HELSINKI: At home in the Finnish capital, Ilona Taimela scrolls through hundreds of WhatsApp chats with her former pupils — pictures of animals, maths sums and simple sentences in English and Finnish.
The teacher last year gave lessons to Finnish children imprisoned some 3,000 kilometers (1,800 miles) away in Syria’s Al-Hol displacement camp — using only the messaging app.
Al-Hol is a sprawling tent
city housing around 60,000 people, mainly women and children displaced by the US-backed battle to expel the Daesh group from war-torn Syria.
Among them are thousands of children of foreign mothers who traveled to Syria to be the wives of Daesh fighters.
“Some of the children didn’t know what a building is, what a house is, because they’ve always been in a tent,” Taimela told AFP.
“There was so much that they needed to learn.”
Rights observers warn the camp’s children are under constant threat from violence, poor sanitation and fires.
“It’s a miserable place, it’s out of control,” said Jussi Tanner, Finland’s special envoy charged with ensuring the fundamental rights of the Finnish children in Al-Hol, including access to health care and schooling, and eventual repatriation.
Extremist propaganda “is free to roam with no counter-messaging,” he said.
Tanner had the idea of offering lessons by phone to Al-Hol’s Finnish children when schoolchildren everywhere moved to distance learning at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
With the help of Finland’s Lifelong Learning Foundation, officials engaged Taimela, a specialist in teaching Finnish kids abroad, and another teacher, to design and teach a curriculum.
With phones banned in the camp, the lessons would have to be in secret, and the politically sensitive project was also to be kept hidden from the Finnish public.
Tanner forwarded details about the voluntary classes to the mothers.
“That same day ... we got maybe eight children,” Taimela said.
Soon 23 of around 35 Finnish children in the camp had signed up.
“Good morning! Today is Thursday May 7, 2020. The first day of distance school!“
Taimela’s first message to the children included a smiling selfie.
“The sun is shining here in Finland. What kind of weather is it there?“
Soon Taimela and her colleague were exchanging hundreds of text and voice messages a day with the children, who were taught one or two subjects a day.
“The little ones would always get Finnish, and the older ones would get geography or history, and some of them also wanted to learn English.”
Sending photos used too much data, so the teachers relied on emojis, but soon realized there were no symbols for mathematical fractions or the ubiquitous Finnish blueberry.
“During the year the blueberry [emoji] arrived, so we were happy,” Taimela says, laughing.
Despite only knowing scant details about the children, Taimela said she and her colleague were “worried all the time about their welfare.”
“Especially when we heard that they were sick, or there was a storm and the tent had collapsed.”
Communication with some families would periodically stop.
“Some of them escaped the camp,” special envoy Jussi Tanner says, “so they were actually taking part in the school while on the run in northwestern Syria in an active conflict zone.”
Others were suddenly repatriated and left the group for good.
After months of lessons, the mother of one six-year-old revealed her daughter could now read.
“Not all six-year-olds in Finland can do that,” Taimela says, smiling. “It was a eureka moment.”
Daesh fighters declared a “caliphate” in large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, three years into Syria’s civil war.
Taimela says she feels “sadness rather than anger” toward the mothers who led their children into the conflict.
Many were vulnerable and believed the promises of militants that they would live in some “kind of paradise.”
But several military offensives whittled away at the brutal Daesh proto-state, until in 2019 Syrian Kurdish forces declared it defeated.
Reluctant Western nations have since brought home handfuls of their Daesh-linked nationals, mostly children.
Taimela had accepted that she would never know what happened to the repatriated children she had taught, but one day she was called to a reception center in Finland.
“It was an emotional few hours” meeting some of her pupils face to face for the first time, she said.
They “came very close” and Taimela read to them.
“I just wanted to know, ‘How is everything, what can I help with?’,” she said.
Finland’s foreign ministry has now repatriated 23 children and seven adults.
Tanner told AFP that only around 15 “harder-to-reach” individuals, of whom 10 are children, remain in camps in Syria.
The issue originally proved divisive in Finland, but opposition has “become much more muted.”
Taimela’s teaching drew to a natural close in mid-2021 and the ministry later made the project public.
She is now looking at how to use the innovative teaching model in other crisis zones or camps, and has received requests regarding Greece, Myanmar and Colombia.
“The Al-Hol teacher, that’s my label now,” Taimela smiles.
“But I’m proud of what we did.”
Finland’s secret school for children of Daesh fighters in Iraq
https://arab.news/63mkd
Finland’s secret school for children of Daesh fighters in Iraq
Three killed in Russian strike on Kyiv
- Moscow’s forces have recently launched a series of aerial assaults on the Ukrainian capital, including an unusual daytime attack on Monday
Moscow’s forces have recently launched a series of aerial assaults on the Ukrainian capital, including an unusual daytime attack on Monday that sent residents running for shelter.
