In Srebrenica, Thousands Gather to Remember 1995 Massacre, Bury Newly Identified Dead

A Bosnian Muslim woman mourns next to the grave of her relative, victim of the Srebrenica genocide, in Memorial Centre in Potocari, Bosnia, Tuesday, July 11, 2023. (AP)
A Bosnian Muslim woman mourns next to the grave of her relative, victim of the Srebrenica genocide, in Memorial Centre in Potocari, Bosnia, Tuesday, July 11, 2023. (AP)
TT

In Srebrenica, Thousands Gather to Remember 1995 Massacre, Bury Newly Identified Dead

A Bosnian Muslim woman mourns next to the grave of her relative, victim of the Srebrenica genocide, in Memorial Centre in Potocari, Bosnia, Tuesday, July 11, 2023. (AP)
A Bosnian Muslim woman mourns next to the grave of her relative, victim of the Srebrenica genocide, in Memorial Centre in Potocari, Bosnia, Tuesday, July 11, 2023. (AP)

Tens of thousands of people from around Bosnia and abroad gathered in Srebrenica Tuesday for the annual ritual of commemorating the 1995 massacre and to give a dignified burial to the victims unearthed from mass graves and only recently identified through DNA analysis.

Twenty-eight years after they were murdered in Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since the Holocaust, 27 men and three teenage boys were laid to rest Tuesday at a vast and ever-expanding memorial cemetery just outside Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, joining more than 6,600 massacre victims already reburied there.

Relatives of the victims can bury only partial remains of their loved ones as they are typically found scattered over several different mass graves, sometimes miles (kilometers) apart. Such was the case of Mirsada Merdzic, who buried her father on Tuesday.

“Only a very few bones of his were retrieved because he had been found (in a mass grave) near the Drina River,” she said while huddling next to a casket shrouded in a green burial cloth. “Maybe the river washed him away.”

Selma Ramic reburied a handful of her father's bones several years ago, but still returns to the town for the anniversary to honor others who shared his fate.

“One photo is the only thing I have left of my father, but I have love for him in my heart,” said Ramic, adding: “He still lives in us. He will live on as long as we are alive.”

The Srebrenica killings were the bloody crescendo of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, which came after the breakup of Yugoslavia unleashed nationalist passions and territorial ambitions that set Bosnian Serbs against the country’s two other main ethnic populations — Croats and Bosniaks.

On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serbs overran a UN-protected safe area in Srebrenica. They separated at least 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys from their wives, mothers and sisters and slaughtered them. Those who tried to escape were chased through the woods and over the mountains around the ill-fated town.

The perpetrators then plowed their victims’ bodies into hastily made mass graves, which they later dug up with bulldozers, scattering the remains among other burial sites to hide the evidence of their war crimes.

The Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic were both convicted of genocide in Srebrenica by a special UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. In all, the tribunal and courts in the Balkans have sentenced close to 50 Bosnian Serb wartime officials to more than 700 years in prison for the Srebrenica killings.

However, most Serbian and Bosnian Serb officials still celebrate Karadzic and Mladic as national heroes. They continue to downplay or even deny the Srebrenica killings and offend the massacre victims and survivors.

Adding to decades of insults, the Bosnian Serb mayor of Srebrenica, Mladen Grujicic, last week publicly described the Mothers of Srebrenica organization — founded by female relatives of massacre victims to demand the exhumation of mass graves and the dignified reburial of their loved ones — as “an engine of hate.”

“We are very sad and we will always be sad,” said Mevlija Sabanovic on Tuesday, after burying a cousin who was just 15 when he was killed.

“We are being humiliated constantly and that is not right. We must find a way to live together,” she added.

Since the end of the war, Srebrenica has been located in the Serb-run Bosnian entity of Republika Srpska, while many of its pre-war inhabitants live in the country’s other entity, the Bosniak-Croat Federation. The two entities — linked by shared, state-wide institutions — were created by the 1995 US-brokered Dayton peace accord that ended the Bosnian war.

Bosnian Serb leaders have never given up on the desire to separate their mini-state from the rest of the country. Stirring fears of a new conflict, in recent weeks they have stepped up their campaign by passing laws rejecting the authority in their territory of Bosnia’s multi-ethnic Constitutional Court and the top international overseer of the 1995 peace agreement, German politician Christian Schmidt.

The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, and enlargement commissioner Oliver Varhelyi, however, used the occasion of the massacre anniversary to pledge to “defend peace and protect life” in Bosnia.

“Europe remembers its responsibility and failure to protect ... we vow to do better,” they said in a statement issued ahead of the commemoration ceremony.



Nigeria's President to Make a Sate Visit to the UK in March

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu gives a joint statement with Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, at the Planalto presidential palace, in Brasilia, Brazil, Aug. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)
Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu gives a joint statement with Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, at the Planalto presidential palace, in Brasilia, Brazil, Aug. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)
TT

Nigeria's President to Make a Sate Visit to the UK in March

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu gives a joint statement with Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, at the Planalto presidential palace, in Brasilia, Brazil, Aug. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)
Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu gives a joint statement with Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, at the Planalto presidential palace, in Brasilia, Brazil, Aug. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)

Nigeria’s president is set to make a state visit to the UK in March, the first such trip by a Nigerian leader in almost four decades, Britain’s Buckingham Palace said Sunday.

Officials said President Bola Tinubu and first lady Oluremi Tinubu will travel to the UK on March 18 and 19, The AP news reported.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla will host them at Windsor Castle. Full details of the visit are expected at a later date.

