The bodies of six Israeli hostages with gunshot wounds retrieved

Israeli-hostage-bodies-bullet-wounds

Important Takeaways:

  • Fury was palpable at the end of a demonstration in Tel Aviv on Thursday, as protesters demanded a deal to free Israeli hostages in Gaza and grieved this week’s news that the bodies of six captives had been retrieved.
  • Their tragic fate has raised fears that more Israeli hostages will not be retrieved alive either, said one protester.
  • There has been no official explanation yet of how the six died.
  • On Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that initial forensic tests suggest that all six hostages had been shot, but it has not determined whether the gunshot wounds were the cause of death.
  • The IDF said four additional bodies were found next to the bodies of the six hostages, which were believed to be those of the Hamas militants who had been holding the hostages, but that no evidence of shooting was found on their bodies.
  • There are currently 109 Israeli hostages that remain in Gaza, including 36 believed to be dead, according to data from the Israeli Government Press Office.

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‘No noises, only birds’: silent strike shuts Myanmar as prisoners freed

(Reuters) – Myanmar’s junta freed hundreds of demonstrators on Wednesday arrested during its months-long crackdown on protests, while businesses in Yangon were shut and streets deserted in response to a call by anti-coup activists for a silent strike.

Several buses full of prisoners drove out of Yangon’s Insein jail in the morning, said witnesses, who included lawyers for some inmates. There was no immediate word from authorities on how many prisoners were freed. A spokesman for the military did not answer calls.

“All the released are the ones arrested due to the protests, as well as night arrests or those who were out to buy something,” said a member of a legal advisory group who said he saw around 15 buses leaving.

In the biggest city Yangon, a call by pro-democracy activists for a silent strike turned the streets eerily quiet.

“No going out, no shops, no working. All shut down. Just for one day,” Nobel Aung, an illustrator and activist, told Reuters.

“The usual meat and vegetables vendors on the street didn’t show up,” said a resident of the city’s Mayangone district. “No car noises, only birds.”

A teacher in the Kyauktada district said the roads were deserted: “There aren’t many people in the streets, only water delivery men.”

Activists have called for a “big protest” on Thursday.

“The strongest storm comes after the silence,” Ei Thinzar Maung, one of the protest leaders, said in a post on Facebook.

AP JOURNALIST FREED

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) activist group says at least 2,000 people have been arrested in the military crackdown on the protests against the Feb. 1 coup.

Among those freed on Wednesday, was Thein Zaw, a journalist for The Associated Press who was arrested last month, AP reported, quoting him as saying the judge had dropped the charges because he was doing his job at the time of his arrest.

Wednesday’s strike came a day after staff at a funeral service in Mandalay told Reuters that a seven-year-old girl had died of bullet wounds in the city – the youngest of about 275 people killed in the bloody crackdown, according to the AAPP.

Soldiers shot at her father but hit the girl who was sitting on his lap inside their home, her sister told the Myanmar Now media outlet. Two men were also killed in the district, it said.

The military had no immediate comment on the incident.

The Myanmar office of the United Nations children’s agency said “the continuing use of force against children, including the use of live ammunition, by security forces is taking a devastating toll on children in Myanmar.”

Since the crisis started at least 23 children have been killed and at least 11 others seriously injured, UNICEF said.

The junta has faced international condemnation for staging the coup that halted Myanmar’s slow transition to democracy and for its lethal suppression of the protests that followed.

Opponents of military rule have regularly called for strikes and parts of the economy have been paralyzed by a civil disobedience campaign, including among civil servants.

Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her campaign to bring democratic civilian rule to Myanmar, has been in detention since the coup and faces charges that her lawyer says have been cooked up to discredit her.

The ousted leader was due to appear for another court hearing via video conferencing on Wednesday, but the head of her legal team Khin Maung Zaw said it had been postponed until April 1, marking the second successive delay due to internet issues.

(Reporting by Reuters Staff; Writing by Ed Davies and Raju Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Michael Perry & Simon Cameron-Moore)

Cubs of the Caliphate: rehabilitating Islamic State’s children

Yazidi students are seen at school in the Sharya camp, in Duhok, Iraq February 23, 2018. REUTERS/Ari Jalal

By Raya Jalabi

RAWANGA CAMP, Iraq (Reuters) – While children who have been through war typically draw devastating pictures of the violence they have suffered, few show themselves as the perpetrators.

The suicide belts, car bombs and other explosives sketched again and again by a 14-year-old boy newly arrived at this camp in northern Iraq are the ones he built himself: used by Islamic State militants against civilians and troops in Iraq and Syria.

One image depicted him killing a man with a spray of bullets, something he said he did during three years as a child fighter forcibly conscripted by Islamic State.

Yazidi students draw with the psychologist at the psychotherapy centre in the Rawanga camp, in Duhok, Iraq February 25, 2018. REUTERS/Ari Jalal

Kidnapped from his Yazidi homeland in northern Iraq, he said he got used to the sound of bombs falling on Islamic State’s de facto capital, Raqqa, in Syria, as security forces closed in last year.

“Here’s where I got shot fighting the SDF,” said the boy, not named to protect him from retribution, referring to the U.S.-backed rebel Syrian Defense Forces and pointing out a bullet wound on his shin.

