Region


CAIRO — Newspaper sellers were once a dime a dozen on Cairo's bustling streets, but now the vendors hawking hot-off-the-press editions have fallen almost silent.

As elsewhere in the world, Egypt's print media has been in sharp decline as news has moved mostly online and readers tend to stay up-to-date via their smartphones.

In Egypt, a country of 103 million people, the trend has been especially stark since the government, which publishes most newspapers, has also raised their prices.

"No one buys newspapers anymore, especially since they got more expensive," said a vendor in her 50s known as Umm Mohammed, wearing a woollen shawl against the winter chill.

Critics also bemoan the homogeneity of the press in a country tightly ruled by army-marshall-turned-President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, where censorship and self-censorship are common.

The stacks of newspapers and magazines before Umm Mohammed have hardly shrunk all morning, she said, sitting at her kiosk in Cairo's western Dokki district.

Between 6 am and 3 pm, she said she had earned just 15 Egyptian pounds, or about $1.

The government three years ago raised prices of dailies from two to three pounds, and of weeklies from three to four pounds, citing costlier raw materials and dwindling subscriptions.

This dampened print circulation in the Arab world's largest country, where the average family income is around 6,000 EGP, or $380, per month.

Sales collapsed further last July when the government scrapped evening newspaper print editions.

"People used to come by to get the evening paper and then pick up a couple of other issues on the way," said Umm Mohammed. "Now we don't even have that."

"It's mobile phones everywhere. People passing my kiosk often ask: 'Oh, people are still selling these, even with everything online?'

"That really upsets me. This is our livelihood. What are we supposed to do?"

'Need to innovate' 

Microbus driver Tareq Mahmud, 44, stopping near the kiosk, said he hadn't bought a newspaper in 11 years.

"I stopped when I realised that the journalists I was reading in the paper every morning were the same ones I had watched on television" the previous evening, he told AFP.

"And I think there are many like me who stopped around then."

According to official statistics, Mahmud is right: Egypt in 2019 published 67 titles -- public, private or linked to political parties -- down from 142 in 2010.

Circulation roughly halved from more than one million copies to 539,000 over the decade.

Ahmad al-Taheri, editor-in-chief of the Rose al-Youssef weekly, a staple of Egyptian journalism for almost a century, said media need to innovate, including in their distribution.

"We need to find new outlets," he told AFP, suggesting new pandemic-era sales points: "Why not pharmacies?"

Media in 'sorry state' 

This is hardly a solution for Umm Mohamed, who after 18 years in the business is planning for her retirement.

In the absence of a trade union or other support system, she, like other vendors, recently signed up to a modest pension scheme with state-run publisher the Ahram Foundation.

But even this pension is not guaranteed.

Abdul Sadiq el-Shorbagy, head of the National Press Authority, told parliament in January that the state press is indebted, owing over $573 million in taxes and insurance payments.


Press outlets are bleeding cash as going online has yet to turn a profit for them, with most content offered for free and advertising revenue proving insufficient.

Imad Eddine Hussein, editor-in-chief of the private daily Al-Shorouk, bemoaned the "sorry state" of the press in Egypt.

All front pages tend to look almost identical, reporting on the same presidential speeches or ministerial announcements.

"It's all the same, across every newspaper, so readers are turning away from them," said Hussein. "If it continues like this, it's not just the state press that's going to disappear, private newspapers will too."

DUBAI — A Yemeni Houthi rebel strike on a military camp in the country's northwest killed nine Sudanese soldiers from a pro-government coalition on Wednesday, Yemeni defence ministry sources said.

"Nine members of the Sudanese forces were killed and 30 others wounded this morning by a Houthi missile," one of the sources told AFP.

The attack targeted a military camp in Midi, in Hajjah province near the border with Saudi Arabia, the source added, requesting anonymity.

Another defence ministry official and a local source confirmed the toll.

A reported Houthi attack on coalition sites in the same province in mid-December killed 14 Sudanese soldiers.

The Saudi-led military coalition has been supporting Yemen's internationally recognised government since 2015 in its battle against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

The Houthis control much of the country's north, including the capital Sanaa.

Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, has sent thousands of soldiers to fight in Yemen, which lies across the other side of the Red Sea.

