Today

Shati refugee camp, Gaza – Inside a stifling tent in Shati, one of Gaza’s overcrowded displacement camps, 30-year-old Raneem Abu Al-Eish cares for her sisters, Aseel, 51, and Afaf, 33.

They sit close to Raneem, laughing at times and at others growing agitated when the cries of children playing outside get too loud.

Aseel and Afaf suffer from celiac disease and intellectual disabilities that impair their speech, understanding, and behaviour – conditions that have only deepened under the strain of war and displacement.

They struggle to express themselves, often overwhelmed by their environment, Raneem explains. While she doesn’t know the medical term for their condition, the symptoms at times mirror Tourette syndrome.

‘People laugh, it devastates them’

The cramped tent shelters seven family members: Raneem, her two sisters, their elderly parents, and another sister with her husband.

Raneem’s mother is frail, and her father is still recovering from an injury sustained in Israel’s relentless war on Gaza, leaving Raneem to shoulder their care alone.

The family used to live in Jabalia camp’s Block 2, until Israel destroyed their home eight months ago. Since then, they have moved from relatives’ homes to makeshift shelters, then to an overcrowded United Nations school.

Now they are in this tent, which traps sweltering heat by midday and lets the bitter cold seep through its thin walls in the night.

Privacy and dignity are nearly impossible in the crowded tent. “When they need to change, we try to get the others to step out,” Raneem says. “But it’s not always possible.”

Yet that is only part of the ordeal for Aseel and Afaf, who are bullied daily due to their conditions.

“People don’t understand what my sisters go through,” Raneem says softly. “They judge by appearances, assuming they’re fine. But they aren’t. They need care, patience, dignity.”

Life in the camp overwhelms Aseel. “She finds it hard to cope with noise or sudden changes,” Raneem explains. “When that happens, she gets distressed – she shouts, cries, sometimes lashes out.”

Afaf, meanwhile, struggles with involuntary movements and impulsive behaviours. “A small argument or loud voice can trigger her,” Raneem adds.

“She doesn’t know how to control it,” she says, which makes it all the more sad that Afaf is frequently targeted for mockery, especially by children.

Using communal bathrooms brings repeated humiliation. “Every bathroom visit becomes a spectacle. People laugh, make cruel remarks, and it devastates them,” Raneem says.

Israel took their protector

The family’s greatest blow came six months ago, when Mohammad, Raneem’s 22-year-old brother, was taken by Israel.

Mohammad had gone to Kamal Adwan Hospital for surgery after a hand injury. While he was there, Israel raided the hospital on October 25 and seized Mohammad. Since then, the family knows nothing about his whereabouts.

Mohammad was the sibling most adept at navigating the outside world. “He got their medicines, managed hospital visits, dealt with aid agencies,” Raneem explains. “Without him, we’re completely alone.”

Since his detention, the sisters face worsening food shortages and a lack of medical care. “He was their protector,” Raneem says, her voice breaking. “Now we have no one.”

Between March and May, intensified bombing again displaced 436,000 Palestinians, many for the second, third or fourth time since the October 2023 beginning of the war. For families like Raneem’s – already in tents or shelters – each new wave of violence means starting over again, often without food or medicine.

For Aseel and Afaf, even basic nutrition is rife with threats. Celiac sufferers cannot eat gluten, which damages their small intestines.

In a starving Gaza where there is little to eat other than wheat-flour bread, which contains gluten, there is little chance that Raneem can find vegetables or meat for the sisters, especially with Mohammad detained.

Without gluten-free flour, Aseel and Afaf risk severe malnutrition, and they have gotten a dismally small amount of the 80 tonnes of gluten-free flour that aid agencies have thus far delivered to Gaza.

Much of it was blocked by closed borders, damaged roads, and broken distribution systems. “The little that reaches us is too expensive or too late,” Raneem says.

Begging for empathy, again and again

Before the war, Aseel and Afaf had routine medical care at Kamal Adwan Hospital.

Their conditions required special diets, medication, and regular therapy, needs now nearly impossible to meet.

Psychological specialist Dr Sara al-Wahidi says the war has sharply worsened the marginalisation of people with disabilities in Gaza.

“We’ve seen people with disabilities become separated from [their families in] displacement areas – some missing for long periods, sadly later found deceased,” she explains.

A 2025 report estimates that at least 15 percent of Gaza’s displaced population lives with a disability, and they have to navigate the makeshift shelters, whether in encampments, schools, or hospitals, that lack functioning ramps, adapted toilets and basic accessibility.

Raneem also battles social stigma, and despite her efforts – talking with neighbours, seeking support from community elders – ignorance persists.

“People provoke them, mock them. All we ask is understanding,” she says.

Some elders occasionally invite the sisters to their tents for a visit, brief moments of respite in a daily reality where they have no consistent medical or social support.

“We’ve been displaced again and again, from Jabalia to the west, then Gaza City,” Raneem recounts. “Every new place, we have to start over, explaining their condition, begging for patience.

“These aren’t just war victims,” she pleads.

“They’re vulnerable people forgotten by the world.”

Here’s where things stand on Tuesday, June 3:

Fighting

• Ukrainian officials said at least five people were killed from fighting and shelling along the war’s front line in eastern Ukraine, which is mostly occupied by Russia.
• Ukrainian shelling and drone attacks on key infrastructure in Russian-occupied areas of southeastern Ukraine led to power cuts across the whole of the Zaporizhia region, according to Russian-installed officials there.
• Similar attacks damaged electrical substations in the adjacent Kherson region, leading to power loss for 100,000 residents and 150 towns and villages, according to the Russian-installed officials.
• However, there has been no effect on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, Europe’s largest nuclear facility, according to Russian officials who occupy the site. The station is currently in shutdown mode.

Ceasefire

• Little headway was made during talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials in Istanbul, but the two sides did agree to swap thousands of prisoners and the remains of 6,000 deceased soldiers. The deal will also include all injured soldiers and those aged between 18 and 25.
• Russia set out a memorandum at the talks to end its war on Ukraine. Terms include Ukrainian forces withdrawing from the four regions annexed by Russia in September 2022, but that Russian forces have failed to fully capture, Kyiv halting war mobilisation efforts and a freeze on Kyiv importing Western weapons.
• The Russian document also proposes that Ukraine end martial law and hold elections, after which the two countries could sign a comprehensive peace treaty.

• Ukraine must also abandon its bid to join NATO, set limits on the size of its armed forces and recognise Russian as the country’s official language on a par with Ukrainian, according to the memorandum.
• Ukraine – which has previously rejected all such demands by Moscow – said it would spend the next week reviewing the memorandum and proposed another round of talks between June 20 and 30.
• The White House said that United States President Donald Trump is “open” to a three-way summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
• Zelenskyy’s chief of staff said in a post on Telegram after the talks that he did not believe Moscow wanted a ceasefire. “The Russians are doing everything to not cease firing and continue the war. New sanctions now are very important,” he wrote.

Sanctions

• The US Senate said it would start working on further rounds of sanctions for Russia and secondary sanctions for its trade partners if peace talks continue to stall.
• Possible sanctions include 500 percent tariffs on countries that buy Russian exports, including oil, gas and uranium. The tariffs would hit India and China, Moscow’s two largest energy customers.
• US Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that senators “stand ready to provide President Trump with any tools he needs to get Russia to finally come to the table in a real way”.

The UK government has threatened to sue former Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich to make sure the money from the club’s sale goes to Ukraine.

The £2.5bn in proceeds have been frozen in a UK bank account since the sale, with Mr Abramovich sanctioned after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The UK government wants the money to be for Ukrainian humanitarian aid, but Mr Abramovich has said he wants it to go to “all victims of the war in Ukraine”.

In a joint statement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “While the door for negotiations will remain open, we are fully prepared to pursue this through the courts if required.”

They said they wanted “to ensure people suffering in Ukraine can benefit from these proceeds as soon as possible”.

They added: “The government is determined to see the proceeds from the sale of Chelsea Football Club reach humanitarian causes in Ukraine, following Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion.

“We are deeply frustrated that it has not been possible to reach agreement on this with Mr Abramovich so far”.

The delay in releasing the funds centres on a disagreement between the UK government and his lawyers.

Mr Abramovich – a Russian billionaire who made his fortune in oil and gas – was granted a special licence to sell Chelsea following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, providing he could prove he would not benefit from the sale.

He is alleged to have strong ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, something he has denied.

He cannot access the £2.5bn sale proceeds under UK sanctions but the money still legally belongs to him.

When he announced his decision to sell the club, he said proceeds from the sale would be donated via a foundation “for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine”, which would include those in Russia.

