March 3, 2016

As a result of the popular unrest engulfed the Oromia kilil, it appears an interesting debate resurfaced among Ethiopian intellectuals of late. The long held consensus among the mainstream intellectuals that TPLF instituted ethnic based politics disintegrates the country, deprives the citizens to exercise individual freedom, restricts citizens movements to enclosed ethnic enclave, and encourages ethnic discrimination is challenged.  What makes the current debate interesting is that it didn’t come from the usual quarter of ill wishers of Ethiopia.  It came from good wishing intellectuals, notably Dr. Messay Kebede and Dr. Minga Negash (Unity Overrides Everything! – Messay Kebede January 20, 2016; Ethiopia Understanding the current protests in Ethiopia: A rejoinder By Minga Negash, February 24, 2016).  In their articles the two advocated to consider ethnic based resistance as means of democratizing Ethiopia.  We now found ourselves back to square one, the ways and means to create a just and fair society in Ethiopia have not drawn consensus among intellectuals.

Dr. Messay argued that ethnicity is already institutionalized in the last twenty-five years and will be difficult to go back to the ‘liberal’ type democratic systems. While, Dr. Minga argued that ethnic parties can serve as one of the civic-like institutions for safe guarding democracy as in liberal democracy civic institutions. Neither of them explained in any detail what mechanism will be implemented to shape the state of Ethiopia, if the country decided to institutionalize ethnic based administration. Without a suggested mechanism to democratically implement the recommendation, peaceful coexistence can only be assumed not assured.  Drs Messay and Minga grossly underestimated the transformative power of democratic process.  Both have ignored the fact that the current structural systems is a consequence of dictatorship not a process of democratization.  They also ignored the fact that the Ethiopians struggle is not limited to removing TPLF but also includes removing the destructive institutions TPLF created to subvert democracy.

Ethiopia is a country with over 80 ethnic groups in varying population sizes and geographic settlements. To create the current ethnic administrative kilil, it has taken the brutal dictatorship of TPLF that would not have been created in democratic process. Without their consents, some ethnic groups have been lumped together and others have been split. To make the matter worst, resources have been unfairly divided among the killils.  When ethnic killil have been created, a time bomb has been planted.  By embracing the process that planted the time bomb and keeping the ethnic administrative structure that keeps the time bomb ticking will even more threatens the existence of Ethiopia.

Modern democracy has been around for long time. We should not be confused what democracy is and what it is not. Similarly, we know what democratic countries have accomplished and could accomplish. For properly functioning democracy, free civil institutions, the rule of law and democratic government are essential ingredients.  All these institutions are grounded on individual rights.  A step out of these principles, a democratic system simply ceases to exist and function. What Drs Messay and Minga offered Ethiopians for choices are false choices among dictatorships of one ethnic group over the other, not a true choice between democracy and dictatorship.  Choosing among various dictatorships is far from reaching peaceful coexistence among ethnic groups.

For the very few who have access to the Internet, it is easy to notice that the Ethiopian social media has been manipulated by the few who mastered to exaggerate and deceive segment of population with less information supply.  The few fanatics who dominated the social media solicited public support with multi-tiered of falsehood and coordinated deceit.  Even the learned citizens are victims of misinformation.  To counter this misinformation, the public has to liberate itself from manipulation and perversion.  The capacity of various independent media outlets for collecting information from the ground is yet to be developed. The mobilization of ethnicity for taking social and political action has been effective among few ethnic groups.  By any imagination, these few incidences should not have president to turn the struggle to democratize Ethiopia to different direction.

From the experience of other countries who established long term peace, the lessons to learn is that the long process of educating and rousing the public to the truth will provide the people knowledge of the true liberty and expose the myths and illusions spread by ethnic demagogues. Ethiopians should not forget, for a moment, the timelessness of liberal democracy and espouse to create institutions that protect the rights of all citizens and make them available for future generations of Ethiopia.  At this critical period, what Ethiopians need is far-sighted leaders who will deliver the country from TPLF evil hands.

e-mail: ethio_nation@yahoo.com

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Mahlet Fasil

The federal high court Arada branch 19th criminal bench has today granted the police investigating senior opposition figure Bekele Gerba and 22 others additional 28 days and adjourned the next hearing until April 15th 2016. The police were given the additional 28 days at a closed hearing this afternoon.

The same court has also adjourned the case for Getachew Shiferaw, Editor-in-Chief of Negere Ethiopia, the opposition’s Blue party newspaper, and two others in his case until April 15th. Getachew Shiferaw et al were detained in January this year. No charges are brought against both cases.

Bekele Gerba, who is the first secretary general of the opposition Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC), was arrested on Dec. 23 2015 following the initial weeks of the Oromo protests that gripped Ethiopia since Nov. 2015. Other 22 members of the OFC were also arrested in what many say was the heaviest crackdown against the party.

Bekele Gerba et al have already appeared in court three times and today’s was the fourth and would have been the last appearance for the police to request additional days. Boontu Bekele, Bekele’s daughter, told Addis Standard this afternoon that since the last three days his families were allowed regular visits for the first time because the ”police said they have finished their investigations,” Boontu said.

In January Bekele Gerba et al went on a hunger strike protesting against inhuman treatments in the hands of the police including denial of family visits at the notorious prison ward called Ma’ekelawi. The families of all the detainees were then briefly allowed to visit. But the situation didn’t seem to have improved.

Wondmu Ebbissa, the lawyer representing Bekele Gerba et al, told Addis Standard this afternoon that Bekele and the 22 others with him are kept in a cell of 4 X 5 m that includes a toilet and beds for all.

Today’s grant by the court of the additional 28 days is against Art 20 sub article 3 of Ethiopia’s infamous Anti-Terrorism Proclamation (ATP), which allows police investigating detainees to request only four appointments of 28 days each from a presiding court. After that the proclamation allows detainees the right to a bail.

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By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO

Mail & Guardian Africa.

Where are the new roads being built in Africa taking the people, and what do the residents in the mushrooming apartments in the cities dream of?

IF you drop in on Ethiopia once every one or two years, the outward progress you see in places like the capital Addis Ababa, is very impressive.

It is a country in a hurry. It is pouring cement, stone, and laying down tar like it is going out of fashion. Ethiopia has been notching up the fastest growth of any African – and world –economy, turning nearly 11% a year.

If you ever visited Ethiopia in the awful days of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military junta in the 1980s, the difference is like Earth and Mars.

Some old habits die hard, though. Ethiopia is not a bright-eyed democracy by any measure. The ruling EPRDF dominates power, and still rules with hammer and tongs, though with a velvet touch. And while its economy is galloping, the benefits have not been fairly shared and inequality is deepening.

Its state-led capitalism and political model were recently tested when high-handed plans to expand the capital into neighbouring Oromo lands provoked protests. According to human rights organisations, over 200 Oromo protestors were killed in the ensuing confrontation.

The government has now backed down and abandoned the expansion, for now, and Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn has struck a rare moderate tone on the Oromo demonstrations.

Also, despite the progress, and an aggressive push to bring more electricity and green power to the grid, outages are still frequent in Addis Ababa. Internet services are in the Stone Age, compared, for example, to what is offer in tech savvy Nairobi.

Hungry, but…

A drought, the worst in nearly 60 years, has also further exposed the country’s fragilities, and nearly 11 million people are in need of food aid.

Yet, it is the fact of the hungry Ethiopians, that reveal the real changes the country has made. Thirty years ago, a drought that was probably only half as severe set off a famine in which, according to some estimates, up to million people died.

It served up horror images of people dying daily like flies, and led to the birth of the celebrity charity concert, with the Bob Geldof-inspired Live Aid concert.

In some of those places where thousands perished, today there are lush irrigated farms.

READ: Ethiopia’s remarkable turnaround: 30 years after famine, village now hosts visitors to show off food security

If there is a miracle then, it is that today millions are hungry and suffering, but there have hardly been any deaths reported.

An African mirror

However, I was tantalised by something elsewhere – how the state of affairs in Ethiopia might mirror what is happening in the rest of Africa.

Like for other countries on the continent, the more interesting question is where the new roads are taking the people, and what the dreams of the residents in the mushrooming apartments in cities like Addis Ababa, Kigali, Nairobi, Accra, and Dakar, are.

It’s not easy to read, for the clues are sometimes hidden in strange places.

I was talking to a thoughtful African economist in Addis Ababa about the drought, when I joked that what Ethiopia needed to do was to buy some rain.

However, he didn’t take it lightly. He looked at me seriously and said, “actually, rain is not a problem. What African countries like Ethiopia that have been hard hit by drought need to do, is to invest in the technology to make rain. It’s possible, you know”.

It is. The Chinese make a lot of rain, and recently even Zimbabwe put some money into seeding clouds to water its parched lands.

READ: In search of rain: Zimbabwe starts modifying weather as drought deepens

I chose to read his comments metaphorically.

What I heard was that even what countries like Ethiopia are doing isn’t what will make Africa a big winner.

For that, we needed to move beyond exploiting the gifts of nature – the minerals, oil, weather, wildlife tourism – or those that were made by our ancestors, like the pyramids, the old Coptic cathedrals, the stone monuments of the Great Zimbabwe, and cave paintings, and do our own new things through innovation.

Zola Tatto in Addis Ababa has been busy allowing people like this Ethiopian woman make a statement. It’s a growing business in Africa and points to interesting explorations by young people on the continent. (Zola Tatto/FB).

Thus if you are to have tourism, then do it like the South Africans, and build Sun City. You can hang a bungee-jumping rope at Victoria Falls, yes, but let it be the start of something ambitious, not the end.

There are not too many matured developments of this, beyond a few like Sole Rebels, the very successful Ethiopian shoe company founded by Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu.

It makes and sells revolutionary eco friendly and vegan handcrafted shoes. It was the world’s first fair trade green footwear firm certified by the World Fair Trade Organisation (WFTO) and is now one of Ethiopia’s most thriving businesses.

It sells its products in over 55 countries, and its biggest markets are in Austria, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and the US.

More Sole Rebels

But will Africa have more Sole Rebels? Yes.

In Addis Ababa, when you park in a mall lot or along a street, something very familiar in other African cities happens. A hawk-eyed vendor nearby will slide up to your car window, and offer to sell you a cheap phone charger, fake Rolex, and other wares.

If you don’t buy, he will present pirate DVDs of the latest Hollywood movies. If you still don’t bring out your wallet, he will probably imagine that you are downcast. He will dig deep in his merchandise and bring out pornography DVDs – speaking highly of local offerings.

It can be offensive, and clearly it’s not the way the vendor will get to heaven.

However, in other ways it is also an act that shows a willingness to go to a forbidden and uncomfortable place, which is where truly ground-breaking ideas reside. People like those vendors are not the type who will pray for rain. They are more likely to try and make it.

Tattoos and forbidden things

Indeed, this time, I noticed in Addis a large number of young men and women spotting strange hairstyles and tattoos (some in unusual places). At one tourist art shop a cashier wearing a low cut blouse had an unmissable wild flower tattoo that obviously started much further down snaking all the way to her neck.

“Good” girls don’t do those kind of tattoos.

And that is what makes it a good indicator. It is a statement of hyper individuality, and a bold break away from what African tradition would approve, and therefore quite promising.

It’s refreshing to see these new explorations of the self and uncharted frontiers around Africa. Inside them, are modern day versions of the 15th century explorer Vasco da Gama.

As long as there is an army of restless and Africans out there, there will be more exciting things, like Ackeem Ngwenya’s shape-shifting wheel, or the Moyo Waterfront Restaurant in South Africa.

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Jerusalem (AFP) – Hundreds of Ethiopian Israelis marched in Jerusalem on Sunday after the government cancelled plans to allow their relatives to emigrate from the African nation, calling the move discrimination.

The Israeli government had in November voted to allow the immigration of some 9,100 Ethiopians known as Falash Mura, descendants of Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity, many under duress, in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But on March 7, an official from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office informed members of parliament the decision would not be implemented because of budgetary constraints.

Police and organisers estimated the crowd at up to 2,000 people for Sunday’s march, which ended outside Netanyahu’s office.

“Stop the suffering, stop the discrimination, stop the racism,” demonstrators chanted, holding signs bearing similar slogans as well as pictures of relatives left behind in Ethiopia.

“Our children, our parents are in Ethiopia,” they chanted, marching alongside elderly residents wearing more traditional garb, some leaning on canes.

Israelis from the Ethiopian community hold up photographs of their relatives in Jerusalem on March 2 …

Antaihe Cheol, a 30-year-old resident of northern Israel, said his father and brother have been waiting to immigrate for 20 years.

“This is simply discrimination,” he told AFP.

His friend Ashebo noted that the government actively encourages immigration of Jews from France, the United States and Russia.

“When it comes to Jews from Ethiopia — everyone refuses,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”

Netanyahu’s office said it was working on bringing to Israel “elderly, solitary and dependent Falash Mura to ease their condition”.

Israelis from the Ethiopian community hold up photographs of their relatives in front of Israel’ …

But “the latest amendment to the budget law does not enable the government to take upon itself significant budgetary commitments to upcoming years, without regulating fiscal sources”, a statement read.

The issue will be discussed in the coming months as part of the budget discussions, the premier’s office said.

Netanyahu’s office considers reuniting Falash Mura families an issue “of humane and social importance”.

Leading the demonstration was MP Avraham Neguise, himself an immigrant from Ethiopia and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party.

Along with MP David Amsalem, Neguise has boycotted all parliamentary votes since being told the government was walking back its November decision, and reiterated on Sunday he would continue doing so until the decree was reversed.

Netanyahu’s coalition holds only a one-seat majority in parliament.

Revital Swid, a lawmaker from the opposition Zionist Union, also accused the government of racial discrimination.

“Would the government tell even one Jew from Russia, or Europe, or America who had family in Israel, we don’t have the money to bring you here?” she asked ahead of the march.

Previous demonstrations by the Ethiopian community against alleged discrimination have led to violence, but Sunday’s march was calm.

Israel’s Ethiopian community includes some 135,000 people.

Israel brought the bulk of Ethiopia’s Jewish community to the country between 1984 and 1991 under the Law of Return guaranteeing citizenship to all Jews, but the law does not apply to the Falash Mura.

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By Prof. Alemayhu G. Mariam

President Barack Obama is in Cuba!  On a mission. Liberate Cubans from “communist” mental slavery!

Hooray! Cuba libre! Free Cuba!

Back in 1898, another American president-to-be, Teddy “The Rough Rider” Roosevelt and crew caught a boat from Tampa, FL and set off on a mission to liberate the Cubans.

From the Spanish.

That “splendid little war”, the Spanish-American War, lasted a little over two months. The Spanish Empire collapsed and the U.S. snagged a number of Spain’s island possessions.

Ah! America’s manifest destiny of carrying on with the burdens of empire.

But Cuba was not liberated at the end of that “little war”. It became “independent”.

In 1928, President Calvin Coolidge went to Cuba to speak before the Pan American Conference and announced: “Today Cuba is her own sovereign. Her people are independent, free, prosperous, peaceful, and enjoying the advantages of self-government.”

