Region

GENEVA — Israel’s decision to outlaw several Palestinian rights groups as terrorist organisations was “like an execution” designed to stop them from probing abuses, the head of one of the bodies told UN investigators on Monday.

Israel last year designated six Palestinian civil society groups as “terrorist” bodies and ordered them shuttered, sparking widespread international outrage.

It was the focus of a first series of public hearings hosted by a high-level team of investigators appointed last year by the United Nations Human Rights Council to probe the underlying causes in the decades-long Middle East conflict.

The first week of hearings, which have been harshly criticised by Israel, will also address the killing in May of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

“In these proceedings, we are not drawing any conclusions or making any judgements”, lead investigator Navi Pillay, a former UN rights chief from South Africa, told the gathering via video link.

Shawan Jabarin, the head of legal-aid human rights group Al Haq, was the first to take the floor.

He charged that the “terrorist” designation in October had come after a years-long smear campaign against his organisation, including efforts to get backers to drop their support, as well as death threats against him and other colleagues.

The designation, which he said was justified with “a secret file”, was “like an execution”, aimed at halting his organisation from examining a vast array of rights abuses.

“We will not stop. Yes, they can they can detain us, they can arrest us, they can put us in prisons, they can kill us... but they can’t change our beliefs... We will continue fighting against the culture and the policy of impunity.”

Although not unprecedented, it is unusual for UN investigative teams to hold public hearings with witnesses.

But in this case, the investigators had determined it was important to be as transparent as possible as they conduct their work to mitigate accusations of bias.

Israel, which has refused to cooperate, was, meanwhile, not convinced.

“Over the upcoming five days, the UN Commission of Inquiry targeting Israel intends to simultaneously play judge, jury and executioner by holding so-called public hearings,” the Israeli mission in Geneva said in a statement.

“This Commission of Inquiry and the convening of these sham trials shame and undermine the Human Rights Council,” it said, insisting that “the Human Rights Council should not be used to convene kangaroo courts”.

MAKTHAR, Tunisia — Most Tunisian schools are cash-strapped and run down, but an innovative project has allowed one to become self-sustaining by generating its own solar power and growing its own food.

Today the man behind the initiative hopes the success of the rural Makthar boarding school can serve as a model to improve the crumbling public school sector in the small North African nation.

Entrepreneur Lotfi Hamadi, 46, founder of the “Wallah [Swear to God] We Can” non-profit group, grew up in France but moved to Tunisia after the 2011 revolution that overthrew dictator Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali.

Based in Tunis, the hospitality consultant set his sights on the school, located in a remote and poor region 170 kilometres southwest of the capital and close to his parents’ hometown of Kesra.

“I wanted to take what works in the business world and turn schools into social enterprises,” said Hamadi, whose parents were economic migrants to France who could not read or write.

“We’re not trying to fill the gap left by the education system but to compensate them a bit, teach them to learn, give them the curiosity to open up to the world,” he said about the school’s 565 students, most of whom are boarders.

Hamadi started a decade ago by gathering donations to buy 50 solar water heaters — allowing regular hot showers for the students for the first time — and 140 photovoltaic panels that produce four times the power consumed on site.

By selling one-third of the surplus back to the national power company, the school could pay back debts to utilities and fund site improvements and extra-curricular activities.

The remaining extra power is distributed for free to three other nearby schools.

Last year, Hamadi’s group launched Kidchen, a farmers’ cooperative that grows vegetables on around eight hectares of nearby land.

While some produce goes to the school canteen, 90 per cent has been sold since this summer, with the profits helping to pay for school activities.

Kidchen is staffed by six school parents, formerly unemployed, and an agricultural engineer, who receive stable incomes and a share of the equity and dividends.

“That pushes us to work harder and produce more,” said chief gardener Chayeb Chayeb, a 44-year-old father of three.

“It’s a project for ourselves.”

‘Discover opportunities’ 

Hamadi said better schooling is urgently needed in the country gripped by years of political instability and economic woes since the revolution.

The situation now is a far cry from the era of Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first president after independence from France in 1956, who strongly promoted primary education.

Initially the Arab Spring uprising inspired hopes of greater social and economic rights, but today “75 per cent of pupils leave primary school without being able to write two sentences”, Hamadi said.

