23/07/2016 Reporters

I will be back at the top of the hour. Now, it is time for Reporters.

Welcome to Reporters. I'm Alice Baxter.

From here in the world's newsroom, we send out the

correspondents to bring you the best stories from across the globe.

Mark Urban reports on Turkey's returned to

democracy in President Erdogan's own inimitable way.

In the aftermath of the coup, President Erdogan and his

supporters and the police and elsewhere want revenge.

They are cracking down on what they call the

forces close in on the stronghold of so-called Islamic State in Mosul.

Lyse Doucet reports from the front line

These people escaped with their lives but more and more Iraqis

are now entering a different kind of hell.

You feel like you are going to faint.

We meet the Kenyan girls who fled their families to escape the

horrors of female genital mutilation.

These girls risked their lives running away but here, they

They are getting an education and they are no longer at

And Asia's new food heaven as Singapore gets

We meet the chefs competing for its first stars.

My mindset is fixed on being a chef opening a very

big restaurant and to inspire others, like Gordon Ramsay inspired

It was the coup that collapsed within just 14 hours.

It caused hundreds of deaths but did almost the exact opposite of what it

leaders had set out to achieve, strengthening the position

of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and giving him a pretext

Tens of thousands of people have been arrested.

Turkey is a Nato member and a pivotal nation in the fight

against Isis and in the Syrian war and in the migrant crisis.

It is now under a three-month state of emergency.

Mark Urban managed to get to Ankara just after the queue ended

Plenty of lives have been smashed here in the last few days.

At this mosque, relatives of eight policemen killed on Friday

This moment of national crisis, those already bereaved must hope

TRANSLATION: My child was 19 years old.

Phalanxes of police were on hand and hundreds of supporters

But the public at large have been held back.

The trouble may not be over and in waves of arrests,

Turkey's leader has called into question the loyalty

In the aftermath of the coup, President Erdogan and his

supporters in the police and elsewhere want revenge.

They are cracking down on what they call the Gulenist movement.

The response has been swift and hard.

These chiefs from military intelligence accused

of being plotters bandaged and battered and

They are accused of supporting the so-called Gulenist Network,

sympathisers of Turkish Islamic cleric Fethullah Gullen.

But the scale of arrests prompts opposition scepticism.

That is why there is a big question mark over this executive order

expelling all of them from the army, from the police, from the judiciary.

At Ankara's police HQ, evidence of how intense

The coup plotters attacked it first with a helicopter and then bonded

from a jet fighter before approaching it from the ground.

While all the time, police inside help out.

What triggered the coup and how could thousands of judges,

army people and police now arrested or dismissed already be found

The list for a crackdown had already been prepared,

a senior government MP has confirmed.

TRANSLATION: We were getting ready for them, we have been gathering

evidence against them for the last three or four years,

All the political parties want to fight this organisation

Parliament was also hammered by the plotters.

Supporters of all parties united in opposition to the coup

but now the governing party with its explanation

of the conspiracy it's thwarted seeks to reap

Having struck so many of the Turkish state and of course the parliament

itself, it is up hard to see the plotters as acting in any way

The opposition United against them and many Turks seem ready to accept

the government line that these plotters were members of a secret

sect as parallel structure, the Gulenist movement.

But how credible is it that thousands of soldiers and police,

as well as a big slice of the high command would support a banned

The opposition accuse Erdogan of finding a pretext of a wholesale

clearout of anyone suspected of disloyalty.

He is the one polarising society, dividing the society.

Using half the population in his own policy's favour

and the rest are feeling excluded, second-class citizens.

At the funeral of Ankara police killed on Friday, Erdogan supporters

in the crowd chanted for the plotters to get

A senior member of his party has told us it won't happen but evidence

of the Gulenist movement's role in the coup will be produced.

TRANSLATION: We are patient but our patience has run out.

Everything we do, we will do legally.

In the aftermath of what many Turks are calling The Event,

the country's rulers seek to channel their supporters' righteous anger.

While the wider Turkish public or foreigners might question this,

the purge is now on the way and Erdogan's people are determined

To Iraq now whether battle to recapture territory controlled

by the so-called Islamic State is making steady progress.

Late last month, Iraqi forces seized the city of Fallujah.

