Region

BEIRUT — An Israeli air strike hit a shipment of Iranian weapons in the Syrian port of Latakia on Tuesday, in the first such attack on the key facility, a war monitor said.

The Israeli raid “directly targeted an Iranian weapons shipment in the container yard”, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Syrian state media reported the strike on the container yard at Latakia Port without specifying what was targeted.

The observatory, a UK-based organisation with a wide network of sources on the ground across Syria, said the raid triggered a series of explosions.

It reported “huge material losses” but added there were no immediate reports of casualties.

According to the Syrian state news agency SANA, the strike occurred at 1:23am (23:23 GMT Monday).

“Our air defences repelled the Israeli aggression in Latakia,” it said, adding that a number of containers caught fire in the strike.

Latakia is the northernmost of Syria’s main ports, and lies around 230 kilometres north of Damascus.

Photos and footage published by SANA showed a fire in the yard but state television said later that firefighters had brought the blaze under control.

Israel rarely comments on the air strikes it carries out in Syria but has said repeatedly it will not allow its archfoe Iran to extend its footprint in Syria.

Syria FM in Tehran 

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

On November 24, Israeli missile strikes in the west of Homs province killed five people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

In two separate Israeli attacks in October, five pro-Iranian militiamen were killed near the Syrian capital Damascus while nine pro-government fighters were killed near the T4 air base east of Palmyra in central Syria, the observatory said.

Iran has been a key supporter of the Syrian government in the decade-old conflict.

It finances, arms and commands a number of Syrian and foreign militia groups fighting alongside the regular armed forces, chief among them Lebanon’s powerful Hizbollah group.

Tuesday’s strike came as Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad wrapped up a visit to Tehran, where he met with top officials to discuss deepening ties.

In 2019, Syria announced it was planning to turn over the container terminal at Latakia Port to Iran.

Earlier this year, Iran said it was planning to establish a direct shipping line between Latakia and one of its southern ports.

The war in Syria is estimated to have killed nearly half a million people and displaced millions more since it began with a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests in 2011.

BAGHDAD — Art exhibitions, book fairs on the Tigris and Godot in Baghdad — after decades of conflict and strife, the Iraqi capital is experiencing an artistic renaissance.

“People need art, they want to develop their artistic taste — it’s an escape route,” said Noor Alaa Al Din, director of art space The Gallery.

“We are like any country, we have the right to art to entertain us.”

The Iraqi capital often makes grim headlines for violence and geopolitical rivalry.

But behind the conflict, tensions and recently the pandemic, a fledgling cultural renaissance has emerged in recent years, recalling a golden age when Baghdad was considered one of the Arab world’s cultural capitals.

Galleries have opened and festivals have blossomed, attracting crowds eager to make up for lost time.

The Gallery opened its doors barely a month ago, but visitors queue around the corner on opening night of any show.

In a recent show, Iraqi-Canadian artist Riyadh Ghenea paid tribute to his late mother with a series of brightly coloured abstract compositions.

She “suffered all the phases that Iraq has been through”, said the artist, who came back to Baghdad in 2011.

Upon his return, “I found neither my mother nor the country that I had left behind,” he said.

‘Alleviate stress’ 

Years of sectarian violence followed the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein.

The rise of the Daesh militant group in 2014 saw more brutality and bloodshed.

Amir, a 25-year-old pharmacist, acknowledges that his entire childhood was accompanied by conflict.

“Art allows us to alleviate the stress of our daily lives,” he told AFP from outside The Gallery.

Normality hangs by a thread in the Iraqi capital, where rocket and drone attacks sometimes target its highly fortified Green Zone, and where a July suicide attack on a market killed more than 30 people.

It was also the site of massive youth-led anti-government protests in 2019, and an ensuing bloody crackdown.

But on a balmy November afternoon, thousands of visitors gathered along the banks of the Tigris for the eighth edition of a book festival.

Organisers of the “I am an Iraqi, I read” event were distributing 30,000 books for free, from fiction to philosophy and foreign languages.

An old Arab adage goes that books are written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad.

A singer accompanied by traditional instruments performed local folk music as the fashionably dressed youth, couples with small children and senior citizens enjoyed the event.

‘Goosebumps and tears’ 

Individuals and foreign institutes have largely driven Baghdad’s cultural rebirth in the oil-rich country.

Last month however, the city hosted the second edition of an international theatre festival, organised by the culture ministry.

“The audience overflowed from the hall” in the opening days, said host venue director Ali Abbas.

“Iraqis used to be afraid to go out into the streets,” he said. “The situation has changed dramatically.”

Troupes hailing from Egypt, Tunisia, Germany and Italy performed for free, and Iraqis too had a chance to shine.

