Unreported World

Marcel Theroux tries to find out who is benefitting from the enormous gas and oil reserves in a country riddled with corruption.

Sonya Saul finds that more than a decade of exposure to the global free market has changed little for the poorest 40% of the population who still live on less than two dollars a day.

Saira Shah travels to the centre of a sleeping sickness epidemic, and discovers that potentially lethal cocktails of chemicals are being injected into patients who are denied a safe drug owing to the lack of financial incentive for the major pharmaceutical companies.

Juliana Ruhfus finds that the lucrative mining of the ore coltan from which tantalum is extracted, and used in the production of mobile phones, is at the root of the war in Congo.

Marcel Theroux investigates life and conditions in Chechnya and how European governments are deliberately ignoring Russian atrocities and oppression in order to maintain good diplomatic and business relations with Russia.

Sandra Jordan looks at the American policy of trying to solve its cocaine drugs problems by eradicating coca production in Bolivia and the consequences and effects this has on the country and its population.

Sandra Jordan investigates why so many young Palestinians have turned to violence in their struggle for self-determination.

Marcel Theroux finds that government repression has driven young people towards joining the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and asks if the "War on Terror" will accelerate the process.

Juliana Ruhfus visits at a country blighted by war and poverty and ruled by warlords, and asks if America's attempts to control Islamic extremism in the country will only further radicalise its population.

Sandra Jordan investigates the causes and human cost of the on-going Maoist rebellion in the world's only Hindu Kingdom.

William Wallis witnesses the horrors of a civil war born out of economic recession and fuelled by ethnic hatred.

Juliana Ruhfus reports on a nation torn apart by economic collapse, political anarchy and gang warfare.

Sandra Jordan investigates the reality of occupation and resistance in Kashmir.

Farai Sevenso takes a look at law and order in South Africa and accompanies a private security company on patrol.

Juliana Ruhfus investigates the strength of Al-Qaeda in Yemen and the attitudes of the people to the US, Al-Qaeda and the "War on Terror".

Sam Kiley investigates the trafficking of children in India for the sex trade in Calcutta and Bombay.

Sandra Jordan reports that members of the indigenous population are rejecting western capitalism and its influence.

Sam Kiley investigates the worsening of tribal conflicts in Papua New Guinea.

Sandra Jordan gains access to Tamil Tiger training camps and examines the effects of the long-running war between Tigers and government.

Aidan Hartley travels to the Dandora slums near Nairobi where gun crime and abject poverty show the growing divide between rich and poor.

Khaled Khazziha, in a refugee camp, meets Mohamed Abdelaziz, President of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, a country not officially recognised by Morocco.

Sandra Jordan reports on the UN's battle against armed gangs in Cite-Soleil.

Aidan Hartley reports on the human cost of the West's demand for goods such as mobile phones and MP3 players.

Evan Williams reports on the conflict over cocoa, which has claimed hundreds of lives and forced thousands of people into refugee camps.

Evan Williams visits the Zabbaleen, a Coptic Christian community in Cairo living and working in rubbish in ghettos overrun by rats, who claim that they are treated as second-class citizens.

Aidan Hartley reports from the Sonoran Desert in Northern Mexico, crossed every day by thousands of illegal immigrants from Central and South America, desperate to reach the USA.

Kate Seelye reports on the consequences of a total ban on abortions, with women scared to visit hospitals and doctors afraid to carry out life-saving operations on female patients.

Nima Elbagir finds the child soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army being told that they are engaged in a war against the entire world as they take over villages and wage a campaign of terror

Jenny Kleeman reveals how, at the same time as Pol Pot's accomplices are put on trial, Cambodia's people are once again being brutally driven from their land, this time by a property boom fueled by tourism.

Ramita Navai reports that 200 girls and women have been victims of honour killings in the past year alone and that a new law outlawing honour killings may have led to a huge increase in forced suicides.

