The Syrian child refugee whose photo hit a nerve online #Syria

It is an everyday occurrence at border crossings out of Syria, but for four-year-old Marwan, it must have been terrifying.

After being temporarily separated from his family at the remote Hagallat crossing on Sunday, he was found by staff from the UN's refugee agency.

Andrew Harper, the head of the UN refugee agency UNHCR in Jordan, took the picture and posted it on Twitter, where it hit a nerve with many users.

It was widely reposted online.

But however heartbreaking the picture was, Mr Harper said, it was not unusual in the "chaos and confusion" of refugee border crossings.

Most refugee groups were headed by mothers bringing several children and all their possessions out of Syria, he said.

When the gates open, there is a crush as desperate refugees surge forward. Every day, children get lost.

With UNHCR staff searching for them when the surge abates, they typically do not spend too long on their own.

Mr Harper said Marwan was taken across and reunited with his mother about 10 minutes after this picture was taken.

On Tuesday, he posted another photo on Twitter that shows Marwan was at the back of a group of refugees when he was met by UNHCR staff.

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The inset image shows Marwan was not far behind his family when met by UNHCR staff

"He is separated - he is not alone," Mr Harper added.

Crossing the border is a nervous time for the children and their families - one more trauma in the hellish journey from destroyed lives in Syria to an uncertain future as refugees in a foreign land.

Most of the refugees crossing at Hagallat - which lacks even a proper road - came from Homs and al-Quaryatayn, and it was likely Marwan was from there too, said Mr Harper.

He was just one of about 1,000 people who crossed into Jordan on that day alone.

There are now 600,000 Syrian refugees registered with the UNHCR in Jordan, part of an estimated 2.4 million across the region as a whole.

A short distance inside Jordan, the mood of the children improved

Malala Yousafzai visited the border as part of her campaign for children's education

It is not clear what the future holds for young Marwan.

But with the mood of other refugee children one of relief once they cross the border, it is hoped that he, too, might look forward to a brighter future.

Malala Yousafzai, the teenager who survived a Taliban assassination attempt in Pakistan and has become a global campaigner for children's education, was also at the border on Sunday.

She witnessed emotional scenes at the border and, with her father, helped several refugees cross the no-man's land that separates the two nations.

The Malala Fund is teaming up with local Jordanian and Syrian organisations to help Syrian children get an education.

Father demands 'one million likes' dowry for daughter Yemen Facebook

Father demands 'one million likes' dowry for daughter

A Yemeni young man who sought to marry his sweetheart was shocked when her father demanded “one million likes” on Facebook as a dowry for her.

The father, Salim Ayyash, asked the would-be husband he must write the word “like” one million times over a period of one month in all his tweets and contacts with friends on Facebook. But the father quickly assured the daunted young man, identified as Osama, that he might consider cutting that number before the end of the deadline.

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Ayyash, a well-known Facebook personality in the western Yemeni province of Taizz, also told the suitor that he would be watching his Facebook and Twitter activity to check whether he was making progress.

“Ayyash said he was watching Osama’s online activities as he set off to accomplish that dowry task



…he also told him that before the end of the month, he would evaluate his achievement and could reduce the dowry if he is satisfied with his achievement,” the Saud Arabic language daily Sada said in a report from Yemen.

It said the rare request by Ayyash came amidst soaring wedding expenses and dowries (money paid by grooms to their brides under Islamic law) in Yemen.

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Post by ‎نقطة حوار‎.

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Female genital mutilation in #Egypt #UNICEF #women_right

Female genital mutilation in Egypt "the highest in the world."

According to UNICEF, 91% of women in Egypt are victims of female genital mutilation (FGM) - the largest number in a single country in the world.



The image below was shared by CNN in 1996 and caused outrage, and shows a 10-year-old girl being mutilated at a barbershop in Cairo.

Due to this, there are many misconceptions surrounding the legality and religiosity of FGM.

FGM was illegalized in Egypt in 1996 (except in hospitals). However, it was the death of an 11-year-old girl in 2007 that led to the complete ban of FGM in Egypt.

In 1997, Egypt's Al-Azhar Institution, the highest authority in the Sunni Islamic world, stated that female circumcision is "un-Islamic" and has nothing to do with religion. The former Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Sheikh Muhammad Tantawi, even declared that his own daughter had not undergone the operation.

--> In the past two years, Al-Azhar has reiterated that FGM is un-Islamic and should not occur under any circumstances. Nevertheless, Al-Azhar's calls were silenced during Morsi's regime which was dominated by ultra-conservative Islamists.

