Region

RIYADH — Even as they highlight the historic nature of a shock rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, regional officials and analysts are injecting a note of caution into their assessments of what it all means. 

The deal announced Friday, brokered by China, stands to end a seven-year rupture in diplomatic ties between the two heavyweights that has stoked unrest across the Middle East. 

Tehran said on Monday it was prepared to take the new air of reconciliation even further — by also mending fences with the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, a staunch ally of Riyadh. 

Like Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia, Sunni-led Bahrain suspended formal relations with Shiite-majority Iran in 2016 after Iranian protesters attacked Saudi diplomatic missions in response to the Saudi execution of a revered Shiite cleric. 

"We should trust the path of diplomacy and take steps in this direction," said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani, highlighting "the positive atmosphere that we are witnessing in the region".

At the same time, though, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan stressed on Monday there were still many sore points to address in the relationship with Iran. 

"Agreeing to restore diplomatic ties does not mean we have reached a solution to all disputes between us," Prince Faisal told the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al Awsat. 

"Rather, it is a sign of our joint will to resolve them through communication and dialogue and peaceful and diplomatic means." 

Whether and how that happens could alter dynamics in flashpoints from Yemen to Lebanon and beyond. 

In Riyadh, especially, the response has been one of wary optimism. 

"If Tehran keeps its end of the bargain this could be a true game-changer, heralding an era of regional peace and prosperity not seen in decades," Faisal Abbas, editor-in-chief of the Arab News, wrote in a column at the weekend. 

"Of course, these are early days; there needs to be a trust-building period, and actions on the ground to cement the agreement."

What next? 

Friday's statement, issued after talks in Beijing, identifies a two-month window for the two sides to formally restart relations and reopen diplomatic missions. 

Beyond that, the language is somewhat vague, including a vow for each side to respect the other's sovereignty and not interfere in the other's "internal affairs". 

What happens next in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has led a military coalition against Iran-backed Houthi rebels, will offer some indication of how deep such promises go. 

The Houthis have previously claimed drone and missile attacks on Saudi oil facilities, including one in 2019 that temporarily halved the kingdom's crude output.

Riyadh and Washington accused Iran of being behind that attack, which it denied. 

"It is more than likely that the Iranians have made assurances to China that they will refrain from attacking Saudi Arabia directly or targeting the kingdom's oil infrastructure," said Mohammed Alyahya, a Saudi fellow at the Belfer Centre at Harvard University. 

"Maintaining stability in the region and protecting the free flow of oil is as important for the Chinese as it is for the Saudis or even for the Americans. 

"Given this alignment of interest, it is not unreasonable to expect the Chinese to put the weight of their considerable economic leverage behind this agreement." 

Such a deal, however, is not the same thing as peace in Yemen, especially if it merely creates more space for ongoing Saudi-Houthi talks that could ultimately see Riyadh disengage from the battlefield.

"If it's just a Saudi-Houthi deal that we're about to see, it has to be the basis for a Yemeni-Yemeni dialogue," said Dina Esfandiary of the International Crisis Group. "Otherwise we're going to have an issue inside Yemen with the grievances of various other parties that aren't being addressed."

'Mood of optimism' 

Similar uncertainty clouds other hotspots. 

Will the Saudi-Iran deal encourage Riyadh to drop its opposition to the regional reintegration of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, who is close with Tehran? 

Could it help unblock the political impasse in Lebanon, specifically a fight by sectarian leaders over the country's next president? 

The absence of clear answers has not dampened enthusiasm for Friday's announcement among analysts like Iraqi Ali Al Baidar, whose country has been roiled by the Saudi-Iran rift for years and tried to hash out an agreement between the two sides before Beijing got involved.

"Iraq is the biggest beneficiary from restoring ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia, this will ease the pressure on the Iraqi scene," Baidar said on Twitter. 

It's the kind of general enthusiasm that has taken hold as the region waits for the specifics of the deal's terms to take shape. 

The rapprochement "certainly creates a mood of optimism", Esfandiary said, "but it remains to be seen what it actually means".

BASRA, Iraq — Iraq's prime minister on Sunday announced a campaign to combat the severe impacts of climate change on the water-scarce country, including by planting five million palms and trees. 

Oil-rich but war-battered Iraq suffers from extreme summer heat, frequent droughts, desertification and regular dust storms, problems that are all exacerbated by a heating planet. 

Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al Sudani told a climate conference that more than seven million Iraqis had already been affected by climate change and hundreds of thousands displaced by drought.

He cited challenges including "high temperatures, scarcity of rain and an increase in dust storms" as well as shrinking green spaces, which all "threaten food, health, environmental and community security".

Sudani, who took office in late October, said his government was launching "a grand afforestation initiative, which includes planting 5 million trees and palm trees in all governorates of Iraq".

In the spring of last year, Iraq was swept by about a dozen major sand or dust storms which blanketed Baghdad and other areas, causing breathing difficulties for thousands and forcing the closure of airports and schools. 

Sudani said the government was working on a wider "Iraqi vision for climate action", speaking at a conference in the southern city of Basra attended by foreign ambassadors and UN officials.

The plan would include promoting clean and renewable energy, new irrigation and water treatment projects and reduced industrial gas flaring, he said, without announcing details on funding or timeframes.

Sudani said Iraq was "moving forward to conclude contracts for constructing renewable energy power plants to provide one-third of our electricity demand by 2030".

Sudani also cited “efforts to preserve Iraq’s rights in the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers”, the two waterways whose flows have been reduced, with Iraqi officials blaming dams upstream in Turkey and Iran.

“The unilateral water control in the upstream countries increases the vulnerability of countries challenged by the effects of climate change,” the Iraqi premier told the Basra meeting. 

As part of the wider plan, the government cited the creation of green belts around cities to act as windbreaks against dust storms. 

Iraq was once dubbed “the country of 30 million palm trees”, but decades of conflict and failing public policies have ravaged the national symbol as urbanisation has shrunk traditional green spaces.

Lush palm groves that once protected large cities such as Baghdad or Karbala have given way to concrete neighbourhoods.

Sudani pledged that Baghdad would soon organise a regional conference to strengthen cooperation and exchange expertise on combating climate change and other environmental pressures.

“I call on friendly countries and all United Nations organisations to support us in facing the effects of climate change,” Sudani said.

Saudi Arabia, Iraq’s wealthy neighbour, in 2021 announced a plan to plant 10 billion trees on its territory within a decade, as well as to plant 40 billion additional trees in collaboration with other countries.

NABLUS, Palestinian Territories — Israeli soldiers shot dead three Palestinians in a pre-dawn firefight in the occupied West Bank, Israeli and Palestinian sources said on Sunday, amid a surge in violence in the region.

The Israeli forces said "gunmen opened fire" at an army position near the Jit junction, west of Nablus in the northern West Bank, with the soldiers responding with "live fire".

A Nablus-based group said the Israeli troops had laid an ambush for them.

The Palestinian health ministry identified three men killed by Israeli gunfire near Nablus as Jihad Al Shami, 24, Uday Al Shami, 22, and Mohammad Dabeek, 18.

The Lions' Den, an emerging Palestinian militant group that claims to rise above traditional factional loyalties and has been blamed for a number of recent attacks on Israeli targets, identified the three as members.

A statement from the group said they had engaged in combat after identifying the Israeli ambush, vowing to revenge the “martyrs”.

Violence intensified last year, but has worsened in the West Bank — which Israel has occupied since the June War of 1967 — after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office in December at the head of a hard-right coalition.

‘Pay the price’ 

Speaking ahead of his weekly Cabinet meeting, Netanyahu commended the Israeli forces who “operate around the clock against those seeking to kill us”.

“The principle is simple — whoever tries to hurt us, or hurts us, will pay the price,” he said in televised remarks.

Hamas, the Islamic rulers of the Gaza Strip, said the deaths would “fuel the great West Bank intifada”, or uprising.

Islamic Jihad, another Gaza-based militant group, said the deaths were part of the “all-out war” it argued Israel had launched against the Palestinian people.

Several Palestinian armed groups had called for revenge since an Israeli forces raid on Tuesday, also in the northern West Bank, killed six Palestinians.

On Wednesday, UN Middle East peace envoy Tor Wennesland urged Israel and the Palestinians to end violence without delay.

“We are in the midst of a cycle of violence that must be stopped immediately,” he said in a statement.

The Sunday shoot-out took place a short distance from an Israeli settlement, with the head of the regional Samaria settler council praising the army for “taking out the murderous terrorist squad operating in the area”.

