Region

SIDON, Lebanon — Three days of fighting in south Lebanon's Ain Al Helweh Palestinian refugee camp have left at least 11 dead and dozens wounded, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Monday.

Clashes broke out over the weekend between members of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' secular Fateh movement and Islamists based in the camp, Lebanon's largest located in the coastal city of Sidon.

Renewed gunfire and shelling on Monday shook the camp, said an AFP correspondent in Sidon, sending frightened residents fleeing.

"According to reports, 11 were killed and another 40 were injured, including one staff member" of UNRWA, said Dorothee Klaus, the UN agency's director in Lebanon.

She added in a statement that UNRWA has "temporarily suspended" operations in the camp due to the fighting.

Palestinian factions said they had agreed on a truce on Sunday but it did not hold, with fighting continuing with automatic weapons and rocket fire.

Officials said five Fateh members and one Islamist had been killed in the initial violence over the weekend.

There was no immediate word on the identities of the other fatalities.

“UNRWA urgently calls on all parties to immediately return to calm and take all measures necessary to protect civilians, including children,” Klaus said.

The statement noted that “two UNRWA schools have sustained damaged” and more than 2,000 Ain Al Helweh residents had been forced to flee.

An AFP correspondent on Monday morning saw dozens of people, mostly women and children, leaving the camp carrying light luggage, while others took refuge in a nearby mosque.

Shells also fell outside the camp, AFP journalists said, with a nearby hospital evacuating patients and shops in Sidon closing fearing further escalation.

By long-standing convention, the Lebanese army does not enter Palestinian refugee camps in the country, now bustling but impoverished urban districts, leaving the factions themselves to handle security.

“We fled from the scene of the fighting, shells are raining in the streets,” a 75-year-old woman told AFP, requesting anonymity for security concerns.

She said armed factions were carrying weapons “to fight Israel, not to fight each other and become displaced”.

Ain Al Helweh, now home to more than 54,000 registered refugees, was created for Palestinians who were driven out or fled during the 1948 war that coincided with Israel’s creation.

In recent years, they have been joined by thousands of Palestinians who had been living in Syria and fled the war there.

Palestinian armed groups in Lebanon rarely confront Israel nowadays, but fighting between rival factions is common in Ain Al Helweh.

The latest violence began late Saturday, killing an Islamist and injuring six others, a Palestinian source inside the camp had told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

The next day, a Fateh military leader and four of his colleagues were killed during a “heinous operation”, the group said.

Tiny Lebanon hosts an estimated 250,000 Palestinian refugees, according to UNRWA.

Most Palestinians, including more than 30,000 who fled the war in neighbouring Syria after 2011, live in one of Lebanon’s 12 official camps, and face a variety of legal restrictions, including on employment.

RIYADH — Saudi Arabia has approved a $1.2 billion grant to Yemen's internationally recognised government, two officials told AFP on Tuesday, the latest attempt to prop up the war-scarred country's flagging economy. 

Yemen's finance minister and central bank governor as well as the Saudi ambassador were expected to disclose details of the grant at a signing ceremony in Riyadh at 5:00pm (14:00 GMT), said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to confirm the amount. 

Since 2015, Riyadh has led an international coalition backing the Aden-based government in its war against Houthi rebels, who seized the capital Sanaa in 2014.

Fighting has dropped off sharply since a UN-brokered truce took effect in April last year, even though it lapsed in October. 

However more than two-thirds of Yemenis depend on aid to survive amid a grinding economic crisis marked by a collapsed currency and import bans. 

The UN special envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, said in June that "economic warfare" between the opposing parties had compounded the country's problems. 

At the end of last year, Huthi drone attacks on government-run oil terminals halted hydrocarbon exports, the main source of income for the Saudi-backed government, which is headed by an eight-member Presidential Leadership Council unveiled in Riyadh shortly after the truce began. 

The government has struggled to finance basic services and pay the salaries of civil servants. 

