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| Carmen Taylor/AP |
Five witnesses who recounted the massacres to AFP said the Islamist militants feared they would be killed by advancing soldiers or separated from their wives when they fled the town.
They killed the women to prevent them from subsequently marrying soldiers or other so-called non-believers, they added. “The terrorists said they will not allow their wives to be married to infidels,” said Sharifatu Bakura, 39, a mother of three. According to Bakura’s account, which was supported by others, Boko Haram fighters received word of a military assault on Bama, formerly an Islamist stronghold in Borno state.
The insurgents had decided to flee to the nearby town of Gwoza before the troops’ arrival but first decided “to kill their wives so that nobody will remarry them”, she said. Bukara’s husband was killed by the insurgents four months ago but she was spared from a forced marriage because she was visibly pregnant. Boko Haram forcibly married scores of women in Bama after seizing it in September. Nigeria’s military announced the recapture of the town on Monday.
Witnesses, who were taken under military protection this week to Borno’s capital Maiduguri, 73 kms (45 miles) away, said the killing of women began 10 days before Bama was liberated. The Islamists said “if they kill their wives, they would remain pious until both of them meet again in heaven, where they would re-unite”, said Salma Mahmud, another witness.
A vigilante who fought alongside the military in the battle to retake Bama, Abba Kassim, said he saw “dozens of women corpses” in the town. While other witnesses reportedly a similarly high casualty figure the numbers were impossible to verify. Nigeria’s national security spokesman Mike Omeri told AFP he would try to verify the reports while the military could immediately be reached for comment.
Intelligence reports of the stolen jetliners were distributed within the U.S. government over the past two weeks and included a warning that one or more of the aircraft could be used in an attack later this month on the date marking the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, said U.S. officials familiar with the reports.
“There are a number of commercial airliners in Libya that are missing,” said one official. “We found out on September 11 what can happen with hijacked planes.”Nothing has officially been confirmed.
Battling Palestinian militants in Gaza two years ago, Israel found itself pressed from all sides by unfriendly Arab neighbors to end the fighting.
Not this time.
After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip. That, in turn, may have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated cease-fire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed.
“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under several presidents.
“At the time we were all happy with the liberation, it was not important who was there. Raqqa was for all Syrians and all those who helped liberate it,” said one of several residents and activists contacted by Reuters via Skype.
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In the weeks that followed, prisons appeared in public buildings, electricity was cut off and shops were banned from selling tobacco, considered anti-Islamic by the ultra-puritan, masked Islamist fighters who began patrolling the city.
“They also closed the universities saying that because women are also taking lessons there it should be shut,” said a resident whose son is a media activist and is now wanted by the Islamists.
[Snip]
“When Raqqa was liberated we thought now that the regime is out, the era of freedom has begun. People started cleaning the streets. We thought we were living a dream,” said another resident who, like most Raqqa locals, declined to be named for their safety. “It was dream. They killed it.”Public executions have become commonplace, churches have been burned, and the streets empty out by nightfall since the only buildings that have electricity are the ones the rebels stole.
“All the FSA cared for was stealing and accumulating money. From the first day of Raqqa’s liberation they left it to the Islamic State."
"They (Russia) plan to hold the Olympics on the bones of our ancestors, on the bones of many, many dead Muslims, buried on the territory of our land on the Black Sea, and we as mujahideen are obliged to not permit that, using any methods allowed us by the almighty Allah."
"I call on you, every mujahid, either in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan or on the territory of the Caucasus to use maximum force on the path of Allah to disrupt this Satanic dancing on the bones of our ancestors."The bones he's referring to are Muslims who were killed in the 19th century by Russian troops.
Interior Ministry deputy spokesman Najib Danish told the AFP news agency that 34 civilians, six soldiers, and four policemen were killed, while some 91 people, mostly civilians, were injured.And President Hamid Karzai really thinks he can negotiate with the Taliban? They're never going to play nice, until Afghanistan is once again firmly in Taliban hands.
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Authorities say that the attack took place while 13 Taliban prisoners were in court, but none of the inmates escaped. But a doctor at a local hospital said that one prisoner was being treated for his wounds.
Farah Province Governor Mohammad Akram Khpalwak told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that the attackers used an Afghan military truck and were wearing Afghan National Army uniforms as they stormed the small-town courthouse.
"We had some security measures in place and we have the capacity to confront meticulously planned deadly attacks. But preventing such attacks usually comes with a lot of casualties," Khpalwak said.
"Although our security arrangements were tight, unfortunately the enemy attacked places visited by ordinary people."
Khpalwak said that the attack during peak office hours caused so many civilian casualties because many litigants were waiting for their cases to be heard in court.
A Taliban spokesman took responsibility for the attack. The insurgents described it as a carefully prepared operation.
The death toll in the Farah attack was the highest in a single attack in Afghanistan for more than two years. Some 80 people were killed in an attack on a Shi'ite Muslim shrine in December 2011.
Already, some rebels and other opponents of Mr Assad have sought to implement their particularly harsh version of Sharia on a small scale, particularly using corporal punishment against suspected criminals and government supporters.
Rebel interrogators in this town, about 20 kilometres from the Turkish border, said they had beaten the legs of detainees with sticks.
Insurgents in nearby Mare' threatened to amputate the hands of alleged thieves and paraded them through town in an effort to publicly shame them, residents said.
In Aleppo, where fierce fighting between insurgents and government forces has raged for weeks, one rebel leader said he had ordered lashings using rubber hoses and knotted ropes.
Abu Yaqoub, a 26-year-old Muslim cleric in rebel-held Tell Rif'at, believes Sharia would provide the best form of government for Syria in a post-Assad era.
"God willing," Mr Yaqoub replied, when asked if Islamic law should be imposed nationwide.Read more about the situation regarding the Islamists in The National.
The protesters demonstrated under the slogan: "There is no terrorism in Syria except that of Assad."
Protesters in the Eastern Ghuta region, just outside Damascus and which has come under regular air raids by the regime army, held up a sign reading: "Thank you to all the 'terrorists' in Syria who are fighting Assad."
"We are all Al-Nusra Front," it said, in reference to the jihadist group blacklisted by Washington on Tuesday.
Lines of children and men linked arms and carried the three-starred flag of the revolution as they called for downfall of the regime in the street as shopkeepers looked on.
