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      Solingen, Germany, Becomes Reluctant Symbol of Migration Battles

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      After a stabbing attack that prosecutors say was committed by a Syrian who was rejected for asylum, the city of Solingen finds itself at the center of a longstanding debate.Two days after a deadly knife attack in the German city of Solingen, the youth wing of the far-right AfD party put out a call for supporters to stage a protest demanding the government do more to deport migrants denied asylum.The authorities had identified the suspect in the stabbing spree that killed three people and wounded eight others as a Syrian man who was in the country despite having been denied asylum and who prosecutors suspected had joined the Islamic State. The attack tore at the fabric of the ethnically diverse, working-class city in the country’s west.But even before the right-wing protests had begun on Sunday, scores of counterprotesters had gathered in front of the group home that housed the suspect and other refugees. They carried banners that read, “Welcome to refugees” and “Fascism is not an opinion, but a crime,” and railed against those who would use the attack to further inflame an already fraught national debate over immigration and refugees.The dueling protests — not unlike those recently in Britain — are emblematic of Germany’s longstanding tug of war over how to deal with a large influx of asylum seekers in recent years. The country needs immigration to bolster its work force, but the government often finds itself on the defensive against an increasingly powerful AfD.The party and its supporters are attempting to use the stabbing attack to bolster their broader anti-immigrant message, with some blaming the assault on “uncontrolled migration” even before the nationality of the suspect was known.“They are trying to use this tragedy to foment fear,” said Matthias Marsch, 67, a Solingen resident who was at Sunday’s counterprotest and worries about a rightward drift in society. “I’m here to stand against that.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Least 38 Killed in Attacks in Southwestern Pakistan

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      At least 38 people have been killed in several assaults across Baluchistan Province since Sunday in what appears to be part of a campaign by armed separatists in the region.The violence began with blasts that ripped through a military camp in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province late Sunday night, killing at least one soldier. Around the same time, armed men stormed into at least four police stations in the province, spraying bullets at officers and setting police vehicles on fire, local officials said.By daybreak, militants had destroyed a bridge, bringing the major railway that runs across it to a halt. Then early Monday morning, the violence hit its apex when gunmen held up traffic on a major highway, shooting and killing nearly two dozen people.Over a 24-hour period, the new wave of violence carried out by an armed separatist group has seized Baluchistan Province in southwestern Pakistan and left at least 38 people dead, worsening the country’s already deteriorating security situation.The spate of coordinated attacks in Baluchistan began on Sunday, as the group, the Baluch Liberation Army, or B.L.A., announced that it was starting a new operation across the province. The B.L.A. is one of several insurgent groups that has demanded the province’s independence from the central government in Islamabad.The deadliest single attack in the campaign so far unfolded in Musakhel, a district in Baluchistan, officials said, when armed men stopped traffic on a highway and demanded that passengers on buses and trucks show them their identity cards, officials said.The gunmen forced some of the passengers out of the vehicles, and then shot and killed them, officials said. Nearly all of the victims were from Punjab Province, officials said, and the gunmen set at least 10 buses and trucks ablaze before fleeing the area.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On Anniversary of Taliban Takeover, Glee, Mourning and an Embrace of Jihad

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      Celebrations marking the third year since the U.S. withdrawal are amplifying a divide in Afghanistan over what principles it should be governed by.The parade of cars rolled through Kabul from morning until night, clogging the streets in end-to-end traffic. Crowds of Taliban and their supporters lined the routes, chanting “God is great!” and “Long live the mujahedeen!” One truck dragged an American flag, a red X drawn across its stars and stripes.Outside the old U.S. embassy, young children — maybe 6 or 7 years old — wearing military fatigues stood on the top of a gray Toyota pickup, clutching small white Taliban flags. A dozen others crammed into the back of the truck, white flags draped over their shoulders. Yet more flags were stapled onto wooden poles, waving in the air.“Our way is jihad!” a man shouted through a loudspeaker from the passenger seat. The children responded: “Long live jihad!”With August in Afghanistan come weeks of celebrations marking the anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal — the last American planes peeled off the runway at Kabul’s international airport on Aug. 30, 2021 — and the Taliban’s return to power.The month has become a time of victors and vanquished, the swell of white flags marking conquered territory, just as past empires planted their own banners. It is also a time of heightened emotions, seeming to amplify the gulf between those who support the Taliban’s conservative rule and those who embraced the liberal ideals of the U.S.-backed Afghan government.The country remains deeply divided over fundamental questions of what principles it should be governed by, and what ideals it should hold. The only point of consensus seems to be that three years into Taliban rule — with its extreme version of Shariah law — it is here to stay.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Walz in the National Guard: A Steady Rise Ending With a Hard Decision