Thursday’s attack began around 3:00 a.m. local time (0000 GMT) when cruise and ballistic missiles were fired on the city, killing three people and injuring 12 others, officials said.
“In the Desnyanskyi district: three people died, including one child (born in 2012) and 10 people were injured, including one child,” the Kyiv City Military Administration wrote on Telegram.
“In the Dniprovskyi district: two people were injured.”
Previous official reports had said two children were killed in the strikes.
In Russia’s western Belgorod region, at least two people were wounded Thursday morning in an attack on the town of Shebekino blamed on Ukrainian troops, governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Telegram.
“This night is tense for Shebekino again. Ukrainian troops were shelling the city for an hour,” he said.
Gladkov previously reported shelling in the same town that injured four people.
On Tuesday, one person was killed and two others were wounded in a strike on a center for displaced people in the region. Several oil depots have also been hit in recent weeks.
The attacks have come as Kyiv says it is preparing for a major offensive against Moscow’s forces.
More than a year since its Ukraine invasion, Russia has suffered stepped-up attacks on its soil, including a drone attack on Moscow Tuesday.
“The situation is quite alarming,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Russia said Wednesday it was evacuating hundreds of children from villages due to the intensifying attacks.
The first 300 evacuated children would be taken to Voronezh, a city about 250 kilometers further into Russia, Governor Gladkov said. Over 1,000 more children would be moved to other provinces in the coming days, he added.
A correspondent for state-run agency RIA Novosti working near Voronezh said buses had arrived with about 150 people on board.
The Kremlin has accused Ukraine — and its Western backers — of being behind the increasing number of reported attacks.
On Tuesday, the foreign ministry said the West was “pushing the Ukrainian leadership toward increasingly reckless acts” after a drone attack on residential areas of Moscow.
At least three buildings were lightly damaged, including two high-rise residential buildings in Moscow’s affluent southwest.
Ukraine, which has seen almost nightly attacks on its capital, denied any “direct involvement.”
Tensions between Russia and the West escalated further Wednesday, when Germany announced it would drastically reduce Moscow’s diplomatic presence on its soil in reply to a similar move from the Kremlin.
Berlin said it had ordered four of Russia’s five consulates in Germany to close.
The move comes after Moscow put a limit of 350 on the number of German government personnel allowed in Russia, a decision that Berlin says would force hundreds of civil servants and local employees to leave the country.
Moscow called Germany’s decision “ill-thought-out” and vowed a response.
And in the United States, the Pentagon announced a new $300 million arms package for Ukraine, including air defense systems and tens of millions of rounds of ammunition.
The United States said it did not support any attack inside Russia, instead providing Kyiv with equipment and training to reclaim its territory.
The fresh aid shipments would bring the total value of US security assistance to Ukraine to $37.6 billion since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, the Defense Department said.
Last week saw the biggest armed incursion into Russia from Ukraine since the offensive began, with two days of fighting in the Belgorod region.
AFP journalists went to the regional capital city, which is also called Belgorod, over the weekend.
Residents confessed a certain amount of worry, but a sense of fatalism prevailed.
“What can we do? We just shout ‘Oh! and ‘Ah!’. What will that change?” said 84-year-old Rimma Malieva, a retired teacher.
Most people AFP spoke to said they trusted the authorities to fix the weaknesses laid bare by the latest raid.
Evgeny Sheikin, a 41-year-old builder, still said “it should not have happened.”
At least five people were killed and 19 wounded in a nighttime bombardment in Ukraine’s Lugansk region, Russia-installed officials said Wednesday.
The Russian army also said it destroyed a Ukrainian navy warship, the Yuri Olefirenko, in Odesa, a claim AFP could not independently confirm.
BRICS ministers meet in push to establish group as counterweight to West
- Talks a prelude to an August summit in Johannesburg that has already created controversy
- BRICS has in recent years taken more concrete shape, driven initially by Beijing
CAPE TOWN: Foreign ministers from the BRICS countries are meeting in South Africa from Thursday as the five-nation bloc seeks to forge itself into a counterweight to Western geopolitical dominance in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The talks are a prelude to an August summit in Johannesburg that has already created controversy because of the possible attendance of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the target of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant.
It accused him in March of the war crime of forcibly deporting children from Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine. Moscow denies the allegations. South Africa had already invited Putin in January.
South African authorities confirmed that foreign ministers from Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa are attending Thursday’s meeting in Cape Town. A deputy minister is representing China.
No agenda has been made public, but analysts said discussions would aim to deepen ties among existing members and consider an expansion of the group.
“BRICS is positioning itself as an alternative to the West and as a way to make space for emerging powers,” said Cobus van Staden of the South African Institute of International Affairs.
