Region

PARIS — Iranian security forces Monday were using heavy weapons to suppress protests in Kurdish-populated regions in Iran's west, intensifying a crackdown that has killed a dozen people over the last 24 hours, rights groups said.

The Kurdish-populated provinces of western and northwestern Iran have been major hubs of protest since the onset of the movement sparked by the death in September of young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested by morality police in Tehran.

There have been particularly intense anti-regime demonstrations in several towns in the last few days, largely sparked by the funerals of people said to have been killed by the security forces in previous protests.

The Norway-based Hengaw rights group said Iranian forces had shelled overnight the cities of Piranshahr, Marivan and Javanroud, posting videos with the thud of heavy weaponry and sound of live gunfire.

It said 13 people had been killed in the region by the security forces over the last 24 hours, including seven in Javanroud, four in Piranshahr and two more in other locations.

Among six people killed by fire from the security forces on Sunday was 16-year-old Karwan Ghader Shokri, Hengaw said.

Another man was killed when security forces fired on crowds as the teenager’s body was being brought to the mosque, it added.

AFP could not immediately verify the toll.

Hengaw said that amid “intense confrontations” between protesters and security forces in Javanroud, there was now a shortage of blood for the wounded in its hospitals.

The latest violence came amid continued concern over the situation in Mahabad, where rights groups said security forces had sent reinforcements the day before to press a crackdown.

“Greatly concerned that Iranian authorities are reportedly escalating violence against protesters, particularly in the city of Mahabad,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote on Twitter.

“We continue to pursue accountability for those involved, as we support the Iranian people,” he added.

The Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) group also posted footage it said showed security forces using live fire against protesters in Piranshahr.

It also showed the distraught mother of the 16-year-old Karwan Ghader Shokri prostrating herself on his corpse as it was taken for burial.

“Mother, don’t cry, we will take revenge,” the mourners chanted in Kurdish, the rights group said.

IHR’s Director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam posted a video showing wounded protesters lying in the street in Javanroud, surrounded by the constant sound of gunfire.

“They are intensifying the violence against defenceless citizens,” he wrote on Twitter.

People also took to the streets in Kermanshah, a Kurdish-populated provincial capital, chanting “death to [supreme leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei”, another video posted by IHR said.

The protests sparked by Amini’s death have become the most serious challenge to the Iranian regime since the 1979 revolution.

Analysts have noted a trend of violence by the security forces has simply triggered more protests, with large crowds turning out for funerals and 40-day “chehelom” mourning ceremonies.

Kurds make up one of Iran’s most important non-Persian ethnic minority groups and generally adhere to Sunni Islam rather than the Shiism dominant in the country.

Amid the crackdown, Iran renewed cross-border missile and drone strikes overnight into Monday in neighbouring Iraq against Kurdish opposition groups it accuses of stoking the protests.

DOHA — QatarEnergy announced a 27-year natural gas supply deal with China Monday, calling it the "longest" ever seen as it strengthened ties with Asia while Europe scrambles for alternative sources.

The state energy company will send four million tonnes of liquefied natural gas annually from its new North Field East project to China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), it said.

The deal "marks the longest gas supply agreement in the history of the LNG industry", said Saad Sherida Al Kaabi, Qatar's energy minister and QatarEnergy's chief executive.

Asian countries led by China, Japan and South Korea are the main market for Qatar's gas, which is increasingly being sought by European countries since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Negotiations with European countries have struggled as Germany and others baulked at signing the type of long-term deals made with Asian nations.

North Field is at the centre of Qatar's expansion of its liquefied natural gas production by more than 60 per cent to 126 million tonnes a year by 2027.

“QatarEnergy has a lot of LNG to market... but they’re very confident about demand,” Ben Cahill, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies think-tank, told AFP.

“And in this market, with buyers worried about energy security and trying to lock up volumes from mid-decade on, there’s no need for QatarEnergy to settle for anything but long-term contracts.”

China is the first country to seal a deal for North Field East.

The Chinese company’s chairman revealed it had also requested a full share of the North Field South project that is dominated by Western energy giants.

The accord would “further solidify the excellent bilateral relations between the People’s Republic of China and the State of Qatar and help meet China’s growing energy needs”, Kaabi said.

Sinopec chairman Ma Yongsheng, who took part in a virtual signing ceremony from Beijing, said it was a “milestone” accord as “Qatar is the world’s largest LNG supplier and China is the world’s largest LNG importer”.

He told the ceremony that he had “formally” requested in October last year a share of Qatar’s North Field South project. TotalEnergies of France, Shell of Britain and US giant ConocoPhillips will share the 25 per cent foreign stake in the field.

“Thank you for taking it into serious consideration,” Ma told Kaabi at the ceremony, adding that Sinopec wanted to explore other potential deals with QatarEnergy.

DUBAI — Bahrain has elected a record eight women and many first-time lawmakers to its 40-seat parliament, according to results announced Sunday of this week’s polls held without opposition candidates.

