treat in most parts of the world, death can occur within hours if severely ill patients are left untreated.

If infection numbers continue to rise, researchers fear that the cases could ultimately rival the largest outbreak, in Haiti, which infected at least 750,000 people after a devastating earthquake in 2010. Aid organizations say they cannot replace the services that the government is supposed to provide. That means there is little chance for significant improvements unless the war ends.

The United Nations has called the situation the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with more than 10 million people who require immediate assistance. And the situation could become even worse. Peter Salama, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, warned that as the state fails, “the manifestation of that now is cholera, but there could be in the future other epidemics that Yemen could be at the center of.”

The Assassination of Ex-President Ali Abdullah Saleh
Former president Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen at a rally with his supporters in Sana, Yemen, in August. (Photo: Mohammed Huwais/Agence France-Presse / Getty Images)

Just days ago, former strongman of Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh turned against his most recent allies and publicly denounced them as a “coup militia.” They struck back on December 4, killing him and spreading a video of his lifeless body dumped unceremoniously in the back of a pickup truck.

The death of Ali Abdullah Saleh brought to a grim end the career of a wily politician who combined charisma, duplicity and brute force to remain a giant in the politics of his impoverished Arabian country for decades. After dispatching his forces to brutalize protesters and surviving an assassination attempt via a bomb hidden in a mosque pulpit, Saleh agreed to leave office in 2012 in an agreement negotiated by foreign powers who hoped he would slip into a quiet retirement abroad.

He did not, instead returning to Yemen to rally his followers and form an unlikely alliance with the Houthis, who stormed Sana in 2014 and later forced the internationally recognized government that had replaced Saleh into exile. His death came at the hands of the same rebels he had used to facilitate his return to political relevance. Saleh’s death also signaled a turning point in the country’s war by shattering the alliance between his loyalists and the rebels known as the Houthis, who had taken over the capital, prompting a punishing bombing campaign by Saudi Arabia and its allies.

That political fracturing could make it harder for the parties to negotiate an end to the conflict, analysts said, while renewed fighting in the capital, Sana, could worsen the humanitarian crisis afflicting Yemen. “His being killed like this is going to deepen the conflict. I think the war could become more fierce. This just adds more layers of revenge … Like him or hate him, Saleh’s death in this way is more than likely going to bring more pain for Yemen,” said April Longley Alley, a Yemen analyst with the International Crisis Group.

International Involvement
(Photo: AFP / Getty)

There appears to be no end in sight for the conflict. Peace talks brokered by the United Nations have stalled, and none of the warring parties have indicated much willingness to back down. The Houthis and their allies firmly control the capital, and Saudi leaders have said they will keep fighting until the other side gives in.

Amid the upsurge in fighting, the United Nations human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, announced the selection of three international law experts to conduct an investigation of human rights abuses in Yemen. The move followed a Human Rights Council resolution approved in September despite fierce initial resistance from Saudi Arabia.

The inquiry is to examine attacks on civilians in a conflict in which most civilian casualties appear to have been caused by Saudi coalition bombing. The inquiry also is to examine widespread recruitment of children by warring parties and arbitrary arrests and detentions.

The United Nations says that Yemen needs $2.3 billion in humanitarian aid this year, but that only 41 percent of that amount has been received. The warring parties are among the greatest aid donors, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates both giving significant sums. But critics note that the countries spend much more on the war effort and that their closing of Sana’s airport has been devastating for civilians.

The United States is also a major donor, as well as a primary supplier of arms to the members of the Saudi-led coalition. Although the United States is not directly involved in the conflict, it has provided military support to the Saudi-led coalition, and Yemenis have often found the remnants of American-made munitions in the ruins left by deadly airstrikes.

None of this bodes well for Yemeni civilians.

“The war still haunts us from all directions,” said Saleh al-Khawlani, who fled his home in northern Yemen with his wife and six children after the Saudi-led coalition began its bombings. They then fled again, to Sana, after an airstrike hit the camp where they had sought shelter, and killed a number of his relatives. They lived on the street for a while and had to beg for most of their food.

“Most of the time, we had only lunch and sometimes we don’t,” he said. “If we have lunch at noon, we don’t have dinner at night.”

Sources:
❋ ‘It’s a Slow Death’: The World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis -By Shuaib Almosawa, Ben Hubbard & Troy Griggs | The New York Times
❋ From War to Cholera, Yemen Is Facing World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis | Democracy Now! (Video)
❋ Yemen’s Cholera Epidemic Reaches New Heights -By Aria Bendix | The Atlantic
❋ U.S. Fingerprints on Attacks Obliterating Yemen’s Economy -By Ben Hubbard | The New York Times
❋ The U.S. May Be Aiding War Crimes In Yemen | VOX (Video)
❋ Yemen’s Ex-President Killed as Mayhem Convulses Capital -By By Shuaib Almosawa & Ben Hubbard | The New York Times
❋ Yemeni Ex-President Ali Abdullah Saleh Killed In Houthi Attack -By Colin Dwyer | NPR
❋ Yemen’s Man-Made Catastrophe Has No End in Sight -By Ishaan Tharoor | The Washington Post
❋ How the War in Yemen Explains the Future of Saudi Arabia -By Simon Henderson | The Atlantic

---

Recommended…
❋ The Photos the U.S. and Saudi Arabia Don’t Want You to See -By Nicholas Kristof | The New York Times
❋ Young Yemeni Girl Is Sole Survivor After Airstrike Topples Her Home | The New York Times
❋ What Exactly Does Cholera Do To Your Body? | Seeker (Video)
❋ Mapping the Yemen Conflict | European Council of Foreign Relations
❋ Interactive Map of Yemen | News Live (Real-Time Updates)

A Wild World Upside Down

Image credit: Patty via Flickr

Hello Readers!

It has been more than three months since my last post. This means it is time for another installment of A Wild World Upside, where I briefly look back before going forward and acknowledge noteworthy news that happened while I was away. This installment will cover news from August 13 to November 22. The format of this post is slightly different than the first installment because of the overwhelming number of events that transpired in such a relatively short period. Here’s what you need to know.

1. News and events are organized by the primary month in which they occurred and by the chronological order of the photos that appear in the slideshow for that month.
2. With few exceptions, the dates on the left indicate the date the photo was taken.  It is the same date you will see if you scroll your mouse across a photo. Some events are represented by multiple photos that may have been taken on different dates.   
3. If the date a photo was taken differs from the actual date of the event, the latter will be provided in the summary.  
4. Each entry begins with the correlating photo’s caption and is followed by a summary, if needed.   
5. Click on an image to enlarge it, read the caption or see the photo credit.
6. This post is best read directly from this site because the email version alters the original formatting.

Keep in mind that these are just some of the many important stories that have cross my desk since August. It is by no means an exhaustive list. Lastly, a couple of entries deserve more attention and may appear as individual post directly above this one in the coming days. It’s a long read. So let’s get to it.

In August

Cara McClure, right, of Birmingham, Ala, cries in a friend’s arms during a solidarity rally on August 13, 2017, for the victims of a white supremacist rally that turned violent in Charlottesville, Va. Protesters decrying hatred and racism converged around the country the day after the rally in Charlottesville. (Photo: Brynn Anderson/ AP)

Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer, holds a photo of Bro’s mother and her daughter on August 14, 2017, in Charlottesville, Va. Heyer was killed Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017, when police say a man plowed his car into a group of demonstrators protesting the white nationalist rally. Bro said that she is going to bare her soul to fight for the cause that her daughter died for. (Photo: Joshua Replogle/ AP)

Members of the Charlottesville community hold a vigil for Heather Heyer following a protest organized by white nationalists that turned deadly at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S. on August 16, 2017. (Photo: Tim Dodson/The Cavalier Daily/Handout via Reuters)

Local Bario 18 gang leader “El Mortal”, 18, poses for a photo on August 19, 2017 in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. He said he has been a gang member since he was age 10. In Honduras, rival gangs including Barrio 18 and MS-13 tightly control territory, earning money from extortion and drug trafficking. (Photo: John Moore / Getty)

The lifeless body of a man lies on a street on August 19, 2017 in Mandaluyong, Philippines. A recent spike in the killings related to the government’s anti-drug operation sparked outrage among citizens as police confirmed deaths as high as 35 bodies in one day. (Photo: Jes Aznar / Getty)

A Yemeni woman sits near her cholera-infected child receiving treatment amid an acute cholera outbreak at a hospital in Sana’a, Yemen, 15 August 2017. The World Health Organization announced on 14 August that the number of suspected cases of cholera in Yemen had reached 500,000, with almost 2,000 deaths related to the disease recorded since late April. (Photo: Yahya Arhab/ European Pressphoto Agency)

Protesters and supporters carry banners and placards as they march with the hearse of slain Kian Loyd delos Santos, a 17-year-old Grade 11 student during his funeral on August 26, 2017 in suburban Caloocan city north of Manila, Philippines. The killing of Kian by police has sparked an outcry against President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug crackdown, which has left thousands dead since assuming office in June of last year. (Photo: Bullit Marquez/ AP)

Nursing home patients at La Vita Bella in Dickinson, Texas going about their day despite rising flooding waters from Hurricane Harvey on August 27 at 9:56 a.m. (Photo: Timothy J. McIntosh via Twitter @DividendsMGR)

Waves were seen lapping over Interstate-10 near Winnie, Tex., on August 29 as floodwater produced by Hurricane Harvey continued to rise. (Photo: Google Map (L); Logan Wheat (R))

US flag weathering the Hurricane Harvey on August 30. (Photo: Reuters/ Carlo Allegri)

August 13 – Cara McClure, right, of Birmingham, Alabama cries in a friend’s arms during a solidarity rally on August 13, 2017, for the victims of a white supremacist rally that turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia. Protesters decrying hatred and racism converged around the country the day after the rally in Charlottesville.

August 14 – Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer, holds a photo of Bro’s mother and her daughter on August 14, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heyer was killed on Saturday, August 12, 2017, when police say a man plowed his car into a group of demonstrators protesting the white nationalist rally. Bro said that she is going to bare her soul to fight for the cause that her daughter died for.

August 16 – Members of the Charlottesville community hold a vigil for Heather Heyer following a protest organized by white nationalists that turned deadly at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S. on August 16, 2017.

August 19 – Local Bario 18 gang leader “El Mortal”, 18, poses for a photo on August 19, 2017 in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. He said he has been a gang member since he was age 10. In Honduras, rival gangs including Barrio 18 and MS-13 tightly control territory, earning money from extortion and drug trafficking. San Pedro Sula has one of the highest rates in the world for violence and homicide rates, most of it gang-related, for a populace not at war. Poverty and violence have driven immigration to the United States, although the number of U.S.-bound immigrants has dropped during the first months of the Trump Presidency.

August 19 – The lifeless body of a man lies on a street  in Mandaluyong, Philippines on August 19, 2017. A recent spike in the killings related to the government’s anti-drug operation sparked outrage among citizens as police confirmed deaths as high as 35 bodies in one day. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte lauded the killing of the 35 people and had asked for the killing of more people involved in drugs. This led to more nationwide protests denouncing his tactics. 

August 23 – A Yemeni woman sits near her cholera-infected child receiving treatment amid an acute cholera outbreak at a hospital in Sana’a, Yemen. After two and a half years of war, little is functioning in Yemen. Repeated bombings have crippled bridges, hospitals and factories. Many doctors and civil servants have gone unpaid for more than a year. Malnutrition and poor sanitation have made the Middle Eastern country vulnerable to diseases that most of the world has confined to the history books. The World Health Organization announced on 14 August that the number of suspected cases of cholera in Yemen had reached 500,000, with almost 2,000 deaths related to the disease recorded since late April. It is one of the world’s largest outbreaks in the past 50 years, prompting The New York Times labeled it the “The World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis” on August 23, 2017.

August 26 – Protesters and supporters carry banners and placards as they march with the hearse of slain Kian Loyd Delos Santos, a 17-year-old student, during his funeral on August 26, 2017, in suburban Caloocan city north of Manila, Philippines. The killing of Kian sparked an outcry against President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug crackdown. Witnesses to the Santos incident claim that they saw police hand the boy a gun and asked him to run before shooting him to death. On October 18, Duterte reluctantly transferred the anti-drug operation from the PNP to the PDEA. On November 13, Donald Trump met with Duterte at an economic summit during his twelve-day visit to Asia. After the meeting, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that “human rights briefly came up in the context of the Philippines’ fight against illegal drugs.” Journalists covering the meeting noted that Duterte called the press “spies” and joked about assassinating them. Trump reportedly chuckled at the comments.

August 27 – Nursing home patients at La Vita Bella in Dickinson, Texas going about their day despite rising flooding waters from Hurricane Harvey on August 27 at 9:56 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. CBS later posted a photo to Instagram of the women after they had been rescued. Hurricane Harvey was the costliest tropical cyclone on record, inflicting nearly $200 billion in damage, primarily from widespread flooding in the Houston metropolitan area, breaking the previous record set by Hurricane Katrina. It was the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since Wilma in 2005, ending a record 12-year span in which no hurricanes made landfall at such an intensity in the country. Harvey was the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the United States. Over a six-day period, Harvey dropped 27 trillion gallons over Texas and Louisiana. At least 46 were killed, around 30,000-40,000 homes were destroyed, and 35,000 people relocated to emergency shelters. Full recovery from the storm is expected to take years to complete.

August 29 – Waves were seen lapping over Interstate-10 near Winnie, Texas, on August 29 as floodwater produced by Hurricane Harvey continued to rise.

August 30 – The U.S. flag weathering the Hurricane Harvey on August 30, 2017. 

