Tag Archives: Violence

People uprooted within states by conflict hits record in 2015

Children ride on the back of a truck loaded with water jerrycans at a camp for internally displaced people in the Dhanah area of the

By Megan Rowling

BARCELONA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The number of people uprooted inside their own countries by war and violence hit a record 40.8 million in 2015, with Yemen recording the most cases of newly displaced, an international aid group said on Wednesday.

Globally there were 8.6 million fresh cases of people fleeing conflict last year within borders, an average of 24,000 a day, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) said in a report. More than half of those were in the Middle East.

Some 2.2 million people in Yemen, or 8 percent of its population, were newly displaced in 2015, largely the result of Saudi-led air strikes and an economic blockade imposed on civilians, the report said.

IDMC said the number of people forced from their homes by conflict but staying in their own countries was twice those who have become refugees by crossing international borders.

“The world is in a tremendous displacement crisis that is relentlessly building year after year, and now too many places have the perfect storm of conflict and/or disasters,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which runs IDMC.

“We have to find ways to protect people from these horrendous forces of both nature and the man-made ones.”

The U.N. refugee agency has said the number of people forcibly displaced worldwide was likely to have “far surpassed” a record 60 million in 2015, including 20 million refugees, driven by the Syrian war and other drawn-out conflicts.

The IDMC report said displacement in the Middle East and North Africa had “snowballed” since the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2010 and the rise of the Islamic State militant group, which is waging war in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

“What has really led to the spike we have seen most recently has been the attack on civilians – indiscriminate bombing and air strikes, across Syria but also Yemen,” said Alexandra Bilak, IDMC’s interim director. “People have nowhere to go.”

DISASTER PREVENTION

Globally, there were 19.2 million new cases of people forced from their homes by natural disasters in 2015, the vast majority of them due to extreme weather such as storms and floods, IDMC said.

In Nepal alone, earthquakes in April and May uprooted 2.6 million people.

Egeland said many countries, such as Cuba, Vietnam and Bangladesh, had improved their record on preventing and preparing for natural disasters.

“But in Asia I would say, and to some extent Latin America, still too little is done to meet the growing strength of the forces of nature fueled by climate change,” he added.

The former U.N. aid chief urged this month’s World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul to focus on building resilience to natural disasters, and finding ways to avert conflicts and protect civilians in war.

IDMC’s Bilak said political action was needed to stop more people being forced from their homes, and staying displaced for long periods.

“The numbers are increasing every year, which clearly shows that the solutions to displacement are not being found,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Sudan and South Sudan have featured in the list of the 10 largest displaced populations every year since 2003, the report noted.

“People are not returning, they are not locally integrating where they have found refuge, and they are certainly not being resettled somewhere else,” Bilak said.

(Reporting by Megan Rowling; Additional reporting by Stine Jacobsen in Oslo; Editing by Katie Nguyen. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

French Police clash with more protesters over labor laws

Masked youths face off with French police during a demonstration against the French labour law proposal in Paris

By Brian Love

PARIS (Reuters) – French police clashed with protesters outside a school building in Paris on Wednesday in fresh unrest involving police amid anger over government plans to reform highly-protective labor laws.

Police used teargas to disperse a crowd that tried to stop them removing nearly 300 immigrants who had moved into an empty secondary school that was due to reopen after renovation, Paris police chief Michel Cadot said.

“The state is obliged to apply the law,” Cadot said. The migrants from countries including Sudan and Eritrea had been removed peacefully after police broke through a ring of 200 to 250 protesters, he said.

Four police were slightly hurt, a statement said.

Hundreds of police officers have been reported injured in the past weeks in clashes with demonstrators during street marches across France the country – most of them rallies in protest over a bill that would make it easier in some cases to fire employees.

On Tuesday seven riot police officers were hurt in clashes with masked youths in the Western city of Nantes.

“This is totally unacceptable, with 300 police hurt since the start of the year,” said government spokesman Stephane Le Foll. “We will not let this pass.”

The primary focus of protest is the planned reform of some of the most extensive and protective labor rules in Europe.

An Elabe opinion poll released on Wednesday showed that three out of four French people oppose a bill that the government argues will remove red tape and encourage employers to recruit in a country where the jobless rate is above 10 percent.

