World

Vinod Kumar was away from home on Tuesday, as he usually is for days at a time in search of masonry work, when he got the dreadful call.

All the women in his family, three generations of them, were dead, crushed in a stampede.

For the rest of the day, Mr. Kumar and his three sons went from hospital to hospital searching for their loved ones among the bodies of the 121 people who had died when a large gathering of a spiritual guru broke into deadly panic.

Close to midnight, they found the bodies of his wife, Raj Kumari, 42, and daughter, Bhumi, 9, at the government hospital in Hathras, laid out on large slabs of ice among the dozens others in the corridor.

“Why did you leave me just like that? Who will scold the children now and push them to go to school?” Mr. Kumar wailed at the feet of his wife.

But he couldn’t afford to be entirely lost in grief yet. The body of his mother was yet to be found. He bent over to pick up his daughter for one last embrace. Bhumi wore a yellow top, and her hair was tied in a ponytail with a pink band.

“Let her sleep,” Nitin, Mr. Kumar’s oldest son, told him, pulling the girl away from his father to lay her back on the slab so they could continue the search.

“I don’t know when I will find my mother’s body,” he said, moving on with the search. “I want to do their last rites together.”

Mr. Kumar’s mother, Jaimanti, was the family’s matriarch. And she was its main devotee to the guru, keeping his posters at home and frequenting his sermons.

Suraj Pal, a former policeman who refashioned himself as a spiritual guru known as Narayan Sakar Hari or Bhole Baba, catered to women like her, families like hers: on the margins of India’s deep economic inequality, and at the bottom its rigid caste hierarchy.

Women from the Dalit caste, who make up a large part of the Baba’s congregation, have long faced discrimination as “untouchables” and have historically been denied access to temples.

When Mr. Kumar’s mother, Jaimanti Devi, heard that the guru was holding a large gathering so close, there was no way she would miss it. She persuaded her reluctant daughter-in-law to come along.

As for Bhumi?

“You know how children are,” Mr. Kumar said. “Our daughter had said she won’t stay back without her mother.”

As dawn broke on Wednesday, Mr. Kumar had shifted the bodies of his wife and daughter home. Zipped in dark body bags, they were placed on slabs of ice in the narrow alley outside their brick house. His mother’s body was found in a morgue in the city of Agra, about two hours away. When the ambulance finally brought her home, neighbors and relatives helped lower the body and place it next to the other two.

Mr. Kumar, held by his sons, broke down completely.

The Kumar family has lived here for at least two generations. Mr. Kumar’s father, who died several years ago, was a mason just like him. That they have been barely an afterthought in India’s development plans, left to fend for themselves, was clear.

Around them, the village overflowed with sewage water from the narrow drains. A larger drain, carrying the sewage of a neighboring town, brimmed, large piles of trash rotting by its banks. Dengue and typhoid fever are all-too-common ailments here.

But Mr. Kumar was trying to give his children a better future. With the $200 a month he made as a day-laborer and mason, he ensured they attended school. Bhumi was particularly fond of her studies, he said. She wanted to become a police officer.

“We have always been poor. That is our life’s story,” he said. “Now it’s over with the death of my dear daughter, wife and mother — in one single blow.”

First, it was his daughter’s turn for the final rites. In the local tradition, children are buried while adults are cremated.

A stretcher made of bamboo was laid out for Bhumi. The body is supposed to be wrapped in new clothes before the final rites. For her, Mr. Kumar had bought an unstitched piece of blue, floral cloth to cover her torso, and a dark blue cloth for her legs.

Men lifted the bamboo frame from all four sides and walked a couple of miles to a spot in the cotton fields, next to a small pond along the highway. Some of the men had already dug a grave. Mr. Kumar slowly lowered Bhumi’s body into the trench and let out a long wail.

Villagers helped to cover her body, scooping mud onto the grave.

Just in that moment, on the highway meters away, the motorcade for the state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, raced past, taking him to the site of the stampede. Villagers were stopped from crossing the road while it did.

Mr. Kumar moved on to the bodies of his mother and wife, shifting them on bamboo to the pyres at the other end of the village. They were wrapped in bright colored saris, pink, red and green.

