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Hamidou Barry has come to Bamako to find his son. His village of Ikerena, in the rural heart of Mali, is a long way from the capital, but this is where he's been told that men detained by the security forces are taken.

Barry rented a room in the home of a very distant relative. The city is expensive: He's running out of money and he still hasn't made contact with anyone who can shed light on the whereabouts of his son, also called Hamidou.

Witnesses told Barry that Hamidou, 38, was arrested in mid-December at the hospital in Douentza where he had taken his friend for treatment. For some reason the police took an interest in the two Fulani men. They found a sermon by Fulani Islamist extremist Hamadoun Koufa on Hamidou's phone, but Barry insists that does not make his son a jihadist.

Koufa is a marabout (preacher) from the central Malian town of Niafunke. He is also a protégé of the veteran Tuareg leader Iyad Ag Ghali, who heads Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith), an al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)-linked militant group.

The connection between the two men is just one of a web of overlapping conflicts and shifting alliances the Malian government is struggling to contain, even with generous Western military support.

Koufa fought in northern Mali with Ansar Dine and allied jihadist groups in 2012, rapidly overrunning the region's main towns. He then led his men south. That advance, threatening Bamako, triggered a French and African Union intervention that scattered his forces.

Koufa re-emerged in 2015 as the head of the newly-founded Macina Liberation Front (FLM), a movement that seeks the revival of the 19th century Macina Empire, a Fulani-led Islamic state based in the central Mopti and Segou regions of present-day Mali.

FLM recruitment has stoked and exploited community tensions, especially between Fulani pastoralists and Bambara farmers over land and access to pasture. The Bambara have turned to government-backed Dozo self-defence militia, and there is now an unbroken tempo of tit-for-tat killings of civilians, along with more formal executions of government officials by the FLM.

Central Mali has taken over from the north as the country's most lethal region.

"It's a toxic mix of intercommunal violence, jihadist activities, and abuses by government forces together fuelling this vicious circle," said Héni Nsaibia, an analyst at Menastream, a risk consultancy firm that covers the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahel.

But the violence is not just narrowly sectarian. A Human Rights Watch report documenting testimonies earlier this year from both communities included the account of a Fulani youth leader who pointed out: "We, the Peuhl [Fulani], were the jihadists' first victims... we've also lost imams, mayors, and chiefs at the hands of the jihadists, but no one talks about that."

Both sides have condemned the government's failure to provide justice for the killings and to hold its own security forces accountable.

A Bambara leader was quoted by HRW as saying: "Since 2015, so many of our people have been gunned down in their farms, at home, or on their way to market. We have reported this to local and Bamako authorities, but what we hear are excuses for why they don't investigate - the rain, the danger, insufficient vehicles. But in the end, there is no justice and the killings keep happening."

When the government does act, it is heavy handed. HRW has recorded a number of arbitrary arrests by the security forces, especially around Douentza, where Hamidou was picked up.

When IRIN last spoke to Barry, he had run out of money and was returning home, without his son.

Abuses fuel FLM recruitment. It has adopted AQIM's playbook of taking advantage of a weak state by embedding within the local community, listening to their problems, and fashioning its message accordingly.

"Hamadoun Koufa came [to Mopti] preaching about the government. He said he would help, not the government," explained Amadou Thiam, a Fulani opposition politician.

"In many villages, the jihadists appear to be replacing the state actors responsible for addressing banditry; for responding to common crime, marital and family disputes; and for ensuring community reconciliation," said Corinne Dufka, HRW's West Africa director.

"The messages they preach in community meetings, against corruption, state neglect, and at times abusive community elders, is appearing to resonate."

The government's presence doesn't extend much beyond Segou, three hours from Bamako. Even without the challenge of insurgency, successive southern-based Malian governments have failed to stamp their authority in the north, where the population is relatively small and conditions extremely harsh.

The Tuareg, a traditionally nomadic group, span the Sahara Desert. They are the largest ethnic group in northeast Mali. Fiercely independent, they have historically been influential in the spread of Islam in the Sahel.

Tuareg militants control the informal trade networks, from migration to drugs and contraband cigarettes, on which the region's economy depends.

Northern Mali has been a stronghold for jihadists since 2003, when Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, fleeing a government clampdown, escaped across the border. Key to the militants' survival was a tacit agreement with the Malian military and state officials that largely left them alone.

In 2012 they made common cause with the Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad. The rebellion relaunched longstanding separatist demands for the secession of the neglected north.

But soon after the independence of "Azawad" was proclaimed, the MNLA was under attack by Ansar Dine and a coalition of jihadist fighters, determined to impose an extreme version of shariah law in the north.

