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Visiting Myanmar\'s Threatened Rohingyas

By ROBERT MACKEY

Despite official obstacles barring most observers and aid workers from western Myanmar, two months after dozens were killed in sectarian clashes and tens of thousands of Muslims were forced from their homes into “resettlement camps,” a television crew from Britain's Channel 4 News managed to report from the region on Tuesday.

As my colleague Thomas Fuller reported in June, Myanmar declared a state of emergency that month after violence between the Buddhist majority and a minority Muslim population known as Rohingyas swept Rakhine State, along the border with Bangladesh. The rape and murder of a Buddhist woman in May led to revenge attacks on the Rohingya community which was blamed for the crime. In the following weeks, up to 60,000 Rohingyas were driven from their homes and a whole section of the regional capital Sittwe was burned to the ground.

The British crew managed to film at a camp for displaced Rohingyas out side Sittwe, and also interviewed Buddhists in the town who claimed, implausibly, that the Muslims had set their own homes on fire. The Buddhists also complained to the reporters that the United Nations and international aid groups are biased in favor of the Muslims.

Myanmar denies citizenship to the entire community of about 800,000 Rohingyas, on the disputed theory that their ancestors arrived in the country after the start of British colonial rule in the 19th century, and the government even proposed expelling them en masse last month. That has led some Rohingyas to try to find refuge across the border in Bangladesh.

According to Moshahida Sultana Ritu, an economist at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh who wrote a New York Times opinion piece on the crisis in July, fears of an influx of refugees “have aroused anti-Rohingya sentiment among some Bangladeshis, and initially Bangladesh's government tried to force the refugees back without assisting them.”< /p>

Ms. Sultana Ritu also accused Myanmar's government of using its security forces “to burn houses, kill men and evict Rohingyas from their villages.” The attack on the Rohingyas, the professor charged, “is not sectarian violence; it is state-supported ethnic cleansing.”



After Bullets Fly in Texas, a Soldier\'s Wartime Training Is Needed at Home

August 13, 2012, 11:31 pm
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
Rigo Cisneros A neighbor in College Station, Tex., took video showing the police as they approached a gunman's home. “If you move, you are dead,” an officer yelled.

When a gun battle between police and a man armed with an assault rifle broke out on a street close to the Texas A&M campus on Monday, most nearby residents took cover. Rigo Cisneros reached for his smartphone.

As bullets whizzed and officers fell with gunshot wounds, Mr. Cisneros, an Army medic with one tour of duty in Afghanistan, crept from his home across the street toward the firefight, snapping pictures and taking video.

And then, when the shoot ing stopped and the police moved in on the home of the gunman, Mr. Cisneros, 40, called out to the officers:

“You got an ambulance here yet?” he asked. “I'm a medic.”

He asked for permission to approach and assist, and received it. It was an opportunity to put his military training to use in the war zone that briefly erupted on his own block.

He first attended to Brian Bachmann, 41, a Brazos County constable. Mr. Bachmann was gravely wounded with a gunshot to the chest.

“I heard gurgling sounds,” Mr. Cisneros said when reached by telephone later. “He was on the ground for 10 minutes, and there was no motion at all.”

Mr. Cisneros said he could feel no pulse. He performed CPR.

When medics arrived, Mr. Cisneros turned his attention to the shooter, whom police identified as Thomas Caffall, 35. He had been shot multiple times and was handcuffed, pale and bleeding on his front lawn. But he was conscious and aware enough to compre hend what he had done.

“Could you please tell the person I shot I'm sorry,” Mr. Cisneros said Mr. Caffall had told him.

Mr. Caffall later succumbed to his wounds, as did Mr. Bachmann, the constable. A passerby, Chris Northcliff, 43, also died of his gunshot wounds, the police said. Three other police officers and a 55-year-old woman were injured.

According to local news agencies, Mr. Bachmann became constable in January 2011 after winning an election the previous November. In Texas, constables are elected officials who serve as bailiffs in the local Justice of the Peace Court system. They also perform duties similar to those of sheriff's deputies and police officers.

The Eagle, a local newspaper, said in a November 2010 article about the election that Mr. Bachmann was married with two children. Before becoming constable, he served 17 years with the Brazos County Sheriff's Office, joining it as a patrol officer, the paper said.

Police said th at Mr. Bachmann and other police officers had gone to the residence on Monday with an eviction notice, but provided few other details about the shooting or Mr. Caffall.

When reached by telephone on Monday, several of Mr. Caffall's relatives declined to comment. A local NBC affiliate reported that Mr. Caffall's stepfather, Richard Weaver, when reached by telephone, had described him as “crazy as hell.”

“At one point, we were afraid that he was going to come up here and do something to his mother and me,” he was quoted as saying, adding that Mr. Caffall had quit his job nine months ago.

On his Facebook page, Mr. Caffall described himself as divorced and Christian.

“I am pulling a cross between Forrest Gump and Jack Kerouac (without the drugs),” he wrote. “I'm on the road, permanently.”

He had photos of several weapons on the page, including an assault rifle pictured in its box with two banana-shaped ammunition clips and an instruct ion manual for a Czech-made SA Vz.58 rifle that he wrote had cost $799. Also pictured was what he described as a Mosin Nagant rifle, a weapon once made in the Soviet Union, complete with bayonet and two boxes of ammunition.

“I'll be at the gun range as much as I can,” he said in the caption to one photo.

