Christchurch, New Zealand – At about 2pm on Friday, when the gunfire at Christchurch’s Linwood mosque finally let up, Abdi Sheikh Hassan found himself underneath a pile of bodies.

He was at the front of the mosque’s prayer hall, close to the Imam, when a man armed with a semiautomatic rifle entered through the building’s only door, and opened fire.

Trapped, worshippers in the back rows piled on top of those at the front. A number of them never got up again.

“There was blood everywhere,” Hassan recalls.

Shaking with fear but unharmed, the 28-year-old stood up to take a look at the carnage. His friend, lying next to him, had been shot in the head.

“Seven people were dead and so many people were injured, [among them] women and children … everyone was in shock.”

Hassan would later find out that Christchurch’s small, tight-knit, Muslim community had been the target of the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand’s modern history. 

Shortly before the assault at Linwood, the gunman had killed more than 40 worshippers at the Al Noor mosque. Altogether, at least 50 people were killed, and dozens more wounded, in what Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, called a well-planned “terrorist attack”.  

A 28-year-old Australian man, identified as Brenton Harrison Tarrant, has been charged with one count of murder, with many more expected. 

At least 50 people were killed in Friday’s attack on two Christchurch mosques [Mark Baker/AP]

One of those presumed dead during the assault was three-year-old Mucaad Ibrahim. Hassan knows the family well.

Like Mucaad’s Somali-born father, Adnan Ibrahim, Hassan also fled violence and instability in Somalia eight years ago, in search of a place “at peace”.

“Security was bad at home and we didn’t think anything bad could happen here,” Hassan says.

“But we, as Muslims, believe anything that happens, good or bad, is Allah testing us, to see if we are following the rules of the Prophet Muhammad,” he adds. 

About 50,000 Muslims call New Zealand home, a small minority in a population of nearly five million. From India and Indonesia, to Pakistan and Palestine, the Pacific Island’s Muslims come from around the world. 

Mourners across New Zealand have paid tribute to the victims of the mosque shootings [Edgar Su/Reuters]

In Christchurch, a city of nearly 400,000 people, Muslims number no more than a few thousand people, and the tragedy of Friday’s loss has impacted nearly every Muslim household in the city.

“We know each other, in the Muslim community, very well,” Hassan says. “We spent a long time praying together… and now we are busy with organising how to bury all the bodies.”

Despite the tragedy, Hassan said he has no plans to leave. Having trained in Christchurch as an engineer and built a life in New Zealand, he was determined to carry on living and working in the place he now called home.

Part of that, he says, means going back to the shuttered Al Noor and Linwood mosques once they were reopened.

“I still believe now it is a safe place and that New Zealand is the best country for us,” he says.

“In any place you can find good and bad people, but most of the people here, Alhamdullilah [thanks to God], are good people and look after us.

“What Allah has given us, we are happy with.”

Turkey and Iran have launched a joint military operation against Kurdish rebels along Turkey’s eastern border, according to an official.

Suleyman Soylu, Turkey’s interior minister, said the offensive on Monday targeted the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

“As of 8:00 this morning, we started an operation with Iran aimed at the PKK on our eastern border,” he told a crowd in the Mediterranean city of Antalya. “We will announce the outcome [later].”

Soylu, who first spoke of the planned offensive on March 6, did not provide further details. 

However, Iran’s official news agency IRNA – citing an anonymous army source – said Iranian forces were not involved in the offensive. 

The PKK, considered a “terrorist organisation” by Ankara and many Western countries, has fought the Turkish state for more than three decades seeking autonomy for the country’s Kurdish minority.

Tens of thousands have been killed in the conflict.

The group operates in Turkey and northern Iraq under its own banner, and as the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria.

Its Iranian offshoot, the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), has fought on and off with Tehran since 2004.

Peace talks between the PKK and Ankara collapsed in 2015, and the Turkish military has stepped up air and land assaults against the group, both inside Turkey and in northern Iraq, where the group’s main base is located.

The military has also launched two operations in northern Syria – Euphrates Shield in 2016 and Olive Branch in 2018 – to prevent the YPG from controlling territory along Turkey’s southern border.

Ankara has also persuaded Russia – the main backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad alongside Iran – to exclude the YPG’s political wing from talks with opposition groups while reiterating a 1998 deal with the Syrian government not to allow the PKK to operate on Syrian territory.

Ankara-Tehran military cooperation

On Monday Iran’s chief of staff, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, travelled to Damascus to discuss combating “terrorism” with his Syrian and Iraqi counterparts, according to local media. 

The Iranian Students’ News Agency quoted him as saying that “foreign forces” in Syria, including the territory controlled by the YPG, “must leave the Syrian soil as soon as possible” – an apparent reference to the US troops whose presence in Syria has so far prevented Ankara from carrying out a large-scale attacks on the YPG.

The group forms the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the US’s main ally in Syria against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

With the support of US air power and weaponry, the SDF has reduced ISIL control over northeastern Syria to a small pocket of territory near the Iraqi border.

