Region

SOCOTRA, Yemen — Only goats seeking shade now use the long-abandoned lines of Soviet-era T-34 tanks, but the rusting relics point to the strategic value that Yemen's Socotra islands hold for foreign powers.

The archipelago's remote location helped it forge its astonishing nature millennia ago , a third of the main island's plants are unique, from bulbous bottle and cucumber trees to alien aloes.

But the 130-kilometre long island, the biggest in the Middle East region, also oversees busy global shipping lanes at the crossroads between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

With mainland Yemen wracked by civil war, Socotra is under the rule of the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC), part of a UN-recognised unity government, but who want an independent South Yemen.

It bankrolls salaries and major infrastructure projects, ranging from schools and hospitals to communication systems and docks.

It is not only oil tankers that must pass Socotra from the Gulf to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

The island also lies on seaways from Pakistan's Gwadar port, a stepping stone on China's trillion-dollar Belt and Road infrastructure initiative giving Beijing access to the Arabian Sea, to Djibouti and into east Africa.

Sea routes are key for shipping hub Dubai, one of the UAE's emirates, where the logistics industry makes up more than 14 per cent of GDP, according to official statistics.

And, while nearly three-quarters of the island has environmental protection, there are vast white beaches unscrupulous tourist developers would die for.

For centuries, Socotra was known by traders as a source of frankincense, some islanders suggest its name comes from the Arabic for "market of resin", but the island was cut off during monsoon months by rough seas.

It was an isolation that gave rise to legends. In the thirteenth century, Italian traveller Marco Polo described Socotra as a feared pirate base, and its inhabitants as "the best enchanters in the world".

Last century it was first a British colonial outpost, then a Soviet base.

But for decades, few others visited.

When British historian Tim Mackintosh-Smith visited in the 1990s, sailing from the mainland on a two-day journey, “not a lot had really changed for eons”, he said.

He recorded the Socotri language, with its roots in ancient south Arabia.

While Socotra is some 350 kilometres south of Yemen’s coast, it lies closer to Africa; it is just 230 kilometres from Somalia.

Socotra’s ancient culture, blending Arabia with Africa and India, evolved with the unique environment.

“It was an ark of a very ancient human existence from the South Arabian mainland a couple of thousand years ago,” Mackintosh-Smith told AFP.

When he pulled out a disposable lighter to smoke a pipe, it sparked “astonishment” among islanders.

The island is “a symbiosis of an extraordinary biodiversity with cultural and linguistic diversity”, he said.

“We sailed around under enormous cliffs plunging to the sea... staying in stone houses with roofs made of tree branches and beams of ancient wrecks,” he said. “To our eyes it seemed absolute pristine.”

‘Pristine’ to clogged 

Islanders say things changed rapidly when an airport opened from 2003.

Today, plastic water bottles and bags clog up creeks near villages, and steady streams of tourists arrive on a weekly two-hour flight from Abu Dhabi.

The visitors post pictures on social media of the island’s stunning  but incredibly fragile beauty.

Balancing the protection of the environment with the needs of people for roads, healthcare, jobs and opportunities is a hard task.

“Socotris are proud of their heritage, and are keen to protect it,” said Saeed Salim Abdulrahman, who is completing a degree translating oral histories from the Socotri language into Arabic and English.

But rapid changes have sparked fears the island’s age-old equilibrium has been damaged.

Poring over faded photographs at the Socotra Folk Museum at Riqeleh, Abulrahman showed how fast Socotra had shifted in just a few decades.

“On an island, everything depends on something else,” said Abdulrahman.

“Now some people look at the island’s resources and say, ‘how can I make money from it?’”

By Shatha Yaish
Agence France-Presse

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — For decades, Sheikh Jarrah was just another neighbourhood in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, but its story has gone viral online since protests flared against the planned expulsion of Palestinians from houses there.

"We have managed... not just to shed light on settlement in Jerusalem but also on the rights of Palestinians to defend themselves, their right to resist the occupier, and their right to their own narrative," said Muhammad Al Kurd.

The 23-year-old poet and writer, one of those facing the loss of their homes, has worked tirelessly to publicise the issue and in the process gained more than 180,000 Twitter followers and more than half a million on Instagram.

He was speaking to AFP last week, before Israeli forces on Sunday entered his family home, issued a summons for his arrest and detained his twin sister Mona Al Kurd, who is a fellow activist with over 1 million Instagram followers.

