Militia

By the busload and planeload, National Guard troops were pouring into the nation's capital on Jan. 16, as governors answered the urgent pleas of U.S. defense officials for more troops to help safeguard Washington even as they keep anxious eyes on possible violent protests in their own states.

Turkey's Defense Ministry is mulling temporarily halting the conscription and the discharge of soldiers, while assessing an alternative that will allow distance training for paid military service, due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, according to local media reports.

A decision on the ministry's proposal will be discussed during April 13's cabinet meeting.

In January this year, Defence Minister Krasimir Karakachanov announced the army was short 5,500 people. According to the 2018 Defence report, the professional armed forces are 20 per cent understaffed, while the voluntary reserve is staggeringly 83 per cent understaffed.

It gets tougher every day to provide manpower to the members of military reserve forces as well as active forces, while the best model to be implemented is the one from Norway, portal Balkan Security Network reports.

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A Filipino soldier, five militiamen and four villagers were killed by a powerful bomb that exploded in a van the troops were inspecting Tuesday amid threats of bombings in a southern province, military officials said.

Rival Libyan leaders meeting in Paris on May 29 tentatively agreed on a political roadmap leading to parliamentary and presidential elections on Dec. 10, but the plan faces major obstacles in the North African country, where the rival authorities rely on an array of unruly militias.

İYİ (Good) Party leader Meral Akşener has testified for a prosecutor after she claimed early January that civilians in two Turkish cities were receiving weapons training in militia camps.

The Kremlin said on Nov. 23 that Turkey’s opposition to the participation of Kurdish militias in Syria’s political process would not stand in the way of a peace “congress” Moscow is seeking to organize in the near future.

Afghanistan is considering training and arming 20,000 civilians to defend territories where Islamic militants have been driven out, officials say, sparking fears the local forces could become another thuggish militia.   

In the woods south of Atlanta, John and Yvette DeMaria are with about a dozen camouflage-wearing, heavily armed Americans huffing and puffing as they scramble to navigate the sprawling piece of property where they train, one weekend a month, to ward off enemies — foreign or domestic.