Region

TEHRAN — Iran said Wednesday that "technical issues" in the now-paused negotiations to restore its 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers have been resolved, but "political" issues persist ahead of concluding any deal.

Iran has been engaged for a year in negotiations with France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China directly, and the United States indirectly, to revive the 2015 deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The US unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran, prompting Tehran to step back from nuclear commitments.

Negotiations in the Austrian capital Vienna aim to return the US to the deal, including through Washington lifting sanctions, and to ensure Tehran's full compliance with its commitments.

"Technical issues and discussions in the Vienna talks have been completed," Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA.

"Only political issues remain," he added.

Foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said early this month that Iran will only return to Vienna to finalise an agreement, not to hold new negotiations.

The talks have been paused since March 11 after Russia demanded guarantees that Western sanctions imposed against Moscow after its February 24 invasion of Ukraine would not damage its trade with Iran.

Days later, Moscow said it had received the necessary guarantees.

Among the key remaining sticking points is Tehran’s demand to delist the Revolutionary Guard, the ideological arm of Iran’s military, from a US terror list.

That sanction, imposed by former US president Donald Trump after he withdrew from the nuclear agreement, is officially separate from the atomic file.

“If Iran wants sanctions-lifting that goes beyond the JCPOA, they’ll need to address concerns of ours that go beyond the JCPOA,” US State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Monday.

The 2015 agreement gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear programme to guarantee that Tehran could not develop a nuclear weapon, something it has always denied wanting to do.

BAGHDAD — Iraq was hit on Wednesday by its third heavy dust storm in two weeks, temporarily grounding flights at Baghdad and Najaf airports, as the weather phenomenon grows increasingly frequent.

The air in Baghdad was thick with a heavy sheet of grey and orange dust, while the state news agency INA cited the meteorological office as saying the latest storm was expected to lift on Thursday.

Flights were suspended at Baghdad International Airport due to poor visibility.

The airport serving the Shiite holy city of Najaf to the south also released a statement announcing flights were grounded.

Two dust storms struck the country earlier in April, leaving dozens hospitalised with respiratory problems and temporarily grounding flights at a number of airports.

“The dust is affecting the whole country but particularly central and southern regions,” Amer Al Jabri, an official at Iraq’s meteorological office, told AFP.

“Iraq is facing climatic upheaval and is suffering from a lack of rain, desertification and the absence of green belts” around cities, he said.

Iraq is particularly vulnerable to climate change, having already witnessed record low rainfall and high temperatures in recent years.

Experts have said these factors threaten social and economic disaster in the war-scarred country.

In November, the World Bank warned that Iraq could suffer a 20 per cent drop in water resources by 2050 due to climate change.

In early April, environment ministry official Issa Al Fayad had warned that Iraq could face “272 days of dust” a year in coming decades, according to the state news agency INA.

The ministry said the weather phenomenon could be confronted by “increasing vegetation cover and creating forests that act as windbreaks”.

ADEN — Yemen's new leaders took a ceremonial oath of office under tight security on Tuesday, completing a major shake-up aimed at ending seven years of war with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

The newly formed, eight-man leadership council performed a largely symbolic swearing-in in Aden witnessed by members of a parliament elected in 2003, as hundreds of soldiers patrolled the southern city, a government official told AFP.

Ex-president Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, who fled to Saudi Arabia when the war started in 2015, handed over his "full powers" to the council in a televised address on April 7.

The ceremony was not announced in advance and was held at an undisclosed location for security reasons. In December 2020, about 20 people died in an attack on Aden airport as government officials arrived.

The Houthis took over the capital Sanaa in 2014, prompting a Saudi-led military intervention to support the government the following year and a war that has caused what the United Nations calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

A fragile, UN-brokered truce has largely held since April 2, the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, providing a rare respite from the fighting.

UN Special Envoy Hans Grundberg attended the swearing-in, along with ambassadors from European and Arab countries, the government official and parliament members told AFP.

The US special envoy for Yemen, Tim Lenderking, also attended, according to Yemen's official news agency.