In September

Storm damage in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, in Sint Maarten on September 6, 2017. (Photo: Gerben Van Es / Dutch Defense Ministry via AP)

An altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe is covered with fallen debris inside the earth-damaged home where Larissa Garcia, 24, lived with her family in Juchitan, Oaxaca state, Mexico on Saturday, September 9, 2017. The family was caught under rubble when the house partially collapsed, leaving Garcia with a broken arm and her father with a head injury. Her mother, who had to be pulled out from underneath a foot-thick section of wall which collapsed (Photo: Rebecca Blackwell / AP)

Josué Tolentino Gómez, 11, stands beside his family’s home on September 10, where he was trapped under the rubble for an hour before being rescued when part of the structure collapsed during the 8.1 magnitude Chiapas  earthquake that struck on September 7 in Juchitán, Oaxaca state, Mexico. (Photo: Rebecca Blackwell / AP)

Antifa (short for anti-fascism) members hold a sign denouncing Nazis along a road at a waterfront park in downtown Portland, Oregon on September 10, 2017. (Photo: Natalie Behring / AFP / Getty)

A Black Lives Matter protester stands in front of St. Louis Police Department officers equipped with riot gear in St. Louis on September 15, 2017. (Photo: Lawrence Bryant / Reuters)

Demonstrators confront police while protesting the acquittal of former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley, in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 16, 2017. Dozens of business windows were smashed and at least two police cars were damaged during a second day of protests following the acquittal of Stockley, who was charged with first-degree murder last year following the 2011 on-duty shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith. (Photo: Scott Olson / Getty)

Bill Monroe poses as he protests the not-guilty verdict in the murder trial of Jason Stockley, a former St. Louis police officer charged with the 2011 shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith, in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 16, 2017. (Photo: Joshua Lott / Reuters)

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches the launch of a Hwasong-12 missile in this undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on September 16, 2017. (Photo: KCNA via Reuters)

People remove debris from a collapsed building, looking for possible victims after a quake rattled Mexico City on September 19, 2017. (Photo: Omar Torres / AFP / Getty)

The body of woman hangs crushed by a collapsed building in the neighborhood of Roma Norte, in Mexico on September 19, 2017. Throughout Mexico City, rescue workers and residents dug through the rubble of collapsed buildings seeking survivors following a 7.1 magnitude quake. (Photo: Marco Ugarte / AP)

A view of the devastation caused by a forest fire in an area of Brasilia’s National Forest in Brazil on September 18, 2017. (Photo: Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters​)

Shaheda, 40, a Rohingya refugee woman who said her body was burnt when the Myanmar army set fire to her house, receives treatment at the Cox’s Bazar District Sadar Hospital in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 19, 2017. (Photo: Mohammad Ponir Hossain / AP)

​Members of the New England Patriots kneel during the national anthem before a game against the Houston Texans at Gillette Stadium on September 24, 2017, in Foxboro, Massachusetts. (Photo: Jim Rogash / Getty)

A giant sign in the front yard of a St. Croix homeowner asks U.S. President Donald Trump for “tremendous! huge! best ever!” relief for the U.S. Virgin Islands, as seen from a Navy helicopter passing over St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, on September 25, 2017. (Photo: Jonathan Drake / Reuters)

After the passage of Hurricane Maria, a man rides his bicycle through a storm-damaged road in Toa Alta, west of San Juan, Puerto Rico on September 25, 2017. (Photo: Ricardo Arduengo / AFP / Getty)

Saudi women activist ​Manal al-Sharif flashes the victory sign from behind the wheel​. ​On ​September 26, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced that women would be allowed to drive starting in June​ 2018. (Photo: AFP​ / Getty)

Naval Aircrewman (Helicopter) 2nd Class Brandon Larnard, assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron, carries an evacuee off an MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter following the landfall of Hurricane Maria on the island of Dominica on September 27, 2017. (Photo: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Sean Galbreath / US Navy / Reuters)

Tomasa Mozo, 69, a housewife, looks up at the roof as she poses for a portrait inside the ruins of her house after an earthquake in San Jose Platanar, Mexico, near the epicenter, on September 28, 2017. The house was badly damaged but with the help of her family Mozo rescued some furniture. She lives in another room of her house and hopes to repair the damage as soon as possible. “I’m afraid to go out, I cannot sleep,” Mozo said. (Photo: Edgard Garrido / Reuters)

U.S. Army veteran Luis Cabrera Sanchez holds his machete as he pauses for a portrait while clearing debris from his damaged home, with family and neighbors, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, on September 29, 2017. Sanchez, who served in the military from 1966 to 1969, said his greatest needs are water, food, and energy. (Photo: Gerald Herbert / AP)

September 6 – Storm damage in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma in Sint Maarten on September 6, 2017. Hurricane Irma was an extremely powerful Cape Verde hurricane, the strongest observed in the Atlantic since Wilma in 2005. It sustained winds of 185 mph (295 km/h) for 37 hours, becoming the only tropical cyclone worldwide to have had winds that speed for that long, breaking the previous record of 24 hours set by Typhoon Haiyan of 2013. It was the first Category 5 hurricane to strike the Leeward Islands on record, followed by Hurricane Maria two weeks later, and the costliest Caribbean hurricane. It was also the most intense Atlantic hurricane to strike the United States since Katrina in 2005, and the first major hurricane to make landfall in Florida since Wilma in 2005.

September 9 – An altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe is covered with fallen debris inside the earth-damaged home where Larissa Garcia, 24, lived with her family in Juchitan, Oaxaca state, Mexico on September 9, 2017. The 2017 Chiapas earthquake struck at 23:49 CDT on  September 7 (local time; 04:49 on the 8th UTC) in the Gulf of Tehuantepec off the southern coast of Mexico, near state of Chiapas,  with a Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent). The magnitude was estimated to be Mw 8.2. The earthquake caused some buildings in Mexico City to tremble, prompting people to evacuate. It also generated a tsunami with waves of 1.75 meters (5 ft 9 in) above tide level; and tsunami alerts were issued for surrounding areas. Mexico’s president Enrique Peña Nieto called it the strongest earthquake recorded in the country, in a century. It was also the second strongest recorded in the country’s history, behind the magnitude 8.6 earthquake in 1787, and the most intense recorded globally, so far in 2017.

September 10 – Josué Tolentino Gómez, 11, stands beside his family’s home on September 10, where he was trapped under the rubble for an hour before being rescued when part of the structure collapsed during the 8.1 magnitude Chiapas  earthquake that struck on September 7 in Juchitán, Oaxaca state, Mexico.

September 10 – ANTIFA (short for anti-fascism) members hold a sign denouncing Nazis along a road at a waterfront park in downtown Portland, Oregon on September 10, 2017. The exact origins of Antifa are unknown, but the group can be traced to Nazi Germany and Anti-Fascist Action, a militant group founded in the 1980s in the United Kingdom. In America, the term is used to define a broad group of people whose political beliefs lean toward the left – often the far left – but do not conform with the Democratic Party platform. The Antifa garnered attention from mainstream media after some of its members showed up in Charlottesville, Virginia as counter-protesters to condemn hate and racism. Members have been spotted at high-profile, right-wing events across the country, including Milo Yiannopoulos‘ appearance at the University of California, Berkeley in February. They also protested Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

September 15 – A Black Lives Matter protester stands in front of St. Louis Police Department officers equipped with riot gear in St. Louis on September 15, 2017. Protest erupted in the city after Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson acquitted former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley of first-degree murder in the 2011 shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith, a 24 year old African-American man. Some of the protests turned violent and some police officers were pelted with water bottles and rocks after declaring the protest an “unlawful assembly.” The St. Louis Police Department response to protests was criticized as unconstitutional and excessive force by the American Civil Liberties Union following a video release of law enforcement officers chanting “Whose streets? Our streets” while making mass arrests.

September 16 – Demonstrators confront police while protesting the acquittal of former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley, in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 16, 2017. Dozens of business windows were smashed and at least two police cars were damaged during a second day of protests following the acquittal of Stockley, who was charged with first-degree murder last year following the 2011 on-duty shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith.

September 16 – Bill Monroe poses as he protests the not-guilty verdict in the murder trial of Jason Stockley, a former St. Louis police officer charged with the 2011 shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith, in St. Louis, Missouri on September 16, 2017.

September 16 – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches the launch of a Hwasong-12 missile in this undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on September 16, 2017. North Korea has fired 22 missiles during 15 tests since February 2017, further perfecting its technology with each launch. It launched missiles over Japan on August 29 and September 15 – two scuds missiles (solid-fueled short or medium-range ballistic missiles) and two Hwasong-12 (liquid-filled intermediate-range ballistic missile). Meanwhile, Trump and Jong Un have continued to trade insults publicly, with the latest juvenile interaction suggesting that a mutually acceptable solution to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is still some way off.

September 18 – A view of the devastation caused by a forest fire in an area of Brasilia’s National Forest in Brazil on September 18, 2017. The National Institute of Space Research (INPE) detected 106,000 fires destroying natural vegetation in September – the highest number in a single month since records began in 1998, said Alberto Setzer, coordinator of INPE’s fire monitoring satellite program. Experts and environmentalists say that the blazes are almost exclusively due to human activity, and they attribute the uptick to the expansion of agriculture and a reduction of oversight and surveillance. Lower than average rainfall in this year’s dry season is also an exacerbating factor.

September 19 – People remove debris from a collapsed building, looking for possible victims after another earthquake rattled Mexico City on September 19, 2017. The 2017 Central Mexico earthquake struck at 13:14 CDT (18:14 UTC) with an estimated magnitude of Mw 7.1 and strong shaking for about 20 seconds. Its epicenter was about 55 km (34 mi) south of the city of Puebla. The earthquake caused damage in the Mexican states of Puebla and Morelos and in the Greater Mexico City area, including the collapse of more than 40 buildings. More than 370 people were killed by the earthquake and related building collapses, including 228 in Mexico City, and more than 6,000 were injured. The quake coincidentally occurred on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which killed around 10,000 people. The 1985 quake was commemorated, and a national earthquake drill was held, at 11 a.m. local time, just two hours before the 2017 earthquake. Twelve days earlier, the even larger 2017 Chiapas earthquake struck 650 km (400 mi) away, off the coast of the state of Chiapas.

September 19 – The body of woman hangs crushed by a collapsed building in the neighborhood of Roma Norte in Mexico City on September 19, 2017. Throughout Mexico City, rescue workers and residents dug through the rubble of collapsed buildings seeking survivors following a 7.1 magnitude quake.

September 19 -Shaheda, 40, a Rohingya refugee woman who said her body was burnt when the Myanmar army set fire to her house, receives treatment at the Cox’s Bazar District Sadar Hospital in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh on September 19, 2017.  Almost 600,000 Rohingya refugees have crossed into Bangladesh, fleeing the violence in Burma’s Rakhine state, since August 25. Many of the refugees tell distressing stories of their villages being attacked or burned by Burmese soldiers, or of their neighbors or family members being injured or killed. The United Nations has accused Burmese troops of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign. The new arrivals in Bangladesh join an already-existing large population of Rohingya refugees, which has prompted the government to announce plans to build one of the world’s largest refugee camps to house more than 800,000 stateless Rohingya, replacing hundreds of makeshift camps that are popping up near the border. Local medical teams, supported by UNICEF and WHO, have started a massive immunization drive in the camps, racing to prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases. The UN Refugee Agency has called the current crisis the fastest-growing refugee emergency in the world today.

September 24 – Members of the New England Patriots kneel during the national anthem before a game against the Houston Texans at Gillette Stadium on September 24, 2017, in Foxboro, Massachusetts. The new wave of #TakeAKnee protests came one day after Donald Trump launched a sensational attack on NFL players during a campaign-style speech in Alabama on September 23, challenging the league’s owners to release any player who engages in the movement started last year by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!”, Trump said to a small, frenzied crowd of ardent supporters. Current and former players decried the president’s remarks. Minnesota Vikings running back Bishop Sankey tweeted: “It’s a shame and disgrace when you have the president of the US calling citizens of the country sons of a bitches.” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell criticized Trump’s “divisive comments”. On November 13, GQ named Colin Kaepernick Citizen of the Year.

September 25 – A giant sign in the front yard of a St. Croix homeowner asks Donald Trump for “TREMENDOUS! HUGE! BEST EVER!” relief for the U.S. Virgin Islands after the island was devastated by Hurricanes Irma and Maria, as seen from a Navy helicopter passing over St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, on September 25, 2017.  After Hurricane Irma pummeled St. John and St. Thomas, St. Croix was mercifully left with about 90% power. But two weeks later, Hurricane Maria arrived to change that, decimating the island. Many of the more than 100,000 residents who live in the islands were left without a place to stay after the storms destroyed their homes. Many residents were also left without the means to communicate. Recovery will be slow but there has been some progress since Hurricane Maria.  Electrical power has been restored to 20% of customers in St. John, 20% of customers in St. Thomas and 10% of customers in St. Croix, according to FEMA. On St. Croix and St. Thomas, about 90% of power has returned to critical facilities such as hospitals, airports and shelters. About 95% of roadways are passable and no major roadways are closed.  Approximately 43% of cell service has been restored. Julio Rhymer, executive director for the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority (WAPA), recognizes that Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, are still struggling from being hit by the hurricanes, but he wants “to make sure the Virgin Islands doesn’t get forgotten in the restoration process.”

September 25 – After the passage of Hurricane Maria, a man rides his bicycle through a storm-damaged road in Toa Alta, west of San Juan, Puerto Rico on September 25, 2017. Maria crashed across the entire U.S. territory of Puerto Rico on September 20, making landfall with winds approaching 150 mph (240 kph). Widespread destruction from the worst storm to hit in nearly a century left almost the entire island without power, and many without running water or cell phone service. Maria also brought heavy rains and flooding. The death toll remains unclear. The task of recovery and rebuilding homes and infrastructure on the island — home to 3.4 million people — has been daunting. On September 29, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz begged the federal government to step up its recovery efforts to get the island back on track: “I am asking the President of the United States to make sure somebody is in charge that is up to the task of saving lives,” she added, warning that “if we don’t get the food and water into peoples’ hands what we are going to see is something close to a genocide”.  Her passionate pleas for help were met with criticism and anger by Donald Trump, who did not visit the island until two weeks after the storm. On October 13, Trump threatened to pull federal emergency management workers from the storm-ravaged island in yet another Twitter tirade. November 20 marked two months since Maria made landfall and Puerto Rico is still in crisis mode. The electrical system has been partially resuscitated, helped by mega-generators imported by the Army Corps of Engineers, but still less than half — 46.6 percent — of Puerto Rico has power. Telecommunications is still operating at about 75 percent capacity; cellphone service at 65 percent; and 1-in-10 Puerto Ricans still lack potable water.

September 26 – Saudi women activist ​Manal al-Sharif flashes the victory sign from behind the wheel​. ​On ​September 26, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced that women would be allowed to drive starting in June​ 2018. The decision highlights the damage that the ban on women driving has done to the kingdom’s international reputation and its hopes for a public relations benefit from the reform. Saudi leaders also hope the new policy will help the economy by increasing women’s participation in the workplace. Many working Saudi women spend much of their salaries on drivers or must be driven to work by male relatives.

September 27 – Naval Aircrewman (Helicopter) 2nd Class Brandon Larnard, assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron, carries an evacuee off an MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter following the landfall of Hurricane Maria on the island of Dominica on September 27, 2017. Dominica was Hurricane Maria’s first victim, and it was clear from a flight over the island nation that the storm showed no mercy.  At least 15 people were killed and there was widespread destruction in the capital of Roseau. Many buildings were damaged, cars and boats were overturned, bridges were clogged with huge tree trucks and many roads were impassable. According to Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, 100% of the agriculture sector and 95% of the tourism sector was destroyed. The Caribbean island of 73,000 residents was a place of lush greenery, punctuated by waterfalls and rain forests. The rain forests appear to have vanished. The remaining residents on the island still have no clean, running water and no power.

