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BEIRUT — The United Nations said on Sunday that minors were still being detained in a northeast Syria prison attacked last month by the Daesh terror group, calling their conditions "precarious".

International rights groups, including Save the Children and Human Rights Watch have previously said that 700 boys had been in the Ghwayran jail before the January 20 operation.

Aged between 12 and 18, they include many who had adult relatives inside the prison and were transferred from nearby displacement camps housing thousands of children of jihadist fighters.

"UNICEF met with some of the children still detained in the Ghwayran detention centre," the UN's child agency said in a statement.

"Despite some of the basic services now in place, the situation of these children is incredibly precarious," it added, without specifying how many minors were still detained.

Farhad Shami of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces told AFP that "hundreds" of minors were still being held in Ghwayran, refusing to disclose an exact figure.

"They are being kept in a safe place," he said

The Daesh prison break attempt from the Ghwayran jail in Hasakeh city triggered a week of clashes inside and around the Kurdish-run facility, leaving hundreds dead, before Kurdish-led forces recaptured the jail.

It was the largest operation in Syria since the group's territorial defeat in 2019.

Jail visit 

UNICEF said it was working to immediately provide care for the minors and confirmed that it "is ready to help support a new safe place in the northeast of Syria to take care of the most vulnerable children".

On Sunday, the SDF said in a statement that UNICEF was the first UN agency granted permission to visit the jail since the attack.

"The delegation was provided with information on the status of the Deash-linked teenagers," the SDF added, using an Arabic acronym for Daesh.

Video footage of the visit posted on social media networks showed around a dozen boys, many covered in blankets, in a prison cell.

Kurdish authorities have repeatedly blamed the international community for failing to support efforts to rehabilitate and repatriate extremist children.

Ghwayran housed at least 3,500 Daesh suspects before last month’s attack.

Kurdish authorities maintain that no prisoners escaped but the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday said that hundreds of extremists had gotten away.

“Some of them have crossed to Turkey,” the war monitor said.

“Others have arrived in areas held by Turkey-backed rebels in Aleppo’s countryside, while some remained in hiding in zones controlled by the semi-autonomous Kurdish administration,” inside Syria, it added.

The observatory, which relies on sources inside Syria, said the escapees include two senior leaders who are now residing in the Turkish-held Syrian town of Jarablus near the Turkish border.

On Thursday, Daesh leader Abu Ibrahim al-Qurashi died during a US raid in the town of Atme in the north-western region of Idlib, Syria’s last major opposition bastion.

IGHRANE, Morocco — Morocco was in shock Sunday after emergency crews found a five-year-old boy dead at the bottom of a well in a tragic end to a five-day rescue operation that gripped the nation and the world.

The ordeal of "little Rayan" since he fell down the 32-metre well on Tuesday gained global attention and sparked an outpouring of sympathy online, with the Arabic Twitter hashtag #SaveRayan trending.

"The fall of a child who reminded the whole world of the values of humanity," read one Moroccan newspaper headline, while others bemoaned the "tragic epilogue" that had brought "sadness and shock".

The boy's father said he had been repairing the well when the boy fell in, close to the family home in the village of Ighrane in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco.

"Little angel, you fought until the end, a hero", said one Twitter user called Anouar, while another said "he has brought people together around him".

Throughout the major digging operation to extricate him from the bottom of the well shaft, authorities had cautioned that they did not know whether he was alive.

The shaft, just 45 centimetres across, was too narrow for the boy to be reached directly, and widening it was deemed too risky, so earth-movers dug a wide slope into the hill to reach him from the side.

The operation made the landscape resemble a construction site, and red-helmeted civil defence personnel had at times been suspended by rope, as if on a cliff face.

From hope to sorrow 

Rescue crews, using bulldozers and front-end loaders, had excavated the surrounding red earth down to the level where the boy was trapped, and drill teams began creating a horizontal tunnel to reach him from the side.

On Saturday morning, the head of the rescue efforts, Abdelhadi Tamrani, said images from a camera sent down showed the child "lying on his side", and that while it was "impossible" to confirm he was alive there were "very high hopes".

But progress slowed to a snail’s pace as the drill teams worked by hand to avoid any vibrations that might bring the brittle soil down on the stricken child, local authorities said.

Late Saturday evening, crowds cheered when the rescue workers broke through the final stretch of earth to reach the boy.

Volunteer digger Ali Sahraoui cleared the last soil away with his hands, becoming a “hero” on social media.

But soon after, AFP correspondents saw the boy’s parents walk down the slope into the horizontal tunnel, visibly crushed, before returning and boarding an ambulance without saying a word.