The French military won back the region for the government. Operation Serval, an air and ground mission, was launched at the request of Bamako as the jihadists rolled south. France continues to fight in Mali as part of a regional anti-terror drive called Operation Barkhane.

Underlining that investment, Emmanuel Macron, the newly elected French president, made Mali his first official visit outside Europe, earlier this month.

The West's concern is the transnational threat of jihadism. Some Malian groups have links with Boko Haram in Nigeria, and AQIM last year launched attacks on Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire. Neighbouring Senegal is concerned it could be next.

In what the International Crisis Group has described as a "security traffic jam", more external military intervention is envisaged, from the G-5 (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) and/or the G-3 (Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali).

But military force alone cannot put Mali together again. The north is now splintered as competing groups emerge - some narrowly ethnic, others backing the jihadists. The government has fallen back on an old model of corrupt payoffs and the use of local proxies to manage the conflict. What is needed, though, is better governance.

The 700-year-old, mud-built Djinguereber mosque in Timbuktu is a tourist must-see. Inside, the light refracts between its adobe pillars. It's cool and airy and the acoustics are just how you'd imagine talking under water might sound. In the desert sky above this iconic building a UN military drone buzzes.

Within minutes of new arrivals at the mosque, a man has spread out a small blanket and set up piles of worn postcards and jewelry. He explains that no tourists have visited this famed site in five years. He looks hopeful, if only for a moment.

Timbuktu was held by the Tuareg-dominated Ansar Dine for several months in 2012. They imposed a stringent, alien version of Islamic law in what is a traditionally moderate country. Centuries-old Sufi shrines and Islamic manuscripts, cultural treasures on which Timbuktu's fame is based, were destroyed.

Although the town was recaptured in January 2013, the only visitors to Timbuktu these days are UN soldiers and a smattering of aid workers and government officials. In the vast northern desert beyond the city, jihadist groups hold sway.

Timbuktu's urbanites find the jihadist presence unsettling. But in the conservative rural areas there is far greater acceptance, a local NGO worker, who asked not to be named, told IRIN.

Timbuktu remains unsafe. On 15 May, there was a rocket attack on the airport; earlier this month a UN police base came under fire, as did a Malian army checkpoint. The raids occur despite the presence of Burkinabe and Swedish contingents of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali.

The scruffy Malian soldiers tasked with jointly securing the city with the UN peacekeeping force, MINUSMA, seem marooned, vulnerable and disconnected from any notion of nation-building. They don't always show up for the nightly joint patrols they are supposed to undertake.

MINUSMA is a 13,817-strong, $933 million operation.

Among its contributors are European countries that have brought a level of sophistication - including drones, special forces, and intelligence cells - few other UN missions possess.

But it is also the UN's most dangerous mission, with 118 peacekeepers killed since 2013.

It hasn't been hard for the jihadists to portray MINUSMA and the European intervention as a neo-colonial plot, propping up a corrupt regime as they steal the country's raw materials. But the West's strategic interests clearly go beyond countering extremism to include policing the migration routes from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean.

From north to south, Mali's state institutions are barely functioning or entirely broken. For months, earlier this year, public schools and hospitals were closed because teachers and health workers were on strike.

"It's difficult to say what really works in Mali today," wrote Abdelkader Abderrahmane, an international consultant on African peace and security issues, in an email to IRIN.

Kamissa Camara, a researcher based in Washington DC and specialising in Africa's Sahel region, said she doubts that any Malian children, save the ones living near Bamako, have gone to school for a straight year since 2012.

The jihadist "threat narrative has obscured a proper assessment of the Malian government's performance and its ability to deliver basic public services and create jobs," Camara wrote in a piece for the Africa Research Institute.

Both Abderrahmane and Camara think that corruption has eroded popular support for successive administrations, and added to the resilience of Mali's overlapping conflicts.

For the past two years there has been a shaky framework for peace called the Algiers Accord, which has been unhurriedly implemented.

The two principal signatories are a coalition of Tuareg rebels known as the Coordination of the Azawad Movements, or CMA, and ostensibly pro-government armed rivals grouped in what is called the Platform.

The jihadists were not included in the agreement and have tried to wreck it. The most dramatic example was a bomb explosion in Gao in January that targeted a joint patrol of rebel fighters (the first patrol of its kind, 18 months after the accord was signed). The attack, which reportedly killed 80 people, stalled the initiative.

