Category Archives: Lands

Turkish soldiers kill activist Kader Ortakaya at Kobane border

Firat News Agency reports: It came out that the woman killed in the attack by Turkish troops at Suruç-Kobanê border today is 28-year-old Kader Ortakaya, an activist from the Collective Freedom Platform and post-graduate at Marmara University.

Kader Ortakaya has lost her life after being shot on the head as Turkish troops fired real bullets and intense tear gas on artists affiliated to the Initiative for Free Art who formed a human chain at Suruç-Kobanê border today.

Soldiers also fired tear gas and real bullets on the people at the Kobanê side of the border.

The young woman’s body has been taken to the hospital in Kobanê and will reportedly be transferred to the Forensic Medicine Institution in Urfa via the Mürşitpınar border crossing.

Kader Ortakaya was from Siverek district of Urfa and doing master degree at Marmara University in Istanbul after graduating from the department of sociology. Ortakaya was joining the resistance vigil in the villages of Mehser and Miseynter for around 25 days. She had also taken part in the works of women’s academy in Amed, Gezi protests of last year, as a person known to be sensitive towards social events.

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Pope Francis: ‘The Vatican is with the Kurdish people’

Kurdish Question reports: In a gathering of the Global Meeting of Popular Movements hosted by the Vatican in Rome between the dates of 27-29 October, Pope Francis met with Kurdish activists from Kurdish Network.

The event was attended by trade unions, women’s movements and land movements from 50 countries. The discussions revolved around struggling against the structural causes of inequality and how the struggles of the people should unify in order to bring about change that transcends national, continental and religious boundaries.

Pope Francis met with several delegations from different countries. Members of the Kurdish Network based in Rome met with Pope Francis to discuss the situation in Kobane and ask for support for the Kurdish people’s resistance against ISIS. The Pope stated that he was following the situation closely and that the “Vatican is with the Kurdish people”.

The Kobane resistance was included in the final resolution of the meeting. The resolution stated that a corridor must be opened to Kobane, support for ISIS — both financial and logistical — should be ceased and the Rojava autonomous region must be recognised by the international community.

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Latest U.S. airstrikes in Syria target groups fighting against Assad regime

The Associated Press reports: U.S. aircraft bombed al-Qaida’s Syrian branch as well as another hard-line rebel faction in northwestern Syria early on Thursday, activists said, in an apparent widening of targets of the American-led coalition against the Islamic State extremist group.

The series of airstrikes overnight targeted three different areas near the Turkish border, hitting a headquarters and a vehicle belonging to the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front as well as a compound of the deeply conservative Ahrar al-Sham rebel group. It marked only the second time the United States had expanded its aerial campaign against Islamic State militants to hit other extremists in Syria.

There was no immediate confirmation from U.S. officials, but the apparent strikes took place amid a Nusra Front offensive that has routed Western-backed rebel groups from their strongholds in Syria’s Idlib province near the Turkish border. The timing suggests that Washington could be trying to curb the militant assault and destroy weapons supplies of hard-line rebels and al-Qaida fighters.

But by striking groups whose primary focus is fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad, the U.S. risks further enraging many Syrians in opposition-held areas who believe Washington is aiding Assad in his struggle to hold onto power in the country’s 3 ½-year-old civil war. Purported civilian casualties have only compounded those frustrations, and activists said Thursday that at least two children were killed in the overnight strikes. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi Sunni opponents of ISIS unlikely to grow in strength

IHS Jane’s Terrorism & Insurgency Monitor: The security situation in Iraq rapidly deteriorated following the fall of Mosul in June 2014 during an insurgent offensive spearheaded by what was then the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), but has since been renamed the Islamic State. Since then, much discussion has arisen on how the group can either be contained or ‘rolled back’ by reducing its territorial holdings on a substantial scale and thus significantly weakening its power base within the country. However, for such an objective, a fundamental prerequisite is a local Sunni Muslim force on the ground that can contest the Islamic State’s control of Sunni majority areas of Iraq, notably the provinces of Anbar, Ninawa, and Salaheddine, as well as parts of Babil, Diyala, and Kirkuk.