Critics fear the bill will undermine employers’ obligations under the current national labor code.

Police chief Cadot is also seeking to tighten the noose on a rolling youth protest movement – called Nuit Debout – that has been organizing late-night sit-ins at the large Place de la Republique square in central Paris.

After repeated clashes where youths hurled petrol bombs and paving stones at police, he has banned alcohol consumption and late night music on the square and told Nuit Debout activists to quit the area every day before midnight.

(Reporting by Brian Love; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Iraq’s all-female combat unit seeks revenge on Islamic State

Iraqi Kurdish female fighter Haseba Nauzad (2nd R), 24, and Yazidi female fighter Asema Dahir (3rd R), 21, aim their weapon during a deployment near the frontline of the fight against Islamic State militants in Nawaran near Mosul, Iraq,

By Emily Wither

NAWARAN, Iraq (Reuters) – When Islamic State swept into the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar in 2014, a few young Yazidi women took up arms against the militants attacking women and girls from their community.

“They took eight of my neighbors and I saw they were killing the children,” Asema Dahir told Reuters last month at a checkpoint near a front line north of Mosul.

Dressed in military fatigues, the 21-year-old is now part of an all-female unit in the Kurdish peshmerga forces, which have played an important role in pushing back Islamic State in northern Iraq.

The killing and enslaving of thousands from Iraq’s minority Yazidi community focused international attention on the group’s violent campaign to impose its radical ideology and prompted Washington to launch an air offensive.

It also prompted the formation of this unusual 30-woman unit made up of Yazidis as well as Kurds from Iraq and neighboring Syria. For them, only one thing matters: revenge for the women raped, beaten and executed by the jihadist militants.

Dahir said she was stunned by the brutality of the militants, some of whom were neighbors and others from outside the area.

“They killed my uncle and took my cousin’s wife who had only just married eight days earlier,” she said, her piercing eyes clouding over. The bride, like thousands of other Yazidi women, is still being held by the militants.

For matching Wider Image pictures, please click on: http://reut.rs/1SNahZe

During the firefights that raged across Sinjar in 2014, Dahir said she killed two Islamic State fighters before being shot in the leg. Reuters could not independently verify the fighters’ personal accounts.

Well-worn photographs of children and families tucked into the edge of mirrors or pressed onto walls in the women’s spartan barracks are reminders of what they have sacrificed to join the fight.

Haseba Nauzad, the unit’s 24-year-old commander, lost her marriage. She was living with her husband in Turkey when Islamic State swept through northern Iraq and announced its so-called caliphate over areas that included traditional Kurdish lands.

“I saw them raping my Kurdish sisters and I couldn’t accept this injustice,” Nauzad said.

Her husband wanted to pay human smugglers to take them to Europe along with more than a million others fleeing conflict in the region, but she insisted on going home to fight the Islamists.

“I put my personal life aside, and I came to defend my Kurdish sisters and mothers and stand against this enemy,” she said. She has lost contact with her husband since he arrived in Germany.

In a conservative society where women are often expected to stay at home, these women say gender does not keep them from entering battle.

“If a man can carry a weapon, a woman can do the same,” said Nauzad. “The men are inspired to fight harder when they see women standing in the same battlefield as them.”

The women in the unit are convinced Islamic State militants are scared of women fighters “because they think if they are killed by a woman, they will not go to heaven,” said Nauzad.

“This story encourages more women to join the fight.”

(Writing by Stephen Kalin; editing by Ralph Boulton)

String of Prosecutions on Rikers Prison Employees

A car exits the Rikers Island Correctional facility in New York March 12, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

By Joseph Ax and Nate Raymond

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The guards, authorities say, wanted to send a message.

“Somebody’s leaving in an ambulance tonight,” Eliseo Perez, an assistant chief for security at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex, told inmates after a rash of attacks on guards, according to prosecutors.

Then he allegedly instructed five subordinates to take prisoner Jahmal Lightfoot into a room and kick his teeth in, an attack that left him with facial fractures.

The ongoing trial of nine correction officers for the alleged 2012 assault and a subsequent cover-up is the latest in a string of prosecutions targeting dozens of Rikers employees over the past four years.

More than 50 guards at the 10,000-inmate complex, one of the three largest in the United States by population, have faced criminal charges since 2012 for assault, falsifying reports and smuggling contraband, court documents and data from various city agencies show.

