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A senior NATO official says there’s reason to be concerned about the large-scale Zapad 2017 military maneuvers being conducted now by Russia and Belarus, since they could be seen as “a serious preparation for big war.”

General Petr Pavel, head of NATO’s Military Committee, told the Associated Press in an interview Saturday that NATO is increasing efforts to re-establish the military-to-military communications with Russia to avoid any “unintended consequences of potential incidents during the exercise.”

The defense chiefs of NATO member countries were holding their annual conference this year in the Albanian capital of Tirana to discuss fighting terrorism, the situation in the Western Balkans and the new U.S. strategy on Afghanistan.

The Zapad war games, being conducted this year mostly in Belarus, run until September 20 and reportedly involve 5,500 Russian and 7,200 Belarusian troops.

‘Not aimed at NATO’

Despite assurances from Moscow that “NATO is not considered as an enemy” and that “the exercise is not aimed at NATO,” Pavel said Russians have not been transparent about the facts of the exercises. He says the number of troops in the exercises — which the Russians say is about 12,700 — could actually be between 70,000 to 100,000.

“All together, what we see is a serious preparation for big war,” he told The Associated Press. “When we only look at the exercise that is presented by Russia, there should be no worry. But when we look at the big picture, we have to be worried, because Russia was not transparent.”

Two weeks ago, Pavel met with the head of the Russian military’s General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov.

The Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, General Curtis Scaparrotti, had a phone call with Gerasimov at the beginning of Zapad 17. Pavel said it was “mainly focused on transparency and risk reduction and avoidance of unintended consequences of potential incidents.”

“We have a high concentration of troops in the Baltics. We have a high concentration of troops in the Black Sea, and potential for an incident may be quite high because of a human mistake, because of a technology failure,” said Pavel. “We have to be sure that such an unintended incident will not escalate into conflict.”

The Military Committee offers consensus-based advice on how the alliance can best meet global security challenges.

Western Balkans

Stability and security in the Western Balkan countries was also discussed during the conference. Pavel said trouble in the region could come from radicalism, organized crime, migration, economic problems or the “malign influence from Russia.”

“We do not compete with Russia for the Western Balkans. We are primarily focused on the Balkans being stable and secure,” he said.

He also added there was no plan for reducing troops in Kosovo or setting a time length for their presence.

About 4,500 troops from 31 countries have been deployed in Kosovo since June 1999, after NATO’s 78-day air campaign to stop a deadly Serbian crackdown against ethnic Albanian separatists. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but Serbia has not recognized it.
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Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said he is prepared to intervene militarily if a referendum held by the nation’s Kurdish population results in violence.

Speaking to the Associated Press Saturday, Abadi said the Kurdish vote on independence is “a dangerous escalation” that will invite violations of Iraqi sovereignty.

Abadi also told an Iraqi news agency that the Kurds would be “playing with fire” by continuing with plans for the referendum, which is scheduled for September 25 in the three governorates that make up the Kurdish autonomous region. The vote is also expected to be held in areas controlled by Kurds but claimed by the Baghdad government.

Turkey warns of ‘grave mistake’

On Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim warned that the Iraqi Kurdish plan to hold an independence referendum was a “grave mistake.”

Iraqi Kurdistan regional President Masoud Barzani is backing the referendum.

Turkey, which borders the Iraqi Kurdish region, has strong ties with Barzani, but Ankara has been stepping up its pressure to call off the vote.

“There are 10 days left. Therefore, I want to repeat our friendly call to Masoud Barzani: Correct this mistake while there is still time,” Yildirim said Friday to supporters.

The warning was followed by Ankara’s first direct threat.

“We don’t want to impose sanctions, but, if we arrive at that point, there are steps that have been already planned that Turkey can take,” Yildirim added.

The warning came days after the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, told the Kurds that they would “pay a price for the vote.”

Ankara fears secession

Ankara, with its own restive Kurdish minority, in an area that mainly borders Iraqi Kurdistan, fears an independent Kurdish state could fuel similar secessionist demands. Those fears are heightened by the suspicion that Syrian Kurds on the Turkish border harbor the same independence ambitions.

Turkish fears of the referendum have created rare common ground across the country’s deep political divide. 

“Balkanization of the Middle East would bring instability,” warned Ceyda Karan, a columnist with the Turkish opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper. “Borders are not drawn fairly in many parts of the world. The question of where to find fairness in redrawing them is unknown.”

WATCH: Iraqi Kurds Prepare for Independence Vote, Despite Opposition

​US: keep focus on IS

The United States has voiced strong opposition to the independence vote.

On Friday the White House released a statement saying the United States “does not support” the Kurdish plan to hold a referendum, and that the plan “is distracting from efforts to defeat ISIS and stabilize the liberated areas.” Further, it says, “holding the referendum in disputed areas is particularly provocative and destabilizing.”

The Trump administration is calling on the Kurds to cancel the referendum and instead engage in “serious and sustained dialogue with Baghdad,” which the U.S. has offered to facilitate.

Iran has also registered its opposition to the referendum, but Turkey arguably has the most leverage on the Iraqi Kurds. The Habur border gate on Turkey’s frontier with Iraq is the main trade route to the outside world for Iraqi Kurdistan, while an oil pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan provides a financial lifeline.

Sanctions possible

Sanctions could prove to be a double-edged sword.

“Habur does not only mean gate to Iraqi Kurdistan,” points out former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen, who set up Turkey’s consulate in Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital of Irbil.

“Habur means gate to Iraq and in today’s terms means gate to the Middle East as all border gates are closed with Syria. There is the oil pipeline; Iraqi Kurdistan oil, including Kirkuk oil, is being marketed to global markets through Ceyhan. That is a win, win for Ankara,” Selcen added.

Financial considerations are not the only factors that Ankara has to consider.

“Ankara is against [the referendum], but on the other hand, Barzani is the best ally in the region. I think they are not that vocal when it comes to the referendum,” said political scientist Cengiz Aktar.

Barzani in the past decade has developed a close relationship with Ankara, one built not only on lucrative trade but also on security cooperation.