“The education system has been suffering since the revolution... because every government has caved in to pressure from the unions,” he said.

As a result, over 95 per cent of the ministry’s budget goes to paying staff salaries, leaving little for maintenance, schoolbooks and teacher training.

Some 100,000 pupils drop out of the Tunisian school system every year, and many parents, worried about low academic standards in state schools, opt for expensive private tuition.

Chayeb, the chief farmer, said the Makthar model had helped his family and given his children better school meals and activities ranging from business skills and foreign languages to robotics and drama.

“Before, I was a seasonal worker on five- or six-month contracts, always somewhere different,” he said. “Now I work near where I live.”

Former student Chaima Rhouma, 21 and studying law with a view to becoming a diplomat, said the project had completely revitalised the school, replacing a garbage-strewn yard with a sports field and garden.

Literature, theatre and cinema clubs had filled her with “good vibes”, she said. “I’ve become more curious, I’m always looking for new things. Here you can study by having fun.”

The school has gained a reputation in the region and is in high demand, with 80 children now on the waiting list, said its director Taher Meterfi.

Hamadi is meanwhile forging ahead with his next project — a largely organic 40 hectare farm project to supply the city’s 23 schools with energy and food for some 3,500 students.

At a time when Tunisia’s crisis is driving many young people to emigrate, he hopes to help children “come to terms with their country and discover the opportunities it has to offer them”.

PARIS — New protests erupted in Iran on Sunday at universities and in the largely Kurdish northwest, keeping a seven-week anti-regime movement going even in the face of a fierce crackdown.

The protests, triggered in mid-September by the death of Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for allegedly breaching strict dress rules for women, have evolved into the biggest challenge for the clerical leadership since the 1979 revolution.

Unlike demonstrations in November 2019, they have been nationwide, spread across social classes, universities, the streets and even schools, showing no sign of letting up even as the death toll ticks towards 200, according to one rights group.

Another rights group, Norway-based Hengaw, said security forces opened fire on Sunday at a protest in Marivan, a town in Kurdistan province, wounding 35 people.

It was not immediately possible to verify the toll.

The latest protest was sparked by the death in Tehran of a Kurdish student from Marivan, Nasrin Ghadri, who according to Hengaw died on Saturday after being beaten over the head by police.

Iranian authorities have not yet commented on the cause of her death.

Hengaw said she was buried at dawn without a funeral ceremony on the insistence of the authorities who feared the event could become a protest flashpoint.

Authorities subsequently sent reinforcements to the area, it added.

Kurdish-populated regions have been the crucible of protests since the death of Amini, herself a Kurd from the town of Saqez in Kurdistan province.

Universities have also emerged as major protest hotbeds. Iran Human Rights (IHR), a Norway-based organisation, said students at Sharif University in Tehran were staging sit-ins on Sunday in support of arrested colleagues.

Students at the university in Babol in northern Iran meanwhile removed gender segregation barriers that by law were erected in their cafeteria, it added.

The protests have been sustained by myriad different tactics, with observers noting a relatively new trend of young people tipping off clerics' turbans in the streets.

IHR said Saturday that at least 186 people have been killed in the crackdown on the Mahsa Amini protests, up by 10 from Wednesday.

It said another 118 people had lost their lives in distinct protests since September 30 in Sistan-Baluchistan, a mainly Sunni Muslim province in the southeast, presenting a further major headache for the regime.

IHR said security forces killed at least 16 people with live bullets when protests erupted after prayers on Friday in the town of Khash in Sistan-Baluchistan.

Amnesty International meanwhile said up to 10 people were feared dead in Friday's violence in Khash, accusing security forces of firing at demonstrators from rooftops.

"Iranians continue taking to the streets and are more determined than ever to bring fundamental changes," said IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam. "The response from the Islamic Republic is more violence."

The protest crackdown has also for now consigned efforts to revive the 2015 deal over Iran's nuclear programme to the back burner and intensified focus on Tehran's ties with Russia — notably its supply to Moscow of drones used in the Ukraine war.

Fierce crackdown 

The protests were fanned by fury over the restrictive dress rules for women, over which Amini had been arrested. But they have now become a broad movement against the theocracy that has ruled Iran since the fall of the shah.