That is about double the rate of prosecution in the prior four years, as authorities crack down on what they say is a toxic atmosphere of violence and corruption.

“Rikers is a very troubled institution,” said Mark Peters, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Investigation, which leads most Rikers-related probes. “We are now seeing the result of systemic neglect.”

Rikers houses male, female and adolescent prisoners in 10 separate facilities, mostly inmates awaiting trial.

RIKERS UNDER MICROSCOPE

Mayor Bill de Blasio has made Rikers reform a priority since taking office in 2014.

Peters, whom de Blasio appointed two years ago, said he had devoted one investigative squad exclusively to Rikers and increased its staff from 20 to 30 members.

Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark, whose office prosecutes most Rikers-related cases, recently proposed a new prosecution bureau based at the complex itself.

The list of law enforcement officials whose attention has turned to Rikers also includes Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.

Next month, federal prosecutors will put two guards on trial for the fatal beating of an inmate. Brian Coll, a correction officer, is accused of stomping Ronald Spear to death and enlisting two other guards to help him conceal the truth. One guard has already pleaded guilty to the cover-up.

Bharara’s office also threw the weight of the federal government behind a lawsuit brought on behalf of adolescent inmates by the New York Civil Liberties Union. The case led to a settlement mandating reforms overseen by a court-appointed monitor.

A two-year investigation by Bharara’s office found the correction department failed to discipline guards adequately for excessive force from 2011 to 2013, said Sara Shudofsky, the chief of the office’s civil division, in an interview.

In 2014, de Blasio also appointed Joseph Ponte to head the correction department. Since then, it has pursued internal investigations more aggressively, with 200 cases ending in disciplinary charges last year, up from 93 in 2013, according to department statistics.

The focus on guards has met stiff resistance from the correction officers union, which claims the effort hides the true causes of Rikers’ problems.

“It is clear from the department’s own statistics that inmates are attacking correction officers and other inmates at an alarming rate,” the union president, Norman Seabrook, said in a statement.

Seabrook also said visitors, not guards, are primarily responsible for smuggling contraband, citing the hundreds of visitors arrested in the last year for bringing illegal items into Rikers.

SMUGGLING SURGE

The Department of Investigation has also pursued broader reforms in response to the persistent problems, Peters said.

In 2014, an undercover investigator posing as a guard gained access to Rikers six times despite carrying heroin, marijuana and razor blades. Another department probe uncovered red flags among two-thirds of a class of new hires, such as prior felony convictions or known gang ties.

In response, the correction department has installed drug-sniffing dogs at Rikers’ entrances and increased its “applicant investigation unit” from 19 employees to 87, to screen potential recruits’ backgrounds and psychological fitness.

Both Peters and Ponte say their departments are now working more closely to address misconduct. That cooperation was on display this month, when a guard was caught on video assaulting an inmate who had thrown a cup of liquid in his direction.

Correction officials turned over the video to investigators immediately, and the guard was arrested within hours.

But the level of violence still troubles observers. The Lightfoot trial, which began in March, highlights the difficulties in curbing incidents by both inmates and officers.

Perez and his team were part of an elite unit assigned to reduce inmate attacks, but prosecutors say their solution was to turn to assault themselves.

Defense attorneys have argued at trial that the guards simply defended themselves when Lightfoot attacked them with a weapon. Prosecutors have said that assertion is false.

“They decided they were going to set the tone that night,” Assistant District Attorney Pishoy Yacoub said at the start of the trial.

(Editing by Scott Malone and Diane Craft)

India working to curb trafficking of women and children

India’s Women and Child Welfare minister Maneka Gandhi, works on a computer before an interview with Reuters at her office in New Delhi, India, October 19, 2015.

By Nita Bhalla

NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – India is working to find ways to curb the widespread trafficking of women and children in the country, including those from neighboring Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan, said Maneka Gandhi, India’s minister for women and children.

South Asia, with India at its center, is the fastest-growing and second-largest region for human trafficking in the world, after East Asia, according to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime.

Speaking at a conference on child adoption in India’s northeastern state of Meghalaya, Gandhi told delegates that the government was in the process of putting in place a series of policies to prevent human trafficking.

