Region

DUBAI — A contemporary art gallery in central Tehran is giving Iranians a chance to let out their frustrations by screaming into clay pots sculpted by a Vancouver-based artist, exhibiting in the country of his ancestors for the first time.

The earthen pots, some of which resemble traditional water jars, are designed not for containing liquids but to relieve the stresses of urban life — noise, traffic and pollution — if only for a moment.

"When logic fails to explain, it becomes natural to scream. The [pots] reflect many conditions that we are faced with, often unexplained with logic," artist Babak Golkar told Reuters by e-mail from Canada last week, shortly after his exhibition opened.

Gallery creator Sohrab Kashani said it has been packed with stylish Iranians screaming into vessels of various shapes and sizes. Some are designed to amplify sound, some to mute, but all made with the same clay that is typical of parts of Iran.

Golkar said he had decided the time was right to return to Tehran after years of avoiding exhibiting there.

"I was physically gone for a long time but mentally never left. To come back and engage actively and not as a passive tourist was a true privilege," he said.

He, like many contemporary artists who have departed from traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture, had difficulty finding a place to work with experimental and performance-based mediums until Sazmanab, a privately funded art centre founded by Kashani, stepped in.

Kashani, a self-taught artist and curator, set up the centre in 2009 to counter the "dearth of contemporary art studies" in Iranian universities.

Art must conform

The art centre is one of dozens of privately owned galleries to be set up in the last 10 years in Tehran, mostly in the northern, wealthier parts of the city of about eight million.

Sazmanab, however, is downtown, close to Iran's universities and the former embassy of the United States.

"We want to reach people that aren't just in the art scene," Kashani said. More than 500 people, including students, artists, industrial workers and their families visited Sazmanab to see the Screaming Pots exhibition which runs until Friday.

Much of Iranian art conforms with Iran's political and religious narratives and it is commercially risky for artists to strike out on their own, even though some do.

"Iran's art scene, I felt, is at a crossroad where engaged and critical artists seem to be frustrated with its art market and are wanting to go beyond that," Golkar said.

WASHINGTON — The United States hit Yemen's former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and two Houthi rebel commanders with sanctions Monday, two days after Saleh walked out on the new government.

The US Treasury said it was blacklisting Saleh, Abdullah Yahya Al Hakim and Abd Al Khaliq Al Houthi "for engaging in acts that directly or indirectly threaten the peace, security, or stability of Yemen".

The US action followed Saturday's UN Security Council sanctions on the three men, for threatening peace in the impoverished Arab country.

The UN sanctions prompted Saleh to pull his General People's Congress Party out of the just-formed unity Cabinet, plunging the country back into political crisis after months of attempts to foster a peace deal between Saleh, the Houthi insurgents believed allied to him, and their political rivals.

The treasury said the three men "have, using violence and other means, undermined the political process in Yemen and obstructed the implementation of its political transition, outlined by the agreement of November 23, 2011... which provides for a peaceful transition of power in Yemen”.

The sanctions freeze any assets the three might have in US jurisdictions and forbids Americans from doing business with them.

Saleh was the turbulent country's president from 1990 to 2012 before he was forced to step down following nationwide protests.

The US Treasury said that since then he has "reportedly become one of the primary supporters of violence perpetrated by individuals affiliated with the Houthi group."

Hakim, the Treasury said, was implicated in plotting a coup attempt against Yemen President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi as the Houthi forces sought to take over Sanaa, Yemen's capital.

The Treasury added that Hakim remained in Sanaa in September "to organise military operations so as to be able to topple the Yemeni government" if peace efforts failed.

Rebel commander Al Houthi was behind several attacks and attempted attacks on the Yemen government and foreign diplomatic facilities over the past year, the Treasury said.

DAMASCUS, Syria — Syrian President Bashar Assad said Monday that the UN envoy's proposal to implement a cease-fire in the embattled northern city of Aleppo was "worth studying".

The envoy, Staffan de Mistura, first raised the idea of small-scale, localised and negotiated truces in Syria at the United Nations in New York late last month. The proposal would involve freezing the fighting in certain areas to allow for humanitarian aid and local steps as part of a push towards a wider peace in Syria's 3 ½-year civil war that has killed more than 200,000.