The UK government has pushed back and argued that the funds should only be spent on humanitarian efforts inside Ukraine.

A House of Lords committee said last year said it was “incomprehensible” that Mr Abramovich’s promise to use the funds to support Ukraine remained unfulfilled, and that the assets remained frozen.

“This impasse reflects badly on both Mr Abramovich and the government, which ought to have pushed for a more binding commitment,” the report said.

Ukrainian drones struck multiple military airbases deep inside Russia on Sunday in a major operation a day before the neighbours held peace talks in Istanbul.

The Russian Defence Ministry said Ukraine had launched drone strikes targeting Russian military airfields across five regions, causing several aircraft to catch fire.

The attacks occurred in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan, and Amur regions. Air defences repelled the assaults in all but two regions – Murmansk and Irkutsk, the ministry said.

“In the Murmansk and Irkutsk regions, the launch of FPV drones from an area in close proximity to airfields resulted in several aircraft catching fire,” the Defence Ministry said. FPV drones are unmanned aerial vehicles with cameras on the front that relay live footage to operators, who in turn use those visuals to direct the drones.

The fires were extinguished, and no casualties were reported. Some individuals involved in the attacks had been detained, the Russian Defence Ministry said.

On Sunday night, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised the “absolutely brilliant” Ukrainian drone attack on the Telegram messaging app.

But the Sunday attacks were only the latest in a series of audacious hits on Russian military facilities, territory and symbols of power over the past three years of war — often acknowledged by Kyiv, and in some cases widely believed to have been carried out by Ukrainian special forces.

What happened on June 1?

Zelenskyy said 117 drones had been used to attack the Russian bases on Sunday. “Russia has had very tangible losses, and justifiably so,” he said.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said that it had hit Russian military planes worth a combined $7bn in a wave of drone strikes on Russian air bases thousands of kilometres behind the front line.

Targets included the Belaya airbase in Irkutsk, about 4,300km (2,670 miles) from the Ukrainian border, and the Olenya airbase in south Murmansk, some 1,800km (1,120 miles) from Ukraine.

Earlier on Sunday, multiple local media reports in Ukraine claimed that the operation was carried out by the SBU using drones smuggled deep into Russia and hidden inside trucks.

At least 41 Russian heavy bombers at four airbases were hit, the reports said. The strikes reportedly hit Tu-95 and Tu-22 strategic bombers, which Russia uses to fire long-range missiles at Ukrainian cities.

Russia is yet to confirm the extent of the damage, but the attack could mark Ukraine’s most damaging drone strike of the war to date.

Al Jazeera’s John Hendren, reporting from Kyiv, said it’s “an audacious strike, one that Ukraine has been waiting a long time and patiently to deliver, and it’s come after Russian air strikes into Ukraine have dramatically accelerated over the past couple of weeks”.

What’s the backdrop?

Both Russia and Ukraine have sharply ramped up their drone attacks against the other side in recent days.

Russia launched more than 900 kamikaze drones and 92 missiles last week, killing at least 16 civilians. Those attacks followed days of Ukrainian strikes on Russian military infrastructure in Russia’s Tula, Alabuga and Tatarstan regions, in which Kyiv used at least 800 drones.

Meanwhile, Ukraine sent a delegation to Istanbul led by its Defence Minister Rustem Umerov for talks on Monday with Russian officials. A previous round of talks, on May 16, led to a deal under which Ukraine and Russia exchanged 1,000 prisoners of war each. Monday’s talks led to an agreement on another prisoner swap.

Zelenskyy, who has previously voiced scepticism about Russia’s seriousness about peace talks, said that the Ukrainian delegation would enter the meeting in Istanbul with specific priorities, including “a complete and unconditional ceasefire” and the return of prisoners and abducted children.

Russia has said it has formulated its own peace terms and ruled out a Turkish proposal for the meeting to be held at the leaders’ level.

Monday’s meeting in Turkiye was spurred by US President Donald Trump’s push for a quick deal to end the three-year war. But the meeting did not lead to any major breakthrough.

Trump, who has increasingly demonstrated frustration with the lack of progress towards a ceasefire, recently vented his frustration at Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Something has happened to him,” Trump wrote on his social media platform on May 25, referring to Putin. “He has gone absolutely CRAZY!”

Trump told reporters, “We’re in the middle of talking and he’s shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities.”

The US president is yet to react to Sunday’s Ukrainian attacks on Russian airbases.

The strikes are the latest in a series of stunning, headline-grabbing attacks that Russia has periodically suffered since it launched the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Crimea Bridge attacks, 2022 and 2023

In May 2018, four years after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, Putin drove a truck across a newly built bridge connecting the Russian mainland to the peninsula, enraging Ukrainians.

Ukraine would take its revenge, first in 2022 and then again in 2023.

In October 2022, a truck explosion that Russia blamed on Ukraine blew up a part of the bridge. Russia repaired the damage, and Putin tried to revive the symbolism of 2018, again driving across it, this time in a Mercedes.

But Ukraine would strike again. In July 2023, the bridge that serves as a crucial supply route for Russian forces in Ukraine was blown up. Russia’s National Antiterrorism Committee said the strike was carried out by two Ukrainian sea drones. Officials said two people were killed and a child was wounded.

Black Sea Fleet attacks, 2023

In September 2023, Ukraine launched a series of attacks on occupied Crimea, using drones and missiles to target key facilities of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet near Sevastopol.

Satellite images showed that the first attack destroyed half of the Black Sea Fleet’s communications command centre in Verkhnosadove.

Ukraine followed up on that attack with a strike against the Saky airfield in Crimea, which was hosting 12 Russian combat aircraft, including Su-24 and Su-30 fighter-bombers, according to the Ukrainian broadcaster Suspilne.

Then came the most devastating of the attacks, on September 22.

Ukraine hit the Black Sea Fleet command headquarters and claimed to have killed 34 officers, including fleet commander Admiral Viktor Sokolov. A further 105 soldiers were reportedly wounded.

Kremlin attack, 2023

In the dead of night in early May 2023, the ultimate symbol of Russian power for centuries — the Kremlin — came under attack, as flashes of light from small explosions over the red building’s citadel were seen in images and grainy video around the world.

Moscow said that two Ukrainian drones had been used in the attack on Putin’s residence, but had been disabled by electronic defences.

“We regard these actions as a planned terrorist act and an attempt on the president’s life, carried out on the eve of Victory Day, the May 9 Parade, at which the presence of foreign guests is also planned,” the Kremlin said in a statement.

Zelenskyy denied that his country had attacked the Russian capital or its president.

“We don’t attack Putin, or Moscow, we fight on our territory,” Zelenskyy told a news conference in Helsinki, Finland. But independent analysts, including from Western nations that are Ukrainian allies, believe Ukrainian special forces were behind the drone attacks on the Kremlin.

And a year later, Ukraine would blur the line between its territory and Russian land in the escalating war between the neighbours.

Kursk invasion, 2024 and 2025

Ukrainian forces launched a surprise attack on the Kursk region on August 6, 2024, taking Moscow by surprise. Russia began evacuating the neighbouring Belgorod region as the country’s forces were forced to confront Ukraine’s offensive in Western Russia.

At the height of the incursion, Ukrainian forces claimed nearly 1,400 square kilometres (540 square miles) of Kursk — roughly twice the size of Singapore.

By the start of 2025, Russia had most of the territory it lost in Kursk before Ukraine launched a second wave of attacks in January.

However, Kyiv suffered a major setback earlier this year after Trump temporarily cut off all military and intelligence assistance. By early March, Russia had recaptured most of the territory.

SANTANDER is slashing interest rates for two of its savings accounts from today – and customers should check if they’re affected.

The major bank is cutting savings rates from June 3 (today) on its Good for Life ISA and Rate for Life accounts.

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The interest rate on the Good for Life ISA account will drop from 4.5% to 4.25%, while the rate for the Rate for Life account will drop from 4.75% to 4.5%.

Those who have saved less than £1,000 in the Rate for Life account will still continue to earn the same rate (1%) on these balances.

It comes after the Bank of England (BoE) cut the base rate from 4.5% to 4.25% last month – the fourth cut since 2020.

The base rate is used by banks to determine the interest rates offered to customers on savings and borrowing costs.

While a rate cut is good news for borrowers, it’s usually bad news for savers, who will usually see savings rates fall when the base rate is cut.

This means they will earn less on their cash.

For example, the average easy access savings rate was 2.78% on May 8, when the base rate was cut.

Now it has dropped to 2.72%, according to comparison site Moneyfacts.

Santander is not the only bank cutting rates on savings accounts. HSBC has also cut rates on eight of its savings accounts today.

