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US Sending Marines to Africa in Preparation for Evacuations in South Sudan

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

The U.S. military is sending Marines and aircraft to the Horn of Africa in anticipation they may be needed to respond to the violence in South Sudan, Fox News confirms.

A senior U.S. Defense official told Fox News that 150 Marines are being moved from Moron, Spain, to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, in case the State Department asks for their assistance in evacuating U.S. citizens left in South Sudan. So far, no request from the department has yet come in to evacuate the roughly 100 U.S. citizens left in the country.

The decision comes after four U.S. troops were injured Saturday when gunfire hit evacuation aircraft. Three of those troops are stable and being sent to the military hospital in Germany, a spokesman said, while the fourth continues to get treatment in Nairobi, in neighboring Kenya.

A few dozen U.S. troops already are in South Sudan providing security. Others are in Djibouti, where the U.S. maintains its only permanent military base in Africa. Ten aircraft are now stationed there including Osprey helicopters and C-130 transport planes.

The U.S. continued intense diplomatic efforts Monday to calm the roiling ethnic violence, including holding a meeting between the U.S. special envoy for South Sudan, Donald Booth, and South Sudan President Salva Kiir.

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Obama says US May Take Further Military Action to Protect Americans in South Sudan

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Photo Credit: AP/U.S. AIR FORCE

Photo Credit: AP/U.S. AIR FORCE

President Barack Obama told Congress Sunday that he may take further military action to protect Americans trying to evacuate violence-plagued South Sudan.

In a letter to Congress, Obama said that about 46 U.S. troops were deployed Saturday to help evacuate Americans. That’s in addition to another 45 troops deployed to reinforce the U.S. Embassy in Juba.

Four U.S. troops were injured in the evacuation mission Saturday when gunfire hit three military planes in Bor. All four are in stable condition, the White House said.

It remains unclear how many Americans are still stranded in Bor and other rural towns.

Obama is on his annual vacation in Hawaii, but he said in the letter to congressional leaders that he’s monitoring the situation. Earlier Sunday, Obama was briefed by advisers on events in South Sudan following a meeting that his national security adviser, Susan Rice, held with national security aides and U.S. personnel still in South Sudan.

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Three US Military Aircraft Hit In Southern Sudan, 4 Wounded

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Gunfire hit three U.S. military aircraft trying to evacuate American citizens in a remote region of South Sudan that on Saturday became a battle ground between the country’s military and renegade troops, officials said. Four U.S. service members were wounded in the attack in the same region where gunfire downed a U.N. helicopter the day before.

The U.S. military aircraft were about to land in Bor, the capital of the state of Jonglei and scene of some of the nation’s worst violence over the last week, when they were hit. The military said the four wounded troops were in stable condition.

The U.S. military said three CV-22 Ospreys – the kind of aircraft that can fly like a helicopter and plane – were “participating in a mission to evacuate American citizens in Bor.” A South Sudan official said violence against civilians there has resulted in bodies “sprinkled all over town.”

“After receiving fire from the ground while approaching the site, the aircraft diverted to an airfield outside the country and aborted the mission,” the statement said. “The injured troops are being treated for their wounds.” It was not known how many U.S. civilians are in Bor.

After the aircraft took incoming fire, they turned around and flew to Entebbe, Uganda. From there the service members were flown to Nairobi, Kenya aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 for medical treatment, the statement said.

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Gold Rush Threatens to Bring New Era of Genocide to War Torn Darfur

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/MOHAMED NURELDIN ABDALLAHImpoverished tribes in war torn Darfur, the scene of decades of misery and genocide, now have one of the oldest reasons for fighting known to man: gold.

More than 800 people have been killed and 150,000 displaced since January as poor, but heavily armed tribes fight over the Jebel Amer gold mining region. That is more than double the number of people killed in political and ethnic fighting in 2012, and world leaders fear the mad dash for precious metal could be plunging the region into a new era of violence. Humanitarian groups say the Sudanese government, led by accused war criminal President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, is pitting tribes against each other in a bid to get the most possible out of some 4,000 mines.

“Ten years after the genocide began, state-sponsored violence has once more taken hold of the region,” said Akshaya Kumar, a policy analyst for the Enough Project, a Washington-based humanitarian organization. “Cash-strapped and dollar-starved, Sudan sees gold as its new oil. The recent gold discoveries are fueling atrocities again in Darfur.”