Hadi's surprise announcement came on the last day of talks in Riyadh involving Yemen's government, the coalition and international envoys. The Houthis refused to attend those talks because they were on "enemy" soil.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Saudi Arabia pushed the former president to step down, confining him to his home and restricting his communications.

'Ready for war' 

The new leadership council, led by former Hadi adviser Rashad Al Alimi, is tasked with "negotiating with the Houthis for a permanent ceasefire", Hadi said in his announcement.

Its members represent widely diverging views and include Aidarous Al Zoubeidi, whose secessionist Southern Transitional Council wants to split Yemen back into two countries — north and south, as was the case until 1990

The council also includes Tarek Saleh, the nephew of Yemen's ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh who was assassinated by his former Houthi allies in 2017.

Abdullah Al Alimi — Rashad's brother and also on the council — told AFP on Saturday that Yemen's new leaders remain ready to fight if peace efforts break down.

"Our first option is peace, but we are ready for war," Alimi said in an interview in Riyadh.

"We believe the council is in a position, with the coalition support, to score a decisive military victory," he added.

Yemen's conflict has killed more than 150,000 people and over 200,000 have died indirectly, including through hunger, unsafe water and disease, UN agencies estimate. Eighty per cent of the 30 million population is dependent on aid.

Of the 301 lawmakers elected in 2003, 143 are pro-government, 90 support the Houthis, 23 are unaffiliated and 45 have died, members of the parliament told AFP. It was not known how many attended Tuesday's ceremony.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel carried out its first air strike on the Gaza Strip in months early Tuesday, in response to a rocket reportedly fired from the Palestinian enclave after a weekend of violence around a Jerusalem holy site.

The occupation forces also said their special forces had made five arrests overnight in the occupied West Bank, which has seen a string of deadly Israeli raids since an uptick in attacks and demonstrations four weeks ago.

Tensions have focused on the highly contested Al Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's Israeli-occupied Old City.

Palestinian worshippers gathering there for Ramadan prayers have been outraged by visits by religious Jewish under heavy Israeli forces protection — as well as restrictions on their own access.

Jews are allowed to visit the site at certain times but prohibited from praying there.

The violence, coinciding with the Jewish Passover festival as well as the Muslim holy month, has sparked fears of a repeat of last year’s events, when similar circumstances sparked an 11-day war that levelled parts of Gaza.

On Monday, warning sirens sounded after a rocket was fired into southern Israel from the blockaded enclave, controlled by the Islamist group Hamas, in the first such incident since early January.

The Israeli forces said that the rocket had been intercepted by the Iron Dome air defence system.

Hours later, the Israeli air force said it had hit a Hamas weapons factory in retaliation.

Hamas claimed to have used its “anti-aircraft defences” to counter the raid, which caused no casualties, according to witnesses and security sources in Gaza.

No faction in the crowded enclave of 2.3 million inhabitants immediately claimed responsibility for the rocket.

But it comes after weeks of mounting violence, with a total of 23 Palestinians and Arab-Israelis killed, including assailants who targeted Israelis in four deadly attacks.

Those attacks claimed 14 lives, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally.

The rocket fire also followed a weekend of Israeli-Palestinian violence in and around Al Aqsa Mosque compound that wounded more than 170 people, mostly Palestinian demonstrators.

Diplomatic sources said the United Nations Security Council was to meet Tuesday to discuss the spike in violence.

Israeli forces said they had refused to authorise a march Jewish nationalists had planned around the walls of the Old City.

A similar parade last year, following a similar wave of violence, was interrupted by rocket fire from Gaza which in turn triggered an 11-day war.

That conflict killed at least 260 Palestinians, including many fighters, and 14 people on the Israeli side, including a soldier.

This month has also seen violence in the West Bank.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said Tuesday it had treated 45 people following a demonstration in the village of Burqa, against a march by Israeli settlers demanding the reestablishment of a nearby settlement evacuated in 2005.

The Red Crescent said some had been hit by tear gas canisters and that its ambulance had been hit by rubber-coated bullets.

Incidents at Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the holiest site in Judaism and the third-holiest in Islam, have triggered repeated rounds of violence over the past century.

Hamas has vowed to defend Al Aqsa’ status as “a pure Islamic site”.