Barzani has provided assistance to Ankara in Turkey’s war against the Kurdish rebel group PKK, which is waging a decades-long insurgency for greater minority rights in Turkey and has bases in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Turkish election politics could further restrict Ankara’s room to maneuver.

The Iraqi Kurdish independence referendum threatens to complicate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-election bid in 2019.

“I understand Mr. Erdogan is trying to balance the traditional Kurdish vote that goes with [Erdogan’s] AK Party and [Turkish] nationalists,” said former diplomat Selcen, who is now a regional analyst.

The Kurdish vote in Turkey traditionally accounts for about 10 percent of Erdogan’s support, votes that could be crucial in what is predicted to be a closely fought presidential election.

Selcen suggests the solution to the political conundrum posed by the Iraqi Kurdish independence vote to Erdogan’s own ambitions could be to simply do nothing. 

“I think in today’s system in Turkey, one should only follow closely what Mr. Erdogan says, and, knowing his usual style and usual rhetoric, I find Mr. Erdogan’s position much milder and more moderate. I will speculate that following September 25, the day of the referendum, it will be business as usual between Ankara and Irbil.”

Dorian Jones contributed to this report from Istanbul.
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Would a 15-year-old girl be married off by her parents in violation of the law? Would another girl, who looks even younger, get justice after an alleged statutory rape at the hands of an older man?

In their impoverished communities in Uganda, the answers hinged on the fact that one girl had a birth certificate and the other didn’t. Police foiled the planned marriage after locating paperwork that proved the first girl was not 18 as her parents claimed. The other girl could not prove she was under the age of consent; her aunt, who’s also her guardian, has struggled to press charges against the builder who seduced and impregnated her.

“The police were asking me many questions about proof of the girl’s birth date. How old she is? Where she goes to school,” said the aunt, Percy Namirembe, sitting in her tin-roofed shantytown home in Masaka near the shores of Lake Victoria in south-central Uganda. “I don’t have evidence showing the victim is not yet 18.”

As Namirembe spoke, in a room decorated with a collage of Christ and the Madonna, her niece sat beside her, her belly swollen and a vacant stare on her face.

In the developed world, birth certificates are often a bureaucratic certainty. However, across vast swaths of Africa and South Asia, tens of millions of children never get them, with potentially dire consequences in regard to education, health care, job prospects and legal rights. Young people without IDs are vulnerable to being coerced into early marriage, military service or the labor market before the legal age. In adulthood, they may struggle to assert their right to vote, inherit property or obtain a passport.

“They could end up invisible,” said Joanne Dunn, a child protection specialist with UNICEF.

With the encouragement of UNICEF and various non-governmental organizations, many of the worst-affected countries have been striving to improve their birth registration rates. In Uganda, volunteers go house to house in targeted villages, looking for unregistered children. Many babies are born at home, with grandmothers acting as midwives, so they miss out on the registration procedures that are being modernized at hospitals and health centers.

By UNICEF’s latest count, in 2013, the births of about 230 million children under age 5 – 35 percent of the world’s total – had never been recorded. Later this year, UNICEF plans to release a new report showing that the figure has dropped to below 30 percent due to progress in countries ranging from Vietnam and Nepal to Uganda, Mali and Ivory Coast.

India is the biggest success story. It accounted for 71 million of the unregistered children in UNICEF’s 2013 report – more than half of all the Indian children in that age range. Thanks to concerted nationwide efforts, UNICEF says the number of unregistered children has dropped to 23 million – about 20 percent of all children under age 5.

Uganda is a potential success story as well, though very much a work in progress. UNICEF child protection officer Augustine Wassago estimates that the country’s registration rate for children under 5 is now about 60 percent, up from 30 percent in 2011.

While obtaining a birth certificate is routine for most parents in the West, it may not be a priority for African parents who worry about keeping a newborn alive and fed. Many parents wait several years, often until their children are ready for school exams, to tackle the paperwork.

Maria Nanyonga, who raises pigs and goats in Masaka, says lack of birth registration caused her to miss out on tuition subsidies for some of the seven nieces and nephews she is raising.

“I tried my best to get the children’s certificates, but I didn’t even know where to start,” she said. “I didn’t know when they were born, and the officials needed that.”

Even now, two years after losing out on the financial aid, Nanyonga is uncertain about the children’s ages.

“I can only guess,” she said. “I think the oldest is 10 and the youngest is 5.”

Henry Segawa, a census worker in the Rakai administrative district, is among those who’ve been trained to do the registration outreach. Their efforts have been buttressed by public awareness campaigns; radio talk show hosts and priests have been encouraged to spread the word.

“When you go to a home, you explain the benefits of birth registration, and people have been responding well,” Segawa said.

On one of his forays, Segawa was on hand in a remote village as a midwife delivered a baby at a decaying health center with a leaky roof, no running water and outhouse walls smeared with excrement.

Upon hearing the newborn’s piercing bawls, Segawa strode toward the birth register to record the newborn’s details.

The baby, Ben Ssekalunga, was the ninth child in his family, said his grandmother, Mauda Byarugaba.

“I want this baby to be her last one,” she said of her daughter. “Nine children are too many.”

Birth registration plays a pivotal role in Uganda’s efforts to enforce laws setting 18 as the minimum age for marriage.

Child marriage remains widespread, due largely to parents hoping to get a dowry from their daughters’ suitors. In the rare cases where the police are alerted, investigators face an uphill task pressing charges if they cannot prove, with a birth certificate or other official document, that the girl is a minor.

But in the recent case in Rakai, police detective Deborah Atwebembeire was able to prevail in a surprise raid on a wedding party because the bride-to-be’s birth certificate proved she was 15.

“When we reached there, I heard one man say, ‘Ah, but the police have come. Let me hope the girl is not young,'” Atwebembeire recalled.

The girls’ parents claimed she was born in March 1999, which would have made her old enough to consent. Yet only months before, the girl’s parents had told birth registration officials she was born in October 2001.

The wedding was called off, and the parents spent a night in jail.

