Region

ANKARA — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday proposed a nationwide vote on guaranteeing a woman's right to wear a headscarf in state institutions, schools and universities.

The subject is particularly important for devout Muslim Erdogan, whose Islamic-rooted ruling party lifted a long-standing ban on wearing the hijab in state institutions in 2013.

The headscarf issue has dominated political debate in recent months ahead of general elections in 2023 that are set to be one of the most serious challenges to Erdogan's two-decade control of Turkey.

Erdogan often refers to the ban's lifting as an example of how his party represents devout Muslim Turks against secular parties that ruled Turkey before his party's arrival in 2002.

"If you have the courage, come, let's put this issue to a referendum... Let the nation make the decision," Erdogan said in remarks aimed at main opposition party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

Kilicdaroglu leads the secular CHP, a party established by the founder of the secular modern Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The CHP leader had proposed a law to guarantee the right to wear a headscarf to alleviate any fears his party would reinstate the ban.

The headscarf was at the centre of debates in the 1990s but no party today proposes a ban in Muslim-majority Turkey.

"We had made mistakes in the past regarding the headscarf," Kilicdaroglu admitted earlier this month. "It's time to leave that issue behind us."

Kilicdaroglu seeks to show religious voters they have nothing to fear from opting for his secular party next year, experts say.

In response, Erdogan proposed a constitutional change that would "soon" be sent for approval to the parliament where his party holds a small majority with his nationalist alliance partner.

But under Turkish law, changes require 400 lawmakers to pass without a need for a referendum and so the CHP would need to give its backing.

Otherwise, with 360 votes, a proposal can be put to the people.

"If this issue cannot be resolved in parliament, we will submit it to the people," Erdogan said.

BEIRUT — Lebanon's parliament failed on Thursday for a third time to elect a successor to President Michel Aoun, stoking fears of a political vacuum after his mandate expires at the end of the month.

Parliament speaker Nabih Berri called for another vote on Monday in the hope of overcoming long-running discord between political factions in crisis-hit Lebanon, already governed by a caretaker cabinet.

Lawmaker Michel Moawad, son of former president Rene Moawad, emerged as a frontrunner when parliament first convened to vote on a new president last month, with lawmakers opposed to the powerful Iran-backed Hizbollah movement backing his candidacy.

But the 42 votes he received in Thursday's session fell well short of the 65 needed for election in the second round of voting.

A total of 119 lawmakers from Lebanon's 128-seat parliament attended the session, but quorum was lost before a second round could be held after some lawmakers walked out.

Fifty-five lawmakers cast blank ballots.

"We are still working on uniting the ranks of the opposition," lawmaker Samy Gemayel, who has backed Moawad's candidacy, told reporters after the session.

"We are facing difficulties, but I hope that as the October 31 deadline approaches everyone will join forces."

Hizbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah told reporters before the vote that "there is no consensus and no comprehensive dialogue between the different blocs".

Under Lebanon's longstanding confessional power-sharing system, the presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian.

Aoun was elected in 2016 after a more than two-year vacancy at the presidential palace as lawmakers made 45 failed attempts to reach consensus on a candidate.

The political deadlock has also scuppered efforts to form a new government since the outgoing Cabinet's mandate expired in May, despite the country being gripped by its worst-ever financial crisis.

At the end of a short visit to Beirut last week, France's Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna urged the swift election of a new president to avoid further political turmoil.

"Lebanon today cannot risk a power vacuum," she said.

Since 2019, the Lebanese pound has lost more than 95 per cent of its value against the dollar on the black market and poverty rates have climbed to cover most of the population.

MOSUL  — When Daesh group fighters bulldozed the ancient monumental Mashki gate in the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2016, it was part of the extremists' systematic destruction of cultural heritage.

Now, US and Iraqi archaeologists working to reconstruct the site have unearthed extraordinary 2,700-year-old rock carvings among the ruins.

They include eight finely made marble bas-relief carvings depicting war scenes from the rule of the Assyrian kings in the ancient city of Nineveh, a local Iraqi official said on Wednesday.

Discovered last week, the detailed carvings show a soldier drawing back a bow in preparation to fire an arrow, as well as finely chiselled vine leaves and palms.

The grey stone carvings date to the rule of King Sennacherib, in power from 705-681 BC, according to a statement from the Iraqi Council of Antiquities and Heritage.

Sennacherib was responsible for expanding Nineveh as the Assyrians' imperial capital and largest city — siting on a major crossroads between the Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau — including constructing a magnificent palace.

Fadel Mohammed Khodr, head of the Iraqi archaeological team working to restore the site, said the carvings were likely taken from Sennacherib's palace and used as construction material for the gate.