September 28 – Tomasa Mozo, 69, a housewife, looks up at the roof as she poses for a portrait inside the ruins of her house after an earthquake in San Jose Platanar, Mexico, near the epicenter, on September 28, 2017. The house was badly damaged during a powerful 6.1 earthquake on September 23, but with the help of her family Mozo rescued some furniture. She lives in another room of her house and hopes to repair the damage as soon as possible.This was the third major earthquake to strike Mexico in the month of September.

September 29 – Hurricane Maria – U.S. Army veteran Luis Cabrera Sanchez holds his machete as he pauses for a portrait while clearing debris from his damaged home, with family and neighbors, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, on September 29, 2017. Sanchez, who served in the military from 1966 to 1969, said his greatest needs are water, food, and energy.

In October

A pair of cowboy boots lies in the street outside the concert venue after a mass shooting at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip on October 1, 2017. A lone gunman fired automatic weapons into a gathering of 22,000 country music fans killing 58 people and wounding hundreds more. (Photo: Steve Marcus / Reuters)

Flowers are placed near the scene of the mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip on October 2, 2017. (Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP)

A woman makes a sign at a vigil on the Las Vegas strip following a mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., October 2, 2017. (Photo: Chris Wattie / Reuters)

Independence supporters march during a demonstration downtown Barcelona, Spain on October 2, 2017. Catalan leaders accused Spanish police of brutality and repression while the Spanish government praised the security forces for behaving firmly and proportionately. Videos and photographs of the police actions were on the front page of news media outlets around the world. (Felipe Dana /AP)

Air Force One departs Las Vegas past the broken windows on the Mandalay Bay hotel, where shooter Stephen Paddock conducted his mass shooting along the Las Vegas Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., October 4, 2017. (Photo: Mike Blake)

Veronica Hartfield, widow of slain Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Officer Charleston Hartfield, and their son Ayzayah Hartfield, 15, attend a vigil for Charleston Hartfield at Police Memorial Park on October 5, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Charleston Hartfield, who was off duty at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival on October 1, was killed when Stephen Paddock opened fire on the crowd killing at least 58 people and injuring more than 450. (Photo: Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty)

A toy car is placed in the coffin of Juan Miguel Soares Silva, 4, one of the victims of the recent municipal daycare center attack, during his burial at Saint Luke’s cemetery in Janauba, Minas Gerais state, Brazil, on October 6, 2017. A Brazilian nursery school guard sprayed children with alcohol and set them on fire, killing six small children and a teacher in an attack which horrified the nation. (Photo: Alex De Jesus / AFP / Getty)

​About 8,000 people lived in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park and a neighboring subdivision​ before the a northern California fire turned it into ash. ​ (Photo: ​Google Earth (L); California Highway Patrol/Golden Gate Division/Handout via ​Reuters (R)​)

Signorello Estate winery, located on Silverado Trail, before flames climbed the ivy-covered walls of the winery headquarters and it eventually collapsed. (Photo: Signorello Winery Estate)

Signorelle Estate winery (2/2) – The remains of the fire damaged Signarello Estate winery after an out of control wildfire moved through the area on October 9, 2017 in Napa, California. Tens of thousands of acres and hundreds of homes and businesses have burned in widespread wildfires that are burning in Napa and Sonoma counties. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/ Getty)

Photographer Ian Frank just took this photo of DeAndre Harris, 22, that he titled “Die Nigger” as heard today with his very own ears at the pro-Trump white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, VA. On October 10, the Charlottesville police department announced that it had issued an arrest warrant for Harris. He is accused of attacking one of the men who beat him.

Emergency crews work to pull bodies from the buildings demolished by the twin bomb blasts in Mogadishu, Somalia on October 14, 2017. At least 327 people and injured nearly 400 police said. The attack was the deadliest in Somalia’s history. (Photo: Mohamed Abdiwahab/ Agence France-Presse/ Getty)

Somalis remove the body of a man killed in a blast in the capital Mogadishu, Somalia Saturday, October 14, 2017. A huge explosion from a truck bomb has killed at least 20 people in Somalia’s capital, police said Saturday, as shaken residents called it the most powerful blast they’d heard in years. (Photo: Farah Abdi Warsameh / AP)

A forensics expert walks in a field after a powerful bomb blew up a car (Rear) killing investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in Bidnija, Malta, October 16, 2017 (Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi / Reuters)

A woman cries as she looks at her house in Raqqa on October 20, 2017, after a Kurdish-led force expelled the Islamic State group from the northern Syrian city. For three years, Raqqa saw some of IS’s worst abuses and grew into one of its main governance hubs, a center for both its potent propaganda machine and its unprecedented experiment in jihadist statehood. (Photo: Bulent Kilic /AFP/Getty)

Myeshia Johnson kisses the casket of her husband, U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson, during his burial service at the Memorial Gardens East cemetery on October 21, 2017, in Hollywood, Florida. Sgt. Johnson along with Army Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah W. Johnson, and Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright were killed in an ambush in Niger on October 4. (Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty)

A relative of Maseno University student Titus Okul, who was shot during a protest the day before, touches his hand at the morgue in Kisumu on October 27, 2017. According to his parents, he was expecting to graduate on December 15. One person was shot dead as fresh protests hit western Kenya on October 27, a day after a deeply divisive election rerun which was marred by low voter turnout and violence, taking the death toll to six. (Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP / Getty)

People celebrate after Catalonia’s parliament voted to declare independence from Spain in Barcelona on October 27, 2017. Catalonia’s parliament voted to declare independence and proclaim a republic, just as Madrid was poised to impose direct rule on the region to stop it in its tracks. The motion declaring independence was approved with 70 votes in favor, 10 against, and two abstentions. Catalan opposition MPs walked out of the 135-seat chamber before the vote in protest at a declaration unlikely to be given official recognition. (Photo: Pau Barrena / AFP / Getty)

Samantha Hanahentzen, 17, poses for a #MeToo portrait in Detroit, Michigan, on October 29, 2017. Hanahentzen said: “When I saw the #MeToo hashtag I was just coming to terms with my sexual assault. It happened when I was in middle school by one of my teachers. (Photo: Lucy Nicholson / Reuters)

Eric Fleming, 41, stops to express his condolences near a bicycle where people have placed flowers to remember the victims of the October 31 terrorist attack in New York City on November 2, 2017. (Photo: Andres Kudacki / AP)

October 1 – A pair of cowboy boots lies in the street outside the concert venue after a mass shooting at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip on October 1, 2017. Stephen Paddock fired automatic weapons into a gathering of 22,000 country music fans killing 58 people (excluding Paddock) and wounding 546 more. The incident was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in United States history, with 58 fatalities. Paddock’s motive for the shooting is unknown. He died in his hotel room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

October 2 – A woman makes a sign at a vigil on the Las Vegas strip following a mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. on October 2, 2017.

October 2 – Independence supporters march during a demonstration downtown Barcelona, Spain on October 2, 2017. Increasing rancor between Madrid and Catalonia culminated in a constitutionally illegal referendum on October 1st in which some 43% of the population (approx. 2.3 million voters) turned out to vote with 90% of ballots cast for independence. In some areas, this quickly descended into violent clashes and street violence. Spanish troops attempted to put down pro-independence demonstrations, injuring some 900 people. Catalan leaders accused Spanish police of brutality and repression while the Spanish government praised the security forces for behaving firmly and proportionately. Videos and photographs of the police actions were on the front page of news media outlets around the world.

October 4 – Air Force One departs Las Vegas past the broken windows on the Mandalay Bay hotel on October 4, 2017, where shooter Stephen Paddock breached the windows to conduct his mass shooting along the Las Vegas Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.

October 5 – Veronica Hartfield, widow of slain Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Officer Charleston Hartfield, and their son Ayzayah Hartfield, 15, attend a vigil for Charleston Hartfield at Police Memorial Park on October 5, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Charleston Hartfield, who was off duty at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival on October 1, was killed when Stephen Paddock opened fire on the crowd killing at least 58 (excluding) people and injuring more than 450.

October 6 – A toy car is placed in the coffin of Juan Miguel Soares Silva, 4, one of the victims of the recent municipal daycare center attack, during his burial at Saint Luke’s cemetery in Janauba, Minas Gerais state, Brazil on October 6, 2017. A Brazilian nursery school guard sprayed children with alcohol and set them on fire, killing six small children and a teacher in an attack which horrified the nation.

October 9 – About 8,000 people lived in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park and a neighboring subdivision​ before the a northern California fire turned it into ash on October 9. The October 2017 Northern California wildfires were a series of wildfires that started burning across the state of California, United States. Twenty-one of the wildfires became major fires that burned at least 245,000 acres (99,148 ha). The wildfires broke out throughout Napa, Lake, Sonoma, Mendocino, Butte, and Solano counties. Seventeen separate wildfires were reported in October.  Owing to the extreme conditions, shortly after the fires ignited on October 8 and 9, they rapidly grew to become extensive, full-scale incidents spanning from 1,000 acres (400 hectares) to well over 20,000 acres (8,100 ha), each within a single day. By October 14, the fires had burned more than 210,000 acres (85,000 ha), forcing 90,000 people to evacuate from their homes. The Northern California fires have killed at least 43 people and hospitalized at least 185, making the week of October 8, 2017, the deadliest week of wildfires in California history. Collectively, this event constitutes the largest loss of life due to wildfires in the United States since the Cloquet Fire in 1918. In total, an estimated 8,900 structures were destroyed.

October 9 – Signorello Estate winery, located on Silverado Trail, before flames climbed the ivy-covered walls of the winery headquarters and it eventually collapsed.

October 9 – The remains of the fire damaged Signarello Estate winery after an out of control wildfire moved through the area on October 9, 2017 in Napa, California.

October 10 – Photographer Ian Frank just took this photo of DeAndre Harris, 22, that he titled “Die Nigger” as heard today with his very own ears at the pro-Trump white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. On October 10, the Charlottesville police department announced that it had issued an arrest warrant for Harris. He is accused of attacking one of the men who beat him.

October 14 – Emergency crews work to pull bodies from the buildings demolished by the twin bomb blasts in the capital Mogadishu, Somalia on October 14, 2017. The blasts killed at least 327 people and injured nearly 400 police. It was the deadliest attack in Somalia’s history, and has shaken and angered thousands across the country. The attack came as the United States under Trump has made a renewed push to defeat the Al-Shabab, Somali-based militants who have terrorized the country and East Africa for years, killing civilians across borders, worsening famine and destabilizing a broad stretch of the region. The blast occurred two days after the head of the United States Africa Command was in Mogadishu to meet with Somalia’s president, and after the country’s defense minister and army chief resigned for undisclosed reasons. While no one had yet claimed responsibility for the bombings, suspicion immediately fell on the group, which frequently targets the capital, Mogadishu. Previous attacks on the capital this year have killed or wounded at least 771 people, according to data compiled by the Long War Journal. The operations included remotely detonated vehicles, suicide car bombings and suicide assaults. At least 11 of these attacks have been assassination attempts against Somali military, intelligence, and government personnel, as well as Somali journalists.

October 14 – Somalis remove the body of a man killed in a blast in the capital Mogadishu, Somalia Saturday, October 14, 2017. Huge explosions from a pair of truck bombs killed at least 327 people and injured nearly 400 police.

October 16 – A forensics expert walks in a field after a powerful bomb blew up a car (Rear) killing investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in Bidnija, Malta, October 16, 2017.  Galizia spent much of her work in recent years reporting on the Panama Papers, the cache of records from a law firm in Panama that detailed offshoring activities of powerful officials and companies around the world. Her reporting on allegations about the wife of Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and a shell company in Panama had caused concern when Malta had assumed the rotating, six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Guardian reported. No suspects have been identified in the bombing, but Galizia’s son Matthew said that his mother was dead because of the incompetence and negligence of the Maltese government and police. “My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists,” he said in a post on Facebook. “But she was also targeted because she was the only person doing so. This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated: the last person left standing is often a journalist.” Nine journalists have been killed for their work this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. If it is confirmed that Galizia was targeted, she would be the 10th, and the first in Europe, the CPJ said.

October 20 – A woman cries as she looks at her house in Raqqa on October 20, 2017, after a Kurdish-led force expelled the Islamic State group from the northern Syrian city. For three years, Raqqa saw some of ISIS’s worst abuses and grew into one of its main governance hubs, a center for both its potent propaganda machine and its unprecedented experiment in jihadist statehood. Although there has been an overall reduction of civilian casualties in areas where de-escalation zone agreements have been put in place, the humanitarian situation has nonetheless escalated significantly in the face of military operations in Raqqa City and Deir-ez-Zor. UNICEF remains extremely concerned about the safety and well-being of children who are caught in the crossfire and face constant aerial bombardments. Conditions in these areas continue to deteriorate due to severe food, water, electricity and medical shortages. In Raqqa, the population has resorted to collecting unsafe water from the Euphrates River, increasing the risk of waterborne disease outbreaks.

October 21 – Myeshia Johnson kisses the casket of her husband, U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson, during his burial service at the Memorial Gardens East cemetery on October 21, 2017, in Hollywood, Florida. Sgt. Johnson along with Army Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah W. Johnson, and Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright were part of a 12-man U.S. special forces team that was ambushed October 4, 2017, by militants believed to be linked to the Islamic State. Five Nigerien soldiers were also killed in the shooting, which broke out as the soldiers left a meeting with local officials near Tongo Tongo. The Trump administration waited nearly two weeks to acknowledge the attack, and details about it remain hazy while an investigation is ongoing. Initial media reports said Johnson’s remains had been discovered by Nigerien troops 48 hours after the ambush. But later reports suggested children found Johnson’s body, with his hands bound and a large gash on his head. The soldiers were initially believed to have been attacked by roughly 50 militants, but that estimate rose to approximately 200 in recent days. Additional remains of Johnson were reportedly found in the African nation in early November – after his funeral had already been held, with his widow questioning whether he was even in the casket. The U.S. military’s inconsistent account of the ambush and the soldiers’ service in Niger has raised drawn scrutiny from Congress and the public to America’s evolving role in African missions. President Donald Trump raised even more controversy when Johnson’s widow accused him of making an insensitive condolence call in which he said her fallen husband “knew what he signed up for.” Trump denied this and accused the widow of lying.

