Terrorism Watch

Voters in Afghanistan have defied deadly attacks to cast ballots in large numbers in the nation's long-awaited parliamentary elections.  Several explosions targeted polling stations, with dozens of people killed or injured in scores of incidents across the country. Voting will be extended amid delays, with some constituencies remaining open on Sunday. A new biometric verification system has caused technical problems. Violence had also marred election campaigning, with 10 candidates killed in the run-up to the polls. Both the Taliban and the Islamic State group had vowed to disrupt them. Kandahar vote delayed after Gen Raziq killed What's at stake in the parliament vote? More than 2,500 candidates, including many women, are vying for 250 seats in the legislative elections, which are being held more than three years late. What are the levels of violence? Polling day has seen dozens of incidents of violence, with scores of deaths and injuries reported: At lea

The 700 hostages captured in Syria by Islamic State terrorists include US and European citizens and are being killed off 10 people a day, Russia’a Vladimir Putin said, criticizing American forces for “catastrophic” failure.  Islamic State terrorists  “have delivered ultimatums and made certain demands, threatening … to shoot ten people every day,”  the Russian leader said, adding that the hostage-takers already started carrying out their threats and executed ten hostages two days ago. “This is just horrible, it is a catastrophe,”  Putin said, adding that the US forces that claim to control the area around the east bank of the Euphrates River, relying on the Kurdish armed forces on the ground, stay conspicuously silent on this crisis. READ MORE: 6 killed as US-led coalition F-15 jets bomb Kurdish forces fighting ISIS – report “Some US and European citizens are among the hostages,”  the president warned, adding that  “everyone is silent … as if nothing has happened.” source 

Two US citizens were wounded and a local police chief killed when Afghan guards opened fire at Austin S. Miller, the NATO and US forces commander in Afghanistan, after his meeting with Kandahar officials in the city. The attack took place on Thursday afternoon after Miller’s meeting with Kandahar’s governor and the provincial police chief, General Abdul Raziq. Raziq was killed in the attack at the governor's office, while two US citizens and several top Afghan officials, including the governor, were wounded, Pajhwok Afghan News reported. General Miller was safely evacuated from the area after the incident, NATO said. At least one Afghan civilian was also killed in the attack, according to reports. Sources told TOLOnews that the bodyguards of Kandahar Governor Zalmay Wesa were involved in the shooting. The officials were fired upon when they were heading towards the helipad after the talks, local media reported, adding that the shots came from one of the nearby buildin

The powerful blast, which rocked a college on Wednesday, was initially attributed to a gas leak. But an hour later the Russian anti-terrorism committee confirmed that an improvised explosive device.  The device was reportely detonated in the canteen. Most of the victims are students of the college, a local human rights ombudswoman said. Crimean emergency services and ambulances were scrambled shortly after the blast was reported. The injured have been rushed to hospitals at once. © Kerch FM  Images courtesy:  Kerch FM Local media has posted photos showing the aftermath of the blast. Ambulances and injured people on stretchers can be seen outside the college building. The Health Ministry was ordered to organize air transportation to victims of the blast, who may require better medical expertise available in larger Russian trauma centers. It is the first high-profile terrorist attack in Crimea since 2014, when it voted in a referendum to secede from Ukraine

BARCELONA — One year after Catalonia’s illegal independence referendum, the  violent demonstrations  in Barcelona on Monday made it painfully obvious that the situation has worsened, not improved. Carles Puigdemont may be out of the picture, but the separatists’ new leader,  Quim Torra , is pursuing the same misguided  agenda as his predecessor. It’s no surprise Catalonia was in utter chaos on Monday. In his speech commemorating the October 1 vote, Torra urged the violent pro-independence group Committees for the Defense of the Republic (CDRs) “to continue pressing” for an independent Catalan republic, for which there is no democratic support. The separatist movement took the central government’s delegation in Girona by force, attacked police headquarters in Barcelona, blocked highways and trains, and even tried to break into the Catalan parliament. My colleagues — from opposition Ciudadanos and other parties — had to be escorted out of the building among insults and threats.