“We achieved our objective, which was to stop the wedding,” Atwebembeire said.

The girl, Asimart Nakabanda, had dropped out of school before the planned marriage. “The man is out of my mind now. I don’t want him anymore,” she said. “I want to go back to school and study.”

The birth registration campaign in Uganda dates back only about five years and there’s still uncertainty as to whether the government will invest sufficient funds to expand and sustain it.

In India, by contrast, the major progress in birth registration results from a decades-long initiative. Public health workers, midwives, teachers and village councilors in remote areas have all been empowered to report births. In areas with internet connectivity, online registration has helped boost overall coverage.

Chhitaranjan Khaitan, an official with the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, said 15 of the country’s 29 states had reported a 100 percent birth registration rate, and seven more states surpassed 90 percent. Many states have successfully linked registration to a nationwide effort to provide every Indian citizen with an identification number.

An added motivation is India’s effort to stem its skewed gender ratio, due largely to families’ preference for sons. By requiring health workers and village officials to register all births, authorities hope fewer newborn girls will be killed by their families.

Pradeep Verma, a 28-year-old car mechanic in the village of Gram Mohdi in the central state of Chhattisgarh, was thrilled to obtain his daughter’s birth certificate earlier this year.

“It was the first thing I did after my daughter was born,” Verma said. “My parents did not register my birth. It was not considered important or necessary in those days.”

Verma has had repeated problems with proving his identity, particularly in getting a government ration card that entitled him to cheap rice and sugar.

“I know how difficult it has been to get an official identity document or enroll in government welfare programs, since I have no proof of birth,” said Verma, who dropped out of school in 10th grade. “My daughter will not have to face such hassles.”

Verma’s state of Chhattisgarh was recording just 55 percent of births in 2011. Amitabha Panda, the state’s top statistician, said reasons included lack of registration centers, outdated data collection methods and wariness of extending outreach to areas where Maoist rebels held sway.

In 2013, with help from UNICEF, the state government launched a campaign using street theater, graffiti and notices distributed at markets to get the word out. Today, the state says it registers virtually every birth.

The West African nation of Mali is another success story. It’s now reporting a birth registration rate of 87 percent – one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa – despite a long-running conflict involving Islamic extremists.

Michelle Trombley, a UNICEF child protection officer in Mali, admires the parents and local officials who persisted with registration efforts even when their communities in the north were occupied by rebels.

“They were so dedicated to having children registered, they would smuggle in the official registration books,” she said. “People were literally putting their lives at risk.”

For all of the progress, huge challenges remain for UNICEF and its partners to attain their goal of near-universal registration by 2030.

In Somalia, wracked by famine and civil war, the most recent registration rate documented by UNICEF, based on data from 2006, was 3 percent – the lowest of any nation.

In Myanmar, the overall registration rate has surpassed 70 percent, but is much lower in the western state of Rakhine, base of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority. Human rights agencies say many thousands of Rohingya children there have no birth certificates because of discriminatory policies.

More broadly, there’s the massive problem of children without birth certificates or other identification who make up a significant portion of the millions of displaced people around the world, fleeing war, famine, persecution and poverty.

In Lebanon, tens of thousands of Syrian children have been born to refugee parents in recent years without being registered by any government. The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, has pushed Lebanese authorities to ease barriers to registration, such as requirements to present certain identity documents.

Major efforts to register refugee children also are under way in Thailand and Ethiopia.

Monika Sandvik-Nylund, a senior child protection adviser with UNHCR, said birth registration can be crucial to enabling refugee children to return to their home countries or to reunite after being separated from their parents.

There are no comprehensive statistics on the extent of such separations, but Claudia Cappa, author of the upcoming UNICEF report, says they can be heartbreaking for a parent.

“How can you claim your child if you don’t have proof he or she really existed?” she said. “Imagine how devastating this might be to a mother.”
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It was a Friday in June, a short workday before a public holiday weekend in Ukraine, and cybersecurity expert Victor Zhora had left the capital, Kyiv, and was in the western city of Lviv when he got the first in a torrent of phone calls from frantic clients.

His clients’ networks were being crippled by ransomware known as Petya, a malicious software that locks up infected computers and data. But this ransomware was a variant of an older one and wasn’t designed to extort money — the goal of the virus’ designers was massive disruption to Ukraine’s economy.

“I decided not to switch on my computer and just used my phone and iPad as a precaution,” he said. “I didn’t want my laptop to be contaminated by the virus and to lose my data,” he said.

​Virus spread like wildfire

The Petya virus, targeting Microsoft Windows-based systems, spread like wildfire across Europe and, to a lesser extent, America, affecting hundreds of large and small firms in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Britain.

While many Europeans saw the June cyberattack as just another wild disruption caused by anonymous hackers, it was identified quickly by experts, like the 37-year-old Zhora, as another targeted assault on Ukraine. Most likely launched by Russia, it was timed to infect the country’s networks on the eve of Ukraine’s Constitution Day.

The cyberattack started through a software update for an accounting program that businesses use when working with Ukrainian government agencies, according to the head of Ukraine’s cyberpolice, Sergey Demedyuk. In an interview with VOA in his office in the western suburbs of Kyiv, Demedyuk said, “every year cyberattacks are growing in number.”

“Sometimes when targeting a particular government agency or official, they mount complex attacks, first using some disguising action, like a denial-of-service attack, and only then launch their main attack aiming, for example, at capturing data,” he said.

Ukraine’s 360-member cyberpolice department was formed in 2015. The department is stretched, having not only to investigate cybercrime by nonstate actors but also, along with a counterpart unit in the state security agency, defend the country from cyberattacks by state actors. Demedyuk admits it is a cat-and-mouse game searching for viruses and Trojan horses that might have been planted months ago.

​Cybersecurity summit

On Wednesday, the director of U.S. National Intelligence, Dan Coats, told a cybersecurity summit in Washington that digital threats are mounting against the West, and he singled out Russia as a major culprit, saying Moscow “has clearly assumed an ever more aggressive cyber posture.”

