Region

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel and Turkey announced the resumption of full diplomatic ties on Wednesday, following years of strained relations between the Mediterranean nations.

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid hailed the diplomatic breakthrough as an "important asset for regional stability and very important economic news for the citizens of Israel".

Lapid's office said the diplomatic development will see ambassadors and consuls general posted to the two countries once more.

The announcement follows months of bilateral efforts to mend ties, with reciprocal visits by top officials.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the return of ambassadors "is important to improve bilateral ties".

But he cautioned that closer ties with Israel should not be interpreted as Ankara "giving up on the Palestinian cause".

Cavusoglu in May became the first Turkish foreign minister to visit Israel in 15 years, during a trip which also saw him meet the Palestinian leadership in the occupied West Bank.

During a landmark visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Ankara two months earlier, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proclaimed their meeting marked “a turning point in our relations”.

Bilateral relations began to fray in 2008, following an Israeli military operation in Gaza.

Relations then froze after the deaths of 10 civilians following an Israeli raid on the Turkish Mavi Marmara ship, part of a flotilla trying to breach a blockade by carrying aid into Gaza in 2010.

A brief reconciliation lasted from 2016 until 2018, when ambassadors were withdrawn once again over the killing of Palestinians. More than 200 Gazans were shot dead by Israeli forces during border protests from 2018 to 2019.

‘Defend’ Palestinian rights 

Reconciliation publicly got under way after Herzog took office in July 2021.

The Israeli president on Wednesday said the full renewal of ties “will encourage greater economic relations, mutual tourism, and friendship between the Israeli and Turkish peoples”.

Despite the diplomatic differences in recent years, trade had continued and Turkey has remained a popular destination for Israeli tourists.

Israel, however, warned its citizens to return home in June, citing an Iranian assassination plot against its nationals in Istanbul.

Lapid then thanked Ankara for its cooperation on the issue and Israelis swiftly resumed their Turkish holidays.

Israel has been wary of upsetting regional allies over its decision to strengthen ties with Turkey, with Herzog dispatched to Cyprus and Greece ahead of his Ankara trip.

Turkey has meanwhile been keen to stress that its normalisation with Israel could yield benefits for the Palestinians.

“As we have always said, we will continue to defend the rights of Palestinians,” Cavusoglu said on Wednesday.

As well as its relations with the Palestinian leadership based in the West Bank, Turkey has also maintained ties with the Islamist group Hamas that rules Gaza.

Efraim Inbar, president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said observers should be “under no illusion” that bilateral ties will be as good as they were during the 1990s.

“As long as Erdogan is in power there will be a certain amount of hostility from Turkey towards Israel, because of his Islamist connection. He will continue to support Hamas for instance,” he told AFP.

Israel has imposed a blockade on Gaza’s 2.3 million residents since 2007 and — along with many Western nations — designates Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

BEIRUT — Turkish air strikes on a Syria border post run by regime forces killed 11 on Tuesday, following an overnight flare-up between Ankara's forces and Kurdish fighters that control the area, a war monitor said.

"Eleven fighters were killed in a Turkish air strike that hit a Syrian regime outpost... near the Turkish border," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, without specifying if the victims were affiliated with the Damascus government or Kurdish forces.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said "Turkish military aircraft have conducted 12 air strikes against positions of the Syrian army deployed on the border strip west of Kobane," a Kurdish-held town.

The raids caused "casualties", SDF spokesman Farhad Shami said, without specifying how many.

Syrian regime forces have deployed in areas controlled by Kurdish fighters near the border with Turkey as part of agreements intended to stem cross-border offensives by Ankara targeting Kurdish forces it views as terrorists.

Tuesday’s raids followed overnight clashes between Ankara’s forces and the Kurdish-led SDF west of Kobani, said the observatory, a Britain-based monitoring group that relies on a network of sources inside Syria.

As part of the escalation, Kurdish forces struck inside Turkish territory, killing one soldier, according to Turkey’s defence ministry.

“Thirteen terrorists were neutralised” in retaliatory attacks by Ankara inside Syria, the ministry said, adding operations were ongoing in the region.

Turkey has launched a series of cross-border offensives targeting Kurdish forces and the Daesh group since 2016, but such operations have rarely resulted in the killing of Syrian regime fighters.

If regime forces are confirmed to be among those killed on Tuesday, the attack would mark one of the largest escalations since Ankara and Damascus traded attacks in 2020 following a Syrian regime strike that killed 33 Turkish soldiers in the north-western province of Idlib.

Turkey has stepped up its attacks in Kurdish-controlled areas of Syria since a July 19 summit with Iran and Russia failed to green-light a fresh offensive.

The SDF, the Syrian Kurds’ de facto army, has since counted at least 13 of its members killed in several Turkish attacks.