The U.S. granted Cuba its “independence”.  In exchange for independence, Cuba had to agree to U.S. intervention in Cuban affairs as it sees fit and keep a perpetual lease on its naval base at Guantánamo Bay (where nearly 800 prisoners have been detained since January 2001 without due process of law and the detention camp Obama promised to shut down).

That was the deal until Fidel Castro and crew began armed struggle in the early 1950s to liberate Cuba from organized crime and organized American companies which dominated the Cuban economy.

In January 1959, Castro and his crew became victorious. Fidel declared, “I am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun.”

For 56 years, the Castro Brothers, Fidel, Raul and Ramon (recently deceased), have run Cuba with an iron fist and index fingers on the triggers of machine guns.

The U.S. imposed an economic embargo on Cuba for over one-half century.

Now Obama is in Cuba to bring Cuba in from the cold. (I did not say the Cold War.)

In 2016, Barack Obama is in Cuba not to liberate Cuban territory but to liberate Cubans from the tyranny of human rights suppression and deprivation.

A couple of weeks ago Obama announced  that he will travel to Cuba in the third week of March to “press Castro on human rights.”

The U.S. “pressed” the Castro Brothers for over fifty years every which way and the Castro Brothers have proved to be tough nuts to crack (pun not intended).

Obama said, “We still have differences with the Cuban government that I will raise directly. America will always stand for human rights around the world.”

Well! Well! Does America “always stand for human rights around the world”?

In July 2015, Obama  traveled to Ethiopia and said, “I don’t bite my tongue too much when it comes to these issues. We are opposed to any group that is promoting the violent overthrow of a government, including the government of Ethiopia, that has been democratically elected.” (Emphasis added.)

The “government” of Ethiopia Obama called “democratic” is none other than the Thugtatorship of the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front (T-TPLF), currently classified as a terrorist group by the Global Terrorism Database.

The T-TPLF won the May 2015 “election” by winning 100 percent of the seats in “parliament” (one hundred percent).

“Ethiopia is the second-worst jailer of journalists in Africa,” according  to Freedom House.

“Ethiopian authorities continue to severely restrict the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, using repressive laws to constrain civil society and independent media, and target individuals with politically motivated prosecutions,”according to Human Rights Watch.

Nevermind the facts, to Obama the T-TPLF is “democratic”.

In July 2009, Obama went to Accra, Ghana and said, “Now, make no mistake: History is on the side of these brave Africans, not with those who use coups or change constitutions to stay in power. Africa does not need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.”

In August 2014, Obama invited the who’s who of African thugtators to the White House to wine and dine them and take pictures (selfies?).

Guess who came to dinner at the White House?

Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya who was on trial at the International Criminal Court on various counts of crimes against humanity.

Paul Biya of Cameroon who has decades-long record of gross human rights violations.

Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso who committed human rights atrocities before he “resigned” in October 2014 after a popular uprising.

Paul Kagame of Rwanda who has been “stoking a rebellion in eastern Congo” resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

Yoweri Museveni of Uganda known for his long record of human rights violations and stealing elections, including the last one a few weeks ago.

Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of  Equatorial Guinea who has rigged a 95 percent victory in every election for decades.

José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola who has been running his  government like a family business (more like a crime syndicate).

Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo who inherited the presidency from his father at age 30 and runs an empire of corruption.

Hailemariam Desalegn, the ceremonial prime minster of Ethiopia, generally regarded as a jovial buffoon.

And so on…

Under Obama’s watch, Africa’s “strongmen” have been stronger than ever before.

African strongmen have become so strong and unashamedly bold that they proudly announce winning election by 100 percent (in Ethiopia) and becoming presidents-for-life in Rwanda, Uganda or ruling-party-for-life in Ethiopia.

I coined the word “diplocrisy” in 2013 to describe Barack Obama’s human rights diplomacy by hypocrisy.

At the time, I was reacting to Secretary of State John Kerry’s statements during the release of the U.S. State Department’s annual Human Rights Report for 2013.

Kerry  remarked,  “Anywhere that human rights are under threat, the United States will proudly stand up, unabashedly, and continue to promote greater freedom, greater openness, and greater opportunity for all people.”

Obama is saying the same exact thing in 2016. He will “press Castro on human rights” and “America will always stand for human rights around the world.”

I can’t quite figure out Obama’s human rights policy.

But I have figured out, rather late in the game, that Obama is a  hypocrite. But not exactly the type of hypocrite he is.

There is the “true hypocrite who ceases to perceive his deception and proceeds to lie with sincerity.”

Then there is the hypocrite who is “worse than a liar”, because he is “a liar that’s also a hypocrite.”

I understand the legacy thing for U.S. presidents, especially in foreign policy.

Richard Nixon “opened” China.

Gerald Ford “ended” the war in Vietnam.

Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold War.

George Bush used weapons of mass deception to plunge America into a war of mass destruction in Iraq.

Barack Obama did the Iran nuclear deal and is working on a climate accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement among twelve Pacific Rim countries). I am not hip with trade deals that ship out American jobs. I am with Bernie on that.

I am with Bernie when he says, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy.”

I give Obama credit for “ending the wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, those it seems those countries are in a state of perpetual war drawing on American lives and treasury.

I give Obama credit for the Affordable Health Care Act and getting the economy on its “feet” after the 2008 debacle.

Bringing in Cuba from the cold is a nice feather in his presidential cap.

I had some reservations about the U.S.-Cuba rapprochement, but not anymore.

But I give Obama no credit for improving human rights globally and particularly in Africa.

Obama says he is going over to Cuba to talk about human rights. Is human rights the reason for the 56 year iron-clad embargo on Cuba?

If the Castro Brothers haven’t learned much about human rights in 56 years, is it possible to teach old dogs new tricks now?

It is perfectly sensible for the U.S. to normalize relations with Cuba after 5 decades. It makes diplomatic and humanitarian sense to reestablish relations, restore flight services and relax travel limits and allow Cubans greater access to U.S. financial institutions.

The way I see it, whatever Brother Obama does for the African Brothers (handout billions of dollars), he should also do for the Castro Brothers (at least in millions).

It is the height of hypocrisy for the U.S. to isolate and punish Cuba for its poor human rights records when the U.S. provides billions of dollars in aid to prop up African thugs in power who commit massacres and genocide every year.

I admit I have difficulty making distinctions in the human rights records of the Tweedle Dees and Tweedle Dums of the world.

But are the human rights “sins” of the Castro Brothers any worse than the “sins” of the African Brothers? I am just sayin’.

Hands down, the T-TPLF regime in Ethiopia has a far, far  worse human rights record than the Cuban regime. Yet the U.S. pumps billions of dollars every year to prop up the T-TPLF.

What is good for the goose should be good for the gander.

But such is Obama’s double standard of human rights diplocrisy.

The Castro Brothers have been around the block with the U.S. a few times over the last one-half century.

They know what’s up. They know who talks the talk and who talks the walk.

They know Obama only talks the talk when it comes to human rights.

Also, if there is anything the Castro Brothers hate, it is criticism of their human rights record.

But Obama says he wants to restructure U.S.-Cuba relations on a foundation of human rights and relaxation of state controls on the Cuban economy. He seems to believe that with more commerce, communication, tourism, social and cultural exchanges Cuba can be transformed into a more liberal democratic society. That remains to be seen.

As Obama visits Cuba, I wonder if he will call for the release of political prisoners. He says he will meet with the families of political prisoners and dissidents.

What will he say to them?

Don’t you ever feel sad/ Lean on me, when the times are bad

When the day comes and you’re down/In a river of trouble and about to drown

Just hold on, I’m comin’/  Hold on, I’m comin’.

That’s Sam and Dave.

Talking about political prisoners, the Castro Brothers may just casually mention something about the human rights of the prisoners in Guantanamo.

Fidel Castro once remarked, “I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I will be a Marxist-Leninist until the last days of my life.”

Fidel Castro is a Marxist-Leninist, an autocrat, a dictator and so on.

But Fidel Castro is no hypocrite. Fidel Castro does not speak with forked tongue. Fidel Castro says what he means and means what he says.

I disagree with Castro on press and individual freedoms, property rights, due process and so on. But I give him credit for his literacy campaign and vast improvements in health and education.

But I respect Castro because he is no hypocrite.

What kind of speech will Barack Obama give in Havana?

I think he will say something along the following lines:

Good afternoon, everybody. It is a great honor for me to be in Havana….  I am deeply grateful for the welcome that I’ve received…

We must start from the simple premise that Cuba’s future is up to Cubans.

I say this knowing full well the tragic past that has sometimes haunted this part of the Caribbean.

This is the simple truth of a time when the boundaries between people are overwhelmed by our connections. Your prosperity can expand America’s prosperity. Your health and security can contribute to the world’s health and security. And the strength of your democracy, once you get to enjoy it, can help advance human rights for people everywhere.

I do not see American and the people of Cuba as a world apart.

After all, Cuba is only 90 miles away!

I see Cuba as a fundamental part of our interconnected hemisphere — (applause) — as partners with America on behalf of the future we want for all of our children. That partnership must be grounded in mutual responsibility and mutual respect. And that is what I want to speak with you about today.

Now, to realize that promise, we must first recognize the fundamental truth that Cuba needs to catch up with the rest of the world in its economic development.  Development depends on good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in Cuba  for far too long. That’s the change that can unlock Cuba’s potential. And that is a responsibility that can only be met by Cubans.

This mutual responsibility must be the foundation of our partnership. And today, I’ll focus on four areas that are critical to the future of Cuba and the Caribbean: democracy, opportunity, health, and the peaceful resolution of conflict.

First, we must support strong and sustainable democratic governments.

As I said in Cairo, Ankara and Accra, each nation gives life to democracy in its own way, and in line with its own traditions. But history offers a clear verdict: Governments that respect the will of their own people, that govern by consent and not coercion, are more prosperous, they are more stable, and more successful than governments that do not.

Democracy is about more than just holding elections. It’s also about what happens between elections.  Repression can take many forms, and too many nations, even those that have elections, are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty.

No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. (No applause.) That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that style of governance to end. (No applause.)

In the 21st century, capable, reliable, and transparent institutions are the key to success — strong parliaments; honest police forces; independent judges — (no applause); an independent press; a vibrant private sector; a civil society. (no applause.) Those are the things that give life to democracy, because that is what matters in people’s everyday lives.

America will not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation. The essential truth of democracy is that each nation determines its own destiny. But what America will do is support good governance, promote the rule of law and accountability.

With better governance, I have no doubt that Cuba holds the promise of a broader base of prosperity. Witness the extraordinary success of Cubans in my country, America. They’re doing very well.

America can also do more to promote trade and investment.   That will be a commitment of my administration. And where there is good governance, we can broaden prosperity through public-private investment partnerships, capacity-building and financial services.

This is also in our own interests — for if people are lifted out of poverty and wealth is created in Cuba, guess what? New markets will open up for our own goods. So it’s good for both.

In Moscow, I spoke of the need for an international system where the universal rights of human beings are respected, and violations of those rights are opposed. And that must include a commitment to support those who resolve conflicts peacefully, to sanction and stop those who don’t, and to help those who have suffered.

In places like Cuba, young people make up over half of the population.

And here is what young Cubans must know: The world will be what you make of it. You have the power to hold your leaders accountable, and to build institutions that serve the people. You can serve in your communities, and harness your energy and education to create new wealth and build new connections to the world. You can conquer disease, and end conflicts, and make change from the bottom up. You can do that. Yes you can — (applause) — because in this moment, history is on the move.

But these things can only be done if all of you take responsibility for your future. And it won’t be easy. It will take time and effort. There will be suffering and setbacks. But I can promise you this: America will be with you every step of the way — as a partner, as a friend. (Applause.)

Cuba, freedom is your inheritance. (Yeah! Cuba Libre!) Now, it is your responsibility to build upon freedom’s foundation. And if you do, we will look back years from now to places like Havana and say this was the time when the promise was realized; this was the moment when prosperity was forged, when pain was overcome, and a new era of progress began.  (Applause.)

Finally, make no mistake: History is on the side of brave Cubans, not with those who cling to power for 56 years. (No applause.)

Cuba doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions. (No applause).

Thank you very much.

Sounds vaguely like the speech Obama made in Accra, Ghana back in July 2009.

De ja vu!

I am not sure what the Cubans will see over Havana’s sky on March 20. “It’s a bird! It’s a  Trojan horse (in the form of Pegasus) with wings. No, no, it’s Air Force One!”

People of Cuba: Hail, Barack Obama, Diplocrite-in-Chief !

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The statements presented a very rosy picture of Ethiopia and hid the income inequalities, adjunct poverty and dismal standard of living that persist. Today, the regime and its partners are forced to admit and present the true state of the Ethiopian economy and its effects on the majority of the population, of which 15 million are now in need of food aid.

Ethiopia touted as the “powerhouse in the Horn” is once again begging the international community to feed its people.

To prove that things had changed in Ethiopia, even Bob Geldof, the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, who sprung to global prominence with his role in Band Aid to raise money for the Ethiopian famine in 1980s, was now leading the call for investments in Ethiopia. The Wall Street Journal in its article, “Rock Star Bob Geldof Spearheads U.S. Private-Equity Push Into Ethiopia”, reported the following on 30 March 2015:

“… A generation ago, this African nation was a magnet for Western charity. Today, some of America’s richest deal makers are delivering something new: investment…

8Miles, the private equity firm Geldof chairs, owns Blue Nile, a company which acquired the 70-year old winery based in Addis Abeba and vineyard near the town of Ziway from the Ethiopian Privatization & Public Enterprises Supervising Agency (PPESA).

There were also others (probably hired by Ethiopia’s million dollar lobbyists) who weighed in and promoted investment in Ethiopia. In his 8 July 2015 article, “Ethiopia: From Famine to Feast”, Andrew S Nevin, PhD, said to be “one of Canada’s global thinkers”, touted Ethiopia’s “renaissance” with this:

“…A nation once characterised by land-locked isolation and poverty, Ethiopia has emerged as Africa’s ‘newest Lion economy’ and continues to accelerate in the global economy. With a population of 70.7 million people, Ethiopia has enjoyed a period of rapid economic growth by about 10% a year since 2004…Ethiopia was once a synonym for poverty and famine. Even though it is still one of the poorest nations in Africa – with an estimated third of the population earning less than $1 a day – the country has one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, and development of the agriculture industry is a major feature of Ethiopia’s economic growth… Ethiopia still remains an attractive business destination for investment, and a risk that is worth taking…”

But just a few months later, the headlines would read differently.

Rene Lefort in an 18 December 2015 wrote the following facts about the Ethiopian famine:

“…The United Nations has warned that more than 8.2 million people in Ethiopia will be in need of food aid by the beginning of 2016 because of a severe drought. The number of people in need climbed from 2.9 million (March 6) to 4.5 million (August 18) and suddenly to 8.2 million (September 21)…”

But the regime went on an extensive propaganda campaign to deny that there was “famine”. Addis based diplomats and journalists remained mum as the regime’s cadres hid the impending humanitarian disaster unfolding right in front of their eyes. When the BBC reported about the famine, the minority regime was not happy and it sent out its deputies to ridicule its reports.