Thick pieces of cow dung were used to set the fire and then it was topped with thick logs of wood. The sky was overcast. Politicians trickled in, one with personal bodyguards who wielded rifles and wore all-black attire. The official stood and watched the bodies go up in flames, and then moved on to the next destination.

Among the villagers huddled around the pyre, some cursed the administration for laxity; others cursed the guru who had gone underground since the stampede, seemingly caring little for the well-being of the devotees or the families they left behind.

One of Mr. Kumar’s sons sobbed in a corner. He pulled the boy close and they both broke down in an embrace as thick clouds of smoke rose from the pyres.

They were left with just each other now, a family of devastated men.

“Don’t cry my son,” Mr. Kumar consoled, as they walked back into the village.

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting from New Delhi.

Over the past two days, angry groups of men in a half-dozen cities in Turkey have turned on the Syrian refugees living among them, damaging their shops and cars and assaulting them with fists and knives.

Across the border in parts of northern Syria where Turkey holds sway, Syrians have confronted the Turkish soldiers in their midst, pelting their vehicles with rocks, tearing down Turkish flags and condemning them in street protests.

The scattered violence, which has left at least seven people dead in Syria, according to a war monitor, has exposed growing cracks in the coexistence between Syrians and Turks on both sides of their shared border. After years of generally peaceful relations, recent political shifts and deepening economic distress have brought tensions to the surface.

Many Turks have come to resent the 3.1 million Syrian refugees in their country and accuse them, with or without evidence, of fueling economic troubles that include low wages and persistent inflation that exceeded 75 percent in May.

And many Syrians who oppose the government of President Bashar al-Assad have gone from viewing Turkey as their greatest protector to fearing that it will abandon them. Support for the idea of sending Syrian refugees home has spread across Turkey’s political spectrum.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who cut ties with Syria in 2011 and backed the rebels seeking to topple Mr. al-Assad, said last week he would not rule out meeting his former foe to try to restore ties.

Speaking by phone from Idlib, a province in northern Syria where protesters clashed with Turkish soldiers this week, a Syrian activist who gave his name as Abu Samer al-Halabi said the region was “like a balloon, about to pop.”

“This tension has deep reasons,” he said. “Above the table, the Turks are with us, but under the table, they are not.”

After the Syrian civil war began in 2011, Turkey threw its border open to refugees fleeing brutal assaults by the Syrian military on rebel communities. Turkey built camps to house them, hosted the political opposition to Mr. al-Assad and backed the rebels in northern Syria battling his forces.

In more recent years, as the war settled into a stalemate, Turkey moved its own forces into rebel-held areas of Syria along the border, posting soldiers along sensitive front lines to deter advances and forming tight bonds with rebel groups in a so-called safe zone that it hoped Syrian refugees in Turkey would return to.

But relatively few have done so, leaving millions of Syrians spread across Turkey. Generally, they have peacefully lived alongside their Turkish hosts, with many learning to speak Turkish and sending their children to the country’s schools. While some have started businesses, many earn low wages in manufacturing and agriculture jobs.

Many Turks opposed allowing so many Syrians into the country, but their views toward the refugees have further soured since a cost-of-living crisis that began in 2018 has left many Turks feeling poorer. Encouraged by right-wing politicians and journalists, many have turned their ire toward the refugees.

The unrest this week was set off by allegations on Sunday that a Syrian man had molested his 7-year-old cousin in a public bathroom in Kayseri, a city in central Turkey. The man was arrested, and the girl and her mother and siblings were put under state protection while the police investigated, the Turkish authorities said.

That night, angry men in Kayseri attacked Syrian cars, shops and homes, setting some on fire, according to footage posted on social media and broadcast by Turkish TV stations.

On Monday, similar attacks happened in a half-dozen other cities, including Hatay, Konya and Istanbul, with men marching with batons through neighborhoods where Syrians live and throwing stones at their buildings. In Gaziantep, a group of men surrounded a Syrian man and stabbed him in the leg, causing him to flee across a busy street, according to surveillance footage broadcast by Turkish news media.