“We have not experienced — yet — a catastrophic attack. But I think everyone in this room is aware of the ever-growing threat to our national security,” Coats added.

And many of the digital weapons the West may face are being refined and developed by Russian-directed hackers in the cyberwar being waged against Ukraine, said Zhora and other cybersecurity experts.

“They are using Ukraine as a testing laboratory,” said Zhora, a director of InfoSafe, a cybersecurity company that advises private sector clients and Ukrainian government agencies.

​Eye of the digital storm

Since the 2014 ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine has been in the eye of a sustained and systematic digital storm of big and small cyberattacks with practically every sector of the country impacted, including media, finance, transportation, military, politics and energy. Sometimes, the intrusions are highly tailored; other times, more indiscriminate attacks like Petya are launched at Ukraine.

Russian officials deny they are waging cyber warfare against Ukraine. Zhora, like many cybersecurity experts, acknowledges it is difficult, if not impossible most times, to trace cyberattacks back to their source.

“Attribution is the most difficult thing. When you are dealing with professional hackers it is hard to track and to find real evidence of where it has come from,” he said. “But we know only one country is the likely culprit. We only really have one enemy that wants to destroy Ukrainian democracy and independence,” he added.

Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, has been less restrained in pointing the finger of blame. Last December, he said there had been 6,500 cyberattacks on 36 Ukrainian targets in the previous two months alone. Investigations, he said, point to the “direct or indirect involvement of [the] secret services of Russia, which have unleashed a cyberwar against our country.”

Ukraine’s cyberpolice head agrees. Demedyuk says his officers have been able to track attacks, especially denial-of-service intrusions, back to “Russian special services, tracking them to their own facilities and their own IP addresses.” But the original source of more complex intrusions, he said, are much harder to identify, with the hackers disguising themselves by using servers around the world, including in Asia and China.

​Digital weapons refined

Digital intrusions have seen data deleted and networks crippled with real life consequences. And digital weapons are being refined often with the knowledge gained from each intrusion.

Zhora cites as an example of this evolution the difference between two large cyberattacks on the country’s electricity grid, the first in December 2015 and the second at the end of last year, which cut off energy to hundreds of thousands of people for several hours.

With the first attack the hackers used malware to gain access to the networks and then shut the system down manually. 

“They sent an email and when someone opened it, the payload was downloaded and later it spread across the network and they used the path created for the hackers to get to the administrator’s work station and then in a live session switched off the subsystems overseeing electricity distribution,” he said.

But with the 2016 attack no live session was necessary.

“They used a malware which opened the doors automatically by decoding specific protocols and there was no human interaction. I think they got a lot of information in the first attack about the utility companies’ networks and they used the knowledge to write the malware for the second intrusion,” he said.

Digital threats to US

In his speech midweek in Washington, Coats specifically cited possible digital threats to America’s critical infrastructure, including electrical grids and other utilities, saying it is of rising concern. 

“It doesn’t take much effort to imagine the consequences of an attack that knocks out power in Boston in February or power in Phoenix in July,” he said.

After the second cyberattack on Ukraine’s electrical grid, a group of American government and private sector energy officials was dispatched to Kyiv, where they spent a month exploring what happened, according to Ukrainian officials.

One lesson the visitors drew was that it would be much harder in the U.S. to switch the grid back on after an intrusion. The Ukrainians were able to get the electricity moving again by visiting each substation and turning the system on again manually, an option apparently more challenging in the U.S., where grid systems are even more automated.

“Virtual attacks are every bit as dangerous as military ones — we are living on a battlefield,” Zhora said.
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British police say they have made an arrest in connection with Friday’s rush-hour bomb attack on a London subway train.

Authorities say the 18-year-old man was arrested in the port area of Dover Saturday morning. Dover is a major ferry port for travel between Britain and France.  A police statement called the arrest “significant.”

Earlier Saturday London Transport authorities said they have re-opened the Parsons Green station where the bomb on a train partially detonated.

Images of the bomb posted on social media appear to show a bucket on fire that had been placed inside a plastic bag close to a railcar door.

Prime Minister Theresa May said after the attack that the country’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Center decided to raise the country’s threat level to critical, meaning that a further attack may be imminent.

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the assault. The terrorist group, however, has a history of claiming responsibility for attacks the group may not be connected with.

Shortly after the attack, armed police descended into the Parsons Green station.

May said the public may see more armed police on the streets and the transport network. The prime minister also said members of the military will begin aiding police, providing security at some sites not accessible to the public.

The National Health Service said late Friday that 21 people who were in the subway car at the time of the explosion were being treated at hospitals, while eight other people had been discharged.

The blast was the fifth major terrorist attack in Britain this year.

WATCH: Police Manhunt Following Terror Attack on London Underground

President Trump weighs in

U.S. President Donald Trump called Prime Minister May on Friday to convey his sympathies, the office of the White House press secretary said in a statement.

The statement said President Trump “pledged to continue close collaboration with the United Kingdom to stop attacks worldwide targeting innocent civilians and to combat extremism.”

Earlier, the British prime minister admonished Trump for his initial reaction to the attack. Trump had tweeted, “Another attack in London by a loser terrorist. These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!”

May responded to the tweet, telling the BBC, “I never think it’s helpful for anybody to speculate on what is an ongoing investigation.”

​Police, intelligence agency work together

London police said their investigation into Friday’s attack is being supported by MI-5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency.

British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson appealed for calm and said it was important not to speculate.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan said the British capital “will never be intimidated or defeated by terrorism.”
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A suicide car bombing of a NATO convoy in southern Afghanistan has killed at least one Romanian soldier and has injured two more.

The Romanian Defense Ministry confirmed the casualties, and a local government spokesman told VOA that Friday’s attack occurred close to the airbase in Kandahar, the provincial capital.

Fazal Bari Biryali said the suicide bomber rammed his explosives-packed car into the foreign military convoy, which was on a routine patrol in the area.