In March, the extremists created their own coalition, Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimin (the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims, or JNIM). It fuses AQIM, Ansar Dine, and FLM, and is led by Ag Ghali. It excludes a small faction that has sided with the so-called Islamic State.

Simply throwing more troops at the jihadists does not seem to be the answer.

But there could now be a new twist in the five-year conflict.

A Conference of National Understanding, held between the government and non-jihadist armed groups in the north, had been heading the way of other stalled provisions of the 2015 peace agreement. But after a series of boycotts, it delivered a key recommendation at its close on 2 April that has jolted Mali's political class: the idea that the government should talk to Malian jihadists, specifically Ag Ghali and Koufa.

After initially appearing to welcome the suggestion, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has since backtracked. France has adamantly rejected it. "We are engaged in a fight. It is a fight without ambiguity against terrorism... And so there is only one way; there are not two," France's then-foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on a visit to Mali in April.

There are also political and legal obstacles to talking with people linked to al-Qaeda. Ag Ghali is on a US terrorist list for a start, which would complicate any potential amnesty deal. Nobody knows what concessions he would seek to extract, how reliable an interlocutor he would be, and how talks might impact on an international coalition that has shed much blood fighting in the north. Domestically, dialogue could also become hostage to Mali's elections due next year.

But it is "worth a try", noted well-regarded Sahelian analyst Alex Thurston in a recent blog: "A peace process that makes no room for Ag Ghali is one that will be disrupted, perhaps fatally, by regular jihadist attacks."

That's not to say, he added, that the Malian government "could magically find common ground with Ag Ghali, but it is to say that opening a channel of dialogue could bear fruit."

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Hamidou Barry has come to Bamako to find his son. His village of Ikerena, in the rural heart of Mali, is a long way from the capital, but this is where he's been told that men detained by the security forces are taken. Barry rented a room in the home of a very distant relative.

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Goska is just five minutes up the road from Dangoma in Nigeria's Middle Belt region. But between the two villages are divisions so deep - and so devoid of compassion and understanding - they threaten the unity of Africa's most populous nation.

Bullet holes and abandoned, burned-out buildings in Goska are evidence something sudden and terrible happened there. Moses Berde, the village head, explains that more than 40 people were killed and over 100 homes destroyed in back-to-back attacks on 24 and 25 December last year.

In this farming village of solid, mud-brick buildings, there's no doubt who the culprits are. They accuse their Fulani neighbours in Dangoma of hiring armed Fulani pastoralists from outside the area to do their dirty work. The interlopers now graze their cattle on Goska's rich farmland, driving off anyone bold enough to venture near.

Berde says he himself was shot at recently when he confronted two Fulani youngsters as they were cutting trees for fodder in his field. A week later two women were attacked. "If it wasn't for the security [forces] urging patience, my boys are eager to go into the bush and sort them out," Berde tells IRIN.

Dangoma sits on top of a gentle rise. It's a more prosperous version of Goska, reflecting the value of cattle over crops. Its elders assemble in a carpeted room as district head Mahmood Suleiman recounts his community's quite different version of events.

"What happened was between Goska people and herdsmen from outside," Suleiman explains. "But people are pointing accusing fingers at us." He then flips the script, without blinking, accusing Goska of attacking Dangoma on 25 December. Seven people died, he says - although there is no visible evidence of the raid.

Surreal

There are places in the world where divisions are so entrenched, positions so implacable, "truth" becomes meaningless - grievance distorts everything.

The area around Goska and Dangoma, the south of Nigeria's northwestern Kaduna State, has been a hotspot of communal violence stretching back to the 1980s. The latest bout began in September last year. IRIN finds some of its victims crowded into the grounds of a primary school in the railway town of Kafanchan, waiting for a daily food ration provided by the Catholic Church and well-wishers.

Pastor Gordon Matum (photo right) has registered more than 2,590 displaced men, women, and children for the feeding programme. There are people here from Goska, along with those from other villages - Godo Godo, Misisi, Mile One, Pasakori, Tundun Wada. All have fled attacks by Fulani herdsmen.

Matum, busy, and harassed by a crowd of people, pauses in the doorway of a classroom to talk. "We've never terrorised, but instead we're the ones that are terrorised," he tells IRIN. "We have been peaceful, but we will defend ourselves, even though we don't have arms."

He is particularly angry over what he sees as a partisan state government that refuses to acknowledge the scale of the displacement. He says that by not declaring the school an IDP camp, it is forcing people to find paying accommodation in the neighbourhood, imposing a double burden on them.

"Where is the government? They are totally silent about the IDPs. [Governor Nasir] el-Rufai said southern Kaduna people are exaggerating the scale of the attacks, but he hasn't come here."