Addressing a gathering of mayors from his governing Justice and Development Party on Monday, Mr. Erdogan condemned the violence and accused his political opponents of stoking it.

“We won’t get anywhere by fueling xenophobia and hatred against refugees in the society,” Mr. Erdogan said, adding that the attacks had been carried out by a “small group” inspired by “this poisonous discourse of the opposition.”

On Tuesday, the Turkish interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, wrote on social media that the security forces had detained 474 people in connection with the violence.

As news of the attacks in Turkey spread in Syria, protesters and armed groups there targeted Turkish forces, accusing the Turks of racism toward Syrians. Also fueling the anger, activists in the area said, was fear that Turkey was exploring ways to restore ties with Mr. al-Assad, a scenario that could endanger Syrians living in areas currently outside the government’s control.

Unrest has broken out in towns across northern Syria, with rebels and protesters confronting Turkish troops. Demonstrators tried to storm the headquarters of the Turkish-backed administration in the town of Afrin on Monday, leading to clashes that killed six people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor based in Britain. A seventh was killed elsewhere.

Turkey has responded by removing some Turkish troops from their posts, reinforcing others and shutting border crossings between Turkey and Syria on Tuesday.

Serhat Erkmen, a Turkish security analyst who does research in northern Syria, said in an interview that armed groups there had been on edge over the possibility that Turkey and Syria would mend ties. Many of their members fled to the north from elsewhere in Syria and feared losing the Turkish protection they had come to count on.

“For them, the idea of Ankara and Damascus reconciling may mean back to status quo, but it is not possible for them to go back to the status quo before the war,” Mr. Erkmen said. “When they hear things like peace negotiations, they feel that they will lose their future.”

Turkey may be able to calm the situation now, but Mr. Erkmen said he expected that interactions between the Syrian and Turkish governments would continue to grow, eventually bringing Mr. Erdogan and Mr. al-Assad together.

“It is coming,” he said. “First, high-level contact, and then, leader-level contact.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

Top Democrats in Congress met on Tuesday with Haiti’s newly installed prime minister, Garry Conille, and pledged to push for additional American assistance days after a U.S.-backed international police mission arrived on the Caribbean island to restore stability to a country that for months has been under siege by criminal gangs.

The Biden administration is planning to release $100 million for the mission, of which the United States is the largest financial backer, doing so over Republican opposition. But Mr. Conille told the Democrats on Tuesday that more money would be needed, and soon.

“This is a critical point,” Mr. Conille said in an interview on Tuesday afternoon following meetings with lawmakers and officials at international financial institutions, where he shared appreciation for the support that has already been committed and stressed the dire need for continued investment.

“I need to have the funding necessary to quickly implement basic infrastructure, repair basic infrastructure, and make sure that the services are available to people,” he said.

“The issues in Haiti are such huge issues and we are making sure that we know what his priorities are and how we can address security and also the economic needs and to make sure the funding is really present,” Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Democrat of Florida and the only Haitian American member of Congress, said in an interview. “We’ve been wrestling here in Congress since October to make sure the funding is available, because we have a short window for success.”

Eight months after the United Nations authorized the use of international forces to be deployed to Haiti, the first wave of forces in the Multinational Security Support Mission, led by Kenya, arrived on June 25 to try to stamp out the violence and regain control of the country.

In Washington, the new prime minister and members of his cabinet also met with Biden administration officials including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. At each stop Mr. Conille, who briefly served as prime minister in 2011, detailed his plans to steer the country out of violence and corruption and to reestablish democratic norms. The transitional government, which was appointed by a council, aims to hold elections before its mandate expires on Feb. 7, 2026.

“They’re looking forward to creating a situation so they can turn it over to a new government, but they need help,” Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said. “They need resources.”

Democrats in Congress have lobbied the Biden administration to do more to support the island nation of over 11 million people.

But funding efforts face a wall of opposition from senior Republicans in Congress who say the specific goals of the mission and ways of measuring success are unclear. They remain wary of pouring millions of dollars into a country controlled by gangs with a long history of political corruption.