A Taliban spokesman swiftly took credit for the blast, claiming it destroyed a military vehicle and killed seven “foreign invaders.” The insurgent group often makes casualty claims that later turn out to be untrue.

“We remind you [NATO] once again your soldiers will keep getting killed here and our sacred jihad will continue with the same vigor as long as you have a single soldier here,” a statement sent to reporters quoted Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, who speaks for insurgent operations in southern Afghanistan.

NATO’s Resolute Support (RS) mission said in a statement: “A small number of RS service members were wounded today when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device targeted their patrol in Kandahar. The service members were taken to a medical facility at the Kandahar airfield for treatment.”

Taliban insurgents routinely have targeted Afghan security forces, but their attacks on foreign troops appear to have intensified since U.S. President Donald Trump announced his “new strategy” for Afghanistan aiming to break the military stalemate with the Taliban.

A suicide bomber earlier this week near the U.S.-run Bagram military airbase, north of Kabul, wounded several American soldiers.

Last week, a bomber riding a motorbike blew himself up near U.S. forces at an entrance to the facility and officials said it caused a “small number of casualties.”

 
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Turkey, Russia and Iran agreed Friday to a deal that will see the countries work together to police a de-escalation zone in Syria’s Idlib province for the next six months, according to a joint statement issued by the three countries following talks in Kazakhstan.

The three nations also agreed to set up a coordination center to monitor the implementation of other de-escalation zones around Syria during the latest round of peace talks in Astana.

According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, observers from all three countries will be stationed at “control and observation” points within the de-escalation zones.

“The observer forces’ main task will be to prevent conflicts between the regime and the opposition and to monitor possible violations of the cease-fire,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

While the three nations agreed to set up the de-escalation zones, the details about how to enforce the safe zones are still being worked out, Russia’s representative at Syrian peace talks, Alexander Lavrentiev, told Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

He said the “mechanism and concrete locations [of a deployed force in Idlib] will be discussed,” according to RIA Novosti.

According to Lavrentyev, Turkey, Russia and Iran all will send about 500 observers to Idlib, with the Russian contingent consisting of military policemen.

Idlib, which borders Turkey, was captured in 2015 by an alliance of jihadists and rebels.

Representatives from both the Syrian government and the rebel groups attended the Astana talks.

 
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At least 18 people were injured, many with burns, following a blast early Friday on a packed rush-hour commuter train in London. Police are treating the event as a terrorism incident.
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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged China to cut oil exports to North Korea to force Pyongyang to rein in its nuclear weapons program during his visit to London on Thursday.

Tillerson’s trip to Britain comes days after the United Nations Security Council imposed new sanctions on North Korea. He said he had hoped for stronger measures from the U.N., and urged Beijing to use its leverage.

“I am hopeful that China, as a great country, as a world power, will decide on their own and will take it upon themselves to use that very powerful tool of oil supply to persuade North Korea to reconsider its current path toward weapons development, reconsider its approach to dialogue and negotiations in the future,” he told reporters following meetings with his British and French counterparts.

Tillerson also had strong words for Iran, which he said was “clearly in default” of its expectations over the nuclear agreement. Britain supports the deal, but the United States accuses Tehran of breaching the terms.

“We must take into account the totality of Iranian threats — not just Iran’s nuclear capabilities, that is one piece of our posture toward Iran,” Tillerson told reporters.

Alongside his British hosts, Tillerson attended a summit on Libya with the country’s U.N. special representative, and delegations from France, the United Arab Emirates, Italy and Egypt.

He said the United Nations has Washington’s full backing in seeking a political settlement.

“What we don’t want to see happen is Libya becoming a place to birth additional terrorist organizations, or provide opportunities for ISIS to re-emerge in a different part of the world. We are all committed to helping the Libyans find a Libyan solution that will lead to their future,” Tillerson said. ISIS is an acronym for Islamic State.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson expressed hope that elections could be held in Libya within a year.

“It’s very important, however, that you don’t do it too fast, and that you get the political groundwork done first. There has to be a constitution, there has to be an accepted basis for those elections to take place,” Johnson said.

Islamic State

There are growing fears, though, that the Islamic State terror group is making a comeback after being ousted in December from its stronghold city of Sirte, Libya.

Militias are exploiting the standoff between the internationally recognized Tripoli-based government and its rival administration in the east, said Riccardo Fabiani of the Eurasia Group.

“Those militiamen and jihadis that were part of the group were going to reform at some point somewhere, and to mount new attacks. So this is not something that is going to disappear overnight and will continue to be there as long as there is insecurity and instability in Libya,” Fabiani said.

Rohingya Muslims

Tillerson also was questioned on U.S. support for the Myanmar government in the wake of the attacks on ethnic Rohingya Muslims. He said the military should take the blame.

“This violence must stop. This persecution must stop. It’s been characterized by many as ethnic cleansing — that must stop,” Tillerson said. “And we need to support [Myanmar State Counselor] Aung San Suu Kyi and her leadership. But also be very clear and unequivocal to the military power-sharing government that this is unacceptable.”

In closing remarks, Tillerson said Britain faced challenges over Brexit, but reiterated that the United States would be a steadfast ally.

Analysts said Britain is keen to underline its ambitions of remaining a global player after its exit from the European Union. London sees its relationship with the United States as key to that goal.
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The Catalonian government on Thursday launched its official campaign for an independence referendum, which Madrid has declared illegal, buoyed by the support of the capital Barcelona.

Crowds filled a bull ring in the northeastern city of Tarragona, applauding and shouting “We will vote!” as regional president Carles Puigdemont arrived to rally support for the October 1 vote.

In a boost for the credibility of the referendum, the mayor of Barcelona said earlier on Thursday that the vote would go ahead in the city, having previously expressed concern that civil servants involved may lose their jobs.

A town hall spokesman was unable to comment further or explain how civil servants could be protected.

Puigdemont himself is facing criminal charges of misuse of public money, disobedience and abuse of office for organizing the referendum, and prosecutors have summoned hundreds of the region’s mayors for questioning.

Police raided a newspaper office and a printing press last week, looking for signs of preparation, and the regional court has ordered Civil Guard agents to shut down web pages providing information about the referendum.

