August 21, 2023

It’s Friday afternoon, August 18, two days after dozens of Christian homes and 19 churches in various neighbourhoods and villages of Faisalabad’s Jaranwala tehsil were vandalised and burned down by a mob over blasphemy allegations. Sayedwala Road, which cuts through Jaranwala city is lined with rows of prison vans and police vehicles. Law enforcement agencies are on high alert in surrounding cities, including Faisalabad, where most residents of Jaranwala had fled ahead of the attacks on their homes. They say they are expecting another mob attack after Friday prayers. Inside Jaranwala, the road leading from Sayedwala Road to Cinema Chowk is blocked with barbed wire and all entrances leading to the roundabout have been cordoned off. The alleged blasphemy incident occurred at Cinema Chowk, a few hundred meters from Jamia Masjid Mahtab, where the prayer leader made announcements, inciting the violence that followed. Additional police contingents from Faisalabad and Rescue-1122 fire engines dot all road entrances from Christian Town to Essa Nagri in Chak 127 on the fringes of Gogera Bank Canal, around two kilometres away, all the way to the Parish House, a further 2kms away. In the street next to Jamia Masjid Mahtab, two to three homes out of many are reduced to ashes. Here, a man sits outside his burned house on a chair and his neighbour, a woman, stands on the footsteps leading to hers. “Someone knocked on my door early in the morning and said everyone in Christian Town has left because of an impending attack and you need to hurry,” she says, reminiscing the ordeal matter-of-factly. The blasphemy suspects were residents of Christian Town, a crisscross maze of narrow streets and no sewage system, a few blocks behind Jamia Masjid Mahtab and adjacent to Chammra Mandi (leather market). An adjoining street carries a makeshift banner with the slogan of Tehreek-i-Labaik Pakistan. A makeshift banner of the TLP hangs in a street adjacent to Christian Town. All photos by author Tents and barbed wire secure the perimeters of the streets where the suspects lived and if those weren’t enough, policemen wade through overflowing gutter water to turn people away from the place. All the homes in those streets are almost burnt to ashes. But in the street next to the mosque where the lady lives, someone had to identify for the mob which of those homes belonged to Christian families. Pointing at her neighbour sitting outside his burned house, she says they only returned Friday morning at around 10am because officials of the building department were supposed to visit their homes to estimate damages. Valuables stolen from a trunk inside a home in Essa Nagri. The Punjab government is considering an offer of recompense for damages between Rs200,000 and Rs1 million, depending on the scale of the damage. On Friday, building department officials began visiting homes in various neighbourhoods to begin to devise a mechanism to estimate damages. “We will measure the size of these houses and arrive at an estimate based on what we can see,” said a building official, making the rounds in Essa Nagri. Irreplaceable losses In Essa Nagri, a member or two of each house that was torched also sit on chairs waiting for the inspection teams to arrive. In this neighbourhood, the boundary wall of the United Presbyterian Church, whose pink walls with painted Christmas ornaments still emanate heat, were broken down using hammers and set alight. The church leads into an extremely narrow street littered with the burned frames of cycles, furniture, and refrigerators. The first house on the right belongs to Allah Ditta and his mother. The 30-year-old was employed as a gardener at Jaranwala Assistant Commissioner Shaukat Masih’s home, who had to flee himself. Allah Ditta says his house was targeted because people in the vicinity knew of his employment. His mother walks me through the ransacked and burnt down rooms, but especially asks me to see the roof. Broken furniture inside a room in Allah Ditta’s home. Iron girders of the roof have melted to the ground inside a home that was vandalised by the mob. “My special needs son lived here,” she says, pointing at the scorched remains of a once bedroom. The iron girders of the roof have melted and fused with the floor. Charred remains of her son’s pigeons litter the ground. “They burned his pigeons,” she says, offering no other explanation. A few paces from her house, another resident, Sarfaraz Emmanuel Paul, stands outside his home surrounded by video loggers and journalists who want to film his burned down house and record his interview. His mother was a Sunday School teacher and in one of the rooms that was completely burned down, her Sunday School materials and hymn books were ripped apart and set on fire. As I walk through the streets, a couple sitting outside their home recognise me and call me over. They were members of our church once and