Now they are closer to the IS stronghold

But as the campaign intensifies, there is growing concern

about the country's humanitarian crisis.

3.5 million people are now displaced.

Lyse Doucet has been out on the front line with Iraqi forces

A gunner on guard, leaving Baghdad and flying north to see the Iraqi

We are travelling with the army chief to see the latest

battlefield success against so-called Islamic State.

IS's black fire still burn on the horizon.

But Iraq's flag flies here now, in ghostly villages.

Houses half built, fields without farmers.

Corpses of IS fighters here, and buried.

And then, like a desert oasis, Tigris is in sight.

This crossing was once a key IS supply route.

Now, a newly built bridge will hasten the army's

The enemy's de facto capital is just 40 miles away.

It will be the hardest of battles against IS - Daesh as it is called.

TRANSLATION: We think Daesh will collapse.

Our orders are to liberate every square inch of Iraq.

We are determined to eliminate Daesh by the end of the year.

They are getting advice from Western armies,

The Iraqis insist they will do the fighting.

We have all the equipment but we need the green light from US

forces to say do the operation and we need the jet fighters

A short distance away, families fleeing the fighting further north.

Most have only the clothes they wear.

19-year-old Jasham heads his family now, a dozen to care for.

There is a human cost in the war against a so-called Islamic State,

These people escaped with their lives but more and more

Iraqis are now entering a different kind of hell.

And as the campaign from Mosul intensifies,

Iraq is struggling to take back its land,

To do that, it needs the world's help.

Yet again this week, this week France was in mourning.

Following the third major terror attack on French soil in Nice.

After that on the Charlie Hebdo offices in January last

year and the Bataclan attacks of November.

So, why is France in particular being targeted and can it ever do

John Simpson examines the unique security

In Nice Cathedral, the nation which now feels more threatened

than any other in the West commemorated its dead.

In the last 18 months, more than 330 people have died

A state of emergency which was imposed in November

The Prime Minister insisted there would be no lapses

Ready, though, the opposition senses real weakness

A series of hammer blows have shaken this country to the core.

In January last year, the assault on the offices in Paris

of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, 17 killed.

Then last November, also in Paris, the concentrated attacks

at the Bataclan concert hall and several other places nearby.

The Bataclan remains closed now, silent.

If you peer through the hoardings, you can still see some

This is a real moment of crisis for France.

A moment when it is being brought face-to-face with a new

reality and with the way it is being governed.

In other words, its identity and its core values,

liberty, fraternity, equality, they are all being,

in one way or another, tested, questioned and challenged.

The street around the Bataclan is pretty empty, so are the cafes.

On a summer's day like this, it would usually be jam-packed.

People I spoke to were shocked by the new disaster in Nice

These kind of attacks are becoming completely normal.

We are at a complete loss about all the events.

Every six months, we have something else.

It looks as though President Hollande will pay a heavy political

When he arrived in Nice, people booed his motorcade.

A leading centre-right opposition figure, Alain Juppe,

claimed the Nice atrocity had been wholly avoidable.

A security commission made several proposals which President Hollande

France is reacting with defiance to the latest atrocity.

But even before the Nice attack, President Hollande's popularity

And it is only human nature to want a scapegoat.

At least 200 million girls and women worldwide have undergone

It is a practice now described by the United Nations as child abuse.

Kenya is one of the countries where it is most prevalent.

One in five between the ages of 14 and 49 have been cut,

But the Kenyan authorities are now trying to eradicate the practice.

A warning, this report contains a graphic description of FGM.

Most of these girls ran away from home because they were about to

In some tribes, the tradition web parts of a girl's vagina

are removed marks the point the girl becomes a woman.

It happened to this teenager when she was just seven years old.

Two years later, her father told her she must marry a man

All of these girls risked their lives running away

but here they have a future, they are getting an education

and they are no longer at risk of being mutilated and crucially

these girls won't go on to harm their own daughters.

Agnes Pereyo who runs this rescue centre and school is trying to stamp

out the brutal custom in her ancient Maasai community.

She introduced me to women in a nearby village,

including a former cutter, who did a demonstration

So you scrape the side of the vagina and take off the clitoris here?

It emerged the cutting used to happen right where we stood.

It is difficult to imagine how terrifying this

experience would be for a little girl.