“We have discussed this issue in the cabinet. We had called a meeting with these countries last month in which all NGOs working on this and others in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh came,” she said on Monday.

“We will have another meeting next week in India. We are telling each other what we can do. This month, we are going to see that specific solutions come into being.”

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, there were 5,466 cases of human trafficking registered in 2014, an increase of 90 percent over the past five years.

Activists say this is a gross under-estimation of the scale of the problem, as much of the illicit organized crime is underground.

They claim thousands of people – largely poor, rural women and children – are lured to India’s towns and cities each year by traffickers who promise good jobs but sell them into domestic work or sex work or to industries such as textile workshops.

In many cases, they are not paid or are held in debt bondage. Some go missing, and their families cannot trace them.

Gandhi said India’s remote northeastern states, which include Assam, Sikkim, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, were a key source area for trafficking and called for the appointment of a special female police officer in each village to keep a check on crimes against women and children.

“There is an enormous amount of trafficking of children going on from the northeast. We find them in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and many going to Malaysia and Thailand. It is not fair,” she said.

“The job of special women police is to be vigilant in the village and see that children do not go missing, women are not beaten by husbands, girls are sent to school.”

A comprehensive new anti-trafficking law is also being drafted, say government officials. This will not only unify several existing laws, but also raise penalties for offenders and provide victims with rehabilitation and compensation.

The law, which is expected to be ready by the end of the year, will also provide for the establishment of a central investigative anti-trafficking agency to coordinate and work between states and special courts to hear such cases.

(Reporting by Nita Bhalla, editing by Alex Whiting. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Macedonian Police Fire Tear Gas on Migrants

Men try to break a border security fence during scuffles between Macedonian police and migrants and refugees near a makeshift camp at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idome

IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – Macedonian police fired tear gas on Wednesday to disperse around 50 migrants stranded in Greece who tried to pull down part of the razor wire fence separating the two countries, a Reuters witness said.

Scuffles briefly broke out and Greek riot police later intervened to break up the crowd.

Tensions have boiled over at the makeshift migrant camp near the town of Idomeni, where more than 10,000 migrants and refugees have been stranded since February, when Balkan countries shut their borders to anyone wanting to head north.

Hundreds of migrants were injured on Sunday in clashes with Macedonian police, who fired tear gas and rubber bullets after a group tried to storm the border.

The Balkan route was the preferred gateway into western and northern Europe last year for around 1 million migrants from the Middle East and beyond.

Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov and his Slovenian and Croatian counterparts, Borut Pahor and Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, later on Wednesday visited a migrant transit center just inside Macedonia, which houses 135 migrants trapped by the border closures.

After meeting some of the Croatian and Slovenian police who are helping to guard the Macedonian border, Ivanov said his country’s authorities would keep the migrant route closed in line with EU policies.

“The latest incidents on the border showed there is a great pressure from the migrants to re-open this corridor, but … we will respect that decision,” he told reporters.

(Reporting by Stoyan Nenov, Kole Casule and Aleksandar Vasovic; editing by Richard Balmforth)

Iran, France concerned with Syria violence

Residents inspect damages after an airstrike on the rebel held al-Maysar neighborhood in Aleppo

By Tom Perry, John Irish and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin

BEIRUT/PARIS/DUBAI (Reuters) – France and Iran voiced concern over escalating violence in Syria on Tuesday, echoing warnings from the United States and Russia as fighting near the city of Aleppo put more pressure on a fragile truce agreement.

The already widely violated “cessation of hostilities” agreement brokered by Russia and the United States has been strained to breaking point by an upsurge in fighting between Syrian government forces and rebels near Aleppo.

The escalation underlines the already bleak outlook for peace talks set to reconvene this week in Geneva. The United Nations says the talks will resume on Wednesday. The government delegation has said it is ready to join the talks from Friday.

With President Bashar al-Assad buoyed by Russian and Iranian military support, the Damascus government is due to hold parliamentary elections on Wednesday, a vote seen by Assad’s opponents as illegitimate and provocative.

Iran said an increase in ceasefire violations could harm the political process a day after Russia said it had asked the United States to stop a mobilization of militants near Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city until the conflict erupted in 2011.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, speaking after a meeting with U.N. Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura in Tehran, blamed the “increasing activities of armed groups” for the violations.