Race against time 

It was Morocco’s royal cabinet that announced he had been found dead.

“Following the tragic accident which cost the life of the child Rayan Oram, His Majesty King Mohammed VI called the parents of the boy who died after falling down the well,” a statement from the royal court said.

The date of the funeral has not been announced but according to Muslim tradition the funeral should take place swiftly, potentially as early as Sunday.

No official information has been released on a possible autopsy.

Huge crowds of thousands of people had gathered to watch the rescue beside the giant pit, singing songs to urge on the diggers, who worked through the nights.

Many of the watchers prayed, chanting in unison “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest).

Workers had tried to get oxygen and water down to the child but it was not clear whether he was able to use them, AFP correspondents reported.

The race against time to rescue Rayan was followed live across the world, and as soon as the tragic conclusion was announced, tributes poured in.

French President Emmanuel Macron said: “I want to say to the family of little Rayan and to the Moroccan people that we share your pain.”

“Rayan’s courage will stay in our memories and continue to inspire us,” wrote AC Milan’s Algerian midfielder Ismael Bennacer in a tweet, accompanied by a drawing of a child being lifted into the sky, carried by a heart-shaped balloon marked with the colours of Morocco.

“We all of us had been holding out hope that little Rayan would make it,” Moroccan-American novelist Laila Lalami wrote on Twitter. “This is all so tragic.”

KHARTOUM — Thousands of supporters of Sudan's army rallied Saturday in front of the UN mission in Khartoum, in a new show of force after months of protests against an October military coup.

Competing processions marched in Khartoum, according to AFP journalists — a sign of the deep divisions that have taken root in the country, which is among the poorest in the world.

Army supporters, some of them riding camels, chanted slogans denouncing "foreign interference" and paying tribute to the military.

People danced and an organiser rallied the crowd from a podium, declaring a "mandate" for General Abdul Fattah Al-Burhan to lead the country throughout its transitional period.

One placard read "no to UN interference", while another showed the face of its Sudan envoy Volker Perthes crossed out in red.

Demonstrators attacked several journalists, AFP correspondents said — a recurrent event during pro-military rallies.

Earlier in the day, hundreds of army backers had boarded a train in Atbara, 250 kilometres north of the capital, to join the procession.

Dozens of anti-army protesters tried in vain to prevent them from boarding, demanding that the "military return to the barracks" and shouting "power to the people", Abu Obeida Ahmed, a resident of Atbara, told AFP.

In Omdurman, across the River Nile from the capital Khartoum, hundreds of women demonstrated to denounce a security crackdown on anti-coup demonstrators that has killed at least 79 people and wounded hundreds, according to a pro-democracy doctors' group.

The latest protests come as the UN has launched talks to help Sudan resolve the political crisis that was triggered by the October 25 coup, led by Burhan.

Last month, UN envoy Perthes said the consultations aimed "to support the Sudanese to reach an agreement on a way out of the current crisis". 

But he added that "the UN is not coming up with any project, draft or vision for a solution".

The coup, one of several in Sudan's post-independence history, derailed a fragile power-sharing arrangement between the army and civilians that had been painstakingly negotiated after the 2019 ouster of longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir.

Army supporters are seeking to cement the post-coup status, while opponents have refused any partnership with the military. Both camps reject the UN push for talks. 

The military has been in power in Sudan for most of the 66 years since its independence from colonial rule, but since the October coup, civil society organisations have declared that “neither partnership, nor negotiation” with the army are possible.

Last week, pro-military protesters also rallied outside the UN offices in Khartoum, holding banners that read “Down, down UN”.

ADDIS ABABA — Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh on Saturday urged the African Union (AU) to withdraw Israel's accreditation, bringing simmering tensions to a head as the 55-member bloc opened a two-day summit in Addis Ababa.

Even as the continent reels from a spate of military coups and the coronavirus pandemic, the relationship with Israel is expected to figure prominently during the summit this weekend.

The dispute was set in motion last July when Moussa Faki Mahamat, chair of the African Union Commission, accepted Israel's accreditation to the bloc, triggering a rare dispute within a body that values consensus.

As heads of state gathered in Ethiopia's capital on Saturday, Shtayyeh called on the body to reject Faki's move.

"Israel should never be rewarded for its violation and for the apartheid regime it does impose on the Palestinian people," he said.

"Your excellencies, I'm sorry to report to you that the situation of the Palestinian people has only grown more precarious."

The summit may see a vote on whether to back or reject Faki's decision, which could yield an unprecedented split in the bloc.

Israel's accreditation last year drew quick protest from powerful members, including South Africa and Algeria which argued that it flew in the face of AU statements supporting the Palestinian Territories. 

