"He has learned to button his shirt using only his left hand, to roll his sleeve with his teeth, to balance on his right foot in the shower. He cannot forgive, though he is desperate to forget. But at night his dreams betray him.

This is how it happened, Abdulle told the Guardian. He was a prisoner in an insurgents' house in Mogadishu, lying on his side, one hand chained to his ankles. He was 17, with fluff on his cheeks and unspeakable fear in his heart. Three other young men were with him – Jalylani, Ali, Abduqadir.

A guard, from the Islamist group al-Shabaab, which is trying to overthrow the Somali government, gripped his shoulder. 'Ismael Khalif Abdulle, come with me.'

A convoy of rebel battlewagons cleared the way through the battered streets. Reaching Masalah, an old military barracks, he saw his mother through the car window and shouted to her. The guard slapped his face. 'Today is not the day to call your mother,' he said.

Ordered to witness the punishment of the "spies and bandits" or face lashes themselves, the entire neighbourhood had assembled. Also watching were some of the Shabaab's top leaders – Sheikh Mukhtar Robow, the Somali-Swede Fuad Shangole, and Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, the American who recruits and finances foreign fighters.

In the middle of the stony parade ground were about 20 militiamen in green fatigues. Their faces were masked. They were wearing surgical gloves. On the ground was a single plastic mattress.

Abdulle says he was made to lie down. His left hand was tied to his right ankle with a thick rope, leaving the other limbs free for what was to come. Rubber surgical tubing bit into his right biceps – a tourniquet. One rebel grabbed his hand, another his forearm. They pulled in opposite directions as a piece of plastic was laid over his wrist.

"Please make it quick," he pleaded.

A heavily built man drew a large wooden-handled knife normally used to slaughter camels. The knife descended.

Though their horror was far from over, Abdulle and the three other young men "cross amputated" – a process of cutting off a hand and foot from opposite sides of the body – by the Shabaab on 26 June 2009, eventually escaped from their Islamist captors, and managed to cross to the government-controlled side of the city. Abdulle recently managed to flee Somalia, and reach a safehouse in Nairobi, Kenya, where he gave this interview.

His story offers a rare insight into how the Shabaab is using its extreme interpretation of Islam to establish order through fear – and to find recruits.

Abdulle was born in 1992, a year after the last effective government fell, and warlords took over the country. As far as it is possible to have a normal upbringing amid the anarchy, he did. Once Shabaab forces took full control of the Bakara market area where he lived, in early 2009, security immediately improved – but at a huge cost to personal and social freedoms.

The UAE's highest judicial body says a man can beat his wife and young children as long as the beating leaves no physical marks.

The decision by the Federal Supreme Court shows the strong influence of Islamic law in the Emirates despite its international appeal in which foreign residents greatly outnumber the local population.

The court made the ruling earlier this month in the case of a man who left cuts and bruises on his wife and adult daughter after a beating.

It says the man was guilty of harming the women but noted that Islamic codes allow for "discipline" if no marks are left. It also says children who have reached "adulthood" — approximately puberty — cannot be struck.

The ruling was reported today in the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National.

Two teenage suicide bombers blew themselves up at a Sufi shrine in Karachi killing nine worshippers, including two children, as Pakistan battles a new wave of Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked violence.

At least 64 people were also wounded in the attack late Thursday said Fayyaz Leghari, chief of police in Karachi, a teeming port city in the country's south that is a maelstrom of communal and criminal violence.

He said 15 patients remain in a critical condition.

Provincial police surgeon Hamid Parhiar said his team found the heads and limbs of the two suicide attackers and said one was 14-years-old and the second was not older than 18.

"We have given their samples to the police for DNA tests in Islamabad," said Parhiar.

The bombs exploded at the entrance of the shrine to Abdullah Shah Ghazi, a saint in the Sufi mystical strain of Islam, as devotees packed it for a weekly gathering in the city's seaside Clifton district.

Ghait is famous in the Muslim world for memorising the Koran by the age of 17.

Yesterday he pleaded guilty to two charges under the Sexual Offences Act of exposing his genitals with the intention that someone would see them and be caused alarm or distress.

Magistrates jailed him for six weeks on each charge, to serve side-by-side, and placed him on the Sex Offenders' Register for seven years.

Ghait was one of 21 Libyan imams invited to Britain by the UK Arabic Society to preach at mosques during Ramadan.

He was staying at a flat in Easton, Bristol, when the offences happened in August.

Sacred Heart primary in Blackburn could become the first Catholic school in Britain to be converted into an Islamic faith school following a dramatic change in the pupil population.
More than nine-in-10 of the school's pupils were Catholic a decade ago but that number plummeted to just three per cent this year.
The local diocese admitted the school – which must have a Catholic head teacher and devote 10 per cent of the timetable to Christian-based religious education – was no longer “serving the needs” of the community.
Under current legislation, the local council must effectively run a competition to find a new organisation to run the school.
Blackburn’s Masjid-e-Tauheedul Islam mosque, which already runs a girls’ secondary school in the town, is among a series of organisations expressing an interest.
Hamid Patel, principal of the Tauheedul Islam Girls’ High School, told the Times Educational Supplement: “Given that most of the pupils are Muslim it makes sense for us to engage with the school.
“We will need more information on the expectations of the local authority, but if the community and the school want us to be involved, then, yes, we are interested.”