Turkey has fervently opposed Syrian President Bashar Assad, backing rebels calling for his removal and opening its doors to refugees.

But last week, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu called for reconciliation between the Syrian government and the opposition.

Cavusoglu’s comments had been seen as an apparent easing of Ankara’s long-standing hostility towards Assad’s government and enraged the Syrian opposition and rebel groups.

TEHRAN — Iran on Monday denied any link with the attacker of British author Salman Rushdie but blamed the writer himself for “insulting” Islam in the novel “The Satanic Verses”.

“We categorically deny” any link with the attack and “no one has the right to accuse the Islamic Republic of Iran”, said foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani in Tehran’s first official reaction to Friday’s stabbing.

“In this attack, we do not consider anyone other than Salman Rushdie and his supporters worthy of blame and even condemnation,” he said at his weekly press conference in Tehran.

“By insulting the sacred matters of Islam and crossing the red lines of more than 1.5 billion Muslims and all followers of the divine religions, Salman Rushdie has exposed himself to the anger and rage of the people.”

Rushdie, 75, was left on a ventilator with multiple stab wounds after the attack at a literary event on Friday in upstate New York.

But by Sunday he was off the ventilator and “on the road to recovery”, though with severe injuries, his agent Andrew Wylie said.

The prize-winning writer had spent years under police protection after Iranian leaders in 1989 called for Rushdie’s killing over his portrayal of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed in the novel.

Suspect pleads not guilty 

The suspected assailant, 24-year-old Hadi Matar from New Jersey, was wrestled to the ground by staff and audience members before being taken into police custody.

He was later arraigned in court and pleaded not guilty to attempted murder charges.

On Monday his mother, Lebanese-born Silvana Fardos of Fairview, New Jersey, described Matar as “a moody introvert” who became increasingly fixated on Islam after visiting Lebanon to see his estranged father.

She told the UK’s Daily Mail her son had “changed a lot” after his trip, adding that he “was angry that I did not introduce him to Islam from a young age”.

In 1989, Iran’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree, or fatwa, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie for what he deemed the blasphemous nature of “The Satanic Verses”.

The fatwa was never officially lifted and translators of the novel were attacked.

Rushdie’s stabbing comes at a sensitive moment in Iran’s talks with major powers on reviving a 2015 nuclear deal abandoned by the United States in 2018, in return for the relifting of crippling US sanctions.

Deeply inflammatory 

Kanani on Monday stressed Tehran’s position that Rushdie, not Iran, was to blame for the attack against him.

Commenting on the novel, Kanani said that “the anger at that time at this inappropriate action was not limited to Iran and the Islamic Republic”.

“Millions of people in Arab, Islamic and non-Islamic countries reacted with anger.

“Condemning the action of the attacker on the one hand and absolving the action of the one who insults sacred and Islamic matters on the other is completely contradictory.”

More than 30 years after its publication, the book and its author remain deeply inflammatory in Iran.

Iranians at Tehran’s book market, when asked by AFP on Saturday to comment on the attack, did not openly condemn the stabbing, which has sparked outrage in the West.

The ultra-conservative Kayhan newspaper, whose director is appointed by current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, greeted the attack.

“Bravo to this courageous and duty-conscious man who attacked the apostate and depraved Salman Rushdie in New York,” it said.

With the exception of reformist publication Etemad, Iranian media followed a similar line, also describing Rushdie as an “apostate”.

MADRID/ TUNIS — Spanish rescuers on Monday found three dead migrants and 45 survivors, mostly Moroccan and some in very bad condition, on a boat off Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, the coastguard said.

Rescuers from Salvamento Maritimo were called out to a boat in trouble off the island and reached the vessel just after midnight, a spokesman said.

He said the crew had found 45 survivors, 42 men, two women and a child, and three bodies.

"All those rescued were Moroccan, with the exception of one sub-Saharan African man," he told AFP.

The 112 emergency services said five of those on board were in bad condition, adding that six people had been taken to hospital.

In the first seven months of the year, 9,589 migrants survived the extremely dangerous sea journey from the coast of Africa to the Spanish islands in the Atlantic, compared with 7,531 a year earlier, interior ministry figures correct to July 31 show.

In the same period, sea arrivals to Spain's Balearic Isles in the Balearic Isles fell to 5,284 from 7,292 a year earlier.

Monday's rescue comes after a frenetic weekend for Salvamento Maritimo which pulled nearly 600 people to safety in waters off the Atlantic archipelago.

Migrant arrivals on the Atlantic archipelago have surged since late 2019 after increased patrols along Europe's southern coast dramatically reduced Mediterranean crossings.

At its shortest, the route from the Moroccan coast is around 100 kilometres, but migrants often come from much further afield, with the distance from Mauritania more than 1,000 kilometres as the crow flies.