He also included a photo of his dog, Lucy.



Grisly Scene After Syrian Rebel Victory Caught on Video

By ROBERT MACKEY

Supporters of the Syrian uprising were reminded on Monday that having their revolution documented in such detail online can be a mixed blessing, as video appeared to show rebel fighters hurling dead soldiers off the roof of a building after a recent battle.

The grisly celebration last month in the northern town of al-Bab can be seen in extremely graphic video recorded as bodies thudded to the ground and observers rushed in for a closer look. (Before viewing the distressing clip, readers must click past a warning from the video-sharing site.)

Graphic video said to have been recorded last month in the Syrian town of al-Bab, where rebels seized control of a government building and dropped the bodies of soldiers they had killed off a roof.

A Syrian activist in al-Bab, Barry Abdul Latif, told The Los Angeles Times via Skype that the video was recorded three weeks ag o outside the local post office, after rebels killed five members of the security forces holed up there. “There were snipers on the roof of the post office,” he said. “Finally the rebels managed to storm the post office and threw explosive devices and the five snipers were killed. Then the rebels threw the bodies from the roof.”

The images surfaced at the same time as other clips, said to show summary executions of prisoners by rebel fighters, enraged some supporters of the uprising.

Although gunshots can be heard on the soundtrack of the video before some of the bodies were thrown off the rooftop, Mr. Latif insisted that the men were killed in battle, but criticized the mistreatment of the bodies in a series of updates posted on Twitter on Monday - and translated into English by another activist who writes as @NuffSilence.

In another update posted on his @Barry_Albab feed, Mr. Latif said that activists in the town had collected the bodies dropped outside the post office and given them proper Muslim burials.

As the Washington Post correspondent Liz Sly reported from al-Bab last month, the town, 30 miles northeast of Aleppo, in a patch of rural territory along the Turkish border now under rebel control, joined the armed uprising only three months ago.

In video said to have been recorded during a protest in April, protesters carrying a coffin chanted “Peaceful! Peaceful!” as they passed members of the security forces on rooftops in al-Bab.

Activists in the town told Ms. Sly that local men took up arms in May, after the security forces opened fire on a demonstration for the first time, killing seven protesters. They seized control of most of al-Bab on July 18.

After a 24-hour battle, residents told the Washington Post reporter, a Free Syrian Army fighter finally took out a sniper's nest on the roof of the post office building with a rocket-propelled gr enade. A widely seen video of that rocket strike appeared to show a soldier blown into the air by the force of the blast.

Video said to have been recorded on July 19 in al-Bab as a sniper's nest on the roof of the local post office was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade.

Video apparently recorded on the roof of the post office building later that day, showing rebel fighters taking control and very graphic close-ups of the mangled bodies of dead soldiers, was posted on an al-Bab opposition Facebook page.

Mr. Latif told The Lede via Twitter on Monday that he did not know who had recorded the video of the bodies being flung off the roof that day and was puzzled as to why it had appeared online now.

In another conversation on the social network, the activist who writes as @NuffSilence speculated that the clip was probably passed from phone to phone until it reached a supporter of President Bashar al-A ssad. As The Lede reported last year, several graphic video clips showing the bodies of dead protesters or rebels being abused by Syrian government soldiers have followed a similar path, eventually being acquired and posted online by opposition activists.

While the politics of the anonymous video blogger who uploaded the clip to an account registered in Lebanon on Saturday remain unknown, the video was quickly copied and re-uploaded by an Assad supporter who added the description: “Turkey-sponsored FSA terrorists a/k/a Freedom Fighters a/k/a Al Qaeda, throwing bodies of slain policemen who were protecting the government post office building in al-Bab.”

Given that several opposition activists have been urging restraint on the rebel Free Syrian Army, and instantly condemned the video from al-Bab on Twitter, it also seems possible that the clip might have been posted online now by a government opponent who was horrified by the scene.

Efforts to hold the Free Syrian Army accountable might be complicated by the informal nature of the rebel network. Ms. Sly reported from al-Bab last month that 15 different groups have taken up arms there since May. While they “collectively describe themselves as part of the Free Syrian Army,” she wrote, “they have no formal contact with the army's leadership, based in southern Turkey.”



Gunman Arrested Near Campus of Texas A&M

By J. DAVID GOODMAN and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Texas A&M University said that a gunman who opened fire near its campus had been taken into custody by police.

The university issued a series of warnings on its Web site, beginning at about 12:30 p.m. local time, when residents near the campus football stadium were urged to remain indoors.

“Active shooter in the area immediately southeast of the intersection of Welborn Rd and George Bush Drive,” the university said on its site, later updating to include a portion of nearby Fidelity Drive in College Station, Texas, about 90 miles northwest of Houston.

The police said the gunman was in custody, the university said fifteen minutes later, but urged people to continuing avoiding the area.

The police told CNN that several people had been wounded. KBTX News in College Station reported that more than one law enforcement officer has been shot, and that the gunman was firing f rom a house with automatic weapons. The local police had not confirmed any deaths, KBTX reported.

Barbara Murphy, 84, who lives near Fidelity Drive, said she heard about six or eight gunshots at around 12:30. About ten to 15 minutes later, she said, she heard another round of gunshots.

“We're doing a lot of remodeling around here, but then I realized it couldn't just be a hammer,” she said. “About that time a neighbor called and don't go outside.”



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