The Deputy Prime Minister, Demeke Mekonen, commenting on a BBC report about the famine in Ethiopia said:

“…It is obvious that the foreign media works with different bodies of special interest. There is no such thing as famine in Ethiopia these days…”

In addition, the minority regime put out a Press Release on 10 November 2015 decrying news reports about famine in Ethiopia.

“…Up to now, the country has mobilised 2 billion Birr [£62 million] and has positioned food from the national reserve in places that are affected, or could be affected, by the drought. The government is working hard to ensure that no one dies from lack of food in this El Nino year and, contrary to some western news reports, there will not be famine of any sort, let alone anything remotely like the magnitude of that of 1984.

… The sensational news broadcast by BBC TV, regarding children dying on a daily basis, does not reflect the current broad reality on the ground and the full preparation that has gone into overcoming the problem. The report also failed to give perspective to the drought situation currently unfolding in Ethiopia and around the world, and how it is triggered by the El Nino phenomenon…”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon visited Ethiopia in January 2016 to see first-hand “the consequences of thedrought in one of the worst affected areas”. At a round table discussion in the Ethiopian capital, Ban Ki Moon said:

“…a crisis of this scale was too much for any Government…The international community must stand with people of Ethiopia, immediate support for Ethiopia will save lives and avoid preventable suffering. Immediate support will also safeguard the impressive development gains that Ethiopia has made over the past years and decades…”

Gayle Smith, longtime friend of the TPLF regime and now Administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) echoed Ban Ki Moon when she made this announcement on 31 January 2016.

“…The Government of Ethiopia estimates that 10.2 million people are currently in need of emergency food assistance. This is in addition to 7.9 million chronically food insecure people who are covered by the Government of Ethiopia-led Productive Safety Net Program, supported by USAID and the donor community. Though the drought in parts of Ethiopia is the worst on record, famine-level mortality like that seen during the mid-1980s is very unlikely given improved safety nets, lack of conflict, and improved information and early warning systems…Ethiopia will need additional support from the international community in order to weather this crisis and to sustain its significant development gains…”

Everyone was sticking to the narrative …

A few months later, despite UN and NGO appeals for food aid, the minority regime and its cadres continued to deny the existence of famine in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Embassy in Washington reported the following in its 8 February 2016 newsletter:

“…Special Envoy and Ambassador Extra-Ordinary and Plenipotentiary to the US, Mexico and Jamaica, Girma Birru gave interviews on current situations in Ethiopia to Tsenat and Selam radio stations in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. respectively. Ambassador Girma said that though the current drought in Ethiopia impacts a vast area and relatively a huge population the government is trying its level best that it does not cause much harm to the people affected…”

Ambassador Girma also said that there was no famine in Ethiopia. Insulting the intelligence of the Ethiopian people, showing utter contempt for their suffering, the Ambassador:

“… challenged those who claim that the drought has turned into famine, by referring to a UN accepted measurement which states for a famine to exist. First, 20% of the house hold in the drought affected area should have nothing to eat or drink. Second, 30% of the entire population in the drought afflicted area, must be suffering from acute malnutrition. And the third is that in every 10,000 people in the drought affected area, two persons must be perishing daily for famine to exist. After having put the internationally accepted criterion, Ambassador Girma, took million people as a base in the drought affected area and proved that there is no famine in Ethiopia…”

The food crisis in the country was downplayed and the reckless regime chose instead to deal in semantics- renaming “famine and starvation” as “food insecurity”.

NGOs were warned not to use the words “famine, starvation or death” in their food appeals. The NGOs were not to state that “children are dying on a daily basis,” or refer to “widespread famine” or say that “the policies of the government in Ethiopia are partially to blame.” They were also not allowed to “compare the current crisis to the famine of the eighties.” They were not to place the blame on the government or its development policies that have uprooted Ethiopians from their lands. Instead, the latest drought in Ethiopia was to be described as “food insecurity caused by a drought related to El Nino.”

The regime was desperate to maintain the narrative of Ethiopia’s great economic renaissance, and the “double digit” annual growth. It was more interested in saving face, than facing the fact that millions of its own people continue to be “fed by donated sacks of grain”.

It did not take long for the bottom to drop.

The United Nations is now calling it the worst drought in 30 years and is saying that 400,000 children were suffering from severe acute malnutrition and more than 15 million people were in need food aid. UN and the Ethiopian government are currently appealing for $1.4 billion in emergency food aid

Carolyn Miles, Chief Executive of Save the Children, US said:

“…We only have two emergencies in the world that we have categorised as category one. Syria is one and Ethiopia is the second. And so we’ve said we need to raise $100m for this response…”

On 1 March 2016, AllAfrica’s Reed Kramer’s interview with Haile Mariam Desalegn was posted. In the interview, the Ethiopian Prime Minister said:

“…The famine, which is the result of the El Niño effect, is unprecedented in our country. The government is doing everything possible to feed our people and prevent starvation. We want to do this without slowing down progress we have made in health and education. To do that we need to work with our international partners. The response to date has not been sufficient…In the event that the lackluster response continues, the government will take every step necessary to avert humanitarian disaster, including diverting funds from other priorities, if that is what it takes…”

Not getting the donor response it desired, the regime is now resorting to threats.

The Ethiopian Prime Minister, who had chastised those who first reported about the famine was now warning the international community for its “lackluster” response to the regime’s, albeit belated, calls for help:

“…If something goes wrong, it is the international community who has not come in. The aid provided to us so far is very little and it often came very late. I urge organisations like UNICEF to come in if they think this is a worst case scenario. Just talking is not a solution…”

A responsible regime would know that the buck stops at Menelik Palace…

Finally, researchers have long argued that poverty was the ultimate cause of famine-and that climate acts simply as a catalyst. Blaming the famine in Ethiopia on El Nino likens it to a natural disaster-it is misleading and irresponsible.

The minority regime and its handlers, including the western media, should stop lying to the Ethiopian people and do the right thing. The regime must first feed its own people instead of feeding its over inflamed ego with tired old propaganda.

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VOA’s Mary Alica Salinas

American President Barack Obama and Cuba’s President Raul Castro disagreed over questions on human rights and Guantanamo Bay in a rare and, at times, tension-filled press conference in Havana.

The two presidents met at the Revolutionary Palace before facing the media. They talked about ways to move toward normal ties between their countries. The discussion included issues on which they disagree, including individual freedoms.

To a question about human rights in Cuba during the press conference, President Obama said, “I’ve met with people who have been subject toarbitrary detention and that’s something that I generally have to speak on because I hear from them directly and I know what it means for them.”

When an American reporter asked President Raul Castro about political prisoners in Cuba, he replied, “What political prisoners?”

Castro added, “Give me a name, or names, or after this meeting is over you can give me a list of political prisoners, and if we have those political prisoners, they will be released before tonight ends.”

President Castro told reporters that he welcomed U.S. action to ease trade and travel restrictions. But he also said the 55-year trade embargo against Cuba must end. And the leader called on the U.S. to return Cuban territory used for the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

U.S. President Barack Obama, left, speaks next to Cuba’s President Raul Castro, during a joint statement in Havana, Cuba, March 21, 2016.

President Obama said the trade embargo did not serve the interests of either country. “The embargo’s going to end,” he said, although he admitted he could not be “entirely sure” when it would happen.

Only the U.S. Congress can end the trade embargo on Cuba. There is Republican opposition in Congress on Obama’s policy shift from isolation toengagement with Cuba.

Three reporters were permitted to ask questions although Castro said he would answer only one. All asked him about political prisoners in Cuba.

Castro also disputed the general idea of human rights problems in Cuba. He argued that no country in the world honors all 61 internationally recognized human rights. He said Cuba honors many, including the right to education, the right to health care, and the right to equal pay for equal work for everyone.

A reporter also asked Castro if he supported Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump as U.S. presidential candidates.

“Well, I cannot vote in the United States,” he answered. The crowd laughed.

Historic trip

US President Barack Obama (C) attends a wreath-laying ceremony at Jose Marti monument in the Revolution Palace of Havana next to the Vice-President of the Cuban Council Salvador Valdes Mesa (C-R) on March 21, 2016.

Obama will attend a state dinner later Monday at the Revolutionary Palace.

He also is to attend meetings of both Cuban Americans and Cuban entrepreneurs. They are to discuss changes both governments can make to support more business ties between the countries.

Cuba and the U.S. officially renewed diplomatic ties in July. The U.S. has loosened travel and commercial restrictions since that time.

But Obama administration officials say the highlight of the trip will be the speech he will give to the Cuban people on Tuesday. He is expected to speak about the history between Cuba and the U.S., current plans to normalize relations and his vision for future relations.

I’m Caty Weaver.

VOA’s Mary Alica Salinas reported this story from Havana. Caty Weaver adapted the story for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

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ESAT Radio Tue 22 Mar 2016

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Brussels attacks: Zaventem and Maelbeek bombs kill many

• 22 March 2016
• From the sectionEurope

Image copyrightAFP

More than 30 people are believed to have been killed and dozens injured in attacks at Brussels international airport and a city metro station.

Twin blasts hit Zaventem airport at about 07:00 GMT, with 11 people reported killed.

Another explosion struck Maelbeek metro station near EU headquarters an hour later, leaving about 20 people dead.

Brussels police have issued a wanted notice for a man seen pushing a luggage trolley through the airport.

He was pictured in CCTV footage with two other suspects who are believed to have died in the blasts.

The Islamic State (IS) group said it was behind the attacks in a statement issued on the IS-linked Amaq agency.

Belgium has raised its terrorism alert to its highest level. Three days of national mourning have been declared.

Prime Minister Charles Michel called the latest attacks “blind, violent and cowardly”, adding: “This is a day of tragedy, a black day… I would like to call on everyone to show calmness and solidarity”.

‘The worst thing I’ve seen’

Two blasts tore through the departures area of Zaventem airport shortly after 08:00 local time (07:00 GMT).

A suicide bomber was “probably” involved, the Belgian prosecutor said.

Eleven people were killed and 81 wounded in the blasts, Belgian Health Minister Maggie de Block said.

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More about the attacks

Live: The latest updates

What we know so far

Why was Brussels attacked?

Crisis information

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Some witnesses reported hearing shots fired and shouts in Arabic before the two explosions.

Others said that people fled the first blast, only to get caught in the second.

A third bomb failed to detonate and was destroyed by the security services.

A local firefighter, Pierre Meys, described seeing “war injuries”.

“I think this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my career,” he said

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“People were running over others that had fallen, I couldn’t breathe. I can’t believe I’m alive,” 15-year-old Antoine told me as he walked with his school friends in a line of hundreds being escorted on foot and by bus to a sports hall, now a makeshift reception centre.

Three hearses passed, heading towards the ruins of the airport departure hall. People sobbed at the sight of them.

Several tourists were asking police what they should do now, where it was safe to go – and when the airport might reopen.

The police were confused too, but offered what little information they had, telling people to head to a reception centre. An officer repeatedly shouted: “Quickly, keep moving, evacuate, this is serious.”

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Carnage on the Metro

The metro blast occurred shortly after 08:00 GMT during the rush hour at Maelbeek station.

It struck the middle carriage of a three-carriage train while it was moving away from the platform.

Alexandre Brans told AP: “The metro was leaving Maelbeek station when there was a really loud explosion. It was panic everywhere. There were a lot of people in the metro.”

Brussels Mayor Yvan Mayeur said “about 20” people had died and more than 100 had been injured, 17 of them severely.

Eyewitnesses recall explosions

In pictures: Brussels explosions

Full coverage

The station is close to EU institutions. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has told employees to stay indoors or at home. All meetings at EU institutions have been cancelled.

Ryan McGhee, a catering worker at a college in Brussels, told the BBC: “The entire city is in lockdown. People are calm at the moment but the atmosphere is tense.”

Security raised

Local and international travel has been suspended or disrupted and security tightened across Europe.

All flights have been cancelled. The airport is due to reopen on Wednesday.

Eurostar has cancelled all trains to and from Brussels. The Thalys France-Benelux train operator says the entire network is closed.

In the UK, security has been stepped up at Gatwick and Heathrow airports. The UK Foreign Office has advised British nationals to avoid crowded areas in Belgium.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron chaired a meeting of the Cobra response committee on Tuesday.

In France the cabinet has held an emergency meeting. There is also extra security at Dutch airports.

Image copyrightHorst Pilger

Image copyrightRalph Usbeck via AP

‘Outrageous’ attacks

There has been strong international condemnation:

• US President Barack Obama called the blasts “outrageous attacks against innocent people”.
• The 28 EU leaders said the bombings were an “attack on our open democratic society” in a joint statement.
• “The terrorists have struck Belgium but it is Europe that was targeted,” said French President Francois Hollande.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin called the attacks “barbaric”.

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Belgium’s Interior Minister Jan Jambon had said on Monday that the country was on the highest level of alert for possible revenge attacks after the capture on Friday of Salah Abdeslam, the main surviving suspect from the Paris attacks in November.

Mr Jambon told Belgian radio: “We know that stopping one cell can… push others into action. We are aware of it in this case.”

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Gaps in intelligence: By Chris Morris, Europe correspondent

European security experts had been braced for another attack for months. But it is always a huge shock when it actually happens.

If this was “revenge” for the arrest of Salah Abdeslam on Friday, it will be a source of considerable concern that a functioning terrorist network was able to respond so quickly and with such devastating effect.

It is possible that a cell linked to Abdeslam brought forward the timing of a future attack because they thought he might blow their cover.

Either way, it shows how advanced the planning was in terms of logistics, explosives, weapons and people willing to carry out such attacks on civilian targets.

The priority now will be to ensure that anyone else who poses an imminent threat to the public is apprehended as soon as possible. But it is clear that there are still huge gaps in intelligence, and Brussels is seen as a soft target.

In the words of French President Francois Hollande, the response from Europe will need to be “calm, lucid and determined” – and it will have to last for a long time.

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• The latest official death toll stands at 31. Up to 230 people are reported to have been injured.
• Two blasts took place at Zaventem airport, to the north-east of the city centre, at around 8am local time; at least 11 people died here and up to 100 were injured.
• A third bomb went off at Maelbeek metro station on the rue de la Loi, close to the European Union headquarters, around an hour later. Twenty people died in this attack and 130 were injured.
• Adelma Tapia Ruiz was the first victim of the attacks to be named. The 37-year-old Peruvian woman was killed at the airport, where she was reported to be catching a flight with her Belgian husband, Christophe Delcambe, and their twin four-year-old daughters Maureen and Alondra, who survived.
• A wounded Jet Airways crew member pictured in the immediate aftermath of the explosion in her torn and bloodied yellow uniform has been named as Nidhi Chaphekar.

• Two of the suspected attackers were captured on CCTV dressed in black and wearing black gloves on their left hands thought to have concealed detonators. Federal prosecutor Frederic van Leeuw saidthe two men “very likely committed a suicide attack”.
• Belgian police launched a series of raids in a massive manhunt for a third man, who is thought to have escaped following the attackswithout detonating his own suitcase bomb.
• The identities of the men are not known and police issued photographs asking the public to help name them.