October 27 – A relative of Maseno University student Titus Okul, who was shot during a protest the day before, touches his hand at the morgue in Kisumu on October 27, 2017. According to his parents, he was expecting to graduate on December 15. One person was shot dead as fresh protests hit western Kenya on October 27, a day after a deeply divisive election rerun which was marred by low voter turnout and violence, taking the death toll to six

October 27 – People celebrate after Catalonia’s parliament voted to declare independence from Spain in Barcelona on October 27, 2017. Catalonia’s parliament voted to declare independence and proclaim a republic, just as Madrid was poised to impose direct rule on the region to stop it in its tracks. The motion declaring independence was approved with 70 votes in favor, 10 against and two abstentions, throwing Spain into the biggest constitutional crisis in its 40-year democratic history. Catalan opposition MPs walked out of the 135-seat chamber before the vote in protest at a declaration unlikely to be given official recognition. Under Spanish national law, the vote has made secessionist parliamentarians vulnerable to arrest for sedition. Immediately following the vote, the Spanish parliament in Madrid voted to strip the Catalan regional government of its powers, invoking a never-before-used article of the constitution — Article 155 — which allows Madrid to dissolve the autonomy of a region if the unity of Spain is deemed at risk. All of that means we have reached the moment the Iberian Peninsula has both anticipated and dreaded since a controversial referendum on Catalan independence was held on October 1: brinksmanship and deep uncertainty about the future.

October 29 – Samantha Hanahentzen, 17, poses for a #MeToo portrait in Detroit, Michigan, on October 29, 2017. Hanahentzen said: “When I saw the #MeToo hashtag I was just coming to terms with my sexual assault. It happened when I was in middle school by one of my teachers. It took me a while to come forward with what had happened to me and then when I went to the administration I was told I didn’t have enough evidence to prove anything and I should just keep quiet about it because I and the school could be sued for slander if I went public with my experience. It was really silencing because when I was being assaulted it was that stereotypical line of ‘let’s keep this between me and you.’ And then when I found the courage to come out with out I was told again ‘let’s keep this quiet.’ So for me too, it was a way to have a voice and it was a way for me to see that I’m not the only one that has gone through this and that women all around the world have all experienced the same thing. It was really unifying.”

October 31 – Flowers are placed near the scene of the mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip. A driver plowed a pickup truck down a crowded bike path along the Hudson River in Manhattan on October 31, killing eight people and injuring 11 before being shot by a police officer in what officials are calling the deadliest terrorist attack on New York City since Sept. 11, 2001. The rampage ended when the motorist — whom the police identified as Uzbek immigrant Sayfullo Saipov, 29 — smashed into a school bus, jumped out of his truck and ran up and down the highway waving a pellet gun and paintball gun and shouting “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” before he was shot in the abdomen by the officer. Saipov was indicted on 22 charges, ranging from terrorism to both murder and attempted murder in aid of racketeering. The associated image was taken on November 2, 2017. 

In November

Myanmar’s de-facto leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has visited the country’s conflict-ridden Rakhine State on November 2, for the first time since an outbreak of violence in August forced more than 600,000 people to flee from the ongoing ethnic cleansing. (Photo: Khine Htoo Mratt / Reuters)

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the world’s richest men, along with 10 other princes, was arrested in Saudi Arabia on November 4, 2017. A midnight blitz of arrests ordered by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia over the weekend of November 4 has ensnared dozens of its most influential figures, including 11 of his royal cousins, in what appears to be the most sweeping transformation in the kingdom’s governance for more than eight decades. (Photo: Ishara S.Kodikara/ Agence France-Presse / Getty)

Saad Hariri announced on November 4 from Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that he was stepping down as Lebanon’s prime minister, but officials in Lebanon have said that his departure would not take effect until he delivered his resignation in person in Beirut. Mr. Hariri’s unexpected trip and resignation unsettled the Middle East, setting off a political crisis in Lebanon and even raising fears of war. Mr. Hariri said he feared for his safety in Lebanon. (Photo: Ratib Al Safadi / Anadolu Agency / Getty)

A migrant arrives at a naval base after he was rescued by Libyan coastal guards in Tripoli, Libya, on November 6, 2017. (Photo: Ahmed Jadallah / Reuters)

People mourn the 26 victims killed at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs during a prayer service on November 6, 2017, in Sutherland Springs, Texas. (Photo: Scott Olson / Getty)

A woman places flowers on coffins during the funeral service for 26 Nigerian women, at the Salerno cemetery, southern Italy. The women died around November 6 while crossing the Mediterranean sea in an attempt to reach Italy. The photo was taken on November 17, 2017. (Photo: Alessandra Tarantino / AP)

An estimated 60,000 people marched alongside ultranationalists and Nazis to mark the 99th anniversary of Polish National Independence on September 11, 2017. Some of the protesters carried flags, including the red falange flag of 1930s fascism, and held up banners and signs that had a clear far-right extremist message, including “Clean Blood,” and “White Europe.” (Photo: Janek Skarzynski / AFP / Getty)

​A woman mourns as she holds the body of her daughter, who died in an earthquake in Sarpol-e-Zahab, western Iran, on November 13, 2017. A magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck along the Iran-Iraq border on Sunday night, killing at least 500 people and injuring another 8,000. (Photo: Mosleh Pirkhezranian / Islamic Republic News Agency via AP)

A damaged building is seen following an earthquake in Sarpol-e Zahab county in Kermanshah, Iran, on November 13, 2017 (Photo: Tasnim News Agency / Reuters)

Protesters gather for a rally in support for marriage equality in Sydney on November 14, 2017. (Photo: AAP)

Protesters block Highway 1806 in Mandan during a protest against plans to pass the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, North Dakota. (Photo: Stephanie Keith / Reuters)

Protesters in Harare demanding that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe step down after the military seized control of the capital, Zimbabwe Broadcasting Company and other central locations on November 14, 2017. Photo taken on November 18, 2017. (Photo: Jekesai Njikizana/Agence France-Presse / Getty)

Robert Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980 and once proclaimed that “only God will remove me!”, resigned as president on September 21 shortly after lawmakers began impeachment proceedings against him, according to the speaker of Parliament. (Photo: Stringer/ Reuters)

Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladić flashes a thumbs up as he enters the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, on November 22, 2017, to hear the verdict in his genocide trial. (Photo: Peter Dejong / AP).

Nura Mustafic, one of the Mothers of Srebrenica and other Bosnian organizations, wipes away tears as she reacts to the verdict which the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, ICTY, handed down in the genocide trial against former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladić, in The Hague, Netherlands on November 22, 2017. A U.N. court has convicted former Bosnian Serb military chief Gen. Ratko Mladić of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison for atrocities perpetrated during Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war. (Photo: Phil Nijhuis / AP)

November 2 – Myanmar’s de-facto leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi visited the country’s conflict-ridden Rakhine State on November 2 for the first time since an outbreak of violence in August forced more than 600,000 people to flee from the ongoing ethnic cleansing. Aung San Suu Kyi, a 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who once embodied her country’s fight for democracy, has come under increased pressure from the international community to denounce the military’s actions. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi has remained conspicuously silent on the Rohingya issue, and when pressed by reporters, she has toed the military’s official line, which contends that the Rohingya are illegally squatting inside Myanmar. “No, it’s not ethnic cleansing,” she said in a rare interview on the subject in 2013.

November 4 – Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the world’s richest men, along with 10 other princes, was arrested in Saudi Arabia on November 4, 2017. A midnight blitz of arrests ordered by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia over the weekend of November 4 has ensnared dozens of its most influential figures, including 11 of his royal cousins, in what appears to be the most sweeping transformation in the kingdom’s governance for more than eight decades. The arrests, ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman without formal charges or any legal process, were presented as a crackdown on corruption. Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, a favored son of the late King Abdullah, was also removed from his post as chief of a major security service just hours before the announcement of arrests. All members of the royal family were barred from leaving the country. With the new detentions, Crown Prince Mohammed, King Salman’s favored son and key adviser, now appears to have established control over all three Saudi security services — the military, internal security services and national guard. For decades they had been distributed among branches of the House of Saud clan to preserve a balance of power in Saudi Arabia, the Middle East’s biggest oil producer.

November 4 – Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who had previously shown no signs of planning to quit, unexpectedly flew to Saudi Arabia and announced his resignation from there, to the shock of his own close advisers. Hours after Mr. Hariri’s announcement — televised Saturday on a Saudi-controlled channel — Saudi Arabia’s assertive new crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, presided over the roundup of some 500 people, including 11 princes, on corruption charges. Hariri’s unexpected trip and resignation unsettled the Middle East, setting off a political crisis in Lebanon and even raising fears of war. But during his resignation speech, Hariri blamed interference in Lebanon by Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah for his decision, adding that he feared an assassination attempt. On November 18, Hariri flew from Saudi Arabia to Paris and met with French President Emmanuel Macron. He told reporters there that he would clarify his political position upon returning to Lebanon for Independence Day celebrations. Hariri returned to Lebanon on November 21, 2017. The next day, Hariri announced he is suspending his resignation, at the request of President Michel Aoun.

November 6 – A migrant arrives at a naval base after he was rescued by Libyan coastal guards in Tripoli, Libya, on November 6, 2017. Many thousands of others have risked their lives this year, fleeing conflict and instability in Africa and the Middle East, in small, often decrepit vessels in an attempt to reach European territories. Migrants crossing in the central Mediterranean – from Libya and Tunisia – have until recently come mostly from Eritrea and Somalia, although increasing numbers of Syrians fleeing the country’s civil war are also making the journey. Libya has become a popular starting point for many journeys, with people traffickers exploiting the country’s power vacuum and increasing lawlessness. The relatively short distance to Lampedusa encourages more people to risk the journey. But the number of fatalities has risen dramatically in a matter of months. More than 2,200 lives have been lost since June, the UN refugee agency UNHCR believes. Migration charities believe that as many as 20,000 people may have died at sea trying to reach Europe in the last two decades.

November 6 – People mourn the 26 victims killed by Devin Patrick Kelley at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs during a prayer service on November 6, 2017, in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

November 11 – An estimated 60,000 people marched alongside ultranationalists and Nazis to mark the 99th anniversary of Polish independence. Some of the protesters carried banners and flags, including the red falange flag of 1930s fascism, and held up signs that had a clear far-right extremist message, including “Clean Blood,” and “White Europe.”

November 13 – A woman mourns as she holds the body of her daughter, who died in an earthquake in Sarpol-e-Zahab, western Iran, on November 13, 2017. The Iran-Iraq earthquake struck November 12, 2017, at 18:18 UTC (21:48 Iran Standard Time, 21:18 Arabia Standard Time). The 7.3 magnitude earthquake occurred on the Iran–Iraq border, just inside Iran, in Kermanshah Province, with an epicenter approximately 30 kilometers (19 mi) south of the city of Halabja, Iraqi Kurdistan. The earthquake was felt as far away as Israel and the United Arab Emirates. With at least 540 people killed (530 in Iran and 10 in Iraq) and more than 8,100 injured, as well as many more unaccounted for, it is currently the deadliest earthquake of 2017.

November 13 – A damaged building is seen on November 13, following an earthquake in Sarpol-e Zahab county in Kermanshah, Iran. A magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck along the Iran-Iraq border on September 12, killing at least 500 people and injuring at least 8,000.

September 14 – Protesters block Highway 1806 in Mandan during a protest against plans to pass the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, North Dakota. The Keystone pipeline was temporarily shut down on November 16, after 210,000 gallons of oil gushed into Marshall County, South Dakota, blackening a grassy field in the remote northeast part of the state and sending cleanup crews and emergency workers scrambling to the site. TransCanada, the company which operates the pipeline, said it noticed a loss of pressure in Keystone at about 5:45 a.m. According to a company statement, workers had “completely isolated” the section and “activated emergency procedures” within 15 minutes.

TransCanada estimates that the pipeline leaked about 5,000 barrels of oil at the site. A barrel holds 42 U.S. gallons of crude oil. The Keystone pipeline system is nearly 3,000 miles long and links oil fields in Alberta, Canada, to the large crude-trading hubs in Patoka, Illinois, and Cushing, Oklahoma. The pipeline’s better-known sister project—the Keystone XL pipeline—was proposed in 2008 as a shortcut and enlargement of the Keystone pipeline. It was completed in 2011. The entirety of its northern span—which travels through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois—would stay closed until the leak was fixed, the company said.

In 2011, climate activists seized upon the Keystone XL pipeline, warning that its completion would allow the exploitation of much of Alberta’s tar sands and lock in too much future carbon pollution. James Hansen, then the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned in The New York Times that exporting oil from the Albertan tar sands would mean “game over for the climate.” In 2015, President Barack Obama blocked the pipeline as part of his administration’s preparation for the UN climate-change talks in Paris. But less than a week after his inauguration, President Donald Trump ordered that decision reversed.

November 14 – Protesters gather for a rally in support for marriage equality in Sydney on November 14, 2017. Australians voiced their opinion on same-sex marriage — and they are overwhelmingly in favor of it. According to the results of a historic national postal survey announced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on November 14, 61.6 percent of Australian voters said yes, same-sex marriage should be legalized. A majority in every single state and territory voted in favor of marriage equality, with a turnout of 79.5 percent of eligible voters nationwide. The results now go to the government, which opted to survey the population before the parliament took up its own vote on the issue. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who voted yes, has already pledged to follow through with the vote’s results. “We must respect the voice of the people. We asked them for their opinion and they have given it to us. It is unequivocal. It is overwhelming,” he said at a press conference. Turnbull said a vote will come before Christmas. Australia will become the 25th country to legalize same-sex marriage in at least some jurisdictions.

November 17 – A woman places flowers on coffins during the funeral service for 26 Nigerian women, at the Salerno cemetery, southern Italy, Friday November 17, 2017. The women died around November 6 while crossing the Mediterranean sea in an attempt to reach Italy.

November 18 – Protesters in Harare on November 18, demanding that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe step down after the military seized control of the capital, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Company and other central locations on November 14. The next day, they issued a statement saying that it was not a coup d’état and that President Robert Mugabe was safe, although the situation would only return to normal after they had dealt with the “criminals” around Mugabe responsible for the socio-economic problems of Zimbabwe. The coup took place amid tensions in the ruling ZANU–PF party between former Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa (who was backed by the army) and First Lady Grace Mugabe (who was backed by the younger G40 faction) over who would succeed the 93-year-old President Mugabe. A week after Mnangagwa was fired and forced to flee the country, and a day before troops moved into Harare, army chief Constantino Chiwenga issued a statement that purges of senior ZANU–PF officials like Mnangagwa had to stop.

November 21 – Robert Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980 and once proclaimed that “only God will remove me!”, resigned as president on September 21 shortly after lawmakers began impeachment proceedings against him, according to the speaker of Parliament. Cheers broke out at a special session of parliament as speaker Jacob Mudenda read out Mugabe’s resignation letter: “I Robert Gabriel Mugabe in terms of section 96 of the constitution of Zimbabwe hereby formally tender my resignation … with immediate effect.”

