Category Archives: News

Yemen’s Houthis ready for talks if air strikes stop: senior member

Reuters: Yemen’s Houthis are ready to sit down for peace talks as long as a Saudi-led air campaign is halted and the negotiations are overseen by “non-aggressive” parties, a senior Houthi member said.

Saleh al-Sammad, who was an adviser to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, also told Reuters in emailed answers that Yemenis reject the return of Hadi, who escaped to Saudi Arabia after Shi’ite Houthi fighters edged closer to his southern base of Aden last month.

Warplanes and ships from a Saudi-led coalition have been bombing the Iran-allied Houthi forces for 11 days, saying they are trying drive back the Houthis and restore Hadi. U.N. brokered peace talks in the preceding weeks between Hadi and the Houthis had failed.

“We still stand by our position on dialogue and we demand its continuation despite everything that has happened, on the basis of respect and acknowledging the other,” Sammad said.

“We have no conditions except a halt to the aggression and sitting on the dialogue table within a specific time period … and any international or regional parties that have no aggressive positions towards the Yemeni people can oversee the dialogue,” Sammad said, without specifying who they might be.

Reuters: Yemen’s Houthi militiamen, supported by army units, gained ground in the southern city of Aden on Sunday, pushing back loyalists of the Saudi-backed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Residents took refuge in their homes and reported hearing sporadic gunfire and blasts of rocket-propelled grenades, and one witness saw a Houthi tank in the downtown Mualla district, which sits astride Aden’s main commercial port.

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Come out and live, Shabab told Kenya students — and then killed them

The New York Times reports: Elosy Karimi curled up in a crawl space, immobilized by fear.

Her classmates were flooding out of the dorms, in boxer shorts and thin nightgowns. Gunfire was ringing all around her. People were screaming. It was predawn and pitch black.

“If you want to survive, come out!” the militants yelled. “If you want to die, stay inside!”

In the terrifying confusion, Ms. Karimi, 23, decided to risk it inside, she said, and stayed hidden in the ceiling above her bunk bed for the next 28 and a half hours.

“I knew those guys were lying,” she said at the hospital, having just arrived to be checked after the ordeal.

New details emerged on Friday about how a handful of fighters from the Shabab militant group, with just a few light weapons, managed to kill nearly 150 students in Kenya’s worst terrorist attack since the 1998 bombing of the United States Embassy in Nairobi.

Survivors said many students had fallen for the militants’ trick, voluntarily leaving their dorm rooms and obeying commands to lie down in neat rows, only to be shot in the back of the head. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS takes control of 90 percent of a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus

Reuters: Islamic State has taken control of 90 percent of a Palestinian refugee camp on the Damascus outskirts where 18,000 civilians have suffered years of bombing, army siege and militia control, a monitoring group said on Saturday.

The hardline group’s offensive in Yarmouk gives it a major presence in the capital. Islamic State, the most powerful insurgent group in Syria, is now only a few kilometers from President Bashar al-Assad’s seat of power.

The United Nations has said it is extremely concerned about the safety and protection of Syrians and Palestinians in the camp. Civilians trapped there have long suffered a government siege that has led to starvation and disease.

“The situation in Yarmouk is an affront to the humanity of all of us, a source of universal shame,” U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman Chris Gunness said.

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After Iraqi forces take Tikrit, a wave of looting and lynching

Reuters reports: On April 1, the city of Tikrit was liberated from the extremist group Islamic State. The Shi’ite-led central government and allied militias, after a month-long battle, had expelled the barbarous Sunni radicals.

Then, some of the liberators took revenge.

Near the charred, bullet-scarred government headquarters, two federal policemen flanked a suspected Islamic State fighter. Urged on by a furious mob, the two officers took out knives and repeatedly stabbed the man in the neck and slit his throat. The killing was witnessed by two Reuters correspondents.

The incident is now under investigation, interior ministry spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan told Reuters.

Since its recapture two days ago, the Sunni city of Tikrit has been the scene of violence and looting. In addition to the killing of the extremist combatant, Reuters correspondents also saw a convoy of Shi’ite paramilitary fighters – the government’s partners in liberating the city – drag a corpse through the streets behind their car.

Local officials said the mayhem continues. Two security officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Friday that dozens of homes had been torched in the city. They added that they had witnessed the looting of stores by Shi’ite militiamen. [Continue reading…]

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Only the finest white tea in Erdogan’s White Palace

Pinar Tremblay writes: The AKP’s grip on the media is well documented in Turkey and is used not only to prevent embarrassing news from spreading, but also to generate a false positive image in the public opinion of the president and his family.

