Latest news with #militants
Arab News
2 days ago
- General
- Arab News
Four soldiers, seven ‘Indian-sponsored' militants killed in Pakistan's northwest, military says
ISLAMABAD: Four Pakistani soldiers and seven 'Indian-sponsored' militants were killed in separate encounters in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, the Pakistani military said late Thursday. Islamabad has accused India of orchestrating several militant attacks in Pakistan, amid heightened tensions between the two neighbors since traded fire earlier this month in worst fighting between them in decades. New Delhi denies the allegations. On Thursday, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the Pakistani military's media wing, said the militants attempted to attack a security forces' check-post in KP's North Waziristan district, which was effectively thwarted by Pakistani forces. 'Indian sponsored khwarij [militants] attempted to attack a Security Forces Check Post in general area Shawal, North Waziristan District. The attempt was effectively thwarted by own troops and in ensuing fire exchange, six Indian sponsored khwarij were sent to hell,' it said in a statement. 'However, during intense fire exchange, Lt. Daniyal Ismail… a brave young officer who was leading his troops from front, fought gallantly and embraced Shahadat along with his three men.' Pakistani security forces neutralized one more 'Indian-sponsored' militant in another encounter in the Chitral district, according to the ISPR. 'Sanitization operations are being conducted to eliminate any other Indian-sponsored kharji found in the area,' it added. Pakistan and India often accuse each other of supporting militancy. This month's standoff, which saw the neighbors trade missiles, drones and artillery fire, was triggered by an attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir that India blamed on Pakistan. Islamabad has denied involvement. Islamabad blames India of backing a separatist insurgency in Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province as well as religiously motivated militant groups, like the Pakistani Taliban, in KP. India denies the allegations.
Arab News
3 days ago
- Business
- Arab News
Militant attacks hit Mozambique as Total readies to resume gas project
MAPUTO: A series of attacks in northern Mozambique this month point to a resurgence of violence by Daesh-linked militants as energy giant TotalEnergies prepares to resume a major gas project, analysts say. The group terrorized northern Mozambique for years before brazenly vowing in 2020 to turn the northern gas-rich Cabo Delgado province into a caliphate. TotalEnergies paused a multi-billion-dollar liquefied natural gas project there in 2021 following a wave of bloody raids that forced more than a million people to flee. The insurgency was pushed to the background by a months-long unrest that followed elections in October. But there has been a new wave of violence. In May, the Islamists attacked two military installations, claiming to kill 11 soldiers in the first and 10 in the second. A security expert confirmed the first attack and put the toll at 17. There was no comment from the Mozambican security forces. There were two dramatic strikes earlier – a raid on a wildlife reserve in the neighboring Niassa province late April killed at least two rangers, while an ambush in Cabo Delgado claimed the lives of three Rwandan soldiers. Also unusual was a thwarted attack on a Russian oceanographic vessel in early May that the crew said in a distress message was launched by 'pirates,' according to local media. 'Clearly there is a cause and effect because some actions correspond exactly to important announcements in the gas area,' said Fernando Lima, a researcher with the Cabo Ligado conflict observatory which monitors violence in Mozambique, referring to the $4.7 billion funding approved in mid-March by the US Export-Import Bank for the long-delayed gas project. 'The insurgents are seeing more vehicles passing by with white project managers,' said Jean-Marc Balencie of the French-based political and security risk group Attika Analysis. 'There's more visible activity in the region and that's an incentive for attacks.' Conflict tracker ACLED recorded at least 80 attacks in the first four months of the year. The uptick was partly due to the end of the rainy season which meant roads were once again passable, it said. TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanne said last Friday that the security situation had 'greatly improved' although there were 'sporadic incidents.' The attack that stalled the TotalEnergies project in 2021 occurred in the port town of Palma and lasted several days, sending thousands fleeing into the forest. ACLED estimated that more than 800 civilians and combatants were killed while independent journalist Alex Perry reported after an investigation that more than 1,400 were dead or missing. Rwandan forces deployed alongside the Mozambique military soon afterwards, their number increasing to around 5,000, based on Rwandan military statements. The concentration of forces in Cabo Delgado 'allows insurgents to easily conduct operations in Niassa province,' said a Mozambican military officer on condition of anonymity. The raid on the tourist wildlife lodge straddling Cabo Delgado and Niassa provinces was for 'propaganda effect,' said Lima, as it grabbed more international media attention than hits on local villages that claim the lives of locals. Strikes on civilians, with several cases of decapitation reported, often fall under the radar because of the remoteness of the impoverished region and official silence. 'More than 25,000 people have been displaced in Mozambique within a few weeks,' the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said last week. This was in addition to the 1.3 million the UN said in November had been displaced since the conflict began in 2017. 'The renewed intensity of the conflict affects regions previously considered rather stable,' said UNHCR's Mozambique representative Xavier Creach. In Niassa, for example, about 2,085 people fled on foot after an attack on Mbamba village late April where women reported witnessing beheadings. More than 6,000 people have died in the conflict since it erupted, according to Acled.