In assessing how realistic a prospect this is, both currently and in the short-to-medium term, it is necessary to examine the existing Sunni initiatives aimed at combating the Islamic State, as well as analysing the dynamics between the group and the other Sunni insurgent organisations in Iraq. Considering that such insurgent groups have their own local support bases within the Sunni population, it may be necessary to attempt to persuade such militants to form a wider, co-ordinated initiative against the Islamic State.

However, this task already faces significant obstacles, most notably because the main Sunni insurgent groups that might combat the Islamic State are generally committed to a path of ‘revolution’ in some form that cannot be reconciled to the present existing order in Iraq. So, rather than merely seeking reform within the system to strive for, for example, greater autonomy for majority Sunni provinces – possibly in the form of a federal system – or seek concessions in the form of reforms to legislation that has widely been perceived by Sunnis as discriminatory, there is a widespread belief among such groups of the need to overthrow the government in Baghdad.

What system should follow that overthrow is of course a defining difference between the different insurgent groups, in particular separating the Islamic State from other actors. However, a significant problem at this juncture – as opposed to the 2005-06 period when the Sunni Awakening Councils were formed – is that with the perceived failure of the political process for Sunnis following the rollback of an earlier manifestation of the Islamic State (the Islamic State in Iraq), from the end of 2006 onwards, Sunni insurgent actors may conclude that consistently rejectionist insurgent groups, particularly those of a Baathist orientation, were correct all along. As a result, they may refuse to countenance engagement with the political process. [Continue reading…]

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Peace Now highlights ‘epidemic’ of incitement in Israel

Mairav Zonszein writes: Peace Now has launched an online video campaign to raise awareness about incitement, intolerance and hate speech directed specifically at “leftists” in Israel and expressed most visibly on Facebook. The organization produced a two-and-a-half minute video entitled, “The writing is still on the wall,” displaying a selection of comments left on its Facebook page. To give you an idea of just a few:

-Leftist whores burn already, you should all be shot in the head.
-You should all be cut up into pieces immediately!!! Israel haters.
-Traitors like you should be hanged.
-Stinky leftists, you should be put in gas chambers, you are worse than the Arabs.
-How great if all the Israeli leftists were kidnapped and killed!

There are also comments specifically calling for the death of Peace Now director Yariv Oppenheimer as well as his family members, in addition to a fairly large amount of Holocaust references.

According to Peace Now’s new media and campaign manager Yaniv Shacham, the video shows only a small fraction of the comments they receive, which he estimates number in the hundreds of thousands.

“We are talking about an epidemic,” Shacham told +972. “It’s not just a few teenagers; we are talking about women and men, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, old and young.” [Continue reading…]

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Inside Kobane

Ersin Caksu reports: Kobane is imbued with a tremendous spirit of solidarity.

Travelling around the city by day is simple because the first vehicle you meet on the street will stop and the driver will offer you a lift.

Maybe that solidarity helps explain why Kobane has held out for so long.

Very few people are still living in their own houses. When necessary, the doors of empty properties are opened and needy people are relocated.

Those still in their homes share the cheese, pickles, jams and dried vegetables they have stocked for the winter with those in need.

Although people have few belongings left, they get by through sharing what they have.

For example, if a car is needed, the YPG unlock a garage, put the owner’s name and the car’s number plate on record so that they can be compensated, and the vehicle is used.

There is no commercial activity in the city. The only business still open is the bakery.

The bread produced here is distributed free among the people.

Other food, which is mainly canned food from the stocks and from the humanitarian aid sent to Kobane, is distributed on certain days of the week as equally as possible.

Water is distributed by tankers. The local administration also distributes flour once every three days. Five households share a 50kg (110lb) sack of flour.