His plan drew an immediate backlash from Syrian media outlets considered mouthpieces for the government, which warned that the veteran diplomat was being "hasty" and overstepping his authority.

On Monday, de Mistura met with Assad in Damascus for talks that touched on the idea of a local cease-fire in Aleppo, Syria's former commercial hub and the last major city where rebels still hold large areas as they battle government forces.

"President Assad ... considered that the initiative of de Mistura was worth studying and trying to work on to achieve its goals of returning security to the city of Aleppo," said the statement, published by the state-run SANA news agency.

It was not immediately clear whether Assad's remarks reflected a change in the government's stance, or an attempt to appear open to the idea without committing to it.

De Mistura, who is a on a three-day trip to Syria aimed at reducing the violence, also travelled Monday to the central city of Homs, where he visited mosques and churches that were once in rebel-held districts before a local ceasefire agreement earlier this year brought an end to the fighting. He also was expected to meet with a delegation representing armed groups from Waar, the last rebel-held part of the city.

In a statement to reporters following his meeting with the Homs governor, de Mistura said he believes that the solution to Syria's conflict is "peaceful and political, and not a military one".

MUSCAT — The Obama administration is facing its last best chance to curb Iran's nuclear programme — not just to meet an end-of-the-month deadline for a deal, but also to seal one before skeptical Republicans who will control Congress next year are able to scuttle it.

In the final stretch of years of negotiations to limit Tehran's nuclear production, US Secretary of State John Kerry met Monday for a second straight day with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and European Union senior adviser Catherine Ashton in Oman's capital. The three diplomats ended discussions late Monday with no sign of an imminent breakthrough.

Asked at a brief photo opportunity if they were making progress, Zarif responded: "We will eventually."

"We are working hard," Kerry added.

The stakes are high as the November 24 deadline approaches. A deal could quell Mideast fears about Iran's ability to build a nuclear bomb and help revive the Islamic republic's economy.

It also would deliver a foreign policy triumph for the White House, which is being hammered by prominent Republican senators over its handling of the civil war in Syria and the growth of the Islamic State militancy in Iraq. Those same critics seek to put the brakes on US-Iranian bartering, if not shut it down completely, once they seize the majority on January 3.

The Obama administration "needs to understand that this Iranian regime cares more about trying to weaken America and push us out of the Middle East than cooperating with us," Republican Senators. John McCain of Arizona, the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said in a statement last week.

President Barack Obama told CBS' "Face The Nation" that his administration's "unprecedented sanctions" on Iran are what forced Tehran to the negotiating table. "Our number one priority with respect to Iran is making sure they don't get a nuclear weapon," he said.

But Obama also cited "a big gap" between Iran and world powers as they try for a final agreement. "We may not be able to get there," he said in the interview broadcast Sunday.

Over the past year, congressional Republicans have made little secret of their scepticism of Obama's outreach to Tehran. They say it has alienated Israel and kept the US from maintaining a hard line on a number of foreign policy fronts, including Iran's detention of three Americans.

That scepticism is borne mostly of concerns that Iran secretly will enrich enough uranium to build nuclear weapons, even after a deal is reached. For years, Iran hid some of its nuclear facilities and blocked inspectors' access at others, raising widespread alarms about its intentions.

Penalties imposed by the US, EU and the UN Security Council aimed to punish Tehran for its covert nuclear programme.

Iran has maintained that its nuclear activities are purely peaceful and necessary to fuel medical and energy demands.

Last week, Kerry, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, rejected suggestions that a GOP-controlled Congress would be able to change course on negotiations with Iran. He also noted that any Senate move would need overwhelming support to be approved. "As we have learned in the last few years, the minority has enormous power to stop things from happening," he said.

He also has said none of the world powers has an appetite for extending the talks beyond the November 24 deadline, although that remains a remote possibility if an agreement appears close.

If a deal is struck before year's end, US lawmakers may have limited ability to undo it. Experts believe most of the US penalties against Iran's financial and oil markets can be suspended, if not lifted entirely, by presidential authority.