A broad divide

Nigeria's Middle Belt straddles the divide between the largely Muslim north and a majority Christian south. It is an ethnically and religiously diverse zone, plagued by conflict over farmland, grazing areas, and stock routes. In southern Kaduna these clashes have pitted the traditionally pastoralist Fulani against farmers who see themselves as "indigenous" to the area.

According to a report by SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based consultancy firm, pastoral/farmer clashes in the Middle Belt accounted for more deaths than Boko Haram last year.

The Fulani have ranged across West Africa's savannah with their cattle for centuries, but in Nigeria they have had more than a passing impact on its history. Their 19 th century jihad transformed the north. Its legacy is a political aristocracy whose southern border stretches to the emir's palace in Kafanchan.

Fulani communities have been in the Middle Belt for over 300 years. Some have settled, giving up the nomadic life, or graze their cattle locally. But there are others who still embrace a transnational existence, annually migrating along at least three international grazing routes - from Cameroon, Chad, and Niger - that pass through southern Kaduna.

Climate change and the drying of northern Nigeria is forcing these herders to move southwards, into lusher but more densely populated tropical forest lands. Traditional mediation systems are failing to effectively adjudicate cross-cultural disputes over land and grazing.

Ethno-religious identity drives politics in Nigeria. The city of Kaduna, for example, is divided by its river. North, the majority of its residents are Hausa-Fulani, who have traditionally held political power in the state.

On the opposing bank are settlers from the rest of the country, mostly Christians, and "indigens" (a troubling concept that recognises "original" inhabitants to the disadvantage of other Nigerians). Newly created chiefdoms in southern Kaduna are both a political and cultural affirmation of independence from the historical control of the Fulani caliphate.

The cost of conflict

A Mercy Corps study in 2013 found that livelihoods of more than a third of pastoralists and farmers in Kaduna and Nasarawa states have been affected by violence over long stretches of time. The study calculated the micro-economic cost across four Middle Belt states as worth $9.2 billion annually.

Without violence, affected households would have seen at least a 64 percent increase in incomes, and potentially as much as 210 percent. Peace could deliver $13.7 billion annually in "total macroeconomic progress" for the Nigerian exchequer, mainly through increased agricultural and meat/dairy production.

In Kaduna State alone, between 10,000 and 20,000 people are estimated to have died in communal conflict since 1980. Among the most vicious episodes was the political violence triggered by the presidential election result in 2011, which continues to feed the current hostilities.

Hausa-Fulani Nigeria was united in its support for presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari. When he lost to incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, from the south of the country, Christians and other ethnic groups were attacked in northern Kaduna; their churches, shops, and homes destroyed on the presumption they had supported Jonathan.

In southern Kaduna, mobs of Christians retaliated by killing Muslims and burning their mosques and property. Among those trapped by the violence and slain, their cattle stolen, were Fulani herders from outside the country.

Haruna Osman is the Kaduna State chair of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association (MACBA), a Fulani lobby group. From his office inside the frenetic Mando motor park, he reels off recent incidents in southern Kaduna in which Fulani are still being killed.

But in seeming to concede that in the current round of violence most of the victims are farming communities, he is blunt. "Ask them why our people were attacked. What happened in 2011 is the genesis of what is happening now.''

He adds: "No Fulani man will give up seeking revenge. [Fulani] from outside [Nigeria] were killed. They will not seek permission from me [to retaliate]. But no Fulani man will attack first. We're the minority [in southern Kaduna]."

Guilt by association

Taking a swipe at the vexed issue of citizenship in Nigeria, where full rights are accorded only in your "home state'', he says Fulani have been in the region for centuries; it is their stock routes the colonial road builders followed. "We are also Nigerians! Give us our share of the land!" he demands.

Sectarian violence is all about guilt by association. In identity-driven conflict, any member of a rival group can be attacked in retaliation for a perceived original wrong committed by that community. If a cow tramples a farmer's field, all Fulani tend to get blamed. The cycle of revenge broadens the conflict and inevitably the suffering.

It also obscures an element of simple criminality. People aren't just singled out because of ethnicity or religion, but because looting and cattle rustling are profitable. Banditry, it seems, is an equal opportunities employer.

Rival communities also share a perception of the security forces and judicial system as partisan, and/or incompetent. Not surprisingly, they tend to take the law into their own hands.

The politicisation of ethnicity and religion is seen as the core of the problem. For Mohammed Bello Tukur, legal adviser to MACBA, this goes beyond local politics. He sees the "demonisation" of herders as a tactic by the opposition nationally "to hang President Buhari", a Fulani, finally elected in 2015.

