Region

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.

SYDNEY — Australia said it would no longer recognise West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on Tuesday, a policy reversal that prompted a curt rebuke from Israel.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said the city’s status should be decided through Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, unwinding a contentious declaration by the previous conservative government.

In 2018, Australia’s then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison followed US president Donald Trump’s lead and unilaterally recognised West Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

The move caused a domestic backlash in Australia and friction with neighbouring Indonesia — the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation — temporarily derailing a bilateral free trade deal.

“I know this has caused conflict and distress in part of the Australian community, and today the government seeks to resolve that,” Wong said.

Jerusalem is claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians, and most foreign governments avoid formally declaring it the capital of either state.

“We will not support an approach that undermines” a two-state solution, Wong said, adding: “Australia’s embassy has always been, and remains, in Tel Aviv.”

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid criticised Tuesday’s move — which comes before November 1 elections.

“We can only hope that the Australian government manages other matters more seriously and professionally,” he said.

Israel annexed east Jerusalem following the 1967 June War, and declared the entire city its “eternal and indivisible capital”.

Palestinians claim the eastern part as the capital of a future state.

Wong insisted that the decision did not signal any broader shift in policy or a new-found hostility towards Israel.

“Australia will always be a steadfast friend of Israel. We were amongst the first countries to formally recognise Israel,” she said.

“We will not waver in our support of Israel and the Jewish community in Australia. We are equally unwavering in our support of the Palestinian people, including humanitarian support.”

The centre-left Labour Party, with Anthony Albanese as prime minister and Wong as foreign minister, came to power in May 2022 after strongly opposing the previous government’s Jerusalem policy.

Wong accused the Morrison government of making the Jerusalem decision to influence a by-election in a Sydney suburb with a sizable Jewish community.

“You know what this was? This was a cynical play, unsuccessful, to win the seat of Wentworth and a by-election.”

Symbolism 

Canberra’s shift was foreshadowed by the removal of language about the Israeli capital on the website of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Although Australia is not a major player in peace talks, Ran Porat, a historian and researcher at Melbourne’s Monash University, said the move was significant.

“In the Middle East in general symbolism is very much at the centre of many conflicts. Symbolism is not negligible, it’s not unimportant.”

The move could be seized on Israel’s opposition Likud, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, as evidence of the government’s failings ahead of a general election.

Lapid will be disappointed, Porat added, but the response had to walk “between the disagreement and not souring relations with Canberra”.

PARIS — Eight inmates died in a fire that raged in Iran's Evin prison, the judiciary said on Monday, doubling the official toll from a blaze that has further stoked tensions one month into protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini.

Authorities blamed the fire in the Tehran jail late Saturday on "riots and clashes" among prisoners, but human rights groups said they doubted the official version of events and feared the real toll could be higher.

The judiciary authority's website Mizan Online said on Monday that four inmates injured in the fire had died in hospital, after reporting the previous day an initial toll of four dead from smoke inhalation.

Gunshots and explosions were heard during the dramatic blaze from inside the complex, according to social media footage, and state media later broadcast images of parts of the prison gutted by the flames.

Iranian authorities have accused "thugs" of torching a prison clothing depot and reported clashes between prisoners, and then between inmates and guards who intervened to put an end to the violence.

Judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei said Monday that the fire was "a crime committed by a few elements linked to the enemy".

But Norway-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR) said it "rejects" the official account of clashes between non-political prisoners unrelated to the protests, citing the "long history of concealing facts" in the Islamic republic.

"The number of those killed in Evin Prison is probably higher than the official count," it added.

Activists noted further confusion when state television announced on Sunday that 40 people had been killed in the prison, only to correct this back to the initial toll of four just minutes later.

IHR said many prisoners had been transferred to Gohardasht prison in Karaj, west of Tehran, in the aftermath of the fire.

The fire came after four weeks of protests over the death of 22-year-old Amini, following her arrest for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code for women.

The wave of demonstrations has turned into a major anti-government movement, confronting Iran’s clerical leadership with one of its biggest challenges since the ousting of the shah in 1979.

At least 122 people have been killed in the crackdown on the Amini protests, and at least 93 more died in separate clashes in Zahedan, Sistan-Baluchestan province, according to an updated toll published by IHR. These tolls include 27 children, it added.

More than 40 human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and IHR in a joint statement Monday condemned Iran’s “mobilisation of their well-honed machinery of repression to ruthlessly crack down” on the nationwide protests.

They called on the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council to hold a special session and “establish an independent, investigative reporting and accountability mechanism” to probe the rights violations.

The New York-based Centre for Human Rights in Iran posted videos of new protests on Monday with schoolchildren shouting slogans against the government in the city of Isfahan, and students protesting in Mazandaran University in northern Iran.

Hundreds of the protesters arrested in recent weeks have been sent to Evin, joining thousands of existing inmates who range from criminal convicts to political prisoners and foreigners.

Freedom of expression activist Hossein Ronaghi called his mother from Evin, where he has been held since last month, and “could hardly speak and could only say a few words”, his brother Hassan wrote on Twitter.

His family says he has suffered ill-treatment in custody and has fractured both legs.

But the wife of activist Majid Tavakoli, likewise arrested during the crackdown, wrote on Twitter that she had no news from her husband since the fire.

Prominent Iranian lawyer Saeid Dehghan wrote on Twitter that a total of 19 lawyers who had been working to defend those arrested had themselves been detained.

European Union foreign ministers endorsed new sanctions on Monday — including visa bans and asset freezes — targeting the morality police, Information Minister Eisa Zarepour and the cyber division of its Revolutionary Guard.

“When you see these terrible pictures of the fire in the prison, when you see that peaceful people, women, men and, increasingly, young people and schoolchildren continue to be brutally beaten then we cannot and will not close our eyes to this,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Naser Kanani said Tehran would give an “immediate response” to the sanctions. The United States, Britain and Canada have already announced sanctions against Iran over rights violations.

BAGHDAD — Iraq's newly-elected President Abdul Latif Rashid pledged on Monday on taking office to throw his weight behind efforts to rapidly form a strong new government.

"The Iraqi people expect a new government to be formed rapidly, and that it be efficient and united," Rashid said on his inauguration at the presidential palace in Baghdad.

Rashid, 78, elected last Thursday to the largely ceremonial post reserved for Iraq's Kurdish minority, swiftly named Mohammed Shia Al Sudani as prime minister-designate.

Sudani's task now is to form a new government that would end a year of political gridlock in the war-scarred nation since general elections were held in October 2021.

But the movement of firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr, Sudani's rival in Iraq's majority Shiite camp, Saturday announced its refusal to join a Sudani-led government, igniting fears of renewed delays that are common in Iraq's multi-confessional politics.

Under the Iraqi constitution, the prime minister-designate has 30 days to form a government, a deadline that has often been missed.

"I will do everything I can to bring political forces closer and sponsor a dialogue," Rashid said, also vowing to work toward "solid and balanced relations with neighbouring countries and the international community".

The stakes are high for the next cabinet, with a colossal $87 billion in revenues from oil exports locked up in the central bank's coffers.

The money can help rebuild infrastructure but it can only be spent after lawmakers approve a state budget presented by the new government.