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Boko Haram, the Nigerian rebel group that kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls in April, has seized the northeastern town where the girls were abducted.

The Guardian reports:

"The militants attacked at about 4pm on Thursday, destroying communications masts and forcing residents to flee, according to witnesses. One described running past bodies strewn on a street.

"The fall of Chibok is hugely symbolic. The town in north-east Nigeria became the centre of world attention in April when Boko Haram fighters stormed the government girls secondary school, forced students onto trucks and drove them into the bush. There was a global Twitter campaign, #BringBackOurGirls, and criticism of the government's response."

Last month, the Nigerian government announced a cease-fire with Boko Haram, insisting that it included a deal to return the kidnapped girls. But the promise cited by the government was never fulfilled and soon more girls were kidnapped by the group.

The Associated Press reports: "In a separate development, police say a car bomb has exploded in northern Kano city tonight, killing at least six people including three police officers. The city is the second largest population center in Nigeria. There's been no claim of responsibility for the bomb, but Boko Haram extremists have detonated them in Kano in the past."

Boko Haram

Nigeria

The mixed Arab and Kurdish city of Zumar in northern Iraq is a window into the fierce battles for territory between the Kurds and the Sunni extremist group known as the Islamic State, or ISIS.

The mountainous landscape is pockmarked with destruction. ISIS took control of the area in August and held it until late October. Then Kurdish forces, with the help of U.S.-led airstrikes, forced the militants back.

And while the so-called Islamic State is gone now, the dispute over this land, rich with oil, is far from over. Kurds and Arabs have claimed the same territory for decades. And now Kurds appear to be staking their claim to all of it.

It's a microcosm of a country fracturing along ethnic and sectarian lines while ISIS preys on historic enmities between tribes, ethnicities and sect to advance its own cause.

In some parts of Iraq, Arabs are forcibly displacing Kurds; in others, Shiite Muslims are displacing Sunni Muslims or vice versa.

On the road to Zumar that reality comes into sharp focus. For nearly a mile we drive by mounds of knee-high rubble. The Arab village of Barzan is gone; not a single house is standing.

Two young Kurdish soldiers, or peshmerga, riding with us claim that when ISIS invaded, the Arabs celebrated. The soldiers say the Arab villagers accused the Kurds of being occupiers and thanked the Sunni extremists for liberating them.

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Barzan, an Arab village outside Zumar, has been completely leveled by U.S.-led airstrikes and Kurdish soldiers. The Kurds say the whole village sided with the Islamic State, though no Arabs remain to tell their side of the story. Leila Fadel/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Leila Fadel/NPR

Barzan, an Arab village outside Zumar, has been completely leveled by U.S.-led airstrikes and Kurdish soldiers. The Kurds say the whole village sided with the Islamic State, though no Arabs remain to tell their side of the story.

Leila Fadel/NPR

During the fight against ISIS here, U.S.-led airstrikes reduced some of the homes to rubble. The peshmerga blew up the ones left standing.

"The Arabs are not welcome here anymore," one of the young soldiers says. In his mind they are all ISIS sympathizers. "They killed our friends, our family and you think we will welcome them back? Impossible."

Among those killed was the young man's brother.

When we arrive in Zumar, the streets are all but empty. I try to get out of the car on a street of destroyed stores, but a truck of Kurdish soldiers stops us. They say they haven't completely cleared the area.

ISIS rigged the homes with explosives and left bombs hidden in pots and buried underground. They tagged buildings with the words "Property of the Islamic State." But those have hastily been crossed out with praise for the peshmerga now in control.

We drive on and find a family who returned home 10 days ago. Like that village on the road, their city looks like a war zone. Many homes are nothing but rubble, some destroyed by airstrikes, others by Islamic State bombings. Twisted pick-up trucks that once belonged to ISIS litter the streets.

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Mohamed Ali stands with his Kurdish family. They are one of the the few families that has returned to Zumar after being driven out by the Islamic State. They say their Arab neighbors should not return. Leila Fadel/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Leila Fadel/NPR

Mohamed Ali stands with his Kurdish family. They are one of the the few families that has returned to Zumar after being driven out by the Islamic State. They say their Arab neighbors should not return.

Leila Fadel/NPR

Mohamed and Ahmed Ali are Kurdish brothers; they're among the few families who returned.

"When I came home and saw the walls standing, I kissed the dirt and the walls," Mohamed says. "I never thought I'd see this place again."

But he says, his neighbors, Arabs, have not and cannot come home.

"They are traitors," he says.

His brother Ahmed nods in agreement.

"My neighbor put a gun to my head," he says. The man was masked and he planned to kill Ahmed, because Ahmed is a policeman. But his children wept nearby, and Ahmed's son recognized the masked man's voice as the neighbor. Only then did the man let him go, but warned him to get out of town.

Throughout the city homes are spray-painted with the word "reserved." Others are tagged with the word "Kurdish," followed by a name.