He blames a "scaremongering", southern-dominated media for "connecting dots in pockets of incidents" and deliberately conflating the conflict with the jihadist northeastern insurgency of Boko Haram. Social media has upped the ante with scandalous glee.

But that is not the view from Goska, or among the weary displaced in the Kafanchan primary school, forced to endure the embarrassment of dependency, their lives on hold. The common thread in all their stories is of sudden attack, being outmatched by men armed with AK-47s who boasted of their political connections. They still do not have the security guarantees that will allow them to return home.

Which way forward?

Historically demarcated stock corridors and gazetted grazing reserves were envisaged as ways to avoid farmer/pastoralist competition for land and water points. They, in theory, could also provide the development services to encourage the settling of the nomadic population.

But grazing routes have been squeezed by expanding and ever larger commercial holdings. According to one study, less than three percent of the grazing reserves "have been acquired, and these are poorly managed". Most of the land, especially in the north, has instead been appropriated by corrupt political and private interests.

A new grazing reserve bill was rejected last year, largely due to opposition from southern senators. Atta Barkindo of the Kukah Centre, an interfaith policy forum set up by the Catholic Church in Kaduna, explains why.

''It's seen as a land grab [of the Middle Belt]. The government would also need to find compensation for subsistence farmers, and that will never happen," he says, flatly. ''The government has to choose between the life of a cow and that of its citizens.''

Tukur, of MACBA, and Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, the former chair of the National Human Rights Commission, argue for a forward-leaning livestock development programme to address "access to water, grazing, agricultural extension services, and access to markets" for both farmers and pastoralists. It would also need to monitor and regulate the regional cattle corridors.

There is also a raft of NGO-led mediation efforts underway over the Middle Belt conflict, a reflection of the abdication of responsibility by state and federal governments. But Odinkalu worries that these initiatives are moving too slowly or lack real leverage.

Urgency is needed because Nigeria is fast-approaching the 2019 election, and the violence will inevitably be politicised and stoked. "If there is no movement this year, forget about it, as the election calendar will overwhelm everything," Odinkalu says.

The levels of distrust run subterranean deep on both sides. The disdain, the subtle asides, the othering, is painful to behold.

Otherwise genial Goska headman Berde is matter of fact in his assessment: "A Fulani man is a Fulani man; he cannot be trusted." Asked if there could ever be reconciliation with his neighbours, his response is less than inspiring: "By God's grace."

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The deadly conflict tearing Nigeria apart (and it's not Boko Haram)

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Goska is just five minutes up the road from Dangoma in Nigeria's Middle Belt region. But between the two villages are divisions so deep - and so devoid of compassion and understanding - they threaten the unity of Africa's most populous nation. Bullet holes and abandoned, burned-out buildings in Goska are evidence something sudden and terrible happened there.

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Central America's Northern Triangle - encompassing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras - is one of the most violent regions in the world outside of a warzone. Transnational gangs or maras have proliferated in the wake of decades of civil war and are largely responsible for a per capita death rate that rivals that in Syria.

The humanitarian impacts have become increasingly obvious over the last two years as more and more people, many of them unaccompanied children, have fled the violence and sought protection, mostly in the United States. An estimated 10 percent of the Northern Triangle's population of 30 million has already left. For those forced to remain, weak and corrupt state institutions have failed to improve their access to health, education, and justice in city neighbourhoods that have been carved up into "territories" by rival gangs, and where schools have become places of recruitment and kidnapping.

"There's still a slow recognition of the scale and magnitude of the problem"

Humanitarian agencies, more used to working in classic conflict settings or in the aftermath of natural disasters, are starting to wake up to the need to respond to the Northern Triangle's epidemic of violence. Organisations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières are leading the way, but their programmes are small-scale and, in terms of their reach, "very much the tip of the iceberg", according to Robert Muggah, director of the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based think tank that focuses on security issues.

"There's still a slow recognition of the scale and magnitude of the problem," he told IRIN. "There are still considerable apprehensions in the humanitarian world about how best to engage."

How do you engage with gangs?

Gangs in the Northern Triangle are financed by a range of organised criminal activities, from more localised extortion and smuggling rackets to the trans-regional trade in narcotics, much of it bound for the United States.

The Igarapé Institute's projections suggest that homicide rates in the Northern Triangle will continue to rise over the next 20 years, even as they fall in other parts of the world.

"This creates a conundrum for the humanitarian community," said Muggah, explaining that, in terms of International Humanitarian Law, gang violence is not defined as an armed conflict, even if the consequences for local populations can be just as devastating and deadly.