Meanwhile, Sunnis in Sistan-Baluchistan — where the alleged rape of a girl in police custody was the spark for protests — have long felt discriminated against by the nation's Shiite leadership.

IHR also warned that "dozens" of arrested protesters had been charged with purported crimes which could see them sentenced to death — up from only a handful earlier reported to be potentially facing that fate.

As well as thousands of ordinary citizens, the crackdown has seen the arrests of prominent activists, journalists and artists such as the influential rapper Toomaj Salehi.

There is also growing concern about the well-being of Wall Street Journal contributor and freedom of expression campaigner Hossein Ronaghi, who was arrested in September and whose family says is on hunger strike in Evin prison.

In a new blow, his father Ahmad is now in intensive care after suffering a heart attack while conducting a vigil outside Evin, Hossein Ronaghi's brother Hassan wrote on Twitter.

KAFR JALES, Syria — Syrian government rocket fire killed nine people including at makeshift camps for displaced people in the country's last major rebel-held bastion early Sunday, a war monitor said.

An earlier observatory toll reported six civilians dead, including two youngsters.

It said another 75 people were wounded when more than 30 rockets exploded in several areas, including the camps, west of the city of Idlib in Syria's northwest.

Shelling continued later in the morning at several locations in the area, and rebels targeted government positions in retaliation for the strikes, according to the observatory.

An AFP correspondent saw flimsy tents destroyed and burned, blood stains and rocket debris at the scene.

At a nearby hospital, the correspondent saw the bodies of two young girls.

Abu Hamid, a camp resident, told AFP: "We awoke this morning and were getting ready for work when we began hearing the sounds of strikes."

"We didn't know where to go. It wasn't one rocket or two, but a dozen. The shrapnel was flying from every direction. We didn't know how to protect ourselves."

The last pocket of armed opposition to President Bashar Assad's regime includes large swathes of Idlib province and parts of the neighbouring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), headed by ex-members of Syria's former Al Qaeda franchise, is the dominant group in the area but other rebel groups are also active.

According to the observatory, the rocket fire came the day after five Syrian forces members died in shelling by a group affiliated with HTS.

The Idlib region is home to about 3 million people, around half of them displaced.

They are among the millions displaced internally and abroad by the war in Syria since 2011. Nearly half a million people have been killed.

With Russian and Iranian support, Damascus clawed back much of the ground lost in the early stages of Syria's conflict, which erupted in 2011 when the government brutally repressed pro-democracy protests.

Despite periodic clashes, a ceasefire reached in 2020 by Moscow and Turkey — which supports anti-Assad rebels — has largely held in the northwest.

QURNA, Egypt — It’s one of the 20th century’s most iconic photos: British archaeologist Howard Carter inspecting the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun in 1922 as an Egyptian member of his team crouches nearby shrouded in shadow.

It is also an apt metaphor for two centuries of Egyptology, flush with tales of brilliant foreign explorers uncovering the secrets of the Pharaohs, with Egyptians relegated to the background.

“Egyptians have been written out of the historical narrative,” leading archaeologist Monica Hanna told AFP.

Now with this weekend’s 100th anniversary of Carter’s earth-shattering discovery — and the 200th this year of the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone which unlocked the ancient hieroglyphs — they are demanding that their contributions be recognised.

Egyptians “did all the work” but “were forgotten”, said Chief Excavator Abdel Hamid Daramalli, who was born “on top” of the tombs at Qurna near Luxor that he is now in charge of digging.

Even Egyptology’s colonial-era birth — set neatly at Frenchman Jean-François Champollion cracking the Rosetta Stone’s code in 1822 — “whitewashes history”, according to specialist researcher Heba Abdel Gawad, “as if there were no attempts to understand Ancient Egypt until the Europeans came”.

The “unnamed Egyptian” in the famous picture of Carter is “perhaps Hussein Abu Awad or Hussein Ahmed Said”, according to art historian Christina Riggs, a Middle East specialist at Britain’s Durham University.

The two men were the pillars, alongside Ahmed Gerigar and Gad Hassan, of Carter’s digging team for nine seasons. But unlike foreign team members, experts cannot put names to the faces in the photos.