The daughter of an al-Qaeda in Iraq militant who forced her mother into marriage and motherhood, then disappeared, Zahraa is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children whose births amid the anarchy and insurgent violence of Iraq were never legally recorded.

Without the paperwork to prove that she is the child of an Iraqi man and that her parents were joined in a legitimate marriage before her birth, Zahraa and others like her have no rights as Iraqi citizens, legal experts say. They do not have birth certificates, passports or national identification cards and will be unable to go to school or hold a government job.

These children, a little-noticed legacy of more than seven years of war, are paying for the sins of their fathers.

"It's dangerous because in the future they might hurt the society that hurt them," said Ahmed Jassim, director of the Nour Foundation, a nongovernmental organization working to improve the lives of the militants' offspring in the northeastern Iraqi province of Diyala.

The children are products of a time when al-Qaeda in Iraq controlled large swaths of the nation after the U.S.-led invasion. The legal system broke down, institutions stopped functioning and an insurgency raged. Some Sunni Muslim communities gave sanctuary to the men, Iraqi and foreign Arabs, believing they would help rid them of a foreign army. But al-Qaeda in Iraq quickly grew brutal, overpowered other Iraqi insurgent groups, declared an Islamic state and enforced a severe form of Islamic law.

...Officials in the Interior Ministry tasked with assisting victims of the Iraq war said the women are not considered victims of rape and, although the situation is unfortunate, there is nothing they can do.

"Helping them could encourage al-Qaeda in Iraq," said Fadhil al-Shweilli, a ministry official who deals with victims of war.

Legal experts said the easiest solution would be to give the children to orphanages or forge their birth certificates with the name of a fake father.

At least six children were killed when a rocket exploded in a village on Sunday in northern Kunduz province, a provincial official and the Afghan interior ministry said.

The incident happened in Ali Abad district of Kunduz, which took the brunt of attacks by the Taliban insurgents on Saturday when the militants fired rockets as part of an effort to disrupt the parliamentary poll in many parts of the country.

Habibullah Mohtashim, the district chief of Ali Abad, said eight children were killed while playing with a rocket round left lying on the ground.

"Seven died on the spot and the other one passed away while being taken for treatment," Mohtashim said.

Mohtashim said the rocket may have been fired by the Taliban on Saturday and did not explode, or was placed for a planned attack which never happened.

Fataho was a long-time Christian deeply involved in the activities of the small, secret Christian community, sources said. Area Christians said they suspected someone had informed the insurgents of Fataho’s faith.

The assailants abducted his wife and children, later releasing her on the condition that she surrender the little ones to be trained as soldiers, sources said.

“We know they have taken the children to brain-wash them, to change their way of life from Christian to Muslim and to teach them the Quran,” said one source. “Al Shabaab was aware that her husband was a Christian, but they were not sure of her faith.”

Ahmad Sani Yerima. Image from Wikipedia.

The quiet marriage of former Zamfara State governor and Senate Minority Whip, Senator Ahmed Sani Yerima to a 13-year old Egyptian girl, has continued to attract condemnation by the womenfolk.
A coalition of women groups yesterday took its protest to the Senate, urging the Senate President, David Mark leadership of the Upper House to suspend him for marrying an underaged girl.  

The coalition, led by Dr. Mma Nkwocha, comprised the Medical Women Association of Nigeria (MWAN), Women Rights Advancement and Pro-tection Alternative (WRAPA) and the Global Association of Women Attorneys (GAFA).
In a swift reaction to the protest, Senators Chris Anyanwu, Emem Uffot Ekaette, Nkechi Nwaogu and Patricia Akwashiki pledged to provide support to the group in its advocacy against the act.

In addition to the call on the Senate leadership to suspend Yerima, the coalition urged his constituents in Zamafara Central Senatorial District to recall him from the Senate.
But Chair of the Senate Committee on Information and Media, Senator Ayogu Eze, said at a briefing session yesterday that those opposed to Yerima’s marriage should go to court.

Sheik Mohammed Hamzi, an official of the Islamist Yemeni opposition party Islaah and the imam of the Al-Rahman mosque in the Yemeni capital of Sana, is one of those who staunchly opposes a legal ban on child marriage.
Although he emphasizes that a woman should not get married before she is physically and mentally ready and that she herself needs to accept the marriage, he believes a law that prohibits child marriage constitutes a rights violation.  
“I am against the child marriage law because it restrains the freedom of others. When a certain age [for marriage] is set, it violates the rights of others. For example, imagine a young man of 13 or 14 years of age who wants to have sex. … This is a violation of his rights,” Sheik Hamzi told The Times in an interview at his Sana home last week.

Pakistan's top Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is buying children as young as 7 to serve as suicide bombers in the growing spate of attacks against Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. targets, U.S. Defense Department and Pakistani officials say.

A Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the going price for child bombers was $7,000 to $14,000 - huge sums in Pakistan, where per-capita income is about $2,600 a year.

"[Mehsud] has turned suicide bombing into a production output, not unlike [the way] Toyota outputs cars," a U.S. Defense Department official told reporters recently. He spoke on the condition that he not be named because of ongoing intelligence efforts to catch Mehsud, a prime target for a U.S. and Pakistani anti-Taliban campaign.