Nationwide Building Society cut savings rates on 63 of its accounts on Sunday, from easy-access ISAs to children’s accounts.

NatWest cut savings rates on four of its accounts last Friday.

Meanwhile, rates on three of its savings accounts and a kids’ current account will be slashed from July 15.

How to get the best savings rate

As savings rates tumble, now is a good time to check what the interest rate is on your existing account.

Around £280billion is sitting in accounts paying zero interest, according to latest data from the BoE.

If you have an interest rate below the rate of inflation – which is currently 3.5% – then consider moving your money elsewhere, otherwise the spending power of your savings is eaten away.

Use price comparison sites such as moneysavingexpert.com or moneyfactscompare.co.uk to browse the best savings accounts on the market.

The best easy access savings rate (based on a balance of £1,000) is offered by Atom Bank at 4.5 per cent.

Experts are predicting that more cuts to the base rate this year are likely, so it may be worth considering locking up your money in a fixed rate savings account if you can afford to do so.

The best one year fixed rate savings account is offered by Hampshire Trust Bank at 4.45%.

However, be aware that you usually can’t make withdrawals out of fixed term savings accounts, even in an emergency.

Anne Bowes from The Private Office said: “Review your savings accounts and switch if you are being paid an uncompetitive rate.

“Double check the terms and conditions of any account you are looking to open – or indeed close – as some accounts may have very short-term bonuses or restricted access.

“That means you might not earn as much interest as you hoped, or get hold of the money in as timely a manner as you were expecting.”

How to switch banks

For customers not happy with the latest shake-up, you may want to consider switching banks.

Switching bank accounts is a simple process and can usually be done through the Current Account Switch Service (CASS).

Dozens of high street banks and building societies are signed up – there’s a full list on CASS’ website.

Under the switching service, swapping banks should take seven working days.

You don’t have to remember to move direct debits across when moving, as this is done for you.

All you have to do is apply for the new account you want, and the new bank will tell your existing one you’re moving.

There are a few things you can do before switching though, including choosing your switch date and transferring any old bank statements to your new account.

You should get in touch with your existing bank for any old statements.

When switching current accounts, consider what other perks might come with joining a specific bank or building society.

Some banks offer 0% overdrafts up to a certain limit, and others might offer better rates on savings accounts.

And some banks offer free travel or mobile phone insurance with their current accounts – but these accounts might come with a monthly fee.

Russia and Ukraine have agreed to a new prisoner swap and the return of thousands of war dead during direct talks in Istanbul although little headway was made towards ending the war.

The delegations met on Monday at the Ottoman-era Ciragan Palace in the Turkish city, and officials confirmed that both sides will exchange prisoners of war and the remains of 6,000 soldiers killed in combat.

Negotiators from both sides confirmed they had reached a deal to swap all severely wounded soldiers as well as all captured fighters under the age of 25.

“We agreed to exchange all-for-all seriously wounded and seriously sick prisoners of war. The second category is young soldiers who are from 18 to 25 years old – all-for-all,” Ukraine’s lead negotiator and Defence Minister Rustem Umerov told reporters in Istanbul.

Russia’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said the swap would involve “at least 1,000” on each side – topping the 1,000-for-1,000 POW exchange agreed at talks last month.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking from Vilnius, Lithuania, said the two parties “exchanged documents through the Turkish side” and Kyiv was preparing for the next group of captives to be released.

The Istanbul meeting marks the second direct dialogue in less than a month, but expectations were low. The talks on May 16 produced another major prisoner swap but failed to reach a ceasefire.

“The exchange of prisoners seems to be the diplomatic channel that actually works between Russia and Ukraine,” Al Jazeera correspondent Dmitry Medvedenko said, reporting from Istanbul.

“We’ve actually had exchanges of prisoners throughout this war, not in the numbers that have been happening as a result of these Istanbul talks,” Medvedenko added.

Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said Kyiv also handed over a list of children it accuses Russia of abducting and demanded their return.

As for a truce, Russia and Ukraine remain sharply divided.

“The Russian side continued to reject the motion of an unconditional ceasefire,” Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergiy Kyslytsya told reporters after the talks.

Russia said it had offered a limited pause in fighting.

“We have proposed a specific ceasefire for two to three days in certain areas of the front line,” Medinsky said, adding that this was needed to collect the bodies of dead soldiers from battlefields.

At the negotiating table, Russia presented a memorandum setting out the Kremlin’s terms for ending hostilities, the Ukrainian delegation said.

Umerov told reporters that Kyiv officials would need a week to review the document and decide on a response. Ukraine proposed further talks on a date between June 20 and June 30, he said.

After the talks, Russian state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti published the text of the Russian memorandum, which suggested as a condition for a ceasefire that Ukraine withdraw its forces from the four Ukrainian regions that Russia annexed in September 2022 but never fully captured.

As an alternate way of reaching a truce, the memorandum presses Ukraine to halt its mobilisation efforts and freeze Western arms deliveries, conditions that were suggested earlier by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The document also suggests that Ukraine stop any redeployment of forces and ban any military presence of third countries on its soil as conditions for halting hostilities.

The Russian document further proposes that Ukraine end martial law and hold elections, after which the two countries could sign a comprehensive peace treaty that would see Ukraine declare its neutral status, abandon its bid to join NATO, set limits on the size of its armed forces and recognise Russian as the country’s official language on par with Ukrainian.

Ukraine and the West have previously rejected all those demands from Moscow.

Ceasefire hopes remain elusive

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the talks “magnificent”.

“My greatest wish is to bring together Putin and Zelenskyy in Istanbul or Ankara and even add [United States President Donald] Trump along,” he said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who chaired the talks, said the world was watching closely. He acknowledged the two sides had discussed the conditions for a ceasefire but no tangible outcome was announced.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told Al Jazeera he was not very optimistic about the talks in Istanbul.

“Russia clearly shows that they don’t want to end the war because Ukraine proposed a 30-days ceasefire in March, and the American and Europe proposition was the same, but only one country [Russia] refused,” Goncharenko said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has ramped up its military efforts far beyond the front lines, claiming responsibility for drone attacks on Sunday that it said damaged or destroyed more than 40 Russian warplanes. The operation targeted airbases in three distant regions – the Arctic, Siberia and the Far East – thousands of kilometres from Ukraine.

“This brilliant operation will go down in history,” Zelenskyy said, calling the raids a turning point in Ukraine’s struggle.

Ukrainian officials said the attacks crippled nearly a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. Vasyl Maliuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine, said the mission had taken more than a year to plan.

Zelenskyy said the setback for Russia’s military would increase pressure on Moscow to return to the negotiating table.

“Russia must feel the cost of its aggression. That is what will push it towards diplomacy,” he said during his visit to Lithuania, where he met leaders from NATO’s eastern flank and Nordic countries.

Ukraine’s air force, meanwhile, reported that Russia launched 472 drones on Sunday – the highest number since the start of its full-scale invasion in 2022 – aiming to exhaust Ukrainian air defences. Most of those drones targeted civilian areas, it said.

On Monday, Russian forces bombarded southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, killing three people and injuring 19, including two children. Separately, five people were killed and nine injured in attacks near Zaporizhzhia in the neighbouring Zaporizhia region.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces had intercepted 162 Ukrainian drones overnight across eight regions and Crimea while Ukraine said it shot down 52 of 80 drones launched by Russia.

Zelenskyy warned that if the Istanbul talks fail to deliver results, more sanctions against Russia will be necessary. “If there’s no breakthrough, then new, strong sanctions must follow – urgently,” he said.

Amnesty International calls for an investigation into the ‘reckless’ attack in the violence-hit Zamfara state.

A military air strike in northwest Nigeria has killed at least 20 people, according to the military and local residents, prompting calls from human rights groups for an investigation into the attack.

The strike occurred over the weekend in Zamfara state, one of the regions worst affected by violence from armed groups, commonly referred to as “bandits”.

Nigerian Air Commodore Ehimen Ejodame said the strike followed intelligence that “a significant number of terrorists were massing and preparing to strike unsuspecting settlements”.

“Further intelligence confirmed that the bandits had killed some farmers and abducted a number of civilians, including women and children,” Ejodame said in a statement, adding that two local vigilantes were killed and two others injured in the crossfire.

However, according to residents cited by the AFP news agency, a group of local vigilantes pursuing a gang was mistakenly bombed by a Nigerian military jet.

The air force had been called in by villagers who had suffered an attack earlier in the weekend. Locals said an unknown number of people were also wounded in the strike.

“We were hit by double tragedy on Saturday,” said Buhari Dangulbi, a resident of the affected area. “Dozens of our people and several cows were taken by bandits, and those who trailed the bandits to rescue them were attacked by a fighter jet. It killed 20 of them.”