"From the beginning of the campaign our discourse has been extremely clear," Muhammad Al Kurd earlier told AFP. "We are talking about colonialism and settlement — not just about human rights abuses."

The protests in Sheikh Jarrah spread early last month to the city's Al Aqsa Mosque compound, sparking a crackdown by Israeli forces against Palestinians there.

That triggered an 11-day war between Israel and Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip, which in turn sparked protests in many countries in support of the Palestinians.

The hashtags #SheikhJarrah and #SaveSheikhJarrah went viral.

Celebrities from actors Mark Ruffalo and Viola Davis to Manchester City footballer Riyad Mahrez have posted about the neighbourhood on social media.

'Unprecedented change' 

While Palestinians and their backers see the issue as a microcosm of the wider conflict over land, Jewish settlers and their supporters have labelled it a mere property dispute, to be decided by Israeli courts.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 in a move never recognised by the international community.

Under Israeli law, Jewish groups can claim land that belonged to Jews before the foundation of Israel 1948, even if Palestinian families have been living there for decades.

Palestinians whose ancestors became refugees in the 1948 war have no means to retrieve their homes or land in modern-day Israel.

Kurd called the situation in Sheikh Jarrah “a tiny sample of Zionist settler colonialism in Jerusalem and Palestine in general” that reflected “the balance of power”.

“Everybody was able to see that we are up against a racist legal system that was written to protect and support settlers,” he said.

Israeli right groups Ir Amim says up to 1,000 Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and the nearby Silwan district face being displaced.

Outside his house, half of which was taken over in 2009 by a Jewish settler, Kurd said he was online from morning until night.

“We’ve seen an unprecedented change in public opinion worldwide,” said Kurd, who speaks flawless English and is studying for a Masters’ degree in the US.

“I think what made the #SaveSheikhJarrah hashtag a success was the narrative we used,” said the slim youth.

Behind him, Israeli flags fluttered on a home taken over by settlers after his neighbours were forcefully expelled.

“People have started to understand the Sheikh Jarrah case and about colonialism in general in Jerusalem,” said the young Palestinian.

“Even if we don’t manage to save the homes, we’ve done something bigger.”

Platforms ‘silencing Palestinians’ 

Kurd said the huge uptick in viewership and followers showed there was a “thirst for the Palestinian reality”.

Palestinian families in the neighbourhood say they were given the keys to their homes by the UN Palestinian refugee agency and Jordan, which controlled occupied East Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967.

Last month, as tensions in Jerusalem mounted during the build-up to the Gaza fighting, the Israeli supreme court postponed a hearing in the Sheikh Jarrah cases until further notice.

But Kurd said he had no faith in the Israeli judiciary.

He also warned of social media platforms’ apparent attempts to silence Palestinian activists, including when they post footage of Israeli security forces using violence against protesters.

Digital rights group Sada Social says it has documented more than 700 instances of such networks restricting access to or removing Palestinian content in May alone.

“At one point we weren’t able to publish anything about Sheikh Jarrah without it being taken down,” Kurd said.

“We received many warnings that our accounts would be deleted, and sometimes our views would drop from a quarter of a million to 90,000 or just 5,000.”

Despite such barriers, he said the impact of the campaign had surprised him.

“I didn’t believe that a post or a picture could change anything in reality,” he said. “But I discovered that our first and last battle is one of words, the battle of narratives and the battle of public opinion.”

“We don’t have the luxury to drop the issue,” he added. “As soon as we do, our homes could be stolen at any moment.”

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli police on Sunday detained for several hours two prominent activists whose campaign against the threatened expulsion of Palestinian families from homes in the flashpoint Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah has found a global audience.

Mona El Kurd, 23, was taken into custody on Sunday morning from her home in the Israeli-Occupied East Jerusalem district, where a legal battle between Israeli settlers and several Palestinian families has crystallised anger over Israel's settlement movement.

Security forces also left a summons for her twin brother, Mohammad, who later turned himself in.

Israeli police told AFP that Mona was "suspected of having participated in riots and other recent incidents in Sheikh Jarrah".

Both were later released and returned home, an AFP reporter said.

While in detention, Mona had been "threatened in an attempt to stop her carrying on with her legally permitted activities", family lawyer Nasser Odeh said. 