Among them was director Anas Abdel Samad, who staged a performance of his piece “Yes Godot”.

German actor Hanno Friedrich, on his first trip to Baghdad, was among the foreigners performing at the festival with his play “Tyll”, adapted from a novel mixing European folklore and the Thirty Years War religious conflict that was fought primarily in central Europe during the 17th century.

“They told us ‘don’t go, it’s dangerous’,” the 55-year-old said — but his experience shattered those stereotypes.

“People climbed on stage and hugged us. They told us they had never seen anything like that,” he said.

“We had goosebumps, and tears in our eyes.”

KHARTOUM — Sudanese police fired tear gas on Monday as thousands of protesters rallied against the military-dominated government near the presidential palace in Khartoum, witnesses told AFP.

Separately in the country's far-west, an official and medics said close to 50 people had been killed in a flareup of tribal violence.

The Khartoum demonstrators marched from various districts of the capital, many carrying national flags or chanting, "No to military rule" and, "The army might betray you, but the street will never betray you."

Protesters, in the latest of many rallies in recent weeks, set up road barricades with rocks and burning car tyres, the black smoke billowing into the sky.

Following an October 25 coup, previous protests were met by a violent crackdown that left 44 people killed up to November 22, a pro-democracy doctors' union said. Hundreds more were wounded, mostly by bullets.

Sudan's top general, Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, seized power and detained Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok but, after international condemnation and mass protests, reinstated him in a deal signed on November 21.

Critics lambasted the agreement and pro-democracy activists vowed to maintain pressure on the military-civilian authority.

"Mr Hamdok betrayed the roadmap" of the transition, said Mahmoud Abidine, demonstrating in the centre of Khartoum.

"What happened is a typical example of a military coup d'etat because it was followed by arrests, killings in the street, and against it are only young people asking for freedom, democracy and a civilian regime," he said.

Darfur dead 

The top general has long insisted the military's move was "not a coup" but a step "to rectify the transition" towards full democracy that started with the 2019 ouster of autocratic president Omar Al Bashir.

Burhan has pledged to lead Sudan to “free and transparent elections” in July 2023.

Hamdok, prime minister in the transitional government, has defended the deal, which he signed after his release from effective house arrest.

He has said he partnered with the military to “stop the bloodshed” that resulted from crackdowns on anti-coup street protests, and so as not to “squander the gains of the last two years”.

But the new transitional council named on November 21 excluded representatives of the main bloc that spearheaded anti-Bashir protests and had been demanding a transfer to full civilian rule.

Rawiya Hamed, another protester, said she joined Monday’s demonstration to “say again that we refuse the agreement between the military and Hamdok”.

The military and paramilitary leaders “don’t care about the country”, she said, a colourful covering on her head.

In West Darfur state, near Chad, at least 46 people died on Saturday and Sunday in violence that escalated after an argument, the state’s Governor Khamis Abdallah told AFP.

The Doctors’ Committee, an independent union, gave a figure of 48 people killed in the Krink area of Darfur by live ammunition.

That brings to around 100 the number of people killed over about three weeks in Sudan’s westernmost region, which has been ravaged by unrest for years.

Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, has also suffered runaway inflation and embarked on tough economic reforms, including slashing subsidies on petrol and diesel and launching a managed currency float.

Those measures came as part of efforts to secure global debt relief.

But the coup sparked international condemnation and punitive measures by Western governments and the World Bank, imperilling the country’s access to aid and investment.

Thirty per cent of Sudan’s population will need humanitarian aid next year, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned in a report Monday, saying the rate is “the highest in a decade”.

It blamed the situation on Khartoum’s economic crisis and the COVID pandemic, floods and disease and the fact Sudan also hosts millions of refugees and internally displaced people.

AL FAW, Iraq — On the banks of the Shatt Al Arab waterway, Iraqi fishermen live in constant fear of arrest by Iranian and Kuwaiti forces for mistakenly straying across frontiers with former enemy countries.

About 15 kilometres from where the mighty Tigris and the Euphrates rivers merge and flow out to the Gulf lies the fishing port of Al Faw.

The port town has been on the front line of two wars that have shaped Iraq’s modern history — in the 1980s against Iran and then after Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

On the opposite bank of the Shatt Al Arab, the green-white-red flag of Iran flutters in the wind, alongside portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic republic, and his successor as supreme guide, Ali Khamenei.

“We have a lot of problems with the Iranians,” said Abdallah, an Iraqi fisherman who preferred not to give his surname.

“If we cross the border because of the current, they arrest us.”

In the past, the border along the invisible median line of the Shatt Al Arab has been a casus belli.

