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Episode details

World Service,13 Jul 2019,23 mins

Available for over a year

In a camp for the wives and children left behind by IS fighters in northern Syria, Anna Foster got few straight answers about why so many foreigners had joined the group and travelled to live in its self-proclaimed 'caliphate'. But she saw plenty of evidence that daily life in the camp today, after the Islamic State has been routed on the battlefield, can be a gruelling challenge for the adults and offers little for children to thrive on. Pascale Harter introduces this and other stories from around the world, with insight, wit and analysis from BBC correspondents, journalists and writers. Mathew Charles travelled to one of the most marginalised and lawless parts of Colombia to see how almost any kind of business - from cattle ranches to casinos - must pay protection money, or risk its employees' lives as well as its profits. In some remoter areas, the writ of the Colombian state simply doesn't run, and it's gangs or paramilitary groups which are really in charge. The rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in the Kashmir valley last year stirred outrage across India - not least because it threatened to inflame sectarian tension between Hindu and Muslim communities on a national level. When the case came to court, Divya Arya spent time with the victim's family and community, a group of nomadic Muslim livestock-herders known as the Bakkarwal, to hear how their coexistence with Hindu neighbours has been affected. And Nick Thorpe takes to the trail of Romania's wolves. The country's Carpathian mountains are home to Europe's largest packs of Eurasian grey wolves, which stalk through Romanian folklore and legend, casting a long shadow. Predators and shepherds have played out a battle of wits here over thousands of years - so how are things looking now for Canis lupus lupus in one of its greatest strongholds? (Image:Wives and children of former ISIS fighters in the al-Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria. Credit: Kate Geraghty/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)

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