‘Unnoticed and unnamed’ 

“Egyptians remain unnoticed, unnamed, and virtually unseen in their history,” Riggs insisted, arguing that Egyptology’s “structural inequities” reverberate to this day.

But one Egyptian name did gain fame as the tomb’s supposed accidental discoverer: Hussein Abdel Rasoul.

Despite not appearing in Carter’s diaries and journals, the tale of the water boy is presented as “historical fact”, said Riggs.

On November 4, 1922, a 12-year-old — commonly believed to be Hussein — found the top step down to the tomb, supposedly because he either tripped, his donkey stumbled or because his water jug washed away the sand.

The next day, Carter’s team exposed the whole staircase and on November 26 he peered into a room filled with golden treasures through a small breach in the tomb door.

According to an oft-repeated story, a half century earlier two of Hussein’s ancestors, brothers Ahmed and Mohamed Abdel Rasoul, found the Deir Al Bahari cache of more than 50 mummies, including Ramesses the Great, when their goat fell down a crevasse.

But Hussein’s great-nephew Sayed Abdel Rasoul laughed at the idea that a goat or boy with a water jug were behind the breakthroughs.

Riggs echoed his scepticism, arguing that on the rare occasions that Egyptology credits Egyptians with great discoveries they are disproportionately either children, tomb robbers or “quadrupeds”.

The problem is that others “kept a record, we didn’t”, Abdel Rasoul told AFP.

‘They were wronged’ 

Local farmers who knew the contours of the land could “tell from the layers of sediment whether there was something there”, said Egyptologist Abdel Gawad, adding that “archaeology is mostly about geography”.

Profound knowledge and skill at excavating had been passed down for generations in Qurna — where the Abdel Rasouls remain — and at Qift, a small town north of Luxor where English archaeologist William Flinders Petrie first trained locals in the 1880s.

Mostafa Abdo Sadek, a chief excavator of the Saqqara tombs near Giza, whose discoveries have been celebrated in the Netflix documentary series “Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb”, is a descendant of those diggers at Qift.

His family moved 600 kilometres north at the turn of the 20th century to excavate the vast necropolis south of the Giza pyramids.

But his grandfathers and great-uncles “were wronged”, he declared, holding up their photos.

Their contributions to a century of discoveries at Saqqara have gone largely undocumented.

‘Children of Tutankhamun’ 

Barred for decades from even studying Egyptology while the French controlled the country’s antiquities service, Egyptians “were always serving foreigners”, archaeologist and former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass told AFP.

Another Egyptologist, Fatma Keshk, said we have to remember “the historical and social context of the time, with Egypt under British occupation”.

The struggle over the country’s cultural heritage became increasingly political in the early 20th century as Egyptians demanded their freedom.

“We are the children of Tutankhamun,” the diva Mounira Al Mahdiyya sang in 1922, the year the boy pharaoh’s intact tomb was found.

The same year Britain was forced to grant Egypt independence, and the hated partage system that gave foreign missions half the finds in exchange for funding excavations was ended.

But just as Egyptians’ “sense of ownership” of their heritage grew, ancient Egypt was appropriated as “world civilisation” with little to do with the modern country, argued Abdel Gawad.

“Unfortunately that world seems to be the West. It’s their civilisation, not ours.”

While the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb stayed in Cairo, Egypt lost Carter’s archives, which were considered his private property.

The records, key to academic research, were donated by his niece to the Griffith Institute for Egyptology at Britain’s Oxford University.

“They were still colonising us. They left the objects, but they took our ability to produce research,” Hanna added.

This year, the institute and Oxford’s Bodleian Library are staging an exhibition, “Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive”, which they say sheds light on the “often overlooked Egyptian members of the archaeological team”.

Excavators’ village razed 

In Qurna, 73-year-old Ahmed Abdel Rady still remembers finding a mummy’s head in a cavern of his family’s mud-brick house that was built into a tomb.

His mother stored her onions and garlic in a red granite sarcophagus, but she burst into tears at the sight of the head, berating him that “this was a queen” who deserved respect.

For centuries, the people of Qurna lived among and excavated the ancient necropolis of Thebes, one of the pharaohs’ former capitals that dates back to 3100BC.

