Region

ADEN — Hundreds of angry Yemenis stormed the presidential palace in Aden on Tuesday protesting poor living conditions in the war-torn country but were eventually pushed back peacefully, an AFP correspondent said.

Protesters, including retired military and security officers, marched in the southern port city, the de facto capital where the internationally-recognised government is based.

"Revolution, revolution in the south," they shouted.

Palace guards shot into the air but protesters continued to march in.

The crowd remained in the building for over an hour before dispersing.

A government official told AFP that Yemeni and Saudi forces escorted to safety members of the Cabinet, including Prime Minister Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed, to the military intelligence building on the palace grounds.

Protesters told AFP that they were angry over a lack of services and a delay in the payment of salaries.

Some carried flags of the southern separatist movement.

Yemen's government was formed in December under a Riyadh-sponsored power sharing agreement between ministers loyal to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and supporters of the secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC).

Both are technically fighting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who control the capital Sanaa in the north.

But the STC has sought to restore South Yemen's independence from the north. The two sides unified in 1990.

Aden residents claim the new government has not done anything to remedy price inflation or repeated power cuts.

The United Nations called Tuesday for an independent probe of a fire in Yemen's capital that killed dozens of migrants in a holding facility.

"There must be an independent investigation into the cause of the fire," the UN envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, told the Security Council.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) earlier on Tuesday blamed the March 7 fire on “unidentified projectiles” fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

The Iran-backed militants control much of northern Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, which was captured from the Saudi-backed government in 2014, sparking a devastating war.

Griffiths said, “The world was reminded of the plight of the migrant community last week when an extraordinary, horrific fire broke out at a detention facility in Sanaa holding predominantly Ethiopian migrants.”

He said dozens were killed in the fire and over 170 seriously injured.

HRW said detainees had been protesting against overcrowding when camp guards rounded up hundreds of them into a hangar and fired two projectiles into the building.

“The migrants said the first projectile produced a lot of smoke and made their eyes water and sting. The second, which the migrants called a ‘bomb,’ exploded loudly and started a fire,” HRW said.

“Houthi authorities should urgently engage with Ethiopian authorities whose nationals are languishing in Yemeni detention centres under their control,” HRW said.

Yemen has been embroiled in a civil war between the government — backed by a Saudi-led military coalition — and the Houthi rebels since 2014, pushing the country to the brink of famine.

Tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, have been killed and millions displaced in the conflict, which has crippled the economy and healthcare system.

The UN calls Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

DUBAI — Yemen's Houthi rebels said Monday that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's comment on supporting a Yemen free from foreign influence was "positive" but needed to be backed by actions.

Washington has already halted support to the Saudi-led military coalition which is backing the Yemeni government against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in a devastating civil war.

"Blinken's comments on Yemen being free from foreign influence were positive," tweeted Houthi political commander Mohammed Ali Al Houthi.

"We are waiting for action to withdraw American elements and experts from the battle and to neutralise American weapons and withdraw them from the confrontation."

"This is what we're looking for and what would be consistent with the comments."

On Sunday, State Department spokesman Ned Price said Blinken highlighted during a call with UN's Yemen envoy Martin Griffiths that the "United States supports a unified, stable Yemen free from foreign influence, and that there is no military solution to the conflict".

Yemen has been embroiled in a bloody power struggle since 2014 between its Saudi-backed government and the Houthi rebels who control the capital Sanaa and most of the north.

The grinding conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions more, triggering what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

TOBRUK, Libya — Libya's new interim Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah pledged to unite divided Libya as he was sworn in Monday, preparing to steer the war-torn country to December elections.

The North African nation descended into conflict after leader Muammer Qadhafi was toppled and killed in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011, with an array of forces battling to fill the void.

A United Nations-supervised process is working to unite the country, building on an October ceasefire between rival administrations in the country's east and west.

Dbeibah, selected during talks in February alongside an interim three-member presidency council, took the oath of office in front of lawmakers in the eastern city of Tobruk.

More than 1,000 kilometres from the capital Tripoli in the west, Tobruk has been the seat of Libya's elected parliament since 2014.

Dbeibah's swearing-in comes after parliament last week approved his Cabinet, in a move hailed by key leaders and foreign powers as "historic".

