Region

DUBAI — Iran seized a US-bound oil tanker off Oman on Thursday, saying it had crashed into an Iranian vessel leaving two crew missing — the latest disruptive incident in the crucial but troubled waterway.

The US Navy demanded the immediate release of the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker, saying it was transiting international waters in the Gulf of Oman and slamming Iran's "continued harassment of vessels".

It is one of a spate of incidents since 2018, when then US president Donald Trump pulled out of a nuclear agreement and reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran, sending tensions soaring.

"The Iranian government should immediately release the oil tanker," the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet said in a statement.

"Iran's actions are contrary to international law and disruptive to regional security and stability," it added.

The latest flare-up comes only days after Tehran's Western rivals toughened sanctions on Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Fifth Fleet initially blamed the Revolutionary Guard, but then said the capture was carried out by Iran’s navy.

It identified the vessel as the oil tanker Advantage Sweet and said it issued a distress call during the seizure.

Iran’s navy said the “violator” ship was captured after a collision with an Iranian ship that left two missing and several injured.

“Following the collision of an unknown ship with an Iranian vessel in the waters of the Persian Gulf two of the vessel’s crew went missing and several others were injured,” the Iranian navy said in a statement.

“The navy of the army, by court order, seized the violator ship, that was fleeing with the flag of the Marshall Islands, and directed it to the coastal waters of the Islamic republic of Iran,” it added.

Troubled waters 

Iran and the United States have traded barbs over the incidents in the sensitive waters of the Gulf that are a chokepoint for at least a third of the world’s seaborne oil.

Thursday’s seizure is just the latest incident in the Strait of Hormuz where ships have been mysteriously attacked, drones downed and oil tankers seized since 2018.

“In the past two years, Iran has unlawfully seized at least five commercial vessels sailing in the Middle East,” the US Navy said.

The MarineTraffic tracking website last showed the Advantage Sweet, owned by Advantage Tankers, off the coast of Oman. The crude oil vessel had departed from Kuwait and was en route to Houston, it said.

On Monday, the US, Britain and the European Union toughened sanctions against the Revolutionary Guard, citing alleged human rights violations.

The Western measures add to ones already taken over Tehran’s hardline response to protests that rocked Iran since the September death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, after her arrest for an alleged breach of strict dress rules for women.

Iran later announced countermeasures, including financial sanctions and entry bans, targeting EU and UK individuals and entities for “imposing and exacerbating cruel sanctions”.

Tensions have escalated since 2018 when the US withdrew from the multinational accord that froze Iran’s nuclear programme. Marathon talks to restart the accord have stalled.

In July 2019, the Revolutionary Guard seized the British-flagged oil tanker Stena Impero in the same waterway for allegedly ramming a fishing boat, and released it two months later.

In 2021, Iran released a South Korean oil tanker it had held for months amid a dispute over billions of dollars seized by Seoul. Last May, Iran also seized two Greek oil tankers.

TEHRAN — A powerful Iranian cleric, a member of the Assembly of Experts that selects the country's supreme leader, has been killed in an armed attack, officials said Wednesday.

"Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani was killed this morning in an armed attack... the assailant was also arrested and is now being investigated," IRNA news agency reported, citing the political and security official for the northern Mazandaran province where the attack happened.

The attack took place in a bank in the city of Babolsar, the official said.

"The motive of the assailant is not yet clear and will be announced after it is clarified," the official added.

The governor of Mazandaran province Mahmoud Hosseinipour said the attacker was a local security personnel of the bank.

"So far, our information and documents indicate that this was not a security or terrorist act," Hosseinipour told state television.

Soleimani, 75, was previously the representative of the country's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

He had also been the imam who led the weekly Friday prayers in the cities of Kashan, in central Isfahan province, and Zahedan in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan.

Under the constitution, the 88-strong Assembly of Experts is mandated with supervising, dismissing and electing the Supreme Leader.

The all-powerful deliberative body is now headed by ultra-conservatives 96-year-old cleric Ahmad Jannati.

Its members are chosen in popular elections for eight year-terms from a pool of candidates vetted by the country’s Guardian Council.

The attack is believed to be the most significant against a cleric in years in the country.

In April 2022, a suspected extremist knife attack in the northeastern shrine city of Mashhad in Razavi Khorasan Province led to death of two clerics and injury of another.

The chief suspect, identified as Abdolatif Moradi, 21, was an ethnic Uzbek who had entered Iran illegally via the Pakistani border a year ago, Tasnim news agency said at the time.

Moradi was hanged in June in the same city on the accusation of “moharebeh”, or “war against God”.

The assailant struck on the third day of the holy month of Ramadan as large crowds of worshippers gathered at the shrine of Imam Reza, one of the most revered figures in Shiite Islam.