Regional home affairs councillor Joaquim Forn said there was a bigger than usual presence of national police in Catalonia.

“They are moving throughout the region. They must be looking for ballot boxes,” he told RAC1 radio.

A majority of Catalonia’s 5.5 million voters want to have their say on the northeastern region’s relationship with Spain, but the independence cause has lost support in recent years and surveys indicate less than 50 percent of the population would choose full self-rule.
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In a Croatian port sits a boat built to carry bananas from Africa to Italy, that laid mines for Nazi Germany and was sunk by Allied planes before it was salvaged as the personal yacht of a globe-trotting communist leader.

Josip Broz Tito and the state he led – Yugoslavia – have long passed into history, and the boat, the Galeb (Seagull), was left to rust in a corner of Rijeka’s once mighty docks.

Now, with Rijeka readying to become European Capital of Culture in 2020, city authorities have secured European Union money to restore the 117-meter (384-feet) boat as a museum, just as debate in Croatia rages over the life and deeds of the man who graced the pink mattress in the front port-side cabin.

If the Galeb was a symbol of Tito’s prestige on the world stage – a communist leader welcome in ports West as well as East – its restoration is part of Croatia’s own tortured process of reconciliation with its 20th century history.

Villain to some, hero to others

To conservatives in Croatia, Tito – who was born in what is today Croatia to a Croat father and Slovene mother – was a totalitarian dictator: to look fondly on him means to be nostalgic for a shared federal state that denied Croats their own until they forged one in a 1991-95 war.

Liberals, however, recall his guerrilla fight against the Nazis and the relative freedom and prosperity of Yugoslavs compared to those who lived in the Soviet Union or in its shadow.

They see in the disdain of conservatives a thinly veiled fondness for the World War II Croatian state that collaborated with the Nazis but was snuffed out with Tito’s Partisan victory – sentiment that has gained a foothold in mainstream Croatian

politics in recent years.

It is a tug-of-war over history and identity that was encapsulated this month in the renaming by Zagreb’s city council of the capital’s Marshal Tito Square to Republic of Croatia square.

Days later, the government ordered the removal of a plaque near the site of a World War II concentration camp that bore a notorious slogan associated with the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia.

“We live in a time when history is being reinvented retroactively,” said Ivan Sarar, who as head of culture at Rijeka’s city council is in charge of its 2020 makeover.

“It’s interesting that just by undertaking this [restoration] we have already been declared revisionists,” he told Reuters.

‘Quasi-cultural exhibitionism’

After years of false-starts, work on restoring the Galeb is imminent – “a mammoth, multi-million-euro task to recreate the 1950s chic of Tito’s floating palace, host to over 100 heads of state and some of Hollywood’s finest.

Some of the furniture remains – in Tito’s cabin, his turquoise-tiled bathroom and the adjacent salon with doors that open to the deck. But the ship itself is little more than a rotting hull.

The Galeb was the stage for Tito’s major contribution to history, said Sarar, a showcase for the non-aligned movement he helped found in answer to the East-West polarization of the Cold War.

But Sarar stressed: “We won’t be soft on anyone.”

He noted Tito’s cosy ties with dictators around the world, the exodus of Italian residents of Rijeka when he took the city as part of Yugoslavia, and his denial of democracy during 35 years of one-man rule until his death in 1980. Yugoslavia fell apart in war a decade later and some 135,000 people were killed.

It was Tito’s seizure of Rijeka and the Istrian peninsula that cemented his status in this part of Croatia as a liberator.

Dozens of streets in Istria still bear his name, as do others in the Balkans – most notably in Serbia, once the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

Conservatives, however, struck a blow with the renaming of Zagreb’s Marshal Tito Square, part of a deal struck by the mayor to secure his majority in the city assembly.

The man behind the initiative, leading right-wing politician Zlatko Hasanbegovic, told Reuters that while Tito was “undeniably a significant historical figure,” so were Napoleon, Stalin and Lenin.

“In all countries, streets and squares bear the names of those who embody the values with which the entire nation identifies itself,” he said, describing the restoration of the Galeb as part of an attempt to revive the cult of Tito.

“Those insisting on it should ask themselves how the tens of thousands of victims of Yugoslav communism look on that kind of quasi-cultural exhibitionism.”

In Rijeka, Sarar denied planning any kind of homage to Tito.

“We want to create a place for dialogue, away from the current situation of extreme black, white and red truths that lead nowhere,” he said. “It’s bound to be difficult.”
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Migrant children, especially those who became separated from their parents, are at risk of abuse, exploitation and trafficking, according to a United Nations report. While discrimination against migrants who travel through the Mediterranean is widespread, children and young people are the most vulnerable. Findings by UNICEF and the International Organization for Migration show that children from sub-Saharan Africa are targeted for abuse more than any other group. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
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Hollywood celebrities may have been the first to host a telethon to raise money for Hurricane Irma victims, but the idea is not theirs alone.

Dutch TV and radio stations also are banding together for an evening-long broadcast aimed at showing solidarity and gathering donations for victims on the island of St. Martin, Netherlands Ambassador to the U.S. Henne Schuwer told VOA in an interview.

“We don’t have as many [radio and TV] stations as you have here in the United States,” so it’ll be easier to arrange, Schuwer said with a smile.

​A cherished exotic part of the whole

Asked how the Dutch people on the mainland feel about the disaster happening half a world away, Schuwer insists that his nation is firmly united with all its citizens.

“It’s part of our kingdom that has been hit, the smallest part, but it’s the Netherlands, the kingdom, that has been hit; they’re part of us.” The ambassador describes the island as “an exotic part of us” but one that the Dutch are happy to have.

The Caribbean island, divided between Dutch St. Martin and French St. Martin, is less than 64 square kilometers located roughly 241 kilometers southeast of Puerto Rico. The island got its name when Christopher Columbus spotted it in 1493 on the feast day of the eponymous Catholic saint.

