Cluster bombs

AL-JAWF, YEMEN — As the world’s focus turns to the rapidly-spreading COVID-19 pandemic, Yemenis are reeling from their own brewing tragedy, contending with the thousands of cluster bombs, landmines and other exploded munitions that now litter their homeland. Just yesterday, a young child was killed and another was injured in the al-Ghail district of al-Jawf when a landmine left by the Saudi military exploded, witnesses told MintPress.

My Lai: the old tree that survived, while the village and people around it did not (Photo: Andre Vltchek © 2020)
Andre Vltchek
21st Century Wire
My Lai. My Son… This story is short, but it is telling. And I have travelled far, in order to bring it to my readers.

Intense fighting and hideous attacks battered Afghans throughout their country last week as negotiators in Qatar weighed the benefits and costs of  a peace agreement that might stop the bloodshed.
In Kabul at least 40 people, including one child, were killed in a complex Taliban attack. Dozens of children whose school was partially collapsed by a massive car bomb were injured. Of these, 21 were hospitalized with serious injuries.

Twenty-five years ago, on 24 March 1999, Operation Allied Force began – the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia that led to the country’s dismemberment – and the independent state of Kosovo was proclaimed. Yet these events were far from historically contingent, as some people claim. So who orchestrated the breakup of Yugoslavia and how?
These days, few remember that the Bulgarians were at the start of it all. Even the Bulgarians themselves don’t like to think about it.

Sri Lanka is the 103rd country to join the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. Sri Lanka acceded to the Convention on March 01, 2018. Under the Convention, Sri Lanka is required to show transparency and report annually in a public document on use, stockpiling, clearance and destruction. These obligations include issuing an immediate and effective warning to civilians living in[Read More...]

In case you missed it, US efforts to prolong the world’s most serious humanitarian crisis in Yemen continue to succeed spectacularly. US military support enables the Saudi coalition to continue to bomb markets, docks, mosques, hospitals, school buses, weddings and funerals, and other civilian targets with impunity. The Saudis’ Yemeni enemy, the Houthi rebels, have no effective air defenses.

WikiLeaks is vilified by governments (and increasingly by journalists) for its exposures, including of the U.S.-UK “special relationship” in running a joint foreign policy of deception and violence that serves London and Washington’s elite interests, says Mark Curtis. By Mark…Read more →

MHARDEH, SYRIA — (War Report) On September 7, Mhardeh, a small Christian town in northern Hama, was targeted with nine Grad missiles — six of which were fitted with internationally-prohibited cluster sub-munitions — by al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists roughly four kilometers away from the town center, occupying the northern Hama countryside areas of Ltamenah and surroundings. Four days later, I went to Mhardeh […]

HODEIDA, YEMEN — The U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition conducted numerous airstrikes across Yemen this past weekend, especially against the strategic port city of Hodeida. Heavy civilian casualties have been reported, as has the use of cluster bombs against civilian targets. Hodeida’s water and sewage treatment infrastructure was also targeted in the bombing campaign.

The truth of corporate journalism, and the great irony of its obsession with ‘fake news’, is that it is itself utterly fake. What could be more obviously fake than the idea that Truth can be sold by billionaire-owned media dependent on billionaire-owned advertisers for maximised profit?