In an attempt to showcase Emine Erdogan as a frugal, simple and environmentally friendly first lady, pro-AKP Yeni Safak Daily published a profile of how she manages the palace’s kitchen. Some intriguing details were revealed. In an effort to minimize waste, the Erdogan family recycles lemon and apple peels into vinegar. They also use their olive and date pits to make sauces. (Al-Monitor could not verify what kind of sauce can be made from these pits.) It appears that Emine is conscious about organic farming and investigates in detail all the origins of the products that enter the palace. We also learned that she had recommended dry mango slices to the first lady of Mali, Keita Aminata Maiga. According to the Yeni Safak article, Maiga was reportedly complaining about not being able to export mangos because of a short shelf life. Emine then recommended to dry mango slices to assist in Mali’s exports. But nothing got the attention of the Turkish public more than the white tea discussed in the article. The first lady of Turkey recommended that we all reconnect with Mother Nature and consume only the most natural products, and confessed that the most frequently consumed tea at the palace is white tea from the Rize region on the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey.

So what is the big deal? White tea is sold in well-stocked supermarkets all over the world, along with black and green tea, at $3-$4 for a pack of 20 tea bags. But that is not the white tea consumed at the presidential palace in Turkey. Indeed, even most residents in Rize are not aware of this white tea, which sells for about $1,800-$2,000 per kilo (2.2 pounds). Considering the increasing poverty and the fact that 22 million out of 77 million people in Turkey live on an average monthly income of $320, this most unrefined and luxurious white tea is not available at your regular supermarket. The majority of Turks, who are mostly black tea drinkers, have not even heard of white tea. The white tea consumed at the palace caused an uproar in social media, where people ridiculed the allegedly modest palace life of the Erdogan family. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen’s children: ‘When can I go out and play again?’

Al Jazeera reports: Among piles of rubble and strewn personal belongings in a residential area outside of Sanaa’s international airport, two young children lay injured and unconscious.

Mariam and Zain al-Jumozee, eight and five years old, suffered cuts from glass windows that shattered during Saudi-led air strikes against the Houthi rebels last week. When they finally woke at the Saudi German Hospital in Hadda, the siblings instantly knew their parents had died. Unable to communicate, covered in plaster and stitches, they remained silent as gunfire continued to pummel the Yemeni capital.

The Saudi-led offensive, aimed at quelling the rise of Yemen’s Houthi rebels, has resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties, with more than 60 children among the dead, according to aid agency UNICEF. Scores of others have been injured.

“Children are in desperate need of protection, and all parties to the conflict should do all in their power to keep children safe,” UNICEF’s representative for Yemen, Julien Harneis, told Al Jazeera. [Continue reading…]

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Pragmatism driving Iran’s Supreme Leader toward nuclear deal

AFP reports: A nuclear deal with Iran is finally within sight because its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has chosen pragmatism over hardline rhetoric and possible conflict with the West.

Throughout 18 months of diplomacy between Iran and six world powers led by the United States, the question that has dominated all others is whether Khamenei will ever sign off on an accord.

Iran’s negotiators, led by the wide-smiling, US-educated Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, have often seemed desperately hemmed in at the talks by stringent red lines set by Khamenei.

The supreme leader, who has the final word on all policy matters foreign and domestic, has also previously cast doubt on whether dialogue would produce results, citing his distrust of America.

But the key parameters agreed in Lausanne on Thursday confirm the 75-year-old cleric’s intention to conclude a deal by June 30, analysts say. [Continue reading…]

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Iranians celebrate nuclear deal: ‘This will bring hope to our life’

The Guardian reports: Jubilant Iranians took to the streets on Thursday night to celebrate news of a breakthrough in nuclear negotiations with the West, and to express their hopes that the deal will end years of international isolation and economic hardship – and avert the threat of war.

The news from Switzerland was especially sweet coming as Iranians celebrated the final day of their Nowruz new year holidays. Even though newspapers, bazaars and state institutions were closed, many welcomed the landmark agreement which they believe will have a dramatic effect on the lives of ordinary Iranians.

Drivers in the streets of Tehran honked their car horns as news of the deal started to break. At 1am in the morning, t the capital’s longest street, Val-e-Asr Avenue, was still lined with cars, with men and women waving flags and flashing V-for-victory signs from open windows.