The Atlantic route is notoriously dangerous because of strong currents, with migrants often setting sail in overcrowded ramshackle boats which are extremely unsafe.

Meanwhile, Tunisian authorities said Monday they intercepted or rescued over 200 migrants trying to reach Europe by sea at the weekend, including an entire extended family from the economic crisis-hit country.

The coastguard on Sunday night thwarted 10 attempted crossings, bringing ashore 156 would-be new arrivals in Italy, the national guard said.

Two-thirds of them were from sub-Saharan Africa and the rest were Tunisians.

Defence ministry spokesman Mohamed Zekri told AFP that 42 Egyptians who had set sail from neighbouring Libya were rescued Sunday off Kerkennah, central Tunisia, after their boat sank and they took refuge on an oil platform.

After a similar incident in the same zone the previous weekend, 10 Tunisian migrants were feared to have drowned while 20 were saved.

Tunisian authorities also said 15 members of a family from Hammamet in central Tunisia, including five women and four small children, were prevented from heading out to sea on Friday night.

Tunisia and Libya are the main points of departure for migrants trying to reach Europe from Africa.

Tunisia is in the throes of political and economic crises, and Libya has been gripped by lawlessness since 2011 that has seen militias turn to people trafficking.

BAGHDAD — Iraq's judiciary said on Sunday it lacks the authority to dissolve parliament as demanded by populist Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr, who is engaged in an escalating standoff with political rivals.

Followers of Sadr, in defiance of his Shiite rivals of the pro-Iran Coordination Framework, have been staging a sit-in protest at Iraq's parliament.

In the latest twist to the political turmoil, the firebrand cleric has urged the judiciary to dissolve parliament by the end of this week to pave the way for new legislative elections.

But the judiciary replied that "the Supreme Judicial Council has no jurisdiction to dissolve parliament", citing "the principle of a separation of powers".

Under the constitution, parliament can only be dissolved by an absolute majority vote in the house, following a request by one-third of deputies or by the prime minister with the approval of the president.

Nearly 10 months on from the last elections, Iraq still has no government, new prime minister or new president, due to repeated squabbles between factions over forming a coalition.

In the latest turmoil to strike the oil-rich but war-scarred nation, Sadr has called for “early democratic elections after a dissolution of parliament”.

The Supreme Council said it agreed with Sadr’s criticism of the system’s “failure to elect a president of the republic, a prime minister and the absence of a government formed within the constitutional timeframe”.

“This is an unacceptable situation that must be remedied,” it said.

The Coordination Framework opponents of Sadr launched their own Baghdad sit-in on Friday, nearly two weeks after his supporters stormed parliament and began an open-ended protest, first inside, then outside the legislature.

The opposing encampments are the latest turn in a stand-off which has so far remained peaceful.

On Twitter, a close associate of Sadr, Saleh Mohamed Al Iraqi, said it was time to show “which of the two sides has the most support” among the Iraqi people.

He called on Sadr’s supporters across the country to rally in Baghdad for a “million-man demonstration”, without giving a date.

Sadr’s camp launched the sit-in after the Coordination Framework nominated a candidate they saw as unacceptable for prime minister.

The cleric’s bloc emerged from the October elections as parliament’s biggest, but still far short of a majority.

In June, 73 of his lawmakers quit in an aborted bid to break the months-long political logjam.

DAMASCUS — The Syrian government's air defence systems intercepted Israeli missiles over the coastal province of Tartus and in central Syria, near the border with Lebanon, state media reported on Sunday.

"Our air defences are intercepting hostile targets in the sky of Tartus and in the air of the Qalamoun Mountain range near the Lebanese border," Syria's official news agency SANA said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said ambulances had rushed to the scene of the strikes in Tartus.

"Israeli strikes targeted military sites of the regime forces and Iranian militias are present in the southern countryside of Tartus, where several missiles landed in the vicinity of Abu Afsa village, and at an air defence base and radar in the area," said the observatory, which has a wide network of sources inside Syria.

On Friday, Israeli shelling wounded two civilians in southern Syria near the occupied Golan Heights, according to state media.

Last month, an Israeli strike near Damascus killed three Syrian soldiers, state media said at the time, with the observatory saying the strike targeted a military facility and an "Iranian weapons depot".

There was no immediate official reaction from Israel.

Since civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes inside the country, targeting government positions as well as allied Iran-backed forces and Hizbollah fighters.

While Israel rarely comments on individual strikes in Syria, the military has defended them as necessary to prevent its arch-foe Iran from gaining a foothold on its doorstep.

The conflict in Syria started with the brutal repression of peaceful protests and escalated to pull in foreign powers and global terrorist.

The war has killed nearly half a million people and forced around half of the country’s pre-war population from their homes.