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Afghan air attack on religious school kills dozens including children

Al Jazeera
April 3, 2018

Dozens of civilians, including children, have been killed in an Afghan air attack on a gathering at a religious school in the northern province of Kunduz, eyewitnesses and an official said.

A religious school in the Dasht-e-Archi district of the Kunduz province was targeted by air raids late on Monday, resulting in the death of at least 70 people, including top Taliban commanders, a district official told Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to media.

Ministry of Defense spokesman, Mohammad Radmanish, told Al Jazeera that the air raid was aimed at "top Taliban commanders".

"The air strike killed more than 30 Taliban fighters, including nine commanders," he said. "The Taliban training centre was bombed and no civilians were present."

The Taliban denied its fighters were present at the school during the time of the attack. 

'I am not a terrorist'

Witnesses told Al Jazeera that the gathering included "a lot of civilians" and the families of those killed in the attack "were devastated".

"There were children as young as 11 or 12 years old in the ceremony who were to be presented with awards and gifts for the completion of their religious courses," Mohammed Abdul Haq, who witnessed the attack, told Al Jazeera. 

"Mothers are wailing and crying outside the hospitals for the death of their children and everyone is crying with them," he added. 

Other witnesses told Al Jazeera that more than 100 people were killed in the attack. 

"I was working in my farm when I heard helicopters and jets bombing the madrassa (religious school) where the Taliban were gathered alongside new Qaris (the ones who memorise the 30 chapters of the Quran) to recognise them with awards," Haji Ghulam, a witness, told Al Jazeera. 

"The Taliban are active in the area, but the ceremony was attended mostly by children and young boys."

Haji said when he went closer to the area, there were many children who were killed and wounded.

"It was a disaster. Blood everywhere," he said, adding that the "many" people were killed.

Images circulating on social media purportedly showed a number of children'ss bodies, accompanied by the phrase: "I am not a terrorist". Al Jazeera could not independently verify the images.

The Taliban, in a statement sent to Al Jazeera, said the air raid killed around 150 religious scholars and civilians, mostly children, while maintaining that no fighters were present during the attack.

UN to probe attack

United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said on Twitter that a human rights team on the ground will investigate the incident.

"UNAMA actively looking in to disturbing reports of serious harm to civilians yesterday from air strike at #DashtiArchi, #Kunduz. Human Rights team on ground establishing facts. All parties reminded of obligations to protect civilians from impact of armed conflict," the tweet said.

Afghanistan's air force, backed by US-led NATO coalition advisers, has accelerated aerial raids in the country in recent months to push the Taliban to the negotiating table, however, civilians have reportedly been killed in several incidents.

Earlier this month, a unit of the Afghan security and intelligence forces carried out a deadly raid in two villages in the Chaparhar district of Nangarhar province, that resulted in the death of seven farmer including two teenagers.

Afghan officials maintained that the people killed in the attack were Taliban fighters.

On January 31, Afghan special forces backed by US air raids launched an offensive against Taliban fighters in the Maiwand district in Kandahar, according to a Human Rights Watch report, released in February. 

At least 20 civilians were killed in the operation, the report said.

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Agencies
January 9,2020

Washington, Jan 9: The U.S. and Iran stepped back from the brink of possible war Wednesday as President Donald Trump signaled he would not retaliate militarily for Iran's missile strikes on Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops. No one was harmed in the strikes, but U.S. forces in the region remained on high alert.

Speaking from the White House, Trump seemed intent on deescalating the crisis, which spiralled after he authorized the assassination of Iran's top general, Qassem Soleimani. Iran responded overnight by firing more than a dozen missiles at two installations in Iraq, its most direct assault on America since the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Trump's takeaway was that “Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world.”

The region remained on edge, however, and American troops including a quick-reaction force dispatched over the weekend were on high alert. Hours after Trump spoke, an ‘incoming’ siren went off in Baghdad's Green Zone after what seemed to be small rockets “impacted” the diplomatic area, a Western official said. There were no reports of casualties.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the overnight strike was not necessarily the totality of Iran's response. “Last night they received a slap,” Khamenei said. “These military actions are not sufficient (for revenge). What is important is that the corrupt presence of America in this region comes to an end.”

The strikes had pushed Tehran and Washington perilously close to all-out conflict and left the world waiting to see whether the American president would respond with more military force. Trump, in his nine-minute, televised address, spoke of a robust U.S. military with missiles that are “big, powerful, accurate, lethal and fast.'' But then he added: “We do not want to use it."