Beyond January 3, however, and without an agreement in place, Congress could try to issue new sanctions without giving Obama that authority to suspend or lift them. Already, a plan to strengthen them if the negotiations expire without a final deal has gathered strong backing from senators from both parties.

If the two sides are close at that point, the administration almost certainly would move to veto any legislation imposing new penalties, or ones that would otherwise tie Obama's hands. Administration officials believe new sanctions could violate the negotiating terms and lead Iran to step up its production of enriched uranium.

But if the negotiations drag on, the White House will have to decide whether it could accept sanctions with a threatened "trigger" to be enacted in future months.

A senior US official said such triggered sanctions could appease anxious lawmakers, while at the same time push Iran more quickly towards a deal. The US official made clear that triggered sanctions are not currently being considered by the White House. The official was not authorised to discuss the strategy by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.

"If Congress can be convinced that the overall framework for a deal is in place and it really is just loose ends that need tying, then I think it would probably wait until seeing a final deal before taking any action," said James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

"However, it may be hard to persuade Congress that a deal is just around the corner," Acton said.

Broadly, a potential agreement would ease economic sanctions against Tehran if itagrees to limit its uranium enrichment to a level that would make it unable to build nuclear weapons. It would have to provide international inspectors with full and verifiable access to Iran's nuclear facilities.

Iranian officials appear guardedly optimistic about reaching an agreement by the end of November, but insist on a quick lifting of the sanctions.

Iran agreed to freeze its uranium enrichment during the negotiations and reduce its stockpile of weapons-grade nuclear material.

"Sanctions have never contributed to the resolution of this issue," Zarif told reporters as he headed to Muscat. "They must be removed. They have not produced any positive results."

BEIRUT — Syrian rebels and Al Qaeda seized the southern town of Nawa Sunday from troops loyal to President Bashar Al Assad after months of intense fighting, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Both local rebel groups and Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra Front claimed credit for the opposition advance.

Nawa is in Daraa province bordering Jordan, Damascus province and Quneitra, which has a boundary on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The rebel and Al Qaeda advance came a day after regime air raids on a town held by the jihadist Islamic State group in northeastern Syria killed 21 civilians and wounded 100, the observatory said.

Syria's military has increasingly resorted to using so-called barrel bombs, which rights groups have condemned as a particularly indiscriminate weapon that often kills civilians.

"Al Nusra Front, Islamist rebel brigades and [moderate] rebel brigades took over the whole of Nawa town," the Britain-based monitor said.

"Regime warplanes then carried out more air strikes targeting the town and its surroundings."

Local rebel groups issued a statement claiming that "now Nawa has been completely liberated".

Activists distributed amateur video showing rebel fighters shooting in the air, riding tanks and stamping on the Syrian flag that they consider to represent the regime they are fighting.

Al Nusra Front also distributed via the Internet photographs showing their black and white flag raised over Nawa.

While not openly admitting that the army had withdrawn, state news agency SANA said troops were “redeploying and reorganising in the Nawa area... in order to prepare for upcoming fighting”.

The development comes days after deep rifts between Al Nusra Front and moderate rebels in the northwestern province of Idlib led to the jihadist group expelling their rivals from their positions.

Speaking to AFP via the Internet, an activist in the southern province of Daraa said: “In the north, there are ideological differences between the [rebel] Free Syrian Army and Al Nusra Front.

“Here in Daraa, tribal ties run deep. There are no such rifts here,” Diaa Al Hariri said.

While suffering consecutive defeats at the hands of the army elsewhere in Syria, the rebels and Al Qaeda have been steadily advancing in Daraa province.

The observatory says it was able to confirm the deaths of two rebels before the army’s withdrawal from Nawa on Sunday, and that there were unconfirmed reports of more dead.

Elsewhere in war-torn Syria, the observatory said two rebel commanders and one from Al Qaeda have been killed by unidentified gunmen in the northern province of Aleppo over the past three days.

In recent months, there has been a wave of murders of rebel leaders.

Syria’s conflict began in 2011 as a peaceful revolt against Assad, but morphed into a civil war that has killed some 195,000 people in less than four years.

Fighting began after Assad’s regime unleashed a brutal crackdown on dissent. More than half of the country’s people have been forced to flee their homes.