Their father Nabil El Kurd said she had been denied access to a lawyer during interrogation, adding that the detentions were "an operation to terrorise the parents, because the voice that emerged from the neighbourhood was thanks to its youth".

As Mona left custody, security forces used stun grenades and fired rubber-coated bullets to disperse protesters who had gathered outside the occupied East Jerusalem police station where she had been held. The Palestinian Red Crescent said 18 people were wounded.

Protests in Sheikh Jarrah spread early last month into the city’s Al Aqsa Mosque compound, sparking a crackdown by Israeli security forces against Palestinians there that further inflamed tensions.

Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, responded by launching volleys of rockets towards Israel on May 10, triggering an 11-day war between the Jewish state and Palestinian militants.

While Palestinians and their backers see the issue as a microcosm of Israeli efforts to push them out of the highly contested city, Jewish settlers and their supporters have labelled it a property dispute to be decided by Israeli courts.

Last month Israel’s Foreign Ministry accused Palestinian “terror” groups of “presenting a real-estate dispute between private parties, as a nationalistic cause” to incite violence.

Looming evictions

The Kurd twins, from one of the families that faces being ousted from their home, have led an active protest movement on the streets and online.

They have gained hundreds of thousands of followers on platforms including Twitter and Instagram, using the hashtags #SheikhJarrah and #SaveSheikhJarrah to bring their neighbourhood’s plight global attention. 

“Our weapon is the tongue and the camera,” their father said.

“Muhammad and Mona made the whole world turn around for our cause.”

Last month, as tensions in Jerusalem mounted during the build-up to the Gaza fighting, the Israeli supreme court postponed a hearing in the Sheikh Jarrah cases until further notice.

Under Israeli law, if Jews can prove that their families lived in east Jerusalem before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that created the state of Israel, they can request the “return” of their property, even if Palestinian families have been living there for decades. 

Palestinians whose ancestors became refugees in the 1948 war have no means to retrieve their homes or land in modern-day Israel.

Israeli right groups Ir Amim says up to 1,000 Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and the nearby Silwan district face being displaced.

Journalist arrested

Sheikh Jarrah has also drawn the attention of press freedom watchdogs, as journalists say they have been targeted by police while trying to report on demonstrations there.

On Saturday, Israeli forces arrested Al Jazeera reporter Givara Budeiri “in a brutal manner”, the network said in a statement, adding that authorities had destroyed a videographer’s camera as he was trying to work.

Budeiri was released from custody several hours after her arrest.

Al Jazeera television’s acting director general, Mostefa Souag, decried “the systematic targeting of our journalists”, dubbing it “in total violation of all international conventions”.

The Paris-headquartered Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has voiced concern over Israel’s “disproportionate use of force against journalists”.

It criticised “attacks” on reporters filming in Sheikh Jarrah, the detention of Palestinian reporters, and the Jewish state’s demolition of a tower in the besieged Gaza Strip where news outlets operated.

During their military campaign in Gaza, Israel levelled the 13-storey building that housed the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television along with the US news agency The Associated Press after warning the structure’s owner to evacuate.

Israel defended the strike, alleging the building also hosted a Palestinian “terrorist” intelligence office. 

Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Walid Al Omari, accused Israel of trying “to silence media that are witnessing, documenting and reporting the truth”.

UNITED NATIONS, United States — The United Nations Security Council called on Houthi rebels to allow inspectors to visit a long-abandoned fuel tanker off Yemen "without further delay" on Thursday.

The 15-member council held a special meeting on FSO Safer at the request of Britain after the rebels said an agreement to allow the UN mission had "reached a dead end".

The 45-year-old fuel vessel FSO Safer has 1.1 million barrels of crude on board and has been abandoned near Yemen's western port of Hodeida since 2015.

The UN says it threatens a catastrophic oil spill that would destroy Red Sea ecosystems, shut down the fishing industry and close Yemen's lifeline Hodeida Port for six months.

Members urged the Houthis to "facilitate unconditional and safe access for UN experts to conduct a comprehensive and impartial assessment and initial repair mission without further delay", a statement said.

UN inspectors were initially meant to assess the tanker last year but the mission has been repeatedly delayed over disagreements with the rebels.

The Houthis insist that the UN team conducts maintenance work but the world body says it must be allowed to assess the site first before carrying out any works.