November 22 – Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladić flashes a thumbs up as he enters the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands on November 22, 2017, to hear the verdict in his genocide trial.  Ratko Mladić, the 74-year-old dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia“, was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) of one count of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity, and four violations of the laws or customs of war committed by his forces during the war in Bosnia from 1992 and 1995. Mladić was found not guilty on one count of genocide. He was sentenced to life in prison on November 22, 2017.

One of the two genocide counts included ordering the siege of Sarajevo, in which his troops surrounded the city for 46 months and carried out a campaign of sniping and shelling at the civilian population “aimed to spread terror amongst them”. With an average of 330 shells pummeling the city daily, more than 10,000 people were killed in what is known as the longest siege of a capital city in recent history. The second count of genocide was for killing more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica, a UN-declared “safe haven” at the time. It was the worst genocide to occur on European soil since the Holocaust. Prosecutors successfully argued that Mladić, along with former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, were among the key players that formed the “joint criminal enterprise” to create a Greater Serbia. He was found guilty of removing Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat inhabitants from Bosnia to establish a Greater Serbia and of taking UN peacekeepers hostage. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people were killed during the war in Bosnia, while as many as 50,000 women were raped. In pronouncing the life sentence, the presiding judge, Alphons Orie, said that Mladić’s crimes “rank among the most heinous known to humankind.”  Mladić’s lawyers said they would appeal. 

Mladić was arrested in May 2011 in a village in northern Serbia, after 16 years in hiding. His health had already deteriorated at the time, with one of his arms paralyzed due to a series of strokes. The verdict was disrupted for more than half an hour when he asked the judges for a bathroom break. After he returned, defense lawyers requested that proceedings be halted or shortened because of his high blood pressure. The judges denied the request. Mladić then stood up shouting “this is all lies” and “I’ll fuck your mother”. He was forcibly removed from the courtroom. The verdicts were read in his absence. The trial in The Hague, which took 530 days across more than four years, is arguably the most significant war crimes case in Europe since the Nuremberg trials, in part because of the scale of the atrocities involved. Almost 600 people gave evidence for the prosecution and defense, including survivors of the conflict, and nearly 10,000 exhibits were admitted in evidence.

November 22 – Nura Mustafic, one of the Mothers of Srebrenica and other Bosnian organizations, wipes away tears as she reacts to the verdict which the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, ICTY, handed down in the genocide trial against former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladić, in The Hague, Netherlands on November 22, 2017. A U.N. court  convicted former Bosnian Serb military chief Gen. Ratko Mladić of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison for atrocities perpetrated during Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war.

---

Like this blog? Consider making a DONATION via Google Wallet.

Venezuelan Torture Victim Detained in Miami Is Free

Marco Coello, accused of taking part in a 2014 demonstration against the government in Caracas, Venezuela, was beaten and jailed for several months. He eventually fled to the United States. (Photo: Scott McIntyre / The New York Times)

Marco Coello, then a skinny 18-year-old high school student, was grabbed by plainclothes agents of the Venezuelan security services as he joined a 2014 demonstration against the government in Caracas. They put a gun to his head. They attacked him with their feet, a golf club, a fire extinguisher. They tortured him with electric shocks. Then Mr. Coello was jailed for several months, and shortly after his release, he fled to the United States.

Human Rights Watch extensively documented his case in a report that year. The State Department included him in its own human rights report on Venezuela in 2015. With such an extensive paper trail of mistreatment in his home country, his lawyer, Elizabeth Blandon, expected a straightforward asylum interview when Mr. Coello appeared at an immigration office this April in Miami.

“I had this very naïve idea that we were going to walk in there and the officer was going to say, ‘It’s an honor to meet you,’” said Ms. Blandon, an immigration law expert in Weston, Fla.

Instead, he was arrested and taken to a detention facility on the edge of the Everglades. He was now a candidate for deportation. “Every time they would move me around, I would fear that they were going to take me to deport me,” said Mr. Coello, now 22.

Mr. Coello’s case drew extensive media coverage in both Miami and Caracas and, eventually, the intervention of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. The senator helped secure Mr. Coello’s release, though he could still be deported.

The case may have been a sign of just how far the government is willing to go to carry out President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. “It’s very unusual — almost unprecedented — that ICE would arrest an asylum applicant who is at a U.S.C.I.S. office waiting for their asylum interview,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell Law School.

He was referring to two agencies that are part of the Department of Homeland Security but, as Mr. Coello discovered, have very different missions: United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which handles citizenship and asylum cases, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which arrests people believed to be in the country without permission.

In the first three months of the Trump administration, ICE agents arrested some 41,000 people, an increase of nearly 40 percent over the same period last year. At the same time, the administration has expressed a desire to be stricter about allowing people into the country with asylum claims, as most such claims are ultimately rejected.

When Mr. Coello was taken to the Krome Detention Center, another asylum seeker was already there.

Denis Davydov is an asylum seeker who fled Russia as an H.I.V.-positive gay man. (Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times).

Denis Davydov, who fled Russia as an H.I.V.-positive gay man, had been on his way back to San Jose, Calif., from a vacation in the United States Virgin Islands. Though it is an American territory, travelers heading to the mainland must pass through Customs and Border Protection — also part of Homeland Security — and when Mr. Davydov did so, he was arrested. Agents flew him to Miami and sent him to Krome, shackled and chained at the wrists and ankles.

Despite his pending asylum case, Mr. Davydov still appeared in the system as having overstayed his original visa. “They would not let him go because he would still be found inadmissible to the United States,” said Jaime I. Ruiz, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection. Mr. Davydov, like Mr. Coello, has been released but still faces potential deportation.

“My fear is that going forward this is business as usual,” said Aaron C. Morris, executive director at Immigration Equality, a nonprofit group that provides free legal representation to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The group is handling more than 620 open asylum cases. “We’re doing our best to advise the community about this new danger without scaring them all.”

Mr. Coello’s case is all the more striking given that Mr. Trump has attacked Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who has used anti-terrorism laws and military tribunals to prosecute political rivals. Mr. Trump has even called for the release of the opposition leader Leopoldo López from prison. Mr. Coello said that his Venezuelan interrogators tried to coerce him into implicating Mr. López but that he refused.

Mr. Coello’s problems in the United States most likely began when he became drowsy working as a driver for the ride-hailing service Lyft and pulled over to sleep in a parking lot. A police officer rapped on his window, telling him it was private property and writing him a ticket. He was convicted of misdemeanor trespassing and paid a fine of $100 and $92 in court costs, according to court records in Fairfax, Va.

That conviction brought him to the attention of ICE. “Marco Coello has one misdemeanor criminal conviction and did not depart the country in accordance with his visa,” said Nestor Yglesias, an ICE spokesman, referring to the tourist visa he had arrived on. “As a result, he violated the terms of his nonimmigrant status in the United States.”

Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge who is now an adjunct law professor at Georgetown University, said that ICE agents could legally arrest individuals in asylum proceedings. “Otherwise everyone could absolutely immunize themselves from removal just by filing with the asylum office,” he said.

But arresting Mr. Coello was also indicative of the Trump administration’s new priorities, he said. “As Jeff Sessions keeps pointing out, anyone here illegally shouldn’t feel safe,” Mr. Schmidt said, referring to the attorney general under Mr. Trump.

Mr. Coello was a high school student in El Hatillo in southeastern Caracas when he joined marches and demonstrations across Venezuela on Feb. 12, 2014, to protest Mr. Maduro, a close ally of Hugo Chávez who took office after Mr. Chávez’s death in 2013.

The protests that day turned ugly, with violence between government forces and civilian protesters, who in some cases threw Molotov cocktails. Mr. Coello, who said he was not involved in the disturbance, was struck on the leg by a tear-gas canister and fell to the ground. Security personnel in plainclothes began to beat him and took him into custody.

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, based on interviews with Mr. Coello and five others arrested, the security forces put a gun to his head and doused him in gasoline. “They wrapped a thin mat around his body, tied it with tape, and approximately 10 officers kicked him and beat him with sticks, a golf club, and a fire extinguisher on his ribs and upper body,” the report said. He was tortured with shocks and told to confess to burning the vehicles. He refused.

Mr. Coello was accused of arson, among other charges related to an alleged attack on the Venezuelan attorney general’s office. After months in detention, he was released pending trial and fled to the United States with his father. His mother later joined them.

Following his time in Virginia, where he was studying English, Mr. Coello moved to Miami and found a job as an assistant cameraman at a local studio associated with the Spanish-language station Telemundo.

When he and his lawyer, Ms. Blandon, arrived at his asylum appointment in April, they were passed off to ICE. “We walk in, she didn’t even introduce herself,” Ms. Blandon said of the Citizenship and Immigration Services official who met them. “‘We can’t entertain your claim for asylum. These two gentlemen from ICE can explain.’”

After articles appeared in the local and Spanish-language news media — “Joven torturado en Venezuela es arrestado en Miami por inmigración” was the headline of one article in El Nuevo Herald — Mr. Rubio, a Republican from the Miami area, contacted Reince Priebus, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff.

The next day, Mr. Coello was released.

Mr. Coello will still have the opportunity to plead for asylum in immigration court. His arrest was legal, but some experts question whether it was the best use of limited resources in an overburdened system. “In years of doing these, I’ve had probably only a few dozen cases where somebody can point to their name in a State Department human rights report and say, ‘That’s me,’” Mr. Schmidt, the former immigration judge, said of Mr. Coello.

With a backlog of nearly 600,000 cases in the system, he asked, “Why clog an already clogged court docket with a case that looks like a slam dunk?”

Source: Torture Victim, Expecting a U.S. Handshake, Was Given Handcuffs Instead -By Nicholas Kulish | New York Times

Recommended…
✻ Marco Coello’s Lawyer Explains Detention During Asylum Interview (Video in English) | Elizabeth Blandon, Esq.*

✻ Immigration Raids: Know Your Rights (Video in English) | Elizabeth Blandon, Esq.*

✻ Know Your Rights When Asked About Immigration Status | ACLU*

✻ Venezuela: A Country Divided -By Quintijn Kat | Al Jazeera

✻ In Venezuela, Prisoners Say Abuse Is So Bad They Are Forced to Eat Pasta Mixed with Excrement -By Rachelle Krygier and Joshua Partlow | The Washington Post

✻ Note: The videos posted above are not intended to be an endorsement of or referral to the attorney or organizational presenter. Instead, the videos were posted for their informational and educational content.

Venezuela in Crisis

A woman with her face painted in the colors of Venezuela’s national flag takes part in the blockade of a highway in Caracas on April 24, 2017. (Photo: Fernando Llano/ AP); Background image: A demonstrator against President Nicolas Maduro’s government during a protest on the east side of Caracas on April 19, 2017. (Photo: Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP / Getty)

Introduction
Venezuela is in the midst of an unprecedented economic and political crisis marked by severe food and medicine shortages, soaring crime rates, and an increasingly authoritarian executive. Critics of President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, say Venezuela’s economic woes are the fruit of years of economic mismanagement; Maduro’s supporters blame falling oil prices and the country’s “corrupt” business elites.

In January 2016, opposition lawmakers took a majority in the legislature—the National Assembly—for the first time in nearly two decades. However, the Maduro government has taken steps since to consolidate his power, including usurping some of the legislature’s powers. Maduro’s actions have been met with massive protests and international condemnation, including threats of expulsion from the Organization of American States.

I. Chavez’s ‘Bolivarian Revolution’

Chavez, a former military officer who launched an ill-fated coup in 1992, was elected president of Venezuela in 1998 on a populist platform. As a candidate, he railed against the country’s elites for widespread corruption, and pledged to use Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to reduce poverty and inequality. During his presidency, which lasted until his death in 2013, Chavez expropriated millions of acres of land and nationalized hundreds of private businesses and foreign-owned assets, including oil projects run by ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.

Chavez, whose rhetoric often drew inspiration from Simon Bolivar, the Venezuela-born revolutionary of the nineteenth century, aimed to align Latin American countries against the United States. He led the formation of ALBA, a bloc of socialist and leftist Latin American governments, and established the Petrocaribe alliance, in which Venezuela agreed to export petroleum at discounted rates to eighteen Central American and Caribbean states.

Chavez also greatly expanded the powers of the presidency. Shortly after he took office, voters approved a new constitution that allowed him to run for another term, removed one chamber of Congress, and reduced civilian control over the military. In 2004, two years after he was briefly removed from office in a coup, Chavez effectively took control of the Supreme Court by expanding its size and appointing twelve justices. In 2009, he led a successful referendum ending presidential term limits.

Chavez remained popular among the country’s poor throughout his presidency, expanding social services including food and housing subsidies, health care, and educational programs. The country’s poverty rate fell from roughly 50 percent in 1998, the year before he was elected, to 30 percent in 2012, the year before his death.

Maduro, who narrowly won the presidency in 2013, pledged to continue his former boss’s socialist revolution. “I am ensuring the legacy of my commander, Chavez, the eternal father,” he said after the vote.

In Pictures – Crisis in Venezuela
Click on images to enlarge and read caption.