Residents told AFP that the bandits had earlier attacked the villages of Mani and Wabi in Maru district, stealing cattle and abducting several people. In response, vigilantes launched a pursuit to recover the captives and stolen livestock.

“The military aircraft arrived and started firing, killing at least 20 of our people,” Abdullahi Ali, a Mani resident and member of a local hunters’ militia, told the Reuters news agency.

Another resident, Ishiye Kabiru, said: “Our vigilantes from Maraya and nearby communities gathered and went after the bandits. Unfortunately, a military jet struck them.”

Alka Tanimu, also from the area, added: “We will still have to pay to get those kidnapped back, while the cows are gone for good.”

Amnesty International condemned the strike and urged a full investigation.

“Attacks by bandits clearly warrant a response from the state, but to launch reckless air strikes into villages – again and again – is absolutely unlawful,” the rights group said.

Nigeria’s military has previously acknowledged mistakenly hitting civilians during air operations targeting armed gangs.

In January, at least 16 vigilantes were killed in a similar strike in Zamfara’s Zurmi district.

In December 2022, more than 100 civilians were killed in Mutunji village while pursuing bandits. A year later, an attack on a religious gathering in Kaduna state killed at least 85 people.

Elon Musk may have resigned from the Department of Government Efficiency, but few believe he’s stepping away from power. In under a year, DOGE brought Silicon Valley-style disruption to Washington, consolidating federal data and dismantling oversight. Now, Musk is expected to channel what he gained into a private AI venture – with public systems still in reach.

Russia and Ukraine have concluded talks in Istanbul with no ceasefire deal, but agreed to an exchange of prisoners and fallen soldiers. The talks took place amid escalated attacks by both sides in recent days.

Two were killed, nearly 200 injured and more than 500 arrested after riots erupted in Paris following Paris Saint-Germain’s first-ever Champions League win. Footage shows police firing tear gas on crowds as looting, fires and clashes engulfed the Champs-Élysées.

Coming into the French Open, Norrie said he had been playing some of his best tennis, describing his level as similar to when he was a top-10 player back in 2022.

It raised eyebrows – but he proved to be right.

A memorable five-set win over former world number one Medvedev set the tone, followed by victories against Argentine qualifier Federico Gomez and fellow Scot Jacob Fearnley, who replaced him as British number two earlier this year.

Facing Djokovic was a different proposition.

Norrie had lost all five of his previous meetings with the three-time French Open champion, including a three-set defeat in the Geneva Open 10 days ago.

He was quickly outmanoeuvred in the first set and, after Djokovic needed medical treatment on foot blisters, the British number three could not maintain an early break in the second.

Crucially, Norrie could not convert more chances, with Djokovic saving break points in lengthy service games at 2-2 and 3-3.

The former world number one then raced away with the final set, breaking early and reeling off five games in a row before serving out victory.

Despite not being able to end his miserable run against Djokovic, Norrie said it has been “a really enjoyable” clay-court swing.

Earlier this year he had been in danger of tumbling out of the world’s top 100 after a difficult couple of years struggling for form and fitness.

But a reinvigorated Norrie will now move back into the top 60 when he starts the grass-court season back in the UK.

“I played 20 clay-court matches, and for me that’s huge,” he said.

“The way for me to take confidence is playing and then actually getting through some tough matches.”

Ngugi wa Thiong’o loved to dance. He loved it more than anything else – even more than writing. Well into his 80s, his body slowed by increasingly disabling kidney failure, Ngugi would get up and start dancing merely at the thought of music, never mind the sound of it. Rhythm flowed through his feet the way words flowed through his hands and onto the page.

It is how I will always remember Ngugi – dancing. He passed away on May 28 at the age of 87, leaving behind not only a Nobel-worthy literary legacy but a combination of deeply innovative craft and piercingly original criticism that joyfully calls on all of us to do better and push harder – as writers, activists, teachers and people – against the colonial foundations that sustain all our societies. As for me, he pushed me to go far deeper up river to Kakuma refugee camp, where the free association of so many vernacular tongues and cultures made possible the freedom to think and speak “from the heart” – something he would always describe as writing’s greatest gift.

Ngugi had long been a charter member of the African literary canon and a perennial Nobel favourite by the time I first met him in 2005. Getting to know him, it quickly became clear to me that his writing was inseparable from his teaching, which in turn was umbilically tied to his political commitments and long service as one of Africa’s most formidable public intellectuals.

Ngugi’s cheerfulness and indefatigable smile and laugh hid a deep-seated anger, reflecting the scars of violence on his body and soul as a child, young man and adult victimised by successive and deeply intertwined systems of criminalised rule.

The murder of his deaf brother, killed by the British because he did not hear and obey soldiers’ orders to stop at a checkpoint, and the Mau Mau revolt that divided his other brothers on opposite sides of the colonial order during the final decade of British rule, imbued in him the foundational reality of violence and divisiveness as the twin engines of permanent coloniality even after independence formally severed the connection to the metropole.

More than half a century after these events, nothing would arouse Ngugi’s animated ire more than bringing up in a discussion the transitional moment from British to Kenyan rule, and the fact that colonialism didn’t leave with the British, but rather dug in and reenforced itself with Kenya’s new, Kenyan rulers.

As he became a writer and playwright, Ngugi also became a militant, one devoted to using language to reconnect the complex African identities – local, tribal, national and cosmopolitan – that the “cultural bomb” of British rule had “annihilated” over the previous seven decades.

After his first play, The Black Hermit, premiered in Kampala in 1962, he was quickly declared a voice who “speaks for the Continent”. Two years later, Weep Not Child, his first novel and the first English-language novel by an East African writer, came out.

As he rose to prominence, Ngugi decided to renounce the English language and start writing in his native Gikuyu.

The (re)turn to his native tongue radically altered the trajectory not just of his career, but of his life, as the ability of his clear-eyed critique of postcolonial rule to reach his compatriots in their own language (rather than English or the national language of Swahili) was too much for Kenya’s new rulers to tolerate, and so he was imprisoned for a year without trial in 1977.

What Ngugi had realised when he began writing in Gikuyu, and even more so in prison, was the reality of neocolonialism as the primary mechanism of postcolonial rule. This wasn’t the standard “neocolonialism” that anti- and post-colonial activists used to describe the ongoing power of former colonial rulers by other means after formal independence, but rather the willing adoption of colonial technologies and discourses of rule by newly independent leaders, many of whom – like Jomo Kenyatta, Ngugi liked to point out – themselves suffered imprisonment and torture under the British rule.

Thus, true decolonisation could only occur when people’s minds were freed from foreign control, which required first and perhaps foremost the freedom to write in one’s native language.

Although rarely acknowledged, Ngugi’s concept of neocolonialism, which owed much, he’d regularly explain, to the writings of Kwame Nkrumah and other African anti-colonial intellectuals-turned-political leaders, anticipated the rise of the now ubiquitous “decolonial” and “Indigenous” turns in the academy and progressive cultural production by almost a generation.

Indeed, Ngugi has long been placed together with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the founding generation of postcolonial thought and criticism. But he and Said, whom he’d frequently discuss as a brother-in-arms and fellow admirer of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad, shared a similar all-encompassing focus on language, even as Said wrote his prose mostly in English rather than Arabic.

For Said and Ngugi, colonialism had not yet passed, but was very much still an ongoing, viscerally and violently lived reality – for the former through the ever more violent and ultimately annihilatory settler colonialism, for the latter through the violence of successive governments.

Ngugi saw his link with Said in their common experience growing up under British rule. As he explained in his afterword to a recently published anthology of Egyptian prison writings since 2011, “The performance of authority was central to the colonial culture of silence and fear,” and disrupting that authority and ending the silence could only come first through language.

For Said, the swirl of Arabic and English in his mind since childhood created what he called a “primal instability”, one that could be calmed fully when he was in Palestine, which he returned to multiple times in the last decade of his life. For Ngugi, even as Gikuyu enabled him to “imagine another world, a flight to freedom, like a bird you see from the [prison] window,” he could not make a final return home in his last years.

Still, from his home in Orange County, California in the United States, he would never tire of urging students and younger colleagues to “write dangerously”, to use language to resist whatever oppressive order in which they found themselves. The bird would always take flight, he would say, if you could write without fear.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s right-wing opposition candidate, narrowly won the second round of voting in the country’s presidential election on Sunday, according to the National Electoral Commission (NEC).

Here is all you need to know about the results:

Who won the presidential election in Poland?

Nawrocki won with 50.89 percent of the votes, the NEC website updated early on Monday.

