Region

BAGHDAD — Two Iraqis were killed and dozens wounded in protest-related violence on Tuesday, as authorities suspended a television station which has broadcast intensive coverage of the months-long movement demanding regime change.

The youth-led campaign has pressed on despite violence that has killed more than 480 people, a vast majority of them protesters, since rallies erupted in Baghdad and Shiite-majority southern Iraq on October 1.

Demanding snap elections, an independent prime minister and accountability for long-standing corruption and bloodshed, youths have occupied squares, blockaded streets and boycotted university classes for nearly four months.

Security forces have responded with live rounds and tear gas, and on Tuesday one protester was shot dead in clashes with riot police in the southern protest hotspot of Kut, according to medical and security sources.

Further north in the capital, a professor at the famed Mustansariyah University was shot dead early Tuesday while driving in his car, medics and police said.

Mohammad Alwan was known to have been protesting in Tahrir Square, a plaza in central Baghdad which demonstrators have transformed into an anti-government tent city.

Activists have long complained that a campaign of kidnappings and drive-by shootings has aimed to intimidate them into calling off the protests.

‘We’ll protest every day’ 

Near Tahrir on Tuesday, protesters carrying makeshift shield tried to seal off roads and threw rocks at riot police firing tear gas and live rounds.

Around 15 protesters were wounded, medics said.

Other rallies and skirmishes rocked the port city of Basra in the south, as well as Amarah, Hillah and Nasiriyah.

“We came out today and we’ll protest every day to support these protests, which are a historic challenge,” said Ajwad Ali, a university-age protester in Nasiriyah.

“We renew our demands for a new prime minister and for the new electoral law to be signed into law. If there is more procrastination, we will escalate our peaceful movement.”

Political factions have thus far failed to agree on a replacement for the prime minister, Adel Abdel Mahdi, who resigned in December but has stayed on in a caretaker role.

And while parliament has passed a new law to oversee parliamentary elections, it falls short of protesters’ demands and has yet to be signed into law by the president.

The delays have infuriated protesters, and even Iraq’s top Shiite religious authority and the United Nations have criticised authorities for failing to enact reform.

The government has also come under fire for not doing enough to protect journalists in the country.

Iraqi authorities this week suspended Al Dijla television station for a month, media and police sources said Tuesday.

“Interior ministry forces fully shut down Al Dijla’s offices in Baghdad last night and respectfully asked the staff to leave,” a source from the broadcaster told AFP.

US ‘outraged’ at rockets 

An interior ministry official confirmed that security forces had stormed the offices in east Baghdad late Monday.

The Al-Dijla employee said the station’s headquarters in Amman had even been ordered by Jordanian authorities to halt broadcasting, after Iraqi authorities filed a complaint.

Starting Monday, the frequency on which Al-Dijla typically broadcasts has showed a still image of its logo.

The channel has provided daily coverage of the anti-government protests, despite pressure on its staff.

Its Baghdad office was raided in the first week of rallies, one of its correspondents and his cameraman were gunned down in Basra and an anchorman was involved in an on-air row with the premier’s military spokesman.

The protests are playing out against a backdrop of heightened tensions between Iran and the US that have threatened to spill over into Iraqi territory.

Washington has blamed Tehran-aligned groups for a spate of nearly 20 rockets attacks against the US embassy in Baghdad and Iraqi bases where American troops are deployed.

The latest rocket attack on the US embassy on Sunday left one person wounded.

In a call to Abdel Mahdi, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “expressed his outrage at the continued assaults by Iran’s armed groups against US facilities in Iraq”, the State Department said in a statement.

Iraq’s foreign ministry earlier said the attack would not impact US-Iraqi relations, although Abdel Mahdi and parliament speaker Mohammed Halbusi said it risked dragging their homeland into a new war.

DUBAI — Yemen's Houthi rebels made gains against government troops north and east of Sanaa on Monday, seizing a strategic road in deadly fighting, loyalist military officials told AFP.

The pro-government sources said the rebels had captured the route that connects Sanaa to the provinces of Marib, to the east, and Jawf to the north.

Dozens have been killed or wounded in the fighting around Sanaa in the past 48 hours, according to these military sources, but they were not able to give precise figures.

"The Houthis are now seeking to take Hazm, the capital of Jawf province," one official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The rebels were now just five kilometres from the city, this source added.

Before the latest upsurge in fighting, Jawf province had been mostly controlled by the Houthis, with its capital still in the hands of the government.

Marib province is partly under Houthi control, with its capital also held by the government.

The renewed fighting, which erupted nearly two weeks ago, included a January 18 missile strike on a loyalist military camp that killed 116 people.

At the United Nations, the flare-up prompted Britain to request a Security Council meeting which will be held Tuesday some time after 15:00 GMT, diplomats said.