SHILLONG: Meghalaya Governor Tathagata Roy on Saturday said that various separatist movements in different parts of India and quite a few in the Northeast have failed because those did not get the support from the majority of the community Roy who was speaking at the annual Get-Together of Harmony, organised by the Central Puja Committee (CPC) here on Saturday, said that not   even a single separatist movement had succeeded in India and the failure of the separatist movement in India was not because of the deployment of the army or because a law and order problem had been quelled down but because it did not get the support from the majority of the community,”. He also said that people who were leading this separatist movement have come back to the mainstream. According to him, majority of the people in this country wanted to live together, adding. “We have been united for the last 70 years and we will continue to be united for all times to come.’” Roy, however, said that the

Hong Kong's chief executive Carrie Lam on Wednesday warned that the government would act "fearlessly" against anyone advocating independence for the city under Chinese rule, as pro-democracy politicians protested ever-diminishing freedoms in the former British colony. As Lam began her policy address speech to the city's Legislative Council (LegCo), four opposition lawmakers were removed from the chamber by security guards, while a further eight walked out. Civic Party LegCo members held up placards in the chamber that read "Safeguard press freedom! Stop suppressing journalists!" in a reference to Hong Kong's refusal of an employment visa to  Financial Times  Asia editor Victor Mallet, who hosted a public event featuring Andy Chan, head of the banned pro-independence Hong Kong National Party (HKNP). Shouts were also heard for press freedom, a universal pension scheme, and against a massive land reclamation project announced by Lam on Wednesday.

Too often resource-rich regions are denied their share of investment and support A soldier prepares for elections in Buea, southwestern Cameroon. Marco Longari / AFP   Octobers are notoriously fraught in Cameroon. In that month in 2016, teachers and lawyers in the country’s marginalised English-speaking regions protested against the imposition of French in their schools and courts. In October 2017, thousands of Anglophone Cameroonians took to the streets to declare independence of a new country they called “Ambazonia”. The resulting crackdown overseen by President Paul Biya, who at 85 has ruled for 36 years, claimed the lives of at least 420 civilians, 175 military and police officers and countless separatist fighters. And today,  voters went to polls  in a nation listed by Transparency International as one of the most corrupt on earth. Mr Biya hopes to secure his seventh term as president and, with a divided opposition and little hope of a fair process, few expect him to lose.

Two senior Uyghur education officials in Xinjiang and a well-known writer who had disappeared from public view in early 2017 without explanation have turned out to be serving life sentences on separatism charges, RFA’s Uyghur Service has learned. The three men—former director of the Xinjiang Education Supervision Bureau Satar Sawut, writer and critic Yalqun Rozi, and former Xinjiang University President Tashpolat Teyip—vanished last year amid rumors they had run afoul of China’s increasingly hard-line policies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). In Sawut’s case, a message posted on a Chinese website in February 2017 said he was undergoing investigation for a serious breach of the party discipline. The post did not say what Sawut was accused of doing. Rozi’s arrest had been the subject of rumors for the past two years, but no witnesses or documents were ever produced to determine his fate. RFA’s Uyghur Service received a letter last month from an anonymous former

Ukraine says one of its soldiers has been killed and three wounded as a result of clashes with Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. The Defense Ministry said on October 16 that separatist fighters violated a cease-fire 37 times during the previous 24 hours by firing machine guns, grenade launchers, and mortars. It said Ukrainian government forces killed two separatists and wounded six. The Russia-backed separatists said Ukrainian government forces violated the cease-fire 33 times, using the same type of weapons. Since April 2014, more than 10,300 people have been killed in fighting between Kyiv's forces and the separatists who control parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Cease-fire deals announced as part of the Minsk accords -- September 2014 and February 2015 pacts aimed at resolving the conflict -- have failed to hold. Source:  https://www.rferl.org/a/kyiv-says-ukrainian-soldier-two-separatist-fighters-killed-in-east/29546116.html

The program, which offers monetary compensation for Maoists who surrender, has not yielded any results in Kerala, but activists say the issue lies in the design of the policy.  Nearly six months have passed since Kerala launched its surrender-and-rehabilitation policy for Maoists currently active and operating in the state, yet the results are not promising. So far, not a single member of Maoist groups have utilised the program — which offers monetary compensation for surrendering to the police — in Kerala. While police say the program is still too new in Kerala to be overtly effective just yet, activists believe the issue runs deeper. Though the policy has been successful in other states with an active Maoist presence (Odisha and Chattisgarh, for example, saw results within months of the program’s launch), the starkly different socio-economic and political reality of Kerala, and the unique way through which Maoism occurs here in the state makes such a program largely irreleva