The government pledged to "preserve the unity, security and integrity" of Libya with Dbeibah insisting that his Cabinet "will be the government of all Libyans".

“Libya is one and united,” he said.

Several ambassadors attended the ceremony alongside parliament speaker Aguila Saleh.

“The time has come for us to shake hands,” Saleh said, calling on Libyans to “turn the page on the past” and seek national reconciliation.

The creation of a unity government caps five months of efforts by the UN since last year’s truce between the country’s main warring factions.

The world body’s special envoy for Libya, Jan Kubis, called the event an “important step towards a unified, democratic and sovereign Libya”.

In a statement, he encouraged the new government “to swiftly embark on addressing the many challenges the Libyan people face”.

Foreign powers 

Dbeibah’s government includes two deputy prime ministers, 26 ministers and six ministers of state, with five posts including the key foreign affairs and justice portfolios handed to women, a first in Libya.

The new administration is expected to replace both the UN-recognised Government of National Accord, based in Tripoli, and a parallel cabinet headquartered in the east, under the de facto control of forces backing military strongman Khalifa Haftar.

Turkey has propped up the GNA, while Haftar’s administration has drawn on support from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia.

Outgoing GNA head Fayez al-Sarraj has said he is “fully ready to hand over” power, while Haftar last month offered “the support of the armed forces for the peace process”.

But the new executive faces daunting challenges to unify the country’s institutions, end a decade of fighting marked by international interference and prepare for elections on December 24.

Mohamed Al Manfi, who heads the presidency council selected with Dbeibah last month also vowed to help cement unity before elections.

“We must be the nucleus of reconciliation ahead of the elections,” Manfi said.

Dbeibah, 61, a wealthy businessman from the western port city of Misrata, once held posts under Qadhafi but has shown no clear ideological position.

During qadhafi’s rule, his family was one of the many beneficiaries of an industrial and economic boom in Misrata.

Dbeibah is also known to be supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood and close to Turkey.

He holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto in engineering, expertise which introduced him to Qadhafi’s inner circle and led him to head a company managing huge construction projects.

Militias and mercenaries 

Dbeibah was considered an outsider compared to other candidates vying for the job, and his election process has been marred by allegations of vote-buying.

But he has jumped into his role even before his inauguration.

On Saturday he launched a national conference on combatting coronavirus, while in a bid to battle corruption he has ordered investment and other financial firms to freeze all their operations.

But after 42 years of dictatorship under Kadhafi and a decade of violence, the list of challenges is long.

Libya’s population of seven million, sitting atop Africa’s largest proven crude oil reserves, faces a dire economic crisis with soaring unemployment, crippling inflation and endemic corruption.

Another key challenge will be ensuring the departure of an estimated 20,000 mercenaries and foreign fighters still in the country, whose presence Dbeibah has called “a stab in our back”.

The UN Security Council on Friday called for all foreign forces to leave “without further delay”.

TEHRAN — British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe appeared in a Tehran court on Sunday to face new charges of “propaganda against the system”, a week after she finished serving a five-year sentence, her lawyer said.

The hearing has dashed the hopes of family and supporters for a swift release of the 42-year-old, in a case that has heightened diplomatic tensions between London and Tehran.

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said it was “unacceptable that Iran has chosen to continue a second wholly arbitrary case”.

According to Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s lawyer, Hojjat Kermani, she is now being prosecuted for “propaganda against the system for having participated in a rally in front of the Iranian embassy in London” in 2009.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe spoke in court where she denied all charges, according to the Free Nazanin support campaign.

“Nazanin... pointed out that all the accusations and evidence put forward had been part of her trial in 2016,” the group said.

“She had already been tried and convicted on this evidence.”

Kermani told AFP that “the hearing took place in a very calm and good atmosphere, in the presence of my client”.

‘Detention effectively open-ended’ 

Under Iranian law, the court has seven working days to issue a judgement, although delays are common.

With the Islamic republic about to celebrate the Iranian new year, it means a ruling might not be released until March 30.

Britain demanded the mother-of-one be allowed to fly home immediately.

“She must be allowed to return to her family in the UK without delay,” Raab said. “We continue to do all we can to support her.”

Kermani said that “given the evidence presented by the defence and the legal process, and the fact that my client has also served her previous sentence, I hope that she will be acquitted”.