The attack in Mashhad came days after two Sunni clerics were shot dead outside a seminary in the northern Iranian town of Gonbad-e Kavus.

AMMAN — Populations across the globe are aging at an unprecedented pace, making many countries increasingly reliant on migration to realise their long-term growth potential, according to a new report from the World Bank. 

The World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees and Societies, identifies this trend as a unique opportunity to make migration work better for economies and people, said a World Bank statement. 

Wealthy countries as well as a growing number of middle-income countries — traditionally among the main sources of migrants — face diminishing populations, intensifying the global competition for workers and talent. Meanwhile, most low-income countries are expected to see rapid population growth, putting them under pressure to create more jobs for young people. 

“Migration can be a powerful force for prosperity and development,” said World Bank Senior Managing Director Axel van Trotsenburg. 

“When it is managed properly, it provides benefits for all people — in origin and destination societies.” 

In the coming decades, the share of working-age adults will drop sharply in many countries. Spain, with a population of 47 million, is projected to shrink by more than one third by 2100, with those above age 65 increasing from 20 per cent to 39 per cent of the population. 

Countries like Mexico, Thailand, Tunisia and Türkiye may soon need more foreign workers because their population is no longer growing. 

Beyond this demographic shift, the forces driving migration are also changing, making cross-border movements more diverse and complex. Today, destination and origin countries span all income levels, with many countries such as Mexico, Nigeria, and the UK both sending and receiving migrants. 

The number of refugees nearly tripled over the last decade. Climate change threatens to fuel more migration. So far, most climate-driven movements were within countries, but about 40 per cent of the world’s population — 3.5 billion people — lives in places highly exposed to climate impacts. 

Current approaches not only fail to maximise the potential development gains of migration, they also cause great suffering for people moving in distress. About 2.5 per cent of the world’s population — 184 million people, including 37 million refugees — now live outside their country of nationality. The largest share — 43 per cent — lives in developing countries. 

The report underscores the urgency of managing migration better. The goal of policymakers should be to strengthen the match of migrants’ skills with the demand in destination societies, while protecting refugees and reducing the need for distressed movements. The report provides a framework for policymakers on how to do this. 

“This World Development Report proposes a simple but powerful framework to aid the making of migration and refugee policy,” said Indermit Gill, chief economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. 

“It tells us when such policies can be made unilaterally by destination countries, when they are better made plurilaterally by destination, transit and origin countries, and when they must be considered a multilateral responsibility.” 

Origin countries should make labour migration an explicit part of their development strategy. They should lower remittance costs, facilitate knowledge transfers from their diaspora, build skills that are in high demand globally so that citizens can get better jobs if they migrate, mitigate the adverse effects of “brain drain”, protect their nationals while abroad, and support them upon return. 

Destination countries should encourage migration where the skills migrants bring are in high demand, facilitate their inclusion, and address social impacts that raise concerns among their citizens. They should let refugees move, get jobs, and access national services wherever they are available. 

International cooperation is essential to make migration a strong force for development. Bilateral cooperation can strengthen the match of migrants’ skills with the needs of destination societies. Multilateral efforts are needed to share the costs of refugee-hosting and to address distressed migration. Voices that are underrepresented in the migration debate must be heard: This includes developing countries, the private sector and other stakeholders, and migrants and refugees themselves.

KHARTOUM — Sporadic gunfire rang out in parts of the Sudanese capital Khartoum Tuesday despite a US-brokered agreement between the warring generals to cease fire for 72 hours to pave the way for talks on a more lasting truce.

Ten days of heavy fighting, including air strikes and artillery barrages, have killed hundreds of people, many of them civilians, and left some neighbourhoods of greater Khartoum in ruins.

But in other areas there has been a reduction in the intensity of fighting since foreign governments scrambled road convoys, aircraft and ships to get their nationals out since the weekend, witnesses said.

Unconfirmed video posted on social media showed bewildered civilians walking down one street in Khartoum North where virtually every building was bombed out and smoke was still rising from the scorched ruins.

The Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) agreed to the ceasefire “following intense negotiations”, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement shortly before the truce took effect at midnight (2200 GMT Monday).

Previous bids to pause the conflict failed to take hold, but both sides confirmed they had agreed to the three-day halt.

“This ceasefire aims to establish humanitarian corridors, allowing citizens and residents to access essential resources, healthcare and safe zones, while also evacuating diplomatic missions,” the RSF tweeted.

In a statement on Facebook, the army said it would abide by the ceasefire on condition its rivals did so.

The RSF accused the regular army of breaking the ceasefire by keeping its aircraft, which have carried out devastating strikes over the past 10 days, in the skies over Khartoum.

‘Edge of abyss’ 

At least 427 people have been killed and more than 3,700 wounded, according to UN agencies. More than 4,000 people have fled the country in foreign-organised evacuations that began on Saturday.