The troops include men from the notorious Janjaweed militia, which is accused of atrocities in the conflict that erupted in 2003 in Sudan’s western Darfur region.

In late 2019, Sudan’s transitional government said the country had reduced its troop strength in Yemen from 15,000 to 5,000 men.

In early 2020, dozens of Sudanese protested in their capital Khartoum, alleging relatives had been recruited by a firm in the United Arab Emirates to be security guards, but they had in fact been sent to war zones in Libya and Yemen.

The UAE is also a member of the Saudi-led coalition.

The Yemen conflict, which began in 2014 after the Houthis seized Sanaa, has sparked what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — For three years, Umm Mohammed Iali has been longing to embrace her granddaughters stuck in Syria since her two sons died fighting for the Daesh group there.

Like thousands of other relatives of extremist fighters, the three Lebanese girls and their mother are being indefinitely held in the northeast Syrian camp of Al Hol.

Sitting in her grandchildren’s bedroom in her home in the city of Tripoli in northern Lebanon, tears stream down Umm Mohammed’s face.

“I have been telling myself they will come back today, they will come back tomorrow — every day for the past three years,” the 50-year-old said.

“I even prepared the bedrooms for their return,” she said, surrounded by heart-shaped pillows and star-speckled walls.

Her oldest granddaughter is 10 and the youngest, born in Syria, is only four.

The Ialis are among dozens of Lebanese families demanding Beirut repatriates their relatives stuck in overcrowded camps like Al Hol.

Al Hol shelters around 56,000 displaced people, including refugees from multiple nations, according to the United Nations. Most fled or surrendered during the dying days of Daesh s self-proclaimed “caliphate” in March 2019, and around half the camp residents are Iraqis.

Daesh in 2014 seized large swathes of Iraq and Syria, ruling its territory brutally until its defeat by local forces backed by a US-led coalition.

The Daesh terrorists continue to perpetrate violence in Al Hol, and the UN has repeatedly warned of deteriorating security conditions there.

Living in ‘misery’ 

Since the fall of Daesh, Syria’s Kurds — who run a semi-autonomous administration in northeast Syria — and the UN have urged foreign countries to repatriate their terrorist-linked nationals.

But this has only been done in dribs and drabs, as countries fear a backlash domestically, both in terms of the reaction of their citizens and the risk of future attacks on their soil.

Umm Mohammed’s Sunni majority hometown, Tripoli, has long been a hotbed for terrorist fighting against regime forces in Syria’s civil war. Hundreds of young Tripoli men have joined extremists and opposition groups there since the war began in 2011.

Their wives and children often followed them.

Mohammed Iali’s widow Alaa, 30, is one of those women. Her husband was killed in 2019 during the battle to take Daesh last bastion in Baghouz, Syria.

Despite the defeat of the “caliphate” that year, the extremists are believed to have recruited dozens of Lebanese men to join their ranks since last summer.

A security official has told AFP that “financial motives” are the main attraction for the youth of Tripoli, one of the poorest places in a country suffering a financial crisis that has left more than 80 per cent of the population living in poverty.

At least eight Tripoli men have been reported killed in Iraq since December.

After fleeing Baghouz, Alaa was moved to a high-security annex at Al Hol.

“All I want is for this woman and her girls to come back,” said Umm Mohammed, whose dream is to hold her granddaughters tightly.

“I live only for them.”

She told AFP that their tents in the camps fill with muddy rainwater every winter.

“They live in misery, deprived of everything.”

Since Alaa arrived in Al Hol her father, Khaled Androun, managed to meet with her and his granddaughters twice but could not secure their release.

His daughter later tried to flee with smugglers but a landmine exploded during her escape, leaving her wounded, he said.

Androun said the girls need access to education, medical attention and psychological help.

“What will become of the children?” he asked.

The case is in the hands of the General Security bureau, one of Lebanon’s top security agencies.

The agency’s head Abbas Ibrahim should “bring back our kids quickly”, Androun said.

In a statement to AFP, Ibrahim confirmed the case is under his agency’s purview, but a solution has yet to be reached.

“We are waiting for a political decision to solve this issue with the relevant authorities,” he said, referring to the Kurdish administration in northeast Syria that runs Al Hol camp.