“The Biden administration’s choice to override the hold I had placed on U.S. taxpayer funding for the ill-conceived Haiti M.S.S. is extremely disappointing,” Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement, using the acronym for the international police force. “I have very clearly expressed my serious and specific concerns about this mission since last September. My concerns exist in part because of the long history of failed international interventions in Haiti, which have wasted billions of dollars and left the Haitian people worse off.”

Along with Mr. Risch, Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, condemned the deployment of Kenyan troops to Haiti, saying the move had left the African nation vulnerable to its own instability.

“On the same day 400 Kenyan police officers arrived in Haiti — the Kenyan Parliament was overrun by protesters,” the two Republicans said in a statement. “As a result, the Kenyan military was mobilized under suspect constitutional authority and used live ammunition to repel the protesters, killing more than 20 civilians. The administration must find a different solution to address Haiti’s insecurity.”

Recent clashes of violence and unrest centered in Port-au-Prince, the capital, were the latest disruption to civil order in a country that continues to be plagued by a series of crises.

Still recovering from a string of natural disasters, including catastrophic earthquakes in 2010 and 2021, Haitians have also faced food shortages, cholera outbreaks and limited access to basic medical care in some parts of the country.

Instability reached new heights in 2021 when President Jovenel Moïse, elected in 2016, was assassinated in his home. Since then, no elections have taken place and gang violence has taken hold. The United Nations has estimated that nearly 80 percent of Port-au-Prince is controlled by a coalition of gangs.

Mr. Meeks and Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick said they were optimistic that the international police mission would succeed in putting Haiti on the road to stability.

“One of the things that I think is important, at least for me, is that the prime minister is not someone that the United States propped up,” Mr. Meeks said.

If Mr. Conille can preside over the demise of the gangs and restore stability, “that’s going to cause a whole different atmosphere on the island,” he added.

Ms. Cherfilus-McCormick said she hoped a meaningful show of force against the violence would “incentivize Haitian people also to start participating” in the country’s transition toward a stable democracy and would draw citizens back to the country.

“If we can help Haitians stay in Haiti, if we can help them actually thrive and be able to leverage themselves, then that becomes another country that we can engage with,” she said.

“We only get one chance here,” Mr. Conille said, “and we cannot fail.”

Frances Robles contributed reporting.

Judges at the International Criminal Court convicted a Malian jihadist on Wednesday for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during a nine-month occupation by terrorist groups of the ancient city of Timbuktu.

The three-member panel said that the man, Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz, a former police leader, had played a major role within the Islamist police in organizing a structure of repression designed to impose an extreme form of Shariah law on a more tolerant form of Islam, traditional in Timbuktu, an intellectual and cultural center.

The presiding judge, Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua, said that Mr. Al Hassan “has been found guilty by majority decision of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture, cruel treatment and outrages upon personal dignity” for public floggings.

Mr. Al Hassan, 46, was also convicted of religious persecution and participating in bogus trials at an Islamist court.

Prosecutors had insisted that he was complicit in crimes against women, who were raped and turned into sexual slaves by having to marry jihadist fighters. But the judges said that while several women had testified that they had been raped by members of the jihadist police while under arrest on charges of wearing improper dress or for having sex outside marriage, and other women were forced into marriage, Mr. Al Hassan had not been involved or criminally responsible in such cases.

Mr. Al Hassan was also acquitted of charges that he had participated in the destruction of mausoleums of Muslim saints, who were locally venerated. Jihadists called their worship heretical.

His sentence is expected to be handed down sometime soon, according to the court.

Mr. Al Hassan pleaded not guilty to all charges, but has not denied being a member of Ansar Dine, a jihadist group that had joined forces with AQIM, an affiliate of Al Qaeda operating in the Sahara.

The four-year trial of Mr. Al Hassan appears to have proved complicated for the court since the three judges filed separate dissenting opinions on different points. The presiding judge, who had been absent for six month for health reasons, voted against conviction on the major charges.

The ruling on Wednesday came nearly a week after the court, based in The Hague, unsealed an arrest warrant for the founder and leader of Ansar Dine, Iyad Ag Ghaly, also known as Abou Fadl, whose whereabouts is uncertain.

