The head of the dreaded Haqqani network who also is second-in-command of the Afghan Taliban has denied insurgents’ involvement in recent bloody attacks in Kabul.

Fugitive Sirajuddin Haqqani made the remarks in a rare Pashto language audio message released late Sunday by the Taliban to VOA.

He specifically referred to the May 31 tanker truck bombing of the Afghan capital’s heavily guarded Wazir Akbar Khan diplomatic sector followed by a triple suicide attack on a funeral in Kabul and last week’s bombing of a mosque in the western city of Herat.

The three strikes killed at least 180 people and wounded hundreds of others. Almost all of the victims were civilians.

“Whoever planned and organized them, this was certainly not the work of the Islamic Emirate [the Taliban], nor will it conduct such activities anywhere [in the country] that are harmful to innocent [Afghan] civilians,” Haqqani asserted.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the blasts in Kabul and Herat.

Most of the casualties were caused by the tanker truck, filled with an estimated 1,500 kilograms of explosives. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani told an international conference in Kabul last week that the massive explosions killed more than 150 people and wounded 350 others, including foreigners.

The attack was the deadliest in Afghanistan since 2001.

‘Foreign invaders’

The Afghan spy agency swiftly blamed the Haqqani network of plotting the massive blast, allegedly with direct assistance from neighboring Pakistan’s spy agency.

Haqqani in his audio message reiterated that the Taliban will not end its insurgency until all the U.S.-led “foreign invaders” are expelled from Afghanistan.

He criticized the Afghan government for allegedly promoting Western traditions in the country, “contrary to Islamic traditions,” in the name of human rights.

“The way you [Afghans] celebrate Afghanistan’s independence from Russians and the way you celebrate Afghanistan’s independence from British invaders, God willing, there will be a time when you will be proudly celebrating independence from Americans and their allies,” the fugitive commander asserted.

The U.S. Department of State designated Haqqani a global terrorist in 2008, before designating his network a foreign terrorist organization in 2012.

Washington also has offered a $10 million reward for the Afghan terror chief, dubbed “Khalifa” or “the boss,” who is believed to have masterminded some of the deadly attacks against local and foreign forces in Afghanistan.

Afghan and U.S. officials alleged Sirajuddin Haqqani orchestrates the violence out of his sanctuaries in volatile tribal areas of Pakistan and with the help of that country’s intelligence operatives.

Islamabad rejects the charges and says its military operations over the past three years have “uprooted all terrorist groups, including the Haqqani network” from the tribal belt near the border with Afghanistan.
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From the third-story window of a barren government office building he now lives in as a refugee, Nasir Abdul is watching his city being destroyed.

Nearly every day for the past three weeks, the Philippine military has pounded the lakeside town of Marawi with rockets and bombs as it tries to wipe out militants linked to the Islamic State group in some of the most protracted urban combat to hit this volatile region in decades.

And on nearly every one of those days, Abdul has stood at the window and watched along with dozens of others who can’t turn away from the deadly spectacle taking place just a mile away.

‘Dying with every bomb’

As plumes of thick black smoke wafted above the city’s minarets again Friday — a day of intense skirmishes that saw the deaths of 13 marines — Abdul stood transfixed. Two helicopter gunships had just finished strafing the city, and now the people beside him were pointing toward a Vietnam-era attack aircraft circling overhead. 

The plane, an OV-10 Bronco, turned suddenly and dove almost straight down on the city center, letting loose two bombs before pulling its nose up and spiraling away. Moments later, blasts shook the city and more smoke billowed skyward.

“It hurts to watch because we know people are dying with every bomb,” the 45-year-old Abdul said, as the sound of gunfire crackled in the distance. When “I see the bombings, I can’t help but cry. I can’t help but think what’s happening to my relatives, my family, my business, my house.” 

“We know a lot of people are buried under that rubble,” he added.

​Downtown leveled, militants remain

Three weeks after a new alliance of Islamic militants tried to seize this town in their boldest attack yet, large chunks of downtown have been leveled. Militants remain holed up in several pockets scattered around the city center, along with at least 100 civilians, including hostages. Most of the town’s 200,000 inhabitants have fled, and more than 200 people have died. 

The military says the dead include at least 138 militants, 58 government troops and 29 civilians, among them a teenager shot Friday as he sheltered inside a Marawi mosque.

