Region

BEIRUT — Lebanon's electricity grid was back online on  Sunday after the army supplied fuel to two key power stations that had run out, a minister said, ending almost a day of total blackout.

The Deir Ammar and Zahrani plants ground to a halt on Saturday, causing the state electricity network to collapse completely for the second time this month.

The Mediterranean country is battling economic turmoil, and the cash-strapped state has in recent months struggled to import enough fuel oil for electricity production.

Most Lebanese saw no major change to their daily lives on Saturday, as the state has been barely providing one to two hours of power a day for months.

Energy Minister Walid Fayad said on Sunday that the grid was back up and running.

“The network is back to normal, as it was before the gasoil ran out at Deir Ammar and Zahrani,” he said in a statement, implying production would revert to the previous few hours a day.

He thanked the army for handing over 6,000 kilolitres of gasoil, half of which he said went to each power station.

The state electricity company had said Saturday that a shipment of fuel oil was expected to arrive that evening, and be offloaded at the start of next week.

Lebanon has witnessed rolling power cuts across the country since the end of its 1975-1990 civil war, but the economic crisis has made matters drastically worse.

Lebanese who can afford it subscribe to private generators to keep appliances on, but even their owners have started to ration power supplies due to the scarcity of fuel.

The international community has long demanded a complete overhaul of Lebanon’s loss-making electricity sector, which has cost the government more than $40 billion since the early 1990s.

ADEN — Six people were killed on Sunday in a car-bomb attack targeting the governor of Aden, the seat of Yemen's internationally recognised government, security sources said.

Aden, in southern Yemen, is home to a separatist movement that last year precariously integrated into the central government, and both have long been aligned against Iran-aligned Houthi rebels in a grinding civil war.

Aden Governor Ahmed Lamlas and Salem Al Socotri, a government minister, both survived the blast which went off as their convoy passed, the sources said.

"A car bomb... on Al Mualla Street exploded while the convoy of officials... was passing," a Yemeni security source told AFP, adding that the victims were in the convoy.

The source said five members of the entourage were killed and 11 others, of whom three were civilians, were wounded in the attack. One person later succumbed to his injuries, bringing the death toll to six.

The central government relocated to Aden from the capital Sanaa in 2014, forced out by the Iran-backed Houthis, who are fighting Saudi-backed Yemeni government loyalists. The Saudi-led military coalition intervened in Yemen's war in 2015.

Prime Minister Maeen Abdulmalek Saeed has called for an investigation into Sunday's "terrorist and cowardly" attack, the official Saba news agency reported.

President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi called the attack a "terrorist operation", Saba news agency reported.

It added that Hadi ordered all security and military agencies to "take the necessary measures to ensure security and stability".

Southern separatists 

Beyond the conflict with the Houthis, southern Yemen has separately been beset by periodic tensions between the central government and southern separatists in recent years, including sporadic armed clashes.

In December 2020, officials from the Southern Transitional Council (STC) were integrated into the Cabinet in an uneasy power-sharing agreement.

Lamlas and Socotri are both STC personnel.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for Sunday's blast, which is the deadliest since December 2020 when an attack ripped through Aden's airport targeting cabinet members.

At least 26 people, including three members of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were killed and scores were wounded when explosions rocked the airport as ministers disembarked from an aircraft.

All Cabinet members were reported to be unharmed, in what some ministers charged was an attack by the Houthis.

The STC has sought to restore the independence of South Yemen, a then country which was integrated into the north in 1990.

The central government and the separatists are, despite their own differences, aligned against the Houthis.

The Houthis have lately intensified a campaign to take Marib city, capital of an oil-rich province of the same name and government loyalists' final toehold in northern Yemen.

Some fear that the Houthis will then turn their attention to expanding in southern Yemen.

STC spokesman Ali Al Kathiri in a statement on Sunday called the Houthis' offensive in Marib a "dangerous" scheme that could be a springboard to targeting the south.

Yemen is also home to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which launches periodic attacks against both fighters aligned with the country's authorities and the insurgents.

Tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, have been killed and millions displaced in Yemen's conflict, dubbed the world's worst humanitarian disaster by the United Nations.

WASHINGTON — US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will meet next week with top diplomats from Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the State Department said Saturday, to discuss "progress made" in the year since they agreed to establish ties.

"Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will meet with Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and the UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan on October 13 in separate bilateral meetings and then in a trilateral setting," the State Department said in a statement.

"They will discuss progress made since the signing of the Abraham Accords last year, future opportunities for collaboration, and bilateral issues including regional security and stability."

