A 90-by-60-foot poster of a Pakistani child who has lost both her parents and two young siblings in a US drone attack, displayed in a field in the Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where a drone strike in November 2013 killed five people and led to a road blockade by thousands of people. This image was created by a collective of artists in Pakistan and the US, who gave it the title #NotABugSplat. US Predator drone operators often refer to kills as ‘bug splats’, as viewing the body…
War news
1 November 2011News
The brother of famed anti-Taliban guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud – who was assassinated days before the 9/11 attacks – told the Guardian: “This absolutely shows that peace with the Taliban is dead ... It doesn’t work. It can’t work.”
Others were less hasty to rush to judgement. For example, former EU envoy to Afghanistan Michael Semple – a world-renowned expert on the Taliban – noted that the assassination was “directly contrary” to the moderate tone recently adopted by the…
1 November 2011News
The Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) analysed 3,771 NATO press releases over nearly two years (1 December 2009–30 September 2011). They concluded: “violence and disruptive incidents [at the hands of NATO forces] remain a constant presence in the lives of many [Afghans], particularly in provinces or districts with largely rural populations.”
Moreover, “[g]iven the tendency towards non-specificity of numbers, the actual total of those killed or captured is likely to be higher” than…
1 November 2011News
The UN assistance mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) interviewed 379 randomly-chosen detainees in 47 facilities around the country between October 2010 and August 2011. Of these 324 were being held regarding offences related to the war. UNAMA found compelling evidence that:
46% of interviewees being held at NDS facilities had been tortured during interrogation; officials at the provincial NDS facilities in Herat, Kandahar, Khost, and Laghman, as well as at the national facility of NDS…
1 October 2010News in Brief
It is “extremely likely” that the Saudi air force deployed UK-supplied Tornado fighter-bombers” to bomb “scores of Yemeni civilians” last autumn, according to an Amnesty International report issued at the end of August.
The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) has documented Britain’s role in supplying and maintaining a range of military aircraft for the Saudi Arabian air force, including Tornado and Typhoon fighter-bombers, together with associated support services, equipment, weapons,…