"We believe that these carvings were moved from the palace of Sennacherib and reused by the grandson of the king, to renovate the gate of Mashki and to enlarge the guard room", Khodr said.

'Iconic' 

When they were used in the gate, the area of the carvings poking out above ground was erased.

"Only the part buried underground has retained its carvings," Khodr added.

ALIPH, the Swiss-based International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas, said the Mashki gate had been an "exceptional building".

Daesh  targeted the fortified gate, which had been restored in the 1970s, because it was an "iconic part of Mosul's skyline, a symbol of the city's long history", it added.

ALIPH is supporting the reconstruction of the Mashki Gate by a team of archaeologists from Iraq’s Mosul University alongside US experts from the University of Pennsylvania.

The restoration project, which is being carried out in collaboration with Iraqi antiquities authorities, aims to turn the damaged monument into an educational centre on Nineveh’s history.

Iraq was the birthplace of some of the world’s earliest cities.

It was also home to Sumerians and Babylonians, and to among humankind’s first examples of writing.

But in the past decades, Iraq has been the target of artifacts smuggling. Looters decimated the country’s ancient past, including after the 2003 US-led invasion.

Then, from 2014 and 2017, the Daesh  group demolished pre-Islamic treasures with bulldozers, pickaxes and explosives. They also used smuggling to finance their operations.

Iraqi forces supported by an international coalition recaptured Mosul, the extremists’ former bastion, in 2017.

DAMASCUS — Palestinian movement Hamas on Wednesday said it restored relations with the Syrian government after a visiting delegation held a “historic meeting” with President Bashar Assad in Damascus.

The Islamist group, which controls the Gaza Strip, was long one of Syria’s closest allies, in large part due to a shared enmity towards Israel.

But it left Syria in 2012 after condemning the Assad government’s brutal suppression of protests in March 2011, which triggered the country’s descent into civil war.

“This is a glorious and important day, in which we come back to our dear Syria to resume joint work,” Hamas chief of Arab relations Khalil Al Hayya told reporters in Damascus.

“This is a new start for joint Palestinian-Syrian action,” he said after meeting Assad along with other representatives of Palestinian factions.

Hamas and Assad have agreed to “move on from the past and look to the future,” Al Hayya added.

By restoring ties with Damascus, Hamas cements its role within the “axis of resistance” against its arch-enemy Israel, analysts said, an Iran dominated alliance that extends to Lebanon’s Hizbollah movement and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

Wednesday’s meeting with Assad “is in line with the broader rapprochement between Hizbollah and Hamas evident in Lebanon over the past year or more,” said Maha Yahya of the Carnegie Middle East Centre.

The moves come amid fundamental shifts in Middle East relationships, including the Islamist group’s long-time ally Turkey restoring full diplomatic ties with Israel in August.

‘Hostile’ attitudes 

Charles Lister, Director of the Syria Programme at the Middle East Institute, said rapprochement is the “only logical move” Hamas could take.

“Given the prevailing regional trend of Arab engagement with Israel, it’s not surprising to see Hamas’ leadership in Gaza seeking to re-enhance and amplify their role within the Axis of Resistance,” he told AFP.

The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco have all normalised ties with Israel in the last couple of years.

Aron Lund, a fellow with the Century International think-tank, said the thaw has “been propelled by the hostile regional attitude to Hamas and by Israel’s normalisation with several Arab states”.

“Hamas simply doesn’t have the luxury of being able to ignore or oppose the Syrian government indefinitely,” Lund said.

Al Hayya said there was consensus among Hamas leadership and supporters over the resumption of ties with Syria — a move also backed by the Palestinian group’s foreign sponsors.

“All the states we notified of our decision were welcoming and supportive of the move, including Qatar and Turkey, who encouraged us to take the step,” Al Hayya said.

Turkey supports rebels against the government in Syria’s civil war, but has lately signalled a willingness to reconcile with Damascus.

According to Lund, Hamas’ rapprochement with Damascus “seems to have been facilitated by the fact that several other Arab states have reconnected with Assad’s regime”.

“Turkey’s recent softening of tone will also have helped,” he told AFP.

‘Too early’ 

The Syrian presidency said Assad met a delegation of Palestinian leaders without mentioning the restoration of ties with Hamas.

But the presidency published a video of Assad and Al Hayya holding hands as they walked with other Palestinian officials.

The two-day Hamas visit to Syria comes after the Islamist group signed a reconciliation deal with its Palestinian rival Fateh in Algiers last week, vowing to hold elections by next October in a bid to settle a 15-year intra-Palestinian rift.

A Hamas leader told AFP that the group, which was headquartered in the Syrian capital before leaving the country, plans to reopen its Damascus office.