Summary: what we know so far

Claire Phipps

• The latest official death toll stands at 31. Up to 230 people are reported to have been injured.
• Two blasts took place at Zaventem airport, to the north-east of the city centre, at around 8am local time; at least 11 people died here and up to 100 were injured.
• A third bomb went off at Maelbeek metro station on the rue de la Loi, close to the European Union headquarters, around an hour later. Twenty people died in this attack and 130 were injured.
• Adelma Tapia Ruiz was the first victim of the attacks to be named. The 37-year-old Peruvian woman was killed at the airport, where she was reported to be catching a flight with her Belgian husband, Christophe Delcambe, and their twin four-year-old daughters Maureen and Alondra, who survived.
• A wounded Jet Airways crew member pictured in the immediate aftermath of the explosion in her torn and bloodied yellow uniform has been named as Nidhi Chaphekar.

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FP

Brutal repression was the secret to the country’s rapid rise. It could also bring it crashing down again.

AMA, Ethiopia — For those who would speak frankly about politics in this landlocked East African country, the first challenge is to find a safe space.

But on a recent evening in Adama, a city in the heart of a region reeling from the largest protest movement Ethiopia has faced in decades, most people seemed at ease. University students poured out of the city’s main campus, spilling into claustrophobic bars and pool halls. Others crowded around a cluster of aging taxis, jostling for a quick ride home.

Though it is one of the largest cities in Oromia — where members of Ethiopia’s Oromo ethnic group have taken to the streets in recent months in unprecedented numbers to protest their political and economic marginalization — Adama has remained mostly quiet.

Hidden beneath the casual veneer of daily life, however, lurks a deep-seated suspicion of the government, which has built a massive surveillance apparatus and cracked down violently on its opponents

Hidden beneath the casual veneer of daily life, however, lurks a deep-seated suspicion of the government, which has built a massive surveillance apparatus and cracked down violently on its opponents.

Citizens feel they have to watch what they say, and where they say it. At the hangouts where crowds have gathered, a political statement might be overheard. Out on the sidewalks, government spies could be on patrol. Inside the university campus, security officials are on the lookout for suspicious behavior.

In a way, the recent unrest is rooted in Ethiopia’s rapid economic rise. The federal government claims to have notched double-digit GDP growth rates over the past decade, but its rigid, top-down approach to developing industry, and attracting foreign investment, has resulted in mass displacement and disrupted millions of lives. This, in turn, has heightened ethnic tensions that today threaten Ethiopia’s reputation for stability.

All across Oromia, government security forces have been struggling to control the spate of violent protests that erupted in November, partly in response to the government’s so-called master plan to coordinate development in Addis Ababa with nearby towns in Oromia, a sprawling central region that surrounds the capital on all sides. Like much of the country, the vast majority of Oromia is rural, home to small-scale farmers who feel left behind by the dazzling growth of Addis.

When this latest round of protests began last year, demonstrators seized on the master plan as symbolic of broader encroachments on Oromo autonomy. They also accused the government of taking land from Oromo farmers for little or no compensation, suppressing the Oromo language in schools, and unfairly redistributing the region’s natural resources.

In Adama, a 23-year-old engineering student, whose full name has been withheld for his safety, was initially reluctant to speak with this reporter for fear of reprisal. He relaxed only after he and some close friends sat down in a deserted cafe near campus, where a quiet woman brewing coffee over hot coals was the only person listening in.

“There are so many problems facing the Oromo people,” he said. “But those who speak about it are getting arrested. Educated people, farmers, teachers, doctors — the government accuses them all of being part of the protests.”

His caution was warranted. Less than two weeks later, a confrontation erupted at the university, reportedly in response to a small demonstration by students — though the details, as always, are hazy. One witness who asked not be named said he heard gunshots as security forces descended on the campus. Amid the confusion, at least two fires were sparked — one in the school’s backup generator.

“On campus, students already feared the armed forces,” said the witness, who is a student at the university. “Now, no one feels like they have any right to speak at all.”

Government security forces have been accused of exacerbating the crisis in Oromia by violently suppressing the protests. In a recent report, Human Rights Watch said it had “documented security forces firing into crowds of protesters with little or no warning, the arrests of students as young as 8, and the torture of protesters in detention.” The rights group said military and police forces have killed “several hundred peaceful protesters” since November.

Members of the Ethiopian diaspora have been equally vocal, taking to social media to call attention to alleged atrocities. Jawar Mohammed, who is based in Minnesota, is perhaps the most prominent online activist, manning a number of social media feeds featuring bloody photos of dead demonstrators and grainy videos of police brutality that have become hubs for Oromo diaspora members around the world. His Facebook page has amassed nearly a half million followers.

“We have freelancers embedded in pretty much every district across the country,” said Mohammed, who was born in Ethiopia but works abroad as the executive director of the Oromia Media Network, a news broadcaster whose satellite feed here has been repeatedly jammed by the Ethiopian government. “They infiltrate the system from top to bottom,” he said in a Skype interview.

How much of an impact social media activism has had on the actual protest movement is a matter of debate. In a country with limited Internet penetration, and where the sole government-owned telecommunications provider has the power to shut down signals and block opposition websites, online activists like Mohammed are necessarily limited in what they can do. According to the engineering student in Adama, people on the ground are driving the protests, and social media matters “only a little bit.”

Where online activists have succeeded is in channeling video and photographic evidence of abuses to the outside word

Where online activists have succeeded is in channeling video and photographic evidence of abuses to the outside word. But even this evidence is difficult to verify; several journalists, including this correspondent, have been detained by officials for attempting to report in some of the worst-affected areas.

There are also questions about the direction social media activists have steered the debate surrounding the protests. Comments by Mohammed’s passionate social media followers sometimes advocate violence against members of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a political party from the northern region of Tigray that dominates the government’s security and intelligence agencies. And because he and other online activists are far from the front lines, some argue that their social media posts are ultimately a distraction. The student who witnessed the altercation at the university in Adama, for instance, said he agrees with Mohammed’s political analysis, but is concerned that the Facebook page has become a magnet for a dizzying array of viewpoints — about religion, regional politics, and ethnic strife — that make the movement more controversial than it needs to be.

Still, Mohammed has a clear strategy in mind. When it comes to human life, he advocates nonviolence. But he encourages demonstrators to block trade routes, destroy the property of companies that are seen as operating against Oromo interests, and avoid bringing crops to market in order to raise food prices.

Might such tactics be unethical during the worst drought Ethiopia has witnessed in decades, which has left 10.2 million people in need of emergency food aid? “Morally, yes,” Mohammed said. “Strategically, no.”

Officials have no time for these “activists on the other side of the Atlantic,” said government spokesman Getachew Reda. He claimed that agitators, some of whom have backing from Eritrea, Ethiopia’s archrival, have infiltrated the ranks of the protesters and are responsible for the current violence. The government security forces, by contrast, have generally handled the situation professionally, he said.

“We may have some bad apples,” Reda said. “Otherwise, the security apparatus that we have in this country is very much oriented towards serving the interests of the public.”

Amid this war of words, normal citizens are caught in the middle. In the quiet café in Adama, the engineering student spelled out a set of remarkably prosaic demands: He would like to see more Oromo professors at the university, for instance, and a fairer allocation of resources for the region. But, he said, he stays quiet for fear of Ethiopia’s pervasive security and intelligence apparatus.

“People don’t feel free,” he said. “We are all psychologically impacted.”

After two months of violent demonstrations, the government announced that it was scrapping the master plan. It wasn’t enough. Some protesters said they didn’t believe it had really been canceled. Others were motivated by grievances that run much deeper than any development scheme, citing marginalization stretching all the way back to the late 1800s, when the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II swept in from the north to expand Ethiopia’s borders and establish the capital city in Oromo lands.

On paper, today’s federal system is meant to ensure some measure of autonomy for all of the country’s ethnic groups, including the Oromos. The ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), is made up of four regional parties, including the TPLF and the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO). But the government lost some credibility in May, when the EPRDF and allied parties won every parliamentary seat in a national election. Though the OPDO holds more parliamentary seats than any other party, protesters say the party either cannot or will not challenge the dominance of the TPLF — and Oromos remain marginalized as a result.

Officials say they are trying to promote meaningful dialogue. “It is the government’s responsibility to make sure that people’s legitimate grievances are addressed properly,” Reda said. To that end, OPDO officials have convened meetings with concerned citizens across Oromia, and hundreds of low-level officials have been dismissed for corruption.

But the government has continued to lean on its powerful security apparatus, which has both enabled Ethiopia’s impressive, state-led economic development and imperiled it by bringing ethnic tensions to the fore. The ongoing protests in Oromia point to cracks in the facade, where citizens feel left out as the government pursues its uncompromising vision of modernization.

By continuing to crack down on demonstrators instead of listening to their demands, Ethiopia risks compromising the reputation for political stability that fueled its unprecedented decade of growth and foreign investment. In that way, the government may soon erode the very foundation of its own economic ambitions.

Image credit: ZACHARIAS ABUBEKER/AFP/Getty Images

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Soruma Ashale an 11 year old 5th grader at Abdisa Aga school in Najjo ( West Walaga). He was wounded by Agazi force that raided the school today March 23, 2016
Kun Soorumaa Ashaalee mucaa waggaa 11 mana barnoota Abdiisaa Aagaa kan Najjotti argamu keessatti barataa kutaa 5ffaati. Guyyaa har’aa Agaaziin dallaa mana barnootaa seenuun daree cabsitee isas akkanatti miidhan.

16 mins ·

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Ethiopia’s leaders continue to improvise a workable response to the popular uprising in Oromia state. An estimated 400 people have been killed and tens of thousands arrested in the ongoing upsurge in Oromo protests that broke out last November.

Initially, Ethiopian authorities pointed fingers at the usual scapegoats, “anti-peace elements” and armed opposition groups operating from Eritrea, Ethiopia’s archrival. As the size of the protesters swelled, officials started to admit — albeit timidly and tangentially — that the protesters’ grievances are legitimate. As the death toll rose inflaming the populace, the authorities stated that the disproportionate use of force was a mistake, an admission made to a visiting U.S. state department delegation in January.

Next, federal authorities and their surrogates tried to lay all the blame at the feet of the governing Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO). The latter, meeting in an emergency session, reversed course by canceling the implementation of the controversial Addis Ababa Master Plan that triggered the protests and promised to address the people’s grievances. After months of muddling, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, addressing the country’s rubber stamp, one-party parliament, on March 16 offered to pay compensation for victims’ families and made a vague apology for failing to heed the people’s grievances. Little has been said about the sheer lack of accountability and impunity got security forces.

On March 22, the Voice of America reported that the OPDO is purging more than 300 local government officials. And that some may soon face criminal charges. The mass purge follows the demotion in early March of two senior OPDO officials: Executive Committee member of both OPDO and EPRDF as well as Head of the Organization’s Office, Dhaba Dabale, and Zelalem Jemaneh, an Executive Committee member of both OPDO and EPRDF and Head of Natural Resource Bureau of Oromia Regional State.

The sacking of OPDO officials is not unexpected. The ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) faces unprecedented opposition from Oromos in all walks of life, including the nationalist regional leaders, police, and the local militia.

Yet Desalegn and his party want to reduce the question of good governance to whether the local government officials that citizens come in contact with to meet their public service need is corrupt or not. The fact of the matter is the entire system is riddled with corruption. And a majority of the protesters are not aggrieved by their interactions with local officials. Neither are they grieving about the quality of public service provided by local officials, poor as that is. In fact, one doesn’t need to come in direct contact with a government official to feel the influence of the state. The suffocating effects of the all-embracing one-to-five structure known asShane or Got and Gare is felt by the public as they go about their daily lives.

The master plan, which triggered the current Oromo protests, is not the handiwork of local government officials. The orders to shoot and kill protesters were not issued by local government officials. The order to detain thousands of protesters and herd them in concentration camp like detention centers is not issued by local government officials.

As speaker of the house Abbadula Gamada implied recently, local government officials have no say in the daily propaganda manufactured by state-owned media, full of highly convoluted narratives that are foreign to the lived experiences of average Oromos. Local officials were not the ones that ordered the detention of prominent opposition leaders and journalists critical of the regime.

Regional authorities have no say in tilting the balance of power between the federal government versus the states. Local officials had no say in crafting a land policy that dispossessed and displaced thousands of poor farmers from their ancestral lands.

The decision to make Ethiopia a one-party state is not made by OPDO officials. The decision to keep 99 percent of the top brass of the security forces in the hands of the Tigrayan ethnic group, which makes up a mere 6 percent of the population of Ethiopia, a country made up of many ethnic groups.

The regime is faulting those purged for failing to contain the protests, meaning for not being as heavy handed as the security forces. This flies in the face of the government’s rhetoric that the protests were legitimate. Seeing that the regime is ready to say any and all kinds of things, one is excused to conclude that the motivation to confuse people rather than create clarity.

This week Desalegn also hosted the traditional Abba Gadaa leaders — the first such encounter between traditional Oromo leaders and state leaders in modern Ethiopian history — in what appears to be a last-ditch attempt to calm tensions in the populous state. While pledging to help calm the situation, the elders pressed the PM to make amends with the Oromo, pay compensation to victims and remove federal security forces from Oromia to reduce the current insecurity and standoff.

As with hitherto mixed messaging from EPRDF officials, the ensuring purge of OPDO leaders is unlikely to quell the uprising. The reason is simple: the Oromo grievance includes but is not limited to questions over the lack of good governance, rampant unemployment, and corruption. The longstanding issue of the political, economic and cultural marginalization of the Oromo is at the core of the Oromo andEthiopian state conflict.

Neither the purges nor the rhetorical gymnastics and charm offensives by the PM can tackle the core issue of marginalization. In fact, these measures do not even scratch the surface of the problem, let alone address it meaningfully. For example, despite making up close to half of the county’s population, the Oromo account for a mere 11 percent of the federal bureaucracy.

While Oromo members form a numerical majority in the rubber stamp parliament, the Tigreans or their minions hold the key posts. During the past 25 years, Tigrean occupied the positions of Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Army Chief of Staff. When a non-Tigrean is placed at the head of a pyramid, power shifted to a Tigrean minder who ran the show behind the scene as a puppet master. For example, when Meles Zenawi first came to power, his title was President and the presidency had all the powers. When he decided to instead become Prime Minister, the presidency was rendered mere ceremonial position. The same is true with other ministries. Currently, Hailemariam, non-Tigrean, hold the premiership but, in reality, power is wielded by senior hardline Tigrean advisors.

The government claims that power is devolved to the states. The reality is such that the regional states, especially Oromia, do not have the powers of a province, let alone a sovereign state in a federation.

Economically, the Oromo sit on the most fertile lands. But land is owned by the federal state, which is ready to displace farmers in the name of investment and development. Farmers are compensated $0.80 per square mile whereas the market rate is $17,777.

Culturally, the Oromo language, the most widely spoken language in the county, is relegated to the countryside, which is fast dwindling in the face of rapid urbanization. A farmer whose farmland is gobbled up by the sprawling capital, Addis Ababa, could not even plead his case at the courts in the city in his native language, Afaan Oromo, let alone receive public service there. Reduced to being security guards, beggary, and menial labor, local Oromos will also have to forfeit their cultural identity and pride in self. Such is the fate of the Oromo in general and those born in the small towns and countryside adjoining Ethiopia’s capital.

