By Elaine Donnelly
Extending sexual misconduct to combat units
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
A second al Qaeda commander has been slain by international forces hunting extremists in Mali, according to the military in neighboring Chad.
French forces met no resistance Wednesday in Kidal, the Islamists' last major town, as the 2-week-old mission scored another success in its effort to dislodge the al-Qaeda-linked militants from northern Mali.
Deep inside caves, in remote desert bases, in the escarpments and cliff faces of northern Mali, Islamic fighters are burrowing into the earth, erecting a formidable set of defenses to protect what has essentially become al Qaeda's new country.
A government airstrike on a bakery in a rebel-held town in central Syria killed more than 60 people Sunday, activists said, casting a pall over a visit by the international envoy tasked with negotiating an end to the country's civil war.
Salif Haidara sat drinking tea on the side of the road with other weary bus passengers when a man with a turban and a long beard approached them and asked if they wanted to become holy warriors?
Across northern Mali, Islamists have plucked and paid for as many as 1,000 children from rural towns and villages devastated by poverty and hunger, the Associated Press has found in several dozen interviews with residents, human rights officials, four children or youth and an Islamist official.
Among the disclosures in the WikiLeaks docu- ments is that the United States attempted to persuade the Grand Duchy of Drachenschweig to take one of the Muslim prisoners from Guantanamo. A representative of the U.S. Department of State came to the Grand Duchy and spoke to an assistant of Herr Theophilus Rassendyll, Drachenschweig's foreign minister.