Once viewed as a loose, largely symbolic association of disparate emerging economies, BRICS has in recent years taken more concrete shape, driven initially by Beijing and, since the start of the Ukraine war in February 2022, with added impetus from Moscow.
Discussions of BRICS’ New Development Bank, which stopped funding projects in Russia to comply with sanctions, were expected on Thursday, a South African foreign ministry source said.
Amid the growing geopolitical polarization resulting from the war in Ukraine, BRICS leaders have said they are open to admitting new members, including oil producing countries.
Venezuela, Argentina, Iran, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are on a list of those who have either formally applied to join or expressed interest, officials said.
“If they can bring in the oil producer countries that will be key, given the petrodollar system,” said William Gumede, a South African political analyst who has written extensively on BRICS.
South Africa, though the bloc’s smallest member, is among its biggest champions.
Its preparations for the Aug. 22-24 summit, however, have been complicated by the ICC announcement on Putin.
As an ICC member South Africa would face pressure to arrest Putin, were he to attend the meeting in Johannesburg.
Putin has not confirmed his plans, with the Kremlin only saying Russia would take part at the “proper level.”
South Africa’s position is unclear. Pretoria has said it will honor its obligations under its ICC membership, but the government is still weighing the possibility of hosting Putin or even moving the summit to China.
Independent political analyst Nic Borain said the government was caught between its support for BRICS and friendship with Russia on one side and the looming backlash from vital Western economic partners on the other.
“Obviously, the best solution for South Africa is if Putin decided not to come.”
Militants kill Pakistani soldier guarding polio team
- Attempts to eradicate polio in Pakistan have been hit by attacks targeting inoculation teams that have claimed hundreds of lives
- Extremist opposition to all forms of inoculation grew after the CIA organized a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden
ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani soldier was killed on Wednesday when militants opened fire on a polio vaccination team, the country’s military said, in the latest attack claimed by the Pakistani Taliban.
Attempts to eradicate polio in Pakistan have been hit by attacks targeting inoculation teams that have claimed hundreds of lives in over a decade.
“Terrorists attempted to disrupt the ongoing polio campaign by firing on the members of the polio team,” the military said in a statement about the assault in the former tribal areas that border Afghanistan.
A soldier deployed to protect the vaccination team was killed during an exchange of fire, it added.
Extremist opposition to all forms of inoculation grew after the US Central Intelligence Agency organized a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which is waging a campaign against security forces, claimed the attack in a statement to media.
Pakistan is grappling with an uptick in militancy since the Afghan Taliban returned to power in neighboring Afghanistan.
North Waziristan has historically been a hive of militancy and was the target of a long-running Pakistani military offensive and US drone strikes during the post-9/11 occupation of Afghanistan.
Iraqi killed fighting for Russia’s Wagner in Ukraine, says group founder
- Abbas Abuthar Witwit died on April 7, a day after arriving at a Wagner hospital in the Russian-controlled, eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk
- Prigozhin confirmed he had recruited Witwit from prison, saying he was not the first native of an Arab country to have joined from jail
LUHANSK, Ukraine: An Iraqi citizen fighting with Russia’s Wagner mercenary force was killed in Ukraine in early April, the first confirmed case of a Middle East native dying in the conflict, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin told Reuters on Wednesday.
Abbas Abuthar Witwit died on April 7, a day after arriving at a Wagner hospital in the Russian-controlled, eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, the RIA FAN news site earlier reported.
Much of the fighting for Bakhmut was done by convict fighters, recruited by Wagner from prisons on the promise of a pardon if they survived six months at the front in Ukraine.
In response to a Reuters request for comment, Prigozhin confirmed he had recruited Witwit from prison, saying he was not the first native of an Arab country to have joined from jail.
Witwit, he said, had fought well and “died heroically.”
RIA FAN said Witwit had been wounded in Bakhmut, the city in Donetsk province that Prigozhin said Wagner had taken in mid-May, after a battle that had raged since last year.
Prigozhin previously said the whole conflict had cost 20,000 of his men’s lives.
In video published by RIA FAN, a man identified as Witwit’s father is shown receiving awards posthumously given to his son, and that he had supported his decision to enlist in Wagner as a “volunteer.”
“Abbas always pursued his freedom and wanted to be a man who defends his freedom and himself, and he told me he found his freedom in Russia,” he is shown saying.
According to court papers seen by Reuters, Witwit was sentenced to four and a half years in prison on drug charges in July 2021 by a court in the Russian city of Kazan. The documents said Witwit was a first year student at a technical university.
Where are the jobs? India's world-beating growth falls short
- Fewer full-time jobs remain in India since unemployment soared to 20.9% in April-June 2020
- Without jobs, tens of millions of young people are becoming a drag on the economy, say experts
MUMBAI: On a hot summer afternoon, 23-year old Nizamudin Abdul Rahim Khan is playing cricket on a muddy, unpaved road in the Rafiq Nagar slum in India's financial capital, Mumbai.