But the support committee is less optimistic. “At present, Nazanin’s future remains uncertain, and her detention effectively open-ended,” it said.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained while on holiday in 2016 and convicted of plotting to overthrow the regime in Tehran — accusations she strenuously denied.

She was working at the time as a project manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the media organisation’s philanthropic wing.

She has been under house arrest in recent months and had her ankle tag removed, giving her more freedom of movement and allowing her to visit relatives in Tehran.

She completed her sentence on March 7.

In a statement on Sunday, Thomson Reuters Foundation CEO, Antonio Zappulla, said Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s “five-year trauma should have come to an end last week” and that she “is an innocent victim of a political dispute”.

“This latest trial and delayed outcome is a deliberate move to prolong her ordeal and her suffering.”

Harsh conditions 

On March 8, her husband Richard Ratcliffe and their six-year-old daughter Gabriella held a vigil outside the Iranian embassy in central London, demanding she be allowed home.

He tried to deliver an Amnesty International petition signed by 160,000 supporters calling for his wife’s release, but was turned away.

Earlier this month, Ratcliffe told the BBC his wife’s detention has “the potential to drag on and on”.

Ratcliffe and media in both the UK and Iran have drawn a possible link between Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s detention and a British debt dating back more than 40 years for military tanks paid for by the shah.

When the shah was ousted in 1979, Britain refused to deliver the tanks to the new Islamic Republic and London has admitted it owes Iran several hundred million pounds.

However, both countries have denied any link with the Zaghari-Ratcliffe case.

She has been temporarily released from Tehran’s Evin prison and has been under house arrest since last spring due to the coronavirus outbreak.

For four years, however, at Evin she spent time in solitary confinement in windowless cells, declared hunger strikes and had medical treatment withheld.

While in prison, she suffered from a lack of hygiene and even contemplated suicide, according to her husband.

Iranian authorities have consistently denied that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was mistreated.

On Friday, campaign group Redress handed a report to Raab, which it said “confirms the severity of the ill-treatment that Nazanin has suffered”.

The legal campaigners said it “considers that Iran’s treatment of Nazanin constitutes torture”.

BEIRUT — The overall death toll for Syria's civil war has reached 388,652 since it began a decade ago this month, a war monitor said on Sunday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the figures include almost 117,388 civilians, among them more than 22,000 children.

The observatory's previous tally was issued in December and stood at more than 387,000.

Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said 2020 saw the lowest annual death toll since the war began with just over 10,000 deaths.

Battles slowed this year as a ceasefire held in northwestern Syria and attention turned to containing the coronavirus pandemic.

The observatory also claimed it had documented at least 16,000 deaths in government prisons and detention centres since the conflict erupted in 2011. It said, however, that the real number was likely higher because its tally does no include 88,000 people believed to have died of torture in prisons.

Today the Syrian government controls more than 60 per cent of Syria after a string of Russia-backed victories against extremists and rebels since 2015.

Among the regions still beyond its reach are the last rebel enclave of Idlib in the northwest, Turkish-held areas along the northern border, and northeastern parts of the country held by US-backed Kurdish forces.

The war has forced more than half the country's pre-war population to flee their homes.

Some 200,000 people have gone missing, according to the war monitor.

AL BOU DOR, Iraq — Hundreds of mourners attended funerals in a village north of Iraq's capital Saturday for eight people killed in attacks claimed by the Daesh terror group, an AFP reporter said.

The attacks took place on Friday and killed six members of the same family, including two women, along with a lawyer and a policeman.

Witnesses said men in military uniform had carried out the three attacks on the victims' homes in the village of Al Bou Dor.

The Iraqi military said it was a revenge attack ordered by a village resident who had been driven out by neighbours who accused him of being a Daesh member.

A Daesh statement said those targeted on Friday had been spying for Hashed Al Shaabi, a Shiite-led coalition force that played a key role in 2017 in ending the terrorists' control of swathes of Iraqi territory.

Iraq declared Daesh territorially defeated in December 2017 after a three-year fight aided by US-led coalition air strikes.

Daesh attacks in urban areas have since dramatically dropped, but Iraqi troops have continued to battle sleeper cells in the country's mountainous and desert areas.