Blinken had met virtually in mid-September with Lapid and top Emirati foreign policy adviser Anwar Gargash, as well as top diplomats from Bahrain and Morocco.

The meeting amounted to a full embrace by President Joe Biden of the so-called Abraham Accords, which his predecessor Donald Trump considered a key foreign policy legacy.

"This administration will continue to build on the successful efforts of the last administration to keep normalisation marching forward," Blinken said at the time.

He said that diplomatic ties has benefitted the people of the region and helps to address broader challenges including terrorism and climate change.

Lapid — like Blinken, representing a new administration after the accord forged by a right-wing government — said he would pay a first visit to Bahrain later in September. He had already visited the other two Arab states.

“This Abraham Accords club is open for new members,” Lapid said.

The United Arab Emirates last year became the first Arab state to normalise relations with Israel since Egypt and Jordan decades earlier, with Bahrain and Morocco following suit soon afterward.

The United Arab Emirates agreed to normalisation after Israel’s then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu backed away from the prospect, blessed by Trump, of annexing vast swaths of the West Bank.

BEIRUT — Lebanon was plunged into a total blackout on Saturday after two main power stations went offline because they ran out of fuel, the state electricity corporation said.

The Mediterranean country is battling one of the planet's worst economic crises since the 1850s, and has in recent months struggled to import enough fuel oil for its power plants.

State electricity in most places is barely available for an hour a day amid rolling power cuts, while the fuel needed to power private back-up generators is also in short supply.

"After the Deir Ammar power station was forced to stop producing power yesterday morning [Friday] due its gasoil reserves running out, the Zahrani plant also stopped this afternoon for the same reason," Electricite du Liban (EDL) said in a statement.

This led to the network's "complete collapse without any possibility of restoring it for the time being", it said.

It was the second such complete outage reported by EDL since the start of the month, after a similar incident last Saturday.

A source at the energy ministry told AFP that all was being done "to find a way out of the problem".

EDL said that a fuel oil shipment was expected to arrive on Saturday evening, and was expected to unload at the beginning

of next week.

Restoring electricity is one of the many tough tasks facing Lebanon's new government, formed last month after 13 months of political wrangling.

Several measures have been launched in a desperate bid to keep the lights on.

Lebanon has reached an agreement towards bringing Jordanian electricity and Egyptian gas into the country via war-torn Syria, while Shiite movement Hizbollah has separately started hydrocarbon deliveries from Iran.

The state is also bringing in some fuel oil for power stations in exchange for medical services under a swap deal with Iraq.

The international community has long demanded a complete overhaul of Lebanon's loss-making electricity sector, which has cost the government more than $40 billion since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war.

TRIPOLI — After escaping, with hundreds of others, from an overcrowded Libyan detention centre where guards shot dead six migrants, Sudanese refugee Halima Mokhtar Bshara says she just wants to leave the country.

“They attacked us, humiliated us, many of us were wounded,” said the 27-year-old from Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region.

“We’re at the end of our tether.”

The Al Mabani facility in the capital Tripoli was at triple its capacity following police raids against migrants last week, when guards shot six people dead on Friday.

The shooting was “related to overcrowding and the terrible, very tense situation,” the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said.

Some 2,000 migrants and refugees escaped in the chaos, including Bshara and her three children.

She was among hundreds taking part in a sit-in in front of the office of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) in Tripoli on Saturday.

Dozens of destitute migrants and refugees, including young children, have been sleeping rough in front of the building for days, in the hope of receiving assistance.

“We’re extremely tired. But we have nowhere to go, we are even being chased off the pavement,” Bshara told AFP tearfully.

“For our security, we ask to be evacuated,” one banner at the site says.

“Libya is not a safe country for refugees,” reads another.

‘We have nothing’ 

In chaos since its 2011 revolution, Libya has long been a favoured departure point for migrants — many from sub-Saharan Africa — fleeing violence and poverty in their own countries and hoping to reach Europe.

Hundreds die each year trying to make the dangerous Mediterranean crossing in rickety, overcrowded boats, while NGOs say those waiting to leave are often subject to violence and abuse.

Late last week, Libyan authorities raided multiple houses and makeshift shelters in a poor suburb of Tripoli, in what it said was an anti-drug operation.

The UN said the raids, mostly targeting irregular migrants, left at least one person dead, 15 wounded and more than 5,000 detained.

Doctors without Borders decried “violent mass arrests”.

“There were 39 of us living in the same building” before the raids, Bshara said.

At first, she said she and her family evaded authorities by hiding in a well, but they were eventually found and placed in the Al Mabani detention centre.

There were so many people there that it was impossible to sleep, said Ismail Derrab, another of those who escaped the facility on Friday.