Here, there is scant evidence of India's fast-growing economy. Bordering what was once Asia largest garbage dumping ground, Rafiq Nagar and surrounding areas are home to an estimated 800,000 people, most living in tiny rooms across narrow, dark alleys.
The young men and women in the area struggle to find jobs or work, and they mostly dawdle the day away, said Naseem Jafar Ali, who works with an NGO in the area.
India's urban unemployment soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a high of 20.9% in the April-June 2020 quarter, while wages fell. While the unemployment rate has fallen since, fewer full-time jobs are available.
Economists say more and more job-seekers, especially the young, are looking for low-paid casual work or falling back on unreliable self-employment, even though the broader Indian economy is seen growing at a world-beating 6.5% in the financial year ending in March 2024.
In 2022/23, the Indian economy grew a stronger-than-expected 7.2%, boosted by the government's capital investments. But private consumption, which forms 60% of India's GDP, grew between 2-3% in the second half of the year, as pent-up spending and base effects faded.
TIP OF THE ICEBERG
India is overtaking China to become the world's most populous nation with more than 1.4 billion people. Nearly 53% are under 30, its much-touted demographic dividend, but without jobs, tens of millions of young people are becoming a drag on the economy.
"Unemployment is only the tip of the iceberg. What remains hidden beneath is the serious crisis of underemployment and disguised unemployment," said Radhicka Kapoor, fellow at economic research agency ICRIER.
Khan, for instance, offers himself as casual labour for home repairs or construction, earning just about 10,000 Indian rupees ($122) a month to help support his father and his four sisters. "If I get a permanent job, then there will be no problem," he says.
The risk for India is a vicious cycle for the economy. Falling employment and earnings undermine India’s chances to fuel the economic growth needed to create jobs for its young and growing population.
Economist Jayati Ghosh calls the country's demographic dividend "a ticking time-bomb."
"The fact that we have so many people who have been educated, have spent a lot of their own or family's money but are not being able to find the jobs they need, that's horrifying," she said.
"It's not just the question of potential loss to the economy ... it is a lost generation."
SMALL BUSINESSES COLLAPSE
Unemployment is far more acute in India's cities, where the cost of living is high and there is no back-up in the form of a jobs guarantee programme which the government offers in rural areas. Still, many in the army of rural unemployed flock to the cities to find jobs.
While urban unemployment was at 6.8% in the January-March quarter, the share of urban workers with full-time jobs has declined to 48.9% as of December 2022 from an already low 50.5% just before the start of the pandemic, government data show.
This means that of the estimated urban workforce of about 150 million, only 73 million have full-time jobs.
For people in urban areas with full-time jobs, average monthly wages, adjusted for inflation, stood at 17,507 rupees ($212) in the April-June 2022 quarter - the latest period for which government data is available.
This was a modest 1.2% higher than the October-December 2019 period, before the start of the pandemic.
But for the self-employed, incomes fell to 14,762 ($178.67) rupees in the April-June 2022 quarter, according to research by Ghosh and C.P. Chandrashekhar, both at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The figure was at 15,247 rupees in the October-December 2019 quarter.
"The big thing that has happened is the collapse of small businesses, which were the backbone of employment," said Ghosh.
Since the Indian government's decision to demonetise 86% of the country's currency in circulation in 2016, there have seen continuous attacks on the viability of small business, with the pandemic being the latest, she said.
Over 10,000 micro, small and medium enterprises shut in 2022-23 (April-March) alone, the government said in parliament in February. In the previous year, more than 6,000 such units had shut. The government did not specify whether any new enterprises were set up in those periods.
GRADUATE PAINTER
Many families in Khan's neighbourhood, typical of the urban sprawl in the city of 21 million, have been hit by job losses and lower incomes in recent years. Young workers are particularly vulnerable.
Arshad Ali Ansari, a 22-year-old student, said he saw his brother and sister lose their jobs soon after the start of the pandemic.
Sitting in a single room with a kitchen attached, where his family of eight lives, Ansari said they survive on his 60-year old father's earnings of about 20,000 rupees a month.
His brother, who was a graduate and had worked in a bank, lost his job during the pandemic and had to join their father in painting houses.
"My brother had education, he had experience," Ansari said.
His sister, once a social worker, also lost her job and has given up hope of finding another.
India will need to create 70 million new jobs over the next 10 years, wrote Pranjul Bhandari, chief India economist at HSBC, in a note earlier this month. But only 24 million will likely be created, leaving behind "46 million missing jobs."
"From that lens, a growth rate of 6.5% will solve a third of India’s jobs problem," Bhandari wrote.