Iran for days had been promising to respond forcefully to Soleimani's killing, but its limited strike on two bases--one in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil and the other at Ain al-Asad in western Iraq--appeared to signal that it too was uninterested in a wider clash with the U.S. Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that the country had “concluded proportionate measures in self-defence.”

Trump said the U.S. was “ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.” That marked a sharp change in tone from his warning a day earlier that “if Iran does anything that they shouldn't be doing, they're going to be suffering the consequences, and very strongly.”

Trump opened his remarks at the White House by reiterating his promise that “Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” Iran had announced in the wake of Soleimani's killing that it would no longer comply with any of the limits on uranium enrichment in the 2015 nuclear deal crafted to keep it from building a nuclear device.

The president, who had earlier pulled the U.S. out of the deal, seized on the moment of calm to call for negotiations toward a new agreement that would do more to limit Iran's ballistic missile programmes and constrain regional proxy campaigns like those led by Soleimani.

Trump spoke of new sanctions on Iran, but it was not immediately clear what those would be.

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Agencies
May 19,2020

Moscow, May 19: Russia confirmed 9,263 new coronavirus infections Tuesday, bringing the country’s official number of cases to 299,941.

On Sunday, the head of Russia's public health watchdog, Anna Popova, said the growth of new coronavirus cases in Russia is stabilizing.

Russia is the second most-affected country in terms of infections.

A record 115 people have died over the past 24 hours, bringing the total toll to 2,837 — a rate considerably lower than in many other countries hit hard by the pandemic.

Russia began easing nation-wide lockdown restrictions last week and announced the national football league would restart in late June.

Critics have cast doubt on Russia's low official mortality rate, accusing authorities of under-reporting in order to play down the scale of the crisis.

Russian health officials say one of the reasons the count is lower is that only deaths directly caused by the virus are being included.

Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova over the weekend denied manipulation of numbers, saying hospitals had a financial interest in identifying infections because they are allocated more money to treat coronavirus patients.

Authorities also say that since the virus came later to Russia, there was more time to prepare hospital beds and launch wide-scale testing to slow the spread.

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Agencies
August 5,2020

Ninety per cent of a sample group of coronavirus-recovered patients from a prominent hospital in China's Wuhan city where the pandemic broke out have reported lung damage and five per cent of them are again in quarantine after testing positive for the virus, according to a media report on Wednesday.

A team at the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University led by Peng Zhiyong, director of the hospital's Intensive Care Unit, has been conducting follow-up visits with '100 recovered patients' since April.

The first phase of this one-year programme finished in July. The average age of the patients in the study is 59.

According to the first phase results, 90 per cent of the patients' lungs are still in a damaged state, which means their lungs ventilation and gas exchange functions have not recovered to the level of healthy people, state-run Global Times reported.

Peng's team conducted a six-minute walking test with the patients. They found that the recovered patients could only walk 400 metres in six minutes while their healthy peers could walk 500 metres in the same period.

Some recovered patients have to rely on oxygen machines even three months after being discharged from the hospital, Liang Tengxiao, a doctor from the Dongzhimen Hospital, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, was quoted as saying by the report.

Liang's team is also conducting follow-up visits with recovered patients aged above 65.

The results also showed that antibodies against the novel coronavirus in 10 per cent of the 100 patients have disappeared.

Five per cent of them received negative results in Covid-19 nucleic acid tests but positive results in Immunoglobulin M (IgM) tests, and thus have to be quarantined again, the report said.

IgM is usually the first antibody produced by the immune system when a virus attacks. A positive result in an IgM test usually means that a person has just been infected by the virus.

It is still unclear if this means these people have been infected again.

The 100 patients' immune systems have not fully recovered as they showed a low level of B cells -- - a primary force for killing viruses in the human body -- but a high level of T cells which only recognise viral antigens outside infected cells.

"The results revealed that the patients’ immune systems are still recovering," Peng said.

The patients also suffered from depression and a sense of stigma. Most of the recovered patients told the team that their families were not willing to have dinner with them at the same table, the report said.

Less than half of the recovered patients have returned to work, it said.

The findings are significant as the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan city.

Hubei province for which Wuhan is the provincial capital has reported a total of 68,138 confirmed Covid-19 cases till now. The disease has claimed 4,512 lives in the province, according to the official data.

China reported 27 new confirmed Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, including 22 locally-transmitted cases, the National Health Commission (NHC) said on Wednesday.

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