While more than three-quarters of Egyptian girls are said to have had their genitals mutilated by this illegal act that violates basic human rights, the government (both current and past) continues to ignore the problem and fails to raise awareness.

Prevalence of FGM in Africa. For more detailed maps, see Mackie and UNICEF 2013, p. 26.

--> Information about the prevalence of FGM has been collected since 1989 in a series ofDemographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). In 2013 UNICEF published a report based on 70 of these surveys, indicating that FGM is concentrated in 27 African countries, as well as in Yemen and Iraqi Kurdistan, and that 125 million women and girls in those countries have been affected

The practice is mostly found in what political scientist Gerry Mackie describes as an "intriguingly contiguous zone" in Africa, from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east, and from Egypt in the north to Tanzania in the south, intersecting in Sudan.^[72] According to UNICEF, the top rates are in Somalia (with 98 percent of women affected), Guinea (96 percent), Djibouti (93 percent), Egypt (91 percent), Eritrea (89 percent), Mali (89 percent), Sierra Leone (88 percent), Sudan (88 percent), Gambia (76 percent), Burkina Faso (76 percent), Ethiopia (74 percent), Mauritania (69 percent), Liberia (66 percent), and Guinea-Bissau (50 percent).

Around one in five cases is in Egypt. Forty-five million women over the age of 15 who had experienced FGM were living in Egypt, Ethiopia and northern Sudan as of 2008, and nine million were in Nigeria.^[74] Most of the women experience Types I and II. Type III is predominant in Djibouti, Somalia and Sudan, and in areas of Eritrea and Ethiopia near those countries. USAID estimated in 2008 that around eight million women in Africa over the age of 15 were living with Type III.

Outside Africa FGM occurs in Yemen (23 percent prevalence), among the Kurds in Iraq (giving the country an overall prevalence rate of eight percent), Indonesia and Malaysia.^[76] It has been documented in India, among the Bedouin in Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and by anecdote in Colombia, Oman, Peru and Sri Lanka.^[77] There are indications that it is performed in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, although no nationally representative information is available for those countries.^[78] There are also immigrant communities that practise it in Australia and New Zealand, Europe, Scandinavia, the United States and Canada.^[11]

In 2013 UNICEF reported a downward trend in some countries. In Kenya and Tanzania women aged 45–49 years were three times more likely to have been cut than girls aged 15–19, and the rate among adolescents in Benin, Central African Republic, Iraq, Liberia and Nigeria had dropped by almost half.^[79] In 2005 the organization reported that the median age at which FGM was performed had fallen in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Kenya and Mali. Possible explanations include that, in countries clamping down on the practice, it is easier to cut a younger child without being discovered, and that the younger the girls are, the less they can resist.

حملة إلكترونية لإدراج «الإخوان» ضمن قائمة «المنظمات الإرهابية» بالعالم #Egypt

تم تدشين الحملة العالمية لجمع التوقيعات لكى يتم ارداج منظمة الاخوان المسلمين ضمن منظمات الارهاب الدولية ولمطالبة منظمات المجتمع الدولي، ومناشدة  بأصحاب الضمير الشرفاء فى كل مكان، بحظر نشاط الجماعة بكل ما هو متاح من الوسائل، واعتبارها تنظيمًا إرهابيًا، ومصادرة مقراتها وأملاكها وأموالها،

للتوقيع من هنا

لمطالبة منظمات المجتمع الدولي، ومناشدة ما وصفهم بأصحاب الضمير الشرفاء فى كل مكان، بحظر نشاط الجماعة بكل ما هو متاح من الوسائل، واعتبارها تنظيمًا إرهابيًا، ومصادرة مقراتها وأملاكها وأموالها، حسب الصفحة الرسمية للموقع. - See more at: http://almogaz.com/news/politics/2013/08/18/1057029#sthash.wmdlIio3.dpuf

UNEDITED aerial footage of #Egypt's #June30 #protests #tahrir

UNEDITED aerial footage of Egypt's June 30 protests

[UNEDITED VERSION] Egypt's Armed Forces has released footage from protests that it has captured using Military helicopters. The video raises tensions between President Morsi and the Armed Forces, and shows the extent of the June 30 protests. Check out the completely UNEDITED footage below:

only in #egypt Egyptian Collective suicide

Egyptian Collective suicide

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Terrorism has no religion only in #Egypt government

الارهاب لا دين لة فقط فى مصر لة حكومة

Terrorism has no religion only in Egypt government