Earlier Saturday Faki said the AU's commitment to the Palestinian push for independence was "unchanging and can only continue to go stronger".

He defended Israel's accreditation, however, saying it could be "an instrument in the service of peace" while calling for "a serene debate" on the issue.

War in Ethiopia 

This year's summit comes as the AU faces mounting pressure to push for a ceasefire in host country Ethiopia, where a 15-month war has killed thousands of people and, the UN says, driven hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation. 

The conflict pits Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government against fighters from the northern Tigray region.

It has precipitated a rapid deterioration in ties between Abiy, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Western powers who once saw him as a reformer but have condemned alleged massacres and mass rape committed during the conflict by Ethiopian and allied forces.

The fact that Ethiopia hosts the AU has made any intervention by the bloc especially delicate, and Faki waited until last August — nine months after fighting began — to appoint Nigeria’s former president Olusegun Obasanjo as a special envoy tasked with trying to broker a ceasefire. 

On Saturday, Abiy praised his fellow African leaders for what he described as their “support”. 

“Ethiopia’s challenge was internal in nature and a matter of maintaining law and order. But the solution of our internal matters was made exceedingly difficult by the role played by external actors,” Abiy said.

“I wish to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support, solidarity and understanding as we underwent these trying times.” 

Abiy also proposed the creation of “an African Union continental media house”, renewing his criticism of international media coverage of Ethiopia and the continent at large.

“Negative media representation of Africa not only disinforms the rest of the world about our continent, but also shapes the way we see ourselves as Africans,” he said. 

Coup ‘resurgence’ 

African leaders are also preoccupied with a recent string of military coups.

Four member states have been suspended by the AU’s Peace and Security Council since mid-2021 because of unconstitutional changes of government — most recently Burkina Faso, where soldiers ousted President Roch Marc Christian Kabore last month. 

Addressing African foreign ministers this week, Faki denounced a “worrying resurgence” of such putsches. 

But the AU has been accused of an inconsistent response, notably by not suspending Chad after a military council took over following the death of longtime President Idriss Deby Itno on the battlefield last April.

Attendees will also discuss the coronavirus pandemic, with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is participating in the summit virtually, expected to provide an update on Africa’s response to COVID-19, nearly two years after the continent’s first case was detected in Egypt. 

As of January 26, only 11 per cent of Africa’s more than one billion people had been fully vaccinated, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

UNITED NATIONS, United States — Providing mercenaries in Libya’s internal conflict has become the main source of revenue for armed groups from Sudan’s own war-torn Darfur region, the United Nations said in a report on Friday.

The report, drawn up by UN experts in charge of monitoring the arms embargo imposed on Sudan, said the guns-for-hire deals had been facilitated by the United Arab Emirates.

It said the activity meant that the arms embargo had been broken “with the transfer of arms and other military materiel into Darfur”.

“Mercenary activities in Libya had been the major source of financing for most Darfurian movements” in 2021, the report said.

It noted that thousands of Sudanese mercenaries are in Libya in the service of the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army controlled by Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

These mercenaries come from signatory and non-signatory movements of the Juba Peace Agreement, concluded in October 2020, the experts said, adding that they are not able to quantify the total number.

“Most Darfurian armed groups continued to work for the Libyan National Army in Libya during the reporting period, securing areas and manning checkpoints. In return for these tasks, the five main movements [SLA/MM, GSLF, SLA/TC, SLA/AW and SRAC] were receiving payments and logistical support,” the UN experts said.

The report noted that “several sources in the movements said that the money and support were discussed and agreed upon in meetings between their military commanders and United Arab Emirates representatives in Libya”.

“The payments were provided by the United Arab Emirates and channelled to the movements by the Libyan National Army, which took a cut,” the report added.

The UN experts said that when confronted last November with allegations about providing “financial and military support to Darfurian forces [both in the Sudan and in Libya], the United Arab Emirates referred to its country’s moderate position and struggle against extremism and hate speech”.

The report also said the Sudanese government had participated in the activities of the so-called “5+5” Joint Military Commission, which brings together representatives from eastern and western Libya to guarantee the ceasefire and the withdrawal of foreign fighters and troops from that country.

The UN experts said several “small groups” of Sudanese mercenaries operating in Libya had shown willingness to engage in peace talks and return to Sudan.

Darfur is a vast region in western Sudan regularly shaken by clashes linked, among other things, to territorial disputes or difficulties in accessing water.

The region has experienced a long war that has, since 2003, left at least 300,000 dead and 2.5 million people displaced, according to the UN.