Connect with us

World

‘I can’t be bullied’, says Sarwat Gilani to online trolls

Published

on

'I can't be bullied', says Sarwat Gilani to online trolls

In the entertainment industry, celebrities have often spoken out about the harmful effects of online trolling on their mental health. Following in the footsteps of Syeda Tuba, Saboor Aly, Anoushey Ashraf, and others, Sarwat Gilani has urged fans to be more understanding and to resist the urge to spread negativity online.

During an appearance on Frieha Altaf’s podcast, Gilani shared how celebrities can be impacted by negative comments and the complexities they face as a result. She emphasised the importance of focusing on positivity and speaking out against online hate.

Gilani compared the issue to the recent criticism faced by Prince Harry and Megan Markle, and expressed how virtual hate can be extremely damaging, leading to depression and insecurity. She personally stated that she refuses to be bullied and that just because someone has internet access and a keyboard, it does not give them the right to put others down.

“I am the bully, I can’t be bullied. I will be a bully to people who are bullying me, always. I’m never a bully with weak or meek people. I feel that just because you have an internet connection and a keyboard, it does not give you the entitlement to put people down,” she said.

Advertisement

The “Churails” actor pointed out that it is a cultural issue to focus on the negative rather than highlighting the positive. She suggested that this behavior is a result of people not being happy in their own lives, and that they judge and bring others down to feel better about themselves.

Gilani also highlighted the lack of effort people put into their judgments and how this was evident during the promotion of her Cannes-winning film “Joyland”. She concluded by urging people to look within themselves and resist negativity, rather than spreading it.

World

Blinken says authoritarian regimes using tech to undermine democracy

Blinken says authoritarian regimes using tech to undermine democracy

Published

on

By

Blinken says authoritarian regimes using tech to undermine democracy

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday technology should be employed to sustain democratic values in the face of efforts by authoritarian and repressive regimes to deploy technology to undermine democracy and human rights.

Like-minded governments and their people were working together to promote free and fair elections, Blinken said, noting safeguarding democracy was a collective effort.

“As authoritarian and repressive regimes deploy technologies to undermine democracy and human rights, we need to ensure that technology sustains and supports democratic values and norms,” he said at the opening of the Summit for Democracy in South Korea.

Blinken said: “But AI is also a critical arena in which democracy is being challenged.

Advertisement

“So while we seek to harness the power of AI and other digital technologies for good, some governments are abusing those same technologies to do just the opposite.

“They’re using AI tools, like facial recognition and bots, to surveil their own citizens. Harass journalists, human rights defenders, and political dissidents. Spread mis- and disinformation that undermines free and fair elections, or sets one segment of our societies against another.

“Our democracies are hardly immune to the harms from AI misuse and failure, including impacts from the choices that tech companies make in deploying their innovations – from our citizens being able to access fewer and less diverse media sources because of the failures of AI-enabled search engines, to discrimination and bias that disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities.

“The United States is determined to shape the terms of our technological future in a way that’s inclusive, rights-respecting, that sustains democratic values and democratic institutions. We’ve made historic investments in our technological capabilities and those of our democratic partners.

“At the same time, we’re pairing those investments with efforts to lead on the governance of artificial intelligence. Those include an executive order strengthening AI safety and security, privacy protections, and equity and civil rights, while promoting innovation. We’ve also set out an AI Risk Management Framework, a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, a new AI Safety Institute, voluntary commitments endorsed by 15 top tech companies, and an international code of conduct for organizations developing advanced AI systems.

Advertisement

“We’re building broad and inclusive support to uphold safe, secure, and trustworthy AI. Just this week, the United Nations is set to adopt the first-ever standalone resolution on AI – focused on ensuring that AI is deployed to advance sustainable development and actually deliver progress in people’s lives. This resolution is led by the United States; it’s now co-sponsored by more than 75 countries. And to those who have not yet joined, we really invite you to do so.

“This unity reflects a strong global consensus in support of two equally important goals: that AI is safe, secure, and trustworthy, and that its benefits are actually shared by all. We must support governance and capacity building that narrows the digital divide.

“AI is just one component of our broader democratic approach to technology.

“We’re countering government surveillance and the misuse of spyware.

“Last year, President Biden issued an executive order prohibiting the use of commercial spyware by the United States Government when its use poses security risks to our country – or where it could lead to misuse by a foreign actor, including to carry out human rights abuse or to suppress civil liberties.

Advertisement

“Six countries just signed on to our joint statement on the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware. They join a 17-member-strong coalition that’s collaborating to make sure that spyware is used consistent with respect for universal human rights and for basic freedoms.