Ending Oromos longstanding marginalization in Ethiopia is not an easy task. For starters, Ethiopian authorities must heed the protesters’ demands and release all political prisoners detained as part of the ongoing crackdown as well as previous ones. It should also set up an independent, transparent, and credible commission of inquiry into the killings of hundreds of unarmed protesters.

In the intermediate period, EPRDF needs to address the issue of its legitimacy to rule. Six months after winning 100 percent of the seats in parliament, the Oromo public had dealt the party a total rejection. Holding new elections under a level playing field at least in Oromia is another measure that could reduce tensions. The EPRDF regime must also elevate the Oromo language as a working language of the federal government at par with Amharic.

As a long-term measure, the ruling party needs to open up the political system so that the Oromo, as well as other people in Ethiopia, could govern themselves through a representative and accountable government.

Source -OPride.com

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ESAT Special News – More than 300 Amharas arrested in Dansha

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ESAT Breaking News – Dr. Merera Gudina has been blocked from traveling to the United States to participate the upcoming Vision Ethiopia’s conference

ESAT Breaking News Mar 24, 2016

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Seife Nebelbal Radio, March 25, 2016 (Amharic)

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The second-in-command of so-called Islamic State (IS) has been killed in a US operation in Syria, US media report.

Defence officials told NBC News that Abdul Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, an Iraqi who was also known as Hajji Iman, was killed during a raid this month.

The second-in-command of so-called Islamic State (IS) has been killed in a US operation in Syria, US media report.

Abdul Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, an Iraqi also known as Hajji Iman, died during a raid by US special forces on Thursday, officials told NBC News.

US Defence Secretary Ash Carter was expected to confirm the jihadist’s death and provide details of the raid in a statement at 14:30 GMT.

The US authorities had offered a reward of $7m (£5m) for Qaduli.

Defence officials told NBC correspondent Richard Engel that US special operations forces landed in helicopters in Syria early on Thursday morning.

They lay in wait as Qaduli drove past them in a car, and were able to stop it.

There was an attempt to capture Qaduli alive, but the situation escalated and the militant and three other people in the vehicle were killed, the officials said.

Qaduli, an ethnic Turkmen, was born in 1957 or 1959 in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, which has been controlled by IS since 2014.

He joined al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) – a precursor of IS – in 2004 under the leadership of the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, serving as his deputy and the local leader in Mosul, according to the US.

After his release from an Iraqi prison in early 2012, he joined IS forces in Syria.

Last year, some sources identified Qaduli as “Abu Alaa al-Afari”, who was said to have taken temporary charge of IS after its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was allegedly injured in an air strike.

Mr Carter will also confirm on Friday the death of the “minister of war” of IS earlier this month, according to the Daily Beast.

Tarkhan Batirashvili, a Georgian known as Omar Shishani, was the target of a US air strike in north-eastern Syria on 4 March, US officials say.

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Swedish television channel (TV4) exposed H&M’s cotton sourcing from Al Amoudi Ethiopia Is H&M turning a blind eye to land grabs in Ethiopia? TV4 does an investigation into H&M’s cotton sourcing from Ethiopia and discovers the disturbing truth. The corrupt businessman Sheik exposed in this investigation. watch the following video for the full documentation.

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By Jim Muir / BBC New

Image copyrightAlamy

Abu Anis only realised something unusual was happening when he heard the sound of explosions coming from the old city on the western bank of the Tigris as it runs through Mosul.

“I phoned some friends over there, and they said armed groups had taken over, some of them foreign, some Iraqis,” the computer technician said. “The gunmen told them, ‘We’ve come to get rid of the Iraqi army, and to help you.'”

The following day, the attackers crossed the river and took the other half of the city. The Iraqi army and police, who vastly outnumbered their assailants, broke and fled, officers first, many of the soldiers stripping off their uniforms as they joined a flood of panicked civilians.

It was 10 June 2014, and Iraq’s second biggest city, with a population of around two million, had just fallen to the militants of the group then calling itself Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham/the Levant (Isis or Isil).

Four days earlier, black banners streaming, a few hundred of the Sunni militants had crossed the desert border in a cavalcade from their bases in eastern Syria and met little resistance as they moved towards their biggest prize.

Rich dividends were immediate. The Iraqi army, rebuilt, trained and equipped by the Americans since the US-led invasion of 2003, abandoned large quantities of armoured vehicles and advanced weaponry, eagerly seized by the militants. They also reportedly grabbed something like $500m from the Central Bank’s Mosul branch.

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How rich is IS?

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Despite territorial losses, IS survives, thanks in no small part to its status as “the best-funded terrorist organisation” in history. While most people decry the validity inferred from the name of IS as a “state”, the group’s financing is certainly more reminiscent of a state than that of organisations such as al-Qaeda that relied heavily on donations to fund their operations.

Islamic State: The struggle to stay rich

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“At the beginning, they behaved well,” said Abu Anis. “They took down all the barricades the army had put up between quarters. People liked that. On their checkpoints they were friendly and helpful – ‘Anything you need, we’re here for you.'”

The Mosul honeymoon was to last a few weeks. But just down the road, terrible things were already happening.

As the Iraqi army collapsed throughout the north, the militants moved swiftly down the Tigris river valley. Towns and villages fell like skittles. Within a day they had captured the town of Baiji and its huge oil refinery, and moved on swiftly to seize Saddam Hussein’s old hometown, Tikrit, a Sunni hotbed.

Just outside Tikrit is a big military base, taken over by the Americans in 2003 and renamed Camp Speicher after the first US casualty in the 1991 “Desert Storm” Gulf war against Iraq, a pilot called Scott Speicher, shot down over al-Anbar province in the west.

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Camp Speicher, by now full of Iraqi military recruits, was surrounded by the Isis militants and surrendered. The thousands of captives were sorted, the Shia were weeded out, bound, and trucked away to be systematically shot dead in prepared trenches. Around 1,700 are believed to have been massacred in cold blood. The mass graves are still being exhumed.

Far from trying to cover up the atrocity, Isis revelled in it, posting on the internet videos and pictures showing the Shia prisoners being taken away and shot by the black-clad militants.

In terms of exultant cruelty and brutality, worse was not long in coming.

After a pause of just two months, Isis – now rebranded as “Islamic State” (IS) – erupted again, taking over large areas of northern Iraq controlled by the Kurds.

That included the town of Sinjar, mainly populated by the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority regarded by IS as heretics.

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Hundreds of Yazidi men who failed to escape were simply killed. Women and children were separated and taken away as war booty, to be sold and bartered as chattels, and used as sex slaves. Thousands are still missing, enduring that fate.

Deliberately shocking, bloodthirsty exhibitionism reached a climax towards the end of the same month, August 2014.

IS issued a video showing its notorious, London-accented and now late executioner Mohammed Emwazi (sardonically nicknamed “Jihadi John” by former captives) gruesomely beheading American journalist James Foley.

In the following weeks, more American and British journalists and aid workers – Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning, and Peter Kassig (who had converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdul Rahman) – appeared being slaughtered in similar, slickly produced videos, replete with propaganda statements and dire warnings.

In the space of a few months, IS had blasted its way from obscurity on to the centre of the world stage. Almost overnight, it became a household word.

Seven-and-a-half thousand miles (12,000km) away, then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott summed up the breathtaking novelty of the horror. It was, he said “medieval barbarism, perpetrated and spread with the most modern of technology”.

IS had arrived, and the world was taking notice. But the men in black did not appear out of the blue. They had been a long time coming.

The theology of murder

The ideological or religious roots of IS and like-minded groups go deep into history, almost to the beginning of Islam itself in the 7th Century AD.

Like Christianity six centuries before it, and Judaism some eight centuries before that, Islam was born into the harsh, tribal world of the Middle East.

“The original texts, the Old Testament and the Koran, reflected primitive tribal Jewish and Arab societies, and the codes they set forth were severe,” writes the historian and author William Polk.

“They aimed, in the Old Testament, at preserving and enhancing tribal cohesion and power and, in the Koran, at destroying the vestiges of pagan belief and practice. Neither early Judaism nor Islam allowed deviation. Both were authoritarian theocracies.”

As history moved on, Islam spread over a vast region, encountering and adjusting to numerous other societies, faiths and cultures. Inevitably in practice it mutated in different ways, often becoming more pragmatic and indulgent, often given second place to the demands of power and politics and temporal rulers.

For hardline Muslim traditionalists this amounted to deviationism, and from early on, there was a clash of ideas in which those arguing for a strict return to the “purity” of the early days of Islam often paid a price.

The eminent scholar Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), who founded one of the main schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, was jailed and once flogged unconscious in a dispute with the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. Nearly five centuries later, another supreme theologian of the same strict orthodox school, Ibn Taymiyya, died in prison in Damascus.

These two men are seen as the spiritual forefathers of later thinkers and movements which became known as “salafist”, advocating a return to the ways of the first Muslim ancestors, the salaf al-salih (righteous ancestors).

They inspired a later figure whose thinking and writings were to have a huge and continuing impact on the region and on the salafist movement, one form of which, Wahhabism, took his name.

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born in 1703 in a small village in the Nejd region in the middle of the Arabian peninsula.

A devout Islamic scholar, he espoused and developed the most puritanical and strict version of what he saw as the original faith, and sought to spread it by entering pacts with the holders of political and military power.

In an early foray in that direction, his first action was to destroy the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab, one of the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, on the grounds that by the austere doctrine of salafist theology, the veneration of tombs constitutes shirk, the revering of something or someone other than Allah.

But it was in 1744 that Abd al-Wahhab made his crucial alliance with the local ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud. It was a pact whereby Wahhabism provided the spiritual or ideological dimension for Saudi political and military expansion, to the benefit of both.

Passing through several mutations, that dual alliance took over most of the peninsula and has endured to this day, with the House of Saud ruling in sometimes uneasy concert with an ultra-conservative Wahhabi religious establishment.

The entrenchment of Wahhabi salafism in Saudi Arabia – and the billions of petrodollars to which it gained access – provided one of the wellsprings for jihadist militancy in the region in modern times. Jihad means struggle on the path of Allah, which can mean many kinds of personal struggle, but more often is taken to mean waging holy war.

But the man most widely credited, or blamed, for bringing salafism into the 20th Century was the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb. He provided a direct bridge from the thought and heritage of Abd al-Wahhab and his predecessors to a new generation of jihadist militants, leading up to al-Qaeda and all that was to follow.

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Born in a small village in Upper Egypt in 1906, Sayyid Qutb found himself at odds with the way Islam was being taught and managed around him. Far from converting him to the ways of the West, a two-year study period in the US in the late 1940s left him disgusted at what he judged unbridled godless materialism and debauchery, and his fundamentalist Islamic outlook was honed harder.

Back in Egypt, he developed the view that the West was imposing its control directly or indirectly over the region in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse after World War One, with the collaboration of local rulers who might claim to be Muslims, but who had in fact deviated so far from the right path that they should no longer be considered such.

For Qutb, offensive jihad against both the West and its local agents was the only way for the Muslim world to redeem itself. In essence, this was a kind of takfir – branding another Muslim an apostate or kafir (infidel), making it justified and even obligatory and meritorious to kill him.

Although he was a theorist and intellectual rather than an active jihadist, Qutb was judged dangerously subversive by the Egyptian authorities. He was hanged in 1966 on charges of involvement in a Muslim Brotherhood plot to assassinate the nationalist President, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Qutb was before his time, but his ideas lived on in the 24 books he wrote, which have been read by tens of millions, and in the personal contact he had with the circles of people like Ayman al-Zawahiri, another Egyptian who is the current al-Qaeda leader.

Another intimate of the al-Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden said: “Qutb was the one who most affected our generation.” He has also been described as “the source of all jihadist thought”, and “the philosopher of the Islamic revolution”.

Image copyrightGetty Images

More than 35 years after he was hanged, the official commission of inquiry into al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 concluded: “Bin Laden shares Qutb’s stark view, permitting him and his followers to rationalise even unprovoked mass murder as righteous defence of an embattled faith.”

And his influence lingers on today. Summing up the roots of IS and its predecessors, the Iraqi expert on Islamist movements Hisham al-Hashemi said: “They are founded on two things: a takfiri faith based on the writings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and as methodology, the way of Sayyid Qutb.”

The theology of militant jihadism was in place. But to flourish, it needed two things – a battlefield, and strategists to shape the battle.

Afghanistan was to provide the opportunity for both.

Rise of al-Qaeda

The Soviet invasion in 1979, and the 10 years of occupation that followed, provided a magnet for would-be jihadists from around the Arab world. Some 35,000 of them flocked to Afghanistan during that period, to join the jihad and help the mainly Islamist Afghan mujahedeen guerrillas turn the country into Russia’s Vietnam.

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There is little evidence that the “Afghan Arabs”, as they became known, played a pivotal combat role in driving the Soviets out. But they made a major contribution in setting up support networks in Pakistan, channelling funds from Saudi Arabia and other donors, and funding schools and militant training camps. It was a fantastic opportunity for networking and forging enduring relationships as well as tasting jihad first hand.

Ironically, they found themselves on the same team as the Americans. The CIA’s Operation Cyclone channelled hundreds of millions of dollars through Pakistan to militant Afghan mujahedeen leaders such as Golbuddin Hekmatyar, who associated closely with the Arab jihadists.

It was in Afghanistan that virtually all the major figures in the new jihadist world cut their teeth. They helped shape events there in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a period that saw the emergence of al-Qaeda as a vehicle for a wider global jihad, and Afghanistan provided a base for it.

By the time the Taliban took over in 1996, they were virtually in partnership with Osama Bin Laden and his men, and it was from there that al-Qaeda launched its fateful 9/11 attack in 2001.

The formative Afghan experience provided both the combat-hardened salafist jihadist leaders and the strategists who were to play an instrumental role in the emergence of the IS of today.

Most significant was the Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who more than anybody else ended up being the direct parent of IS in almost every way.

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A high-school dropout whose prison career began with a sentence for drug and sexual offences, Zarqawi found religion after being sent to classes at a mosque in the Jordanian capital, Amman. He arrived in Pakistan to join jihad in Afghanistan just in time to see the Soviets withdraw in 1989, but stayed on to work with jihadists.

After a stint back in Jordan where he received a 15-year jail sentence on terrorist charges but was later released in a general amnesty, Zarqawi finally met Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1999. By all accounts the two al-Qaeda leaders did not take to him. They found him brash and headstrong, and they did not like the many tattoos from his previous life that he had not been able to erase.

But he was charismatic and dynamic, and although he did not join al-Qaeda, they eventually put him in charge of a training camp in Herat, western Afghanistan. It was here that he worked with an ideologue whose radical writings became the scriptures governing subsequent salafist blood-letting: Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir.

“The brutality of beheading is intended, even delightful to God and His Prophet,” wrote Muhajir in his book The Theology of Jihad, more generally referred to as the Theology of Bloodshed. His writings provided religious cover for the most brutal excesses, and also for the killing of Shia as infidels, and their Sunni collaborators as apostates.

The other book that has been seen as the virtual manual – even the Mein Kampf – for IS and its forebears is The Management of Savagery, by Abu Bakr Naji, which appeared on the internet in 2004.