But it was “too early” to talk about relocating its headquarters to the Syrian capital, said the official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The thaw between Hamas and Damascus was brokered by Tehran and Hizbollah, a senior Hamas source said.

For the past decade, Syrian officials had accused Hamas of betrayal.

In a 2013 speech, Assad had accused Palestinian groups he did not identify of treating the country like a “hotel” that they leave “when conditions are tough” in a thinly-veiled reference to Hamas.

Hamas has its origins in the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, whose Syrian branch was one of the leading factions in the armed opposition after Syria’s civil war broke out.

Hamas officials have said they broke ties with the Brotherhood in 2017.

British historian Sarah Irving examined the societal repercussions of a 1927 catastrophic earthquake which hit Palestine, Jordan, southern Lebanon and Syria and the repercussions in the lecture “Knowing about earthquake in Mandatory Levant”, held on Tuesday at the CBRL Amman Institute in Jabal Luweibdeh.

Regarding the magnitude, a previous 1837 earthquake killed far more people that the one during the British Mandate in 1927, noted the scholar, who is a lecturer in International History at Staffordshire University.

“The focus was on political and colonial dynamics; it seemed that very little had been done on it, and also I was particularly interested as well in environmental history,” Irving said, adding that in terms of how ethnographic and cultural studies discuss earthquakes, fires and floods, the villagers would perceive them as “God’s wrath”.

Irving realised that news coverage, especially from the international media, was largely inaccurate. She also understood that memoirs describing the earthquake of 1927 were not correct, adding that if the memoirs were written a few years later, they often picked up some unrelated anecdotes and twisted the factual historical events.

“The epicentre of the 1927 earthquake was Jericho, and it affected Jerusalem, Nablus, Salt and Amman,” Irving said, noting that “there are two main tremors, and the epicentre was on the northwestern part of the Dead Sea, which is part of the big network of geological faults, known as the African Rift Valley”.

“The worst death toll was in Nablus, which suffered very seriously, and that was caused by the Ottoman style buildings, which include heavy stone work,” Irving underlined, adding that Jerusalem had similar architecture which badly affected the city.

People lived in tents for months after the disaster. Luckily, the fact the earthquake occurred in July actually alleviated any potential additional suffering for surviving families, she noted.

If the earthquake happened in the wintertime, she said, the death toll would be higher due to the harsher weather conditions. Irving added that Al Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre suffered significant damage after the event as well. 

However, British authorities were not well organised in terms of responding to the crisis; the army distributed tents, but British authorities did not pay for the damage caused by the earthquake, Irving claimed, adding that it went on to become part of a complex British diplomatic policy.

ZARZIS, Tunisia — Thousands of Tunisians demonstrated and a general strike shut down the coastal city of Zarzis on Tuesday to demand a renewed search for relatives who went missing during a September migration attempt.

The city has been rocked by days of protests also fuelled by anger over the burial of four people, suspected of being missing Tunisians, in a nearby cemetery for foreign migrants — allegedly without efforts to identify them.

The powerful UGTT trade union federation voiced support for the strike and demanded an inquiry into the rescue effort and how the bodies were buried.

Tuesday's protests come four weeks after 18 Tunisians boarded a boat headed for Italy, joining tens of thousands of clandestine migrants who have attempted to reach Europe in recent years — many of them Tunisians exhausted by a chronic economic crisis.

Zarzis residents have been angered by reports that authorities buried four bodies found at sea — believed to be passengers from the boat — in a nearby cemetery for foreign migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, whose bodies regularly wash up along the coast after similar tragedies.

Those bodies have since been exhumed for identification, while another two bodies believed to be Tunisians have been found.

That would leave 12 passengers from the boat still missing.

Media reports said as many as 4,000 protesters, including relatives of the missing, marched along the city's main street, many holding up pictures of lost loved ones or signs saying "we want the truth".

Shops and government offices were closed, along with health services, except for emergency cases.

On Tuesday, President Kais Saied asked Justice Minister Leila Jaffel to open an investigation “so that Tunisians can know the full truth and who was behind these tragedies”.

The Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH) said authorities had “not devoted the necessary resources to search and rescue operations in a timely way” and called for an inquiry into the burials.

The North African country has a long Mediterranean coast, in places just 130 kilometres from the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Despite generally favourable weather from spring to autumn, the voyages on barely seaworthy boats often end in tragedy.

Earlier this month, AFP journalists saw the coastguard intercepting migrants aboard overcrowded boats.

Tunisian authorities intercepted nearly 200 migrants attempting to reach Europe over the weekend, the defence ministry said on Tuesday.

According to official figures, more than 22,500 migrants have been intercepted since the start of the year, around half of them from sub-Saharan Africa.