“We’re defending human rights defenders online. Today, we’re releasing first-of-its-kind guidance to give technology companies the tools to help prevent, mitigate, and seek justice for attacks on human rights defenders online.

“We’re protecting access to a free and open internet. Since 2023, the US Government has supported 30 million users of circumvention tools, like VPNs, to get around government internet blackouts each month through the Surge and Sustain Fund for Anti-Censorship Technology.

“The stakes of this work could not be greater. But again, seeing everyone here today, seeing the work that we’ll be doing over the next three days, the information we’ll be sharing, the best practices we’ll be working on together, that, again, gives me confidence that this is a challenge that we can not only embrace, but that we can succeed in meeting. If we can harness all of the extraordinary potential, all the extraordinary good in AI, while mitigating the downsides, we will – we will – advance progress for people in all of our countries and around the world.

“It’s a tremendous responsibility, but we have to meet it in this moment. Because again – I’ll close with this – this is moving so fast, it’s moving so quickly, that what is decided now and in the weeks and months ahead is going to shape the future for generations to come. So there’s urgency to this effort, and we’ll be much more effective, much stronger, when we work together.” 

Advertisement

Continue Reading

World

South Sudan shutters all schools as it prepares for an extreme heat wave

South Sudan shutters all schools as it prepares for an extreme heat wave

Published

on

By

South Sudan shutters all schools as it prepares for an extreme heat wave

South Sudan is closing all schools starting on Monday in preparation for an extreme heat wave expected to last two weeks.

The health and education ministries advised parents to keep all children indoors as temperatures are expected to soar to 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit).

They warned that any school found open during the warning period would have its registration withdrawn, but the statement issued late Saturday didn’t specify how long schools would remain shuttered.

The ministries said they “will continue to monitor the situation and inform the public accordingly.”

Advertisement

Resident Peter Garang, who lives in the capital, Juba, welcomed the decision. He said “schools should be connected to the electricity grid” to enable the installation of air conditioners.

South Sudan, one of the world’s youngest nations, is particularly vulnerable to climate change with heat waves common but rarely exceeding 40 C (104 F). Civil conflict has plagued the east African country which also suffered from drought and flooding, making living conditions difficult for residents.

The World Food Program in its latest country brief said South Sudan “continues to face a dire humanitarian crisis” due to violence, economic instability, climate change and an influx of people fleeing the conflict in neighboring Sudan. It also stated that 818,000 vulnerable people were given food and cash-based transfers in January. 

Advertisement
Continue Reading

World

Children of IS fighters left to rot in Syria camp

Children of IS fighters left to rot in Syria camp

Published

on

By

Children of IS fighters left to rot in Syria camp

Ali is 12 and has survived things no child should see, spending half his life in what amounts to a prison camp for jihadist families in an arid corner of northeastern Syria.

He knows not to dream of freedom. Instead he fantasises about having a football. “Can you get me one?” he said, as if he was asking for the Moon.

Five years after the fall of the Islamic State group’s brutal “caliphate”, tens of thousands of women and children linked to the jihadists are still being held by the US-backed Kurdish forces in camps rife with violence and abuse, with seemingly no clear plan of what to do with them.

More than 40,000 inmates – half of them children – are cooped up behind the barbed wire fences and watchtowers of the windswept al-Hol camp run by Washington’s Kurdish allies.

Advertisement

The children of the jihadists’ failed project live out a grim existence in tattered, tightly packed together tents with little water and limited access to sanitation. Few go to school.

Many have never seen a television or tasted ice cream.

Some boys are taken from their mothers by the guards once they reach 11 in violation of international law, a UN expert found, with the Kurdish authorities claiming it is to stop them being radicalised.

They admit the jihadists still exercise control in parts of the camp through fear, punishments and even murder.

One former inmate told AFP that IS paid pensions to some widows.

Advertisement

Even Ali is old enough to be terrified of them. “They enter tents at night and kill people,” he said.

“It’s not a life for children… they are paying the price for something they didn’t do,” an aid worker told AFP.

The al-Hol camp ballooned as the coalition and its allies in the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) closed in on IS’s last bastion in eastern Syria, putting an end to their five-year reign of terror marked by beheadings, rapes, massacres and enslavement.

When the extremists were finally defeated in March 2019, families of suspected jihadists were trucked north to al-Hol from the last holdout in Baghouz.