“We have nothing. We would like to get out of this country,” said the young Sudanese man.

‘Not a safe country’ 

Official migrant detention centres in Libya are riddled with corruption and violence, including sexual assault, according to the United Nations and human rights groups.

The UNHCR had said before Friday’s shooting deaths that it was “increasingly alarmed about the humanitarian situation for asylum seekers and refugees in Libya”.

It temporarily suspended its activities at its Tripoli office this week, citing mounting tensions.

“We renew our appeal to the Libyan authorities to allow the resumption of humanitarian flights out of the country, which have been suspended for almost a year,” it said in the earlier statement.

Waffagh Driss, another Sudanese migrant, said that Libyan authorities had targeted migrants “according to the colour of their skin”.

“The situation in Tripoli for black people is terrible,” the 31-year-old said.

“We are exposed to every kind of danger. Our life is at risk.”

“I am asking to leave Libya because it is not a safe country.”

TEHRAN — Iran’s first president after the 1979 Islamic revolution, Abolhassan Banisadr, died in a Paris hospital on Saturday aged 88, after decades of exile in France following his dismissal by parliament.

“After a long illness, Abolhassan Banisadr died on Saturday at the [Pitie-]Salpetriere hospital in southeast Paris,” official IRNA news agency said, citing a source close to the former president.

His family in France confirmed his death.

“We would like to inform the honourable people of Iran and all the activists of independence and freedom that... Abolhassan Banisadr has passed away... after a long struggle with illness,” they said in a statement.

The family statement hailed Banisadr as someone who “defended freedoms”.

But he was slammed by Iran’s judiciary.

“All these years, under the shadow of French and Western intelligence, he did not miss a beat to defame the people and the system of the Islamic republic,” said a statement published on its Mizan Online website.

Banisadr won Iran’s first free election in 1980 to become president hot on the heels of the previous year’s Islamic revolution.

But he was dismissed by the Iranian parliament in 1981 as his relations with late supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini deteriorated. Since then, he had been living in exile in France.

‘Khomeini’s spiritual son’ 

Born on March 22, 1933 in a village near Hamadan in western Iran, Banisadr was a supporter of liberal Islam.

A practising Muslim, at the age of 17 he became active in the ranks of the National Front of Iran, the movement of nationalist leader Mohammad Mossadegh.

After studying theology, economics and sociology, Banisadr became a staunch opponent of the shah’s regime.

Wanted by the police, he was forced to flee Iran in 1963 and settled in Paris. In 1970, he advocated the union of the Iranian opposition around Khomeini, who was exiled in Iraq at the time.

In October 1978, Khomeini went to France, and Banisadr became part of his inner circle, referring to him as “dear father”.

Banisadr would later express regret that he had not recognised Khomeini’s “taste for power”.

On February 1, 1979, Banisadr was on the plane that brought Khomeini back to Iran.

He served as Iran’s minister of economics and, for a few days, foreign affairs.

The man at times referred to as “Khomeini’s spiritual son” was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran on January 26, 1980.

From exile and back 

From the start of his mandate, Banisadr faced immense difficulties: The US hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq war, economic woes and, above all, the opposition of powerful clerics.

In charge of the armed forces as president from February 1980 to June 1981, he reorganised Iran’s military and spent much of his time on the front lines of the start of the eight-year war with Iraq.

But the proponent of a “third Islamic path” that respected democratic principles, he faced intense pressure from ultraconservative clerics.

After over a year of disputes with some senior members of the Shiite clergy and the Islamic Republic Party that controlled parliament, the democratisation process came to a halt.

On June 21, 1981, Banisadr was dismissed by parliament for “political incompetence”, with Khomeini’s approval.

After hiding for a week, he was smuggled onto an air force jetliner hijacked by one of his supporters, and escaped to France, where he was granted asylum and provided with police protection.

Once in exile, Banisadr founded the National Council of Resistance of Iran with Massoud Rajavi, leader of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran and representatives from minority communities such as Iranian Kurds.

Banisadr fell out with Rajavi, however, and later left the council.

He wrote a book that accused Iran’s ayatollahs of plotting to seize power, and testified about the murders of Iranian dissidents that he blamed on the mullahs.

He had been living in Versailles since May 1984.

For many Iranians born after the 1979 revolution, Banisadr was an unknown.

“He was president for a very short time, then he left for France,” said a 40-year-old worker in Tehran, who declined to be identified. “His activity had no resonance here.”

“I don’t know him,” said Ali, a 40-year-old salesman. “Recognition occurs when that person is here and working.”