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Children as young as 11 beheaded by ISIS in Mozambique
Children as young as 11 have been targeted by violence and beheaded in northeast Mozambique during an ISIS insurgency in the region, the charity Save the Children said on Tuesday.
The UK-based aid organization said it was “outraged and deeply saddened” by reports that children had been targeted in the conflict in the gas-rich Cabo Delgado province.
The violence has claimed the lives of 2,600 people in the east African nation – half of them civilians – and displaced 670,000, according to Save the Children.
One mother, whose name was withheld to protect her identity, told the charity her 12-year-old son was beheaded as she hid with her three other children.
“That night our village was attacked and houses were burned,” she said.
“We tried to escape to the woods, but they took my eldest son and beheaded him. We couldn’t do anything because we would be killed too,” the mother added.
A second mother said she had been unable to bury her son who was killed by armed men after she had to leave her home for her own safety.
“After my 11-year-old son was killed, we understood that it was no longer safe to stay in my village. We fled to my father’s house in another village, but a few days later the attacks started there too,” she said.
The charity said the situation had seriously deteriorated in the past 12 months with an escalation of attacks.
The humanitarian crisis in the region has been exacerbated by a series of floods in 2020 and Cyclone Kenneth which struck northern Mozambique a year earlier.
“Reports of attacks on children sicken us to our core,” Chance Briggs, Save the Children’s country director in Mozambique, said.
“A major concern for us is that the needs of displaced children and their families in Cabo Delgado far outweigh the resources available to support them.
“Nearly a million people are facing severe hunger as a direct result of this conflict, including displaced people and host communities.”
Insurgents, known locally as Al-Shabaab, have staged a series of attacks in Cabo Delgado since 2017 and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State organization in 2019.
They have been accused of beheadings and desecration of corpses.
Government forces, which have been bolstered by private military companies, have also been accused by rights groups of atrocities that amount to war crimes.
John Bass, US acting under secretary of state for political affairs, will travel to Qatar and Pakistan April 26-30, US State Department announced on Friday.
In Doha, Qatar, he will meet with senior Qatari government officials and other diplomatic missions to discuss support for Afghanistan and shared security interests in the region, US State Department said in a statement.
In Islamabad, Pakistan, Under Secretary Bass will meet with senior Pakistani government officials to discuss a range of regional and bilateral issues as part of the U.S.-Pakistani partnership, the statement added.
John Bass served as US ambassador to Afghanistan under Donald Trump administration between December 2017 and January 2020.
A tripartite meeting between the delegations of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan was held in Kabul with the aim of connecting North Asia to South Asia and reducing transit and transportation costs among these three countries, the Ministry of Trade and Commerce said in a statement.
In this meeting, an agreement was reached on the creation of a joint technical committee to continue the talks.
This tripartite meeting was held under the leadership of Nooruddin Azizi, the Acting Minister of Industry and Commerce, Vice President of Turkmenistan and Srik Zhumangarin, the Deputy Prime Minister of Kazakhstan.
Earlier, a bilateral meeting was held between the delegation of the Islamic Emirate and Turkmenistan. The ministry of commerce said the participants of the meeting discussed the construction of a large joint logistics center in Torghondi, the trilateral transit agreement between the IEA, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, the expansion of Afghanistan’s railway, solving issues related to Afghan transit and export goods, and a number of other commercial issues.
Acting Minister of National Defense Mohammad Yaqub Mujahid has said that no destructive groups including Daesh have physical presence in Afghanistan, adding the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) will not allow anyone to pose threat to any country in the region from the Afghan soil.
Mujahid made the remarks in a meeting with a delegation from Malaysia in Kabul on Thursday.
According to a statement released by the Ministry of Defense, Mujahid highlighted Malaysia’s “good treatment” of Afghan refugees and its long-standing relations with Afghanistan, and said that Malaysia is a powerful Islamic country and visits should increase.
He added that with the establishment of the Islamic Emirate, occupation and war ended in Afghanistan, and the country is fully secure.
Based on the statement, the Malaysian delegation called Afghanistan a friendly country and while emphasizing on comprehensive cooperation, it assured that what they have seen in Afghanistan will be shared with the authorities of their country.
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