Today, Abdel Rady’s village is no more than rubble between the tombs and temples, the twin Colossi of Memnon — built nearly 3,400 years ago — standing vigil over the living and the dead.

Four Qurnawis were shot dead in 1998 trying to stop the authorities from bulldozing their homes in a relocation scheme.

Some 10,000 people were eventually moved when almost an entire hillside of mud-brick homes was demolished despite protests from UNESCO.

In the now deserted moonscape, Ragab Tolba, 55, one of the last remaining residents, told AFP how his relatives and neighbours were moved to “inadequate” homes “in the desert”.

The Qurnawis’ dogged resistance was fired by their deep connection to the place and their ancestors, said the Qurna-born excavator Daramalli.

But the controversial celebrity archaeologist Hawass, then head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said “it had to be done” to preserve the tombs.

Egyptologist Hanna, however, said the authorities were bent on turning Luxor into a sanitised “open-air museum... a Disneyfication of heritage”, and used old tropes about the Qurnawis being tomb raiders against them.

Sayed Abdel Rasoul’s nephew, Ahmed, hit back at what he called a double standard.

“The French and the English were all stealing,” he told AFP.

“Who told the people of Qurna they could make money off of artefacts in the first place?”

‘Spoils of war’ 

Over the centuries, countless antiquities made their way out of Egypt.

Some, like the Luxor Obelisk in Paris and the Temple of Debod in Madrid, were gifts from the Egyptian government.

Others were lost to European museums through the colonial-era partage system.

But hundreds of thousands more were smuggled out of the country into “private collections all over the world”, according to Abdel Gawad.

Former antiquities minister Hawass is now spearheading a crusade to repatriate the Rosetta Stone and the Dendera Zodiac, and his petition has already attracted more than 78,000 signatures.

Returning the two artefacts to Egypt would show “the commitment of Western museums to de-colonising their collections and making reparations for the past”, the petition says.

The Rosetta Stone has been housed in the British Museum since 1802, “handed over to the British as a diplomatic gift”, the museum told AFP.

But for Abdel Gawad, “it’s a spoil of war”.

The Frenchman Sebastien Louis Saulnier meanwhile had the Dendera Zodiac blasted out of the Hathor Temple in Qena in 1820.

The celestial map has hung from a ceiling in the Louvre in Paris since 1922, with a plaster cast left in its place in the southern Egyptian temple.

“That’s a crime the French committed in Egypt,” Hanna said, behaviour no longer “compatible with 21st-century ethics”.

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories — The election triumph of veteran hawk Benjamin Netanyahu may usher in one of the most right-wing governments in Israeli history but for many Palestinians it's just a change of brand.

The difference between Netanyahu and defeated centrist incumbent Yair Lapid is like the difference "between Pepsi and Coca Cola", said Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh soon after the result of Tuesday's election was confirmed.

Netanyahu's previous terms in office saw what little remained of the Middle East peace process collapse in a surge of Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank.

During his brief premiership, Lapid adopted a more conciliatory approach, approving a modest increase in the number of Israeli work permits issued to Palestinians from the blockaded Gaza Strip and using his speech to the UN General Assembly in September to express support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yet, few Palestinians were shedding tears over Lapid's departure.

"At least, with Lapid gone, we can stop pretending that the Israelis are interested in peace," said Ahmad Saadi, a 31-year-old market stallholder, as he left afternoon prayers in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

"Maybe now the world will see that Netanyahu is not the exception, he represents the true feelings of Israelis, and they are not interested in peace."

In the Gaza Strip, where more than half the workforce is unemployed, the additional work permits were welcome for the lucky few who got them.

But Gazans also remember the three-day war which Lapid launched against the Islamic Jihad group in August, in which 49 Palestinians died, 17 of them children.

"I am afraid that Netanyahu and the right will cancel the permits for workers from Gaza," said construction worker Sohail Mohammed, 54, who recently managed to get one of the 17,000 Israeli work permits made available under Lapid.

"I only just got the permit that gave me and my family hope for a better life," he added.

For Mohammed Al Hindi, 27 and unemployed, it was "a boring repetition of the same scenario".

"The repercussions on us in Gaza are not important, because what matters to them is the security of Israel," he told AFP.

