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Friday, January 3, 2014

Video and Images of the Crisis in South Sudan

A Christian minister at a United Nations camp in South Sudan led people in forming a “chain of peace” to symbolize their desire for a peaceful end to the violence gripping the country.

As my colleague Nicholas Kulish reported, thousands of South Sudanese have fled their homes in recent days as fighting between forces loyal to the government of President Salva Kiir have fought against a rebellion led by his former vice president, Riek Machar, plunging the young nation into chaos.

The fighting began last month when units of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the national military, staged an antigovernment mutiny, which Mr. Kiir accused Mr. Machar of orchestrating. The violence soon spread across the country, pitting members of South Sudan’s two dominant ethnic groups, the Dinka and the Nuer, against each other. Since then an estimated 180,000 people have fled their homes, and much of the country has been left in ruins.

Many of these internally displaced persons have sought shelter on more than a dozen bases belonging to the United Nations Mission in South Sudan. Toby Lanzer, a United Nations special representative in South Sudan, said in an update posted to Twitter on Friday that there were an estimated 30,000 seeking shelter on United Nations bases in the capital alone.

The United Nations Mission in South Sudan posted several videos to YouTube in recent days that showed glimpses of life inside these compounds. In one video, a Christian minister led a group of South Sudanese in forming a “chain of peace” to symbolize their desire for a peaceful outcome to the country’s unfolding crisis. In a second video, United Nations police officers can be seen searching people’s bags and later explaining the challenges of securing a rapidly growing camp.

“Our major preoccupation now as U.N. police is enforcing law and order in these camps,” an unidentified police spokesman said. “And enforcing law and order in these camps means people being free from arms, from machetes, no uniforms at all. We want coexistence in these camps.”

United Nations police officers in South Sudan explained the challenges of securing a rapidly growing camp for people fleeing violence.

Last week, Sudarsan Raghavan, a correspondent for The Washington Post, described the chaos in a dispatch from Malakal, a South Sudanese town that was heavily damaged by fighting between rival factions of the national army on Christmas Eve.

The corpses of soldiers, dressed in camouflage fatigues, lay in the streets and ditches. Shop after shop had been plundered, leaving the poor and hungry to scavenge through the remains. Houses burned to the ground still smoldered, the scars of the four days of chaos that tore through this town.

Not even the U.N. peacekeepers’ base was entirely safe. A bullet passed through the stomach of Nyauny Otham, who had sought refuge there with her family and thousands of other terrified civilians. On Saturday, the 6-year-old rested in a hospital bed, a white sheet covering her tiny body.

The conflict between the forces loyal to President Kiir and those under the command of Mr. Machar has appeared to focus in recent days on the central town of Bor, just 120 miles north of Juba, the capital.

Aris Roussinos and Phil Caller, two journalists from Vice Media, a self-described “youth media company” based in Brooklyn, said in a series of posts to Twitter on Friday that they traveled to Bor from Juba on a military helicopter. They men shared pictures and insights from the trip on Twitter.

Mr. Roussinos said that government military officers expressed confidence in their ability to maintain control of at least some parts of Bor and said that “rumors of a rebel advance” on the capital were “untrue.”



Syrians Protest Assad and Islamist Militants

As my colleagues Hwaida Saad and Rick Gladstone report, Syrian opposition activists said that an alliance of seven rebel groups launched attacks across northern Syria on Friday against the jihadist militants who call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS â€" a powerful Qaeda affiliate that includes foreign fighters.

Video and images posted online by activists appeared to show that anti-ISIS protesters took to the streets in the city of Aleppo and in rural areas near the Turkish border that remain outside government control.

A small number of protesters even gathered in the village of Kafranbel, where ISIS militants kidnapped eight media activists and destroyed an independent radio station last week, according to Raed Fares, the director of the town’s media center, who is currently on a speaking tour in the United States.

Speaking to The Lede by telephone from Detroit, Mr. Fares said that the protesters â€" who held up several of the witty banners the village is famous for online â€" were few in number partly because of the recent raid by ISIS, which established a base outside the town, and partly because the government had recently taken to shelling parts of Kafranbel used for demonstrations. He added that while six of those detained last week by ISIS have been released, two are still missing.

According to Mr. Fares, the ISIS crackdown on his team of media activists in Kafranbel helped convince rebels from the Free Syrian Army it was time to move against the Islamists outside the village and across Idlib Province.