Those civilians who can provide voluntary help behind the frontline.

They repair vehicles, guns and generators, in a city that has had no electricity for the past 18 months.

They help doctors tend to the wounded, carry arms and ammunition to the frontline, cook for fighters and repair their clothes. [Continue reading…]

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Kobane official calls for more outside help to defeat ISIS

Rudaw reports: Anwar Muslim, president of the Syrian Kurdish canton of Kobane, appealed for more international support and weapons to defeat Islamic State militants.

He thanked the United States, which has air dropped weapons, and the Iraqi Peshmerga, who crossed the Turkish border into Kobane last Friday and where they appear to have helped to halt ISIS attacks.

Muslim, who travelled from Kobane to Erbil for a conference, said the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian Kurdish militia, now considered itself part of the international coalition battling ISIS.

The town of Kobane and the surrounding canton had been under pressure from ISIS for months with no outside assistance to its defenders. Thanks to US air support and Peshmerga reinforcements, the town has now held out for more than 50 days.

Some 30 per cent of the canton was now out of the control of ISIS, Muslim told the second day of the Middle East Research Institute conference.

“ISIS is a disease just like cancer,” he said. “We acknowledge the help of all international forces and the giving of weapons in particular.”

ISIS had to be “killed” because of its savagery and opposition to humanitarian values and he hailed the YPG as “heroes”.

The co-operation between the US and Peshmerga with the YPG of recent weeks marks a significant shift in Washington’s attitude towards a group previously ostracised because of its links to the Turkish Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), considered a terrorist organisation by Washington and Ankara.

The apparent political settlement or “marriage of convenience” between the US and the YPG could prove a model as Washington sought to create partnerships with other Syrian opposition groups, Max Hoffman of the Centre for American Progress, told the forum. [Continue reading…]

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Think helping to fight ISIS will get you off terrorist list? Think again

McClatchy reports: The role of Syrian Kurds in the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State has prompted calls for the removal of an affiliated Kurdish guerrilla group from the U.S. blacklist, bringing fresh scrutiny to a terrorist-designation process that some critics call arbitrary and outdated.

So far, the U.S. government’s response to the fighters of the Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, could be summed up as: Thanks for the help, but you’re staying on the list.

Shedding a U.S. foreign terrorist designation is a long and complicated undertaking – a feat accomplished by just a handful of the dozens of groups that have landed on the list since its inception in 1997. A designation means that a group has earned the dubious label – and economic sanctions – of being named a “tier-one” foreign terrorist organization. Tier-two members are banned from entry to the United States; tier-three groups are undesignated but closely monitored.

Several organizations have languished on the State Department’s tier-one list even though they’re essentially defunct, with their leaders killed, jailed or engaged in peace talks with the governments they once attacked. Others on the 59-member list have been weakened but are still considered threatening. And, of course, there are the active, high-profile groups that in American minds are synonymous with terrorism: the Islamic State, al Qaida and Hezbollah, for example.

Those three, as well as the PKK, are among a half-dozen U.S.-designated groups now involved in the conflict over the Islamic State’s cross-border fiefdom. The battle is stirring up an unprecedented soup of militants, with five tier-one terrorist groups – both Sunni and Shiite Muslim – on the same side as the United States against the Islamic State, itself a designee. The Obama administration’s unsavory de facto partners against the Islamic State include the Lebanese militants of Hezbollah and the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al Qaida. [Continue reading…]

Since the Nusra Front was also targeted in the series of cruise missile strikes that marked the expansion into Syria of the U.S. war on ISIS, I think both they and the administration would dispute this claim that they have become de facto partners.

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Slaughter of Anbar tribesmen shows weakness in U.S. plan to beat ISIS

McClatchy reports: For four grueling months, Naim al Goud, his kinsmen and the local police fought off an Islamic State offensive against his town near Hit, a key city in Iraq’s war-torn Anbar province. In his telling, their constant pleas for Iraqi army intervention and U.S. airstrikes were ignored.