In September 1980, Saddam’s forces invaded after scrapping the 1975 Algiers agreement that aimed to put an end to disputes over the borderline.

After the 2003 US-led invasion, Iraq and Iran said they wanted to return to the agreement, against the backdrop of growing Iranian influence in its Arab neighbour.

Arrests and fines 

Iraqi fishermen at Al Faw, such as Tareq Ziad, complain of “being harassed” by both Iran and Kuwait.

When their boats leave the Shatt Al Arab and head for the open seas of the Gulf, they often find themselves in Kuwaiti and Iranian waters because of the currents.

The Iranians “put you in prison and make you pay a fine of $3,000. That is what happened to my brother a few days ago. He was arrested by an Iranian river patrol and he paid $3,000”, Ziad said.

Iranian authorities, contacted by AFP, did not respond to a request for comment.

The head of the fishermen’s union in Al Faw, Badran Al Tamimi, said they have “no support from the [Iraqi] government”.

Kuwait also arrests Iraqi fishermen who “inadvertently” venture into the territorial waters of the emirate, he said.

“Yesterday evening, I went to the Kuwaiti border to bring back three fishermen who were arrested. This week, I have been there three or four times,” Tamimi said.

A Kuwaiti security official, on condition of anonymity, told AFP: “People seized in the border areas are handed over, in good health, by the ground forces, in coordination with the Iraqi side.”

Marine species in rivers 

The fishermen of Al Faw also have environmental challenges to grapple with.

“We go out to sea for eight to 10 days and when we return, we’ve caught between 500 kilogrammes and one tonne, compared to three or four tonnes 20 years ago,” complained fisherman Abdallah.

Fishing expeditions have become much shorter and the boundaries are closely monitored by Iraq’s neighbours.

In addition, the price of fuel has shot up.

As Iraqi rivers dry up due to drought and the construction of dams in Iran and Turkey, so too does the amount of seasonal fish that locals relied on for food.

And while the river waters ebb to ever lower levels, the Gulf rises.

“We are seeing more and more marine species in the river as the water becomes saline,” said Iyad Abdelmohsen, a marine biologist at Baghdad’s Al Mustansiriyah University.

And “human activities, such as sewage and waste” that end up in Iraq’s waterways are causing “digestive illnesses, diarrhoea and even cholera”, he said.

BAGHDAD — It was meant to compete with the Taj Mahal in grandeur, but former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s monumental Al Rahman Mosque project was never completed.

Instead, the half-finished edifice of grey concrete stands in the heart of Baghdad as testimony to the sectarian and political strife that has shaped much of Iraq’s modern history.

The aim was for the mosque, with a capacity for 15,000 worshippers, to be one of the largest in the Middle East.

Launched in the 1990s in the midst of a crippling Western embargo over Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, the construction of the mosque was designed to be a snub to Washington.

But the dictator’s dreams of grandeur — along with them his iron-fisted rule — would come crumbling down with the 2003 US-led invasion.

Today, a vast hole gapes at the sky from where an 84 metre-tall, gold-adorned ceramic dome was supposed to cover the central prayer hall.

Around it, eight secondary domes 28 metres high, each flanked by eight smaller domes, stand in a suspended state of near completion.

Several cranes are frozen in time above the edifice, which towers over the upscale Mansur district of the capital.

“Unfortunately, we’ve neglected the country’s heritage,” architect and university professor Mohamed Qassem Abdel Ghaffour told AFP.

“These projects belong to all Iraqis, we should make use of this heritage, and turn them into cultural and touristic sites,” he added.

“All of this is Iraq’s money and the state must profit from it.”

Although it was initially built as a Sunni mosque, it was taken over by Shiite clerics after the fall of Saddam.

Today, it is a symbol of division between Shiites, now the dominant political force in Baghdad after decades of marginalisation in the Shiite-majority Arab state.

“After the fall of the old regime, the mosque fell under the control of the Islamic Virtue Party,” a senior government official who asked to remain anonymous told AFP.

“The party was never able to complete construction, because the costs are huge.”

Weapons of the parties 

Saddam Hussein “wanted a mosque bigger than the Taj Mahal”, he recalled.

The Islamic Virtue Party has blocked government plans to turn the mosque into a university or museum, the official said.

Although the party’s takeover of the mosque remains unofficial, its members hold the main weekly prayers each Friday at noon under one of the secondary domes.

About 150 families have lived for years in makeshift homes that sprouted on vacant lots surrounding the mosque.

In January 2020, a court recognised the authority of the Shiite waqf — the institution that manages the community’s religious properties — over the mosque.

