Syria
War crimes were likely committed by fighters aligned with Syria’s transitional government and forces loyal to former President Bashar al-Assad, a new U.N. report said. The sectarian violence in March killed about 1,400 people, most of them civilians and the majority from Assad’s Alawite sect. The report found that Alawite men were separated from women and children by members of interim government forces before being taken away and executed. A number of women and children, though, were also killed. Some of the attackers went door-to-door looking for Alawites, the report said, and filmed the executions themselves. While interim government forces carried out the atrocities, the U.N. said it “found no evidence of a governmental policy or plan to carry out such attacks.”
More from Al Jazeera here.
Sudan
BBC has obtained rare footage from inside the Sudanese city of el-Fasher, which has been besieged by the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group for 14 months. The alarm has been raised by local aid groups who say that people are now starving inside the city, which is the last holdout of government forces in the Darfur region. "Our children are dying before our eyes," one woman at a community kitchen told the BBC. People have resorted to eating animal fodder and money that used to buy a week’s-worth of meals can now only buy one. "The children of el-Fasher are dying on a daily basis due to lack of food, lack of medicine,” Dr Ibrahim Abdullah Khater, a paediatrician at the Al Saudi Hospital, said. “Unfortunately, the international community is just watching."
More from BBC here.
Afghanistan
The Taliban says it plans to mark the fourth anniversary of its return to power by flying helicopters over the capital Kabul and showering flowers down on the city. The celebrations come at a bleak time for the country, with sky-high unemployment, a battered economy, and an influx of Afghans who’ve been expelled from neighboring countries. Almost 10 million people are food insecure and, a horrifying stat, one in three children is stunted, according to the U.N. It is unclear whether women will be able to take part in the festivities. They were barred from the third anniversary event at Bagram Airfield last year.
More from AP here.