An effigy depicting Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro is set alight during the traditional burning of Judas as part of Holy Week celebrations, at a street in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 16, 2017. (Photo: Marco Bello / Reuters)

Demonstrators rally during the so-called “mother of all marches” against Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 19, 2017. (Photo: Marco Bello / Reuters)

A woman with her face painted in the colors of Venezuela’s national flag takes part in the blockade of a highway in Caracas on April 24, 2017. (Photo: Fernando Llano / AP)

A demonstrator against President Nicolas Maduro’s government during a protest on the east side of Caracas on April 19, 2017. (Photo: Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP / Getty)

An opposition supporter looks on during clashes with security forces at a protest against President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas, on May 4, 2017. (Photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters)

A demonstrator holds a tear gas canister during clashes with riot police in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 19, 2017. (Photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters)

An anti-government protester wears a mask during clashes with security forces in Caracas on April 19, 2017. (Photo: Fernando Llano / AP)

Demonstrators gather in front of the police as they attend a women’s march to protest against President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Caracas on May 6, 2017. (Photo: Christian Veron / Reuters)

An opposition demonstrator is hit by the jet from a riot police water cannon during a protest against President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas, on May 10, 2017. (Photo: Juan Barreto / AFP / Getty)

A Venezuelan opposition activist sits against a wall reading “Freedom!” during a protest against President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas on May 8, 2017. (Photo: Juan Barreto / AFP / Getty)

Demonstrators gather in front of the police as they attend a women’s march to protest against President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Caracas on May 6, 2017. (Photo: Christian Veron / Reuters)

Demonstrators rally during the so-called “mother of all marches” against Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 19, 2017. (Photo: Marco Bello / Reuters) Demonstrators rally during the so-called “mother of all marches” with a sign that reads “No more dictatorship” against Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas on April 19, 2017. (Photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters)

View of damage in a supermarket in Valencia, Carabobo State, on May 5, 2017, the day after anti-government protesters looted stores, set fire to cars and clashed with police, leaving at least five people injured, and one dead after being hit in the head by a projectile . (Photo: Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP / Getty)

A man attends a march paying homage to Juan Pablo Pernalete, a student killed during a protest against the president, Nicolás Maduro. (Photo: Ronaldo Schemidt/ AFP/ Getty Images)

Opposition supporters confront riot security forces while rallying against President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 12, 2017. (Photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters)

Opposition activists are run over by a charging National Guard riot control vehicle during a protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas on May 3, 2017. (Photo: Carlos Becerra / AFP / Getty)

An opposition demonstrator takes cover while clashing with riot police in Caracas on April 19, 2017. (Photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters)

Demonstrators clash with the police in Caracas on April 19, 2017. (Photo: Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP / Getty)

Workers clean the floor next to empty shelves and refrigerators in a supermarket after it was looted in San Cristobal, Venezuela, on May 17, 2017. (Photo: Carlos Eduardo Ramirez / Reuters)

A woman rests on a tire at a roadblock set up by residents outside her home in El Hatillo’s municipality near Caracas, on May 2, 2017. Residents blocked streets with trash bags, broken concrete and twisted metal Tuesday to protest the president’s bid to rewrite the constitution amid a deepening political crisis. (Photo: Fernando Llano / AP)

II. An Oil-Based Economy
Venezuela is highly vulnerable to external shocks due to its heavy dependence on oil revenues. Oil accounts for about 95 percent of Venezuela’s export earnings and 25 percent of its GDP, according to figures from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

The state-run petroleum company, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), controls all the country’s oil exploration, production, and exportation. Critics say PDVSA is grossly mismanaged and suffers from cronyism, a bloated payroll, underinvestment in infrastructure, and a lack of budgetary oversight.

As global oil prices fell from $111 per barrel in 2014 to a low of $27 per barrel in 2016, Venezuela’s already shaky economy went into free fall. That year, GDP dropped 12 percent while inflation soared to 800 percent. By early 2017, the country owed $140 billion to foreign creditors while it held only $10 billion in reserves, raising fears of a default.

Many critics fault the Chavez government for squandering years of record oil income. “Chavez did not use the massive oil price boom between 2004 and 2013 to put money aside for a rainy day,” wrote Harvard University economist Ricardo Hausmann in 2016. Instead, he “used the boom to expropriate large swaths of the economy, impose draconian foreign currency and price controls, and to subsidize imports. All this weakened the economy and made the country more dependent on imports, which Venezuelans can no longer afford.”

III. Price Controls and Shortages
Venezuela’s economic crisis is marked by soaring inflation and shortages of food, medical supplies, and staples like toilet paper and soap. Experts say the government’s strict price controls, which were meant to keep basic goods affordable for the country’s poor, are partly to blame. Many manufacturers in the country cut production because of the limits on what they could charge for their goods.

Another policy contributing to the country’s economic problems, many experts say, are currency controls, which were first introduced by Chavez in 2003 to curb capital flight. By selling U.S. dollars at different rates, the government effectively created a black market and increased opportunities for corruption. For instance, a business that is authorized to buy dollars at preferential rates in order to purchase priority goods like food or medicine could instead sell those dollars for a significant profit to third parties. In April 2017, the official exchange rate was ten bolivars to the dollar, while the black market rate was more than four thousand bolivars to the dollar.

Imports reportedly fell to $18 billion in 2016, down from $66 billion in 2012, as foreign-made goods became increasingly expensive. Many consumers are faced with the choice of waiting for hours in line for basic goods or paying exorbitant prices to so-called bachaqueros, or black market traffickers.

Experts say widespread expropriations have further diminished productivity. Transparency International, which ranks Venezuela 166 out of 176 on its perceived corruption index, reports that the government controls more than five hundred companies, most of which are operating at a loss. (By comparison, Brazil, which is more than six times as populous as Venezuela, has 130 state-run companies.)

IV. A Humanitarian Crisis

Observers have characterized the situation in Venezuela as a humanitarian crisis. In 2016, the head of the Venezuelan Pharmaceutical Federation estimated that 85 percent of basic medicines were unavailable or difficult to obtain. Hospitals reportedly lack supplies like antibiotics, gauze, and soap. Infant mortality rates reportedly reached 18.1 per 1,000 live births in early 2016, up from 11.6 in 2011, while maternal mortality reached 130 per 100,000, more than twice the 2008 rate. Diseases like diphtheria and malaria, which had been previously eliminated from the country, have reemerged.

Poverty has also spiked. In 2016, a local university study found that more than 87 percent of the population said it did not have enough money to buy necessary food. Another study by a local nutrition organization found that 30 percent of school-aged children were malnourished. According to a 2016 report from Human Rights Watch, the Maduro administration “has vehemently denied the extent of the need for help and has blocked an effort by the opposition-led National Assembly to seek international assistance.”

Poverty and lack of opportunity are exacerbating Venezuela’s high rates of violence. Long one of the world’s most violent countries, in 2016 Venezuela experienced its highest-ever number of homicides: 28,479, or roughly 91.8 homicides per 100,000 residents, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, an independent monitoring group. (The U.S. rate, by comparison, is 5 per 100,000.) Maduro’s administration has deployed the military to combat street crime, but rights groups and foreign media have reported widespread abuses, including extrajudicial killings.

The humanitarian crisis has spilled across Venezuela’s borders, with thousands of desperate people crossing into neighboring Brazil and Colombia; others have left by boat to the nearby island of Curaçao. By some estimates, as many as 150,000 Venezuelans left the country in 2016 alone.

V. Political Turmoil

Amid the crisis, the Maduro administration has become increasingly autocratic. Opposition lawmakers, under the Democratic Unity Roundtable coalition, won a majority in the National Assembly in 2015 for the first time in sixteen years, but Maduro has taken several steps to undermine them. In September 2016, Venezuela’s electoral authority, which is considered loyal to Maduro, ordered the opposition to suspend a campaign to recall the president, sparking protests and international condemnation. The following month, the Supreme Court stripped the National Assembly of powers to oversee the economy and annulled a law that would have freed eighty political prisoners, including opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. The president and the opposition subsequently entered into Vatican-brokered reconciliation talks, but those were declared “frozen” in November after Maduro administration officials stopped attending meetings. Maduro said he plans to stay in office until his term ends in 2019.

In March 2017, the judicial branch briefly dissolved the National Assembly. The court revised its order days later following an international outcry, but kept the legislature in contempt, effectively preventing lawmakers from passing laws. A week later the government barred opposition politician Henrique Capriles, who narrowly lost to Maduro in the 2013 presidential election, from running for office for fifteen years, citing Capriles’s failure to secure proper approval for budgets and contracts.

Government security forces have attacked journalists, and several foreign reporters have been detained and, in some cases, expelled, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2017, Freedom House rated Venezuela as “not free,” making it one of two countries in the Western Hemisphere, along with Cuba, with the democracy watchdog’s lowest ranking.

VI. The Region Reacts
Mercosur, an economic and political bloc comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela, suspended Venezuela in 2016. In March 2017, the secretary-general of the Organization of the American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, recommended suspending Venezuela from the bloc unless the Maduro administration moved quickly to hold elections. The last time OAS suspended a member country was 2009, when it did so to Honduras following a military coup.

U.S. policy under Donald J. Trump appears to follow that of former President Barack Obama, writes CFR Adjunct Senior Fellow Matthew Taylor. In February 2017, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Vice President Tareck El Aissami for his alleged involvement in international drug trafficking. Later that month Trump met with Lilian Tintori, the wife of Leopoldo Lopez, and called for his release. In April 2017, as protests continued in Caracas, the U.S. State Department issued a statement voicing concern over government actions against Capriles and demonstrators.

On May 19, The Trump administration sanctioned eight members of Venezuela’s Supreme Court, including the court’s president, Maikel Moreno, the U.S. Treasury Department announced. U.S. officials said the sanctions were a direct response to an incident in March in which the Supreme Court annulled the nation’s democratically elected National Assembly, which is controlled by Venezuela’s opposition party. At the time, the Supreme Court, which remains loyal to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, justified the takeover by claiming that the National Assembly was in contempt of its rulings. The court ultimately sought to authorize Maduro’s oil joint ventures by bypassing congressional approval. Despite tensions between Washington and Caracas, the United States remains Venezuela’s largest trading partner.

Meanwhile, the Maduro administration retains the support of allies in Bolivia, Ecuador, and several Caribbean nations. China has lent Venezuela more than $60 billion since 2001, and is the South American country’s largest creditor. Meanwhile, Venezuela has sought significant ties with Russia. Before oil prices fell in 2014, Venezuela was set to become the largest importer of Russian military equipment by 2025. In February 2017, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reaffirmed Moscow’s support for the Maduro government, saying bilateral relations “are on the rise.”

Reprint (w/ relevant updates added by blogger): Venezuela in Crisis -By by Danielle Renwick and Brianna Lee | Council on Foreign Relations

Recommended…
✻​ Venezuela Is Falling Apart – By Moisés Naím & Francisco Toro | The Atlantic
✻​ Internal Splits, Immolations, and Burning Houses: Venezuela Gets Worse -By Emily Tamkin | Foreign Policy
✻​ Venezuela’s Crisis | Human Rights Watch
✻​ Thousands Protest Human Rights Crisis in Venezuela -By Tamara Taraciuk Broner | HRW
✻ ​Crisis Upon Crisis in Venezuela | New York Times Editorial Board
✻​ U.S. Sanctions Venezuela’s Supreme Court -By Aria Bendix | The Atlantic

Out of Time in Arkansas

It’s done. The state of Arkansas executed four death row inmates in the span of eight days. From April 20 – April 27, inmates Ledell Lee, Jack Jones, Marcel Williams and Kenneth Williams, all paid the price of their crimes by being put to death by lethal injection. Eight death row inmates were originally scheduled to die in Arkansas over that span, but half were spared. During that eight-day span, Arkansas also made history by performing the first double-execution the United States has seen in 17 years. Jack Jones and Ledell Lee were both killed Monday, April 24, just hours apart. The article below appeared in The New Yorker on May 8.
_______________

Arkansas wanted to execute all eight inmates featured above in April. Half were spared. The names of those not spared are in bold. The inmates, clockwise from top left, are Don Williamson Davis, Bruce Ward, Stacey Johnson and Ledell Lee;  bottom left, are Jack Harold Jones, Marcel Williams, Kenneth Williams and Jason McGehee (Photo: Arkansas Department of Correction).

By the opaque reasoning of capital punishment, the state of Arkansas grew some unknowable fraction safer on the evening of April 24, when Jack Jones, a fifty-two-year-old, overweight, hypertensive, diabetic amputee, was strapped to a gurney in the Cummins Unit prison and administered drugs to successively sedate him, impair his breathing, stop his heart, and kill him. According to the state’s timeline, the process was a model of efficiency, taking only fourteen minutes to complete—less time than one might spend registering a vehicle at the Little Rock D.M.V. This was significant, as the night’s work was just getting started. Arkansas was staging the first double execution in the United States since 2000. Three hours later, Marcel Williams, a forty-six-year-old man who also suffered from diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, was strapped to the same gurney, injected with the same cocktail of drugs, and declared dead within seventeen minutes.

Jones’s and Williams’s executions were the second and third in a four-day period; at the same facility, on the preceding Thursday, Ledell Lee, aged fifty-one, became the first prisoner to be put to death in Arkansas since 2005. A fourth man, Kenneth Williams, aged thirty-eight, who had been on death row since 2000, was executed at Cummins on Thursday, shortly before midnight, when his warrant was set to run out. These four were among eight men whom Arkansas sought to execute in eleven days. With the state’s supply of the sedative midazolam due to expire at the end of the month, the proposed schedule came to resemble a lethal clearance sale. To socioeconomics and race—the known and inescapably arbitrary factors in the application of the death penalty—we may now add a novel dynamic: the shelf life of benzodiazepine compounds. There is a banal horror in the bureaucratic diligence that noted the drug’s expiration date, calculated how many people might be killed before it passed, and generated the warrants that Asa Hutchinson, the state’s Republican governor, signed.

McKesson Medical-Surgical, Inc., which distributes vecuronium bromide—a drug that is commonly used during surgery but that can also be used to stop a person’s breathing—filed suit against Arkansas, claiming that it had been duped into providing an ingredient of the cocktail. Four of the executions were blocked by court order. The Eighth Amendment prohibition against “cruel and unusual” punishment served as a measure of the elastic morality that facilitates the death penalty: does it constitute cruelty to infuse the condemned with a sedative, rather than a stronger anesthetic, particularly if, as attorneys for Jones and Williams argued, the circulatory conditions of the men might impair its effectiveness?

The rush of executions is notable not only for its barbarism but also for its contrast to prevailing thinking about capital punishment. Support for the death penalty peaked in 1994, with eighty per cent of Americans in favor. Last year, a Pew study found that the number had fallen to forty-nine per cent—the first time since 1971 that less than half of the public supported it. The declining crime rate accounts for part of the drop: in the mid-nineties, murders were twice as common as they are now. At the same time, the idea that death serves as a deterrent to other criminals has been consistently unsupported by evidence. Data from the Death Penalty Information Center shows that, in the past forty years, there have been eleven hundred and eighty-four executions in the South, compared with four in the Northeast, yet homicide figures in 2015 were nearly seventy per cent higher in Southern states than in Northeastern ones. The death penalty is about retribution for past offenses, not prevention of future ones.

There is also a growing awareness that it is perhaps impossible to create a justice system that both executes criminals and avoids killing innocents. The sclerotic appeals process insures that years, if not decades, will pass before the condemned meet their state-authored fate. But streamlining the process only increases the likelihood that innocent people will die. Since 1973, a hundred and fifty-nine inmates on death row have been exonerated of the crimes for which they were sent there. A prisoner in Ohio named Ricky Jackson spent thirty-nine years on death row before a key witness admitted to lying in the testimony that led to his conviction. Jackson is alive solely because of the inefficiency of the system that sought to kill him.