On Tuesday, the Houthi rebels said negotiations with the UN had reached an impasse after several days of talks.

The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told the council meeting that the UN team "remains ready to deploy".

"The UN will keep that team on stand-by for as long as we have donor funding to do so," said OCHA's director of operations and advocacy, Reena Ghelani.

"Some of those funds, however, will start running out soon, so we hope things will start moving much, much faster," she said.

ERBIL, Iraq — Three civilians were killed Saturday in a Turkish drone attack on a refugee camp in northern Iraq in an area which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently threatened to "clean up".

Erdogan accuses Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) of using the mountainous area in Iraq's north as a springboard for its insurgency against the Turkish state.

Turkey regularly conducts cross-border operations and air raids on PKK rear bases in Iraq — moves that have strained relations between the two neighbours — and launched its latest offensive in April.

Kurdish lawmaker Rashad Galali said Turkey's drone strike hit a playground "near a school" in the UN-supported Makhmur camp set up in the late 1990s to house Kurdish refugees from Turkey.

"Three civilians were killed and two wounded," he told AFP, adding that children were not among the dead.

Earlier this week Erdogan compared Makhmur camp to the Mount Qandil region along Iraq's eastern frontier, where the PKK has bases.

"The issue of Makhmur is as important to us as Qandil... because Makhmur has become the incubator of Qandil... and if we don't intervene the incubator will continue producing [terrorists]," he said.

"If the United Nations does not clean up this district, we will take care of it in our capacity as a UN member state," Erdogan warned.

Turkish troops have maintained a network of bases in northern Iraq since the mid-1990s on the basis of security agreements struck with the regime of late dictator Saddam Hussein.

The PKK has waged a rebellion in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey since 1984 that has claimed more than 40,000 lives, and uses bases in Iraq to train fighters and launch attacks on Turkey.

Saturday’s drone strike came just hours after five Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters were killed in an ambush and clashes with the PKK in northern Iraq, according to a Kurdish official.

Serbast Lazkin, deputy minister for peshmerga affairs in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, said two peshmerga fighters were also wounded in the clash in the Mount Matin district of Dohuk province.

The People’s Defence Forces (HPG), the armed wing of the PKK, accused the peshmerga of entering “a conflict zone in Matin” between it and Turkey “which wants to occupy Iraqi Kurdistan”.

“These peshmerga movements are a stab in the back for the PKK and we refuse their entry into an area under our control,” it said in a statement.

The latest developments come weeks after Turkey’s ground and air offensive against PKK militants in Iraq in April raised concerns.

But Iraqi expert Adel Bakawan of the iReMMO institute for Mideast studies said he did not expect Saturday’s incident to be the precursor for a new Turkish operation in Iraq.

“There is nothing extraordinary in this. It is just a continuation [of Turkish policy]. There will be no invasion or massive offensive by Turkey” against northern Iraq, he said.

Other experts have noted that Turkey has increasingly reverted to the use of drone warfare to attack the PKK bases, with some even dubbing it a military “revolution”.

Drones provide Turkish forces a cheaper and more precise result, 

they say.

The PKK’s pan-Kurdish agenda has often put it at odds with Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish government, which has sought to maintain good relations with Ankara.

The peshmerga affairs ministry has called on “everyone to respect the borders of Kurdistan and to refrain from endangering its security and stability”.

The federal government in Baghdad has taken a stronger line, condemning repeated air and ground incursions into Iraq by Turkish forces.

QAMISHLI, Syria — Syria's Kurds on Saturday handed four relatives of Daesh terror group fighters, including three children, to Dutch diplomats for repatriation, a thorny issue for authorities in The Netherlands.

The group consisted of a Dutch woman and her two children as well as another 12-year-old girl, "a humanitarian case", whose mother had agreed to her repatriation following a request from the Dutch government, top Syrian Kurdish foreign affairs official Abdel Karim Omar said.

The four were handed over to a delegation led by The Netherlands' Syria Envoy Emiel de Bont and Senior Foreign Ministry official Dirk Jan Nieuwenhuis.

De Bont said the delegation had "a clear and well-defined mandate to receive in the care of a mission, a small number of Dutch nationals up to now residing in the Roj detention facility", following a Dutch court ruling on the individuals' cases.

"We are here then to serve the rule of law and to do what we can to assist the due legal process," he added.