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      In a military career that spanned three decades, Tim Walz achieved one of the highest enlisted ranks in the Army. Some peers took issue with the timing of his retirement.In the 1980s, the U.S. military was in the middle of a transformation. The Vietnam War was over, and a force once staffed with drafted troops who had fought and died in the jungles of Southeast Asia was transitioning to ranks filled solely with volunteers.In Nebraska, Tim Walz was one of those volunteers.Mr. Walz, now Minnesota governor and the presumptive Democratic candidate for vice president, raised his hand to join the Army National Guard just two days past his 17th birthday on April 8, 1981. In a career in the military that spanned three decades, he battled floods, managed an artillery unit and achieved one of the highest enlisted ranks in the Army. He also navigated a full-time job teaching social studies alongside his part-time military occupation as an enlisted combat arms soldier, a role that trained him for war.Mr. Walz never went to war. Most of his service covered a period when America was bruised from foreign entanglements and wary of sending troops into combat overseas for long stretches. And it ended when Mr. Walz was 41, as the military ramped up for war after Sept. 11.Since being picked as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate this week, he has found himself facing allegations previously aired by Minnesota Republicans and newly amplified by JD Vance, former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate.Those criticisms center on Mr. Walz’s decision to retire from the Army in 2005, the year before his artillery battalion deployed to Iraq. He was thinking seriously about a run for Congress and spoke with other soldiers about being torn between his loyalty to his fellow troops and his desire to move on with his life. At the time, there were vague expectations that the unit might deploy, but actual orders came several months later.The unit deployed to Iraq for more than one year beginning in 2006. During that time, soldiers in the unit provided security for transportation convoys and other tasks common in a combat zone. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Evan Wright, Award-Winning Reporter and Author of ‘Generation Kill,’ Dies at 59

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      Mr. Wright was known for his immersive journalism that focused on subjects outside mainstream media coverage to explore the nooks and crannies of American life.Evan Wright, an award-winning journalist whose reporting from the Iraq War formed the best-selling book “Generation Kill” and whose work illuminated the lives of those on the fringes of society, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 59.His death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office and was confirmed in a statement released Monday night by his family.Mr. Wright was known for his immersive journalism that often focused on subjects outside mainstream media coverage, including traveling with anarchists behind the Battle of Seattle in 1999, covering the 1996 Aryan Nations World Congress and riding with the Marines leading the United States’ invasion of Iraq. His reporting on crime, war and American subcultures was published in Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor, as well as in Hustler, Vanity Fair and Time.“I failed at everything else,” he told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2011, discussing what led him to journalism. “I was optimistic. It was a refuge for rogues and miscreants.”Mr. Wright moved from his native Ohio to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to pursue screenwriting, according to a 2009 Los Angeles Times article. He landed his first paid journalism job in 1995 as an entertainment editor at Hustler, reviewing pornographic films and covering the adult film industry. At Rolling Stone Mr. Wright was introduced to combat and military culture, first on assignment in Afghanistan in 2002 embedding with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, and then in 2003 with the Marines’ First Reconnaissance Battalion in Iraq. Mr. Wright secured a spot in the lead vehicle in the push from Kuwait to Baghdad, eventually filing a three-part series in Rolling Stone called “The Killer Elite,” which received the 2004 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taliban Talks With U.N. Go On Despite Alarm Over Exclusion of Women