Charles visited Nigeria, a Commonwealth country, four times from 1990 to 2018 before he became king. He previously received Tinubu at Buckingham Palace in September 2024.m

Previous state visits by a Nigerian leader took place in 1973, 1981 and 1989.

A state visit usually starts with an official reception hosted by the king and includes a carriage procession and a state banquet.

Last year Charles hosted state visits for world leaders including US President Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.


Iran Strikes Hard Line on US Talks, Saying Tehran's Power Comes From Saying 'No'

Traffic moves through a street in Tehran on February 7, 2026. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP)
Traffic moves through a street in Tehran on February 7, 2026. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP)
TT

Iran Strikes Hard Line on US Talks, Saying Tehran's Power Comes From Saying 'No'

Traffic moves through a street in Tehran on February 7, 2026. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP)
Traffic moves through a street in Tehran on February 7, 2026. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP)

Iran's top diplomat insisted Sunday that Tehran's strength came from its ability to “say no to the great powers," striking a maximalist position just after negotiations with the United States over its nuclear program and in the wake of nationwide protests.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, speaking to diplomats at a summit in Tehran, signaled that Iran would stick to its position that it must be able to enrich uranium — a major point of contention with President Donald Trump, who bombed Iranian atomic sites in June during the 12-day Iran-Israel war.

Iran will never surrender the right to enrich uranium, even if war "is imposed on us,” he noted.

"Iran has paid a very heavy price for its peaceful nuclear program and for uranium enrichment." 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to travel to Washington this week, with Iran expected to be the major subject of discussion, his office said.

While Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian praised the talks Friday in Oman with the Americans as “a step forward,” Araghchi's remarks show the challenge ahead. Already, the US moved the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, ships and warplanes to the Middle East to pressure Iran into an agreement and have the firepower necessary to strike the Islamic Republic should Trump choose to do so, according to The AP news.

“I believe the secret of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s power lies in its ability to stand against bullying, domination and pressures from others," Araghchi said.

"They fear our atomic bomb, while we are not pursuing an atomic bomb. Our atomic bomb is the power to say no to the great powers. The secret of the Islamic Republic’s power is in the power to say no to the powers.”

‘Atomic bomb’ as rhetorical device Araghchi's choice to explicitly use an “atomic bomb” as a rhetorical device likely wasn't accidental. While Iran has long maintained its nuclear program is peaceful, the West and the International Atomic Energy Agency say Tehran had an organized military program to seek the bomb up until 2003.

Iran had been enriching uranium up to 60% purity, a short, technical step to weapons-grade levels of 90%, the only non-weapons state to do so. Iranian officials in recent years had also been increasingly threatening that Tehran could seek the bomb, even while its diplomats have pointed to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s preachings as a binding fatwa, or religious edict, that Iran wouldn’t build one.

Pezeshkian, who ordered Araghchi to pursue talks with the Americans after likely getting Khamenei's blessing, also wrote on X on Sunday about the talks.

“The Iran-US talks, held through the follow-up efforts of friendly governments in the region, were a step forward,” the president wrote. “Dialogue has always been our strategy for peaceful resolution. ... The Iranian nation has always responded to respect with respect, but it does not tolerate the language of force.”

It remains unclear when and where, or if, there will be a second round of talks. Trump, after the talks Friday, offered few details but said: “Iran looks like they want to make a deal very badly — as they should.”

Aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea During Friday's talks, US Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of the American military's Central Command, was in Oman. Cooper's presence was apparently an intentional reminder to Iran about US military power in the region. Cooper later accompanied US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, to the Lincoln out in the Arabian Sea after the indirect negotiations.

Araghchi appeared to be taking the threat of an American military strike seriously, as many worried Iranians have in recent weeks. He noted that after multiple rounds of talks last year, the US “attacked us in the midst of negotiations."

“If you take a step back (in negotiations), it is not clear up to where it will go,” Araghchi said.

 

 


Russia: Man Suspected of Shooting Top General Detained in Dubai

An investigator works outside a residential building where the assassination attempt on Russian Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev took place in Moscow, Russia February 6, 2026. REUTERS/Anastasia Barashkova
An investigator works outside a residential building where the assassination attempt on Russian Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev took place in Moscow, Russia February 6, 2026. REUTERS/Anastasia Barashkova
TT

Russia: Man Suspected of Shooting Top General Detained in Dubai

An investigator works outside a residential building where the assassination attempt on Russian Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev took place in Moscow, Russia February 6, 2026. REUTERS/Anastasia Barashkova
An investigator works outside a residential building where the assassination attempt on Russian Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev took place in Moscow, Russia February 6, 2026. REUTERS/Anastasia Barashkova

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Sunday that the man suspected of shooting top Russian military intelligence officer Vladimir Alexeyev in Moscow has been detained in Dubai and handed over to Russia.

Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev, deputy head of the GRU, ⁠Russia's military intelligence arm, was shot several times in an apartment block in Moscow on Friday, investigators said. He underwent surgery after the shooting, Russian media ⁠said.

The FSB said a Russian citizen named Lyubomir Korba was detained in Dubai on suspicion of carrying out the shooting.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Ukraine of being behind the assassination attempt, which he said was designed to sabotage peace talks. ⁠Ukraine said it had nothing to do with the shooting.

Alexeyev's boss, Admiral Igor Kostyukov, the head of the GRU, has been leading Russia's delegation in negotiations with Ukraine in Abu Dhabi on security-related aspects of a potential peace deal.