Many of the signs and banners held up by protesters referred to abuses by the fundamentalist militants, including the torture and execution of Hussein Suleiman, a prominent activist doctor in the Aleppo area who used the name Abu Rayan. According to the Activists News Association, an opposition media network founded by the British-Syrian blogger Rami Jarrah, who writes as Alexander Page, a placard held up at a protest in Aleppo decried both the killing of Abu Rayan by ISIS and the murder of another doctor blamed on government forces.

Post by (ANA) Activists News Association.

Video posted online by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in Britain with a network of activists inside Syria, was said to show protesters marching in Aleppo on Friday, chanting that President Assad and the Islamist rebel militia were both enemies of their revolution.

Writing on his @AlexanderPageSY Twitter feed, Mr. Jarrah shared what he described as a video clip recorded in Aleppo as members of the Free Syrian Army detained the local ISIS commander.

According to Mr. Jarrah’s Activist News Association, video posted on YouTube on Friday showed a demonstration in the village of Kafar Taharim, “dedicated to Dr. Hussein Suleiman, tortured and killed by ISIS.” Among the chants, the activists said, was “May God Protect the Free Syrian Army!”

Video said to have been recorded during a demonstration on Friday in Kafar Taharim, a Syrian village about eight miles from the Turkish border.

The same group reported on Facebook that a second clip recorded later showed “the moment demonstrators were fired upon by ISIS” as the militants attempted to disperse the protesters.

Video said to have been recorded on Friday as Islamist militants dispersed a protest in Kafar Taharim with live fire.

Hassan Hassan, a Syrian-born journalist who is now an editor for the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National, saluted the protesters and drew attention to several placards, including one that denounced ISIS as “the REGIME State in Syria and Iraq.”

Another selection of placards shared online, said to have been displayed at Friday’s protests, included one sign that read “journalists… then doctors… and what next?” in reference to the ISIS enemies list.

Charles Lister, a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar drew attention to video that terrified many Syrian viewers â€" a clip said to have been recorded in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, showing a group of young militants singing at an ISIS training camp for boys named for the Qaeda militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

A propaganda video said to show the “Cubs of Camp al-Zarqawi” training to be Islamist militants in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta.

Liam Stack contributed reporting.



Inside the Tale of North Korea Execution by Ravenous Dog

Jang Song-thaek, in blue, being escorted in court on Dec. 12, 2013. He was later executed.Yonhap/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Jang Song-thaek, in blue, being escorted in court on Dec. 12, 2013. He was later executed.

BEIJING â€" There is no end to shocking stories from North Korea, many involving the myriad cruelties of the brutal police state as reported by defectors. But the latest tale â€" a news media report that the young North Korean leader might have had his uncle torn apart by ravenous dogs while he watched â€" may say less about the North than what outsiders have come to expect of it.

Here’s how it all started. More than three weeks ago, a Hong Kong newspaper, Wen Wei Po, published an article saying the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, had ordered his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, to be stripped naked, then thrown into a cage where he and his five closest aides were set upon by 120 dogs that had been not been fed for days. The men were completely devoured in front of Mr. Kim, the Hong Kong report said.

The death-by-dog story got more traction online starting Dec. 24, when a commentary published in The Straits Times, based in Singapore, said the fact that Wen Wei Po ran such a lurid article was a sign of the Chinese Communist Party’s “displeasure” at North Korea. It called Wen Wei Po the party’s “official mouthpiece” in Hong Kong.

A picture released by the North Korean Central News Agency shows Kim Jong-un delivering a New Year's speech in which he defended the  execution of Jang Song-thaek.Kcna/European Pressphoto Agency A picture released by the North Korean Central News Agency shows Kim Jong-un delivering a New Year’s speech in which he defended the  execution of Jang Song-thaek.

Though Wen Wei Po has taken editorial stands that favor party policy, it is not an official mouthpiece of Beijing. And some scholars in Hong Kong have criticized what they call the newspaper’s low editorial standards. (It is true, however, that analysts have been saying for months that China, North Korea’s patron, is unhappy with Mr. Kim for ignoring its entreaties to stop its nuclear weapons and missile tests.)

The Straits Times commentary brought more attention to Wen Wei Po’s North Korea report. Then on Friday, some Western news organizations ran stories about that original article. NBC News, for example, summarized the article in an online report co-written from Beijing, with the caveat that it had no independent confirmation of the assertions.