Image copyrightCreative commons

“We need to massacre and to do just as has been done to Banu Qurayza, so we must adopt a ruthless policy in which hostages are brutally and graphically murdered unless our demands are met,” Naji wrote. He was referring to a Jewish tribe in seventh-century Arabia which reportedly met the same fate at the hands of early Muslims as the Yazidis of Sinjar did nearly 14 centuries later: the men were slaughtered, the women and children enslaved.

Naji’s sanctioning of exemplary brutality was part of a much wider strategy to prepare the way for an Islamic caliphate. Based partly on the lessons of Afghanistan, his book is a detailed blueprint for provoking the west into interventions which would further rally the Muslims to jihad, leading to the ultimate collapse of the enemy.

The scenario is not so fanciful if you consider that the Soviet Union went to pieces barely two years after its withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Naji is reported to have been killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan’s Waziristan province in 2008.

Iraq fiasco

The fallout from the 9/11 attacks changed things radically for the jihadists in late 2001. The US and allies bombed and invaded Afghanistan, ousting the Taliban, and launching a wider “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden went underground, and Zarqawi and others fled. The dispersing militants, fired up, badly needed another battlefield on which to provoke and confront their Western enemies.

Luck was on their side. The Americans and their allies were not long in providing it.

Their invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was, it turned out, entirely unjustified on its own chosen grounds – Saddam Hussein’s alleged production of weapons of mass destruction, and his supposed support for international terrorists, neither of which was true.

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By breaking up every state and security structure and sending thousands of disgruntled Sunni soldiers and officials home, they created precisely the state of “savagery”, or violent chaos, that Abu Bakr Naji envisaged for the jihadists to thrive in.

Iraq was on the way to becoming what US officials are now calling the “parent tumour” of the IS presence in the region.

Under Saddam’s tightly-controlled Baath Party regime, the Sunnis enjoyed pride of place over the majority Shia, who have strong ties with their co-religionists across the border in Iran.

The US-led intervention disempowered the Sunnis, creating massive resentment and providing fertile ground for the outside salafist jihadists to take root in.

They were not long in spotting their constituency. Abu Musab Zarqawi moved in, and within a matter of months was organising deadly, brutal and provocative attacks aimed both at Western targets and at the majority Shia community.

Doctrinal differences between the two sects go back to disputes over the succession to the Prophet Muhammad in the early decades of Islam, but conflict between them is generally based on community, history and sectarian politics rather than religion as such.

Setting himself up with a new group called Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Tawhid means declaring the uniqueness of Allah), Zarqawi immediately forged a pragmatic operational alliance with underground cells of the remnants of Saddam’s regime, providing the two main intertwined strands of the Sunni-based insurgency: militant Jihadism, and Iraqi Sunni nationalism.

His group claimed responsibility for several deadly attacks in August 2003 that set the pattern for much of what was to come: a suicide truck bomb explosion at the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed the envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 20 of his staff, and a suicide car bomb blast in Najaf which killed the influential Shia ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and 80 of his followers. The bombers were salafist jihadists, but logistics were reportedly provided by underground Baathists.

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The following year, Zarqawi himself was believed by the CIA to be the masked killer shown in a video beheading an American hostage, Nicholas Berg, in revenge for the Abu Ghraib prison abuses of Iraqi detainees by members of the US military.

As the battle with the Americans and the new Shia-dominated Iraqi government intensified, Zarqawi finally took the oath of loyalty to Bin Laden, and his group became the official al-Qaeda branch in Iraq.

But they were never really on the same page. Zarqawi’s provocative attacks on Shia mosques and markets, triggering sectarian carnage, and his penchant for publicising graphic brutality, were all in line with the radical teachings he had imbibed. But they drew rebukes from the al-Qaeda leadership, concerned at the impact on Muslim opinion.

Zarqawi paid little heed. His strain of harsh radicalism passed to his successors after he was killed by a US air strike in June 2006 on his hideout north of Baghdad. He was easily identified by the tattoos he had never managed to get rid of.

The direct predecessor of IS emerged just a few months later, with the announcement of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) as an umbrella bringing the al-Qaeda branch together with other insurgent factions.

But tough times lay ahead. In January 2007, the Americans began “surging” their own troops in Iraq from 132,000 to a peak of 168,000, adopting a much more hands-on approach in mentoring the rebuilt Iraqi army. At the same time, they enticed Sunni tribes in western al-Anbar province to stop supporting the jihadists and join the US-led Coalition-Iraqi government drive to quell the insurgency, which many did, on promises that they would be given jobs and control over their own security.

By the time both the new ISI and al-Qaeda leaders were killed in a US-Iraqi army raid on their hideout in April 2010, the insurgency was at its lowest ebb, pushed back into remote corners of Sunni Iraq.

They were both replaced by one man, about whom very little was publicly known at the time, and not much more since: Ibrahim Awad al-Badri, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Six eventful years later, he would be proclaimed Caliph Ibrahim, Commander of the Faithful and leader of the newly declared “Islamic State”.

Territorial takeover

Baghdadi’s career is so shrouded in mist that there are very few elements of it that can be regarded as fact. By all accounts he was born near Samarra, north of Baghdad, so the epithet “Baghdadi” seems to have been adopted to give him a more national image, while “Abu Bakr” evokes the first successor to (and father-in-law of) Prophet Muhammad.

Like the original Abu Bakr, Baghdadi is also reputed to come from the Prophet’s Quraysh clan. That, and his youth – born in 1971 – may have been factors in his selection as leader.

All accounts of his early life agree that he was a quiet, scholarly and devout student of Islam, taking a doctorate at the Islamic University of Baghdad. Some even say he was shy, and a bit of a loner, living for 10 years in a room beside a small Sunni mosque in western Baghdad.

The word “charismatic” has never been attached to him.

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Who is the leader of IS?

As a youth, Baghdadi had a passion for Koranic recitation and was meticulous in his observance of religious law. His family nicknamed him The Believer because he would chastise his relatives for failing to live up to his stringent standards.

Who is Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?

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But by the time of the US-led invasion in 2003, he appears to have become involved with a militant Sunni group, heading its sharia (Islamic law) committee. American troops detained him, and he was reportedly held in the detention centre at Camp Bucca in the south for most of 2004.

Camp Bucca (named after a fireman who died in the 9/11 attacks) housed up to 20,000 inmates and became a university from which many IS and other militant leaders graduated. It gave them an unrivalled opportunity to imbibe and spread radical ideologies and sabotage skills and develop important contacts and networks, all in complete safety, under the noses and protection of their enemies.

Baghdadi would also certainly have met in Camp Bucca many of the ex-Baathist military commanders with whom he was to form such a deadly partnership.

The low-profile, self-effacing Baghdadi rang no alarm bells with the Americans. They released him, having decided he was low-risk.

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But he went on to work his way steadily up through the insurgent hierarchy, virtually unknown to the Iraqi public.

By the time Baghdadi took over in 2010, the curtains seemed to be coming down for the jihadists in the Iraqi field of “savagery”.

But another one miraculously opened up for them across the border in neighbouring Syria at just the right moment. In the spring of 2011, the outbreak of civil war there offered a promising new arena of struggle and expansion. The majority Sunnis were in revolt against the oppressive regime of Bashar al-Assad, dominated by his Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam.

Baghdadi sent his men in. By December 2011, deadly car bombs were exploding in Damascus which turned out to be the work of the then shadowy al-Nusra Front. It announced itself as an al-Qaeda affiliate the following month. It was headed by a Syrian jihadist, Abu Mohammed al-Julani. He had been sent by Baghdadi, but had his own ideas.

Jostling with a huge array of competing rebel groups in Syria, al-Nusra won considerable support on the ground because of its fearless and effective fighting skills, and the flow of funds and foreign fighters that support from al-Qaeda stimulated. It was relatively moderate in its salafist approach, and cultivated local relationships.

Al-Nusra was slipping out of Baghdadi’s control, and he didn’t like it. In April 2013, he tried to rein it back, announcing that al-Nusra was under his command in a new Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (Syria or the Levant). Isis, or Isil, was born.

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What’s in a name?

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During the short and turbulent period over which it has imposed itself as a major news brand, so-called Islamic State has confused the world with a series of name changes reflecting its mutations and changing aspirations, leaving a situation where there is no universal agreement on how to refer to it.

• After emerging in Iraq as the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), its spread to Syria prompted the addition of “and al-Sham”, a word that can mean Damascus, Syria, or the wider Levant
• Many chose to use the easy acronym Isis, with the “S” standing either for Syria or al-Sham, though the US administration and others opted for Isil (the “l” standing for “Levant”). Both are still widely used though technically outdated
• In Arabic the same acronym can come out as Daash, sometimes spelled Daesh in English; it has passed into common usage among many Arabs, but is disliked by the organisation itself, which sees it as disrespectful of the “state”; although Daash has no meaning in Arabic, it also has an unpleasant sound to it, which may be why American and Western officialdom often use it
• After further expansion of territory and ambitions, the movement dropped geographical specificity and called itself simply “the Islamic State”; Much of the world was politically reluctant simply to call it that, for fear of implying legitimacy
• The BBC and others have generally opted for calling it the “self-styled” or “so-called” Islamic State on first reference, and IS thereafter

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But Julani rebelled, and renewed his oath of loyalty to al-Qaeda’s global leadership, now under Ayman al-Zawahiri following Bin Laden’s death in 2011. Zawahiri ordered Baghdadi to go back to being just the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) and leave al-Nusra as the al-Qaeda Syria franchise.

It was Baghdadi’s turn to ignore orders from head office.

Before 2013 was out, Isis and al-Nusra were at each other’s throats. Hundreds were killed in vicious internecine clashes which ended with Isis being driven out of most of north-west Syria by al-Nusra and allied Syrian rebel factions. But Isis took over Raqqa, a provincial capital in the north-east, and made it its capital. Many of the foreign jihadists who had joined al-Nusra also went over to Isis, seeing it as tougher and more radical. In early 2014, al-Qaeda formally disowned Isis.

Isis had shaken off the parental shackles. But it had lost a lot of ground, and was bottled up. One of its main slogans, Remaining and Expanding, risked becoming empty. So where next?

Fortune smiled once more. Back in Iraq, conditions had again become ripe for the jihadists. The Americans had gone, since the end of 2011. Sunni areas were again aflame and in revolt, enraged by the sectarian policies of the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki. Sunnis felt marginalised, oppressed and angry.

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When Isis decided to move, it was pushing at an open door. In fact, it had never really left Iraq, just gone into the woodwork. As it swept through Sunni towns, cities and villages with bewildering speed in June 2014, sleeper cells of salafist jihadists and ex-Saddamist militants and other sympathisers broke cover and joined the takeover.

With the capture of Mosul, Isis morphed swiftly into a new mode of being, like a rocket jettisoning its carrier. No longer just a shadowy terrorist group, it was suddenly a jihadist army not only threatening the Iraqi state, but challenging the entire world.

The change was signalled on 29 June by the proclamation of the “Islamic State”, replacing all previous incarnations, and the establishment of the “caliphate”. A few days later, the newly anointed Caliph Ibrahim, aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, made a surprise appearance in Mosul in the pulpit of the historic Grand Mosque of Nour al-Din al-Zangi, heavily laden with anti-Crusader associations. He called on the world’s Muslims to rally behind him.

By declaring a caliphate and adopting the generic “Islamic State” title, the organisation was clearly setting its sights far beyond Syria and Iraq. It was going global.

Announcing a caliphate has huge significance and resonance within Islam. While it remains the ideal, Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders had always shied away from it, for fear of failure. Now Baghdadi was trumping the parent organisation, setting IS up in direct competition with it for the leadership of global jihadism.

A caliphate (khilafa) is the rule or rein of a caliph (khalifa), a word which simply means a successor – primarily of the Prophet Muhammad. Under the first four caliphs who followed after he died in 632, the Islamic Caliphate burst out of Arabia and extended through modern-day Iran to the east, into Libya to the west, and to the Caucasus in the north.

The Umayyad caliphate which followed, based in Damascus, took over almost all of the lands that IS would like to control, including Spain. The Baghdad-based Abbasid caliphate took over in 750 and saw a flowering of science and culture, but found it hard to hold it all together, and Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols in 1258.

Emerging from that, the Ottoman Empire, based in Constantinople (Istanbul), stretched almost to Vienna at its peak, and was also a caliphate, though the distinction with empire was often blurred. The caliphate was finally abolished by Ataturk in 1924.

So when Baghdadi was declared Caliph of the Islamic State, it was an act of extraordinary ambition. He was claiming no less than the mantle of the Prophet, and of his followers who carried Islam into vast new realms of conquest and expansion.

For most Islamic scholars and authorities, not to mention Arab and Muslim leaders, such claims from the chief of one violent extremist faction had no legitimacy at all, and there was no great rush to embrace the new caliphate. But the millennial echoes it evoked did strike a chord with some Islamic romantics – and with some like-minded radical groups abroad.

Four months after the proclamation, a group of militants in Libya became the first to join up by pledging allegiance to Baghdadi, followed a month later by the Ansar Beit al-Maqdis jihadist faction in Egypt’s Sinai. IS’s tentacles spread deeper into Africa in March 2015 when Boko Haram in Nigeria took the oath of loyalty. Within a year, IS had branches or affiliates in 11 countries, though it held territory in only five, including Iraq and Syria.

It was in those two core countries that Baghdadi and his followers started implementing their state project on the ground, applying their own harsh vision of Islamic rule.

To the outside world, deprived of direct access to the areas controlled by IS, one of the most obvious and shocking aspects of this was their systematic destruction of ancient cultural and archaeological heritage sites and artefacts.

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Some of the region’s best-known and most-visited sites were devastated, including themagnificent temples of Bel and Baalshamin at Palmyra in Syria, and the Assyrian cities of Hatra and Nimrud in Iraq.

It wasn’t just famous archaeological sites that came under attack. Christian churches and ancient monasteries, Shia mosques and shrines, and anything depicting figures of any sort were destroyed, and embellishments removed even from Sunni mosques. Barely a month after taking over Mosul, IS demolition squads levelled the 13th Century shrine of the Imam Awn al-Din, which had survived the Mongol invasion.

All of this was absolutely in line with IS’s puritanical vision of Islam, under which any pictorial representation or shrine is revering something other than Allah, and any non-Muslim structures are monuments of idolatry. Even Saudi kings and princes to this day are buried without coffins in unmarked graves.

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By posting videos of many of these acts which the rest of the world saw as criminal cultural vandalism, IS also undoubtedly intended to shock. In that sense, it was the cultural equivalent of beheading aid workers.

And there was a more practical and profitable side to the onslaught on cultural heritage. In highly organised manner, IS’s Treasury Department issues printed permits to loot archaeological sites, and takes a percentage of the proceeds.

That is just the tip of the iceberg of a complex structure of governance and control put in place as IS gradually settled in to its conquests, penetrating into every aspect of people’s lives in exactly the same way as Saddam Hussein’s intelligence apparatus had done.

Captured documents published by Der Spiegel last year give some idea of the role of ex-Baathist regime men in setting up and running IS in a highly structured and organised way, with much emphasis on intelligence and security.

