Ugandan intervention in Congo risks stoking ethnic violence
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Economist
24-07-2025
- Economist
Ugandan intervention in Congo risks stoking ethnic violence
NEAR A HILLTOP village of thatched huts and purple cassava fields, young men with Kalashnikovs stand guard by a dirt road. Though the mood is relaxed, the checkpoint in Ituri province in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a reminder that the whole region is racked by violence. Since 2017, militias linked to two of Ituri's main ethnic groups, the Hema and the Lendu, have battled over access to land, livestock and gold mines, forcing more than 1m people in Ituri to flee their homes. Some 100,000 were displaced between January and March alone.
Reuters
03-06-2025
- Reuters
Syrian man handed life sentence in Germany for war crimes
BERLIN, June 3 (Reuters) - A German court sentenced a Syrian man to life in prison on Tuesday for crimes against humanity and war crimes it said he had committed as a leading member of a Hezbollah-backed militia during Syria's civil war. The Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart found the 33-year-old man guilty of leading a militia that carried out brutal attacks on Sunni Muslim civilians in his home town of Busra al-Sham in southern Syria. It did not name the man. In 2013 the militia beat three people with Kalashnikovs and handed them over to the military intelligence of Syria's then-president Bashar al-Assad, which tortured them and kept them in appalling conditions, the court found. In a 2014 raid, the group also forced a 40-year-old man and his family from their home. The man was tortured and later found on the street unable to walk due to his injuries, the court verdict said. Hezbollah, a Lebanese Iranian-backed Shi'ite group, played a major role propping up Assad during the civil war in Syria. German prosecutors have used universal jurisdiction laws that allow them to seek trials for suspects in crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world. Based on these laws, several people suspected of war crimes during the Syrian conflict have been arrested in the last few years in Germany, which is home to almost one million Syrians. In a landmark case in 2022 a German court jailed Syrian ex-intelligence officer Anwar Raslan for life for murder, rape and crimes against humanity, in the first ever conviction for state-backed torture committed during Syria's civil war. In January this year, a high-ranking member of the Islamic State militant group, a Syrian national identified as Ossama A., was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity in Germany, partly for alleged involvement in a genocide against the minority Yazidi community. The trial of the man sentenced on Tuesday began last October and lasted for 42 court days. It included 30 witnesses, most of whom were Syrian nationals now living around the world, testifying over multiple sessions. The court also consulted expert witnesses and reviewed extensive image and video evidence, some of which was made available after Assad's fall from power last December, including images of detention facilities and looted homes. The court said the verdict could be appealed.
Telegraph
26-03-2025
- Telegraph
Gazans are seeing Hamas for the murderers they are, only its Western fellow travellers remain blind
Over the last 48 hours, there have been more protests against Hamas inside Gaza than we have seen over the past 17 months in London. The marches first emerged in the north of the Strip, with beleaguered Gazans bravely calling for the release of Israeli hostages, facing down reprisals from their jihadi overlords. When did you last hear such demands at the rallies endured by our capital on Saturdays? The uprisings are ongoing. They have spread south, even erupting in the Hamas stronghold of Jabalia in Gaza City, where a protest in 2019 was viciously repressed by the jihadis. It is impossible to know whether they will be snuffed out by hastily recruited 16-year-olds with Kalashnikovs or if this is the start of something bigger. But the episode has already neatly revealed the deplorable hypocrisy at the heart of Gaza activism in Britain, seemingly more concerned with feeding a lust for the denigration of Israel than the welfare of the Palestinians. I first learnt about the protests from my old friend in Gaza City, whom I know from my time as a foreign correspondent. He sent me a message on WhatsApp containing links to footage on Facebook. I was unable to open them. 'Try to please,' he implored. 'Important videos.' He was desperate to get the word out because he and his comrades felt they were facing a media blackout. The irony was stark. The BBC falls over itself to blame Israel the minute civilians are killed, without waiting for the facts; yet risk your life to protest against Hamas and the prevarication is palpable. Here were real-life Palestinians making their voices heard in Gaza, only for journalists to stick their fingers in their ears because it disrupted the narrative they'd been peddling for the past, well, forever. From one point of view, you'd have thought that the story would be widely covered. After all, isn't the BBC normally keen to make a distinction between the fanatics of Hamas and the innocent civilians of Gaza as soon as an Israeli bomb lands? The problem, however, is that what serves the narrative in one context can have the opposite effect in another. The unpalatable truth is this: in the back of every liberal mind there lurks a guilty sympathy for Hamas. They have learnt not to say it out loud, but in a brain addled by centrist fundamentalism, decolonisation dogma and critical race theory, it is hard to resist the siren call to embrace the most savage jihadism simply because it fits. The white man is the enemy. The imperialists are to blame. Colonialism is the worst evil ever to befall mankind and the underdog deserves solidarity, ergo resistance is justified. This is how they think. Yasser Arafat's alignment with the decolonisation movement in the Sixties, in particular the Algerian defeat of the French, was a stroke of genius which won unquestioning solidarity from the Left. The delusion persists today. The reality, of course, is that most Jews are not white. Israel is not a colonial power. The Palestinians have been offered a state on several occasions – including the 2008 Olmert proposal, which satisfied 100 per cent of their supposed demands – but turned down every one in favour of bloodshed. Hamas is no different from Islamic State. 'Resistance' is simply code for the wanton rape, butchery and mutilation of families in their beds, motivated by fanatical religion (Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, for God's sake). But when you're wearing your BBC goggles, such subtle distinctions as these become cloudy. Pretty soon, you end up thinking Yahya Sinwar is Che Guevara. Shamefully, this dogma continues to dominate on the Left today. You just can't shake them out of it. So we end up with patrician BBC journalists ignoring facts which don't match their dogmatic understanding of the world, as they don't want to confuse the public. We see activists in London, in their keffiyehs and crop-tops, tearing down hostage posters just as the weary people of Gaza take to the streets in defiance of their jihadi oppressors. Resistance is justified, you say? Perhaps. So where's your solidarity for the Palestinian resistance against Hamas, who brought this nightmare on their heads in the first place?