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      The meeting is the first between the Taliban and a United Nations-led conference of global envoys who are seeking to engage the Afghan government on critical issues.Taliban officials attended a rare, United Nations-led conference of global envoys to Afghanistan on Sunday, the first such meeting Taliban representatives have agreed to engage in, after organizers said Afghan women would be excluded from the talks.The two-day conference in Doha, Qatar, is the third of its kind. It is part of a United Nations-led effort, known as the “Doha process,” started in May 2023. It is meant to develop a unified approach for international engagement with Afghanistan. Envoys from around 25 countries and regional organizations, including the European Union, the United States, Russia and China, are attending. Taliban officials were not invited to the first meeting and refused to attend the second meeting, held in February, after objecting to the inclusion of Afghan civil society groups that attended.The conference has drawn a fierce backlash in recent days after U.N. officials announced that Afghan women would not participate in discussions with Taliban officials. Human rights groups and Afghan women’s groups have slammed the decision to exclude them as too severe a concession by the U.N. to persuade the Taliban to engage in the talks. The decision to exclude women sets “a deeply damaging precedent” and risks “legitimatizing their gender-based institutional system of oppression,” Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, said in a statement referring to the Taliban’s policies toward women. “The international community must adopt a clear and united stance: The rights of women and girls in Afghanistan are nonnegotiable.”Since seizing power from the U.S.-backed government in 2021, Taliban authorities have systematically rolled back women’s rights, effectively erasing women from public life. Women and girls are barred from getting education beyond primary school and banned from most employment outside of education and health care, and they cannot travel significant distances without a male guardian.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Qaeda Commander at Guantánamo Bay Is Sentenced for War Crimes

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      A U.S. military jury decided on a 30-year prison term. But under a plea deal, the prisoner’s sentence will end in 2032.A U.S. military jury on Thursday ordered a former Qaeda commander to a serve a 30-year prison sentence for war crimes carried out by his insurgent forces in wartime Afghanistan in the early 2000s. The military judge excused the panel from the chamber and then announced that, under a plea agreement, the prisoner’s sentence would end in eight years.The outcome was part of the arcane system called military commissions, which allows prisoners to reach plea deals with a senior official at the Pentagon who oversees the war court but requires the formality of a jury sentencing hearing anyway.In handing down the maximum sentence, the jury of 11 officers rejected arguments by defense lawyers for Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi that he deserved leniency, if not clemency, for his early humiliations in C.I.A. custody, subsequent cooperation with U.S. investigators and failing health.Mr. Hadi, 63, was aware of the deal that reduced his sentence to 10 years, starting with his guilty plea in June 2022. It was unclear whether victims of attacks by Mr. Hadi’s forces and their family members had been told. None of the five people who testified last week about their loss commented as they streamed out of the spectators’ gallery on Thursday morning following an at-times emotional two-week sentencing trial.The prisoner also did not appear to react when the jury foreman, a Marine colonel, announced the harshest of possible sentences. Mr. Hadi, who is disabled by a paralyzing spine disease and a series of surgeries at Guantánamo, sat in court in a padded therapeutic chair, listening through a headset providing Arabic translation.His case was an unusual one at the court, which was created to prosecute terrorism cases as war crimes after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. While prosecutors cast Mr. Hadi as a member of the Qaeda inner circle before those attacks, there was no suggestion in his plea agreement that he knew about the plot beforehand.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Battlefield Commander’s Case Goes to Guantánamo Jury

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      The panel is deciding a sentence for a prisoner who pleaded guilty to commanding Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan that carried out war crimes.A military jury on Wednesday began deliberating a sentence for an admitted war criminal at Guantánamo Bay after prosecution and defense lawyers portrayed the prisoner as, alternately, a senior member of a global Qaeda conspiracy or a battlefield commander defending Afghanistan from the U.S. invasion.Many of the U.S. officers serving on the 11-member panel are themselves veterans of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How they view the crimes of the man called Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi could influence the length of his sentence, and whether they heed his lawyer’s request to recommend clemency.The closing arguments focused on the battlefield in wartime Afghanistan, in contrast to the court’s better known cases, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000, which are portrayed as acts of terrorism.Mr. Hadi, 63, who was captured in 2006, pleaded guilty in 2022. Under the terms of his agreement, he is to receive a sentence in the 25- to 30-year range. But he could be released to the custody of a trusted country, if one can be found that will give him specialized care for a paralyzing spine disease that has left him disabled.Douglas J. Short, the lead prosecutor, called Mr. Hadi a “senior member of one of the most notorious conspiracies to date, Al Qaeda,” who joined the movement before the Sept. 11 attacks and did not give up the fight when the United States invaded. Mr. Short said that Mr. Hadi put civilians in harm’s way in a campaign of suicide bombings and other operations in the early 2000s in Afghanistan, when the United States was pursuing a “hearts and minds” strategy.He offered a timeline of the deaths of 17 U.S. and foreign coalition soldiers in 2003 and 2004. They were war crimes, he said, because the Taliban and Qaeda forces who carried them out blended in with the civilian population and used unorthodox methods of warfare, such as turning civilian taxis into bombs by packing them with explosives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More