Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow is attempting to build relations with the Islamic Emirate and that Russia wants to see all the ethnic groups in Afghanistan take part in running the country.
He made the statement in a meeting with Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon during the Russian leader’s first trip abroad since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict.
“We are doing everything so that the situation in that country normalizes,” Putin said in Dushanbe, as quoted by AP. “We are attempting to build relations with the political forces that control the situation.”
“We are working from the premise that all ethnic groups in Afghanistan, as was already said, must properly participate in running the country,” he said.
The Islamic Emirate earlier sent a diplomatic delegation to Russia to head the embassy of Afghanistan in Moscow.
Moscow has invited the Islamic Emirate to a number of conferences held to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.
The Russian embassy has remained active in Kabul since the fall of the former government of President Ashraf Ghani.
People walk past part of a rocket wedged in the ground in Lysychansk, Luhansk region, Ukraine [File: Leo Correa /AP Photo]
Fighting
Evidence suggests twin Russian air strikes deliberately targeted a theatre used as a shelter in Mariupol, Amnesty International said in a report.
Russia is stepping up its attacks across Ukraine with several regions beyond the Donbas targeted on Wednesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. Ten missiles hit a residential area of the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv, killing at least five people with rescue efforts continuing.
Rescuers are attempting to evacuate residents from the front-line eastern city of Lysychansk, with about 15,000 people remaining in the city, Ukrainian authorities said.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin denied that Moscow’s forces were responsible for the missile raid on a crowded shopping centre in the Ukrainian town of Kremenchuk earlier this week, in which at least 18 people were killed and many remain missing in the rubble.
Diplomacy
Ukraine carried out its biggest exchange of prisoners of war since Russia invaded, securing the release of 144 of its soldiers, including 95 who defended Mariupol’s steelworks, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said.
The European Union is close to reaching a compromise deal to defuse the standoff with Russia over Kaliningrad as trade through Lithuania could return to normal within days, Reuters reported.
US President Joe Biden thanked Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for striking a deal with Finland and Sweden for the two Nordic countries to soon become NATO candidates.
Biden said he would deploy more American troops, warplanes and warships across Europe as NATO agreed the biggest strengthening of its deterrents since the Cold War in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Economy
The United Kingdom will provide another 1 billion pounds ($1.2bn) in military support to Ukraine, as NATO has branded Russia the biggest “direct threat” to Western security.
NATO agreed to a long-term financial and military aid package to modernise Ukraine’s largely Soviet-era military.
On Sunday, the government of Nigeria’s northwestern state of Zamfara issued a directive for its citizens to “prepare and obtain guns to defend themselves against bandits”.
While a number of state governments and top military officers have made similar calls in the past across parts of the country, this seems set to be the first formal process.
“Government has directed the state commissioner of police to issue licence to all those who qualify and are wishing to obtain such guns to defend themselves,” Ibrahim Dosara, the Zamfara commissioner for information, said in a statement on Sunday, on behalf of the state’s Governor Bello Matawalle.
The commissioner said the efforts would be handled by the 19 traditional rulers in the state who would be given 500 forms each to distribute in their emiratis to people without criminal records before the forms are sent to the police for vetting.
Guns are an everyday topic of dialogue in Zamfara, one of the hot spots of insecurity in a region sometimes referred to as the “Wild Wild West”, where banditry is rampant. Bandits have killed at least 250 people, abducted thousands more and razed many villages to the ground in the first half of 2022, in the state alone.
But the latest tilt in the discussion – to granting citizens permission to carry arms – could open up a state of anarchy across Nigeria, which is currently battling multidimensional insecurity challenges, researchers and analysts caution.
While the numbers of weapons in the possession of non-state actors vary, it is generally acknowledged that between five to six million small arms and light weapons (SALWs) are in circulation.
And Matawalle’s instructions could increase the proliferation of them, says Murtala Ahmed Rufa’i, an expert on insecurity and a history lecturer at Usman Dan Fodio University in neighbouring Sokoto.
“Giving access to citizens to acquire weapons means you are opening a new chapter of violence – an eye for an eye,” Rufa’i told Al Jazeera. “It is not a decision informed by knowledge or reality of what is on the ground.”
“By saying everyone should [get] a weapon, you are indirectly saying you cannot provide security of lives and property. Then the question is, as a governor, what are you?” Rufa’i said.
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Security agencies in Africa’s most populous country are currently overwhelmed in containing attacks from different groups across its territory. In March, Nigeria’s defence chief Lucky Irabor revealed that 80 percent of the army has been deployed across the country’s 36 states, weakening its capacity to effectively fight in the most insecure areas.
Under the country’s federation-style of governance, supervisory power over its security agencies lies in the presidency, so state policing is currently not allowed under the constitution.
To fill in the gap, vigilante groups have taken over the responsibility of protecting themselves and other citizens. While they help in repelling attacks by armed groups on vulnerable communities nationwide, human rights groups and civil society say they are also engineering fresh headaches – more clashes and human rights violations.
Since the return of democracy in 1999, vigilantes have been agitating for restructuring Nigeria’s federal system and more recently, secession. Others – like the Civilian Joint Task Force in Borno, epicentre of Boko Haram’s operations, and Amotekun, backed by the six governors of the southwest region – are a response to the current surge in insecurity and receive state support.