He defeated liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, who secured 49.11 percent of the vote.

The outcome was a surprise because exit polls had projected a narrow loss for Nawrocki.

What happened in the first round of the election?

The first round took place on May 18, where, as expected, none of the 13 presidential candidates could manage to reach a 50 percent threshold.

Trzaskowski won 31.4 percent of the vote, while Nawrocki got 29.5 percent. As the top two candidates, Nawrocki and Trzaskowski proceeded to the run-off.

Who is Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s new president?

Nawrocki, 42, is a conservative historian and amateur boxer.

He contested as an independent candidate, backed by the outgoing president, Andrzej Duda’s Law and Justice (PiS), Poland’s main opposition party.

The newly elected president’s academic work, as a historian, centred on anti-communist resistance. At the moment, he runs the Institute of National Remembrance, a Warsaw-based government-funded research institute that studies the history of Poland during World War II and the period of communism until 1990.

At the institute, Nawrocki has removed Soviet memorials, upsetting Russia.

He administered the Museum of the Second World War in the Polish city of Gdansk from 2017 to 2021.

Nawrocki has had his share of controversies. In 2018, he published a book about a notorious gangster under the pseudonym “Tadeusz Batyr”. In public comments, Nawrocki and Batyr praised each other, without revealing they were the same person.

United States President Donald Trump’s administration threw its weight behind Nawrocki in the Polish election. The US group Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its first meeting in Poland on May 27. “We need you to elect the right leader,” US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said during the CPAC event.

Calling Trzaskowski “an absolute train wreck of a leader”, Noem said, “I just had the opportunity to meet with Karol and listen: he needs to be the next president of Poland. Do you understand me?”

How did Nawrocki win?

Experts say the consistency of Nawrocki’s messaging on the campaign trail may have earned him his win.

“People choose someone they see as strong, clear, and consistent,” Liliana Smiech, chairwoman of the Foundation Council at Warsaw Institute, a Polish nonprofit think tank specialising in geopolitics and international affairs, told Al Jazeera.

“Even with the accusations against him, voters preferred his firmness over Trzaskowski’s constant rebranding. Trzaskowski tried to be everything to everyone and ended up convincing no one. Nawrocki looks like someone who can handle pressure. He became the president for difficult times.”

Unlike Trzaskowski, Smiech said, Nawrocki “didn’t try to please everyone”.

Yet he managed to please enough voters to win.

What is the significance of Nawrocki’s win?

Most of the power in Poland rests in the hands of the prime minister. The incumbent, Donald Tusk, leads a centre-right coalition government, and Trzaskowski was the ruling alliance’s candidate.

Nawrocki has been deeply critical of the Tusk administration. The president has the ability to veto legislation and influence military and foreign policy decisions.

On the campaign trail, Nawrocki promised to lower taxes and pull Poland out of the European Union’s Pact on Migration and Asylum, an agreement on new rules for managing migration and setting a common asylum system; and the European Green Deal, which sets benchmarks for environmental protection for the EU, such as the complete cessation of net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Like other candidates, including Trzaskowski, Nawrocki called for Poland to spend up to 5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defence. Poland spent 3.8 percent of its GDP on military expenditure in 2023, according to World Bank data.

“Some expected a wave of support for the left or liberal side, especially among young people. That didn’t happen. Nawrocki won in the 18-39 age group,” Smiech said.

“It’s a clear message: people still care about sovereignty, tradition, and strong leadership. Even younger voters are not buying into the idea of a ‘new progressive Poland’.”

What were the key issues in the Polish election?

The Russia-Ukraine war, which began in February 2022, is a concerning issue for the Poles, who are fearful of a spillover of Russian aggression to Poland due to its proximity to Ukraine.

While Poland initially threw its full support behind Ukraine, tensions have grown between Poland and Ukraine.

Nawrocki is opposed to Ukraine joining NATO and the EU.

Yet, at the same time, Poland and Nawrocki remain deeply suspicious of Russia.

On May 12, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said an investigation had revealed that Russian intelligence agencies had orchestrated a massive fire at a shopping centre in Warsaw in May 2024. This is why multiple candidates in this election proposed raising the defence budget to 5 percent of the GDP.

Abortion is a key issue in Poland, which has some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe. In August 2024, Prime Minister Tusk acknowledged that he did not have enough backing from parliament to deliver on one of his key campaign promises and change the abortion law. PiS, which backed Nawrocki, is opposed to any legalisation of abortion.

Other issues included economic concerns about taxes, housing costs and the state of public transport.

What’s next?

Nawrocki is expected to be sworn in on August 6.

Smeich said Nawrocki will need to prove that he is not just good at campaigning, but also at governing.

“Expectations are high. People want someone who will defend Poland’s interests, stay firm under pressure, and not give in to media or foreign influence. He’s starting his term in a tough moment — exactly the kind of moment he was elected for.”

A man who burned a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London has been found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence.

Hamit Coskun, 50, shouted abusive comments about Islam as he held the flaming book aloft in Rutland Gardens in Knightsbridge on 13 February.

On Monday he was found guilty at Westminster Magistrates Court of the offence and of using disorderly behaviour, and fined £240 with a statutory surcharge of £96.

District Judge John McGarva said Coskun’s conduct was “provocative and taunting” and told him “you have a deep-seated hatred of Islam and its followers”.

Turkey-born Coskun, who is half Kurdish and half Armenian, travelled from his home in Derby and set fire to the Quran at around 14:00 GMT, the court heard.

The judge said Coskun’s hatred of Islam had stemmed from his experiences in Turkey “and the experiences of your family”.

He said: “It’s not possible to separate your views about the religion to your views about the followers.

“Your actions in burning the Quran where you did were highly provocative, and your actions were accompanied by bad language in some cases directed toward the religion and were motivated at least in part by hatred of followers of the religion.”

Judge McGarva said he “did not accept” Coskun’s claim that his criticism was of Islam in general and not its adherents.

Coskun had posted on social media that he was protesting against the “Islamist government” of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who the defendant allegedly said had “made Turkey a base for radical Islamists and is trying to establish a Sharia regime”, prosecutors said.

Coskun said in a statement that his conviction was “an assault on free speech and will deter others from exercising their democratic rights”.

A Humanists UK spokesperson has said the case does “raise concerns” and the bar for prosecutions is too low.

They said: “When blasphemy laws were repealed in 2008, it was a victory for freedom of expression.

“We must make sure that public order legislation is not used to disproportionately target speech – even offensive speech – on religious matters, thereby chilling legitimate criticism and expression.”

Judge McGarva said he did not view the case as an attempt to expand blasphemy laws.

He said that burning a religious book, although offensive to some, was not necessarily disorderly, but that other factors (including Islamophobic comments made in police interviews) made it so on this occasion.

Coskun’s legal fees are being paid for by the National Secular Society and the Free Speech Union (FSU). Both organisations have said they intend to appeal against the verdict “and keep on appealing it until it’s overturned”.

An FSU spokesperson said: “If that means taking it all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, we will do so.

“Religious tolerance is an important British value, but it doesn’t require non-believers to respect the blasphemy codes of believers.”

Iraqi authorities have opened an investigation into a mass die-off of fish in the country’s central and southern marshlands, the latest in a series of such incidents in recent years.

One possible cause for the devastation is a shortage of oxygen, triggered by low water flow, increased evaporation and rising temperatures driven by climate change, according to officials and environmental activists. Another is the use of chemicals by fishermen.

“We have received several citizens’ complaints,” said Jamal Abd Zeid, chief environmental officer for the Najaf governorate, which stretches from central to southern Iraq, adding that a technical inspection team had been set up.

He explained that the team would look into water shortages, electrical fishing, and the use by fishermen of “poisons”.

For at least five years, Iraq has endured successive droughts linked to climate change. Authorities further attribute the severe decline in river flow to the construction of dams by neighbouring Iran and Turkiye.

The destruction of Iraq’s natural environment adds another layer of suffering to a country that has already faced decades of war and political oppression.

“We need lab tests to determine the exact cause” of the fish die-off, said environmental activist Jassim al-Assadi, who suggested that agricultural pesticides could also be responsible.

Investigations into similar incidents have shown that the use of poison in fishing can lead to mass deaths.

“It is dangerous for public health, as well as for the food chain,” al-Assadi said. “Using poison today, then again in a month or two … It’s going to accumulate.”

Hassan Audu is lost in the past.