That complexity has been reflected in the politics of death-penalty prosecutions. In January, Bob Ferguson, the Washington State attorney general, proposed a bill that would eliminate the death penalty in his state. The same month, Beth McCann, the Denver district attorney, announced that her city was done with it. In March, Aramis Ayala, the state attorney for the Ninth Circuit, in Florida, announced that her office would not pursue capital punishment in any cases. Her office was in the midst of prosecuting Markeith Loyd, who is accused of murdering his pregnant girlfriend and a policewoman. Ayala said, “I’ve been unable to find any credible evidence that the death penalty increases safety for law-enforcement officers.” She added that the expense of death-penalty appeals drains resources from other prosecutions. In response, Governor Rick Scott removed the Loyd case, along with twenty-two others, from Ayala’s jurisdiction—an action she is challenging in court.

Last year, the Presidential election was won by a man who had demanded the death penalty for five young black and Latino men who were convicted of a brutal rape in Central Park that they did not commit. He appointed an Attorney General who had successfully fought to vitiate federal prohibitions on the execution of the mentally ill. He chose a Supreme Court Justice who, in his first major vote on the Court, cast the decisive one, in a 5–4 decision, to allow an execution to proceed—that of Ledell Lee, who died minutes later.

These are the actions of powerful men in service of outmoded ideas. We in this country are unaccustomed to mass executions carried out under government auspices. We would prefer to believe that such things happen in less evolved locales. Yet that is precisely what the state of Arkansas set out to achieve. The condemned men perpetrated a litany of horrors, but the rationales for putting them to death—a decades-delayed catharsis for the victims’ families, a lottery-slim chance that some future violence will be deterred—are as close to their expiration as Arkansas’s supply of midazolam.

Source: The Banal Horror of Arkansas’s Executions -By Jelani Cobb | The New Yorker

Jelani Cobb has been a contributor to The New Yorker and newyorker.com since 2012, writing frequently about race, politics, history, and culture. He is the author of “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.”

---

Recommended…
✻​ Arkansas Wants to Execute Seven Inmates Before Their Drugs Expire -By Garrett Epps | The Atlantic
✻​ Four Arkansas Executions Are Tied to the Expiration of a Drug That Does Not Work in Lethal Injections -Jessica Wapner | Newsweek
✻​ Fourth Arkansas Execution in Eight Days Prompts Questions About Inmate’s Movements -By Mark Berman | Washington Post
✻​ After Arkansas Executions, Lawyer Criticizes Use Of Capital Punishment | NPR
✻​ A Century of Death: 196 Executions, 15 Governors, and Arkansas’ Deadliest Day | KATV
✻​ Bearing Witness to Executions: Last Breaths and Lasting Impressions -By Alan Blinder and Manny Fernandez | The New York Times

The Rise of Radical Populism & The Decline of Human Rights

The 100th day of Donald Trump’s presidency will be April 29, 2017. No one knows what will happen in the next 100 days. But if present and past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, Donald Trump is and will be a disaster for human rights. From his immigration ban to his support for torture, Trump has jettisoned what has long been, in theory if not always in practice, a bipartisan American commitment: the promotion of democratic values and human rights abroad.

Worse is probably set to come. Trump has lavished praise on autocrats and expressed disdain for international institutions. He described Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as a “fantastic guy” and brushed off reports of repression by the likes of Russia’s Vladi­mir Putin, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As Trump put it in his bitter inauguration address, “It is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, has written that Trump’s election has brought the world to “the verge of darkness” and threatens to “reverse the accomplishments of the modern human rights movement.”

But this threat is not new. In fact, the rise of Trump has only underlined the existential challenges already facing the global rights project. Over the past decade, the international order has seen a structural shift in the direction of assertive new powers, including Xi Jinping’s China and Putin’s Russia, that have openly challenged rights norms while at the same time crushing dissent in contested territories like Chechnya and Tibet. These rising powers have not only clamped down on dissent at home; they have also given cover to rights-abusing governments from Manila to Damascus. Dictators facing Western criticism can now turn to the likes of China for political backing and “no-strings” financial and diplomatic support.

This trend has been strengthened by the Western nationalist-populist revolt that has targeted human rights institutions and the global economic system in which they are embedded. With populism sweeping the world and new superpowers in the ascendant, post-Westphalian visions of a shared global order are giving way to an era of resurgent sovereignty. Unchecked globalization and liberal internationalism are giving way to a post-human rights world.

All this amounts to an existential challenge to the global human rights norms that have proliferated since the end of World War II. In that time, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, has been supplemented by a raft of treaties and conventions guaranteeing civil and political rights, social and economic rights, and the rights of refugees, women, and children. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War served to further entrench human rights within the international system. Despite the world’s failure to prevent mass slaughter in places like Rwanda and Bosnia, the 1990s would see the emergence of a global human rights imperium: a cross-border, transnational realm anchored in global bodies like the U.N. and the European Union and supervised by international nongovernmental organizations and a new class of professional activists and international legal experts.

The professionalization of human rights was paralleled by the advance of international criminal justice. The decade saw the creation of ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the signing in 1998 of the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court — an achievement that then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan hailed as a “giant step forward in the march towards universal human rights and the rule of law.” On paper, citizens in most countries now enjoy around 400 distinct rights. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in 2007, human rights have become nothing short of “the dominant language of the public good around the globe.”

Crucially, this legal and normative expansion was underpinned by an unprecedented period of growth and economic integration in which national borders appeared to disappear and the world shrink under the influence of globalization and technological advance. Like the economic system in which it was embedded, the global human rights project attained a sheen of inevitability; it became, alongside democratic politics and free market capitalism, part of the triumphant neoliberal package that Francis Fukuyama identified in 1989 as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” In 2013, one of America’s foremost experts on international law, Peter J. Spiro, predicted that legal advances and economic globalization had brought on “sovereigntism’s twilight.” Fatou Bensouda, the current chief prosecutor of the ICC, has argued similarly that the creation of the court inaugurated a new era of post-Westphalian politics in which rulers would now be held accountable for serious abuses committed against their own people. (So far, no sitting government leader has.)

But in 2017, at a time of increasing instability, in which the promised fruits of globalization have failed for many to materialize, these old certainties have collapsed. In the current “age of anger,” as Pankaj Mishra has termed it, human rights have become both a direct target of surging right-wing populism and the collateral damage of its broader attack on globalization, international institutions, and “unaccountable” global elites.

The outlines of this new world can be seen from Europe and the Middle East to Central Asia and the Pacific. Governments routinely ignore their obligations under global human rights treaties with little fear of meaningful sanction. For six years, grave atrocities in Syria have gone unanswered, despite the legal innovations of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. Meanwhile, many European governments are reluctant to honor their legal obligations to offer asylum to the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing its brutal civil war.

To be sure, not all of these developments are new; international rights treaties have always represented an aspirational baseline to which many nations have fallen short. But the human rights age was one in which the world, for all its shortfalls, seemed to be trending in the direction of more adherence, rather than less. It was a time in which human rights advocates and supportive leaders spoke confidently of standing on the “right side of history” and even the world’s autocrats were forced to pay lip service to the idea of rights.

If the human rights age was one in which the contours of history were clear, today it is no longer obvious that history has any such grand design. According to the latest Freedom in the World report, released in January by Freedom House, 2016 marked the 11th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. It was also a year in which 67 countries suffered net declines in political freedoms and civil liberties. Keystone international institutions are also under siege. In October, three African states — South Africa, Burundi, and Gambia — announced their withdrawal from the ICC, perhaps the crowning achievement of the human rights age. (Gambia has since reversed its decision, following the January resignation of autocratic President Yahya Jammeh.) Angry that the ICC unfairly targets African defendants, leaders on the continent are now mulling a collective withdrawal from the court.

African criticism reflects governments’ increasing confidence in rejecting human rights as “Western” values and painting any local organization advocating these principles as a pawn of external forces. China and India have both introduced restrictive new laws that constrain the work of foreign NGOs and local groups that receive foreign funding, including organizations advocating human rights. In Russia, a “foreign agent law” passed in 2012 has been used to tightly restrict the operation of human rights NGOs and paint any criticism of government policies as disloyal, foreign-sponsored, and “un-Russian.”

In the West, too, support for human rights is wavering. In his successful campaign in favor of “Brexit,” Nigel Farage, then-leader of the UK Independence Party, attacked the European Convention on Human Rights, claiming that it had compromised British security by preventing London from barring the return of British Islamic State fighters from the Middle East. During the U.S. election campaign, Donald Trump demonized minorities, advocated torture, expressed admiration for dictators — and still won the White House. Meanwhile, a recent report suggests that Western support for international legal institutions like the ICC is fickle, lasting only “as long as it targets other problems in other countries.”

In the post-human rights world, global rights norms and institutions will continue to exist but only in an increasingly ineffective form. This will be an era of renewed superpower competition, in what Robert Kaplan has described as a “more crowded, nervous, anxious world.” The post-human rights world will not be devoid of grassroots political struggles, however. On the contrary, these could well intensify as governments tighten the space for dissenting visions and opinions. Indeed, the wave of domestic opposition to Trump’s policies is an early sign that political activism may be entering a period of renewed power and relevance.

What, then, is to be done? As many human rights activists have already acknowledged, fresh approaches are required. In December, RightsStart, a new human rights consultancy hub, launched itself by suggesting five strategies that international rights NGOs can use to adapt to the “existential crisis” of the current moment. (Full disclosure: I have previously worked with one of its founders.) Among them was the need for these groups to “communicate more effectively” the importance of human rights and use international advocacy more often as a platform for local voices. Philip Alston, a human rights veteran and law professor at New York University, has argued that the human rights movement will also have to confront the fact that it has never offered a satisfactory solution to the key driver of the current populist surge: global economic inequality.

In a broader sense, the global human rights project will have to shed its pretensions of historical inevitability and get down to the business of making its case to ordinary people. With authoritarian politics on the rise, now is the time to re-engage in politics and to adopt more pragmatic and flexible tactics for the advancement of human betterment. Global legal advocacy will continue to be important, but efforts should predominantly be directed downward, to national courts and legislatures. It is here that right-wing populism has won its shattering victories. It is here, too, that the coming struggle against Trumpism and its avatars will ultimately be lost or won.

Source: Welcome to the Post-Human Rights World -By Sebastian Strangio | Foreign Policy

---

Recommended…
✽ The End of Human Rights -By Stephen Hopgood | The New York Times
✽ International Law in the Age of Trump: A Post-Human Rights Agenda -By Ingrid Wuerth | LawFare
✽ Human Rights in the Era of Trump -By Mark Philip Bradley | American Historical Association

Russia Ministry of Justice Moves to Ban Jehovah’s Witnesses as ‘Extremist’ Organization

The Jehovah’s Witnesses elders Vyacheslav Stepanov, 40, left, and Andrei Sivak, 43, are facing trial on charges of inciting division and hatred ​(Photo by James Hill​).​

On April 5, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation began consideration of a claim from the Ministry of Justice to liquidate the Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia.  If the Ministry of Justice succeeds, Jehovah Witnesses will be banned as an extremist organization, a move that would lead to the seizure of the church’s headquarters near St. Petersburg and the outlawing of the group’s organized worship. The Russian justice ministry’s call for the country’s Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters to be shut down represents an attempt to “eliminate the legal existence” of the religion, said the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). The USCIRF is a bipartisan federal commission, with commissioners appointed by the president, the Senate and the House.

The justice ministry suspended the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in St. Petersburg last month, alleging that its activities “violate Russia’s law on combating extremism.” The Russian branch of the U.S.-based religion said a ban on its headquarters would directly affect around 400 local branches in the country and all 2277 of its religious groups, with their 175,000 followers. The USCIRF said that if the court sides with the justice ministry it would constitute the first time Russia has banned an organized religious organization.

“If the Supreme Court rules in April that this group is ‘extremist’ it would mark the first time that Russia legally has banned a centrally-administered religious organization and would effectively criminalize all Jehovah’s Witnesses’ activity nationwide. USCIRF calls on the Russian government to stop its harassment of this peaceful religious group.”

The ruling would also cap off years of increased restrictions by the Russian Federation against minority religions. Last summer, Russia introduced an anti-terrorism law that also restricted evangelism, and a regional court ordered the deportation of six missionaries with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 2015, a court banned the Church of Scientology’s Moscow branch.

Russia’s dominant religion is Russian Orthodox Christianity, which comprises about 72 percent of the population, up from just 31 percent in 1991, according to analysis from the Pew Research Center.

Under a Russian law passed in 1997, there is freedom of religion, but four faiths are designated to be traditional—Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism—and other religious organizations must register with the government. Some groups, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are registered, still face bureaucratic and legal hurdles. Jehovah’s Witness leaders estimate that there are 175,000 Russian-based adherents to the faith, which was founded in the United States the 1870s. Unlike Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus is the son of God but do not believe in the Trinity.

“They would basically be prosecuting Jehovah’s Witnesses as criminals,” David Semonian, international spokesperson for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, says of the pending court declaration. “Anyone who would actually would have our publications could be criminalized. It is of great concern.”

The statement from the group added: “The treatment of the Jehovah’s Witnesses reflects the Russian government’s tendency to view all independent religious activity as a threat to its control and the country’s political stability.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses have filed a counter claim asking the court to rule the Justice Ministry’s actions as political repression. A ruling in favor of the ministry would make it a crime for Jehovah’s Witnesses to worship in the Russian Federation and dissolve the faith’s legal means to own or rent Kingdom Halls, their places of worship. In 2015, the Russian Federation banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ website JW.org, and customs officials stopped shipments of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Bibles, citing the possibility they were extremist literature. Last year, Russia threatened to close the group’s national headquarters.

Roman Lunkin, a human rights fellow at the Wilson Center and an expert on church-state relations in Russia, says that Russian authorities have been targeting minority religions as “extremists” in an effort to demonstrate support for the Russian Orthodox Church and to marginalize organizations with suspected pro-western sympathies. “The treatment of the Jehovah’s Witnesses reflects the Russian government’s tendency to view all independent religious activity as a threat to its control and the country’s political stability,” the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said in a statement on April 4.

“Jehovah’s Witnesses are no threat to either the Russian Orthodox Church or to the Russian Government,” Semonian says. “The constitution guarantees freedom of worship, and that is all we are asking, to have the same rights as other religious groups have so we can go about our ministry in a peaceful way.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses are pacifists, and their religious beliefs require them to abstain from political activity. They declare allegiance only to God, not to a state or political entity. They do not vote, lobby, protest, or join military. This lack of participation can be seen as a threat if a state demands nationalist and patriotic activity.

“The persecution of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is very much tied to the resurgence of a new view of nationalism, where everything within the state is fine, but anything outside of the state has to be crushed,” Kristina Arriaga de Bucholz, a U.S. commissioner for International Religious Freedom appointed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, says.

