Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 27 May 2014

Iraqi government forces battling armed groups in the western province of Anbar have repeatedly struck Fallujah General Hospital with mortar shells and other munitions. Fighting in the region, part of an intensified campaign against militants that include the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS), has displaced over 35,000 people in recent days. Since early May, government forces have also dropped barrel bombs on residential neighborhoods of Fallujah and surrounding areas. Though Ukraine's incoming president, Petro Poroshenko, has said he would like to begin talks with Moscow to tackle a pro-Russia insurgency in the east, Kiev launched airstrikes on rebels holding the airport in the city of Donetsk. Journalists covering the conflict have been reminded of the risks with the killing of a reporter and his translator at the weekend, and a forced disappearance of another earlier this month still unresolved. Nigeria's authorities say they now know the whereabouts of the nearly 300 schoolgirls kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram, but they do not want to go in and rescue them by force, fearing for the girls' safety. The brutal insurgency has caused a humanitarian crisis in the northeast, exacerbated by abusive military forces and now a growing vigilante movement. Egypt is voting for a new president, following a months-long crackdown on the opposition, civil society and the media. The security forces’ repeated excessive use of lethal force has left well over 1,000 people dead since the military ousted former president Mohamed Morsy last July. The head of the armed forces who led that coup, Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, is widely expected to win the election. Kenya’s Somali community is "being scapegoated" in a counter-terrorism operation. According to a new report by Amnesty International, thousands have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, harassment, extortion, ill-treatment, forcible relocation and expulsion. In ongoing violence in Libya, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper in Benghazi was killed yesterday. He had frequently spoken out against Islamist extremism. The United Nations Support Mission in Libya labelled it a "terrorist act" and called on the Libyan authorities to investigate.