But with US President Donald Trump‘s decision in December to withdraw US forces from Syria, Turkey has repeatedly threatened to attack the YPG. 

Alexey Khlebnikov, a Middle East analyst at the Russian International Affairs Council, said if Turkey and Iran were indeed cooperating against the Kurds, it could have wider implications for the region.

“It might be seen as a strong message to Kurds in Syria and to the US,” he said. “Ankara-Tehran military cooperation might be well extended to Syria.”

But Ziya Meral, a London-based researcher, said Turkey’s alleged operation with Iran should be viewed with caution. “Many in Ankara still think Iran engages with the PKK and enables it while also wanting to contain its Iranian affiliate PJAK,” he said.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, the Iraqi army also clashed with PKK fighters in Sinjar, near the country’s border with Syria, while the Kurdistan24 news outlet reported that unidentified fighters carried out attacks on Iranian border guards in Iran’s Kurdish region. 

The moves, experts said, raised the possibility the Kurdish rebels could face a crackdown in the four countries they operate in.

In the absence of further details about the alleged joint Turkey-Iran operation, Paul Levin, director of the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies, said it “could all be coincidence or more of the same low-intensity conflict we’ve seen for years”.

“If not, a stepped three-front fight against Iraq, Turkey and Iran would be difficult for the PKK and its allied forces in the region,” he said. 

London, United Kingdom – Thousands of children with EU citizenship or those of Europran nationals could fall through the cracks of the United Kingdom’s registration system after Brexit, according to a UK charity.

The Coram Children’s Legal Centre released a report on Monday pointing to issues that might arise for children and young people in relation to the EU Settlement Scheme, which will be fully rolled out by the end of the month.

The scheme is designed to register around 3.5 million citizens in the UK from the EU’s 27 countries.

They must apply online for “settled status” if they have lived in the UK for at least five years, or “pre-settled status” if they haven’t reached that threshold. The application is free.

Anyone who fails to apply or is denied status by June 2021 if the UK leaves the EU with a deal, or December 2020 of it leaves without, will become undocumented.

The government and Prime Minister Theresa May have repeatedly assured EU citizens they will be able to continue living and working in the UK after Brexit. 

But rights groups have raised concerns that should even a fraction of applications go wrong, given the scale of the task, it could result in thousands of people living in the UK becoming undocumented two years down the line.

Vulnerable groups

Among the vulnerable groups, says Coram, are unaccompanied children and young adults who have grown up in UK care homes or foster care, as well as children from disadvantaged families.

Children separated from one of their parents are also at risk.

“The Home Office from the start hasn’t recognised the complexity of the lives that are going to be interrupted by the scheme,” Marianne Lagrue, a policy manager at Coram Children’s Legal Centre and co-author of the report, told Al Jazeera. 

“For people who are working, it’s very straightforward. Everything is almost automatic. But for anyone whose life falls outside that straightforward pattern, it gets quite complicated quite quickly,” she added.

According to the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, there are an estimated 900,000 children of EU-born parents living in the UK, excluding Irish citizens. About 239,000 of them were born in the UK but do not have an automatic right to British citizenship.

The Home Office, the government department in charge of migration and security, has estimated there are approximately 5,000 EU children in care in the UK, not including care leavers.

The government has been running pilots of the EU settlement scheme since August 2018 with universities and other private and health institutions. The final test phase was opened to the public at the end of January. 

According to government figures, out of 150,000 applications submitted so far, nearly 90 percent have been closed – 70 percent of which were granted settled status and the rest pre-settled status. 

Other vulnerable groups may include the elderly, carers, the Roma community, and anyone who has lived in precarious or temporary accommodation, or has relied on informal work.

The Coram Children’s Legal Centre took part in one of the pilots and found that in a fifth of cases, the child did not have the documentation needed to apply for the scheme.

“In half of those cases, they really didn’t know how they were going to get it,” said Lagrue. 

Applicants to the EU settlement scheme must be able to prove both residence, mainly through tax records, and nationality.

For children separated from their parents, this could prove challenging.

“If you are a Polish child and you don’t live with both parents, to get a passport for the first time, a national identity document, you need either both of your parents to support your application in person or a court order explaining you only have one parent exercising parental responsibility,” Lagrue said, adding that this could be difficultif the child has lost contact with one parent. 

Rights groups are also concerned that unaccompanied EU youth may face further obstacles when they turn 18. 

“We know particularly for care leavers that they are vulnerable to being homeless, or unemployed, and we anticipate that will be similar for EEA nationals,” Ilona Pinter, a policy and research manager at the Children’s Society, told Al Jazeera.

“So having documentation will be particularly difficult because their status relies potentially on their parents, or the local authority they are in the care of.”

“If just 15 percent of the current population of EU national children fail to ‘regularise’ their status before the cut-off point, 100,000 children would be added to the UK’s undocumented child population overnight, nearly doubling it,” said Kamena Dorling, head of policy and public affairs at Coram.

“This ‘second Windrush’ generation of children and young people will be unable to work, unable to open a bank account or drive a car and effectively barred from college, university and secondary healthcare.”