Five years on, dozens of countries are still refusing to take back their nationals with SDF leader Mazloum Abdi – whose soldiers guard the Western-funded camp – calling it “a ticking time bomb”.

– ‘Acute deprivation’ –

Advertisement

AFP interviewed IS widows, aid workers, security forces and administration employees in the difficult to access camp, including inside the high-security “annex”, the camp within a camp where “foreign” and more radical women and their children from 45 countries are held apart from the “local” Syrians and Iraqis.

Some asked not to be named for fear of what might happen to them.

To complicate matters, some 3,000 men are held with the women and children in the Syrian and Iraqi sector of the camp. Some are ordinary refugees, but suspicion lingers over others detained by Kurdish fighters as the caliphate collapsed.

Not even the guards venture into the rows of tents at night unless they are carrying out a raid.

The huge dusty camp – first built for refugees fleeing the wars in Iraq and Syria – dwarfs the nearby town of al-Hol, with its small houses and narrow streets.

Advertisement

Its thousands of white tents are crammed so closely together that it is almost impossible to walk between them without bumping into something.

Privacy is nonexistent, with the communal kitchens and toilets squalid and insufficient, say humanitarian workers who provide some basic services on top of the food aid on which the inmates survive.

Behind the camp’s high fences, kids roam dirt roads, bored and frustrated, some throwing stones at visitors. A blond boy blinked at the camera and then drew his finger across his throat to mimic a beheading.

Most children do not go to the makeshift schools. Instead they try to earn a little by carrying water, cleaning or fixing tents for those whose families wire them money.

Others work in the camp’s market, or trade their food aid.

Advertisement

“Al-Hol is a suffocating place for children to live and grow-up,” said Kathryn Achilles from Save the Children.

They “have endured acute deprivation, bombardment and have now been in the camp for almost five years. They need more,” she said.

‘We’ll be left here’

“How can our children dream if they’ve never seen the outside world?” a mother of five held in the high-security annex reserved for foreign women and their children told AFP.

Two thirds of the annex’s 6,612 inmates are children, according to the camp’s administrators.

Advertisement

The 39-year-old gave birth to her youngest child in al-Hol after fleeing Baghouz in 2019 after her husband – an IS fighter – was killed there.

Like all of the women in the camp, she was covered head-to-toe in a niqab and black gloves, a thin slit in the face covering showing her wide, dark eyes.

Although the niqab is banned in the smaller Roj camp holding IS members’ families close to the Turkish border, women in al-Hol told AFP they would not dare to take it off, fearing punishment from hardliners.

“It is a bitter life, and what’s worse, they say we’ll be left here,” the mother lamented, with the authorities starting to build new sections where each tent will have its own toilet and kitchen.

Jihan Hanan, the head of the camp’s civil administration, confirmed that the work was being done “because the camp may be in place for the long term”.

She admitted life was “difficult for residents, but it’s also difficult for us given the security situation.”

Advertisement

Murder and sexual abuse

But it is what is happening to the children that most worries humanitarian organisations.

In 2022, two Egyptian girls, aged 12 and 15, were murdered in the annex, their throats cut and their bodies dumped in an open septic tank.

Rana, a Syrian girl, was shot in the face and shoulder in 2022 by armed men who accused her of having a child out of wedlock when she was 18.

“They kidnapped me for 11 days and hit me with chains,” she told AFP.

Advertisement

Other children are being sexually abused and harassed, a health worker told AFP. In three months in 2021, she treated 11 cases of child sexual abuse.

Some cases were children abusing other children. “They may not know they are hurting each other,” she said, adding that a child who abuses is likely to have been a either a victim of sexual assault or witness to it.

Children in al-Hol have seen or heard murders as well as “shootings, stabbings and strangulations on their way to buy food from the marketplace or while on their way to school,” Save the Children said in a 2022 report on the camp.

The trauma triggers sleeping disorders, bed-wetting and aggressive behaviour, it said.

“I try not to let my kids socialise to keep them out of harm, but it is almost impossible because the camp is packed,” said Shatha, an Iraqi mother-of-five.

“Every time my kids go out, they come back beaten.”

Advertisement

Yet keeping children confined to their tents was tantamount to holding them “in a prison inside a prison”, a social worker told AFP.

‘Coming for my son’

Every mother AFP spoke to in al-Hol – particularly those in the annex – were terrified about their boys being taken from them and sent to “rehabilitation centres” by the guards.

The high-security camp within a camp contains women from 45 countries including France, the Netherlands and Sweden, with large numbers from Turkey, Tunisia, Russia, the Caucasus and the Central Asian republics.