Unreported World goes undercover to investigate how the increased Chinese presence in East Africa has lead to a huge increase in elephant poaching, with potentially devastating effects on tourism and the local economy. The team also hears astonishing claims that when Chinese president Hu Jintao travelled to Tanzania for a state visit, his officials left with large quantities of illegal ivory. Reporter Aidan Hartley and director Alex Nott begin their journey at a conservation area in northern Kenya, run by Kuki Gallman. She says that elephant poaching has risen from six animals in 2007 to 57 in 2009, just in her small area. It's not long before the team discovers the carcasses of several elephants, killed for their tusks. Local gamekeepers say that poachers spray herds indiscriminately with AK 47s, killing babies, mothers and pregnant elephants. Kuki says it's the highest death toll for decades and elephants are at risk of becoming extinct in the area.

As the world's attention focuses on recent sectarian violence in Nigeria, Unreported World provides an exclusive report on the events leading up to the latest round of bloodletting. Reporter Peter Oborne and director Andy Wells were the only television journalists in the town of Jos in the immediate aftermath of a previous outburst of sectarian violence, which left 500 people dead. There, they uncover the truth about the convulsion of barbarism that is afflicting a country, and which is rapidly spiralling out of control.

Unreported World is granted rare access to the Pakistan headquarters of what the US and UN say is a front organisation for one of the world's biggest terrorist networks, and the organisation behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks. While the group says it's a charity set up to help the poor, reporter Evan Williams talks to insiders, government ministers and terrorism experts to investigate the truth about an organisation that has expanded its activities from Kashmir to attacking western targets outside Pakistan. Williams and director Will West begin their journey in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province. They have a meeting with Asadullah, a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba - 'The Army of the Righteous'. The terrorist organisation has been directly blamed for the Mumbai attacks that killed 173 people, and a string of other deadly attacks in India. Asadullah tells Williams he and 26 friends fought in Kashmir, but he was the only one who survived.

Unreported World meets remarkable people fighting back against leprosy in India, where millions affected by the disease are pushed to the margins of society, ostracized by their friends and families. Based on targets set by the World Health Organization, the Indian government claims it has eliminated leprosy. However Unreported World reveals the numbers of new cases in some areas could be much higher than previously estimated.

Unreported World travels to eastern Congo to witness the remarkable work of one man who liberates the child soldiers who have been forced to fight in one of the world's longest-running conflicts. While they are fortunate enough to film the moments several dozen youngsters are released, the team also discovers that hundreds more are being abducted as rebels and the army prepare for a new round of fighting.

Reporter Jenny Kleeman and director James Jones travel from Italy to Africa to reveal how human traffickers are using black magic to coerce and trap Nigerian women into a life of prostitution in Europe. Women are made to swear an oath of loyalty to their traffickers in an elaborate ritual that compels them to pay back extortionate sums of money. If they ever break free or report their traffickers, they believe they will be cursed.