The Saudi Development and Reconstruction Programme for Yemen has touted Riyadh's efforts to ease Yemen's economic woes, including a $1 billion deposit in the central bank earlier this year, a $600 million oil derivatives fund and $400 million for development projects such as housing and hospitals. 

A surprise rapprochement deal announced in March between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which backs the Houthis, raised hopes for a durable ceasefire in Yemen. 

The following month, Saudi ambassador Mohammed Al Jaber travelled to Sanaa for talks with Houthi officials.

Those meetings ended without a new agreement, though Jaber told AFP in May he believed all parties were "serious" about wanting peace.

SIDON, Lebanon — Clashes in south Lebanon's Ain Al Helweh Palestinian refugee camp killed at least two people on Monday, medics told AFP, bringing the death toll to eight since fighting erupted over the weekend.

Renewed gunfire and shelling on Monday shook the camp, said an AFP correspondent in the coastal city of Sidon, sending frightened residents fleeing after three days of violence.

The clashes over the weekend had killed five members of Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas's secular Fateh movement and one Islamist fighter, officials said.

Physician Riad Abu Al Enein, who heads Al Hamshari Hospital in Sidon near the camp, told AFP that a 31-year-old man died Monday from his injuries while undergoing surgery.

At another Sidon hospital, Raee, nurse Norma Mohsen said that "today we received one dead person and six wounded" from the camp, the site of frequent clashes between rival factions.

Al Hamshari was treating 13 others wounded in Ain Al Helewh, including a patient in critical condition, said Abu Al Enein.

Palestinian factions said they had agreed on a truce on Sunday but it did not hold.

Dozens of residents, mostly women and children, have fled the camp carrying light luggage, while others took refuge in a nearby mosque, the AFP correspondent said.

By long-standing convention, the Lebanese army does not enter Palestinian refugee camps in the country — now bustling but impoverished urban districts — leaving the factions themselves to handle security.

"We fled from the scene of the fighting, shells are raining in the streets," a 75-year-old woman told AFP, requesting anonymity for security concerns.

'Heinous operation' 

She said armed factions were carrying weapons "to fight Israel, not to fight each other and become displaced".

Ain Al Helweh, now home to more than 54,000 registered refugees, was created for Palestinians who were driven out or fled during the 1948 war that coincided with Israel's creation.

In recent years, they have been joined by thousands of Palestinians who had been living in Syria and fled the war there.

Palestinian armed groups in Lebanon rarely confront Israel nowadays, but fighting between rival factions is common in Ain Al Helweh, Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp.

The latest violence began late Saturday, killing an Islamist and injuring six others, a Palestinian source inside the camp had told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

The next day, a Fateh military leader and four of his colleagues were killed during a “heinous operation”, the group said.

Shells also fell outside the camp, AFP journalists said, with a nearby hospital evacuating patients and shops in Sidon closing fearing further escalation.

Tiny Lebanon hosts an estimated 250,000 Palestinian refugees, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

Most Palestinians, including more than 30,000 who fled the war in neighbouring Syria after 2011, live in one of Lebanon’s 12 official camps, and face a variety of legal restrictions, including on employment.

BAGHDAD — Mohammed has been taking nearly a dozen captagon pills daily for seven years. Now, as Iraq grapples with a major drug crisis, the 23-year-old hopes for a fresh start.

Iraq, which borders with Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, has long been a transit country for the region’s ballooning trade in the amphetamine-type drug and other narcotics.

But in recent years, Iraq itself has witnesses a dramatic spike in drug abuse, prompting authorities to search for answers, both by cracking down on traffickers and by providing help to addicts.

Methamphetamine, or crystal meth, originating in Afghanistan or Iran, is among the most common drugs in Iraq today, alongside captagon, which is produced on an industrial scale in Syria and trafficked via Iraq to Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Gulf states where it has gained notorious popularity.