Palestinian analyst Noor Odeh said the differing ideological positions expressed by Israeli politicians over the future of the occupied territories made little difference to policy, which was always dictated by the security fears of Israelis.

“In terms of policy, being opposed to statehood, seeking annexation [of the occupied West Bank], whether de facto or not, they are all reading from the same playbook, because they are all catering to the same far-right public opinion,” he said.

But Odeh did voice concern over the role of the far-right in a future Netanyahu-led government.

The former premier’s return to power came largely thanks to a surge in support for his far-right ally, the Religious Zionism bloc, whose co-leaders Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich now expect to be rewarded with key ministries.

The two men have said they want the public security and defence portfolios, although Israeli analysts have said Netanyahu is likely to resist that.

But even without those ministries, the far-right is expected to wield unprecedented influence.

“These are two sociopaths,” Odeh said of the far-right leaders, whose sights are set on annexing the West Bank and ensuring Israel’s security services use more force in countering Palestinian unrest.

“The amount of cruelty that will be meted on Palestinians is definitely expected to rise.”

“Is the world going to keep Netanyahu on a leash the way they would any other extreme right-wing government, or are they going to cover up for him and whitewash for him and what his Cabinet does?” he asked.

PARIS — Iranian students protested and shopkeepers went on strike on Saturday despite a widening crackdown, according to reports on social media, as demonstrations that flared over Mahsa Amini's death entered an eighth week.

The clerical state has been gripped by protests that erupted when Amini, 22, died in custody after her arrest for an alleged breach of Iran's strict dress code for women.

As the working week got under way, security forces adopted new measures to halt protests at universities in Tehran, searching students and forcing them to remove facemasks, activists said.

But demonstrators were heard chanting "I am a free woman, you are the pervert" at Islamic Azad University of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, in a video published by BBC Persian.

"A student dies, but doesn't accept humiliation," sang students at Gilan University in the northern city of Rasht, in footage posted online by an activist. AFP was unable to immediately verify the videos.

In the north-western city of Qazvin, dozens chanted similar slogans at a mourning ceremony 40 days after the death of demonstrator Javad Heydari — a custom that has fuelled further protest flashpoints.

The Norway-based Hengaw rights group said people were observing a "widespread strike" in Amini's home town of Saqez, in Kurdistan province, where shops were shuttered.

A video aired later by Manoto, a television channel based abroad and banned in Iran, appeared to show students locked inside Islamic Azad University in north Tehran.

'Massacre' 

Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights said Saturday that at least 186 people have been killed in the protest crackdown, a rise of 10 from Wednesday.

It said another 118 people had lost their lives in separate protests since September 30 in Sistan-Baluchistan, a mainly Sunni Muslim province in the southeast, on the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

An official in Kerman province admitted the authorities were having trouble quelling the protests that erupted after Amini's death on September 16.

“The restrictions on the Internet, the arrest of the leaders of the riots and the presence of the state in the streets always eliminated sedition, but this type of sedition and its audience are different,” Rahman Jalali, political and security deputy for the province, was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency.

In a flare-up in Sistan-Baluchistan, up to 10 people, including children, were killed on Friday by security forces in the city of Khash, Amnesty International said.

Molavi Abdol Hamid, the cleric who leads Friday prayers in Sistan-Baluchistan’s capital Zahedan, condemned the Khash “massacre” that he said had killed 16 people.

Videos verified by AFP show people running for cover as bursts of gunfire are heard in Khash and Zahedan.

Iran has sought to portray the protest movement as a plot hatched by its arch-enemy the United States.

US downplays 

Biden remarks 

Ultra-conservative President Ebrahim Raisi on Friday dismissed a pledge by his US counterpart Joe Biden to “free Iran”, retorting that Iran had already been freed by the overthrow of the Western-backed shah in 1979.

“Our young men and young women are determined and we will never allow you to carry out your satanic desires,” he told a gathering commemorating the November 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran by radical students.

US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby played down the American leader’s remarks.

“The president was expressing our solidarity with the protesters as he’s been doing, quite frankly, from the very outset,” Kirby told reporters.

Asked whether the Biden administration thought Iran’s regime could soon fall, he said: “I don’t believe we have indications of that kind.”