Mohamed explains the graffiti. Kurds who came back and found their homes destroyed by the Islamic State are taking Arab homes to compensate themselves. When they pick a house they write the word reserved on it.

And Kurds who found their homes standing are writing "Kurdish" on the wall, to make sure no one mistakes it for an Arab home and takes it.

Kurdish residents say it's only fair, because they believe the Arabs sided with the Islamic State when the extremists invaded and Kurds had to flee.

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Mohamed points to the homes across the road.

"Those homes are Arab and all of the ones behind them," he says. "And they should not come back."

The Arabs of Zumar, who once made up about half the city, are not here to tell their side of the story. Most Sunni Arabs don't back the Islamic State, and many have died fighting the group, which isn't exclusively Sunni Arab.

But the ISIS does seize on historic grievances, like the tensions between Kurds and Arabs. The Kurds appear to be using this fight to seize land and oil that they believe should be part of a future Kurdistan.

Before leaving town, we meet a Kurdish man, Ismael Ali Ibrahim. He's just returned after months of displacement.

He walks us through his kitchen. A rocket pierced a hole in the wall, and glass and gravel cover the floor. One of his kid's toys, a little stuffed Santa Claus, lay in the rubble.

"I don't know what this ISIS wants or where they came from," he says between sobs, standing in his broken home. "I blame politics and the state."

We walk outside by an empty pen that once housed his sheep, and a bulldozer destroyed by a rocket that he once used to make a living.

He doesn't know what he'll do now, but he thanks God for his life.

Despite this war, his desire is for Iraq to stay united.

But when I ask him if his Arab neighbors should come back, he says no: "They were the cause of all these problems."

Islamic State

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Iraq

Three Minutes in Poland

Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film

by Glenn Kurtz

Hardcover, 288 pages | purchase

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Read an excerpt

In 2009, Glenn Kurtz stumbled across some old family films in a closet in his parents' house in Florida. One of the films, shot more than 70 years earlier by his grandparents while on vacation in Europe, turned out to include footage of his grandfather's hometown in Poland.

"I realized it was 1938," Kurtz tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "And there are all of these beautiful images of children and adults in this town, one year before World War II begins. I was just haunted by these faces. They're so happy to be filmed, they're so excited to see these Americans coming to visit the town. And of course I know something that they don't know — which is what's about to happen."

Kurtz set out to restore the film (which you can watch here) and find the people in it. The book based on this journey is called Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.

Interview Highlights

On what you can see in the video

There's this extraordinary, beautiful detail of the people — their faces, the clothing that they're wearing. There's lots of kids who kind of mob my grandfather and jump up and down and wave their arms and try to get into the frame. It's just this sort of commotion of these visitors coming to visit the town, and everybody wants to see what's going on and be in the picture.

When I found the film, it was not in playable condition. It had fused into, essentially, a hockey puck. So I started hunting around, and I ultimately donated the film to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And they were extraordinarily helpful. They gave the film to a film laboratory in Maryland ... and they spent four months restoring the images.

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In a still from the 1938 film footage, 13-year-old Morris Chandler appears on the left, among other town children. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hide caption

itoggle caption United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

In a still from the 1938 film footage, 13-year-old Morris Chandler appears on the left, among other town children.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

On finding survivor Morris Chandler, who appears as a 13-year-old boy in the film

Once the film had been restored and digitized, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum put it on their website. It was part of their collection and it was there with all of the other home movies that they have. And I received an email one day, from a woman I'd never heard of, out of the blue. And she said that someone had brought this film to her attention and that she was sitting, watching it with her father; camera pans across the crowd, there are all these children jumping and waving, and suddenly, a boy's face looked out and she saw her grandfather as a 13-year-old boy. And in this email that she wrote to me, she said, "He's still alive, and he'd very much like to talk to you, because I believe he knew your family as a child."

On watching the film with Chandler

A few weeks later, my family and his family gathered in Florida and we watched the film together. And Mr. Chandler has a prodigious memory. I sometimes feel like he'd been waiting his whole life to talk about this town. And we sat for hours, looking at these few minutes of film and he was able to identify a number of people who he recognized immediately. There were stories about those people, and then, of course, about his life, about people who didn't appear in the film. And it was just one of the most extraordinary experiences in my life.

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Glenn Kurtz is also the author of Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music. Franziska Liepe/Farrar, Straus and Giroux hide caption

itoggle caption Franziska Liepe/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Glenn Kurtz is also the author of Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music.

Franziska Liepe/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

On what it was like for Chandler to watch the film

Yeah, in fact, one of the things he said to me on the phone when we first spoke was, "You've given me back my childhood." And I think, for someone who survived the Holocaust — the tragedy of that, the loss of it, the intense fear of that experience — just overshadows everything that came before it and makes what came before, in a sense, almost incomprehensible. And when we were sitting and watching the film, one of the things that he said was, "I just can't believe that I was a kid." It was a part of his life that he couldn't even relate to anymore. But here it was, in these beautiful color images, and one of the things that he said to me was, "Now, I can show you that I'm not from Mars." He had felt that isolated in his family, as if he had come from Mars.