Mohammed, who asked to use a pseudonym, is one of about 40 patients being treated at a rehabilitation clinic which the Iraqi health ministry opened in the capital Baghdad in April.

The young man, from the western Al Anbar province on the border with Syria, told AFP he had been introduced to captagon, also known as “zero-one”, by his work colleagues at a food store.

“It makes you active, gives you energy and keeps you awake,” he said of the drug.

Since age 16, Mohammed would take “10 to 12” captagon pills a day, he confessed. Selling for the equivalent of $2 apiece, the stimulant “is everywhere”.

Like the other patients at Al Canal Centre for Social Rehabilitation, he came to the clinic on his own initiative.

After an initial two-week stay, he returned home, but then quickly headed back to the clinic, fearing a relapse.

Captagon, Mohammed said, “leads you either to prison or to death”.

‘Plague’ 

Around him, in the laid-back atmosphere of the rehab centre gym, men of nearly all ages were playing table tennis and foosball, some of them smiling. Others were visibly tired or had blank expressions on their faces.

Patients usually stay for around one month at the facility, which also includes a women’s wing and offers psychological support. Once discharged, they return for weekly check-ups for a period of six months.

“We host all ages. It starts at 14-15, but most are in their 20s,” said the clinic’s director, Abdel Karim Sadeq Karim.

The most common substance abuse the facility treats is crystal meth. “From the very first dose, there’s addiction,” said Karim.

His deputy, Ali Abdullah, called it “a plague that totally destroys individuals”, noting a hike in drug consumption in Iraq since 2016.

Iraqi security forces now announce near-daily drug busts and arrests, in operations supported by intelligence and cooperation with neighbouring countries.

Hussein Al Tamimi, spokesman for Iraq’s narcotics directorate, told AFP that authorities had detained more than 10,000 suspects between October and June for “crimes related to narcotics — traffickers, resellers or consumers”.

According to the government agency, security forces also seized 10 million captagon pills and 500 kilogrammes  of other drugs including at least 385 kilogrammes of crystal meth.

A regional meeting hosted by Baghdad in May saw “the creation of a shared database” to exchange information between authorities across borders, said Tamimi.

That meeting also led to “the establishment of weekly contacts between our services and the competent services of Arab states” and of other countries in the region, he added.

Market transformation 

According to an AFP tally based on official records, at least 110 million captagon pills have been seized across the Middle East this year.

In mid-July, Iraq’s interior ministry announced the discovery of a rare captagon manufacturing lab in the country’s south.

It was the first such announcement in a country where drug production remains virtually nonexistent.

A Western diplomat stationed in Baghdad told AFP that Iraq’s emerging importance for captagon trafficking may be attributed in part to a crackdown in neighbouring Jordan.

Amman has reinforced its borders in a bid to cut off trade routes via its territory and set up a forum to tackle smuggling from Syria, while Jordanian security forces often open fire at suspected drug traffickers.

Until about seven years ago, Iraq had been almost exclusively a transit country, but that has gradually changed as drugs can also replace payment for rights of passage, said the diplomat, requesting anonymity.

The domestic resale that resulted has generated local consumption and “potentially... a real market”, the diplomat added, noting the high proportion of young people among Iraq’s 43-million-strong population.

Recognising the risks, the government has opened three rehabilitation centres — in Al Anbar province, Kirkuk in the north and Najaf in central Iraq — with plans to expand the scheme to other provinces.

Their aim is to give addicts who have been arrested a place to recover, away from traffickers in prison.

KHARTOUM — Sudan's paramilitaries have ordered civilians to vacate homes in the capital's south, several residents said on Sunday, as fighting between the forces of rival generals raged in the western Darfur region.

"Members of the Rapid Support Forces [RSF] told me I had 24 hours to leave the area," Khartoum resident Fawzy Radwan told AFP.

He had been guarding his family's home since fighting began in the city more than three months ago between the RSF and the regular army.