Washington Post
3 days ago
- General
- Washington Post
India-Pakistan clashes renew fears over nuclear risk
The tenuous ceasefire that brought India and Pakistan back from the brink of war this month was hailed on both sides as a victory. But experts warn that the disruption to the regional equilibrium renews concern over the risks posed by armed conflict between nuclear powers. Following an attack by militants in India-administered Kashmir that left more than 20 people dead, India accused Pakistan of involvement in the attack — a claim Pakistani officials denied. India responded with strikes in Pakistan, which rapidly escalated into an exchange of attacks that included an Indian strike near Pakistan's army headquarters, after which U.S. officials stepped in to help broker a ceasefire deal.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
How social media lies fuelled a rush to war between India and Pakistan
As missiles and drones crisscrossed the night skies above India and Pakistan earlier this month, another invisible war was taking place. Not long after the Indian government announced Operation Sindoor, the military offensive against Pakistan triggered by a militant attack in Kashmir that Delhi blamed on Islamabad, reports of major Pakistani defeats began to circulate online. What began as disparate claims on social media platforms such as X soon became a cacophony of declarations of India's military might, broadcast as 'breaking news' and 'exclusives' on the country's biggest news programmes. According to these posts and reports, India had variously shot down multiple Pakistani jets, captured a Pakistani pilot as well as Karachi port and taken over the Pakistani city of Lahore. Another false claim was that Pakistan's powerful military chief had been arrested and a coup had taken place. 'We'll be having breakfast in Rawalpindi tomorrow,' was a widely reshared post in the midst of hostilities, referring to the Pakistani city where its military is headquartered. Many of these claims were accompanied by footage of explosions, crumbling structures and missiles being shot from the sky. The problem was, none of them were true. A ceasefire on 10 May brought the two countries back from the brink of all-out war after the latest conflict, which marked the biggest crisis in decades between the nuclear-armed rivals, and was ignited after militants opened fire at a beauty spot in Indian-controlled Kashmir, killing 26 people, mainly Indian tourists. India blamed Pakistan for the attack – a charge that Islamabad has denied. Yet even as military hostilities have ceased, analysts, factcheckers and activists have documented how a fully-fledged war of disinformation took place online. Misinformation and disinformation was also being circulated widely in Pakistan. The Pakistan government removed a ban on X just before the conflict broke out, and researchers found it immediately became a source of misinformation, though not on the same scale as in India. Recycled and AI-generated footage purportedly showing Pakistani military victories was widely shared on social media and then amplified by both its mainstream media, respected journalists and government ministers to make fake claims such as the capture of an Indian pilot, a coup in the Indian army and Pakistani strikes wiping out India's defences. There were also widely circulated fake reports that a Pakistani cyber-attack had wiped out most of the Indian power grid and that Indian soldiers had raised a white flag to surrender. In particular, video game simulations proved to be a popular tool in spreading disinformation about Pakistan 'delivering justice' against India. A report into the social media war that surrounded the India-Pakistan conflict, released last week by civil society organisation The London Story, how X and Facebook owner Meta 'became fertile ground for the spread of war narratives, hate speech, and emotionally manipulative disinformation' and 'became drivers of nationalist incitement' in both countries. In a written statement, a Meta spokesperson said, it took 'significant steps to fight the spread of misinformation', including removing content and labelling and reducing the reach of stories marked as false by their factcheckers. While disinformation and misinformation were rampant on both sides, in India 'the scale went beyond what we have seen before,' said Joyojeet Pal, associate professor at the school of information, University of Michigan. Pal is among those arguing that the misinformation campaign went beyond the usual nationalist propaganda often seen in both India and Pakistan: 'This had the power to push two nuclear armed countries closer to war.' Analysts say that it is evidence of a new digital frontier in warfare, where an onslaught of tactical