In practical terms, this means that humanitarian agencies responding to gang violence cannot expect any special protection and may themselves become targets. Attempts to negotiate access with gang members controlling a particular "territory" where agencies want to work can also be deemed a criminal offense.

"If you meet with a convicted killer and don't report their whereabouts, you could be charged with a crime of association. It does raise a big red flag for some agencies, because they no longer have the immunity under IHL to engage in these kinds of negotiations formally," said Muggah.

Joaquim Guinart, MSF's field coordinator in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, said his organisation does not attempt to engage with gangs in "red areas" of the city where levels of crime and violence are highest and the organisation is providing care to victims of sexual and other types of violence.

"Always the gangs have people keeping watch in different parts of the neighbourhood. When they approach us, we explain what we're doing and they accept it," he told IRIN. "We monitor violent events through the media and schools. Now, mass killings of several people at once are increasing and the gangs are often fighting for territory, which is putting us on alert."

Questions of neutrality

The ICRC, which runs programmes providing assistance to returning migrants and communities affected by armed violence in all three countries, does not rule out talking to the gangs.

"We would at some stage attempt to have some dialogue with the gangs. We don't talk about what it is we discuss with them," said Yves Heller, the ICRC's communications coordinator for the region.

He added that "it is a completely different dynamic" than talking to armed actors in the context of a conflict, where "you're dealing with some very clear principles".

Related stories:
The new buzzword in aid - and why agencies are slow to act Latin America faces up to urban 'war'Humanitarian intervention in violence-hit slums - from whether to how Exiled by force

The need to coordinate humanitarian efforts with local government departments also raises what Muggah described as "existential questions for agencies that seek to remain neutral and impartial".

"In urban violence situations, if you don't have some alignment with different sectors of the government, then you're just applying light band aids that are quickly ripped off," he told IRIN. "It means lowering a flag, not necessarily waving your agency identity and engaging in complex negotiations with governments to help them supplement gaps."

He added that governments in the Northern Triangle have been wary about accepting help from humanitarian agencies because of the message it can send about the dire state of security in their countries.

"It took a lot of communication, clarification, and dialogue between groups like the ICRC and governments to ensure there was a common understanding. There were situations where the ICRC was taken to task for communicating findings that were seen to be reflecting negatively on the country in question," he said.

Setting an example

The biggest dividend for small-scale humanitarian interventions in this region can be the extent to which local governments attempt to replicate them.

When MSF began providing care to sexual violence victims in Tegucigalpa four years ago, for example, there was no national protocol for treating such patients.

"Now, the government is going to introduce a protocol for sexual violence, and that is something we've been fighting for," said Guinart. "Our work has given us legitimacy to talk about these things."

Through multi-disciplinary teams consisting of doctors, nurses, social workers, and psychologists, MSF is also "trying to demonstrate to health authorities the need to address this in a more holistic way," said Henry Rodriguez, the organisation's head of mission for Mexico and Honduras.

"We don't pretend to change behaviours or the origins of the violence, but at least we can raise awareness about the need to give more support to this population."

More help needed

Encouraging more humanitarian agencies to start programmes in the Northern Triangle will depend to a large extent on finding willing donors.

The only major donor currently funding humanitarian programmes in the region is the EU's humanitarian aid department, ECHO.

"Development donors are doing great work in terms of violence prevention, but in terms of humanitarian response there's very little," said Vicente Raimundo, ECHO's regional head for Central America. "It's a paradox, because usually it's the other way around."

"I think that we all have failed in acknowledging that we have a humanitarian problem."

ECHO is partnering with the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, to help displaced populations in El Salvador, and with the Norwegian Red Cross and the Norwegian Refugee Council in Honduras and El Salvador to make schools safer and children less vulnerable to recruitment by gangs.

But major gaps remain, particularly in the health and education sectors. "It's about psychosocial support, and also the needs of people who can't get to a hospital because it means crossing certain territory [that belongs to a rival gang]. It's about kids being threatened, recruited, and extorted in schools," said Raimundo. "I think that we all have failed in acknowledging that we have a humanitarian problem."

Not just a US problem

Muggah noted there has been a general decline in aid to Latin America in the last five to 10 years and that many donors view the situation in the Northern Triangle as in "the US's backyard" and therefore something American donors should be addressing.

US-funded initiatives have tended to focus on law enforcement and addressing drug trafficking, although the more recent Strategy for Engagement in Central America will also aim to boost economic development, reduce violence, and strengthen government institutions.