The war between army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, has killed at least 3,900 people, according to a conservative estimate, and displaced some 3.5 million.

Much of the fighting has occurred in densely populated neighbourhoods of Khartoum, pushing 1.7 million residents to flee and forcing the millions who remain to shelter from the crossfire in their homes, rationing water and electricity.

Hundreds of residents were being evicted from southern Khartoum's Jabra neighbourhood, according to residents on Sunday.

Jabra and the nearby area of Sahafa are home to the army artillery corps as well as an RSF base used by Daglo.

"They told us this is a military zone now and they don't want civilians around," resident Nasser Hussein told AFP.

The RSF has been accused of rampant looting and of forcibly evicting people from their homes since the war began on April 15.

Along with Khartoum, some of the worst violence has been in the conflict-scarred region of Darfur, where allegations of war crimes have sparked a new investigation by the International Criminal Court.

Again on Sunday, clashes in the town of Nyala — the capital of South Darfur state and Sudan's second-biggest city — sent bombs falling on civilian neighbourhoods, witnesses said.

In the Central Darfur state capital Zalingei, the army "killed 16 rebels and captured 14, including an officer", a military source told AFP on Sunday, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

Days of “bombs repeatedly falling in our homes” have sent civilians fleeing from Nyala, according to Issa Adam, who spoke to AFP from a displacement camp.

Many are “now out in the open during the rainy reason”, he said.

Mohamed Khater had also fled Nyala with his children after bombs killed his neighbours.

From a nearby camp, he told AFP that “no organisation has reached us, and we’re scared of the fighting reaching us”.

Over 2.6 million people have been displaced within Sudan since the war began, and more than 800,000 others have fled across borders.

SIDON, Lebanon — At least six people were killed on Sunday in clashes in south Lebanon’s restive Ain Al Helweh Palestinian refugee camp, said Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas’s Fateh movement and a source at the camp.

The fighting between Fatah and Islamists in the camp, which erupted overnight, killed a Fateh military leader and four of his colleagues, the secularist movement said.

A Palestinian source inside the camp, speaking on condition of anonymity, said an “Islamist from the Al Shabab Al Muslim group” was also killed and six others including the group’s leader were wounded.

An AFP journalist said clashes at Ain Al Helweh, the largest of the 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, were still ongoing on Sunday afternoon.

Fateh in a statement confirmed the death of commander Ashraf Al Armouchi and four of his “comrades” during a “heinous operation”.

The statement denounced an “abominable and cowardly crime” aimed at undermining the “security and stability” of the Palestinian camps in Lebanon.

A Lebanese soldier was also wounded, hit by shrapnel from “a mortar shell that fell in one of the military posts”, the army said on Twitter, which is being rebranded as X.

His condition was reported as stable.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati in a statement called the timing of the clashes “suspicious in the current regional and international context”.

Mikati criticised “repeated attempts to use Lebanon” as a battleground for the settling of outside scores “at the expense of Lebanon and the Lebanese”.

“We urge the Palestinian leadership to cooperate with the army to control the security situation and deliver to the Lebanese authorities those who compromise it,” his statement added.

A ceasefire was agreed from 6:00 pm (15:00 GMT) during a meeting of Palestinian factions including Fateh, also attended by members of the Lebanese Amal and Hizbollah movements, a joint statement afterwards said.

An AFP journalist reported that the sound of gunfire lessened in the evening.

Fighting between rival groups is common in Ain Al Helweh, which is home to more than 54,000 registered Palestinian refugees who have been joined in recent years by thousands of Palestinians fleeing the conflict in Syria.

By long-standing convention, the Lebanese army does not enter Palestinian refugee camps in the country, leaving the factions themselves to handle security.

The camp has gained notoriety as a refuge for extremists and fugitives.

More than 450,000 Palestinians in Lebanon are registered with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

Most live in one of the 12 official refugee camps, often in squalid conditions, and face a variety of legal restrictions, including on employment.