Giving him time to draw and talk about his experience is part of a treatment program to help him move on and protect both him and others from lasting damage.

Hundreds of children are estimated to have been used as fighters by Islamic State, including boys who joined with their families or were given up by them and the offspring of foreign fighters groomed from birth to perpetuate its ideology.

Experts have warned that indoctrinated children, who began escaping the clutches of Islamic State as its territory fractured last year, could pose an ongoing threat to security, both regionally and in the West, if they are not rehabilitated.

Treating Yazidi children, who were separated from their families and in many cases orphaned, holds particular challenges.

Yazidi students wait for the therapist at the psychotherapy centre in the Rawanga camp, in Duhok, Iraq February 25, 2018. REUTERS/Ari Jalal

Yazidi students wait for the therapist at the psychotherapy centre in the Rawanga camp, in Duhok, Iraq February 25, 2018. REUTERS/Ari Jalal

PERSECUTED TWICE

There is little in the way of specialized care for them in Iraq, where the minimum age of criminal responsibility is nine. The government has detained and prosecuted dozens of children for their suspected IS affiliation, according to a recent report by New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Naif Jardo Qassim, a psychotherapist treating children at Rawanga refugee camp near Dohuk emphasized that they are “victims and not criminals,” and should be treated as such.

Highlighting the scale of the task, Yazidi teacher Hoshyar Khodeida Suleiman recounts the story of one of his students, a young boy reunited with his family in the autumn.

A few days later, the boy’s father woke up in the middle of the night to find his son wielding a knife to his throat, confused about whether he should kill his parents or himself.

“He was screaming that they were infidels and that he would rather die than be one of them,” Suleiman said.

When the militants overran Yazidi towns and villages in 2014, it killed or enslaved more than 9,000 adults and children in what the United Nations has called a genocidal campaign against a religious minority labeled heretic by Islamic State.

It sold girls and women into slavery, marrying some off to fighters, and trained many boys to join the ranks of what it called the Cubs of the Caliphate, posting videos of them committing atrocities in the name of its self-declared state.

Most of the children returned, not home, but to displacement camps in northern Iraq, where they live with relatives – their parents either missing or killed by the militants.

“Everything changed while they were gone,” said Qassim. “That’s if they even remember anything from their lives before.”

Adding to that instability is the weight of the traumas they have endured.

“These children have seen their families killed, or were kidnapped, beaten and brainwashed,” he said. “In some cases, they witnessed executions, were forced to kill or were raped, multiple times, for years.”

Qassim works for Yahad In-Unum, one of a handful of international NGOs which has set up a children’s center in the camp, where children can receive psychological treatment, ranging from talk to art therapy.

They also come to play, said Qassim, “and remember how to be children again”.

Yazidi students draw with the psychologist at the psychotherapy centre in the Rawanga camp, in Duhok, Iraq February 25, 2018. REUTERS/Ari Jalal

REMEMBERING

Qassim’s six-month-old center is currently treating 123 children, a mix of girls and boys all under the age of 18, recently returned from Islamic State-held territory.

“When they first come back from captivity, the children can often be aggressive, violent, confused and angry,” he said, adding that many of the children were forced to forget their native Kurdish. “That quickly dissolves into anxiety and deep depression, as the trauma begins to settle in.”

The center devises a treatment program for each child, which involves both individual and group therapy sessions.

“We slowly work to undo the years of brainwashing they were subjected to,” said Qassim. “We want them to forget the last few years and start again.”

He said all the children he has treated were successfully “de-indoctrinated”, adding, “no child is beyond saving”.

The relative novelty of so-called deradicalization programs means opinion is divided over their effectiveness; Laila Ali, spokesperson for UNICEF in Iraq which supports such services, says rehabilitation is “absolutely possible”.

Some children are harder to reach than others, particularly those who have forgotten life before IS.

One 10-year-old boy was smuggled out of Syria just three and a half weeks ago and has since been living with his uncle in the camp. Shy at first, he became animated when describing his “accomplishments” during his fighter training in Deir Ezzor, Syria and said he is not sure his current life is better.

Qassim says he exhibits confusion about whether he should denounce Islamic State’s teachings. He and other children sneak off to pray in the toilets, unconvinced they will not get in trouble with Islamic State for shirking religious obligations.

Qassim says he is hopeful he will be back to normal soon.

Some face new humiliations on their return. “I had to move in with my relatives because my parents said they would never accept me back because of what I did,” said one former fighter, now aged 15.

Qassim is the only psychotherapist at his center and the work takes its toll. “It’s very difficult to hear children tell you these stories – of rape, of combat, of killings… In my life, I’d never heard such horrors.”

With little in the way of funds or a roadmap, some community members have pitched in to help in their own ways.

Suleiman aims to rehabilitate Yazidi children at Sharya refugee camp near Dohuk by “reconnecting them with their Yazidi faith”, with an emphasis on “humanity and human decency”.

On a rainy afternoon in late February, they came to class in traditional clothes he had given them: white dresses and scarves with black and gold headbands for the girls; trousers, matching waistcoat and red and white keffiyeh scarf for the boys.

“It’s a simple thing,” he said. “But the clothes are a reminder of who they are and where they come from.”

(Reporting by Raya Jalabi; editing by Philippa Fletcher)