But analysts have said in recent weeks that the movement does not want a war at present, partly because its military capacities were degraded by the last one.

They say Hamas is also wary that a new conflict could prompt Israel to cancel thousands of work permits issued in recent months to residents of impoverished Gaza, where unemployment is near 50 per cent.

But Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian faction which Israel says has thousands of fighters and rockets in the enclave, said on Monday that “the enemy’s threats to cut off aid to Gaza will not force us into silence over what is happening in Jerusalem”.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Monday that the United States was “deeply concerned” about the tensions and that senior US officials had been in touch by telephone with their counterparts from Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Arab governments. 

“We have urged all sides to preserve historic status quo” at Al Aqsa compound and avoid “provocative” steps, he said.

KARBALA, Iraq — Envisioned as a lush fortress against worsening desertification and sand storms, the “green belt” of Iraq’s Karbala stands as a wilted failure.

Sixteen years after its inception, only a fraction of the 76 kilometre crescent-shaped strip of greenery has materialised, though the years proved a deep need for protection against mounting environmental challenges.

Eucalyptus, olive groves and date palms first took root in 2006 as part of a plan for tens of thousands of the trees to form a green protective shield around the city in central Iraq.

“We were very happy because the green belt would be an effective bulwark against dust,” said Hatif Sabhan al-Khazali, a native of Karbala — one of Iraq’s Shiite holy cities that attracts millions of pilgrims every year.

Iraq’s host of environmental problems, including drought and desertification, threaten access to water and livelihoods across the country.

But nowadays, the southern axis of Karbala’s green belt is only about 26 kilometres long while the northern axis of the 100 metre wide strip is even shorter, at 22 kilometres.

Irrigation is sparse. No one pulls out the weeds anymore. Branches of the stunted olive trees sway between date palms — symbolic of Iraq — that struggle to grow.

“The construction was stopped,” said Nasser Al Khazali, a former member of the Karbala provincial council.

He blamed “lack of interest from the central government and local authorities”, saying: “The funding didn’t follow.”

According to him, only 9 billion dinars ($6 million) was spent on the northern axis, out of the originally planned 16 billion dinars.

It does little 

“Negligence” is how Hatif Sabhan Al Khazali explains the fate of the green belt project.

It’s a frequent refrain — along with “financial mismanagement” — on the lips of many Iraqis and was a driving factor behind near-nationwide protests against graft, crumbling public services and unemployment that shook the country in 2019.

Iraq has consistently been a low scorer on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking 157th out of 180 countries for perceived corruption levels in state institutions last year.

What was meant to be a buffer against frequent dust storms that envelop the country does little to lessen their impact.

Earlier in April, two such storms blanketed Iraq in less than one week, grounding flights and leaving dozens hospitalised due to respiratory problems.

According to the director of Iraq’s meteorological office, Amer Al Jabri, sand and dust storms are expected to become even more frequent.

He attributed this increase to “drought, desertification and declining rainfall”, as well as the absence of green spaces.

Iraq is particularly vulnerable to climate change, having already witnessed record low rainfall and high temperatures in recent years.

In November, the World Bank warned that Iraq could suffer a 20 per cent drop in water resources by 2050 due to climate change.

Water shortages have been exacerbated by the building of upstream dams in neighbouring Turkey and Iran.

‘Criminal gangs’ 

These water shortages and the attendant soil degradation have led to a drastic decline in arable land.

Iraq “loses around 100,000 dunams of agricultural land every year”, said Nadhir Al Ansari, a specialist in water resources at Sweden’s Lulea University of Technology.

“This land is then transformed into desert areas,” he said, warning that Iraq should “expect more dust storms” — which would have dire consequences on agriculture and public health.

Ansari blamed this on the Iraqi government and the “absence of water planning”.

During the country’s last dust storm, the agriculture ministry assured that it was working on “restoring vegetation cover” in Iraq.

Last year an official with the ministry of water resources referred to “several initiatives” to plant green belts but he said that “unfortunately these belts were not maintained”, the state INA news agency reported.

As an example the official cited Karbala, where Hatif Sabhan Al Khazali despairs at seeing the city’s green belt left to “criminal gangs and stray dogs”.