(Vice Impact) – On Saturday, October 14, 2017, a large truck filled with 350 kg of homemade and military-grade explosives drove into the Hodan District of Mogadishu and detonated at a busy crossroad near the Safari Hotel. A fuel tanker parked nearby caused a massive fireball. 512 people lost their lives and 316 were injured. The organization […]
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(The New York Times) – In wars around the globe, thousands of children were front-line targets, used as human shields and recruited to fight this year on “a shocking scale,” Unicef said on Thursday. The United Nations agency warned against normalizing the brutality, a sentiment it has echoed in reports year after year. Link
(CNN) – They have been killed, recruited to fight, used as human shields, forced into marriage and enslaved. 2017 has been a “nightmare year” for children caught in the crosshairs of conflict, the UN’s agency for children has said. Link
(AFP) – Jean-De-Dieu was working in the fields in his village of Mamoundioma one day in October when he heard the distant but unmistakeable sound of gunfire. The 48-year-old pastor and farmer abandoned the fields and fled with his wife and their 10 children to Oicha, 25 kilometres (15 miles) away, where they took refuge with […]
(IOM) – Metal towers of lights reached out of the sea and flames belched into the midnight sky as the Aquarius reached Bouri Field, the largest oilfield in the Mediterranean, about 65 nautical miles north of Libya. I had been sitting cross-legged on deck of this rescue ship, listening to a group of West African […]
(All Africa) – Fifteen-year-old “Sophie” was a student in the Central African Republic when the Seleka, the armed group of mostly Muslim fighters that had ousted the previous government, threatened to kill the students and teachers at her school. The school shut down. When Sophie, whose name we changed for her protection, spoke with Human Rights […]
(NRC) – “We’re seeing a spike in families fleeing fighting that are arriving in overcrowded camps in Mogadishu. The camps are already overfilled with drought-stricken people, barely surviving in flimsy shelters,” said the Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) Country Director in Somalia, Victor Moses. “The double shock to people fleeing both conflict and drought means that […]
(Stanford Medicine) – Whether responding to humanitarian emergencies, advocating for quality education, intervening when children are most vulnerable — in war, natural disasters or extreme poverty — Save the Children receives worldwide recognition as one of the chief protectors and defenders of children in crisis. Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the organization’s international chief executive officer, is no stranger to diplomacy, advocacy […]
(Middle East Eye) – US lawmakers have overwhelmingly passed a bill that denounces the killing of civilians in Yemen’s war, though language in an earlier version about cutting military support to the Saudi-led coalition was scrapped. The latest version of the bill, which was adopted in a 366-to-30 vote late on Monday, laid out the […]
(The National Interest) – In February, President Donald Trump identified human trafficking as a key issue of concern for U.S. domestic and foreign policies, and stated that his administration would make it a priority to stop the epidemic. Yet on September 30, President Trump waived nearly all sanctions that would prevent certain countries that use child […]