Their emergence has contributed to an increase of SALWs available nationwide.
Meanwhile, licensing of private firearms remains a preserve of the president under Nigerian laws and five separate bills on regulating firearms are currently under parliamentary review.
For now, states need authorisation to issue those licences from their police commissioners, who report to the federal command in Abuja and need its approval.
In 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari revoked the licence of all private weapons across the country, but this decision put him on a collision course with lawmakers who cited the insecurity nationwide as a reason to allow vulnerable citizens to carry arms. The order has been barely enforced.
But the embargo on firearms licences is still in force, Zamfara police chief Ayuba Elkana said after Matawalle’s comments.
And Irabor, the country’s top general, agrees.
“If what I read is true, I do not also think that the governor has the power to instruct the commissioner of police to issue licences because the commissioner of police does not have the powers to issue licences, ” he said at a military event on Monday.
Demand and supply
Since 2011, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) staged an intervention in Libya to unseat the late leader Muammar Gaddafi, a constant stream of SALWs across the Sahel has energised fresh and evolving crises in the region.
“The conflicts outside are seriously affecting the proliferation,” Lagos-based James Barnett, a non-resident fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington DC, said. “It is a West Africa challenge: there is instability across the five Sahel countries, and it is a huge challenge with the weapons flow.”
A lack of government capacity to intercept the flow, corruption within the law enforcement agencies and porous borders have exacerbated the situation, but armed groups have also attacked security installations and carted away weapons.
Early this year, the Nigerian police after an internal audit said it could not account for 178,000 pieces of ammunition in 2019.
A directive that citizens can bear arms will increase demand within the country for what is already in constant supply within and around its borders, experts say.
Nigeria’s banditry problems grew out of decades of intercommunal clashes and climate change. Despite the proportion of violence being witnessed regularly, a military approach will not resolve issues, experts warn.
“The government has no option than to go non-kinetic,” Rufa’i said. “We should know that some of these problems are a result of social, economic and political injustice. If you don’t address the underlying factors, no amount of kinetic approach would work.”
“The concern is not [just] about adding more weapons in circulation because there are already a lot of weapons in circulation in the northwest,” Barnett told Al Jazeera. “The concern is by divesting the security responsibilities, the government is giving the green light to untrained people to kill bandits. It will lead to more intercommunal clashes and will exacerbate many of the grievances that drive this kind of conflict.”
Already, residents of the state are concerned that Matawalle’s directive might cause a breakdown in existing peace agreements brokered by the government with some bandit factions or that armed groups may now see civilians as an existential threat and respond with more violence.
“The bandits have local and international connections,” Rufa’i told Al Jazeera. “Already, we are seeing the synergy between bandits and other sects across different parts of the northwest. It is very easy for them to extend their invitation of these terrorist groups to come to their aid.”
The British “Middle East Eye” website has revealed that Seven Sudanese rebel groups, including former Janjaweed forces, agreed to withdraw their forces from Libya at a meeting earlier this month.
The British website pointed out that a meeting was held in Niger from June 10 to 12, at the invitation of a French organization, was attended by representatives from the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, Norway, Turkey and Egypt.
The meeting discussed practical ways to disarm the rebel groups and how they might be reintegrated into the national army, the British website said, adding that the forces that are regarded internationally as mercenaries are made up of around 30,000 men fighting alongside the warlord Khalifa Haftar, based in the east of the country.
The website confirmed that June’s meeting was the second to discuss Sudanese armed groups in Libya as part of a broader push by regional and international powers to withdraw all mercenaries, indicating that another meeting was held in February and attended by the rebels and representatives from the governments of Sudan, Chad, Niger, and Libya.
It also indicated that the meeting also included discussions about how to tackle terrorism in the region, illegal migration from Africa to Europe, and smuggling of weapons and drugs, alongside how international powers would pay to remove foreign forces from Libya and return them to their countries.
A car bomb attack on the convoy of a Yemeni military official in the southern port city of Aden killed at least six people and wounded several others, military officials said.
The head of security forces of Lahaj province, Saleh al-Sayed, survived the assassination attempt, three military officials said on Wednesday.
Two of the officials said at least five civilians and one military officer were killed and six others were seriously wounded in the attack.
Speaking at the scene, Army Colonel Amar al-Sherhy described the bomb blast as “a cowardly, treacherous attack using an explosive device that was planted in a car. Thank God, he [al-Sayed] is safe”.
Al-Sayed is Lahaj’s commander of the military units of the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC).
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack but al-Qaeda group fighters have stepped up their operations in south Yemen recently.
At least 10 Yemeni soldiers were killed in the region in two separate attacks last week.
Aden has been the seat of the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi since Houthi rebels seized the capital of Sanaa in 2014, triggering the country’s protracted war.
Instability in the south, where the Saudi-backed government is based, complicates international efforts to end the seven-year-old conflict. Several attacks have been recorded despite a ceasefire agreement between the Saudi-led coalition and the Iran-aligned Houthis in the north.
Yemen’s multifaceted war has killed tens of thousands of people and pushed millions to the brink of famine.
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