“A pacifist group that tells its members that their allegiance is to something outside of the government is immediately a group that will be perceived as dangerous to the regime.” -Kristina Arriaga de Bucholz

Other minority Christian groups in Russia, like evangelicals, have not yet faced the same level of scrutiny. Lunkin says it is impossible to accuse evangelicals of extremist activity because their literature and Bible translation matches that of the Russian Orthodox Church. Jehovah’s Witnesses have their own translation of the Bible, and they also have their own magazine and educational materials. Evangelicals also have closer relationships with government officials, he says. “It’s [about] a protection of traditional religions, and the Orthodox identity of Russian people,” Lunkin says. “But in fact it is about protecting personal power, because the main fear is changing of regimes in Russia.”

Jehovah’s Witness church leadership has reached out to the U.S. State department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and the U.S. Helsinki Commission for aid. “We will do everything within our legal means to have the judgment reversed,” Semonian says. “Jehovah’s Witnesses are known worldwide for our peaceful activities, and under no circumstances would we ever resort to violence or any other activity that could be misunderstood or considered extremist.”

Jehovah’s Witness leaders have also asked their eight million members worldwide to write letters to Russia officials, including President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, to ask them to intervene. Instructions tell writers to “be candid but respectful,” and to mention how the faith has benefited their families. “Keep in mind that ‘a mild answer turns away rage,’ and ‘a gentle tongue can break a bone,’” the instructions say, quoting the Biblical book of Proverbs.

The decision will come as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is finalizing its annual report identifying countries of concern, its first such report for the Trump administration. The Commission is a bipartisan government advisory group that makes policy recommendations to the President, Congress, and the Secretary of State. Since 2009, the group has designated Russia as a “Tier 2” nation, on the watch list one step below countries of particular concern. “The fate of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is the fate of any religious group that does not pledge its allegiance to the Russian government,” Arriaga says. “April [sic] will definitely mark a new chapter of religious persecution in post-Soviet Russia.”

Source: Russian Supreme Court Considers Outlawing Jehovah’s Witness Worship -By Elizabeth Dias | TIME

---

Recommended….
✽ United States: Russia’s Ban of Jehovah’s Witnesses as ‘Extremist’ Shows That Moscow Views All Independent Religions as a Threat -By Jason Le Miere | Newsweek
✽ Russia Moves to Ban Jehovah’s Witnesses as ‘Extremist’ -By Andrew Higgins | The New York Times

Charles Blow: War as Political Weapon

Injured boys at a field hospital after airstrikes on the rebel held areas of Aleppo, Syria November 18, 2016 (Photo by Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters/TPX IMAGES). Background image: The Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, pictured above in a 2014 photo, has been described as a “living hell” and “the “worst place on Earth.” (Photo by United Nation Relief and Works Agency/Getty Images)

Donald Trump has turned his back on pretty much everything he has ever said about United States military involvement in Syria and launched nearly 60 missiles at an air base in the country.

Trump’s official statement claimed that the strikes were in response to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s monstrous chemical weapons attack against his own people. But the statement also went further into the fiction of fear often touted to buttress humanitarian missions: “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”

This has echoes of the George W. Bush warning about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” a lie that led us into a near decade-long war.

Not to be indelicate here, but atrocities happen in the world all the time (and have happened on an even larger scale before in Syria). Humans are capable of unimaginable cruelty. Sometimes the victims die quickly and are made visible by media for the world to see. Other times, they die in slow motion, out of sight and out of mind. Sometimes banned weapons are used; sometimes conventional weapons; sometimes, neglect, isolation and starvation.

And the world in general, and America in particular, has a way of being wishy-washy about which atrocities deserve responses and which ones don’t. These decisions can be capricious at best and calculated camouflages for ulterior motives at worst. Indeed, the motivations for military action needn’t be singular at all, but are often multiple, tucked one inside the other like nesting dolls.

Acts of war can themselves be used as political weapons. They can distract attention, quell acrimony, increase appetite for military spending and give a boost to sagging approval ratings. This “rally-around-the-flag” (or “rally”) effect is well documented by pollsters.

As Gallup wrote in 2001 after the attack of 9/11: “In the wake of the terrorist attacks Tuesday, American approval of the way President George W. Bush is handling his job has surged to 86 percent, the fourth highest approval rating ever measured by Gallup in the six decades it has been asking Americans to make that evaluation. Only Presidents George H. W. Bush and Harry Truman received higher ratings — the elder Bush twice during the Gulf War, with 89 percent (the highest ever) and 87 percent ratings, and Truman with 87 percent just after the Germans surrendered in World War II.”

It’s easy to sell the heroism of a humanitarian mission or the fear of terror or the two in tandem, as Trump attempted in this case.

The temptation to unleash America’s massive war machine is seductive and also addictive. Put that power in the hands of a man like Trump, who operates more on impulse and intuition than intellect, and the world should shiver.

The problem comes when the initial glow dims and darkness descends. We punch holes in some place on the other side of the world and the war hawks — many beholden to the military-industrial complex — squawk and parade about with chests swollen. But, feeding the beast of war only amplifies its appetite. Market Watch reported last week, “It could cost about $60 million to replace the cruise missiles that the U.S. military rained on Syrian targets Thursday night,” but Fortune reported that shares of weapons manufacturers, as soon as they began trading Friday, were “collectively gaining nearly $5 billion in market value.”

War is a business, a lucrative one.

Americans, who rightly are appalled by the images of dead children, applaud. They feel proud to slap the hand of a villain without risking American bodies. But now American might is irrevocably engaged. Our thumb is on the scale, and our reputation on the line.

Often, action begets more action, as unintended consequences sprout like weeds. In the most extreme cases, we take down a bad leader in some poor country. In theory, this helps the citizens of that country. But in the complex reality that we have had to keep learning over and over in recent history, it often creates a vacuum where one bad man can be replaced by even worse men.

We are then already in waist-deep. We have to make an impossible choice: stay and try to fix what we broke or abandon it and watch our nightmares multiply. Nobility of the crusade is consumed by the quagmire.

This is why we would all do well to temper the self-congratulatory war speeches and thrusting of pom-poms of our politicians and pundits, some of whom hypocritically opposed the use of military force by President Obama following an even worse chemical attack in Syria in 2013.

As righteous as we may feel about punishing Assad, Syria is a hornet’s nest of forces hostile to America: Assad, Russia, and Iran on one flank and ISIS on another. You can’t afflict one faction without assisting the other. In this way, Syria is a nearly unwinnable state.

We’ve been down this road before. Just over the horizon is a hill: Steep and greased with political motives, military ambitions, American blood and squandered treasury.

Being weary here isn’t a sign of weakness; to the contrary, it’s a display of hard-won wisdom.

Source: War as Political Weapon -By Charles M. Blow | The New York Times

---

Recommended….
✽ Dan Rather Slams Journalists Who Hailed Donald Trump’s Bombs As ‘Presidential’-By Hillary Hanson | Huffington Post
✽ Donald Trump’s Syrian Civil War Paradox -By Owen Matthews and Sophia Slater | Newsweek
✽ Obama Was Right to Abandon ‘Red Line’ on Syria’s Chemical Weapons -By Christopher Dickey | The Daily Beast
✽ The Real Targets of Trump’s Strike Were His Domestic Critics -By Greg Grandin | The Nation
✽18 Times Donald Trump Said the U.S. Shouldn’t Bomb Syria -By Ashley Hoffman | TIME

Chemical Weapons, Barrel Bombs, & Massacres – A Litany of Atrocities in Syria

A man carries the body of a dead child, after what rescue workers described as a suspected gas attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in rebel-held Idlib, Syria, on April 4, 2017 (YouTube Photo by Ammar Abdullah / Reuters).

The decision came on April 6 on Air Force One on the way to Florida. Mr. Donald Trump assembled his National Security Council on his plane, some by secure video link, as the generals made the case that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had to learn there was a price to pay.

Mr. Trump claimed he was shaken by photos his staff had shown him of children dying after the Syrian government’s chemical weapons attack — far more graphic than those the public had seen — so he did not need a lot of convincing: “What happened in Syria is truly one of the egregious crimes, and it shouldn’t have happened,” he told reporters when he poked his head into the press cabin. “And it shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”

Two hours later at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, Mr. Trump gave the order to unleash 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles (at a cost of $500,000 per missile) at Al Shayrat airfield in western Syria, where the chemical weapons attack originated. His generals had given him the option of delaying a day, but Mr. Trump chose not to wait.

It had been only 63 hours from the chemical attack to the American strike.

With its missile strike on Shayrat air base in central Syria, Washington signaled that it had judged President Bashar Assad responsible for the horrific chemical weapons attack in northern Syria that drew international outrage last week. But it is not the first or even deadliest atrocity of the war. Rights groups and many Middle Eastern and Western nations say Assad is responsible for a litany of war crimes in the six years he and his supporters have struggled to extinguish a popular uprising and armed insurgency against his rule.

The violence started early on, with detentions, torture, and summary executions, and escalated to bombardment, massacres, sieges, and chemical warfare. Various monitors put the war’s toll at over 400,000 killed. The United Nations has recorded over 5 million refugees from the conflict, and says about half the country’s population is displaced within Syria’s borders or abroad.

Assad has denied responsibility for all specific allegations of war crimes. He maintains his war is one against terror, though he acknowledges that civilians have sometimes been caught in the cross-fire.

Here are some of the 6-year-old war’s worst atrocities:

Abdul-Hamid Alyousef, 29, holds his twin babies, who were killed during a suspected chemical weapons attack, in Khan Sheikhoun in the northern province of Idlib, Syria, April 4, 2017. Alyousef also lost 22 members of his family, including his wife, two brothers, nephews and many other family members in the attack that claimed scores of his relatives. (Photo: AP)

BARREL BOMBS
Though not the deadliest weapon in the government’s arsenal, the so-called barrel bomb is now synonymous with Syria’s civil war. The crude, unguided munition — oil barrels packed with explosives and shrapnel — is emblematic of the government’s determination to brutalize its opponents. Soldiers roll them off of helicopters above opposition areas to slam into markets, hospital, schools and military baes below. Sometimes squadrons will bomb an area twice, minutes apart, to kill the first responders who have gathered in the area — a grisly scenario dubbed a “double tap” attack. Thousands of people have been killed in documented barrel bomb attacks, though Assad denies they even exist.

BAYDA AND BANIYAS MASSACRES
On May 2 and 3, 2013, government troops and government-backed militias stormed the towns of Bayda and Baniyas on Syria’s coast and, according to a Human Rights Watch investigation, went door to door burning homes and shooting families in cold blood. At least 248 people were killed. The troops were allegedly looking for army defectors and other dissidents.

It was one of the most widely reported killings in a string of tit-for-tat massacres by pro-government and pro-opposition forces that hardened the conflict’s sectarian dynamics. Bayda and the affected neighborhood in Baniyas are predominantly Sunni districts in a coastal region distinguished for its high proportion of Alawites and Christians. Assad is an Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and he has crafted the image of his government as a bulwark against Sunni terrorism. Though the initial protests against him represented a cross-section of Syrian society, the spiraling sectarian violence in 2012 and 2013 fractured the country along religious lines, and now opposition forces are dominated by Sunnis.

A similar massacre a year earlier in the town of Houla, near the Lebanese border, also stoked Sunni fears. A U.N. investigation said government forces and pro-Assad militias carried out that attack, which killed 108 people, including 49 children.

GHOUTA SARIN GAS ATTACK
On Aug. 21, 2013, exactly one year and one day after then President Barack Obama issued his “red line” warning against chemical weapons use and transfers, a horrific sarin nerve gas attack killed hundreds of people in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus. Shocking images of residents suffocating in the streets were seen around the world, and one survivor, Kassem Eid, said he saw neighbors dropping dead “like it was judgment day.” In hospitals, medical workers produced videos of victims convulsing and gasping for breath, while others lay motionless, white foam coating their mouths. Doctors lifted patients’ eyelids to reveal their pupils shrunken to the size of pinpricks, just like victims of the attack last week in the opposition-held northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun.

A U.N. investigative team determined that sarin gas was used in the Ghouta attack, but its report did not identify a culprit. The U.S. and other nations said Assad’s government was responsible. Human Rights Watch said the government was the “likely” culprit and the rockets that carried the gas were likely fired from one or more of a string of military installations that ring the capital.

An injured Syrian child waits for treatment at a makeshift hospital in the rebel held area of Douma, north east of the capital Damascus, following reported air strikes by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad on February 2, 2015. More than 400,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict started, and around half of the country’s population has been displaced. (Photo: Getty Images)

NAPALM-LIKE WEAPONS ATTACKS
Five days after the gas attack on Ghouta, government aircraft bombed a school in the town of Orem al-Kubra, near Aleppo, with a napalm-like weapon, activists reported. Fuel clung to students like jelly, witnesses said, burning skin and flesh. At least 10 people were killed. Human Rights Watch has documented dozens of attacks where the Syrian government used so-called “incendiary weapons” in the conflict. Their use in civilian areas is against international law. Schools are also frequent targets of the government’s airstrikes.

THE SIEGE OF EAST ALEPPO
After four months of siege and non-stop bombardment, government forces retook the eastern sector of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, last December. By the end of the campaign, every medical facility had been bombed at least once, according to the Syrian American Medical Society. More than 20,000 civilians and fighters agreed to evacuate from the city to other opposition areas in northern Syria instead of face the government’s feared security forces; thousands more crossed first into government parts of the city then continued on to opposition-held Idlib and Aleppo provinces.

A U.N. investigative panel said the evacuation, made under crushing duress, amounted to forced displacement of civilians from their homes, a war crime. Other such actions have dislodged tens of thousands more dissidents to opposition areas of northern Syria, part of a population shift that is changing the demographics of the country.

The U.N. panel also blamed Syrian jets for bombing a humanitarian convoy in the Aleppo countryside during the siege, killing more than a dozen relief workers. It said the attack was a war crime.

TARGETING THE MEDICAL SECTOR
Human rights organizations and international medical charities say Assad’s forces target hospitals, clinics and ambulances in opposition-held areas. Earlier in the conflict, doctors said they were tortured by security forces for helping wounded protesters at anti-government rallies. According to Physicians for Human Rights, government and allied Russian forces have killed 727 medical workers in the course of the conflict.

Sources & Recommended Reading…
✽ Syrian Civil War Timeline | Wikipedia
✽ Chemical Weapons Attack Latest in Litany of Syria Atrocities | AP via The New York Times
✽ 63 Hours: From Chemical Attack to Trump’s Strike in Syria -By Michael D. Shear & Michael R. Gordon | The New York Times
✽ World Report 2017: Syria | Human Rights Watch
✽ Amnesty International Annual Report 2017: Syria | Amnesty International
✽ Syria’s War on Doctors -By Ben Taub | The New Yorker
✽ The War on Syria’s Doctor -By Ellen Francis | Foreign Policy