There's been a slow but growing acknowledgement of the need for a stronger humanitarian response to urban violence in the Northern Triangle, said Muggah, but aid agencies are "struggling to find what their added value is".

While organisations like MSF and ICRC have started experimenting with various interventions, "some agencies have kept their heads in the sand and not got involved in the messy and often highly politicised work of [responding to] urban violence."

"In the meantime," he added, "there are enormous needs in these areas, and if the goal is to reduce suffering and to promote protection, the humanitarian world can play a role."
(TOP PHOTO: Soldiers patrol a neighbourhood in Comayagüela, Hondruas, in March 2016 after the Mara 18 gang threatened residents with death if they didn't leave their homes within 24 hours. Antonio Aragon/ECHO)
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Gang violence in Central America is a humanitarian crisis

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Central America's Northern Triangle - encompassing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras - is one of the most violent regions in the world outside of a warzone. Transnational gangs or maras have proliferated in the wake of decades of civil war and are largely responsible for a per capita death rate that rivals that in Syria.

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The monsoon is in its last throes here on Nepal's eastern frontier. As another deluge begins, Karna Rai takes shelter in a makeshift teashop in the Beldangi refugee camp where he has lived for the past 24 years after being driven out of Bhutan.

"I live here and have raised my children here, but I have no options, no rights," Rai said. "I am a person with no home."

He is one of more than 100,000 people who fled Bhutan in the early 1990s when the government cracked down violently on the ethnic Nepali minority. Members of the community had demonstrated against discriminatory policies, which were part of a "Bhutanisation" campaign to enforce a narrowly conceived national identity that did not include them. About a sixth of the ethnic Nepali minority were stripped of their citizenship, and the army rounded up many and forced them over the border in what Human Rights Watch has called "ethnic cleansing".

After failed attempts to convince Bhutan to let the refugees return, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, started helping them resettle in third countries.

Begun in 2007, it has been one of the agency's most successful resettlement programmes, and UNHCR said recently that it had found a home for its 100,000 th refugee. But that still leaves about 12,000 people in three remaining camps - and their options are running out as the programme winds down by the end of this year.

Kevin Allen, UNHCR's representative in Nepal, said refugees interested in pursuing resettlement were given numerous opportunities to declare their interest, and the large-scale resettlement programme was initially supposed to conclude in December 2015.

"The programme was exceptionally extended into 2016 to ensure the maximum possible use of resettlement for qualifying cases," he said in an interview in the capital, Kathmandu.

Rai, 61, said his five children - two of whom were born in the camp - all now live in the United States. He survives his wife, who died in Beldangi in 2008. Despite his children being successfully resettled into a third country, Rai insists he wants to go back to Bhutan.

"There is nothing like the motherland," he said. "I dream about going home."

The fate of the remaining refugees is unclear.

"Of course, UNHCR is willing to work closely with both governments, but it is really for the governments of Nepal and Bhutan to come to alternative solutions," said Allen.

Alternative solutions seem unlikely, given that the stances of both governments have not changed over the past two decades.

"The Nepal government does not have any intention to issue citizenship to the Bhutanese refugees," home ministry spokesman Balkrishana Panthi told IRIN over the phone. "The Nepal government is focused on repatriation."

For its part, Bhutan has repeatedly said it won't consider letting the refugees return. Recent remarks to that effect were reported by the Kathmandu Post, which quoted a letter from Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay to a US senator who had written to him about the plight of the refugees. Tobgay reportedly said they were "non-nationals and illegal immigrants", and that the camps had been infiltrated by Maoist militants intent on overthrowing Bhutan's monarchy.

Years of living in limbo have taken a heavy toll on those in the camps, according to the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization Nepal, a local NGO.

TPO counsellor Govinda Raj Kattel said rates of drug and alcohol abuse are alarmingly high in the camps, especially among young people.

"There is a lack of security for their future, a lack of identity, a lack of opportunity for younger people," he said. "They cannot reach their full capacity here."

Kattel added that while the remaining refugees live relatively well, as money is sent from family members abroad, they still experience mental health issues such as anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Remittances are sent back and you see a spike in sales in alcohol around the shops outside the camp, or a spike in patients who need more psychosocial services," he said.

One doctor, who asked not to be named, said he had seen increased rates of self-harm and that at least a quarter of those abusing substances were under the age of 18.

"They are frustrated, and sometimes this manifests in impulsive or destructive behaviour," he said. "And many are worried about their futures, of course."

While many turn to drugs or alcohol for escape, 21-year-old Aita Sing Rai (no relation to Karna Rai) is going to try for a last-minute resettlement.