Residents of Sunni strongholds like Mosul and Falluja in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria, found that IS operatives already knew almost everything about everybody when they moved in and took over in 2014.

At checkpoints, ID cards were checked against databases on laptops, obtained from government ration or employee registers. Former members of the security forces had to go to specific mosques to “repent”, hand over their weapons and receive a discharge paper.

“At first, all they did was change the preachers in the mosques to people with their own views,” said a Mosul resident who fled a year later.

“But then they began to crack down. Women who had been able to go bare-headed now had to cover up, first with the headscarf and then with the full face-veil. Men have to grow beards and wear short-legged trousers. Cigarettes, hubble-bubble, music and cafes were banned, then satellite TV and mobile phones. Morals police [hisba] vehicles would cruise round, looking for offenders.”

A Falluja resident recounted the story of a taxi-driver who had picked up a middle-aged woman not wearing a headscarf. They were stopped at an IS checkpoint, the woman given a veil and allowed to go, while the driver was sent to an Islamic court, and sentenced to two months’ detention and to memorise a portion of the Koran. If you fail to memorise, the sentence is repeated.

“They have courts with judges, officials, records and files, and there are fixed penalties for each crime, it’s not random,” said the Falluja resident. “Adulterers are stoned to death. Thieves have their hands cut off. Gays are executed by being thrown off high buildings. Informers are shot dead, Shia militia prisoners are beheaded.”

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Severed heads on park fences: A diary of life under IS

An activist based in Raqqa from a group called Al-Sharqiya 24 has been keeping a diary of what life is like under Islamic State group rule.

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There are IS departments that carry the organisation’s grip into every corner of life, including finance, agriculture, education, transport, health, welfare and utilities.

School curricula were overhauled in line with IS precepts, with history rewritten, all images being removed from schoolbooks and English taken off the menu.

“One thing you can say is this,” said the Mosul resident. “There is absolutely no corruption, no wasta (knowing the right people and pulling strings). They are totally convinced they are on the right track.”

One recent story tells a lot about IS and its ways.

As Iraqi security forces were pressing forward in areas around Ramadi earlier this year, civilians were fleeing the battle – and IS fighters, losing the day, were trying to sneak out too.

Two women, running from the combat zone, approached a police checkpoint.

As they were being waved through to safety, one of the women suddenly turned to the police, pointed at the other, and said : “This is not a woman. He’s an IS emir [commander].”

The police investigated, and it was true. The other woman was a man, who had shaved, and put on makeup and women’s clothes. He turned out to be top of the list of wanted local IS commanders.

“When IS arrived, he killed my husband, who was a policeman, raped me, and then took me as his wife,” the woman told the police.

“I put up with him all this time, waiting to avenge my husband and my honour,” she said. “I tricked him into shaving and putting on makeup, then denounced him to the police.”

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What is life like for women under IS?

“Nour” is a woman from Raqqa, the so-called Islamic State’s (IS) capital inside Syria. She managed to escape the city and is now a refugee in Europe, where she met up with the BBC.

This story is based on her experiences and those of her two sisters, who are still inside the IS-held city.

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Taking on the world

Having taken over vast swathes of territory in Iraq with their lightning offensive in June 2014, the militants might have been expected to calm down and consolidate their gains.

But, like a shark that has to keep moving or else it will die, IS barely paused before initiating a new spiral of provocation and reprisals that was predictably to draw it into active conflict with almost all the major world powers.

Already, the June offensive had threatened the approaches to Baghdad, prompting the Americans to start bringing in hundreds of military advisers and trainers to see how to help the struggling Iraqi army.

Just two months later, the attack on Kurdish areas in the north triggered US air strikes in defence of the Kurdistan capital, Irbil, and then to help stave off the threat of genocide to the Yazidis. Fourteen other nations were to join the air campaign.

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Ten days later, IS beheaded James Foley and the others followed, in line with the doctrine of exemplary brutality as punishment, deterrent and provocation. The most shocking was to come some months later, with the burning alive of the downed Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Shock intended.

The US-led bombing campaign was extended to Syria in September 2014 after IS besieged the Kurdish-held town of Kobane on the Turkish border. Coalition air strikes turned the tide there. IS lost hundreds of fighters killed at Kobane and elsewhere. More revenge was called for. IS turned abroad.

From the declaration of the caliphate until early 2016, some 70 terrorist attacks were either carried out or inspired by IS in 20 countries around the globe, from California to Sydney,with an estimated 1,200 victims killed. The attacks carried the same message of punishment, deterrence and provocation as the hostage beheadings, while also demonstrating IS’s global reach.

At the same time, they carried through the militants’ doctrine of distracting the enemy by setting fires in different locations and making him squander resources on security. For IS, “the enemy” is everybody who does not embrace it. The world is divided into Dawlat al-Islam, the State of Islam, and Dawlat al-Kufr, the State of Unbelief.

The most consequential of these atrocities were the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai on 31 October and the Paris attacks on 13 November, provoking both Russia and France to intensify air strikes on IS targets in Syria.

Had IS gone mad? It seemed determined to take on the whole world. It was goading and confronting the Americans, the Russians, and a long list of others. By its own count, it had a mere 40,000 fighters at its command (other estimates go as low as half that).

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Could it really challenge the global powers and hope to survive? Or can President Barack Obama fulfil his pledge to “degrade and ultimately destroy” IS?

Final showdown

If there seems to be something apocalyptic about IS’s “bring it on” defiance, that’s because there is.

When the organisation first brought out its online magazine – a major showcase and recruitment tool – just a month after the “caliphate” was declared, it was not by chance that it was named Dabiq.

A small town north of Aleppo in Syria, Dabiq is mentioned in a hadith (a reported saying of the Prophet Muhammad) in connection with Armageddon. In IS mythology, it is the scene where a cataclysmic showdown will take place between the Muslims and the infidels, leading to the end of days. Each issue of Dabiq begins with a quote from Abu Musab Zarqawi: “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify – by Allah’s permission – until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.”

The prospect of taking part in that final glorious climax, achieving martyrdom on the path of Allah and an assured place in paradise, is one of the thoughts inspiring those heeding the IS call to jihad.

That could help explain why the organisation seems to enjoy an endless supply of recruits willing to blow themselves to pieces in suicide attacks, which it calls “martyrdom-seeking operations” (suicide is forbidden in Islam). Hundreds have died in this way, and they happen virtually daily.

It’s one of the elements that makes IS a formidable fighting force that will be hard to destroy even in strictly military terms.

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The Baathist legacy at the core of IS

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IS is in many respects a project of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s outlawed Baath party, but now with a different ideology. Former agents or officers of Saddam Hussein’s regime dominate its leadership… They represent a battle-hardened and state-educated core that would likely endure (as they have done through US occupation and a decade of war) even if the organisation’s middle and lower cadres are decimated.

Is Islamic State invincible?

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The head of security and intelligence for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, Masrour Barzani, tells the story of a frustrated would-be suicide bomber who screamed at his captors: “I was just ten minutes away from being united with the Prophet Muhammad!”

“They think they’re winners regardless of whether they kill you or they get killed,” says Barzani. “If they kill you, they win a battle. If they get killed, they go to heaven. With people like this, it’s very difficult to deter them from coming at you. So really the only way to defeat them is to eliminate them.”

Probably for the first time in military history since the Japanese kamikaze squadrons of World War Two, suicide bombers are used by IS not only for occasional terrorist spectaculars, but as a standard and common battlefield tactic.

Virtually all IS attacks begin with one or several suicide bombers driving explosives-rigged cars or trucks at the target, softening it up for combat squads to go in. So much so that the “martyrdom-seekers” have been called the organisation’s “air force”, since they serve a similar purpose.

Formidable though that is, IS as a fighting force is much more than a bunch of wild-eyed fanatics eager to blow themselves up. For that, they have Saddam Hussein to thank.

“The core of IS are former Saddam-era army and intelligence officers, particularly from the Republican Guard,” said an international intelligence official. “They are very good at moving their people around, resupply and so on, they’re actually much more effective and efficient than the Iraqi army are. That’s the hand of former military staff officers who know their business.”

“They are very professional,” adds Masrour Barzani. “They use artillery, armoured vehicles, heavy machinery etc, and they are using it very well. They have officers who know conventional war and how to plan, how to attack, how to defend. They really are operating on the level of a very organised conventional force. Otherwise they’d be no more than a terrorist organisation.”

The partnership with the ex-Baathists, going back to Zarqawi’s early days in Iraq, is clearly a vital component in IS success.

But that does not mean its fighters are invincible on the battlefield. The Kurds in north-east Syria were fighting IS off with no outside help for a year before anybody noticed. And even now, IS makes what would conventionally be seen as costly mistakes.

In December 2015, they lost several hundred fighters in one abortive attack east of Mosul alone, and probably 2,500 altogether that month. In total some 15,000 are estimated to have been killed by Coalition air strikes since August 2014.

But they seem to have little difficulty making up the numbers. With a population of perhaps 10 million acquiescent Sunnis to draw on in Iraq and Syria, most recruiting is done locally. And if IS remains in place, there will soon be a new generation of young militants.

“I didn’t join out of conviction,” says Bakr Madloul, a 24-year-old bachelor who was arrested in December at his home in a Sunni quarter in southern Baghdad and accused of taking part in deadly IS car bomb attacks on mainly Shia areas, which he admits.

Bakr says he was working as a construction foreman in Kurdistan when IS took over Mosul. He was detained for questioning by Kurdish security, and met a militant in jail who persuaded him to go to Mosul, where he joined up with IS and manned a checkpoint until it was hit by a Coalition air strike.

He was then sent back to his Baghdad suburb to help organise car bombings. The explosives-packed vehicles were sent from outside Baghdad, and his job was to place them where he was told by his controller, usually in crowded streets or markets.

“Only one of the five car bombs I handled was driven by a suicide bomber,” he says. “I spoke to him. He was 22 years old, an Iraqi. He believed he would go to paradise when he died. It’s the easiest and quickest way to Heaven. They strongly believe this. They would blow themselves up to get to Heaven. There were older ones in their 30s and 40s.”

“I asked my controllers more than once, ‘Is it OK to kill women and children?’ They would answer, ‘They’re all the same.’ But to me, killing women and children, I didn’t feel at all comfortable about that. But once you’re in, you’re stuck. If you try to leave, they call you a murtadd, an apostate, and they’ll kill you or your family.”

Bakr knows he will almost certainly hang. I asked him if he would do the same things over if he had his life again. He laughed.

“Absolutely not. I would get out of Iraq, away from IS, away from the security forces. I took this path without realising the consequences. There is no way back. I see that now.”

But up in Kurdistan, another IS prisoner, Muhannad Ibrahim, has no such regrets.

A 32-year-old from a village near Mosul with a wife and three children, he was a construction worker for a Turkish company when IS took over the city. Two of his older brothers had died fighting the Americans there in 2004 and 2006. He joined IS without hesitation and was commanding a small detachment when he was captured in a battle with the Kurds.

“We were being oppressed by the Shia, they were always insulting and bothering us,” he says. “But that’s not the main motivation, religious conviction is more important. All my family is religious, praise be to Allah. I came to IS through my faith and religious principles.”

“If I had my time over again, I would take the same path, the same choices. Because I am convinced by this thing, I have to go to the end. Either I am killed, or Allah will decree some other fate for me.”

Taming Mosul

Defeating IS militarily is less about its own strengths and vulnerabilities than it is about the deficiencies of the forces arrayed against it. IS is as strong as the weaknesses of the failed states whose collapse into “savagery” has left room for it to take root and grow.

Iraq and Syria have to be the primary focus, as the commander of Coalition forces, Lt Gen Sean MacFarland, spelled out in February 2016:

“The campaign has three objectives: one, to destroy the Isil parent tumour in Iraq and Syria by collapsing its power centres in Mosul and Raqqa; two, to combat the emerging metastasis of the Isil tumour worldwide; and three, to protect our nations from attack.”

It goes without saying that Coalition air strikes, deadly and effective as they are, have their limitations. Only in co-ordination with cohesive, motivated ground forces can the territory taken by IS be regained. And that’s the crippling problem, in both countries.

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The Kurds in the north of both Iraq and Syria have made considerable progress in pushing IS back from areas they regard as theirs, with the help of air strikes. But they are neither capable of going all the way, nor should they – in both countries, they would stir up acute communal sensitivities in the Sunni Arab areas where IS is rooted.

Pro-government forces in Iraq have largely dislodged IS from Diyala province and the Tikrit area north of the capital, but that was mainly the work of Iranian-backed Shia militias who leapt to the defence of Baghdad and the south as IS advanced southwards in June 2014 after the army collapsed.

Using them in mainly Sunni areas is fraught with risk.

Ramadi, the provincial capital of al-Anbar to the west, was recaptured at the end of 2015 in an offensive spearheaded by the government’s US-built Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), with the Shia militias kept out of this Sunni stronghold. But the CTS has limited numbers and has been badly battered. And Ramadi was left in ruins, its entire population fled.

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All of which does not augur well for the sound retrieval of remaining Sunni hotbeds where IS is dug in in Iraq, such as Falluja – barely 30 miles from Baghdad – and above all, Mosul, 10 times the size of Ramadi.

Surprisingly, given the presence of literally hundreds of competing rebel factions, it’s in Syria that the chances of making serious progress against IS may be greater, though still not great.

The IS imperative has spurred all the outside parties involved there, including the Americans and the Russians and their regional and local allies, for the first time to put serious weight behind a truce and a negotiated settlement between rebels and regime.

The idea and driving motive is that all parties would then be free to turn on IS, and, to be consistent, also al-Nusra Front, because it belongs to al-Qaeda. It may seem like a long shot, but the US seems to be pushing very hard indeed, making things happen that have proven intractable for nearly five years.

If all the parties – the rebel groups, the Kurds, regime troops and militias, and their outside allies including the Coalition and the Russians – can somehow be reconciled and turned against IS, its chances of surviving for long in Syria would not be great.

Its only real conurbation there is Raqqa. It is much less deeply embedded in the Sunni population in Syria than in Iraq. Disgruntled Syrian Sunnis have many other vehicles for pressing their grievances against the regime.

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So it keeps coming back again to Iraq, and specifically, to Mosul. Ten times the size of Raqqa. And that’s not the only reason for its significance.

“Mosul is the beating heart of IS,” says a senior western official in northern Iraq. “IS is essentially an Iraqi creation. The tragic reality is that at the moment, it is the main Sunni political entity in Iraq. From the West, it’s looked at as a kind of crazed cult. It’s not. Here in Iraq it represents an important constituency. It represents a massive dissatisfaction, the alienation of a whole sector of the population.”

“That’s not to say that the people in Mosul are enthusiastic about IS, but for them, it’s better than anything that comes from Baghdad.”

The word in both Baghdad and northern Iraq is that the Americans are pushing seriously hard for a Mosul campaign by the end of 2016, with President Obama’s departure in mind. That may not be possible, given the difficulties involved in assembling credible ground forces, as well as severe financial crises affecting both Baghdad and Kurdistan.

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But if it does go ahead, the fear is that wrongly-conceived short-term victory, if it is achieved, will turn into long-term disaster, given the total lack of national reconciliation between Sunnis and Shia in the wake of the sectarian carnage that followed Saddam’s overthrow in 2003.