As George Clooney campaigns against the atrocities being committed in Sudan, Unreported World has filmed extensive documentary footage from the war zone. Aidan Hartley and Daniel Bogado gained rare access to the Nuba Mountains to film the heroic doctors who are saving children in a largely hidden war being perpetrated on civilians by one of the world's most brutal dictatorships. The Nuba Mountains region, in the South Kordofan oil fields upriver from Khartoum, is a troubled part of Sudan where a civil war has continued since the 1980s. Nuba always fought alongside its southern black African Christian neighbours against the Arab Islamic regime in Khartoum, but the region was left behind in the peace accord that led to the independence of South Sudan in mid-2011. In June 2011, President Omar al-Bashir's forces launched fresh attacks against opposition supporters in Nuba, many of them Christians and black Africans. The Unreported World team highlights how government forces are carrying out almost constant aerial bombardment of civilian settlements, driving them from their fields so they cannot grow crops, while banning relief deliveries by international agencies. As soon as they arrive in Nuba, Hartley and Bogado are caught in an air raid by Sukhoi ground attack jets firing rockets as terrified families dive into foxholes while explosions rumble in the surrounding villages. In another incident soon after, the team films traumatised children running into caves to hide from Antonov bombers. The impact of Khartoum's refusal to allow medicines into Nuba is clear as doctors are forced to carry out operations on shrapnel-wounded children without anaesthetics and almost no medicines apart from traditional herbs. Hartley and Bogado visit the Catholic Mother of Mercy hospital, the only functioning hospital for a million civilians trapped by the war. Made for 80 beds, it has 500 patients. The situation is so dire that even the medical staff are not eating as they tend the wounded and sick. Teenage mother Alawiya tells Hartley how her new-born baby was killed in her arms by a blast that also claimed the lives of her mother and sister and tore off her right arm. One doctor claims that 80 per cent of all victims are civilians: the result of deliberate targeting. An estimated 350,000 civilians have been driven from their homes by fighting and many have fled to live in the caves. The team travels with a local doctor to caves in the mountain of Tungule, where thousands have been forced to live. In one clinic hidden among the rocks, Dr Alamin examines a seven-month-old baby, who he says has severe pneumonia and will die as Khartoum has banned the delivery of vaccines for children as well as supplementary foods for starving babies, and the United Nations, which evacuated in 2011, has delivered no supplies for a year. The team stays with Mansur and his family in one cave overnight to shelter from aerial attacks, and as the sun goes down he cooks what food he has been able to buy that day with the last of his money: a few handfuls of sorghum grain that went cheap because it was contaminated by petrol. The next morning the team films at a school the cave dwellers have set up under the canopy of tall trees. As the children attend their morning assembly, a bomber circles overhead and hundreds of children run screaming in fear to take cover in the nearby caves. Their teachers tell Hartley that the schools have no pens, no books, nothing with which to learn, due to Khartoum's attacks. As he unleashed terror last year, Bashir declared: 'There will be no time to speak of diversity of culture and ethnicity... Islam [will be] the official religion and Arabic the official language... we will force them back into the mountains and starve them.' As Unreported World shows, this is exactly what he has done, and unless action is taken, the horn of Africa faces another terrible man-made famine.

nreported World gains unprecedented and exclusive access to the Baghdad Bomb Squad. Nine years after the invasion and with the British and the Americans gone, Iraq still faces almost daily attacks from those trying to foment political chaos and sectarian hatred. Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Alex Nott spend time with a small band of brave Iraqi officers trying to prevent further murderous attacks. With modest resources and great courage in the face of terrible danger, four 12-man squads work around the clock defusing bombs or investigating crime scenes where a device has detonated. The Unreported World team joins one team as they begin a morning shift, when the bombers are at their busiest. Twenty-nine year old officer Rawad Yassin, who has already spent six years in the bomb squad, tells Guru-Murthy that his family have urged him to leave the unit but he feels a responsibility to his fellow officers. Travelling in convoy they are called out to the suburb of Karrada. They believe they are heading to an unexploded device but on arrival find the aftermath of detonated device. The target was a senior military commander in charge of the Ministry of Communications Protection Force. Several of his staff have been killed, and more than a dozen injured. As the team head off, reports come in of other bombings around Baghdad. Another unit finds an unexploded device right outside Iraq's Oil Ministry. Unreported World reveals extraordinary footage showing how a 'sticky bomb', which is fixed under the car of a Brigadier General, is made safe. In the last two years more than 30 bomb disposal experts have been killed across Iraq. Guru-Murthy speaks to someone close to one of those killed trying to defuse a vehicle bomb. Ali Hameed shows Guru-Murthy video footage of the incident which left his partner Ali Latif with terrible injuries. Hameed says since the incident he's been living with severe psychological stress. The bomb squad believes Sunni extremists known as 'Al Qaeda in Iraq' are behind most of the bombings. The violence is deepening the sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Most targets are Shia, and Shia leaders including the Prime Minister accuse Sunni politicians of complicity. In turn Sunni leaders claim Shia are blaming them so Iraq can be dominated by the Shia. Guru-Murthy highlights how Sunnis feel wrongly blamed and persecuted. They want nothing to do with Al Qaeda but feel cut out of power by the Shia led government. The team speaks to one of the most powerful Sunni tribal leaders - Sheikh Ali Al Hatam. Five years ago he ordered his men to stop fighting the Americans and turn on Al Qaeda. Now he feels betrayed and believes the Shia government is using the current bombing campaign as an excuse to increase discrimination against Sunnis. He fears the result will be further terrible sectarian violence. In the week Unreported World is in Baghdad the bomb squad save many lives but across the country some 30 bombs explode and more than a hundred people are killed. When US troops withdrew in December, President Obama said they'd left Iraq stable and democratic. The Bomb Squad know that stability is still elusive. As Lieutenant Jassim Hamad Saleh says over shocking footage showing when he was injured in a bomb blast... 'Our work is a sacrifice, dealing with bombs means going to meet death. Death normally comes to people, but we go to death'.

