Gunmen Massacre Staff at Yemeni Nursing Home

Armed men stormed a Christian-administered nursing home in Aden on Friday, tying up and killing the staff, including six nuns, guards, and a gardener. Sixteen people were left dead in the attack, though the facility’s 60 residents were left unharmed. The nursing home was established by Mother Teresa in the 1970s and the killed workers included people of Indian, Rwandan, Kenyan, Ethiopian, and Yemeni nationality.

On Sunday, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula denied responsibility for the attack. “This is not our operation and it’s not our way of fight,” the group claimed in a statement issued by the terrorist group’s political wing, Ansar al-Sharia. Pope Francis addressed the massacre on Sunday, calling those killed “the martyrs of today” in a mass at St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.

Turkey’s Leading Opposition Newspaper Seized by Government

After the government seized the offices of the country’s largest opposition newspaper, Zaman, on Friday, the paper returned to print on Sunday with pro-government articles, though it is unclear who published the latest edition. Many of the staff have left the paper and founded a new opposition paper, Yarina Bakis, which means “Look to Tomorrow.” The news of the office’s seizure on Friday created outrage; demonstrators gathered at the paper’s Istanbul office and Zaman staff livestreamed the rally before it was broken up by riot police that night. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has stressed that the seizure was the result of a court order and said he could not interfere because the matter was “legal, not political.” No reason has been given for the court order to take over the paper, but analysts believe it is the latest volley in ongoing conflict between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government and popular cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Headlines

• Militants attacked army and police barracks in Ben Guerdan, Tunisia, near the Libyan border, this morning, leaving at least 30 security officials and civilians and 21 militants dead; six militants were arrested and Tunisian authorities locked down two border crossings and a nearby resort town.

• At least 61 people, 52 of whom were civilians, were killed on Sunday when the Islamic State detonated a truck bomb at a military checkpoint in Hillah, Iraq, south of Baghdad.

• Egyptian Interior Minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar has accused members of the Muslim Brotherhood trained in Gaza by Hamas of assassinating Egypt’s top prosecutor with a bomb last year and said that 14 people have been arrested in connection to the crime; Hamas has denied involvement in the attack.

• On Sunday, Jabhat al-Nusra attacked a Kurdish district of Aleppo with mortar and rocket fire, killing at least nine civilians.

• Israel has accused a Palestinian man of traveling to Egypt to recruit students for military training in Gaza and to build up “military infrastructure” in the West Bank; the man was arrested in January and is expected to face indictment soon.

Arguments and Analysis

“This Is What Life Is Like for Egyptians Caught in a War” (Maged Atef, BuzzFeed)

“Until 2013, there were hardly any military operations inside al-Arish. Militia groups only targeted military checkpoints on major highways, and residents in the city weren’t bothered. But after Wilayat Sinai attacked the army’s largest headquarters in the region last January, killing more than 35 and wounding nearly 80 soldiers, the Egyptian military ramped up its aerial bombardment campaign. Since then, Islamist fighters in the towns of Sheikh Zuwayed and Rafah have fled and moved into al-Arish and targeted the military convoys within the city. ‘Now death is at every corner,’ said Said al-Meteny, who used to run a clothing shop in al-Arish until the violence caused him to shut it down. According to locals in North Sinai who spoke to BuzzFeed News, the majority of fighters in the province are originally from the Bedouin town of Sheikh Zuwayed, near the border with the Gaza Strip. Khaled, who is in his mid-forties and asked to be identified with a pseudonym because he has many relatives fighting for Wilayat Sinai, said the villages around Sheikh Zuwayed have become the main battlefield between the army and the Islamists. ‘The Islamist forces are stronger and more prominent in southern parts of Sheikh Zuwayed,’ he said. ‘It is difficult for the army to enter those villages with its heavy machinery and it has to resort to airstrikes and shelling.’”

“Is the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization or a firewall against violent extremism?” (Marc Lynch, Monkey Cage)

“The Muslim Brotherhood, at least in post-coup Egypt, no longer enjoys a strong presence in society with an elaborate network of social services and a tolerated public presence. Its patient strategy of long-term change through participation lies in ruins. Its organization has been shattered, with its leadership either in prison, exiled or dead and the survivors divided between multiple power centers inside Egypt and abroad. It is no longer deeply embedded in society or engaged in a patient strategy of Islamization of the political and cultural realms. It no longer has a robust internal organization, vast financial resources, a clearly defined ideology, or a tightly disciplined membership. It is neither shrouded in secrecy nor is it rigidly hierarchical. This has important implications for long-standing hypotheses and assumptions about the Brotherhood and Islamist politics more broadly. Researchers should therefore admit to greater uncertainty about the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology, organization and strategy than ever before. Arguments that held up well five years ago no longer necessarily apply.”

-J. Dana Stuster

SALEH AL-OBEIDI/AFP/Getty Images