GAZA CITY — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fateh movement said Sunday it is cancelling this week's Gaza ceremonies marking the 10th anniversary of Yasser Arafat's death due to security concerns.

Gaza-based Fateh spokesman Fayez Abu Eita told AFP that Hamas said it could not guarantee security at the memorial events scheduled for Tuesday.

"We were informed by the security and political wings of Hamas that they were unable to guarantee the safety of the festival," he said. "Faced with the danger posed to the public, we were obliged to announce its cancellation."

The Fateh announcement comes after at least 10 explosions hit houses and cars belonging to senior Fateh members in Gaza on Friday, reportedly without causing any casualties.

Hamas security confirmed in a statement that it had informed Fateh that it was unable to guarantee the event's security.

Friday's blasts brought a furious response from Fateh, which placed the blame squarely on Hamas, the de facto rulers in Gaza.

Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, who had been due to visit Gaza on Saturday, promptly cancelled his trip.

One of the explosions targeted a stage in Gaza City set up for a ceremony in honour of veteran Palestinian leader Arafat, who founded Fateh.

This year was the first time in years a public commemoration of Arafat's death was to have been held in Gaza, which has been ruled by Hamas since 2007 when it ousted forces loyal to Fateh, sparking a bitter and sometimes bloody feud.

For seven years, Gaza and the West Bank were ruled by separate administrations until the two factions inked a deal in April which led to the formation of a national unity government that took office in June.

Based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the unity government — which is formed of technocrats — has yet to fully take up its functions in Gaza.

Iyad Al Buzum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said security for the memorial could not be guaranteed because of "intra-Palestinians tensions", as well as "logistic and administrative difficulties" which he blamed on Hamdallah.

He specifically blamed the unity government for failing since its formation to pay the salaries of Gaza security personnel.

KFAR KANA, Israel — Clashes and demonstrations took place across Israel Sunday as police raised alert levels nationwide amid a wave of anger over the deadly shooting of a young Arab-Israeli.

With shops, schools and business shuttered as Arab towns and villages observed a general strike, police raised the alert to one below the highest level and deployed in areas of friction, spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

The protests began early Saturday after police shot dead a 22-year-old in Kfar Kana near the northern city of Nazareth.

Kheir Hamdan was killed after he attacked police with a knife as they tried to arrest a relative.

Police say warning shots were fired first before the officers felt their lives were threatened and aimed directly at him.

Relatives say Hamdan was killed "in cold blood", with CCTV footage apparently contradicting the official version.

In the footage, a man in a white T-shirt is seen banging on a police van window with a knife for about 10 seconds before starting to run off as a man gets out of the back door.

The man fires his gun as he walks towards Hamdan, and officers drag his body into the vehicle.

The shooting brought angry crowds onto Kfar Kana's streets where around 2,500 people demonstrated as youths threw stones and burned tyres.

Struggling to cope 

It came as Israel struggled to cope with a wave of unrest which has gripped occupied East Jerusalem for more than four months, with police facing off against youths almost nightly.

In Kfar Kana, up to 40 masked youths stoned police and set rubbish bins alight, Samri said.

Twenty people were arrested, among them minors, she added.

Student groups were also staging protests in Jerusalem, the northern port city of Haifa and in Beersheva in the southern Negev desert, with a major demonstration expected at the northern town of Umm Al Fahm at 1400 GMT.

In strife-torn East Jerusalem, clashes raged in Shuafat refugee camp for a fifth straight day as masked youths held running battles with Israeli forces, an AFP correspondent said.

Shuafat has been the focal point of unrest since Wednesday when one of its Palestinian residents deliberately ran over two groups of pedestrians, killing a security officer and a teenager and injuring eight other people.

Saturday's shooting and the outpouring of Arab anger dominated Israel's main newspapers.

"They killed him in cold blood because he was an Arab," Hamdan's father Rauf told Maariv, his words reflecting a widely held belief that police are quicker on the draw when an Arab is involved.

'An execution' 

"If he had been a Jew, it wouldn't have ended that way. They wouldn't have shot him and if they had, they would have shot him in the leg and he wouldn't be dead," Hamdan said.