had used all their retirement funds to move to Essa Nagri a few years ago to start a small prayer ministry. Their home, to the left of Pastor Saleem Arif’s All Evangelical Covenant Church near Gogera Branch Canal, was looted and burned to the ground. The pastor’s own home, on top of the church, was also looted and burned. The story is the same in every street of Essa Nagri as visitors — journalists, government officials, neighbours, NGO workers and members of the clergy — hug and cry with the residents, most of whom have returned that day and are seemingly apoplectic with shock. ‘Indescribable scenes’ Shahbaz Samuel Francis Masih, an elder (position of authority in church hierarchy) at the Catholic Church, describes how the violence played out in his street. According to him, Father Khalid Mukhtar called him and asked him to tell people to leave. He oversaw the exodus and sent those who couldn’t leave into nearby sugarcane fields. He points at an ‘alam’ (a black flag marking Shia place of residence) erected at a house in the distance. “I ran to my

Saudi Arabia has engaged in a large-scale and brutal killing of African refugees and migrants at its southern borders with Yemen that could constitute crimes against humanity, according to a prominent rights group. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented, in a report made public on Monday, “widespread and systematic” abuses committed by Saudi border guards against mostly Ethiopian refugees who flee armed conflict, economic hardships and droughts in their homelands. The nongovernmental New York-based organisation said hundreds, and likely thousands, have been murdered by Saudi border guards between March 2022 and June 2023, and killings are continuing. Witnesses said they were targeted by firearms, explosives, and artillery and mortar shelling from Saudi border guards when trying to cross. Some saw dozens killed in front of their eyes, while others experienced serious injuries like amputations, or saw refugees arrested. “I saw people killed in a way I have never imagined,” said Hamdiya, a 14-year-old girl who crossed the border in a group of 60 in February but was forced to go back to the Yemeni capital Sanaa after repeated attacks. “I saw 30 killed people on the spot.” A male minor interviewed by HRW said border guards detained their group of five men and two 15-year-old girls after killing many others, and ordered the men to rape the girls. One man refused and was shot and killed on the spot. “I participated in the rape, yes. To survive, I did it,” the boy said. “The girls survived because they didn’t refuse. This happened at the same spot where killings took place.” “Saudi Arabia’s abuses against migrants and asylum seekers, committed historically and detailed more recently in this report, have been perpetrated with absolute impunity. “If committed as part of a Saudi government policy to murder migrants, these killings would be a crime against humanity,” HRW said in its report, for which it interviewed dozens of Ethiopians and analysed videos, photographs and satellite imagery. Rights groups have documented abuses of refugees in Yemen by both the government and the Houthi armed group that took control of parts of the country since the war started in 2014 – and launched one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises – but HRW said the scale and intensity have only increased since. Seeking safety via the ‘Yemeni Route’ East African refugees, predominantly Ethiopians, begin their arduous journey to Saudi Arabia by taking on the Eastern Route, also known as the Yemeni Route, which goes through Djibouti then by boat across the Gulf of Aden. In Yemen, smugglers take them north by land, and the abuse begins. HRW said a network of smugglers, traffickers and authorities have for years kidnapped, detained and beaten Ethiopian refugees in Yemen, and extorted them or their families – mostly displaced women and children in dire straits themselves – for money. Female refugees are often at risk of being sexually assaulted by smugglers or other refugees, and two out of 10 interviewed by HRW said they became pregnant as a result. Refugees are often taken to one of two makeshift “camps” on the Yemeni side of the border, separated by ethnicity, ostensibly for language purposes. “There are no fewer than 50,000 people,” HRW quoted Berhe, an 18-year-old from southern Tigray as saying of al-Raqw camp where Tigrayan Ethiopians were taken. People interviewed by HRW confirmed that there were tens of thousands in the makeshift camps, waiting to cross into Saudi Arabia. The crossing is a mountainous border separating Yemen’s Saada governorate and Saudi Arabia’s Jizan province, which is documented to be littered with land mines. Refugees travel in groups that could range from a handful of people to several hundred. On the way, the refugees may be attacked with explosive weapons – including mortar projectiles – at times for hours on end, or days. The people who survive the attacks but do not manage to escape back into Yemen are detained by Saudi border guards. While the exact numbers of people killed were difficult to document, survivors were able to give HRW the number of people who returned to the camps in Yemen, between 4 and 10 percent of those who had set out. One of the people HRW interviewed said he had approached the border guards to retrieve the body of a girl from his village and found “her body was piled up on top of 20 bodies”. The group called on Saudi Arabia to immediately and urgently revoke any policy to deliberately use lethal force on refugees, asked concerned governments to impose sanctions on Saudi and Houthi officials, and said the United Nations should establish an independent investigation into the killings and abuses. Source:https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/21/hrw-report-details-saudi-arabian-guards-killing-refugees-at-yemen-border

Heavy rain has deluged parts of Southern California, with forecasters warning of a “potentially historic amount of rain” and severe flooding in the usually arid part of the United States, as Tropical Storm Hilary raced in from Mexico. One person died in Mexico amid reports of flash flooding in the Baja California peninsula, where some roads were swept away and images on social media showed torrents of water gushing down city streets that had been turned into rivers. California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for much of Southern California, with flash flood warnings in effect throughout a region more accustomed to drought. In a White House statement, US President Joe Biden said the federal government had deployed emergency teams and resources ahead of the storm and his administration “stands ready to provide additional assistance as requested. I urge people to take this storm seriously, and listen to state and local officials”. In Palm Springs, about 160km (100 miles) east of Los Angeles, forecasters said the city could get between six and 10 inches (15-25 cm) of rain from the storm. The city usually gets about 4.6 inches (12 cm) of rain in an entire year. Newsom, on a tour of Southern California, said Palm Springs was dry when he left on Sunday but an hour later it had received “the most significant rainfall over a 60-minute period any time in the history of Palm Springs”. The streets were soon flooded. “That’s how quickly this system is moving. Take nothing for granted,” Newsom told a news briefing in Los Angeles after updating Biden on the situation. Floodwaters raced through the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River, which normally contains barely a trickle. Hundreds of flights in San Diego, Las Vegas and Los Angeles were cancelled, professional sporting matches rescheduled and many schools cancelled Monday’s classes. Amid all the storm preparation, a 5.1-magnitude earthquake rocked the city of Ojai, about 129km (80 miles) northwest of Los Angles. There were no immediate reports of injuries. Hilary made landfall on Sunday in the northern part of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, where nearly 1,900 people were evacuated to shelters, according to the country’s army. The storm was especially dangerous in low-income areas where housing is often poorly built. “We’ve always been aware that it’s a risky area. A lot of water runs (nearby) but what are we going to do? It’s the only place we have to live,” said Yolanda Contreras, living in a flood-prone area of Rosarito, south of the US-Mexican border. Officials warned motorists of the dangers of driving through flood waters [Alan Devall/Reuters] Around the coastal town of Mulege, on the eastern side of the Baja California peninsula, one person died after his family was swept away while crossing a stream on Saturday. Phone lines and electricity were cut in several of the surrounding villages after lamp posts fell, the Mexican army said. Hilary was initially designated Category 4 – the second-most powerful on the five-step Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale – but weakened as it headed towards the densely populated Mexican border city of Tijuana. Nancy Ward, the director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said Hilary could be one of the worst storms to hit the state in more than a decade. “Make no mistake,” she told a press conference on Saturday. “This is a very, very dangerous and significant storm.” Hurricanes hit Mexico every year on both its Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Although the storms sometimes affect California, it is rare for them to strike the state with much intensity. Scientists have warned that storms are becoming more powerful as climate change makes the world warmer. Source:https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/21/tropical-storm-hilary-drenches-usually-arid-southern-california