“We will continue to live and build here in Samaria and the entire region,” Yossi Dagan said in a statement, using the Jewish biblical name for the northern West Bank.

Netanyahu’s government has vowed to continue the expansion of West Bank settlements, which are illegal under international law.

Last month, UN chief Antonio Guterres said “each new settlement is another roadblock on the path to peace”.

Calls for calm 

On Thursday, a member of the armed wing of Hamas opened fire outside a Tel Aviv cafe, wounding three men in their 30s before being shot dead.

Hours before, three armed Palestinians were killed in an Israeli forces operation in the northern West Bank.

The Tel Aviv attack came just hours after Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin had called for de-escalation ahead of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan that starts in March and the Jewish holiday of Passover in April.

Austin, following talks with Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant during a brief visit to Israel, also called on the “Palestinian leadership to combat terrorism and to resume security cooperation and to condemn incitement”.

Since the start of the year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed the lives of 81 Palestinian adults and children, including militants and civilians.

Thirteen Israelis, including three children and one policeman, and one Ukrainian civilian have been killed over the same period, according to an AFP tally based on official sources from both sides.

QAMISHLI, Syria —  Children of foreign terrorists play football on a dirt field at a centre in north-eastern Syria that Kurdish authorities hope will help rehabilitate minors raised on Daesh group ideology.

More than 50 boys aged 11-17, some with parents hailing from Britain, France, Germany or the United States, live at the heavily guarded Orkesh rehabilitation centre near the city of Qamishli, close to the Turkish border.

Opened six months ago, it is the first facility seeking to rehabilitate foreign boys in the Kurdish administered northeast, where prisons and camps are packed with thousands of Daesh group relatives from more than 60 countries.

Another centre opened its doors in 2017 to rehabilitate young former militants.

The success of the centres is crucial to “saving the region from the emergence of a new generation of extremists”, said Khaled Remo, co-chair of the Kurdish administration’s office of justice and reform affairs.

Some of the boys wearing tracksuits played table football in one of the rooms, while others kicked around a ball outside in the sun, talking to one another in broken Arabic.

Once the boys turn 18, they will need a new rehabilitation programme or for their home countries to take them back.

“We don’t want the kids to stay permanently in these centres, but diplomatic efforts are slow, and many children need rehabilitation,” Remo said.

Kurdish-led forces, supported by a US-led coalition, spearheaded the fight against Daesh in Syria, driving the group from its last redoubt in the country in 2019.

Tens of thousands of people, including relatives of suspected extremists, have been detained ever since in the Kurdish-controlled Al Hol and Roj camps, including around 10,000 foreigners in Al Hol alone.

While girls are also in the camps, this rehabilitation centre focuses on boys because they would be who Daesh remnants — now in hideouts in the desert — would recruit to fight if they could, Remo said.

Therapy sessions 

Kurdish authorities have repeatedly called on countries to repatriate their citizens, but foreign governments have allowed only a trickle to return home, fearing security threats and domestic political backlash.

The boys at the rehabilitation centre were transferred from Al Hol and Roj, authorities said, as well as from the Ghwayran prison, where hundreds were killed after militants stormed it early last year.

Some with their heads shaved or wearing beanies attend classes in Arabic and English, learning mathematics, drawing and even music.

Inside one classroom, the boys fiddled around with crayons, one teenager drawing the sunset in shades of orange and pink.

Later that day, they were learning to count in English, repeating the numbers after their female teacher.

The facility also has dormitories, recreation areas and a dining hall, and the boys can play chess or watch documentary films and cartoons.

The centre’s goal is to prepare the boys “to integrate into their communities in the future” and live better lives “in a normal context”, said Aras Darwish, who heads the project.

“Our goal is to offer psychosocial and educational support,” Darwish said of the centre, which provides individual and group therapy sessions.

The boys are also encouraged to draw in order to express their feelings and deal with memories, he said, pointing to a room decorated with drawings of trees, cars and houses.

Save the Children in December warned that around 7,000 children of suspected foreign extremists were “trapped in desperate conditions and put at risk on a daily basis” in overcrowded detention camps in northeast Syria.

Al Hol is notorious for violence, with killings and attacks even targeting children, guards and humanitarian workers.