Most people in Mali were not aware of the trial, said El Hadj Djitteye, an analyst who was in Timbuktu during the occupation and later founded the Timbuktu Center for Strategic Studies on the Sahel, a research center.

By contrast, he said, Mr. Ag Ghaly is one of the best-known jihadists in Mali, and any trial against him would be followed closely. That could drastically change the current, widely held perception in the West African country about the International Criminal Court — that it is irrelevant to Mali’s current troubles.

The jihadist occupation of Timbuktu became notorious at the time because the desert city was a longtime Muslim pilgrimage site and a place known for its revered mosques and collections of ancient manuscripts. French and Malian troops retook control and drove out the jihadists in early 2013.

A veteran Mauritanian filmmaker, Abderrahmane Sissako, later depicted the ordeal faced by the local population in the acclaimed 2014 movie “Timbuktu.”

In an earlier case in 2016, the court handed down a sentence of nine years to another jihadist who had shown remorse and pleaded guilty to ordering and participating in the attacks on Timbuktu’s holy sites.

The damaged mausoleums have since been restored with the help of foreign donors.

But many of the abuses against women and men, cited in Mr. Al Hassan’s trial, resemble actions still being carried out in other parts of Mali and in neighboring countries.

Groups aligned with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have unleashed more violence in the country and other parts of West Africa over the past decade, making the region known as the Sahel, a wide area south of the Sahara, a hub for terrorist activity.

In 2012, jihadist groups like Ansar Dine controlled only parts of northern Mali. Now, militants affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have expanded into the country’s center and south, as well as into areas of neighboring Niger and more than half of Burkina Faso.

Over the years, the groups have carried out waves of attacks on villages, boats and convoys, killing tens of thousands of civilians and displacing millions of others, according to research institutes tracking the conflict and United Nations figures.

“The jihadists have deeply ingrained themselves into the local landscape,” said Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim, the Sahel project deputy director at the International Crisis Group who is based in Dakar, Senegal. That, he adds “has made it much harder to uproot them.”

The current conflict plaguing Mali began when a loose coalition of Tuareg rebel groups and Islamist militants seized control of large areas in the north of the country in 2012. The militants eventually imposed their rule on several towns and cities in the area, including Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal.

The French troops who uprooted Ansar Dine from Timbuktu left Mali in 2022 after a decade-long mission that many experts consider a failure. A United Nations peacekeeping operation also left Mali late last year amid souring relations with the country’s military rulers, who took power in a coup in 2020 and have allied themselves with Russia.

Besides attacks in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, the Qaeda affiliate that Ansar Dine is part of has carried out assaults in other West African countries, including Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast.

Ruth Maclean contributed reporting.

A lava fountain surged out of Mount Etna in Sicily on Thursday, sending a glowing burst of orange out of a crater and down its flank.

Dark ash from the eruption fell on towns at the foot of the volcano, and residents were seen in video footage sweeping a thick layer of dust off streets and sidewalks.

Earlier this week, activity also intensified at Stromboli, a volcano nearby in the Aeolian Islands, with huge clouds of ash and debris falling into the sea.

Salvatore Cocina, head of Sicily’s civil protection department, said that the authorities were evaluating the possibility that large amounts of lava falling into the sea from the Stromboli volcano could cause a tsunami.

He said that boats for day trippers had been halted and that the Italian Navy was ready to carry out evacuations if necessary.

So far, there have been no reports of any injuries.

Stromboli and Mount Etna are active and regularly erupt, but they are experiencing a particularly high level of activity, said Claudio Peri, an inspector with Sicily’s firefighters.

Marco Neri, an Italian volcanologist, said that the crater from which the lava fountain burst out of Etna had been dormant for about four years but began erupting about two weeks ago, culminating in the explosion on Thursday.

He added that the cloud of ash had reached nearly 15,000 feet, with winds then sending the plume over surrounding towns.

The mayor of the Sicilian port city of Catania, Enrico Trantino, on Friday banned the riding of motorcycles there for two days because of the risks related to the presence of ash, and he set a speed limit of about 20 miles an hour for cars.

The runway at the Catania airport became unusable on Friday because of the volcanic ash, the airport posted on social media, adding that arrivals and departures were suspended until at least the afternoon.