He is a sheik from the large Shummari tribe; hails from Hasaka, a marginalized area of northern Syria; and a cousin, according to the pan-Arab television channel Al Arabiya, is a rebel commander in control of an oil-rich area bordering Iraq.
The controversy has raised thorny issues, since the project is intended to bring economic development to a marginalized area within a poverty-stricken nation.
According to a recent piece by The Guardian, Pakistan's Health and Nutrition Development Society (HANDS), which heads the Marginalized Area Reproductive Health Viable Initiative, sends groups of women ages 18 to 40 to villages that lack access to government health care facilities.
Artefacting, which has done similar projects in gritty sections of Mumbai and Detroit, calls attention to social justice issues and inequality in marginalized areas.
Many Muslims say the hard-line sentiments found in their religion, especially in marginalized areas like this one, are a reaction to the growing strength of fundamentalism among India's Hindu majority, a strength that is both social and political.
However, rather than having southern independence as his goal, Garang instead strongly advocated for a united secular Sudan in which the south (and other marginalized areas) would have equal opportunities for development and prosperity.
The Islamist character of the opposition reflects the main constituency of the rebellion, which has been led since its start by Syria's Sunni Muslim majority, mostly in conservative, marginalized areas.
The struggle for self-government has become a familiar casus belli for rebel groups in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and other marginalized areas of Sudan far from the capital, Khartoum.
The police arrested five people in northern France on Thursday, the first arrests in connection with recent rioting that renewed concerns about security in marginalized areas facing high unemployment.
"No peace will come in Sudan if we leave the marginalized areas in Sudan and make peace in the south," Abubakar Hamid Nour, general coordinator of the Justice and Equality Movement, one of two Darfur rebel groups, declared in an interview at his headquarters, a pitch-dark mud-brick house here in Tiné (pronounced TEE-nay).
One of our grantees, Samasource, is working in Africa, South Asia and other marginalized areas to bring paid work to people in need.