Kenya banned female genital mutilation in 2011, the UN Agency

for Children says young girls are far less likely to be cut today

TRANSLATION: This is a tradition that is very important to us,

Otherwise, the girls will want sex all the time.

We are not allowed to do it any more.

Otherwise, I would cut my seven-year-old daughter

In these deeply traditional patriarchal communities, away

from the big cosmopolitan cities, many men still demand that

But attitudes are changing and these Maasai tribe cricketers

are helping to lead the charge, refusing to marry any

We use it as a way to bring our youth together, to bring

the communities together, to tell them that female genital

In the long run, I believe it will help our society.

Definitely it will happen in my lifetime, I know.

With just two weeks to go until the Olympic Games in Brazil,

the man in charge of security has told the BBC that the threat

of a terror attack is his overwhelming concern.

An extra 80,000 security personnel have been brought in to patrol

the streets of Rio and the stadiums amid concern that the country

But as we hear now, police also fear an upsurge in gang violence.

Rio has a reputation as one of the world's

Within sight of the beaches where Olympic volleyball

and triathlon events will take place, armed police patrol narrow

alleyways which by night revert to the control

They let off fireworks to let us know they are watching.

After a quiet couple of years, violence has returned

Rio is a much safer place today than it was 20 years ago but even

the last year or so, in these pacified favelas,

They have been more murders than attacks

and with the Olympic Games taking place down on Copacabana beach,

there is a real concern that some of this violence could spill over

In this Olympic city, shocking numbers of innocent

victims are killed in crossfire, often by police.

Children are taught to dive for cover at the sound of gunfire.

And petty crime invades the tourist beaches below.

Police officers warn they might not be able to guarantee public safety

Welcome to hell, they're stark message to visitors

We police officers are hiding our badges, our wallets, our guns

But city and state officials say that with an extra 80,000 security

personnel on the streets, Rio will be safe during the games

but says the security chief, there is one overriding concern.

TRANSLATION: For me, the biggest threat is terrorism.

Brazil is not an obvious target but we have a weakness

and it is our immense borders, so that is my number one concern.

The BBC recently saw evidence showing just how easy it would be

More than 70 Syrian nationals able to acquire genuine Brazilian

passports from crime gangs and corrupt officials.

Training exercises are designed to ease concerns but with 10,000

miles of often porous land borders, Brazil would be a soft target

for anyone seeking to disrupt the games.

Rio de Janeiro is still one of the world's most beguiling cities

and will provide a stunning backdrop for the Olympics but it has

Now, you may not know this but Singapore has long been

a foodie's paradise, and this week, for the first time,

the citystate got its own Michelin guide to its best restaurants.

In the past, its hospitality industry has been run mainly

New moves to hire local staff have spawned a new breed

Joel Chow is only 18 but he knows what he wants to be when he is older

My mindset is fixed on wanting to be a chef, opening a very big

restaurant and inspiring others like Gordon Ramsey has inspired me.

So enthusiastic if he about a career chef,

he enrolled at the Singaporean culinary school.

And that'll be the start of your carrot soup?

Joel and his classmates don't have just dreams to be celebrities chefs,

they are also here to fulfil a crucial need in Singapore

which has a shortage of chefs as well as service staff to cater to

Singapore has become something of a culinary capital.

Alongside its vibrant street food culture, top international chefs

top international chefs have opened restaurants here with a Michelin

But a cut in the number of foreign workers, restaurants

and hotels can hire, and expensive levies

to employ them has made the problem especially acute.

So, the government has introduced training programmes to raise

productivity and get more locals to sign up and become

It is something many young people have shied away from doing.

But the chief executive of the culinary school who is also

a director of the Singapore Hotel Association says

Interest now for the younger generation is they want to pursue

their dreams and it is not just what my parents want

With a government support, to encourage more people

to join this industry, I think it is wonderful.

Because of all this, I think we have seen

an increase of 10% and I think that is pretty good.

The rise in the school's intake could go a little way to fixing

the problem but it will take many more young people with Joel's

enthusiasm to help reduce Singapore's reliance

It has the highest proportion of foreign workers and weaning

itself off them to recruit home-grown talent will continue

That all looks delicious, doesn't it?

That is all from Reporters for this week.

From me, Alice Baxter, goodbye for now.