Tricked into a Boko Haram camp in Niger State, North-central Nigeria, the 16-year-old is mired in the mud of his traumatic experience as a child soldier. He is a witness to the terror and tragedy devastating his hometown of Shiroro. He struggles to move towards a glimpse of the future. Audu’s nine-year-old brother, Ja’afar Hassan, was caught in Boko Haram’s vicious net in 2022, with families and friends thrown into agony that the terrorists had conscripted their beloved son. For years, no one could trace Ja’afar’s footpaths to the camp; his parents wallowed in pain, begging local authorities in the Mashekeri village of Shiroro to help retrieve their son.

When Ja’afar’s captors sauntered into the village in 2024 for their exploits, they encountered a weary Audu, exhausted from his desperate search for his younger brother. The terrorists took advantage of his desperation, asking him to follow them into the forest to retrieve his brother. He hopped on a motorbike, wedged among the terrorists, as the rider zigzagged his way toward the forest’s edge.

“They asked me to come see my brother. When I arrived, they locked me up in a mud cell,” Audu tells HumAngle. “We used three motorcycles, two people each, including the one I was on. They asked me to come with them and see my brother. Since I knew my brother was with them, I went along.”

The boy wears a sour face and a sober appearance, beaming softness and stone-heartedness simultaneously. One minute, his eyes catch tears during the interview in a secured location in the Hudawa area of Kaduna State in northwestern Nigeria, and the next minute, he carries a terrifying face, stirring up a panic-stricken atmosphere.

Concerned that he might go rogue if allowed to travel alone, Audu’s stepmother, Laraba, accompanied him from Zamfara to Kaduna to speak with HumAngle. Since returning from the terrorist den, his chances of going berserk have been high, according to the stepmother, who noted that the boy has lost his tenderness as a teenager, occasionally displaying wild behaviour and betraying a civil demeanour. Blame him, but also blame the men who lured him into the valley of violence, keeping him in the logistics unit of the camp where he witnessed how terrorists planned attacks, brutally punished offenders, and detained civilians for ransom. 

The terrorists fed him enough tuwo, a local Nigerian meal made from maize, and a hastily prepared tomato soup. He had wanted to return home the same night with his brother, but fed like a cat, Audu stayed, with the terrorists promising more sumptuous meals if he swallowed their rulings. He had more than three square meals that he couldn’t have at home. Back in Mashekeri, a single solid meal daily was a luxury. The boy found that luxury in multiple folds in the terrorist camp and stayed glued to it, quickly forgetting his initial mission to bring his brother back home.

“I never missed home. Whenever I mentioned home, they would say, ‘Some other time.’ Since then, the feeling of returning home faded,” Audu tells HumAngle.

He is one among dozens of children lured with food to embrace corrosive doctrine peddled by violent extremists. The food weaponisation strategy is deployed by a fragment of the Boko Haram terror group predominantly settling in the lush canopy of the Alawa Forest in the Shiroro area of Niger State. Caught up in the terrorist zone, children are vulnerable to hunger and displacement and are trained to become brutal terrorists.

They are recruited into different areas of terrorist operations. While Audu, for instance, was placed in the logistics unit, his younger brother was taught how to spot a target and pull the trigger. Teenage girls trapped in the camp are kept as wives, a euphemism for sex slaves. The women are also responsible for the food supply, preparing meals for the captives and commanders in the camp, and determining the food ration formula.

Fed to forget home

The terrorist group deliberately ravages specific areas, destroying crops and farming infrastructures, looting stores and houses, and destroying properties to make life difficult for locals.

After impoverishing and uprooting them from the agrarian areas, the terrorists, having access to the food supply, take advantage of the undernourished children, tricking them into their enclaves with promises of enough food and water. They also use this tactic to gain appeal among marginalised communities, seeking to win the hearts and minds of potential supporters by providing crucial services and distributing meals. 

HumAngle’s investigation, spanning months of identifying underage boys and girls tricked into the terrorists’ territory, interviews with their parents, and local sources, including farmers and vigilantes, reveals this strategy. We monitored some radicalised teenagers from the moment they were abducted to when they escaped from the terror camps to reunite with their families. Many of the victims’ parents asked HumAngle to hide the identity of their children for fear of reprisals and stigmatisation. Being a minor, we spoke to Ja’afar through his uncle, but Audu and two other teenagers with the same story spoke to us directly.

Several months after they tricked him into the camp, Ja’afar fell into a toxic love with guns and the deadly triggers they pulled. As a child, he was trained in the art of using a weapon to snuff life out of a human being and to get a human to do his bidding in seconds. When Audu witnessed his younger brother’s newly acquired prowess in spraying bullets, he fell flat for the escapade. 

“It was an admiration. I admired the way boys my age wielded weapons,” he says. He had thought only grown-up men like police officers could do so until he saw his mates displaying mastery in it and following terrorists to the battlefield as they fought security agents or rival terror groups. “I gradually got used to their lifestyle. I adapted. It felt good, and I liked it.”

This terrorist empire belongs to a man simply known as Mallam Sadiqu. Sadiqu is a Boko Haram commander and a protégé of Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of the extremist group. An adherent of the catch-them-young maxim, Sadiqu heavily invests in manipulating teens and young people. The empire’s underworld setting, known among terrorists as Markaz (centre), makes it easier for them to plan covert anti-state operations.

Interactive map/ Mansir Muhammed, HumAngle

Recruiting children as fighters didn’t start with Mallam Sadiqu’s terror camp — terrorists in West and Central Africa deployed child soldiers in their fights against authorities. A 2021 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report revealed that since at least 2016, the region has recorded more than 21,000 children used by non-state armed groups.

“Whether children in West and Central Africa are the direct targets or collateral victims, they are caught up in conflict and face violence and insecurity. The grave violations of their rights perpetrated by parties to the conflicts are unacceptable,” UNICEF says.

The global humanitarian organisation added in a 2022 report that over 8000 children had been recruited by insurgents since 2009, describing Boko Haram as the major recruiter of child soldiers in Nigeria. The sect forcibly recruits children to strengthen its fighting ranks, abducting many of them during raids on villages, schools, and camps. 

Boys are often trained as fighters, spies, or to carry ammunition, while girls are frequently subjected to sexual violence, forced marriages, and used as domestic servants. Some of the children are direct descendants of these fighters, with terrorists raising a deadly generation of criminals. Boko Haram is also notorious for using children as suicide bombers, with at least 117 kids, mostly girls, used in covert bombing operations between 2014 and 2017, according to UNICEF.

Interactive map/ Mansir Muhammed, HumAngle

Bewildered by the near-perfect coordination of the terrorist enclave, however, Audu’s naivety made him think it was a sovereign territory set up for religious purification and built to fight the secular state. The setting first set him off balance before offering an adrenaline of safety, power, and protection from what he thought was the government’s persecution. There were four rogue commandants, with only one supreme leader: Mallam Sadiqu, a dangerous man with a growing network of followers and foot soldiers.

The terrorist apprentice 

In April 2025, HumAngle travelled to several satellite communities in the Shiroro area of Niger State. Apart from battling deeply-rooted insurgents, we found that the communities suffer from apparent government absence, turning the local areas into ungoverned spaces. Many villages and townships lacked good roads, hospitals, and basic schools. The terrorists are taking advantage of the governance gap to brainwash children and teenagers into believing in their ideology. There is also the social welfare appeal.

“When I fell critically ill in the forest, a doctor came in to treat me. I was worried that I might not be able to get adequate treatment in the bush, but I was wrong. I got a treatment far better than what I would have gotten at home,” Audu says. Even now that he’s out of the den, he wonders why he got better medical attention in the camp, saying, “This was one of the attractive points.”

Audu was placed under the watchful eye of Muhammad Kabir, the commander in charge of logistics and operations. Considered a stranger, Audu wasn’t given a gun or taught how to use it. He had only seen his terrorist chaperone servicing guns upon returning from battlefields. Kabir also prepared the fighters for operations, especially when they had fierce face-offs with security agents and local hunters surveilling the forest areas.

Kabir moved from the Sambisa forest to the Allawa wilderness to join Mallam Sadiqu in Shiroro. In September 2021, the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), released an internal memo confirming that scores of senior Boko Haram fighters were moving out of the Sambisa Forest to work in cahoots with Sadiqu, who was wielding rocket-propelled grenades and shuffling between Kaduna and Niger states at the time. The NSCDC advised security agents to scale up surveillance in the affected areas, according to the memo obtained by HumAngle. Kabir was among the terrorists the NSCDC was referring to, locals and security sources said, corroborating the internal memo.

Audu would later learn how to reload guns for the militants in the camp. He painstakingly watched his boss service various rifles, including the Russian Avtomat Kalashnikova (AK-47), the Gewehr 3 (G3), and Rocket-Propelled Grenade (RPGs). Kabir also prepared the fighters for war against the military and terrorist rivals. Under the operations unit was the group’s bomb manufacturer; he had produced scores of explosive devices used to waylay unarmed citizens and military men, tearing them apart and killing them instantly during face-offs. Audu referred to him as Baba Adamu.