On Friday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform, Binance, acknowledged funds belonging to or intended for Iranians had flowed through its service and may have run afoul of US sanctions.

“Earlier in the week, we discovered that Binance interacted” with “bad actors” using Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges, said Chagri Poyraz, head of sanctions at Binance.

Some of these users “attempted to move crypto through Binance’s exchange”, he wrote on a blog on the company’s website. “As soon as we discovered this, we moved to freeze transfers [and] block accounts.”

No Iranian cryptocurrency platforms are currently under sanctions. But US-imposed restrictions prohibit a US entity or US national from selling goods and services to Iranian residents, businesses or institutions. The ban includes financial services.

BAGHDAD — When a landslide buried part of an Islamic shrine in Iraq this summer, killing eight pilgrims, sorrow quickly turned to anger because the site was run without oversight from state or religious authorities.

The deadly disaster struck in August near Karbala when tonnes of soggy earth and rock collapsed onto the Shiite shrine Qattarat Al Imam Ali, dedicated to the imam’s journey on his way to battle in AD657.

By the time the search-and-rescue effort was over, three trapped children had been brought out alive — but the bodies of two men, five women and one child had also been pulled from the rubble.

The shared grief quickly gave way to public fury when Iraqi government and religious officials said they were not responsible for the site, or for policing its building and safety standards.

The shrine was one of hundreds that are being run privately and are therefore unregulated — many of which, some critics charge, operate with profit rather than piety as the main motive.

Karbala resident Maitham Abbas lashed out at what he called a “fake shrine”, dismissing it as a money making scheme.

Since the tragedy, politicians, clerics and religious officials have acknowledged the need to better enforce building standards in a war-scarred country generally plagued by crumbling infrastructure.

Iraq’s Waqf, the body in charge of managing Shiite mosques, tombs and other places of worship, reports that only 135 out of Iraq’s 664 known sanctuaries are formally registered.

The others are beyond Waqf’s remit and derive their legitimacy from the faith invested in them by flocks of visiting pilgrims, many of whom give what they can in donations.

There are “around 100 shrines dedicated to the daughters of Imam Hassan”, who passed only briefly through Iraq, said Hashem Al Awadi, deputy head of the government department responsible for Shiite shrines.

“Where does all this offspring come from?” he asked incredulously.

Informal 

pilgrimage sites 

Under Saddam, “an informal approach was cultivated by the people, indeed by the Shiite institutions, to avoid being attached to the state”, said Sabrina Mervin, a historian specialising in Shiism.

The post-Saddam years were marred by sectarian violence but also saw a Shiite revival as millions of faithful once more flocked to their holy sites, especially the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala.

Hundreds of smaller shrines opened up — many outside the purview of the religious authorities, which are often reluctant to proactively check building standards for fear of offending believers.

The Shiite revival was driven not by institutions but by “pilgrim practices which evolve from the grassroots, from the religiosity of the faithful”, said Mervin, of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

“If there are pilgrims... there is necessarily a foundation story that makes a place a holy place,” she said.

“The religious authorities have no arguments to prevent pilgrims from showing their attachment and devotion to major Shiite figures, even in places that are unrecognised.”

Registration 

can be tricky 

Most such sites are dedicated to relatives or descendants of Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed and the founder of the Shiite strand of Islam.

One is located on the side of a motorway south of Baghdad, dating back to the 1980s and not registered by the Waqf, where faithful offer chocolate snacks and small cash donations.

Pilgrim Kamel Rahim, 78, was praying to be healed from sickness at the graves of three distant descendants of Imam Ali — Sayyed Ahmed, Sayyed Ali and their father Al Mozher.

Rahim explained that local residents had “discovered stones on which their names were inscribed. They dug and found two graves”.

Awadi, the state official, said more shrines should seek official recognition, which offers them “legal weight and stature” as well as state development funding, and grants their guardians the status of civil servants.

But the process of authenticating and approving a shrine is protracted, he said, as it involves an assessment of its founding story and “a lineage investigation” of the deceased who is revered there.

This, he explained, can be a sensitive subject, especially if the request is denied.

“If you report a fake shrine,” he said, “how many people do you think will believe you, and how many will accuse you of straying from the path of religion?”