When South Sudan split from Sudan two years ago, it took with it much of the nation’s oil wealth. With shrinking oil revenues, al-Bashir is seeking to increase the $2.2 billion worth of gold produced by the mines annually. And his strategy to keep control of the vast region’s gold, amid hundreds of thousands of amateurs in a virtual free-for-all, relies on fighters battle-hardened from decades of ethnic and religious war.

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Half of All Girls In South Sudan Forced To Marry

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Photo Credit: AP

The 17-year-old beaten to death for refusing to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather. The teen dragged by her family to be raped to force her into marrying an elderly man. They are among 39,000 girls forced into marriage every day around the world, sold like cattle to enrich their families.

More than one-third of all girls are married in 42 countries, according to the U.N. Population Fund, referring to females under the age of 18. The highest number of cases occurs in some of the poorest countries, the agency figures show, with the West African nation of Niger at the bottom of the list with 75 percent of girls married before they turn 18. In Bangladesh the figure is 66 percent and in Central African Republic and Chad it is 68 percent.

Most child marriages take place in South Asia and rural sub-Saharan Africa, according to the population fund. In terms of absolute numbers, India, because of its large population, has the most child marriages with child brides in 47 percent of all marriages.

Government statistics in South Sudan show half the girls there aged 15 to 19 are married, with some brides as young as 12 years old.

“The country’s widespread child marriage exacerbates South Sudan’s pronounced gender gaps in school enrollment, contributes to soaring maternal mortality rates, and violates the right of girls to be free from violence,” says a Human Rights Watch report published Thursday ahead of International Women’s Day on Friday.

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Christian Priests Imprisoned For Baptizing Islamic Convert

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Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir has tossed two priests into prison for baptizing a woman convert to Christianity.

Agence France Presse reports from say Sudan the convert was a woman of Arab origin and that the government leaped into action when Muslims threatened violence.

“A little-known group calling itself al-Qaida in the Nilien States sent a statement to Sudanese journalists on Tuesday threatening violence against Copts unless the woman who converted and was kidnapped by the Christians is returned,” reports said.

Christian Solidarity International USA President John Eibner says that the decision to jail the priest may be the result of party rivalries.

“What we do know, however, is that the various Islamist forces, including Bashir’s party are competing with each other to show that they adhere to Shariah norms,” he said.

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Inexplicable: Obama Waives Sanctions on Countries that Use Child Soldiers

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U.S. President Barack Obama issued a new executive order last week to fight human trafficking, touting his administration’s handling of the issue.

“When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed — that’s slavery,” Obama said in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative. “It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world. Now, as a nation, we’ve long rejected such cruelty.”

But for the third year in a row, Obama has waived almost all U.S. sanctions that would punish certain countries that use child soldiers, upsetting many in the human rights community.

Late Friday afternoon, Obama issued a presidential memorandum waiving penalties under the Child Soldiers Protection Act of 2008 for Libya, South Sudan, and Yemen, penalties that Congress put in place to prevent U.S. arms sales to countries determined by the State Department to be the worst abusers of child soldiers in their militaries. The president also partially waived sanctions against the Democratic Republic of the Congo to allow some military training and arms sales to that country.

Human rights advocates saw the waivers as harmful to the goal of using U.S. influence to urge countries that receive military assistance to move away from using child soldiers and contradictory to the rhetoric Obama used in his speech.

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Sudan President: non-Muslims will have no rights under sharia constitution

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President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said on Saturday Sudan’s next constitution would be “100 percent Islamic” to set an example for neighboring countries, some of which have seen religious parties gain power after popular uprisings.

The secession of mostly non-Muslim South Sudan a year ago sparked predictions that Sudan, which hosted former al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, would start implementing Islamic law more strictly.

In a speech to leaders of the mystical Islamic Sufi tradition in Khartoum, Bashir suggested Sudan’s new, post-secession constitution could help guide the region’s political transformation.

“We want to present a constitution that serves as a template to those around us. And our template is clear, a 100 percent Islamic constitution, without communism or secularism or Western (influences),” said Bashir.

“And we tell non-Muslims, nothing will preserve your rights except for Islamic sharia because it is just,” he said.

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