“Baba Adamu had picked Ja’afar up in the village, luring him into the enclave and training him to operate guns and produce bombs,” Audu notes. “Baba Adamu himself learned bomb making from one man who later died during a gun battle with the military.”

Working with the operations unit, Audu’s duty included joining other child soldiers to work on Mallam Sadiqu’s illegally acquired farm fields. In many Shiroro villages, the group has violently evacuated local farmers, illegally occupying their lands to farm. When they needed more workforce on the farms, they abducted vulnerable civilians, forcing them to farm for them. Audu says he had joined other teenage terrorists to supervise civilians working on the farm. They planted beans, maize, and rice and harvested richly while the local farmers struggled to cultivate their fields over fears of being attacked.

Dozens of farming communities in Shiroro also signed a peace deal with the Sadiqu-led terror camp, paying millions before accessing their farm fields. In 2021, a journalist documented how 65 agrarian communities paid over ₦20 million to access their farm lands and live peacefully in the villages. In the same fashion as terrorists in northwestern Nigeria, Sadiqu partners with communities and, in some cases, collects levies to allow people to farm freely.

“We would travel through villages in the Alawa town to work on Mallam Sadiqu’s fields, which are close to people’s homes. Sometimes, we would spend days on the farms, planting and harvesting. We planted maize and rice most of the time. It was a big field,” Audu adds. “Almost all those who can ride motorcycles in the camp used to labour there. Almost all of us used to go there to work. We used to buy boiled cassava from the townspeople. But when the people fled, we harvested the cassava from the farms. We would boil and eat them while on the farms.”

Shadow justice

One man, Mallam Shaffi, was the spiritual commandant of the gang, usually regarded as the amirul da’wah. He led daily prayers and preached on Fridays, encouraging the children to neglect modern ways for their anti-Western governance path. Every morning, he admonished the combatants to fight for God’s cause, manipulating verses from scripture to convince his disciples that Western ways would only lead them to hell. Anyone antagonistic to their violent operations and extremist tendencies is an enemy and must be taken out of the way, Audu says.

Although Sadiqu presided over the general affairs of the camp, Mallam Shaffi served as the Amirul Khadi (chief judge). This role gave him oversight that ensured discipline and strict adherence to their extremist doctrine within their sphere of control. He was consulted before judgments were made on offenders. In this clime, misdemeanours could attract capital punishments; petty thieves caught with their hands in the cookie jar were first jailed before their hands got cut off.

When Sani, Mallam Shaffi’s younger brother, was found guilty of petty theft, he was not spared. “His hands were cut off instantly; they passed a judgment,” Audu recalls. It was his first time witnessing such a gory scene, wondering why a man would lose his hands “just because he stole”. But something even more shocking unfolded before his eyes months after he arrived at the forest: six combatants were killed on the camp’s wild execution ground.

“They killed them for imposing a tax on the Gbagyi locals and seizing their farm produce,” Audu tells HumAngle. “The fighters executed are Jabir Dogo, Usmna, ⁠Attahir, ⁠Abdullahi, ⁠Elele, and Abu. They killed them about a month ago.”

The black market justice system turns like a vicious circle: if the rules favour you today, they might be used against you tomorrow. 

One morning, Ja’afar woke up locked in a cell, with his hands and legs tightly bound. He was accused of stealing petrol and bullets from the logistics store. Ja’afar’s case seemed different from other thefts recorded in the past. While others stole from civilians on the other side, he stole from the terrorists — that was considered a grave offence, raising tension that the punishment might be more than cutting off his hands, like they did for Sani.

Audu’s worry suddenly grew cancerous; he was there to rescue his brother, and now he had been fed so much that he even forgot about going home. The detention of his younger brother tensed his worry; the probability that the young lad would be killed was high. He had committed treason, according to their laws, and the most severe punishment for such an offence was brutal death. 

Rumours mounted that Mallam Shaffi had ordered that Ja’afar’s throat should be slit. That rumour flared up Audu’s fear. He had lately been nursing the thoughts of escaping the forests due to increased aerial attacks from the military. That trepidation was aggravated when the military perpetuated surveillance of their camp almost every day, killing the combatants frequently.

“Teenagers far younger than me and my sibling had been killed in that forest, either by the terrorists or the military,” Audu says, enveloped in his sweat. Months after leaving the camp, the boy still lives in fear, displaying paranoia towards every positive event around him and showing violent tendencies at any provocation.

Lost in the lush

As he forged escape routes for himself and his brother, Audu says he thought about scores of girls also trapped in the terrorists’ camp. Girls from satellite communities in Shiroro were tricked into the underworld after they were promised better living conditions. One girl, Zainab Mainasara, suddenly disappeared after terrorists raided her community in 2021, kidnapping a considerable number of girls. Since then, Zainab’s parents have done everything to retrieve their daughter from the hands of the terrorists. Later, they learned she had settled with them, marrying one of them.

When Audu came to the forest, he met Zainab. He had learned about her from the lips of villagers, especially how the terrorists attempted to pay her bride price to her father in the Kurebe area of Shiroro. HumAngle spoke to her father, Ali Mainasara, somewhere on the shore of the town, where he is currently burying his head. He left the Kurebe community in shame after villagers accused him of marrying off his 17-year-old daughter in exchange for farming freedom.

Ali denied the allegation during an interview with HumAngle, saying he wanted to give his daughter the formal education he lacked. “But the terrorists took her away from me one afternoon, with guns and weapons in their hands,” he says, amid sobs. “If she were with me, she would probably have finished schooling or legitimately married.” 

Zainab’s mother, Fatima Mainasara, left the community for a neighbouring village. The incident that took their daughter away from them also shattered their homes, as Fatima seemed to have swallowed the flying rumour that Zainab’s father sold her out to terrorists. “Since the incident, her mother has been quite distressed and experiences anxiety daily. She has been diagnosed with chronic hypertension. The reality is that we are suffering deeply. I am urging the government to assist in securing my daughter’s release so that she can be safely reunited with her family,” Mainasara cries out.

Audu knows where to find Zainab, but cannot take anyone there. While in captivity, he realised Zainab was forcefully married to his chaperone in the forest, Muhammad Kabir. Now with two kids from the ‘unholy’ marriage with the terrorists, Audu recalls that Zainab and many other girls were in charge of cooking and sharing food in the camp. Knowing each other from Shiroro, they had met on many occasions and exchanged greetings, but they’d never had a chance to discuss anything. It was forbidden to be seen discussing with the fighters’ wives in the camp.

“Zainab’s first child was named Adam. I don’t know the second boy’s name,” Audu notes. “Adam could be around two or three years old. The boy can walk and talk. The second boy is an infant.”

Mainasara’s worries double up at the mention of his daughter’s sudden disappearance into the woods. He fears Zainab might have been brainwashed into the realm of extremism, as news emerging from the terrorist camp revealed she had been fully immersed in the life outside her home. Her mother, once chubby, has become emaciated due to the anguish of her daughter’s disappearance. The grief has taken a toll on her health, but Zainab’s captors won’t let her go.

Scores of girls in Kurebe are in Zainab’s shoes: they were indoctrinated by terrorists a few years back, and now they can’t look back. One such girl is Rumasau Husaini, who was just 11 years old when she was abducted in 2022. Her father, Haruna Husaini, is still desperately searching for her. He once offered to pay a ransom for his daughter’s release, but it failed.

“When we reached out to the terrorists, we asked them to return her, but they told us it was impossible since she had already been brought into the forest,” Husaini recounts. “They mentioned discussing her dowry, but I refused to entertain that. All I want is my daughter back.”

Other girls caught in the trap of the terrorist group include Mary, Azeemah, and Khadijah — all from the Kurebe village of the Shiroro town. While Zainab was betrothed to Muhammad Kabir, Mary was forced to marry Ismail, another terrorist, and Azeema was given to Mallam Shafii.

As the grip of Boko Haram grew stronger in Shiroro, casting a shadow over the community, girls and boys became an endangered species. Mallam Sadiqu took over the leadership of several ungoverned communities neighbouring the Alawa Forest. One evening in 2021, he announced in his local mosque, with his voice echoing through the modest building: all girls must be married off or risk being forcefully betrothed to terrorists.

“Any female child that is up to 12 years old should be married off,” Sadiqu was quoted to have announced, instilling fear among the parents who listened. Unable to bear the thought of their daughters being taken by terrorists, many families chose to flee, relocating their girls to safer locations or sending them to displacement camps in more garrison areas.