Security forces regularly take boys over 11 from the annex in night raids or sweeps of the marketplace, a policy a UN expert condemned as “forced arbitrary separation”.

Advertisement

Zeinab, an Egyptian mother, said her 13-year-old son was taken away from her a year ago. Now she worries it will soon be her 11-year-old’s turn.

“I can’t sleep at night. When I hear sounds outside, I fear they are coming for my son,” she said.

Some mothers hide their boys from the guards in holes and trenches or prevent them from going outside.

“Some boys may have turned 20, but we don’t know where they are hiding,” a member of the security forces admitted.

Authorities say they take the boys to protect them from “sexual abuse” and a “radicalised” environment.

The Pentagon told AFP that it was aware that some youths were removed “to both youth centres and detention facilities” but said “we keep the well-being of children at the centre of our policies and encourage local authorities to ensure their actions consider the best interests of children.”

Advertisement

IS cells

Kurdish forces have long warned about IS cells in the camp, with a spike in murders, arson and escape attempts in 2019. Rifles, ammunition and tunnels have also been found in regular security sweeps.

A Syrian woman who fled the camp in mid-2019 recalled how an IS member known as Abu Mohamed would visit widows monthly and pay them $300 to $500.

“He used to come in a security forces uniform and promise that the group will return,” she said.

In the annex’s squalid marketplace, women pore over the few available pieces of meat through the slits in their niqabs, while others haul away bottles of water and rugs in three-wheeled carts or on makeshift sleds made from cardboard attached to a rope.

Seeing journalists, some raised a gloved index finger to the sky, a gesture frequently used by IS signifying the “oneness of God”.

Advertisement

While many women are repentant, others don’t hide their continued allegiance to IS.

IS “are still here, and they have a stronger presence in certain sectors of the camp,” according to Abou Khodor, a 26-year-old Iraqi man who has been in the camp for seven years.

He complained that diehards from IS’s last bastion in Baghouz had “ruined” the camp. But one of the women captured there said it was more complex.

‘Death does not scare us’

“There are supporters of IS, and those who have become even worse,” she said. Others, however, “don’t want anything to do with it anymore.”

Advertisement

At a protest over searches in the camp earlier this year, one woman was filmed shouting at the guards, “We are here now but one day it will be you!

“The Islamic State is not going away, even if you kill and beat us… Death does not scare us.”

But an Egyptian woman was seen urging calm, saying, “We don’t want problems.”

Such is the mistrust that some women resist being treated with what they call “Western medicine” leading to outbreaks of disease, most recently of measles.

Women and children in the annex also have to get permission to go to the health centres outside the camp, and it sometimes takes “days, weeks or even months” for less critical cases, according to Liz Harding, head of Doctors Without Borders mission in northeastern Syria.

“Fear, movement restrictions, insecurity and lack of emergency services at night” was cutting them off from care, she added.

Advertisement

Some smuggle in medication and at least one woman performs clandestine dental procedures, which has led to cases of sepsis.

“She doesn’t have the tools, but there is no other dental care,” a Russian woman complained.

– Huge burden for Kurds –

The grim desperation of the situation weighs heavy on the Syrian Kurds running the camp. Many lost comrades to IS militants whose family members they now have to guard.

“It’s a major problem… a burden both financially, politically and morally as well,” the head of the Syrian Democratic Forces Mazloum Abdi told AFP.

Humanitarian groups in the camp said children should not have to live in such conditions and insist they should not be defined by their parents’ actions.

Advertisement

“Mothers want their children to go to school, to grow up healthily and hope they won’t be discriminated against because of all they have experienced,” said Save The Children’s Achilles.

Kurdish authorities have repeatedly urged countries to repatriate their citizens, but hold out little hope of it happening anytime soon. Hanan, the camp’s civilian chief, said many “nationalities have no one asking about them”.

Asked by AFP what it plans to do with the women and children, the Pentagon said “the only long-term, durable solution for the residents… is the return or repatriation of displaced persons to their areas or countries of origin.”

While Iraq has started slow but successful repatriations, thousands of Syrians are stuck in al-Hol awaiting tribal sponsorship to return to areas under Kurdish control. For now, a return for those from Syrian government-held areas looks impossible.

“We wish everyone could go home,” Hanan said. “We don’t intend to lock anyone up and leave them.”

Advertisement

But it was little comfort to a Russian mother of two who told AFP she felt the world had abandoned her and her children.

“There is no place to go. There is no solution,” she said. 

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © GLOBAL TIMES PAKISTAN