Adalah, an NGO which fights for the rights of Israel's Arab minority, called the shooting "an execution”, dismissing the police's version about warning shots.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that anyone breaking the law would be "punished severely".

"We will not tolerate disturbances and riots. We will take determined action against those who throw stones, firebombs and fireworks, and block roads, and against demonstrations that call for our destruction," he told the weekly Cabinet meeting.

He said he had instructed Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch to examine the possibility of "revoking the citizenship" of anyone calling for Israel's destruction, in a threat clearly aimed at the Arab minority of around 1.4 million — some 20 per cent of the population.

But several Arab and leftwing parliamentarians blamed the bloodshed on Aharonovitch who said last week that any "terrorist" who harms civilians "should be killed".

"This sweeping statement by the minister could be interpreted as taking off the gloves to allow the use of deadly force for reasons that are not justified and against the law," Israeli rights group ACRI warned in a letter to the attorney general.

It said the CCTV footage raised "grave suspicions" that police had violated protocol stating that deadly force should be used only as a last resort.

SANAA — Yemen's new Cabinet was sworn in on Sunday despite calls by former autocratic president Ali Abdullah Saleh and Shiite militias allied to him for it to be boycotted.

Twenty-nine ministers including members of Saleh's powerful General People's Congress (GPC) and others seen as close to the Shiite Houthi insurgents attended the inauguration at the presidential palace, participants said.

The line-up was sworn in before President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who succeeded Saleh after he was forced to resign in early 2012 following a year of Arab Spring-inspired protests.

Saleh's GPC had on Saturday urged Cabinet nominees from the party to turn down their ministries, as it rejected newly imposed UN Security Council sanctions against him.

The GPC has also sacked Hadi from its leadership, apparently in retaliation after accusations he had solicited the sanctions announced Friday against Saleh and two Houthi commanders for threatening peace.

Six ministers were absent from Sunday's swearing in ceremony, with Prime Minister Khaled Bahah saying three of them were abroad and three others turned down their appointments.

The GPC on Saturday called for members to turn down the Cabinet posts, while the Huthis rejected the government and demanded a reshuffle to dismiss ministers they consider unqualified or corrupt.

The new 36-member Cabinet was formed as part of a UN-brokered peace deal under which the Houthis, also known as Ansarullah, are supposed to withdraw from Sanaa, which they seized on September 21.

On November 1, the main parties signed an agreement brokered by the UN envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar, for the formation of a government of technocrats.

Rebel representatives and their rivals, the Sunni Al Islah (Reform) Islamic Party, mandated Hadi to form a government and committed to support it.

Bahah on Sunday called for political factions to "cooperate" with the new government to help resolve the "dangerous" crisis.

"The most serious challenge we are facing now is how to preserve the state" to prevent a "conflict... with unpredictable outcomes", he said in a statement carried by the official Saba news agency.

Yemen has been dogged by instability since the uprising forced Saleh from power in February 2012, with the Houthi militias and Al Qaeda seeking to fill the power vacuum.

Since it overran Sanaa, Ansarullah has expanded its control to coastal areas and regions south of the capital, where its fighters have met fierce resistance from Sunni tribes and Al Qaeda.

The rebels are thought to be backed by forces loyal to Saleh.

The turmoil has raised fears the Arabian Peninsula nation, which neighbours oil-rich Saudi Arabia and lies on the key shipping route from the Suez Canal to the Gulf, may become a failed state.

BAGHDAD — US President Barack Obama said Sunday that deploying additional troops to Iraq signals a "new phase" in the fight against the Islamic State group, as Baghdad investigated whether strikes killed the jihadists' leader.

After earlier unveiling plans to send up to 1,500 more US troops to Iraq to advise and train the country's forces, Obama told CBS News on Sunday the US-led effort to defeat IS was moving to a new stage.

"Phase one was getting an Iraqi government that was inclusive and credible — and we now have done that," Obama told CBS News on Sunday.

"Rather than just try to halt [IS'] momentum, we're now in a position to start going on some offence," the president added, stressing the need for Iraqi ground troops to start pushing back IS fighters.

"We will provide them close air support once they are prepared to start going on the offence against [IS]," Obama said.

"But what we will not be doing is having our troops do the fighting."