The team begin their journey on set with Saba Sahar - an actress, screenwriter and Afghanistan's first female film director. In a country where few women work at all, Saba is directing her sixth production - a TV series about the Afghan police force. The only woman on set, Saba has complete authority, even over the real policemen who are acting as her extras. As well as directing, Saba is playing the heroine, who's a female cop succeeding in a man's world. Saba's high-profile job is provoking some of the most dangerous people in the country. The drug lords and the Taliban have threatened her life. 'Each morning when I leave the house I think I'll never see my family again. I might be killed,' she tells Kleeman. Kleeman and Lang meet Salim Shaheen, Afghanistan's most prolific film director. He's directed and starred in over 100 low-budget, high-octane movies over three decades. With a large fan base, Salim has a huge influence on ordinary Afghans. He takes Kleeman on to the film set where he's in the middle of directing a fight scene. Salim fears the departure of foreign troops from Afghanistan could mean the end of his career. 'There's going to be a civil war here,' he warns. 'If the Taliban come back, films will be banned. I'll have to leave the country.' Like Saba Sahar, Salim's life has been threatened. 'Every second we are under threat,' he tells Kleeman. 'Every minute our lives are in danger.' The team meets a Taliban fighter. He tells Kleeman that cinema goes against their interpretation of Sharia law and should be outlawed. He has a warning for Salim and Saba: 'They should be told that what they are doing is wrong first,' he says. 'If that doesn't stop them, we will punish them according to Sharia law.' The punishment, he says, is death. Everyone the team meets is convinced the Taliban will soon be back in power, and Afghanistan will soon return to fundamentalism. But Kabul's DVD bazaars are booming. Salim takes Kleeman into a market where one trader says he sells up to 1400 copies of a newly released film per day. There's a huge appetite for home-grown cinema. Salim and Saba have already paid a high price for making films: Saba has been rejected by her wider family, and Salim lost eight crew members in a rocket attack on one of his sets. He shows Kleeman footage of the aftermath. 'I'll continue in their name,' he says. 'I'm prepared to sacrifice myself. I'll never give up making films.' Salim and Saba have more sacrifices ahead: the Taliban want them to suffer for believing in the freedoms promised by the west.

Ade Adepitan meets some of Cuba's top basketball players and finds out why some of them are defecting when the country seems to be opening up.

Aidan Hartley reports from his home town in Kenya on an extraordinary project to rescue the children who live on its streets.

In war-torn Gaza, Location, Location, Location means finding an apartment in one of the highly sought-after areas that are usually not shelled or hit by missiles.

Indonesia is home to the planet's most polluted river and a textile industry supplying some of the world's biggest fashion brands.

Unreported World meets the extraordinary dancers and musicians at Iraq's only music and ballet school, battling to keep their art alive against the rising tide of violence in Baghdad.

This powerful episode documents the lives of Thai children as young as seven who fight in the brutal sport of Muay Thai, knocking out their opponents with elbows, knees, feet and fists.

A unique, devastating insight into the last days in the battle between Kurdish fighters and Isis for the Syrian town of Kobani.

