Western leaders denounce Putin’s ‘illegal’ election win as allies send congratulations

He knows not to dream of freedom. Instead he fantasizes about having a football. “Can you get me one?” he said, as if he was asking for the Moon. Five years after the fall of the Islamic State group’s brutal “caliphate”, tens of thousands of women and children linked to the jihadists are still being held by the US-backed Kurdish forces in camps rife with violence and abuse, with seemingly no clear plan of what to do with them. More than 40,000 inmates — half of them children — are cooped up behind the barbed wire fences and watchtowers of…