An island that prides itself as a destination where one’s limits “are the sky in one direction and the bottom of the sea in the other” now finds itself struggling to survive.

​Daily crisis meeting

The Dutch government conducts a crisis meeting every day in The Hague, chaired by the prime minister, and the initial focus is on the basic necessities.

“Get the sewage system back working again, hopefully that can be done quite quickly; the drinking water system, that needs to be back on line again very, very quickly; luckily, that’s not as heavily damaged as could have been, as far as we can see,” Schuwer said.

Addressing health care issues, preventing outbreaks of infectious diseases and getting St. Martin’s hospital up and running again, are also high on the agenda.

Schuwer says reported looting on St. Martin is now under control.

“All looting is bad,” he said, but there’s a difference between taking a bottle of water from the store because one needs it, versus walking off with a television set for which he says “there’s no excuse, under any circumstances.”

An enhanced military presence, with a target number of around 550 total, is being deployed to St. Martin.

​Friend in need

Schuwer said his country is grateful for the help the United States immediately offered and almost just as immediately provided, after the hurricane hit the island.

“It was wonderful to see that in a moment like this, you’re here as an ambassador, and one of the first phone calls you get is from your colleague in the State Department, with a very simple message: If you need something, just ask.”

Schuwer credits close bilateral ties, including strong military cooperation, as having laid the foundation for the show of support in time of crisis. 

“The U.S. military also asked immediately: Can we help?” he said.

Schuwer said the U.S. has assets in the Caribbean which “we either don’t have or only have in smaller numbers,” such as military transport planes. He credits the Americans with helping clear the runway for the main airport on the island.

“We asked them for help on Saturday, on Sunday we got our reply and they were there, that was fantastic; they’re there now helping us with air traffic control,” he said, which is crucial as planes arrive to evacuate individuals with medical conditions, followed by tourists, and then local permanent residents.

Now the difficult part starts

Dutch authorities hope the majority of St. Martin’s permanent residents will decide to stay and begin rebuilding the island quickly, Schuwer said, but added: “If they want to get out, we cannot stop them, but we’ll talk to them, and say that this is your island, now the difficult part starts.’”

The ambassador said the Dutch government understands that tourism, the island’s main source of income, will probably be paralyzed for months, so it is considering incentives to encourage residents to stay on and rebuild.

King Willem-Alexander has visited the Dutch half of St. Martin and chose to stay there overnight to demonstrate his commitment and support for the rebuilding effort. Above all, the ambassador said, there is solidarity linking all Dutch people in other parts of the kingdom with the “Sint Maarteners.”

Schuwer said the message is: “You’re part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. We are with you. You have suffered very badly; we will get you through the first few days and, more importantly, we will remain with you after the television cameras are gone.”

The Latin phrase Semper progrediens, always progressing, is St. Martin’s official motto. The island’s residents may have cause to recall that sentiment in the weeks and months ahead, as they weather the aftereffects from Hurricane Irma.
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The World Anti-Doping Agency has dismissed all but one of the first 96 Russian doping cases forwarded its way from sports federations acting on information that exposed cheating in the country.

The cases stem from an investigation by Richard McLaren, who was tasked with detailing evidence of a scheme to hide doping positives at the Sochi Olympics and beforehand.

The 95 dismissed cases, first reported by The New York Times , were described by WADA officials as not containing enough hard evidence to result in solid cases.

“It’s absolutely in line with the process, and frankly, it’s nothing unexpected,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli told The Associated Press on Wednesday at meetings of the International Olympic Committee. “The first ones were the quickest to be dealt with, because they’re the ones with the least evidence.”

McLaren uncovered 1,000 potential cases, however, and a WADA spokesperson told AP it is the agency’s understanding that sports federations are considering bringing some of them forward.

Tainted samples missing

Niggli cautioned that it will be difficult to pursue some cases, because the Russian scheme involved disposing of tainted samples, and the Russians were not cooperative with McLaren in turning over evidence.

“There are a thousand names, and for a number of them, the only thing McLaren’s got is a name on a list,” Niggli said. “If you can prosecute an athlete with a name on a list, perfect. But this is not the reality. There were thousands of samples destroyed in Moscow.”

The revelation of the 95 dropped cases comes with a deadline fast approaching to make a decision on Russia’s participation at next February’s Winter Olympics.

Two IOC committees that will decide the matter — one reviewing individual cases and another looking at the overall corruption in Russia — are due to deliver interim reports at the IOC meetings later this week.

270 Russian athletes cleared for Rio 

In resolving the case against Russia’s suspended anti-doping agency (RUSADA), WADA has insisted the agency, the country’s Olympic committee and its sports ministry “publically accept the outcomes of the McLaren Investigation.” Track’s governing body put similar conditions in place for the lifting of the track team’s suspension.

The IOC, however, has made no such move. More than 270 Russian athletes were cleared to compete in the Summer Games last year in Rio.

“The best we can do to protect clean athletes is to have a really good, solid anti-doping process in Russia,” said WADA president Craig Reedie, who is also a member of the IOC. “That’s our role and our priority. The rest of it, you have to go and ask the IOC.”

IOC president Thomas Bach said the committees are “working hard all the time.”

Russia blames WADA

Meanwhile, Russian officials are showing no signs of acknowledging they ran a state-sponsored doping program.

This week, the country’s deputy prime minister, Vitaly Mutko, blamed RUSADA and the former head of the Russian anti-doping lab, Grigory Rodchenkov, for the corruption, and suggested WADA was at fault, too. Rodchenkov lives in hiding in the United States after revealing details of the plot.

“We are rearranging the system but it should be rearranged so that WADA could also share responsibility,” Mutko told Russia’s R-Sport news agency. “They should have been responsible for (Rodchenkov) before, as they have issued him a license and given him a work permit. They were in control of him but now the state is blamed for it.”
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Baghdad’s central criminal court sentenced a Russian national to death by hanging for his membership in the Islamic State group, the court said in a statement.