But the fighting is so intense, it’s impossible to fully recover bodies to get an accurate casualty toll. 

​Fears of Islamic State

The conflict in Marawi has raised fears that the Islamic State group’s violent ideology is gaining a foothold in this country’s restive southern islands, where Muslim separatists have fought for greater autonomy for decades. 

The military says militants are trying to establish a caliphate here, similar to one IS has attempted to create in the Middle East that stretches from the Syrian city of Raqqa to embattled Mosul, in Iraq. They believe 40 foreign fighters have participated in the fighting in Marawi, including Malaysians and Indonesians. 

The government has asked the U.S. to provide intelligence and other technical support, and at least one American surveillance plane has flown in support of the Philippine forces.

Abdul said that while people in Marawi support autonomy, few back the extremist militant groups who have grown notorious for carrying out kidnappings and beheadings. 

However, Lt. Col. Jo-ar Herrera, spokesman for the army’s 1st Infantry Division, said the insurgents likely have “a lot of sympathizers, a lot of supporters in this area.”

The main group leading the siege, the Maute, has deep roots in the city — “in terms of relatives, in terms of connections, in terms of culture, heritage,” he said.

Maute brothers 

The Maute, named after three militant brothers, staged a similar attack in November on nearby Butig, on the opposite side of Lake Lanao, which lasted six days. But the intensity of the latest assault, and the ability of the militants to hold out for so long, appears to have caught the government off guard. Herrera said insurgents had prepared for as much as a year, stocking secret caches in basements with food, weapons and ammunition.

Rexson Tamano, who is sleeping on the floor of an outdoor hallway in the same provincial government building as Abdul, said he saw no suspicious activity and no sign an attack was imminent.

When gunfire heralded the start of the siege May 23, he called his pregnant wife on the other side of town to check in on her and their four children.

“She said ‘stay where you are, please don’t come for us, it’s too dangerous,’” Tamano recalled. But he ran home anyway. On the way, he was stopped near a hospital at a checkpoint manned by militants. They wore black ski masks, and each held a machine-gun.

“I tried to walk away but they called me over and asked whether I was Muslim or Christian,” Tamano said. He told them the truth, he was Muslim, and they waved him through. The city’s minority Christians have been singled out for execution. 

​‘It’s our city. It’s so painful.’

Mikee Rakim, a humanitarian volunteer, said one group of 10 Christians told him they had been taken hostage when the fighting started. Militants beheaded two of them and were preparing to kill the rest when an airstrike hit a neighboring house, enabling them to escape. 

While most of the displaced have headed inland, about 200 are sheltering at the headquarters of the provincial government, which has distributed food, water and sleeping mats to the families camped out here. Every time airstrikes take place, they gather in small groups at the windows, which look east toward the city.

While explosions shook Marawi on Friday and fighter jets buzzed overhead, one boy pushed a baby on a stroller through a hallway. In a corner, several other children sat making toy tanks out of paper. 

“ISIS! ISIS” cried one boy, laughing as he pointed to a tiny black flag on one of the tanks.

Fahadda Camim, who was conducting an assessment for Community Family Services International, a Filipino humanitarian organization, said the children were “copying what they see outside” and were in need of counseling. 

Abdul said he did not want to watch the fighting. But he could not resist, either. 

“It’s our city,” he said. “It’s so painful. It’s impossible to turn away.”
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A speeding taxi knocks the pedestrian off her feet, sending her hurtling through the air. Dozens of people stand gawking or walk past, as if the young woman sprawled in the busy intersection doesn’t exist. A full minute passes, and another speeding vehicle, this time an SUV, tramples the prone woman. 

After a grainy video of a traffic accident in the city of Zhumadian surfaced on Chinese social media this past week, the initial reaction was outrage directed at the more than 40 pedestrians and drivers who passed within meters of the woman, all failing to offer help.

But for many Chinese, the video was something more: a 94-second reminder of their society’s deep rot.

Morally bankrupt

Even as China presents itself outwardly as a prosperous rising power, around kitchen tables and in private WeChat groups, Chinese citizens routinely grumble about a nation that’s gone bankrupt when it comes to two qualities: “suzhi,” or “personal character,” and “dixian,” literally “bottom line,” or a basic, inviolable sense of right and wrong.