‘Bring back the women’ 

Umm Mosaab, 35, managed to flee Al Hol in 2018 with her two teenage boys after paying a smuggler about $8,000. Her 17-year-old daughter, however, remains detained in Roj, another camp.

Umm Mosaab went to Syria in 2015 to join her husband in Raqqa, Daesh’s de-facto Syrian capital, but he was later killed in battle.

“I haven’t seen my daughter in five years,” she said.

Jailed for nine months after she returned to Lebanon, Umm Mosaab is part of a group of families lobbying Lebanese authorities to return their relatives held in Syria

“My daughter followed me there. How is that her fault?” she asked.

Tripoli resident Noor Al Huda Abbas, 59, said she begged officials to return her seven-year-old granddaughter along with her mother from Al Hol, but all she got was empty promises.

“Bring back the women and arrest any of them that might be suspects,” said Abbas, whose two sons died in Syria.

“I want my son’s daughter... we are not asking for the moon.”

Children born to jihadist parents “did not choose this life”, she said through tears. “But we can change their lives for the better.”

BAIDOA, Somalia — Under the blazing sun, Salado Adan Mohamed puts the finishing touches to her makeshift shelter, cobbled together from branches and fragments of discarded cloth.

She has just arrived in the south-western Somali city of Baidoa, the last refuge for people fleeing the worst drought in the country in a decade.

Along with her three children, the 26-year-old mother walked for five days “without eating” to make the 70 kilometre  trek from her village to Baidoa.

She settled in Muuri, one of 500 camps for displaced people in the city, where aqals — traditional dome-shaped huts — have been hastily built in recent weeks.

Desperate, hungry and thirsty, more and more people are flocking to Baidoa from rural areas of southern Somalia, one of the regions hardest hit by the drought that is engulfing the Horn of Africa.

According to the UN’s World Food Programme, nearly 13 million people, mostly farmers and herders, are going hungry in the region: 5.7 million in Ethiopia, 2.8 million in Kenya and 4.3 million in Somalia — a quarter of the country’s population.

In Somalia, the UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA said this month that the number of people who have left their homes in search of water, food and pasture has doubled to more than 554,000.

‘We have nothing left’ 

Mohamed says she and her husband saw their crops devoured by swarms of locusts that have ravaged many parts of East Africa in recent years.

Within just a few months, what little they had left was wiped out when the rains failed for a third straight time since the end of 2020.

“We had three camels which died during the drought season, 10 goats — we ate some, others died and the rest were sold — and all five cattle perished because of the lack of water and pasture,” she says.

“We have nothing left.”

With her husband and children, Mohammed started out from her home village for Baidoa, the last hope for many in the stricken region.

But her husband, who has tuberculosis, did not make it all the way. Too weak to continue, he turned back. She has not heard from him since.

The countryside around Baidoa is under the control of the Al Qaeda linked Al Shabaab Islamist group, which held the city itself for several years at the height of the insurgency before being driven out in early 2012 by Somali-led forces.

But the persistent insecurity means almost no aid can be sent out of the city.

Even in Muuri, Mohamed says she struggles to provide even one meal a day for her children.

“Sometimes we get something to eat, sometimes not... If there’s not enough, I sacrifice for my children,” she says, a weary look on her face.

Spectre of 2011 

Humanitarian organisations have been ringing alarm bells on the deteriorating situation in the Horn of Africa for weeks, with fears of a repeat of the 2011 famine in Somalia that cost the lives of 260,000 people.

Insufficient rainfall since late 2020 has come as a fatal blow to populations already suffering from locust invasions between 2019 and 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We had our usual reserves of sorghum, but we have eaten through them in the last three years. They are now finished,” says Ibrahim Mohamed Hassan, a blind 60-year-old who walked about 60 kilometres with his family to Garas Goof camp in Baidoa.

He says 30 of the 50 families in his home village have fled.

“The others will follow,” he predicts, adjusting his sunglasses which are held together with a rubber band.

Malnutrition and disease 

Over the past decade, Baidoa — which lies about 250 kilometres northeast of the capital Mogadishu — has become accustomed to large population influxes.

At least 60 per cent of its population — now estimated to be between 700,000 and 800,000 — are displaced and the number of informal settlements has exploded from 77 in 2016 to 572 now.

But at the medical centre in Tawkal 2 Dinsoor camp, the scale of the current influx is worrying.