On the impact of the Holocaust on that town

When my grandparents visited in 1938, there were approximately 3,000 Jews living in the town, and by the end of the war, fewer than 100 were still alive.

Author Interviews

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On the stories the survivors shared with him

When I started to research the project, I thought that I was going to try and recreate what the town was like. But 75 years later, what you're left with are these fragments — not only documents, but also these memories. Some of these memories which the survivors have been willing to share with their families, you know, have become stories that are fairly polished. And they tend to share with their families stories that aren't too scary — things that are even amusing or things that have, you know, a happy ending.

I was fortunate that the survivors were willing to share with me, I think, more, actually, than they'd shared with their own families. As an outsider, they were willing to talk with me and weren't trying to protect me, although they were still trying to protect themselves in some ways. And it took many, many times of speaking with people, sometimes, to get behind the polished stories that they were willing to share. And, of course, everything that they remember is intimately bound, inextricably bound, with loss.

Read an excerpt of Three Minutes in Poland

The first 2015 Ford F-150 rolled off the assembly line this week, and it is no normal truck. The new F-150 pickup is the first with an aluminum body, making it hundreds of pounds lighter than its predecessors.

Ford isn't taking this gamble on just any truck — the F-150 is the company's most important vehicle. Morgan Stanley estimates the F-Series truck line and SUV derivatives represent 90 percent of Ford's global profits.

In Detroit, they take trucks seriously, but few Detroiters take trucks more seriously than Alana Strager, program management analyst for the Ford F-150.

She's not just a second-generation car person — she's a second-generation Ford truck person. Strager's dad was in charge of big commercial trucks at Ford in the '80s and '90s. Her own obsession with trucks began during her sophomore year of college, when her dad had her work as a receptionist at Ford for $8 an hour.

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Ford says the new high-strength steel frame and aluminum body takes about 700 pounds off the weight of the F-150. Carlos Osorio/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Carlos Osorio/AP

Ford says the new high-strength steel frame and aluminum body takes about 700 pounds off the weight of the F-150.

Carlos Osorio/AP

"I walked into the studio the first day, and there were clay models of these heavy trucks, like huge, like real, life-size clay. People were like playing with this clay and it was this big huge truck," Strager says. "And I thought 'Wow. OK, this is going to be a fun summer.' "

But the project Strager has enjoyed the most is the development of the new aluminum-bodied F-150. Her team has been developing this truck since 2009, completely retooling their factories to accommodate using aluminum alloy on a mass scale.

For example, instead of the spot welds used with steel, factories will use high-strength adhesives and laser welding. But everyone — from the auto mechanic to the dealer — has to be retrained.

All of this is happening while Ford's major competitors in the truck space, GM and Chrysler, are gaining market share. Still, in the truck world, the Ford F-Series is not the 800-pound gorilla — it's King Kong.

"It's been the best-selling truck in the United States for the last 37 years, unbroken," says Aaron Bragman, Detroit bureau chief for Cars.com. "That's just an astonishing figure."

Changing the truck has set the automotive industry atwitter with expectation. Some seem to hold more than a secret hope that Ford and its truck will, after nearly 40 years of dominance, finally fall on its tailgate.

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"I do races and stuff like that, and I have it ingrained in my head that you never look back, because you lose time, you lose seconds if you look back to see where everybody else is," says Strager. "We don't look back. We carve the path."

Business

Ford's New F-150 May Pave The Way For More Aluminum Cars

Ford says that the new body cuts about 700 pounds off the weight of the truck, without sacrificing any capability. But the company isn't willing to talk much about the most important reason for this redesign — what kind of miles per gallon the thing gets.

Bragman says that Ford's move to aluminum is one of the biggest gambles in the auto industry in years. Will customers who identify with the slogan "Built Ford Tough" want a lighter body truck? Other questions loom large, says Bragman.

"How the truck is used by customers, how the truck is recycled at the end of its life, how it's repaired, how it's insured, will it cost more to actually have it repaired?" says Bragman. "There's still a lot of questions that we haven't quite gotten the answers to, that we're not going to know until the truck really starts to get in consumers' hands."

Bragman says the real gamble is whether Ford can maintain its profits after investing so heavily in the redesign. But Strager has no doubt that the truck will continue to deliver.

"Our future isn't hinging on the success of this truck — this truck will be successful because this truck kicks booty," says Strager. "This is an amazing vehicle. And I have no doubt about that."

While the truck is important to the auto industry all across the United States, Strager says it's success is especially vital to Detroit.

"Yeah, I'm all Detroit, the D, Rock City, Motor City," she says. "No one is going to bring us down, we are going to survive. We are going to get through this and we are going to come out on top. Detroit is still the Motor City, and it's just going to get better and better and better. So whoever thinks that's not the case, look out, because here we come."

trucks

Detroit automakers

Ford Motor Company