This action-packed, eye-opening episode visits Texas to meet the young children participating in what has been described as the world's most dangerous organised sport: bull-riding.

Unreported World meets the brave - and very funny - comics risking their security by satirising Zimbabwe's politicians online.

Reporter Marcel Theroux and director Victoria Bell are in Malaysia, where the government has declared transgender people to be enemies of Islam. There they meet the Trans women who are forced to live in what human rights groups say is one of the worst places in the world to be transgender and accompany the country's religious police as they crackdown on anything considered ‘un-Islamic'.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Patrick Wells travel to Venezuela, where they are joined by a family's frantic door-to-door search for medicines for their desperately ill daughter. This is one of the thousands of families who are affected by the shortage of drugs and medical equipment across the country. The episode visits a hospital lacking items as basic as antibiotics, and if doctors decide to speak out they are labelled anti-revolutionaries. The show will reveal how one of the world's biggest oil producers has been crippled by an economic disaster.

Reporter Fazeelat Aslam and director Karim Shah reveal how thousands of families living in Pakistan's richest city, Karachi, are suffering from chronic water shortages as a result of climate change, mismanagement, corrupt officials and criminal gangs. Their eye-opening report shows how drastic the situation has become, with families who are running out of supplies sometimes having to spend half their salary buying water illegally from criminals, or wait up night after night to see if community water taps will be turned on for a couple of hours.

Channel 4's multi-award-winning foreign affairs strand returns for a new series with a film following a volunteer ambulance service in Somalia's war-torn capital, Mogadishu. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Sasha Achilli accompany the extraordinary team who risk their lives braving bombs, gunfights and al-Shabaab militants to get sick people to hospital in a city where the government struggles to cope and where they are many people's only hope.

Reporter Marcel Theroux and director Kate Hardie-Buckley travel to Mongolia's capital Ulaanbaatar, where the air quality can reach more than 100 times the accepted limit and is causing a public health disaster. A layer of smog caused by coal smoke blankets the city. The smog is full of floating soot particles, some of which are small enough to bypass the body's defences, causing fatal illnesses including respiratory disease, heart disease and cancer. According to Unicef, cases of respiratory infections have tripled here over the last 10 years as pollution surges. The team visit a children's hospital where senior paediatrician Dr Oyenbileg tells Theroux that respiratory illness is the biggest killer of children under five, as they are more susceptible to respiratory diseases such as bronchitis and pneumonia.

Reporter Rania Abouzeid and director Karim Shah travel to Kabul where the population, long used to living with bombs and gunfights, face a new danger: criminal gangs who kidnap for ransom. Often their victims are children. The Unreported World team join the lead detective of the police anti-kidnap squad as they attempt to reunite kidnap victims with their families.

A film from Brazil exploring the impact of the country's new President, Jair Bolsonaro, on the LGBT community. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Kate Hardie-Buckley travel to Sao Paulo - which holds the world record for the largest gay pride parade ever - as its inhabitants prepare for Carnival.

Marcel Theroux meets people - including children - who've fallen foul of Pakistan's strict blasphemy laws, and the lawyers and activists who are determined to see them sentenced to death.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy meets Vittorio Brumotti, a fearless TV reporter who's taking on Mafia drug-dealers and gangsters in southern Italy.

Exploring the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian’s rampage through the Bahamas. When Dorian hit the region back in August, it sparked worldwide headlines. In its aftermath, reporter Seyi Rhodes uncovers the dark story of how Haitian migrants have been left homeless and now, prohibited from rebuilding, are being deported by the government. They live with families who are in hiding after their homes were wrecked and their documents lost. Their futures are now uncertain with the government threatening jail sentences and heavy fines.

Adnan Sarwar meet pupils, parents and teachers trying to survive at a primary school caught in a turf war between lawless drug-dealing gangs in Cape Town, South Africa

Sahar Zand meets Iraq's new social media stars. They've got millions of followers, but, as Unreported World finds out, fame can have deadly consequences.