Slow process 

Children in Al Hol “are in daily danger of indoctrination to violence”, the US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement Saturday, adding that teenagers with foreign parents “expressed a desire to return to their country of origin”.

In early March, UN chief Antonio Guterres called for the swift repatriation of foreigners from Al Hol.

“The worst camp that exists in today’s world is Al Hol... with enormous suffering for the people that have been stranded there for years,” Guterres said.

He warned that letting this “untenable situation fester” will only fuel “more resentment and despair”.

Reem Al Hassan, 28, a counsellor at the Orkesh centre, said the programme was working.

“We can see a big difference in the kids compared to when they first came,” she said.

“At first, some of them refused to take part in classes with women teachers,” she said, as militants had imposed a strict segregation of genders when they controlled territory in Syria and Iraq.

“But the situation is better now — we see gradual, if slow, improvement.”

TUNIS — Like many black Tunisians, 26-year-old Nebras Magnnah has been fearful since waves of racist attacks targeting Sub-Saharan African migrants were unleashed after incendiary remarks by President Kais Saied.

Ever since Saied last month ordered “urgent measures” against sub-Saharan migrants over a purported “criminal plot” to change the North African country’s demographic make-up, Magnnah said she was insulted on the street.

Magnnah, a college graduate working as a waitress, said the speech “incited physical and verbal violence” with openly racist actions taken without fear of reprisal.

“Leave, what are you still doing here?” she said people shouted at her in the street.

Saied’s comments have fuelled attacks, evictions and other retaliation against migrants, international rights groups have said, and West African countries flew home hundreds of their fearful nationals.

Tunisia’s already disadvantaged black minority has also been hit.

Black Tunisians make up some 10 to 15 per cent of the country’s 12 million people, many with centuries-old roots in Tunisia from ancestors who arrived during the slave trade.

Racist ‘green light’ 

Saadia Mosbah, who heads the anti-racism campaign group Mnemty, pointed to “five or six attacks on black Tunisians” in recent weeks.

“After the speech, I noticed that black Tunisians were also afraid,” said the 63-year-old former flight attendant, whose campaigning led to an anti-discrimination law being passed in 2018.

As well as online vitriol, Mosbah has also been insulted on the streets including with many telling her to “go home”.

But that did not stop her from showing solidarity with the Sub-Saharan migrants.

Mosbah helped provide necessities to the most vulnerable among the more than 21,000 sub-Saharans living in Tunisia, according to the latest official figures, many of whom recently found themselves without work or housing.

Mosbah had previously argued that the Tunisian state was neither “racist nor segregationist”, but after the president’s comments, racism that was “more or less hidden” has rapidly “risen to the surface”.

Saied’s speech was “like a green light from the political power to racists”, she said.

Even more surprising, she found, was that among those who expressed racist comments were the country’s so-called “intellectual elite”.

Anthropologist Stephanie Pouessel said black Tunisians were “collateral damage” from Saied’s speech, which she said targeted undocumented migrants and not skin colour.

But black Tunisians already faced “everyday racism” she added, describing it as “latent but systematic” and noting they faced “difficulty in accessing high-ranking posts”.

Many live in poor areas in the impoverished south.

Most black Tunisians live in “disadvantaged areas and belong to the poorest strata”, wrote researcher Maha Abdelhamid for the EuroMeSCo think tank in 2018.

Following Saied’s “bombshell” comments, many black Tunisians remained silent over the issue of migrants, Pouessel added.

Many feared that speaking up over the rights of migrants would relegate them to a status of foreigners in their country “when they have always struggled to be considered fully Tunisians”, she added.

‘Demand respect’ 

Former national football captain Radhi Jaidi, who is black, took to Twitter to support migrants.

“I am African not because I was born in Africa but because Africa was born in me,” he wrote.

Jaidi said he was “troubled that individuals took the initiative to do the government’s work against illegal immigration with aggression and outside the law”.

But while he had hoped his message would generate support from other celebrities, apart from tennis star Ons Jabeur, there was little by way of solidarity.

“My post sought to demand respect for the rights” of migrants, he told AFP, deploring the attacks that “marred Tunisia’s image”.

Jaidi continues to promote Tunisia as “a country of freedom and hospitality” but fears lasting damage.

He pointed to the “very political gesture” by players in Senegal’s under-20s football team — when they celebrated a recent victory against Tunisia by showing off their black skin.