Sunni grievances in Iraq are such that if IS did not exist, it would have to be invented. Without reconciliation and a sense of Sunni empowerment and partnership in a national project, IS in some shape or form will always be there, just as the Taliban are now resurgent in Afghanistan despite everything that was done to oust them.

But the Iraqi expert on radical movements, Hisham al-Hashemi, believes that IS could be badly damaged if the Coalition succeed in one of their top-priority tasks – to kill Abu Bakr Baghdadi.

Leaders have been killed before, and replaced with little obvious effect on the course of history. But Hashemi believes Baghdadi is different.

“IS’ future depends on Baghdadi,” he says. “If he is killed, it will split up. One part would stay on his track and announce a new caliphate. Another would split off and return to al-Qaeda. Others would turn into gangs following whoever is strongest.”

“The source of his strength is that he brought about an ideological transformation, blending jihadist ideas with Baathist intelligence security methods, enabling him to create this quasi-state organisation.”

Hashemi believes only Baghdadi can hold it together. There have been numerous false reports of him being hit, but he appears to be stubbornly and elusively still alive, not seen in public since that mosque appearance in early July 2014.

The Americans are unlikely to rest until they have killed Baghdadi, not least because of their belief that he personally repeatedly raped an American NGO worker, Kayla Mueller, and then had her killed in early 2015.

But even if they do get him, and even if IS does break up, the Sunni problem in Iraq will not go away.

Capitalising on chaos

IS is in any case spreading its bets and developing other territorial options. At present, Libya looks the most promising. It has just the kind of failed-state anarchy, the “savagery”, that leaves room for the jihadists to move in, forging alliances with local militants and disgruntled supporters of the overthrown regime. Just like Iraq.

IS signalled its arrival there in typical style, issuing a polished video in February 2015 showing a group of 21 bewildered Egyptian Christian workers in orange jumpsuits being beheaded on a Libyan beach, their blood mingling with the waters of the Mediterranean as a warning to the “crusader” European countries on the other side.

The man who voiced that warning was believed to be the IS leader in Libya, an Iraqi called Wissam al-Zubaydi, aka Abu Nabil. By coincidence, Zubaydi was killed in a US air strike on the same day IS struck terror in Paris, 13 November 2015.

The man sent by IS to replace him, Abu Omar al-Janabi, was another Iraqi and former Baathist with a tough reputation and a knack for generating revenue – clearly with one eye on Libya’s oil facilities, given the damage wrought by Coalition bombing on the organisation’s exploitation of fields in Iraq and Syria.

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The US and allies have been powerless to halt IS advances in Libya, taking over a big stretch of the coast around the central city of Sirte, which was to (overthrown) Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi what Tikrit was to Saddam Hussein. Another American air strike in February killed (among nearly 50 other people) Noureddine Chouchane, reputedly an IS figure responsible for the deadly attacks on Western tourists in his native Tunisia next door.

With little prospect of a national unity government to end Libya’s chaotic fragmentation and provide partners on the ground, such remote strikes – which sometimes act as powerful recruiters for the militants – are about all the frustrated Western powers can do as IS takes root and spreads.

There are other possibilities already beckoning – Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia… wherever there are dysfunctional states and angry Muslims, there are opportunities for IS, competing strongly with a diminished al-Qaeda as a dominant brand in the jihadist market. Adding the extra risk for the West, that that competition could be another spur for spectacular terrorist attacks which they know are being actively plotted.

Battle for minds

In the first 18 months after the declaration of the “Islamic State”, the number of foreign fighters making their way to join jihad in Syria and Iraq rose dramatically. The New York-based security consultancy Soufan Group estimated that 27,000 foreign jihadists had made the trip from 86 countries, more than half of them from the Middle East and North Africa.

Clearly, the caliphate had appeal, despite – perhaps in some cases because of – its graphically publicised brutality. A tribute to its extraordinary skill in using the internet and social media as a propaganda and grooming tool.

Ten months after vowing to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the organisation, President Obama ruefully acknowledged that IS “has been particularly effective at reaching out to and recruiting vulnerable people around the world including here in the United States, and they are targeting Muslim communities around the world”.

And he put his finger on the real challenge, monumentally greater than the comparatively simple task of defeating IS militarily:

“Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas, a more attractive and more compelling vision,” he said.

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The complex art of IS propaganda

Image copyrightIS image

On a relatively normal day… there was a total of 50 distinct pieces of propaganda. The photo reports and videos included depictions of an IS offensive in northern Syria and eulogies for the dead in Salahuddin… Overwhelmingly, though, the propagandists were preoccupied with a carefully refined view of ‘normal’ life.

Fishing and ultraviolence

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The problem is that when disenchanted people in the region look around them – especially the young, the idealistic, or the hopeless unemployed who have no future – they see scant evidence of “better ideas” or attractive and compelling visions.

They see the ruins of an “Arab Spring” which raised hopes only to dash them cruelly.

The brutal, corrupt dictatorships which it shook have either fragmented into chaos and sectarian and tribal upheaval, like Syria itself, Libya, Yemen and (with Western intervention) Iraq, or the “deep states” of their former regimes came back, even more harshly in the case of Egypt, more gently in the case of Tunisia.

While many of the European jihadists may have heeded the call for other reasons, socio-economic factors play an important part in radicalising some of the Arab jihadists, and will continue to do so unless addressed.

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Why IS still attracts recruits from Europe

Image copyrightWest Midlands Police

The flow of recruits, both fighters and families, leaving their homes in Europe to live under so-called Islamic State rule in Raqqa in Syria has slowed dramatically.

“It reached its peak in 2013-14, when it was far easier for jihadists to cross the 822km-long (510-mile) Turkey-Syria border, when IS propaganda on social media went largely unchallenged, and when IS was on a roll militarily, seizing ever more territory across northern Syria and north-western Iraq.

“While all three of those factors have now changed to the detriment of IS, the underlying factors propelling young Britons and Europeans towards joining the group have not gone away. So what are they?

Islamic State: What is the attraction for young Europeans?

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One of the biggest contingents is from Tunisia, where a detailed survey in the poorest suburbs of the capital showed clearly that the radicalisation of young people there had far less to do with extreme Islamic ideology as such than it did with unemployment, marginalisation and disillusion after a revolution into which they threw themselves, but which gave them nothing, and left them hopeless.

A rare insight into the types of people who volunteer to join IS came with the emergence in European media in March of batches of what are believed to be “secret” IS files withpersonal details of recruits.

The data from 2013-14 purported to identify members from at least 40 countries. It included names, addresses, phone numbers and skill sets – a potential treasure trove for intelligence agencies trying to track and prosecute nationals who have signed up with the group.

IS is also filling a desert left by the collapse of all the political ideologies that have stirred Arab idealists over the decades. Many used to travel to the Soviet Union for training and tertiary education, but communism is now seen as a busted flush. Arab socialism and Arab nationalism that caused such excitement in the 1950s and 1960s mutated into brutal, corrupt “republics” where sons were groomed to inherit power from their fathers.

In this vacuum, IS took up the cause of punishing the West and other outsiders for their actions in the region over the past century:

• the carve-up by the colonial powers 100 years ago, drawing a border between Iraq and Syria which IS has now erased
• the creation of Israel under the British mandate for Palestine, and its subsequent unswerving political and financial support by the US
• Western (and indeed Russian) backing for corrupt and tyrannical Arab regimes
• the Western invasion and destruction of Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts, with the death of uncounted thousands of Iraqis
• the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisoner abuse scandals….

The roots of IS also lie in a crisis within Islam.

“Isil is not Islamic,” said President Obama, echoing statements by many western leaders that “IS has nothing to do with Islam”.

It has.

“It is based on Islamic texts that are reinterpreted according to how they see it,” says Ahmad Moussalli, professor of politics at the American University of Beirut. “I don’t say they are not coming out of Islamic tradition, that would be denying facts. But their interpretation is unusual, literal sometimes, very much like the Wahhabis.”

Hisham al-Hashemi, the Iraqi expert on radical groups, agrees.

“Violent extremism in IS and the salafist jihadist groups is justified, indeed blessed, in Islamic law texts relied on by IS and the extremist groups. It’s a crisis of religious discourse, not of a barbaric group. Breaking up the religious discourse and setting it on the right course is more important by far than suppressing the extremist groups militarily.”

Because ancient texts can be interpreted by extremists to cover their worst outrages does not implicate the entire religion, any more than Christianity is defined by the Inquisition, where burning at the stake was a stock penalty.

Extremist ideas remain in the dark, forgotten corners of history unless their time comes. And IS time came, with Afghanistan, Iraq, and everything that followed.

“Salafism is spreading in the world, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Arab countries,” says Prof Moussalli.

He blames the Saudis for stifling the emergence of a moderate, democratic version of Islam, the “alternative Islamic discourse” to salafism that President Obama would like to see.

“A moderate Islamic narrative today is a Muslim Brotherhood narrative, which has been destroyed by the Gulf states supporting the military coup in Egypt,” says Prof Moussalli, referring to the Egyptian military’s ousting of the elected President Mohammed Morsi, a senior Muslim Brotherhood figure, in July 2013.

“We lost that opportunity with Egypt. Egypt could have paved the way for real change in the area. But Saudi Arabia stood against it, in a very malicious way, and destroyed the possibility of changing the Arab regimes into more democratic regimes that accept the transfer of power peacefully. They don’t want it.”

Saudi Arabia’s ultra-conservative Wahhabi religious establishment and its constant propagation have raised ambiguity over its relations with radical groups abroad. Enemies and critics have accused it of producing the virulent strain of Wahhabism that inspires the extremists, and even of supporting IS and other ultra-salafist groups.

But Jamal Khashoggi, a leading Saudi journalist and writer who spent time in Afghanistan and knew Bin Laden, says that simply is not true

“We are at war with IS, which sees us as corrupt Wahhabis.” he says.

“IS is a form of Wahhabism that has been suppressed here since the 1930s. It resurfaced with the siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and spread here and there. But Saudi Arabia didn’t back it at all, it saw it as a threat. So it’s true that salafism can turn radical, just as the US right-wing produces some crazy lunatics.”

Hundreds of people died in a two-week siege when extremist salafists took over the Grand Mosque, the holiest place in Islam, in protest at what they saw as the Kingdom’s deviation from the true path.

More recently, Saudi Arabia’s security forces and its Shia minority have in fact been the target of attacks by IS, and the kingdom has executed captured militants. It has an active deradicalisation programme.

But Mr Khashoggi agrees that the Saudis made a huge mistake when they backed the overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt and the subsequent crackdown on the movement, which has pushed political Islam into the arms of the radicals.

“There were no pictures of Isis, Bin Laden or al-Qaeda in Tahrir Square,” he says. “It was an opportunity for democracy in the Middle East, but we made a historical blunder for which we are all paying now.”

But the Kingdom’s extreme conservatism, its distaste for democracy, and its custodianship of the shrines in Mecca and Medina to which millions of Muslims make pilgrimage every year, have made it one of the main targets for calls for an unlikely reformation within Islam as part of the battle to defeat IS and other extremist groups.

“We must accept the fact that Islam has a crisis,” says a senior Sunni politician in Iraq.

“IS is not a freak. Look at the roots, the people, the aims. If you don’t deal with the roots, the situation will be much more dangerous. The world has to get rid of IS, but needs a new deal: reformation, in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, al-Azhar [the ancient seat of Sunni Islamic learning and authority in Cairo].”

“You can’t kill all the Muslims, you need an Islamic reformation. But Saudi and Qatari money is blotting out the voices so we can’t get anywhere. It’s the curse of the Arab world, too much oil, too much money.”

Regional rivalry

IS is at the heart of yet another of the region’s burning themes – the strategic geopolitical contest, the game of nations, that is taking place as Syria and Iraq disintegrate.

When the US-led coalition destroyed the Iraqi state in 2003, it was breaking down the wall that was containing Iran, the region’s Shia superpower, seen as a threat by the Saudis and most of their Sunni Gulf partners since its Islamic revolution in 1979.

Iran had for years been backing anti-Saddam Iraqi Shia factions in exile. Through those groups, the empowerment of the majority Shia community in Iraq after 2003 gave Iran unrivalled influence over Iraqi politics.

The arrival of the IS threat led to even more Iranian penetration, arming, training and directing the Shia militia who rose in defence of Baghdad and the South.

“If it weren’t for Iran, the democratic experiment in Iraq would have fallen,” says Hadi al-Ameri, leader of the Iranian-backed Badr Organisation, one of the biggest Shia fighting groups.

“Obama was sleeping, and he didn’t wake up until IS was at the gates of Erbil. When they were at the gates of Baghdad, he did nothing. Were it not for Iran’s support, IS would have taken over the whole Gulf, not just Iraq.”

Image copyrightGetty Images

For Saudi Arabia and its allies, Iranian penetration in Iraq threatens to establish, indeed largely has, a Shia crescent, linking Iran, Iraq, Syria under its minority Alawite leadership, and Lebanon dominated by the Iranian-created Shia faction Hezbollah.

From the outset of the war in Syria, the Saudis and their Gulf partners, and Turkey, backed the Sunni rebels in the hope that the overthrow of Assad would establish Sunni majority rule.

So then a north-south Sunni axis running from Turkey through Syria to Jordan and Saudi Arabia would drive a stake through the heart of the Shia crescent and foil the Iranian project, as they saw it.

That is essentially what IS did in 2014 when it moved back into Iraq, took Mosul and virtually all the country’s Sunni areas, and established a Sunni entity which straddled the suddenly irrelevant border with Syria, blocking off Shia parts of Iraq from Syria.

If IS had just stayed put at that point and dug in, who would have shifted them? Had they not gone on to attack the Kurds, the Americans would not have intervened. Had they not shot down a Russian airliner and attacked Paris, the Russians and French would not have stepped up their involvement.

“Had they not become international terrorists and stayed local terrorists, they could have served the original agenda of dividing the Arab east so there would be no Shia crescent,” says Prof Moussalli.

We may never know why they did it. Perhaps their virulent strain of salafism just had to keep going: Remaining and Expanding.

Could they now just row back and settle in to their “state”, stop antagonising people, and eventually gain acceptance, just as Iran has after its own turbulent revolution and international isolation?

It seems unlikely, for the same driving reasons that they made that escalation in the first place. And even if IS wanted to, the Americans also seem set on their course, and they have proven implacable in their pursuit of revenge for terrorist outrages.

But what is the alternative? Given the problem of assembling capable ground forces, can the Americans be complicit in a takeover of Mosul by Iranian-backed Shia militias, and of Raqqa by Russian- and Iranian-backed Syrian regime forces or other non-Sunni groups like the Kurds? Is their hostility to IS so strong that they would watch the Iranians connect up their Shia crescent? And would the Saudis and Turks go along with that?

There are no easy answers to any of the challenges posed by IS in all the strands of crisis that it brings together.

That’s why it’s still there.

Credits:

Author: Jim Muir

Editor: Raffi Berg

Production: Ben Milne, Susannah Stevens

Graphics: Henry Clarke Price

Video: Mohamed Madi

All images are subject to copyright

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