“Nobody gave us any kind of help,” said al Goud, a sheikh of the Albu Nimr, one of Anbar’s largest Sunni Muslim tribes. He said he texted target locations to Iraqi commanders to relay to their U.S counterparts, with no response. “We saw American fighters flying overhead. Maybe they hit somewhere else, but not the places we wanted them to attack.”

Exhausted, hungry and low on ammunition, al Goud and hundreds of his tribesmen ceased firing on Oct. 22 in return for a pledge from the Islamic State that civilians wouldn’t be harmed. They then set out on a 15-hour overnight drive through the desert, leaving behind families and associates and nursing another in a long list of Sunni tribal grievances that are hindering reconciliation with the Shiite-led government and threatening to derail President Barack Obama’s plan to crush the Islamic State.

“They did nothing for us,” al Goud said in an interview last week in a rented house in Baghdad. “It’s all killing and disaster.”

A week later, the Islamic State executed more than 40 Albu Nimr captives on a Hit street and drove thousands of Albu Nimr civilians into the desert, where hundreds have been slaughtered – more than 400 by Monday. Tribal leaders’ calls for help from the Iraqi army and for U.S. airstrikes again went unanswered. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli forces displayed ‘callous indifference’ in deadly attacks on family homes in Gaza

Amnesty: Israeli forces have killed scores of Palestinian civilians in attacks targeting houses full of families which in some cases have amounted to war crimes, Amnesty International has disclosed in a new report on the latest Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip.

Families under the Rubble: Israeli attacks on inhabited homes details eight cases where residential family homes in Gaza were attacked by Israeli forces without warning during Operation Protective Edge in July and August 2014, causing the deaths of at least 104 civilians including 62 children. The report reveals a pattern of frequent Israeli attacks using large aerial bombs to level civilian homes, sometimes killing entire families.

“Israeli forces have brazenly flouted the laws of war by carrying out a series of attacks on civilian homes, displaying callous indifference to the carnage caused,” said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International.

“The report exposes a pattern of attacks on civilian homes by Israeli forces which have shown a shocking disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, who were given no warning and had no chance to flee.” [Continue reading…]

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Yazidis face genocide by ISIS after U.S. turns away

The Daily Beast reports: In August, the Obama administration intervened to stop what it called a pending genocide of Yazidi minorities in Iraq. Now the U.S. is gone, but the genocide continues.

Thousands of Yazidis remain stranded and starving on Mount Sinjar while thousands more have been sold off into slavery by ISIS, according to Yazidi leaders, several of whom are in Washington to beg for urgent assistance.

When President Obama announced U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq in early August, he said the mission was twofold: to protect U.S. personnel in Erbil and to save the ethnic Yazidis from ISIS, who had fled from their villages, chased by ISIS, and were stranded on the mountain with no food, no supplies, and no protection.

“People are starving. And children are dying of thirst. Meanwhile, ISIL forces below have called for the systematic destruction of the entire Yazidi people, which would constitute genocide,” said Obama. “And when we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye. We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide. That’s what we’re doing on that mountain.”

At first, international airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops somewhat alleviated the Yazidi crisis and opened up an escape corridor for many Yazidis to flee. But in October, the United States turned to other parts of the battle, leaving the Yazidis largely to fend for themselves. ISIS has now surrounded Mount Sinjar again, trapping approximately 10,000 Yazidis there. Meanwhile, ISIS forces are taking over Yazidi villages near the mountain one after another, killing the men and selling the women and children into the slave trade. [Continue reading…]

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How Iraq’s Shia militias are turning the fight against ISIS into a campaign against Sunnis

Tirana Hassan writes: Behind the relative safety of the large concrete blast walls, a Kurdish Peshmerga commander sat behind a dark wooden desk and described the situation in the battle-scarred towns in Iraq’s northern province of Salahaddin.