The official Bahrain News Agency published the list of 34 candidates who won seats in the second round of parliamentary elections on Saturday, adding to six confirmed after a first round on November 12.

Two major opposition groups, the Shiite Al Wefaq and the secular Waad, were prevented from presenting candidates. These parties were dissolved in 2016 and 2017 respectively.

Amnesty International said ahead of the poll that the elections were taking place in an “environment of political repression”.

An election official in the small Gulf kingdom pushed back against the criticism.

“Only the voices of the Bahraini voters are heard, and all other voices are neither heeded nor influential,” Nawaf Abdullah Hamzah, director of the election process, was quoted as saying Saturday by the official news agency.

More than 330 candidates, including a record 73 women, ran for a seat on the council of representatives — the lower house of parliament that advises King Hamad, who has ruled since his father died in March 1999.

Six women have served in the outgoing chamber.

Bahrain has about 350,000 registered voters out of a population of 1.4 million.

Turnout in the first round was 73 per cent, authorities said, but no figures have been released for the second round.

This was the country’s third election since the 2011 demonstrations.

The second round of voting coincided with the Manama Dialogue conference, which has brought top diplomats from across the world to the capital from Friday until Sunday.

Bahrain, the host of the US Fifth Fleet, often accuses its neighbour Iran of training armed groups in order to cause unrest, a charge Tehran denies.

SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt — Vulnerable nations least responsible for planet-heating emissions have been battling for three decades to get wealthy polluters to pay for climate damages.

Their final push took barely two weeks.

The "loss and damage" inflicted by climate-induced disasters was not even officially up for discussion when UN talks in Egypt began.

But a concerted effort among developing countries to make it the defining issue of the conference melted the resistance of wealthy polluters long fearful of open-ended liability, and gathered unstoppable momentum as the talks progressed.

In the end a decision to create a loss and damage fund was the first item confirmed on Sunday morning after fraught negotiations went overnight with nations clashing over a range of issues around curbing planet-heating emissions.

"At the beginning of these talks loss and damage was not even on the agenda and now we are making history," said Mohamed Adow, executive director of Power Shift Africa.

"It just shows that this UN process can achieve results, and that the world can recognise the plight of the vulnerable must not be treated as a political football."

Loss and damage covers a broad sweep of climate impacts, from bridges and homes washed away in flash flooding, to the threatened disappearance of cultures and whole island nations to the creeping rise of sea levels.

Observers say that the failure of rich polluters both to curb emissions and to meet their promise of funding to help countries boost climate resilience means that losses and damages are inevitably growing as the planet warms.

Event attribution science now makes it possible to measure how much global warming increases the likelihood or intensity of an individual cyclone, heat wave, drought or heavy rain event.

This year, an onslaught of climate-induced disasters — from catastrophic floods in Pakistan to severe drought threatening famine in Somalia — battered countries already struggling with the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and soaring food and energy costs.

“The establishment of a fund is not about dispensing charity,” said Pakistani climate minister Sherry Rehman.

“It is clearly a down payment on the longer investment in our joint futures, in the down payment and an investment in climate justice.”

Who pays? 

The agreement was a balancing act, over seemingly unbridgeable differences.

On the one hand the G-77 and China bloc of 134 developing countries called for the immediate creation of a fund at COP27, with operational details to be agreed later.

Richer nations like the United States and European Union accepted that countries in the crosshairs of climate-driven disasters need money, but favoured a “mosaic” of funding arrangements.

They also wanted money to be focused on the most climate-vulnerable countries and for there to be a broader set of donors.

That is code for countries including China and Saudi Arabia that have become wealthier since they were listed as developing nations in 1992.

After last-minute tussles over wording, the final loss and damage document decided to create a fund, as part of a broad array of funding arrangements for developing countries “that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change”.

Other key points of contention were left ambiguous, or put into the remit of a new transitional committee that will be tasked with coming up with a plan for making the decisions a reality for the 2023 UN climate summit in Dubai.

A reference to expanding sources of funding, “is vague enough to pass”, said Ines Benomar, researcher at think tank E3G.

But she said debates about whether China — the world’s biggest emitter — among others should maintain its status as “developing” was likely to reemerge next year.

“The discussion is postponed, but now there is more attention to it,” she said.

For his part, China’s envoy Xie Zhenhua told reporters on Saturday that the fund should be for all developing countries.

However, he added: “I hope that it could be provided to the fragile countries first.”

 ‘Empty bucket’ 

Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network International, said other innovative sources of finance — like levies on fossil fuel extraction or air passengers — could raise “hundreds of billions of dollars”.

Pledges for loss and damage so far are miniscule in comparison to the scale of the damages.

They include $50 million from Austria, $13 million from Denmark and $8 million from Scotland.

About $200 million has also been pledged — mainly from Germany — to the “Global Shield” project launched by the G7 group of developed economies and climate vulnerable nations.

The World Bank has estimated the Pakistan floods alone caused $30 billion in damages and economic loss.