The verdict obliged the Islamic Virtue Party to pay $200 million in compensation, according to a statement from the waqf.

The waqf accuses the party of having occupied the site “for more than 16 years”, “without any legal or religious legitimacy”.

But the court ruling has not been enforced.

Activist Subeih Al Kachtini said that Iraqi security forces had tried several times to intervene.

“But faced with the weapons of the state, there are the weapons of the parties,” he said.

‘Architectural symbolism’ 

Development of land adjacent to the mosque to build a shopping centre or a housing complex could create up to 20,000 jobs, according to the waqf.

But “construction cannot resume until the mosque is removed from partisan conflicts”, Kachtini said, and the status quo remains.

For Caecilia Pieri, a researcher at the French Institute of the Near East, the mosque testifies to the “policy of architectural symbolism” of Saddam’s Baathist regime.

The late dictator’s approach could be summed up as: “I write Allah Akbar [God is Greatest] on the national flag and build mosques,” said Pieri, a specialist in the architecture of Baghdad in the 20th century.

Mazen Al Alussi, who headed the department in charge of conception and planning under Saddam, said the project was a “one of a kind” initiative.

The cost to complete the mosque need not be exorbitant, said Alussi. “It should be turned into a unified mosque where both Shiites and Sunnis can pray.”

KHARTOUM — Sudan’s top general Abdel Fattah Al Burhan said on Saturday there are “positive indicators” that measures taken against his country following an October military takeover could soon be lifted.

Burhan — Sudan’s de facto leader since the ouster of president Omar Al Bashir in April 2019 — removed the civilian government and declared a state of emergency on October 25, upending a three-year transition to civilian rule.

The power grab triggered a wave of international condemnation and several punitive measures, with the World Bank and the United States freezing aid, a blow to a country already mired in economic crisis.

The African Union has also suspended Sudan’s membership over what it termed the “unconstitutional” takeover.

The military’s move triggered mass anti-coup protests which were met by a crackdown that killed at least 44 people, according to an independent union of medics.

“The international community including the African Union is watching what will happen in the coming days,” Burhan told AFP in an interview.

“I believe there are positive indicators that things will return [to how they were] soon. The formation of a civilian government will put things back in order.”

Burhan’s interview with AFP was one of a series he gave to international media a day after UN chief Antonio Guterres, in a report to the Security Council, called Sudan hostile to journalists.

On November 21, Burhan signed a deal to reinstate Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok who was ousted in the coup and kept for weeks under house arrest.

The Burhan-Hamdok agreement was welcomed by the United Nations, the African Union, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It was also cautiously greeted by Britain and the United States.

But critics have lambasted it as “whitewashing” and accused Hamdok of “betrayal”, with pro-democracy activists vowing to maintain pressure on the military-civilian authority.

The top general has long insisted the military’s move on October 25 “was not a coup” but a step “to rectify the transition”.

Hamdok, prime minister in the transitional government since 2019, has defended the deal, which he signed after his release from effective house arrest.

He has said he partnered with the military to “stop the bloodshed” and to “not squander the gains of the last two years”.

Sudan was led by civilian-military ruling council under an August 2019 power-sharing deal that outlined a transition to civilian government after Bashir’s three decades of iron-fisted rule.

Planned elections 

Burhan has previously said he had no intention to run for president following the lapse of the transition.

On Saturday, he told AFP the August 2019 deal had “included a clear clause that all participants of the transitional period will not be allowed to take part of the period that directly follows it”.

But a landmark 2020 peace deal with rebel groups “granted some participants to the transitional period the right to become part of the government” that followed the transition, he said.

Burhan and Hamdok agreed to make amendments to the August 2019 power-sharing deal.

“There is work now on a new political charter as stated on November 21, to be agreed upon by political forces and to determine the rest of the transitional period until the elections are held,” Burhan said.

He said “all political forces” will be part of that deal apart from Bashir’s defunct National Congress Party.

Since the coup, Burhan has removed clauses referring to the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) — an umbrella group which spearheaded the protests against Bashir — from the 2019 power-sharing deal.

In November, Burhan formed a new Sovereign Council, the highest transitional authority, with himself as chief, and military figures and ex-rebel leaders keeping their posts.

He replaced FFC members with lesser-known civilian figures.

Hamdok has maintained that he has “full freedom” to choose members of his cabinet after the coup, provided that they are “independent” and “non-partisan”.

It was not clear yet whether ministers from ex-rebel groups, who signed the 2020 peace deal and were part of the deposed Cabinet, would be included.

“There is a discussion on whether to keep these rights as stated in the agreement or find any other solution,” Burhan said.

If they are to be excluded from the next Cabinet, “it has to be with their consent”.