UN chief Antonio Guterres on Monday warned that Sudan was on “the edge of the abyss” and that the violence “could engulf the whole region and beyond”.

The fighting has pitted forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan against those of his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the RSF.

The RSF emerged from the Janjaweed militia that then-president Omar Al Bashir unleashed in the Darfur region two decades ago, leading to war crimes charges against Bashir and others.

The Forces of Freedom and Change, the main civilian bloc which the two generals ousted from power in a 2021 coup, said the truce would allow for “dialogue on the modalities of a permanent ceasefire”.

The United States and European, Middle Eastern, African and Asian nations launched emergency operations to bring to safety their embassy staff and Sudan-based citizens by road, air and sea.

But millions of Sudanese are unable to flee the country, which has a history of military coups. They are trying to survive acute shortages of water, food, medicine and fuel as well as power and Internet blackouts.

Britain requested an emergency UN Security Council meeting on Sudan, which was expected to take place Tuesday, according to a diplomat.

Shortly after the ceasefire took effect, Britain announced it had launched “a large-scale evacuation” of its citizens trapped in Sudan.

Britain had faced pressure to act after comparisons to the chaotic evacuation of Britons after Afghanistan’s Taliban took control of Kabul in 2021.

“The government has begun a large-scale evacuation of British passport holders from Sudan on RAF [Royal Air Force] flights,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said. “Priority will be given to the most vulnerable.”

Britain already carried out an operation Sunday to withdraw its diplomats. But, citing the dangers on the ground, it had held off on extracting its citizens more widely despite Western allies evacuating hundreds of their own passport holders.

Foreign Office minister Andrew Mitchell said some 2,000 Britons had registered with the ministry seeking help.

‘Unspeakable destruction’ 

The capital, a city of five million, has endured “more than a week of unspeakable destruction”, Norway’s ambassador Endre Stiansen wrote on Twitter after his evacuation.

A UN convoy carrying 700 people on Monday completed an arduous 850 kilometre road trip to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast from the capital.

The United Nations head of mission Volker Perthes said the convoy arrived safely. A UN statement said he and other key staff will “remain in Sudan and will continue to work towards a resolution to the current crisis”.

The military toppled Bashir in April 2019 following mass citizen protests that raised hopes for a transition to democracy.

The two generals seized power in the 2021 coup, but later fell out, most recently over the planned integration of the RSF into the regular army.

Experts have long drawn links between the RSF and Russian mercenary group Wagner. Blinken earlier on Monday voiced “deep concern” that Wagner risked aggravating the war in Sudan.

BERLIN — German police said they had detained a 28-year-old Syrian man on Tuesday in relation to a suspected terrorist plan to use a homemade bomb against civilian targets.

Police, who arrested the man in Hamburg, also searched a number of addresses in the northern port city as well as in the southern town of Kempten, they said.

Around 250 officers were involved in the operation on Tuesday morning, seizing evidence including chemical substances.

Investigations were focused on the 28-year-old and his 24-year-old brother, the authorities said.

Motivated by "radical-Islamist and jihadist convictions", the pair were suspected of planning an attack with a "self-made explosive" aimed at "civilian targets".

The elder brother was said to have used the online platform eBay and other providers to buy the ingredients to make explosive materials in recent weeks.

His sibling, who lives in Kempten, was believed to have supported the planning of the suspected attack.

The 28-year-old has already been charged by German courts with "terrorism financing", police said.

“It has once again become clear that the threat from Islamist terrorism remains acute,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in a statement.

Separately, prosecutors said they had indications that a knife attack in Duisburg last week had an Islamist motive.

A 26-year-old Syrian has been arrested in relation with the stabbing at a gym in the western city, which left four men severely injured.

Investigators discovered the potential motive after searching the suspect’s mobile phone, Duesseldorf prosecutors said.

Islamist extremists have committed several violent attacks in Germany in recent years, the deadliest being a truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 that killed 12 people.

The Tunisian attacker, a failed asylum seeker behind the 2016 incident, was a supporter of the Daesh group.

In another case, an extremist and his wife were jailed in 2020 for planning a biological bomb attack in Germany with the deadly poison ricin.

DAMASCUS — Syria on Tuesday condemned fresh European sanctions against individuals and entities linked to President Bashar Assad’s government, arguing the measures impeded aid to areas affected by a devastating earthquake.

The European Union on Monday imposed sanctions on 25 individuals and eight entities accused of involvement in human rights violations and drug trafficking in the war-torn country.

The bloc said in a statement that the sanctions “are not meant to impede the provision humanitarian assistance to any part of the country”, which was hit by a deadly quake on February 6.