Since the fall of Daesh's self-styled "caliphate" in March 2019, Syria's Kurds and the United Nations have repeatedly urged foreign countries to repatriate their nationals held in northeast Syria.

At least 220 such children with Dutch nationality remain in Syria or Turkey, 75 per cent of whom are under the age of four and were born in the region to parents with Dutch citizenship.

At a press conference in the regional capital Qamishli, Kurdish official Omar reiterated calls for other countries to “meet their responsibilities by repatriating their citizens and cooperating with us on this situation”, a major burden for authorities in the de facto autonomous region.

About 75 boys and girls are living with their mothers in Kurdish-run camps in Syria, while a few are also in the extremist-run northwestern area of Idlib, according to Dutch authorities.

There are some 30 Dutch women and 15 men in Kurdish-run camps.

‘About our safety’ 

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and their US-led coalition allies declared the defeat of a self-proclaimed Daesh “caliphate” in March 2019 after ousting extremists from their last Syrian stronghold in the eastern village of Baghouz.

Tens of thousands of people suspected of being wives and children of Daesh fighters have ended up in the Al Hol camp.

Kurdish authorities warn the camp, hit by dozens of murders since early 2021, has emerged as an extremist powder keg.

The UN said in February it had documented cases of “radicalisation, fundraising, training and incitement of external operations” at Al Hol.

Anna Sophia Posthumus, spokeswoman for The Netherlands’ justice and security ministry, said the country did not have a “general policy” of repatriating people from war-torn regions.

There has previously only been one exception to this policy, she said, a 2019 case involving two minors.

The question of repatriating Dutch nationals in areas formerly held by Daesh is a thorny issue in The Netherlands.

“We would prefer a tribunal in the region” be set up to try suspects, Posthumus said. She noted that “discussions” had already taken place, but “it’s still at a very... initial phase”.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s liberal VVD party has emphasised the security threat posed by such returns, while the centre-left D66 party, a likely potential partner as he seeks to build a coalition, supports bringing back children on humanitarian grounds.

VVD politician Ingrid Michon tweeted that “We do everything that’s possible to keep Netherlands safe. Then we should not pick up these Daesh-goers from Syria. This is about our safety. Stop this”.

Far right-wing politician Geert Wilders said it was “unacceptable and unbearable” to repatriate women linked to Daesh fighters.

“Those terror women have forfeited their right to ever set foot on Dutch soil,” he tweeted.

TEHRAN — Iran's supreme leader on Friday urged voters to turn out for this month's presidential election, warning that staying away would mean doing the work of the "enemies of Islam".

Iranians are set to elect a successor to President Hassan Rouhani on June 18 amid widespread discontent over a deep economic and social crisis.

"Some want to give up the duty to participate in the election with absurd reasons," Khamenei said, in a televised speech.

"It is the will of the enemies, the enemies of Iran, the enemies of Islam and the enemies of religious democracy."

The presidential election campaign kicked off on May 28, without fanfare and in an atmosphere of indifference, as many say the result is a foregone conclusion.

Khamenei last week made similar calls urging people not to heed calls to boycott the poll.

The opposition based outside Iran is running a campaign on social media networks calling for people to stay away from the polls, using hashtags in Farsi such as #NototheIslamicRepublic.

"It has been said that some people are reluctant to go to the ballot box due to the pressures on their livelihoods, which we all know and experience," Khamenei said, adding that such problems are solved "by making the right choice, not by not choosing".

He also quoted the Islamic republic's late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, saying that, under certain circumstances, to abstain from voting is "one of the worst deadly sins".

Iran's conservative-dominated Guardian Council approved seven candidates — five ultraconservative and two reformists — to run from a field of about 600 hopefuls.

Ultraconservative judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi, who took 38 per cent of the vote in the 2017 presidential election, is widely seen as a favourite.

Rouhani, who is constitutionally barred from running for a third consecutive term, has warned of the risk of low turnout.

A record 57 per cent of Iranians stayed away from parliamentary elections in February last year in which thousands of candidates, many of them moderates and reformists, were barred from running.

The election comes at a critical time amid talks with world powers aimed at reviving a 2015 nuclear deal that offered sanctions relief in return for Iran's agreement to tight controls on its nuclear programme.

The accord has been on life support since then-US president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018, and reimposed crippling sanctions.