In a possible sign of how speculative the dog story might be, it was not picked up by mainstream South Korean news media, which does report many other stories from the North, citing defectors or other sources, that are difficult or impossible to confirm because of Pyongyang’s stranglehold on information. For the South Korean press, it seems, the dog story was too sensational even by North Korean standards. No official in Seoul has come out to lend credence to the report, although South Korean officials have briefed the press on intelligence reports of Mr. Jang’s execution.

It is worth noting that feeding people to animals, an ancient Roman specialty in the day, is not at all normal in North Korea. In literature from ancient Korea, there are references of bodies, not live humans, being thrown to dogs.

Of course, North Korea being North Korea, it is impossible to know for sure what happened to Mr. Kim’s powerful uncle, including whether dogs were involved. The state is considered one of the hardest in the world for spies to penetrate, and the leadership is notoriously secretive.

In this case, the country may have contributed to outsiders’ willingness to give the story some credence. North Korea has no qualms about using extreme language about traitors and how they should die. (The North has said Mr. Jang was a traitor who was trying to oust his nephew in a coup.) North Korean news media once released video footage of an effigy of Lee Myung-bak, the conservative former South Korean president whom the North loathed as a “traitor,” being attacked by dogs, run over by a tank and stoned by protesters. His pictures were used as targets at North Korean firing ranges.

After Mr. Jang was purged during a Dec. 8 party meeting, North Korean news media cited some citizens calling for “tearing the traitor Jang’s body to pieces and throwing them into a boiler.” When a North Korean military court sentenced him to death, its verdict said those who betrayed Mr. Kim “should be given no place to be buried.” Such extreme language helped give rise to wild speculation in South Korea about how Mr. Jang was killed. Some unconfirmed South Korean news reports said he might have been executed by machine guns or mortars and that his body might have been further damaged by a flamethrower.

Still, all that anyone seems to agree on is that Mr. Jang is dead.

On Dec. 23, The New York Times reported that the killing had its roots in a clash between Mr. Jang and Mr. Kim over control of natural resources, notably coal and fishing grounds. The report, which cited American and South Korean officials, said there had even been a firefight between armed men loyal to each of the two men. When the dust settled, Mr. Jang’s allies were detained, and two of his lieutenants were executed by a firing squad that may have used antiaircraft machine guns to do the deed. Firing squads are a usual method of execution in North Korea, although employing such large weaponry would be unusual.

Days later, Mr. Jang was publicly denounced, tried and executed. The official report of the execution by the state-run Korean Central News Agency did not say how Mr. Jang was executed. It did say he was a “traitor” and “worse than a dog.”



Videos of Fighters and Air Raids in Iraq’s Anbar Province

Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda fought for control of Falluja and Ramadi on Friday, escalating a battle over the two cities that have increasingly become centers of Sunni extremism since American forces withdrew from the country at the end of 2011.

As my colleagues Yasir Ghazi and Tim Arango reported, the battles have pitted the Qaeda-affiliated Sunni extremists against the security forces of the Shiite-dominated central government, backed by local tribesmen who are not strong supporters of the government but, in this struggle, have decided to side with the army and police against Al Qaeda.

Video published online show some of the Qaeda-affiliated fighters entering the area in recent days.

Video described as showing Islamic State in Iraq fighters entering Anbar province.

The fighting on Friday was the fifth day the militants have been battling government security forces and their tribal allies in the two cities, with regional implications, as the Sunni militants in Iraq fought beneath the same banner as the most hard-line jihadists they have inspired in Syria â€" the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as my colleagues wrote.

Another video showed Anbar tribal fighters in an area outside the main cities.

Tribal fighters in Anbar who oppose the Al Qaeda militants.

And the Iraqi Ministry of Defense this week released its own footage showing airstrikes. The ministry said in a statement on its website on Thursday that its air forces’ precise airstrikes resulted in losses to the group.

Footage from the Iraqi Defense Ministry showing recent airstrikes against militants in Anbar.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Videos of Fighters and Air Raids in Iraq’s Anbar Province

Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda fought for control of Falluja and Ramadi on Friday, escalating a battle over the two cities that have increasingly become centers of Sunni extremism since American forces withdrew from the country at the end of 2011.