“Whatever the final result of the negotiations, we are winners,” Behrang Alavi told AFP. “Now we will be able to live normally like the rest of the world.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran, U.S. agree on outline of nuclear deal

The Associated Press: Iran and six world powers have agreed on the outlines of an understanding to limit Iran’s nuclear programs, officials told The Associated Press Thursday. Negotiations continued on a dispute over how much of it to make public.

The officials spoke outside weeklong talks that have been twice extended past the March 31 deadline in an effort to formulate both a general statement of what has been accomplished and documents describing what needs to be done to meet a June 30 deadline for a final accord.

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Putin: Try to take Crimea away and I will give you a nuclear war

The Times reports: The Ukraine crisis has brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any point for a generation, according to an account of a secret meeting between Russian and American military and intelligence figures.

As President Putin celebrated the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea on March 18 with an appearance at a concert outside the Kremlin, a group of retired Russian generals sat down in Torgau, Germany, with a group of their American counterparts. The assembled Russians once ran the interior ministry, the military directorate in charge of nuclear weapons, the GRU (Russian military intelligence) and the FSB (the main successor agency to the KGB). The American individuals present had similar backgrounds in the military, CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency.

Behind closed doors, over two days, the Russians delivered a series of blunt warnings from Moscow that reveal just how precarious Europe’s security has become over the past year, and how broad the gulf between the Kremlin and the West now is.

The US party at the Elbe Group talks appears to have been surprised to discover that Russian security experts believe that the US is bent on destroying their country — and that Russia is both entitled and fully prepared to use nuclear force to defend itself. That point of view reflects both Mr Putin’s assessment of Russia’s vulnerability and the KGB background shared by him and his closest advisers, according to Kremlin insiders.

Swaggering nuclear rhetoric has increasingly permeated Russian life. In a recent documentary, Mr Putin said that when he gave the instruction to annex Crimea, he also ordered that Russia’s nuclear forces be placed on full alert.

He has referred to Russia’s nuclear might many times since the Ukraine crisis began, including in remarks to a group of schoolchildren in August, when he reminded them that “Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers”, and “it’s best not to mess with us”. [Continue reading…]

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In Tikrit, a celebratory mood but lingering concerns

The Washington Post reports: On Wednesday, there were no signs of civilians in the city center. An elderly woman and her daughter found there had been “taken to somewhere secure,” one militiaman said. Houses were largely intact, indicating that the city fell with relatively little combat. Iraqi forces had outnumbered the militants by at least 10 to 1, according to estimates by Iraqi officials. In addition, the U.S.-led strikes had killed several of the Islamic State’s leaders in the city.

But the scene is likely to be different in neighborhoods to the north, where some militants have dug in. The United Nations released images in February that showed that at least 536 buildings in the city have been damaged by the fighting.

Security forces had begun the painstaking task of defusing hundreds of roadside bombs and booby traps left by the retreating militants, with explosions ringing through the streets as they went about their task.

About 185 booby-trapped houses have been identified in the city, in addition to about 900 improvised explosive devices, Interior Minister Mohammed al-Ghaban said as he visited one of Hussein’s former palaces on the banks of the Tigris.

The largest palace had suffered significant damage, seemingly from airstrikes, with an entire wing sagging. Iraqi military officials have said that the strikes helped significantly in softening the way for ground operations after the offensive stalled — although the Shiite militiamen among the pro-government forces are reluctant to acknowledge that the air raids played a role.

Ghaban spoke a few feet from the site of one of the Islamic State’s worst atrocities, the slaughter of what the government estimates to have been as many as 1,700 soldiers from Camp Speicher, a military base just outside Tikrit.

Trails of dried blood could seen on the walls along the river, where soldiers were summarily executed and thrown in the water.

“Innocent blood has been spilled here,” Ghaban said. “We don’t want revenge. We want to liberate people and the land.”

The emotionally charged nature of the Tikrit fight had raised concerns about the potential for abuses by the plethora of armed groups taking part.

In a televised speech on Tuesday, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi insisted that only Iraqi blood was being spilled in the battle. But the Farsi graffiti scrawled next to an Islamic State flag painted on a wall outside the city’s presidential palace seemed to suggest otherwise. [Continue reading…]

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Yemenis turn against Saudi-led bombing as civilian casualties rise

The Wall Street Journal reports: Yemenis once supportive of the Saudi-led bombing campaign against Houthi rebels in their country are turning against the operation as civilian casualties mount and vital economic infrastructure is destroyed by airstrikes, including one on Wednesday that killed 29 employees at a dairy factory far from rebel-held areas.