France, which backs the opposition, also expressed concern, but blamed the other side. “It warns that the impact of the regime and its allies’ offensives around Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta are a threat to the cessation of hostilities,” government spokesman Romain Nadal said. The Eastern Ghouta is an opposition-held area near Damascus.

Syria’s civil war has killed more than 250,000 people, created the world’s worst refugee crisis, allowed for the rise of Islamic State and drawn in regional and international powers. The intervention of Russia swung the war in Assad’s favor.

WASHINGTON “VERY, VERY CONCERNED”

The United States, which also backs rebels fighting Assad, on Monday said it was “very, very concerned” about increased violence and blamed the Syrian government for the vast majority of truce violations.

Both the government and a large number of rebel groups had pledged to respect the cessation of hostilities agreed in February with the aim of allowing a resumption of diplomacy towards ending the five-year-long war. Jihadist groups including the Nusra Front and Islamic State were not part of the deal.

A senior official close to the Syrian government said the truce had effectively collapsed.

“On the ground the truce does not exist,” said the official, who is not Syrian and declined to be named because he was giving a personal assessment. “The level of tension in Syria will increase in the coming months.”

The eruption of fighting on the front lines south of Aleppo marks the most serious challenge yet to the truce.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based organization that tracks the war, said dozens of government fighters had been killed in a big offensive to take the town of Telat al-Eis near the Aleppo-Damascus highway on Tuesday.

A rebel fighting in the area said the assault launched at dawn was backed by Russian air strikes and Iranian militias, adding that the attackers had suffered heavy losses. The Syrian military could not be reached for comment.

Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have both deployed in the southern Aleppo area in support of the government, while the Nusra Front is also fighting in close proximity to other rebels.

The Syrian prime minister was quoted on Sunday as saying government forces were preparing a major operation in the region with Russian support.

Further south in Homs province, Russia said one of its attack helicopters had crashed in the early hours of Tuesday, killing both pilots. It said the helicopter had not been shot down and the cause of the crash was being investigated.

“PROVOCATIVE” ELECTION

De Mistura, speaking in Tehran, said he and Amir-Abdollahian had agreed on the importance of the cessation continuing, that aid should reach every Syrian and that “a political process leading to a political transition is now crucially urgent”.

De Mistura, whose two predecessors quit, has said he wants the next round of Geneva talks to be “quite concrete” in leading towards a political transition.

Ahead of the first round of talks, Damascus had ruled out any discussion of the presidency, calling it a red line.

A senior Iranian official on Saturday rejected what he described as a U.S. request for Tehran’s help to make Assad leave power, saying he should serve out his term and be allowed to run in a presidential election “as any Syrian”.

Some members of the main Syrian opposition alliance, the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), arrived in Geneva on Tuesday, and U.N. spokesman in Geneva Ahmad Fawzi said the talks were expected to begin on Wednesday.

De Mistura is working according to a U.N. Security Council resolution approved in December that sets out a political process including elections after the establishment of “credible” governance and the approval of a new constitution.

The Syrian government says it is holding Wednesday’s elections in line with the existing timetable that requires a vote every four years. Russia has said the vote does not go against the peace talks and is in line with the constitution.

French President Francois Hollande last month, however, said the idea was provocative and “totally unrealistic”.

(Additional reporting by Tom Miles in Geneva, and Samia Nakhoul and Laila Bassam; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Peter Millership and Giles Elgood)

Abbas Offers To Meet Netanyahu

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas gestures as he delivers a speech in the West Bank city of Bethlehem

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Thursday he was working to stop Palestinian knife attacks and other street violence against Israel and had offered to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to rekindle peace efforts.

The remarks appeared to be an effort by the Western-backed Abbas to turn the tables on Israel, which has cast him as responsible for the diplomatic deadlock and the surge of bloodshed.

Speaking to Israel’s Channel 2 TV, Abbas gave rare details on his domestic security drives, a touchy matter as many Palestinians deem such moves collaboration with their enemy.

“Our security forces go into the schools to search pupils’ bags and see if they have knives. You don’t know this,” he said.

“In one school, we found 70 boys and girls who were carrying knives. We took the knives and spoke to them and said: ‘This is a mistake. We do not want you to kill and be killed. We want you to live, and for the other side to live as well.'”