“There is no one left in any of these villages, they are all empty,” he told me.

This was not entirely true. As my colleague and I drove into the village of Yengija, some 50 miles south of Peshmerga-controlled Kirkuk, in an area controlled by the Islamic State until late August, the streets were packed — but not with residents.

Men who looked like soldiers lined the main street, scores of them, standing at attention with AK-47 assault rifles slung over their shoulders. With U.S.-provided Humvees parked along the side of the street, it looked like a military parade was about to start. But there was nothing official about this army. The men bore no insignia of Iraq’s armed forces: Most had on mismatched military fatigues, while some wore black balaclavas printed with a menacing skeleton face. From their slender frames, it looked like some were no more than 16 or 17.

It was only when we saw the bright yellow flags flying from a checkpoint and burned-out buildings that we realized who these armed men were. They were part of the Saraya al-Khorasani Brigade, one of the many Shiite militias that have assumed a national military role since the Iraqi government’s security forces crumbled this summer, fleeing their positions as the Islamic State fighters swept through Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

The Khorasani Brigade is a relatively recent addition to the network of Shiite militias in Iraq — and despite a similar sounding name, has no connection to the Khorasan Group, the alleged al Qaeda-affiliated organization that was the target of U.S. airstrikes in Syria in September. The Khorasani Brigade is just one of dozens of similar militias that are essentially running their own show in parts of the country. These Shiite militias are supplied with weapons and equipment from the central government in Baghdad, which is now being assisted by a U.S.-led military alliance in its fight against the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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HRW: ISIS tortured Kobane child hostages

Human Rights Watch: Kurdish children from the Syrian city of Kobani (or Ain al-`Arab in Arabic) were tortured and abused while detained by Islamic State (also known as ISIS), Human Rights Watch said today. Four children gave detailed accounts of the suffering they endured while held for four months with about 100 other children.

The children, aged 14 to 16, were among 153 Kurdish boys whom ISIS abducted on May 29, 2014, as they traveled home to Kobani. According to Syrian Kurdish officials and media reports, ISIS released the last 25 of the children on October 29. Interviewed one by one in Turkey, where they had fled to safety after ISIS released them in late September, the four boys described enduring repeated beatings with a hose and electric cable, as well as being forced to watch videos of ISIS beheadings and attacks.

“Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, children have suffered the horrors of detention and torture, first by the Assad government and now by ISIS,” said Fred Abrahams, special advisor for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch. “This evidence of torture and abuse of children by ISIS underlines why no one should support their criminal enterprise.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. backs Kurds on arms for Kobane, exposing more cracks in Turkey ties

Rudaw reports: In a clear sign of further cracks in US-Turkish ties, the US Department of State said Monday it backs Erbil’s move to send more arms to Kobane, the same day the Turkish president railed against too much international attention to the besieged Syrian-Kurdish town.

A group of 150 Peshmerga fighters from the Kurdistan Region are fighting alongside Syrian-Kurdish defenders who have resisted an overrun by the Islamic State, the jihadi group most commonly known as ISIS or ISIL.

“We support what they’re (Kurds) – their help in fighting back against ISIL in Kobane, yes,” said the US State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki, responding to a reporter’s question about whether the US supports the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) decision to resupply Kurdish fighters in Kobane.

Major general Karzan Shaqlawai of the Peshmerga Ministry told Rudaw that a new resupply convoy of arms was on its way to Kobane with weapons for the Peshmerga and Syrian People’s Protection Units (YPG). They said the convoy was going through Turkey.

Ajansa Nûçeyan a Firatê reports: YPG Commander Mahmud Berxwedan said after the peshmerga forces crossed into Kobanê they have acted like a single army, rather than in coordination. He added: “The peshmerga are endeavouring to carry out what is asked of them in a self-sacrificing way.” Mahmud Berxwedan said the peshmerga had carried out effective strikes against the ISIS gangs with the heavy weaponry they had brought with them.