The man was arrested as Iraqi forces pushed the extremist group out of Mosul’s western half, according to the statement released late Tuesday. The fight for Mosul’s west was the second phase of the operation to retake Iraq’s second largest city from IS that was launched in October of last year and declared complete in July.

The individual was tried under Iraq’s anti-terrorism law and confessed to carrying out “terrorist operations” against Iraqi security forces since 2015, said Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar, spokesman for Iraq’s supreme judicial council.

Earlier this week, Iraqi forces announced they were holding more than 1,300 foreign women and children from 14 countries at a camp for displaced people in northern Iraq. The individuals from 14 countries surrendered to Kurdish forces at the end of August after an Iraqi offensive drove the extremist group from the northern town of Tal Afar, near Mosul, Iraqi security officials said.

The women and children will not be charged with crimes and will likely be repatriated to their home countries, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

In 2016, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi attempted to fast-track death sentences as his government faced growing anti-government protests demanding reform.

However, he United Nations warned the move would likely result in “gross, irreversible miscarriages of justice… given the weaknesses of the Iraqi justice system,” according to a statement from U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein.

Rights groups criticize Iraq’s widespread use of the death penalty. In 2016, Iraq executed more than 88 people, topped only by Saudi Arabia, Iran and China, according to Amnesty international.

 
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Facing a backlash in Europe over palm oil’s environmental toll, the world’s top producers are scrambling to find new markets and even striking unusual barter deals, such as exchanging Sukhoi jets for the edible oil.

The European Union is the second-largest palm oil export destination after India for both Malaysia and Indonesia, which dominate production in a global market worth at least $40 billion.

But palm has come under increasing fire in Europe over its impact on forest destruction, encouraging producers to look at new markets ranging from Africa to Myanmar.

Threatened by crumbling demand in Europe, the industry is waging a public relations battle and pushing producers to enter more price-sensitive markets, where Indonesia should have an advantage over Malaysia due to its lower production costs.

“Our principle is we will not let go of even one tonne of trade contract or potential demand palm has globally,” Indonesia’s deputy Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Musdhalifah Machmud told Reuters.

Machmud said palm oil sales were being brought up in “every trade negotiation” Indonesia conducts.

Palm oil is used in thousands of household products, from snack foods to soaps, as well as to make biodiesel. 

But the demand boom has spread plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia across an area of more than 17 million hectares — an area greater than the size of Portugal and Ireland. They are mostly carved out of rainforests, which critics say has lead to an increase in the greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

Environmental activists have pressured consumer companies into demanding that their palm suppliers adopt more environmentally sustainable forestry practices. But in Europe, politicians say the industry’s standards on sustainability do not go far enough.

So far, palm oil sales to the European Union have held up. 

Indonesian exports rose about 40 percent to 2.7 million tons in the first half of 2017 from a year earlier.

Indonesia’s overall palm exports were worth $18 billion last year, with EU sales accounting for 16 percent, the Indonesian Palm Oil Association (GAPKI) said. For Malaysia, the EU made up nearly 13 percent of exports, government data showed.

‘Imported deforestation’ 

Europe is particularly concerned about the soaring use of oils, including palm, as a biodiesel fuel. Once regarded as a green alternative, an EU-commissioned report now says it creates more emissions than fossil fuels.

France said in July it will reduce the use of palm in biofuels over concerns of “imported deforestation”, prompting concerns from Indonesia that other European countries could follow suit.

In Germany, the environment ministry said it will press to amend an EU renewables directive to take account of the study showing “palm oil and soyoil caused, in comparison to other biofuels, very much higher greenhouse gas emissions per energy unit through indirect land use change.”

The European parliament In April voted to phase out unsustainable palm oil by 2020. The resolution endorsed a single Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO) plan for Europe-bound palm and other vegetable oil exports to ensure they are produced in an environmentally sustainable way.

In addition to environmental damage, the industry has come under fire over frequent reports of land grabs, child labor and harsh working conditions. Some of the annual forest fires that send shrouds of smoke over parts of Southeast Asia have broken out on palm oil concessions that burn forests to clear land.

Indonesian Trade minister Enggartiasto Lukita in May warned his EU counterparts that he might ask Jakarta not to buy Airbus planes in retaliation, the Jakarta Post reported.

GAPKI Chairman Joko Supriyono told a United Nations sustainability meeting in New York last week that Indonesian palm oil plantation governance met international standards.

Meanwhile, Indonesia is looking at new palm oil markets in Africa offering barter trades with palm oil. Lukita told reporters on a visit to Nigeria he had proposed to swap palm oil for crude oil.

Indonesia signed a preliminary deal last month with Russia’s Rostec to exchange commodities, including palm, as part of a $1.14 billion payment for 11 Sukhoi jets.

Indonesia’s Vegetable Oil Association executive director Sahat Sinaga said palm oil producers will open a marketing and research company in Russia, aiming to increase exports of 920,000 tons in 2016 by 4-5 percent per year up to 2023.

The group is also planning to open a storage facility in Pakistan, which imports 1-2 million tons of palm from Indonesia a year, anticipating further growth in demand.

Malaysia more vulnerable

The Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC) says it will increase efforts to diversify into new markets such as Myanmar, the Philippines and West Africa regardless of the EU Resolution.

Malaysia’s plantation industries and commodities minister Mah Siew Keong said in June he met EU commissioners and members of parliament for talks. The ministry did not respond to a request for further comment.

Malaysia is more reliant on palm oil exports than Indonesia, shipping out more than 90 percent of its palm oil last year, compared to about 70 percent in Indonesia.

Production costs in Malaysia are also 10-15 percent higher than in Indonesia, analysts estimate.

“If EU doesn’t take up palm for biodiesel, demand for palm oil globally will fall and prices will be affected on the downside . . . which will impact everyone equally,” said Ivy Ng, regional head of plantations research at CIMB Investment Bank.
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Tens of thousands of women who survived enslavement and rape during the 1992-95 Bosnian war are still being denied justice, according to a report from Amnesty International. A quarter of a century after the conflict began, rights activists say many of the survivors are living in poverty and have lost all hope the perpetrators will face trial. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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