Going on the offensive will be a signficant challenge for Iraq's forces, which saw multiple divisions fall apart in the early days of the jihadist offensive, leaving major units that need to be reconstituted.

The additional troops announced by Obama would roughly double the number of American military personnel in the country to about 3,100, marking a significant return of US forces to Iraq by a president who has hailed his role in their 2011 departure.

A US-led coalition has already been carrying out air strikes against IS in Syria and Iraq, where the extremist group has declared an Islamic "caliphate" in large areas of the two countries under its control.

Some of those strikes targeted a gathering of IS leaders near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul late on Friday, the Pentagon said, and Iraqi authorities were seeking to determine if the group's chief Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi had been killed.

A senior Iraqi intelligence official said there was no "accurate information" on whether Baghdadi was dead but that authorities were investigating.

"The information is from unofficial sources and was not confirmed until now, and we are working on that," the official said.

The death of the elusive IS leader would be a major victory for the US-led coalition but officials said it could take time to confirm who had been hit in the strikes.

"I can't absolutely confirm that Baghdadi has been killed," General Nicholas Houghton, the chief of staff of the British armed forces, told BBC television on Sunday.

"Probably it will take some days to have absolute confirmation," he said.

A spokesman for US Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, also could not confirm if Baghdadi was present at the time of the raid, which he said had intentionally targeted the group's leadership.

The strikes were a further sign of "the pressure we continue to place on the [IS] terrorist network”, spokesman Patrick Ryder said.

The aim was to squeeze the group and ensure it had "increasingly limited freedom to manoeuvre, communicate and command".

Kobani battle 

kills 1,000

Highlighting the enormous security challenges Iraq faces, a wave of car bombs struck Shiite-majority areas of Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 37 people.

IS meanwhile said that a British national had carried out a suicide bombing that killed a senior Iraqi police officer.

The group said in a statement posted online that "Abu Sumayyah Al Britani" detonated a truck carrying eight tonnes of explosives on the outskirts of the northern town of Baiji, killing Major General Faisal
Al Zamili.

The attack on Friday came during fighting to capture Baiji, which has been the scene of heavy clashes as pro-governmental forces seek to fully retake the town.

A senior officer said Friday that government forces now hold "more than 70 percent" of the town, which is near where Iraqi soldiers have been holding out for months against a jihadist siege of Iraq's largest oil refinery.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, meanwhile said Sunday that fighting for the town of Kobani in neighbouring Syria had now killed more than 1,000 people, most of them jihadists.

KUWAIT CITY — Tens of thousands of stateless people in oil-rich Kuwait will be offered citizenship of the impoverished African nation of Comoros to end their decades old problem, the government said Sunday.

The stateless people — known as bidoons — would be granted “special applications for Comoros’ economic citizenship,” Kuwait’s interior ministry assistant undersecretary, Major-General Mazen Al Jarrah, told Al Jarida daily.

Those who accept the offer would be given free residence permits in Kuwait, in addition to a series of incentives like free education and healthcare and the right to employment, Jarrah was quoted as saying.

The process would start as soon as an embassy for Comoros is opened in Kuwait in the coming months.

But a lawmaker Faisal Al Duwaisan, a member of parliament’s human rights committee, described the move as “very grave” and vowed to file a motion to question the prime minister if the government implements its decision.

He said the announcement means the government has been providing false information to lawmakers suggesting that stateless people hold nationalities of other countries. “If this is true, the government should deport them to their home countries and not to Comoros,” he said.

More than 110,000 stateless people were born and raised in Kuwait and claim the right to citizenship in the Gulf emirate.

The Kuwaiti government, which describes them as illegal residents, says only 34,000 qualify for consideration for citizenship.

The rest are considered natives of other countries who either emigrated to Kuwait after the discovery of oil five decades ago or were born to these migrants.

In the past three years, bidoons have held demonstrations to demand citizenship and other basic rights, and police have dispersed them using force, arresting hundreds who are on trial for illegal protests and assaulting police.

A Kuwaiti lawmaker in April proposed to send stateless people convicted of breaching public security and protesting to a camp he suggested should be built in the desert.

Comoros is an archipelago state located off eastern Africa and is a member of the Arab League.