At least 164 civilians have been killed since the airstrikes started last week, according to Yemen’s health ministry, while the United Nations put the figure at 93 dead and 364 wounded. Aid agencies say their ability to provide Yemen with urgent medical and food supplies has been restricted by both ground fighting between local factions and the Saudi airstrikes.

Even those who cheered the Saudi intervention against Houthi rebels are now appealing for its end. Last week, Riyadh assembled a coalition of 10 regional countries to counter the Iran-linked Houthi militants as they expanded across the country and forced Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to flee last week to Saudi Arabia.

The Houthis have admitted to receiving some arms and training from Iran, but maintain that their continuing military campaign is an independent decision to rid the country of an inept and corrupt government. U.S. officials say the Houthis are a national movement with limited ties to Iran, although they share a similar religious faith. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS seizes most of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus

AFP reports: Militants from ISIS seized control of most of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus Wednesday, a local Palestinian official told AFP.

“Fighters from ISIS launched an assault this morning on Yarmouk and they took over the majority of the camp,” said Anwar Abdel Hadi, director of political affairs for the Palestine Liberation Organization in Damascus.

Fighting was continuing inside the camp, he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based activist group, said ISIS was in control of a “large part” of the camp after fighting with Palestinian groups also opposed to President Bashar Assad’s regime.

Yarmouk was once a thriving neighborhood home to 160,000 Palestinian refugees and Syrians but has been caught up in the country’s fighting and besieged by regime forces for more than a year.

Only about 18,000 residents are estimated to remain in the camp after many fled the fighting. [Continue reading…]

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Palestine formally joins International Criminal Court

Al Jazeera reports: Palestine has formally attained membership of the International Criminal Court, a move that could open the door to possible war crime indictments against Israeli officials despite uncertainty over its wider ramifications.

The accession on Wednesday is another landmark in the Palestinian diplomatic and legal international campaign, which gained steam in 2014.

The Palestinians moved to join The Hague-based court on January 2, in a process that was finalised on Wednesday, setting the scene for potential legal action.

“Palestine has and will continue to use all legitimate tools within its means in order to defend itself against Israeli colonisation and other violations of international law,” said senior Palestinian official Saeb Erakat. [Continue reading…]

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Iran says Saudi ‘attack’ on Yemen endangers region

AFP reports: Iran warned Tuesday that the Saudi “attack” on Yemen endangered the whole region, calling for an immediate halt to the military operation against Shiite rebels.

“The fire of war in the region from any side… will drag the whole region to play with fire. This is not in the interest of the nations in the region,” Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said.

“We strongly object to the military solution in Yemen. We believe that the Saudi military attack against Yemen is a strategic mistake,” Abdollahian told reporters on the sidelines of a Syria donors conference in Kuwait.

“Military operations must stop immediately” to open the way to a “political solution,” he said.

A Saudi-led Arab coalition has been pounding rebel positions in Yemen since Thursday. Riyadh accuses Tehran of backing the Huthi Shiite rebels.

Abdollahian said Iran sees the intervention in Yemen as “external aggression” that will foment extremism in the region.

But Tehran and Riyadh are “capable of cooperating to strike a compromise in Yemen,” and the same can apply to a solution in Syria, he added. [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda in Syria signals sharia law for Idlib

Reuters: The al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front indicated on Wednesday that a Syrian city captured from the government in recent days would be ruled according to Islamic sharia law but the group would not seek to monopolize power there.

Nusra Front’s leader, Abu Mohamad al-Golani, also said residents of the northwestern city of Idlib would be treated well by his fighters and other Islamist factions that captured it on Saturday.

“We salute the people of Idlib and their stand with their sons, the Mujahideen, … and God willing they will enjoy the justice of sharia, which will preserve their religion and their blood,” Golani said in an audio recording posted on Nusra Front-affiliated online media.

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ISIS targets Africa in new issue of recruitment magazine

Newsweek reports: ISIS have released a new issue of its recruitment magazine which is focused solely on expanding its presence across Africa, as the terror group’s propaganda strategy continues to develop.

The release, titled Shariah Alone Will Rule Africa, speaks of the ‘Libyan Arena’, Tunisia, Algeria, the Sinai Peninsula and West Africa. The cover of the magazine shows a large picture of Tunisia’s Great Mosque of Kairouan, seen as one of the holiest sites in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

The magazine, which includes another interview from British hostage and photojournalist John Cantlie, sees spokesman for ISIS, Muhammad al-Adnani, congratulate Nigerian radical Islamist group Boko Haram for “joining the caravan” of jihad, saying that they would “now guard yet another frontier of the Khilafah [caliphate]”. [Continue reading…]

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