Abbas’s administration and Israel coordinate security in the occupied West Bank despite the stalling two years ago of U.S.-sponsored negotiations on Palestinian statehood.

Netanyahu says he is open to renewing talks and that Abbas has been avoiding these while inciting violence with his rhetoric against Israel.

But Abbas told Channel 2 that the onus was on Netanyahu.

“I will meet with him, at any time. And I suggested, by the way, for him to meet,” the Palestinian leader said in English.

Asked what became of that overture, Abbas said: “No, no – it’s a secret. He can tell you about it.”

Netanyahu’s office had no immediate response.

Since October, Palestinian stabbings, car-rammings and gun ambushes have killed 28 Israelis and two U.S. citizens. At least 190 Palestinians, 129 of whom Israel says were assailants, have been killed by its forces. Many others were shot in clashes.

Abbas’ Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank under 1993 interim peace deals. Israeli forces now freely operate in PA areas, something Abbas described as sapping his credibility at home. He said he was willing to take action against Palestinians that Israeli intelligence deems a threat.

“If he (Netanyahu) gives me responsibility and tells me that he believes in (the) two-state solution and we sit around the table to talk about (the) two-state solution, this will give my people hope, and nobody dares to go and stab or shoot or do anything here or there,” Abbas said.

Netanyahu has said he would favor the creation of a Palestinian state as long as Israel’s terms are met such as its security needs. Whether Abbas could vouchsafe the Gaza Strip is in doubt, as it is under the de facto control of armed Hamas Islamists who oppose permanent coexistence with Israel.

For his part, Netanyahu has been hazy about whether he would remove Jewish settlements in the West Bank to make way for the Palestinians. He heads a pro-settlement coalition the includes one ultra-nationalist party opposed to Palestinian statehood.

(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Drought Protest Turns Violent

MANILA (Reuters) – Philippine police opened fire as a protest by thousands of rice farmers who lost their crops turned violent on Friday, killing one and wounding about a dozen, a leader of a farming group said.

About 6,000 farmers blocked a portion of the main highway in North Cotabato province on the southern island of Mindanao, demanding government assistance after drought linked by some to El Nino hit hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland.

“Loud bursts of gunfire erupted,” Norma Capuyan, leader of a farmers’ group, told reporters. “There was heavy volume of fire. We ran to a church compound and the police surrounded us.”

A farmer died on the spot and about a dozen others were wounded in the legs and shoulders, Capuyan said, adding the police first tried to disperse them with water cannon but started shooting when they held their ground.

North Cotabato Governor Emmylou Mendoza said about 20 police were wounded when the farmers attacked them with sticks and stones. She said the first shot was fired by the protesters.

The police issued a statement saying it was investigating.

“Any violation of national police rules and regulations shall be meted (out) with the appropriate penalty,” national police spokesman Chief Superintendent Wilben Mayor said in a statement.

The protest began on Wednesday when farmers barricaded the highway in Kidapawan, demanding a dialogue with the governor and the release of 15,000 sacks of rice she had promised to them as relief.

The agriculture ministry said more than 300,000 hectares of farmland had been affected by drought, causing loses of about 5.3 billion pesos ($115.09 million) in rice and corn. It said the effects of El Nino were minimal.

(Reporting by Manuel Mogato and Enrico dela Cruz; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Boko Haram Targets Civilians

A member of a civilian vigilante group holds a hunting rifle while a woman pumps water

KERAWA, Cameroon (Reuters) – Adama Simila wears a knife tied to his belt by a piece of rope, his only protection against Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist insurgents who have repeatedly targeted his home town in remote northern Cameroon.

While the threat once came from heavily armed, battle-hardened jihadists crossing from neighboring Nigeria, today Simila knows he is more likely to die at the hands of a teenage girl strapped with explosives.

“We’re here to look out for suicide bombers,” said the 31-year-old, a member of a local civilian defense force in the town of Kerawa.

After watching its influence spread during a six-year campaign that has killed around 15,000 people according to the U.S. military, Nigeria has now united with its neighbors to stamp out Boko Haram.

A regional offensive last year drove the insurgents from most of their traditional strongholds, denying them their dream of an Islamic emirate in northeastern Nigeria. An 8,700-strong regional force of troops from Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria is seeking to finish the job.