As my colleagues Yasir Ghazi and Tim Arango reported, the battles have pitted the Qaeda-affiliated Sunni extremists against the security forces of the Shiite-dominated central government, backed by local tribesmen who are not strong supporters of the government but, in this struggle, have decided to side with the army and police against Al Qaeda.

Video published online show some of the Qaeda-affiliated fighters entering the area in recent days.

Video described as showing Islamic State in Iraq fighters entering Anbar province.

The fighting on Friday was the fifth day the militants have been battling government security forces and their tribal allies in the two cities, with regional implications, as the Sunni militants in Iraq fought beneath the same banner as the most hard-line jihadists they have inspired in Syria â€" the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, as my colleagues wrote.

Another video showed Anbar tribal fighters in an area outside the main cities.

Tribal fighters in Anbar who oppose the Al Qaeda militants.

And the Iraqi Ministry of Defense this week released its own footage showing airstrikes. The ministry said in a statement on its website on Thursday that its air forces’ precise airstrikes resulted in losses to the group.

Footage from the Iraqi Defense Ministry showing recent airstrikes against militants in Anbar.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Stranded Antarctic Ship Story, Like the Ice, Will Not Let Go

Journalists from The Guardian posted this footage on Friday of the helicopter rescue, then the boarding of the Australian icebreaker.

A team of rescuers from a Chinese icebreaker may need to be rescued themselves, soon after they plucked dozens of people from the Antarctic ice aboard a ship that had been stranded for more than a week.

Chris Turney, a leader of the expedition whose members were evacuated by the Chinese vessel Xue Long’s helicopter on Thursday, shared more photographs of the mission and then an update on Twitter about the unexpected turn of events in the rescue ordeal.

Dr. Turney and his team were among the 52 scientists, journalists and tourists aboard the chartered Russian Akademik Shokalskiy ship, which became lodged in ice in the Antarctic on Christmas Eve. The Xue Long, or Snow Dragon, icebreaker and an Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis each tried to reach the ship but were prevented by the harsh weather and ice.

During their predicament about the research vessel, Dr. Turney and others had been an online source of firsthand information, sharing videos and photographs of how they were keeping occupied as they waited to be rescued, and then posting photographs of the rescue itself.

On Friday, the updates from Dr. Turney’s and other online accounts continued to flow as it appeared the polar ice had yet to loosen its grip on any of the participants in the saga.

CCTV, China’s biggest television network, in its English-language broadcast, reported that the Chinese ship was stuck in heavy ice which had complicated the rescue operation.

Journalists from The Guardian posted footage showing some of the passengers climbing aboard the helicopter, settling in and then spotting the icebreakers below as they swept over them.

Alok Jha, a journalist for the newspaper and a BBC presenter, shared more images and videos online on his Twitter account @alokjha, as did Laurence Topham, a producer working for the newspaper. Both men had joined the expedition to report on it, posting to Antarctica Live via @GdnAntarctica.

Dr. Turney shared a message from Australian maritime authorities that said the Aurora was on standby as a precautionary measure to assist the Chinese ship if needed:

Xue Long notified AMSA at 1pm AEDT this afternoon it has concerns about their ability to move through heavy ice in the area.

The Aurora Australis has been placed on standby by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s (AMSA) Rescue Coordination Centre Australia (RCC Australia) to remain in open water in the area as a precautionary measure.

The Xue Long has advised RCC Australia that it will attempt to manoeuvre through the ice when tidal conditions are most suitable during the early hours of 4 January 2014.

There is no immediate danger to personnel on board the Xue Long.

He also shared an extensive blog post describing the evacuation, which left the Russian crew behind to look after the ship, and the rescued passengers landing on the Aurora, which will take them onward to Tasmania by mid-January. He wrote, in part:

Team members, luggage, science gear and samples from the expedition were transported with good grace, humour and professionalism, whilst also bringing food supplies back for the Russians (we only had five day’s supply left).

Everyone held together to the end, supporting one another and keeping good humor under very trying conditions.

Everyone is well and in good humor - albeit a little relieved. The helicopter voyage over some 14 nautical miles of jagged, broken sea ice just reaffirmed to the team how massive the ice breakout must have been that trapped us.

The ordeal was widely followed online and received widespread news coverage, including a televised appearance on New Year’s Eve.

My colleague Andrew Revkin wrote about how the rescue efforts, while vital, disrupted other scientific efforts and provided a distraction from serious research on the impact of climate change on Antarctica.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



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