Mahmud Berxwedan said that since the end of October the initiative had passed to the YPG forces and answered questions from the ANF regarding the arrival of the peshmerga, the situation of civilians and the latest state of the conflict. [Continue reading…]

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This is how ISIS smuggles oil

Mike Giglio reports from Besaslan: This town on the Turkish-Syrian border is covered in trash. Residents refuse to let any outsiders — even garbagemen — inside. What makes Besaslan more guarded than the other grim towns lining what has become one of the world’s most dangerous borders sits at the end of a winding dirt road: oil.

The oil brings Omar to town weekly, huddling with grease-covered men to negotiate the purchase of faded, 17-gallon drums. A Syrian in his thirties, Omar was once a proud rebel in his country’s civil war. Now he’s a merchant in the trade that bankrolls the extremists who hijacked it: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The militants can make more than $1 million a day selling oil from fields captured in eastern Syria. But the way this shadowy trade works on the ground remains largely unknown. [Continue reading…]

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Obama administration cuts funds for investigating Bashar al-Assad’s war crimes

Foreign Policy reports: The U.S. State Department plans to cut its entire $500,000 in annual funding next year to an organization dedicated to sneaking into abandoned Syrian military bases, prisons, and government facilities to collect documents and other evidence linking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its proxies to war crimes and other mass atrocities during the country’s brutal civil war, according to the recipient of the assistance and a senior U.S. official.

The move, which has not previously been reported, comes as the Obama administration is stepping up funding to collect evidence of war crimes in Iraq by the Islamic State, an extremist Islamist organization that has horrified the world with its mass killings, enslavement of women, and beheadings of ethnic minorities, foreign aid workers, and journalists, including two American reporters who were executed in recent months. The funding shift has raised concern among human rights advocates that the United States and its allies are reducing their commitment to holding the Syrian leader accountable for the majority of Syria’s atrocities because the interests of Washington and Damascus are converging over the fight against the Islamic State.

For the past two years, the U.S. State Department has channeled a total of $1 million in funds to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a group of international war crimes prosecutors that sends local researchers, lawyers, and law students into Syrian battle zones to collect and extract files and other evidence that can help map the Syrian command structure and identify the military orders authorizing illegal activities, including barrel bomb campaigns, the starvation of besieged towns, and a spate of mass murders that have pushed the conflict’s death toll past 190,000 since March 2011.

The materials are part of a growing storehouse of evidence being collected inside Syria and then transported outside the country for safekeeping in the event that a court is set up at some time in the future for war crimes trials for senior regime officials. The commission has served as a critical plank of an American strategy aimed at assembling enough evidence to hold some of Syria’s worst violators of human rights accountable for their crimes at some point in the future.

But in an abrupt reversal, Obama administration officials recently notified the commission that the State Department would be eliminating its $500,000-a-year contribution, according to the group. [Continue reading…]

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Europe’s bird population has fallen by over 420 million in three decades

The Guardian reports: Bird populations across Europe have decreased by over 420 million in the past 30 years, according to a study that brings together the results of scientific surveys in 25 countries. While some rarer species have seen an increase in numbers due to concerted conservation efforts, more common species across Europe are facing a steep decline.

Some of the birds that have suffered the most alarming declines are the most well known species including the house sparrow which has fallen in number by 147m or 62%, the starling (53%) and skylark (46%).

The study looked at 144 species across Europe between 1980 and 2009. Dividing the species up into four groups, from extremely rare to most common, analysts found that a small number of common species declined by over 350 million –over 80% of the total population decline of birds in that time period overall. Rarer birds, in contrast, increased by over 21,000 in the same time period.

The results indicate that efforts at conserving rarer species seem to be having an impact but may be too narrow an approach, possibly at the expense of more common species. [Continue reading…]

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