Now, increasingly on the back foot, Boko Haram is retaliating with a deadly guerrilla campaign against civilians, and ordinary people like Simila have become the last line of defense.

“I’m not scared. They are people, we are also people. We must die to live,” said Simila, who was at the Kerawa market in September when two girls detonated themselves, killing 19 people and injuring 143 others. A nearly identical bombing at the same market followed in January.

Outside Nigeria, Cameroon has been hardest hit by Boko Haram, which now operates out of bases in the Mandara Mountains, Sambisa Forest and Lake Chad — areas straddling the borders between Cameroon, Nigeria, Chad and Niger.

Since August 2014, the sect has carried out 336 attacks in Cameroon, according to the Cameroonian army, which has lost 57 of its own men while defending the north.

Of 34 recorded suicide bombings killing 174 people, 80 percent were carried out by girls and young women aged 14 to 24 years.

Girls abused as sex slaves by the group are psychologically damaged and therefore more vulnerable, the army says. Boko Haram also uses girls because they are thought less likely to arouse suspicion, although that may be changing now.

“The goal now is to stop Boko Haram incursions into villages, stop them from planting IEDs (home-made bombs), and stop suicide bombings,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Tetcha, a senior officer in the army’s operation against Boko Haram.

Cameroon has thrown vast resources into protecting the north.

In total nearly 10,000 of its troops are deployed against Boko Haram. The army’s Rapid Intervention Brigade (BIR), comprised of its most professional, best equipped soldiers, patrols a high-risk 400-km (250-mile) stretch of the border with Nigeria.

The U.S. military backs them with equipment, training and intelligence gathered from American drones flown out of a base in the town of Garoua. A Reuters reporter saw a small American military camp inside another BIR base in nearby Maroua.

Still, the terrain is mountainous and Boko Haram has rigged many roads with explosives designed to kill soldiers. Army officers are convinced that some fighters from Boko Haram, which pledged allegiance to Islamic State last year, have been trained at IS camps in Libya.

Armed incursions by Boko Haram fighters have dropped. But the army does not have enough soldiers to deploy in every town in northern Cameroon, and suicide bombers strike regularly, often several times in a single week.

“The border is under control, but it’s still very porous,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Emile Nlaté Ebalé, head of operations and logistics for the BIR’s mission in the north.

“EVERYBODY SUFFERS IN THIS PLACE”

Faced with such an asymmetrical threat, Cameroon’s army has turned to so-called vigilance committees for help.

As the blazing midday sun beat down on Kerawa, Bouba Ahmada walked along a dry, scrub-lined creek bed, an ancient flintlock musket slung around his neck.

“Here is Cameroon, over there is Nigeria,” he said, gesturing towards the abandoned homes just across the dusty expanse. “It’s empty. Only Boko Haram stays there.”

Made up of men and boys armed with machetes, home-made rifles or bows and arrows, these self-defense forces have the blessing of the local government.

They accompany the army on patrols and intelligence gathering missions, question travelers, and denounce to the military anyone deemed suspect.

Last week they intercepted two female suicide bombers and handed them over to the army before they were able to detonate.

“We are not 100 percent dependent on this information, but this information is crucial,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Tetcha, who is not only defending Cameroon but also a growing number of Nigerians.

Close to the border sits the U.N.-run Minawao camp, home to nearly 57,000 refugees who have fled Boko Haram in Nigeria.

“Everybody suffers in this place,” said James Zapania, a 24-year-old camp resident from Gwoza, Nigeria. “We’re not worried about Boko Haram coming here, we’re worried about food.”

Refugees like Zapania often receive a chilly welcome from suspicious local villagers, many of whom view them as collaborators or even underground Boko Haram fighters.

According to one Cameroonian officer, the army has removed a number of individuals from Minawao for “activities that were not in line with the behavior of a normal refugee”.

Suspicion is everywhere. And while Boko Haram infiltrators make up only a tiny portion of fleeing refugees, many, including the Cameroonian military, fear that desperation provides fertile ground for recruitment.

“We need to act quickly. There are young people with no work who could be vulnerable. When people are hungry, they are easily approached,” said Colonel Didier Badjeck, a Cameroonian military spokesman.

(Editing by Joe Bavier and Giles Elgood)