He was born in the camp, and his brothers have now all gone to the United States. As the youngest child, he stayed behind to care for his aging parents, who want to return to Bhutan.

"Every time someone leaves, I feel a knot in my stomach," said Rai. "My parents talk about Bhutan and dream about Bhutan. But I have my own dreams. I am fed up of being a refugee. I want my own identity."
(TOP PHOTO: Bhutanese refugees in Nepal practice the Hindu ritual of Chinta to bid farewell a deceased family member in October 2016. The Guru who performs the ritual is said to be able to speak to the souls of the dead. CREDIT: Manny Maung)

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No way home: time runs out for Bhutanese refugees in Nepal

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The monsoon is in its last throes here on Nepal's eastern frontier. As another deluge begins, Karna Rai takes shelter in a makeshift teashop in the Beldangi refugee camp where he has lived for the past 24 years after being driven out of Bhutan.

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We prioritise areas where the need is greatest, and the places we can access with minimal risk to life. We deliver aid independently, neutrally and without bias.

In addition to our work inside Syria, we also co-lead the Whole of Syria Protection Cluster with UNHCR and have a leading role in the shelter, WASH and education sectors, as well as interagency advocacy forums.

Emergency response is at the core of NRC's work inside Syria.

We:

Distribute tents and special kits before oncoming extreme weather conditions. These kits are filled with basic necessities for living in displacement, such as tents and blankets.

Negotiate access to those in hard-to-reach places, often the most in need and forgotten.

Homs was very good. I liked it so much. But then the war came, they started to kill us and I lost my brother.

Amar, nine years old

Many Syrian children cannot remember a life without war. Education provides them with a safe space, where they can continue to learn and play. We do whatever it takes to prevent the children and youth of Syria from becoming a lost generation.

Our education projects:

Rehabilitate schools and repair damaged community centres. We build makeshift schools where it is safe to do so.

Create opportunities for children to go to school or access education through self-learning initiatives, raising awareness on the importance of continuing education.

Train young former professionals to become tutors for children and adolescents, helping them with after-school tutoring and other forms of informal education.

Distribute teaching and student kits.

Ensure education is prioritised, even in the most difficult circumstances.

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH)

In Syria, many buildings and systems that provide water, sanitation and hygiene have been destroyed. We work to ensure that people can drink clean water and have proper sanitation facilities.

In many of our WASH activities, our experts work closely with our shelter teams.

Our WASH projects include:

Distributing hygiene kits, which include soap, washing powder and sanitary products.

Repairing schools' water and sanitation infrastructure.

Repairing communal water and sanitation infrastructure.

NRC's priority is to repair and build shelters and community buildings, and to make sure people fleeing their homes have a roof over their heads.

Our shelter teams work side-by-side with our WASH experts as they carry out many of their projects.

Our shelter teams:

Distribute tents and shelter materials.

Distribute winter and summer kits containing necessities such as blankets, mattresses, clothing, waterproof sheeting, and mud-proof boots.

Assist the repairs of schools and community buildings, including water and sanitation infrastructure.

Work, where necessary, in informal and formal camps and settlements

Food security

In areas where people inside Syria are undernourished, and where drought has hit the hardest, NRC works to bring them sufficient clean water and food.

Our food security activities:

Distribute food directly where the local market does not function.

Provide cash vouchers to buy goods in the local market where it functions.

Distribute seeds and agricultural tools.

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We prioritise areas where the need is greatest, and the places we can access with minimal risk to life. We deliver aid independently, neutrally and without bias.

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Twenty years of armed conflict and inter-communal violence has pushed millions of people into vulnerability, faced to fight off food insecurity, malnutrition and epidemic outbreaks.

Communities in North Kivu province, for example, have been left with acute needs. Raids and communal clashes between armed groups in Walikale and Lubero territories forced nearly 373,000 people to flee their homes, making up 42 per cent of the province's displaced population at the end of 2016.

NRC is concerned by the UN mission in DRC, MONUSCO, reducing its presence in some territories. As such, it is crucial now more than ever that humanitarian agencies are able to step up efforts to ensure that displaced families are fully protected. "Unless we properly define who and how we can protect civilians after the UN mission scales down, DRC's people will be plunged deeper into crisis," warned Blom.

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DR Congo has world's highest number of people fleeing conflict internally | NRC

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Twenty years of armed conflict and inter-communal violence has pushed millions of people into vulnerability, faced to fight off food insecurity, malnutrition and epidemic outbreaks. Communities in North Kivu province, for example, have been left with acute needs.