misinformation is used to manipulate the narrative and escalate tensions. Factcheckers say misinformation including the repurposing of old footage and widespread fake claims of military victories mirrored much of what had come out of Russia in the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war. The Washington DC-based Centre for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), which tracked and documented the misinformation coming from both sides, warned that the weaponisation of misinformation and disinformation in the the most recent India-Pakistan conflict was 'not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a broader global trend in hybrid warfare'. Raqib Hameed Naik, the executive director of CSOH, said there had been 'a pretty catastrophic failure' on the part of social media platforms to moderate and control the scale of disinformation that was being generated from both India and Pakistan. Of the 427 most concerning posts CSOH examined on X, some of which had almost 10 million views, only 73 had been flagged with a warning. X did not respond to request for comment. Fabricated reports from India largely first emerged on social media platforms X and Facebook, Naik said, often shared or reposted by verified right-wing accounts. Many accounts were open supporters of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government, led by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, which has a long history of using social media to push its agenda. BJP politicians also reposted some of this material. Among the examples circulating were a 2023 video of an Israeli airstrike on Gaza that was falsely claimed as an Indian strike on Pakistan, as well as an image of an Indian naval drill from the same year presented as evidence that the Indian navy had attacked and taken over Karachi port. Video game imagery was passed off as real-life footage of India's air force downing one of Pakistan's JF-17 fighter jets, while footage from the Russian-Ukraine war was claimed to be scenes of 'massive airstrikes on Pakistan'. Doctored AI visuals were widely circulated to show Pakistan's defeat and visuals of a Turkish pilot was used in fabricated reports of a captured Pakistani pilot. Doctored images were used to fabricate reports of the murder of Pakistan's popular former prime minister Imran Khan. Many of these posts first generated by Indian social media accounts gained millions of views and the misinformation spread to some of India's most widely watched TV news. India's mainstream media, which has already suffered a major loss of credibility owing to its heavy pro-government stance under Modi, is now facing difficult questions. Some prominent anchors have already issued apologies. Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), an Indian human rights organisation, has filed formal complaints to the broadcasting watchdog for 'serious ethical breaches' of six of the country's most prominent television news channels in their reporting of Operation Sindoor. Teesta Setalvad, secretary of CJP, said channels had completely abandoned their responsibilities as neutral news broadcasters. 'Instead, they became propaganda collaborators,' she said. Kanchan Gupta, a senior adviser to the Indian ministry of information and broadcasting, denied any government role in the misinformation campaign. He said the government had been 'very alert' to the issue of misinformation and has issued explicit advice to mainstream media reporting on the conflict. 'We set up a monitoring centre which operated 24-7 and scrutinised every bit of disinformation that could have a cascading impact, and a fact check was put out immediately. Social media platforms also cooperated with us to take down vast numbers of accounts spreading this disinformation. Whatever was in the ambit of the law to stop this was done.' Gupta said that 'strong' notices had since been issued to several news channels for a violation of broadcasting rules. Nonetheless, he emphasised that the 'fog of war is universally accepted as a reality. It is a fact that in any conflict situation, whether overt or covert conflict, the nature of reportage tends to go high-pitch'.
Washington Post
5 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
How U.S. cuts in Somalia could imperil the fight against al-Shabab
As President Donald Trump overhauls U.S. policy in Africa — slashing foreign aid programs and paring back assistance for allied forces in the region — al-Shabab militants are on the march in Somalia. One of al-Qaeda's best-funded and most lethal global affiliates, al-Shabab has retaken important towns from Somali forces over the past three months. Its fighters previously launched an assault on a U.S. airfield in Kenya and plotted attacks on the U.S. mainland.