“Before, we used to receive about 1,000 internally displaced people, or even less, per month. Today, we host about 2,000 to 3,000,” says the centre’s supervisor Hassan Ali Amin.

He says he has observed cases of malnutrition and diarrhoea among children, as well as measles and pneumonia among weakened adults.

“If the situation continues to worsen, we expect to receive thousands, hundreds of thousands of people,” adds Mohamednur Mohamed Abdirahman, field director of the British charity Save The Children in Baidoa.

‘Sad and skinny’ 

Abdulle Kalar Maaney says he does not want to imagine the worst-case scenario: A fourth season of poor rainfall.

He says he is “very hopeful” that the rains will return in March and that he will be able to return to his home village.

He arrived in Muuri with his wife and 10 children having lost his last precious possessions: His donkey and his cart.

He was counting on the beast to earn some money after they arrived in Baidoa, but the donkey died during the 90 kilometre journey to the city and he abandoned the cart.

“I never thought I would end up like this,” sighs the slender 48-year-old, clad in an oversized shirt.

“I was big and strong when I had my cattle,” he says. “I’ve become sad and skinny since the drought killed them all off.”

VIENNA — As the world faces up to the chaos unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, observers are assessing the inevitable impact of the conflict on the talks on Iran’s nuclear programme in Vienna.

The latest round of negotiations to salvage the 2015 deal on Iran’s nuclear deal started in late November and are widely expected to reach a crunch point in the coming days.

Officially, all states at the talks — Britain, China, France, Germany, Iran and Russia, with the US taking part indirectly — have tried to separate the talks from broader geopolitical tensions.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 did not prevent the original accord from being reached a year later.

The deal, known as the JCPOA, secured sanctions relief for Iran in return for strict curbs on its nuclear programme to prevent it acquiring an atomic weapon, something Iran has always denied wanting to do.

The other parties to the latest talks have presented a relatively united front towards Tehran. The question is whether that can survive the huge geopolitical shocks emanating from the Ukraine conflict.

“Of course the international community sees Iran as an ally of Russia in this crisis,” said Iranian international relations expert Fayaz Zahed.

The war “is undermining understanding” between the countries involved and that the “situation is very fragile”, he added.

Another effect on the talks could come through oil prices, which have soared to their highest level in seven years in response to the conflict and the barrage of Western sanctions against Moscow.

“Soaring oil prices will put intense pressure on Western governments, particularly the US, to deliver an agreement quickly,” said analyst Henry Rome from the Eurasia Group.

The JCPOA began to disintegrate in 2018 when the then US president Donald Trump withdrew from the deal and reimposed sanctions on Tehran.

If those sanctions are once again lifted, Iran’s considerable oil reserves will return to the global market, easing the fuel price rises which are preoccupying the White House.

On the other hand, Rome says the current situation will “lessen Tehran’s sense of urgency”, as it is benefitting from higher prices from oil sales to China.

Iran then is in no hurry in this crucial phase of the talks, insisting on certain “red lines” concerning how many sanctions would be lifted — and on guarantees against a repeat of Trump’s actions.

“US has already ‘walked away’ from JCPOA,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh tweeted on Monday. “We must make sure it won’t happen again.”

Another key point of contention is Iran’s demand that the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), close its investigation into past nuclear activity at several undeclared sites.

The IAEA’s Director General Rafael Grossi has said several times that Iran’s explanations on the sites have not been satisfactory.

Iran is “playing with fire”, the head of the French delegation Philippe Errera tweeted on Sunday. “You have to know when you’re going too far,” he warned.

The Western states have repeatedly stressed the urgency of wrapping up the talks since they restarted in November. On Monday, France’s foreign ministry once again said it was “critical” to close a deal this week.

US State Department Spokesman Ned Price has warned that Washington is “prepared to walk away if Iran displays intransigence to making progress”.

In that case the US has made reference to a “Plan B” it would put into effect to prevent Iran gaining nuclear weapons capability.

While the history of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme is littered with missed deadlines, Barbara Slavin of the Atlantic Council believes a deal is still within reach — and sooner rather than later.

Given Western moves to isolate Russia from the world economy, she says, Iran “needs to reduce its dependence on what has now become a pariah state and restore at least some economic ties to Europe”.