Here, the common refrain goes, is an unmoored country where manufacturers knowingly sell toxic baby formula and fraudulent children’s vaccines. Restaurants cook with recycled “gutter oil” and grocery stores peddle fake eggs, fake fruit, even fake rice. Many Chinese say they avoid helping people on the street because of widespread stories about extortionists who seek help from passers-by and then feign injuries and demand compensation, perhaps explaining the Zhumadian incident.

“It’s a problem with the entire country: our moral bottom line has fallen so low,” Tian You, a novelist based in the southeastern city of Shenzhen, said by phone. “If I’m truly honest, I wonder, would I myself have dared to help the woman?”

Drivers under investigation

After the Zhumadian video surfaced this week, garnering more than 5 million views in its first 24 hours before being censored, local police were forced to disclose that the accident took place weeks earlier, on April 21. The woman, surnamed Ma, died, while the two drivers who hit her were held under investigation, police said, without giving further details.

The news swept through social media and even state media outlets. The Communist Youth League, an influential party organization, circulated the video on its Weibo account, urging its 5 million followers to “reject indifference.” An opinion column on china.com, a state media organ, asked citizens to reflect on the tragedy. Others used the episode as a starting point to vent about social ills.

“Like the polluted haze facing our country, we see boundless corruption, left-behind children, medical disputes and so forth,” a columnist in the Chengdu Economic Daily wrote. “Have our society’s morals gotten better or worse in the last 10 years? What about our future, are you confident about that? Don’t ask me, because I’m not.”

Decades of concern

Public concern about China’s morals has reached back decades and across age groups. Ever since China began its free market reforms in the 1980s, older citizens have frequently griped about its moral decay and profess nostalgia about a more innocent socialist era, while younger, worldly Chinese wonder why fraud and fake products aren’t as rampant in other countries.

Chinese scholars say that many issues that leave the middle class disillusioned are a result of lagging government regulation and the dislocating forces of swift development.

“In the West, law, faith and morality are a three-legged stool,” said Ma Ai, a sociologist at the China University of Political Science and Law. “Our legal system is catching up, but we don’t have religion and a new moral system has not established after China transformed away from a traditional, collectivist society.”

Examples elsewhere

A national debate flared up following a similar case in 2011, when an unattended 2-year old was hit by a truck on a busy street in Guangdong province and laid in a pool of blood without any help from bystanders for seven minutes. She died later. In the following years, several cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, enacted Good Samaritan laws.

To be sure, examples of bystander apathy are ubiquitous, from the case of Kitty Genovese, the woman stabbed to death in daylight in a Queens apartment complex in 1964, to last year in Chicago, where a man who was knocked unconscious in an assault was run over and killed by a taxi after a group of bystanders walked away from him. 

In India, a video showed a man unsuccessfully pleading for help following a road accident that killed his wife and child in 2013. That same year, passers-by refused to stop to help a naked, bleeding gang-rape victim after she was dumped from a bus onto a New Delhi street. The 23-year-old student died of her injuries.

Chinese particularly self-critical

But the Chinese have been particularly self-critical on the matter.

In 2009, the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, ran a provocative story with a picture of a dog standing by another injured dog in a busy street and pondered whether humans would do the same. The report was headlined, “Do Chinese people lack compassion?” 

A 2014 state media poll found that Chinese thought “lacking faith and ethics” was the No. 1 social problem, followed by “being a bystander or being selfish.”

Many in China’s intelligentsia reject the idea that an ancient strain of Chinese culture that focuses on the immediate family explains modern tragedies like Zhumadian. Confucius, after all, taught the Golden Rule. And Mencius, another revered philosopher, urged his disciples to love others’ children and respect others’ parents as one would their own.

More frequently heard are indictments of the Communist regime that has suppressed religion and traditional values and emphasized stability over justice.

Tian, the Shenzhen writer, cited the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao Zedong in the 1960s, which turned families and neighbors against each other in a battle for survival. Hyper-capitalistic, no-holds-barred competition consumed the reform era that followed Mao’s death.

“Our political system doesn’t regulate the things it should and it manages things it shouldn’t,” said Zhang Wen, a well-known Beijing commentator who pointed out that many charitable organizations have disbanded due to government pressure, resulting in a decline of “charity spirit.”