When Sadiqu finally took absolute control of the political and economic lives of the locals, he propagated his extremist beliefs, wielding threats like weapons and eliminating anyone daring to defy him. He banned schools, stripping formal education away from children and forcing them into menial jobs and denying them a brighter future.

The tragedy deepened so much that the Nigerian military declared Kurebe a terrorist zone. In April 2022, six out-of-school girls were sent to fetch water from the nearby Kurebe stream. In a cruel twist of fate, they were mistaken for armed terrorists by the Nigerian military. An air raid ensued, killing the unprotected children who had already been traumatised by the circumstances forced upon them.

As the dust settled, it became clear that Boko Haram’s reign of terror was far from over. With schooling activities ground to a halt in the community, the terrorists began abducting the very children they had denied an education. The girls were taken as brides, and the boys were forcibly recruited into their radical ideologies, whisked away to secret camps hidden deep within the forests of Alawa.

“Up till now, some of our boys and girls are still missing,” laments Yusuf Saidu, the district head of Kurebe. He looked disturbed as he spoke of the lost boys and girls missing from their homes and families. “They marry the girls and sometimes even come to pay dowries to their parents.”

As military surveillance abounded in the Alawa Forest, Mallam Sadiqu built fortresses around himself to dodge attacks. Then, fear grew like wildfire in the terrorist camp, especially among children and teenagers trapped in the camp. Audu realised his younger brother could be killed if he folded his arms — either by military airstrikes or through the terrorists’ shadow justice system, which recently found him guilty of stealing. 

One night, while everyone slept, he crept into the cell where Ja’far was caged and untied him. Discreetly, the two brothers walked out of the camp, trudging through the woods to find a way out. After days of sojourning in the forested expanse, they finally reunited with some relatives in the Shiroro area. Knowing they were not safe anywhere in the town, their relatives moved them to a community in northwestern Nigeria.

Back to square one

For Ja’afar, it was a free ride out of the lion’s den. And for Audu, the journey had only just begun. Their lives never remained the same; even after escaping from the radical world, they struggled to adapt to a regimented civilian lifestyle under their guardians. A few months after reuniting with families, Ja’afar exhibited attitudes suggesting he could no longer live in a civilian community. He would threaten his mates with death or charge at them at any slight provocation. His family has handed him over to the military in Kaduna State, hoping for a deradicalisation and psychological reform process so he can be safely reintegrated into society.

Audu, who appears calmer, was moved to Zamfara State to stay with a family member and is under tight monitoring. The family feared the proximity of the original town to Shiroro could later prompt the teens to return to the terrorists. Months after they returned, the boys seemed to be back to square one. Audu, for instance, is not enrolled in a school and struggles to have three square meals as adequately provided to them in the terror camp.

The situation remains dire back in Shiroro: locals caught up in war zones can hardly feed themselves properly, as food insecurity bites harder. Unfortunately, food insecurity is a reality for many Nigerians, yet those in power tend to downplay the issue. The United Nations predicted last year that by 2030, over 80 million Nigerians might face a severe food crisis. In many villages and displacement camps HumAngle visited while gathering this report, hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity dominate the land, with hundreds of locals uprooted by the insurgency relying on animal feed due to an extreme food shortage. 

HumAngle spoke to Dapit Joseph, a child psychologist at the Federal University Kashere, Gombe State, to further understand the implications of children being recruited in this manner.

“You know, food is a physiological need; it’s the foundation of human motivation and the first in the hierarchy of needs. People need food to survive, and in the quest to get it, they can do anything to survive. When people are hungry, especially children, that hunger can be weaponised to lure them into terrorism,” he asserts.

Joseph noted that we can neither blame the children nor the parents in this situation, because “when you’re caught up in a devastating war-torn area, you lose a lot of things, you become traumatised, and all you do is struggle to survive. It’s a very terrible condition that comes with a lot of psychological effects.”

The psychologist thinks the government needs to prioritise rehabilitating and providing social support for the children. Social support, he says, includes providing the basic needs these families require to survive and educating the parents on how to take care of these vulnerable children in society.

“Religious bodies have a role to play. You know, we attach serious meaning to religion in this part of the world,” he advised. “So if religious bodies can go, talk to these people, give them hope, and tell them that it won’t remain like this forever, it would help.”

For a region big on farming and fighting insecurity, it remains unclear what the Niger State authorities are doing to avert Boko Haram’s weaponisation of food shortages to recruit children. However, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Niger State Homeland Security, Aminu Aliyu, recently told local journalists that the government and security agents were aware of the situation, failing to reveal steps to put the situation under control.

Laraba, Audu’s stepmother, worries about what might happen to him and his younger brother. She says she ponders every day, with no clarity, how to ensure these children do not derail again. Her heart pounds whenever she sets her eyes on Audu every morning because she’s clueless about providing a permanent succour to the brothers.

Audu’s parents are stuck in Shiroro, living from hand to mouth, swept under the control of terrorists in the ungovernable Kurebe village. Now, looking after their children has become a burden for Laraba, who complained recently that Audu has refused to return to school after terrorists brainwashed him against Western education.

“He has now returned to Hudawa, and he shouts about wanting to get married, instead of going back to school, but we’ve warned him against that,” Laraba says. For a 16-year-old, the stepmother thinks marriage should not be the next chapter in Audu’s life, but the boy seems convinced otherwise.

Audu’s return to the town also bothers Laraba because the area, although in Kaduna, borders Shiroro, making it easy for the boy to return to terrorism if he finds no help. “We’re seeking help from all angles so that he can at least start a business even if he can’t return to school,” she says.

Ja’afar’s uncle has also expressed doubt over his fate. He says living with the military has not yielded desired results, noting that the boy does not seem to have been deradicalised months after he was taken to the army. As it stands, the future of both boys has been halted.

Asked if he was considering going back to the forest fringe if he gets the chance, Audu says he would not hesitate if another chance was given, “because I got enough food that I don’t have access to even at home.”

President Sheinbaum labels vote a ‘success’, but experts warn criminals could use it to infiltrate judiciary.

A landmark vote to select judges in Mexico has been labelled a “success” by the president despite a sparse turnout and widespread confusion.

Just 13 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in Sunday’s vote to overhaul the court system. President Claudia Sheinbaum proclaimed that the election would make Mexico more democratic, but critics accused her of seeking to take control of the judiciary, while analysts warned it could open the way for criminals to seize influence.

The vote, a cornerstone policy of Sheinbaum and predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, aimed to fill about 880 federal judicial positions, including Supreme Court justices, as well as hundreds of local judges and magistrates.

But many voters said they struggled to make informed choices among a flood of largely unknown candidates, who were barred from openly disclosing party affiliations or engaging in widespread campaigning.

‘Largely empty’ polling stations

Al Jazeera’s John Holman reported from Mexico City that polling stations were “largely empty”.

“On what the government planned to be a historic day, the majority of Mexicans prefer to do something else,” he said.

Still, Sheinbaum hailed the election as “a complete success” that makes the country a democratic trailblazer.

“Mexico is a country that is only becoming more free, just and democratic because that is the will of the people,” the president said.

The reform, defended by supporters as necessary to cleanse a corrupt justice system, was originally championed by Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Lopez Obrador, who frequently clashed with the old judiciary.

‘Painstaking process’

Experts had warned that turnout would be unusually low due to the sheer number of candidates and the unfamiliarity of judicial voting.

To be properly informed, voters “would have to spend hours and hours researching the track record and the profiles of each of the hundreds of candidates”, said David Shirk, a professor at the University of San Diego.

That concern was echoed by voters at the polls.

“We are not very prepared,” said Lucia Calderon, a 63-year-old university teacher. “I think we need more information.”

Francisco Torres de Leon, a 62-year-old retired teacher in southern Mexico, called the process “painstaking because there are too many candidates and positions that they’re going to fill”.

Beyond logistical challenges, analysts and rights groups raised fears that powerful criminal groups could use the elections to further infiltrate the judiciary.

While corruption already exists, “there is reason to believe that elections may be more easily infiltrated by organised crime than other methods of judicial selection”, said Margaret Satterthwaite, the United Nations special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers.

Although all candidates were supposed to have legal experience, no criminal record and a “good reputation”, several have been linked to organised crime and corruption scandals.

Rights group Defensorxs identified about 20 candidates it considers “high risk”, including Silvia Delgado, a former lawyer for Sinaloa cartel cofounder Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Another candidate, in Durango state, previously served nearly six years in a US prison for drug offences.

Election results are expected in the coming days. A second round of judicial elections is scheduled for 2027 to fill hundreds more positions.