Depending on how deeply the world slashes carbon pollution, loss and damage from climate change could cost developing countries $290 billion to $580 billion a year by 2030, reaching $1 trillion to $1.8 trillion in 2050, according to 2018 research.

Adow said that a loss and damage fund was just the first step.

“What we have is an empty bucket,” he said.

“Now we need to fill it so that support can flow to the most impacted people who are suffering right now at the hands of the climate crisis.”

MANAMA — The United States is reinforcing defence infrastructure in the Middle East, at a time of tension with Iran which likely abandoned a plan to attack Saudi Arabia due to security ties, a US official said Sunday.

Brett McGurk, the National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, told the annual Manama Dialogue conference in Bahrain that his country is focused on deterring "imminent threats" in the strategic energy-rich and conflict-ridden region.

"The United States is now actively building and enabling an integrated air and maritime defence architecture in this region", said McGurk, the top White House official on the Middle East.

"Something long talked about is now being done, through innovative partnerships and new technologies", he added without elaborating.

On Saturday, the US Central Command chief General Michael Kurilla announced during the same conference that a US-led task force will deploy more than 100 unmanned vessels in the Gulf region's strategic waters by next year to stave off maritime threats.

The announcements came after Israel and the United States blamed Iran for a drone strike off the coast of Oman last week that hit a tanker operated by an Israeli-owned firm.

The attack, which coincided with heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington, was the latest in a string of disruptions in Gulf waters that are a major route for world energy supplies.

McGurk said the US forces have “exposed and deterred imminent threats” by Iran, confirming earlier reports that the Islamic republic was planning an attack against its regional rival Saudi Arabia.

“That attack likely did not emerge because of the close security cooperation between Saudi Arabia and the United States, which is ongoing and continuous,” he explained.

Speaking at the same session, the Israeli National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata described Iran as Israel’s “most prominent security threat”.

Israel has lobbied the United States and main European powers to abandon attempts to renew a 2015 deal with Tehran over its nuclear programme.

Negotiations over that deal have stalled.

“Enough with futile talks in Vienna,” said Hulata, adding that “even the people of Iran are saying enough” as it embarks “on a brutal crackdown against its own people”.

He was referring to the two months of nationwide protests which have become the biggest challenge to Iran’s clerical regime since the country’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

DOHA — FIFA president Gianni Infantino blasted the "hypocrisy" of Western critics of Qatar's human rights record on Saturday, making a passionate defence of the World Cup in the Gulf state on the eve of the kick-off.

The build-up to the tournament has been dominated by concerns over Qatar's treatment of migrant workers and women, to the visible annoyance of organisers.

Qatar officials say their country has been the target of "racism" and "double standards" and they point to the reforms on working conditions and safety that have been hailed as groundbreaking in the region.

Football itself again took a back seat on Saturday, with the focus firmly on off-field politics just 24 hours before hosts Qatar were due to open the tournament against Ecuador.

Infantino, speaking at his opening press conference of the tournament in Doha, had harsh words for critics of Qatar.

"This moral lesson-giving, one-sided, is just hypocrisy," said the Swiss.

"I don't want to give you any lessons of life, but what is going on here is profoundly, profoundly unjust."

He added: “For what we Europeans have been doing for the last 3,000 years we should apologise for the next 3,000 years before starting giving moral lessons to people.”

Infantino also expressed his support for marginalised communities.

“Today I feel Qatari, today I feel Arab, today I feel African… today I feel disabled, today I feel a migrant worker,” he said.

Another issue that has dominated the build-up to the tournament is the sale of beer in Daesh, which severely restricts alcohol consumption.

Organisers on Friday performed a dramatic U-turn, banning beer sales around stadiums just 48 hours before kick-off.

World governing body FIFA gave no reason for the surprise decision but media reports said there had been an intervention by Qatar’s ruling family.

Dozens of Budweiser beer tents had already been set up at grounds ahead of the first game.

Infantino made light of the ruling on the last-minute change on Saturday.

“I think personally if for three hours a day you cannot drink a beer, you will survive,” he said. “The same applies in France, Spain, Scotland.”

DAMASCUS — Israeli strikes on Saturday morning killed four Syrian soldiers and wounded one in central and western districts, Syrian state media reported.

"At about 06:30 am [0330 GMT], the Israeli enemy carried out an air attack" which resulted in "the death of four soldiers, the wounding of one soldier and material losses," a military source told the official SANA news agency.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that the strikes targeted pro-Iranian groups in Homs and Hama provinces, hitting weapons and ammunition sites.

Israel also targeted a Syrian air defence battery in Latakia province, it added.

Israel rarely comments on such reports, but it has carried out hundreds of air strikes on Syrian territory since war broke out there in 2011, targeting government positions as well as allied Iran-backed forces and Hizbollah fighters.

Israel has repeatedly said it will not allow its archfoe Iran to gain a foothold there.

Israeli strikes targeting the Shayrat airbase on November 8, 2021 wounded two Syrian regime soldiers, according to Syrian state media.