In his own middle-class circle, Zhang said, many friends speak about feeling “emotionally withdrawn” in the pressure-cooker economy.

“We’ve become individuals, alienated and doing whatever we can to get ahead,” he said. “There is no space left to care for others.”
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Susi Pudjiastuti, Indonesia’s minister of marine affairs, who is known for blowing up foreign fishing ships that trespass into her nation’s waters, has urged the United Nations to declare illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUUF) an organized crime.

IUUF is not a new entry in the annals of international crimes. But as more nations are working to manage their resources to prevent overfishing in their offshore and coastal waters, IUUF is a growing concern, according to the U.N.

Although hard numbers are difficult to gather, the world’s fisheries in 2012 produced roughly 160 million tons of fish and generated over $129 billion in exports while providing nutrition for billions of people, according to World Bank data.

Speaking at the U.N. Ocean Conference this week in New York City, Pudjiastuti said fishing boat crews involved in IUUF “are involved not only in fish crimes but also smuggling drugs, weapons and other illegal economic products, even human trafficking. This disrupts domestic economic competition because the perpetrators have no cost and gain so much profit.”

There is little disagreement that billions of dollars, or even tens of billions, are at stake with IUUF each year.

Dependent on ocean, fishing

According to the World Bank, Indonesia, which has 2.6 million fishermen and 140 million citizens who rely on marine and coastal economic systems, claims IUUF losses up to tens of millions of dollars per year.

Pudjiastuti has been pushing to make illegal fishing a transnational crime since 2015.

She has the backing of General Assembly President Peter Thomson, a diplomat from Fiji, a Pacific Island nation that “is extremely reliant on marine resources from an economic and food security perspective,” according to a study by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

“I welcome Indonesia’s efforts in this field. IUUF is indeed a transnational crime,” Thomson told VOA Indonesia. “Ultimately, it is the responsibility of all parties, international organizations, governments, civil society, NGOs and the scientific community. This is not just an individual’s responsibility but the responsibility of all of us.”

With others at the conference, Thomson also spoke out against the plague of plastic waste polluting the world’s oceans.

WATCH: UN Official Peter Thomson: ‘The Ocean Is in Deep Trouble’

“The sea is in the midst of a plastic-and-pollution disaster,” he said. “If we don’t act, there will be more plastic than fish in 2050.”

Indonesians, who produce more ocean waste than any nation other than China, rallied to this issue at the conference. Among the Indonesian delegates were Melati and Isabel Wijsen, two Bali teenagers who initiated Bye Bye Plastic Bags, the community movement that aims to reduce plastic waste.

Sustainable goals

Combating IUUF is one of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, which include steps to end overfishing; end illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and destructive fishing practices; and implement science-based management plans. The U.N. hopes the steps restore fish stocks in the shortest time feasible, at least to levels that can produce maximum sustainable yield as determined by their biological characteristics.

The Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by all 193 heads of state via a U.N. resolution in September 2015 at a special Summit of the United Nations in New York.

Pudjiastuti is both revered and criticized for her hard-line approach to combat illegal fishing. Last year, Indonesia, made up of more than 17,000 islands, sank 60 foreign fishing ships as part of its independence day celebrations.

In May, Pudjiastuti was one of the recipients of the Peter Benchley Ocean Award — named after the author of Jaws. She was cited for her efforts in protecting Indonesia’s marine ecosystem, as well as tackling poachers and organized crime.

About 10,000 vessels a year use to fish in Indonesian waters, but that has stopped. “We catch them and we sink them, and it has been an effective deterrence,” she said.

Since taking office in 2014, after a three-decade career as a seafood entrepreneur, Pudjiastuti has blown up hundreds of vessels, but the tactic has created tensions with regional neighbors.

China causes concerns

Indonesian officials are particularly worried about China’s expansion of its fishing fleets and occasional forays into the waters of other countries in the region.

In the past, Pudjiastuti has said they have captured few Chinese vessels, which are big, fast and often accompanied by their nation’s coast guard.

But she continues to push for an end to IUUF.

“It’s better to have an idea that is too early than too late,” she said. “I am proud that Indonesia is thinking about this ahead of other countries, and that we have actually done it, not just talk about it.”

This report originated with VOA Indonesia.
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