A Syrian foreign ministry official accused the EU of “repeating lies” by “claiming sanctions on Syria do not impede the delivery of humanitarian aid or access to food and medical equipment”, according to Syria’s official news agency SANA.

The measures are “a serious threat to the lives and livelihood of Syrians”, the official said.

Following Western allies the United States and Britain, the bloc sanctioned Samer Kamal Assad and Wassem Badi Assad, the president’s cousins, over alleged involvement in the trafficking of stimulant drug captagon, a key source of income for Damascus.

The EU also imposed sanctions against others including private security firms for helping the Syrian regime recruit fighters, and Russian engineering and construction company Stroytransgaz over its control of the country’s largest phosphate mines.

On February 23, the EU had said it would ease Syria sanctions for six months to speed up aid deliveries to the quake-stricken country, after the US announced a similar move.

But the Syrian foreign ministry official on Tuesday dismissed that measure as having “no effect at all, it is purely propaganda”.

The EU has sanctioned Syria’s government and individuals and entities linked to it following Damascus’s repression of protesters more than a decade ago.

Syria’s war since 2011 has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions.

KHARTOUM -- Fighting in Sudan's capital entered a second week on Saturday as crackling gunfire shattered a temporary truce, the latest battles between forces of rival generals that have already left hundreds dead and thousands wounded.

Overnight, the heavy explosions that had previously rocked the city in recent days had subsided, but on Saturday morning, fighting resumed.

Heavy gunfire, loud explosions, and fighter jets roared in many parts of the capital Saturday morning, according to witnesses.

Violence broke out on April 15 between forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and his deputy turned rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The former allies seized power in a 2021 coup but later fell out in a bitter power struggle.

The army announced Friday that it had "agreed to a ceasefire for three days" for the Eid Al Fitr holiday that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had called for a day earlier.

Daglo said in a statement he had "discussed the current crisis" with Guterres, and was "focused on the humanitarian truce, safe passages, and protecting humanitarian workers".

Two previous 24-hour ceasefires announced earlier in the week were also ignored.

The fighting has seen the RSF -- a force tens of thousands strong, formed from members of the Janjaweed militia that led years of violence in the western Darfur region -- take on the regular army, with neither side seemingly having seized the advantage.

'Stench of blood'

In Khartoum, a city of 5 million people, the conflict upended the lives of civilians, who have sheltered in terror inside their homes without electricity in baking heat for days.

Many civilians have ventured out only to get urgent food supplies or to flee the city.

Eid is meant to be spent "with sweets and pastries, with happy children, and people greeting relatives", resident Sami al-Nour told AFP. Instead, there has been "gunfire and the stench of blood all around us".

While Khartoum has seen some of the fiercest battles, violence also exploded across the country.

Late Friday, the army accused the RSF of attacks in the capital's twin city of Omdurman where they released "a large number of inmates" from a prison, accusations the group denies.

Battles have also raged in Darfur, where Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in the city of El Fasher said their medics had been "overwhelmed" by the number of patients with gunshot wounds, many of them children.

Embassies prepare for evacuation

Plans are being made to evacuate foreign nationals, with the United States, South Korea and Japan deploying forces to nearby countries and the European Union weighing a similar move.

On Friday, the US said the situation was still too risky for an evacuation of embassy personnel.

Later, the RSF said it was ready to "partially" open "all airports" in Sudan to evacuate foreign citizens.

Though it is not possible to verify which airports the RSF controls, Burhan on Saturday told Al Arabiya TV that the army was in control of "all airports, except for Khartoum airport" and one in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur.

In an earlier statement, Sudan's army said Burhan had received calls from leaders of multiple countries to "facilitate and guarantee safety for evacuating citizens and diplomatic missions".

It noted that the evacuations are expected to begin "in the coming hours", adding that the US, Britain, France, and China are planning to airlift their nationals out of Khartoum using military jets.

Saudi Arabia evacuated its mission in the country, with staff heading to Port Sudan in the east and from there to the kingdom, the army said. Jordan is planning a similar evacuation.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said 413 people had been killed and 3,551 wounded in the fighting across Sudan, but the actual death toll is thought to be higher.

More than two-thirds of hospitals in Khartoum and neighbouring states are now "out of service", and at least four hospitals in North Kordofan state were shelled, the doctors' union said.

The World Food Programme said the violence could plunge millions more into hunger in a country where one third of the population needs aid.

Burhan and Daglo's dispute centred on the planned integration of the RSF into the regular army, a key condition for a deal aimed at restoring Sudan's democratic transition.

The military toppled autocratic president Omar Al Bashir in April 2019 following massive protests.

In October 2021, Burhan and Daglo joined forces to oust a civilian government installed after Bashir's downfall.

Daglo now says the coup was a "mistake", while Burhan believes it was "necessary" to include more groups into politics.