The closed-door meeting could yield a joint statement, one of the diplomats said. The UN's envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, is scheduled to give a report on the situation in Yemen via video link, the diplomat added.

The clashes have shattered a period of relative calm in a country devastated by five years of war.

On Monday a missile struck a popular market west of the city of Taiz in south-western Yemen, killing three civilians and wounding seven others, according to the Saba news agency, which blamed the Houthis for the attack.

The war in Yemen pits the Iran-backed Houthis against the internationally recognised government which since 2015 has been reinforced by a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and its allies, including the United Arab Emirates.

On Friday, the government acknowledged the Houthis' progress, saying it had carried out a "tactical withdrawal" of its own troops from certain positions east of Sanaa, some of which it had held for three years.

In a report published on Friday, the International Crisis Group said the Huthis "appeared to be making the biggest gains on the battlefield".

The think tank warned that if the renewed fighting spread, it would represent "a devastating blow to current efforts to end the war".

The conflict has left tens of thousands of people dead, mainly civilians, and triggered what the United Nations has said is the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

PARIS — Hydrocarbon gases bubbling from the bottom of the Red Sea are polluting the atmosphere at a rate equivalent to the emissions of some large fossil fuel exporting countries, researchers said Tuesday.

The gases seeping from the waters — which are ringed by the resorts and ports of several countries, including Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — then mix with emissions from industrial shipping and turned into noxious pollutants that are very harmful to human health.

The Middle East holds more than half of the world's oil and gas reserves and the intense fossil fuel exploitation that takes place there, and the region releases enormous amounts of gaseous pollutants into the atmosphere.

But during a 2017 expedition around the Gulf, researchers at the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry noticed that levels of ethane and propane in the air above the northern Red Sea were up to 40 times higher than predicted, even accounting for regional manmade emissions.

The team analysed possible sources for the gas emissions, including traffic, agriculture, burning of biomass, and power generation from hydrocarbons.

They came to an unexpected conclusion: the two gases had to be seeping out of the sea bed after escaping natural subterranean oil and gas reservoirs.

They were then carried by currents to the surface, where they mix with another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, which is emitted in high amounts by industrial shipping.

The resulting gas compounds are extremely harmful to human health, according to the team's study, published in Nature Communications.

"I have to admit that I was surprised myself with these results," lead author Efstratios Boursoukidis told AFP.

"We spent almost two years working on this dataset to confidently prove that the emissions were coming some two kilometres below the sea surface."

The team calculated that the rate of ethane and propane leakage was "comparable in magnitude" to those of several hydrocarbon exporting nations, such as the United Arab Emirates or Kuwait.

The emissions result in another source of atmospheric methane, a potent greenhouse gas, the study said.

The situation is exacerbated by nitrous oxide pollution from the large number of shipping containers passing through the northern Red Sea, one of Earth's busiest transport lanes.

And it's only likely to get worse as the route gets busier.

"In the coming decades, ship traffic through the Red Sea and Suez Canal is expected to continue to increase, with a concomitant rise in nitrogen oxide emissions," said Boursoukidis.

"We expect that such increase will amplify the role of this source, leading to significant deterioration of the regional air quality."

NEAR MAARET AL NUMAN, Syria — The Syrian army was poised Monday to enter Maaret Al Numan, a town of symbolic and strategic importance in the country's last major opposition bastion that is deserted after months of bombardment.

Maaret Al Numan is a strategic prize lying on the M5 highway linking Damascus to Syria's second city Aleppo, a main artery coveted by the regime.

It is also the second biggest city in the beleaguered northwestern province of Idlib, the last stronghold of anti-government forces and home to some 3 million people — half of them displaced by violence in other areas.

The Syrian army has since Friday seized around 18 towns and villages around the city, reaching its eastern outskirts, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday.

They have also cut a section of the M5 leading north from Maaret Al Numan to Idlib city, the observatory and the pro-government Al Watan newspaper reported.

Retaking full control of the highway is essential to the government's efforts to rekindle a moribund economy.

The fighting has forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee their homes, with hundreds of vehicles on Monday packing a road leading out of the flashpoint region under heavy bombardment.

"Maaret Al Numan is nearly besieged," said observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman, explaining that regime forces were now stationed south, east and north of the city.

Pincer movement 

Abdel Rahman said Damascus loyalists were now pushing from the west and northwest in a bid to tighten the noose around the opposition holdout.

An AFP correspondent in the region said regime forces were also trying to reach the city’s south-western edges to prevent rebels and extremists from falling back.

Idlib and nearby areas of Aleppo and Latakia provinces are dominated by the Hayat Tahrir Al Sham extremist group, led by members of the country’s former Al Qaeda franchise.

In recent months, the regime of President Bashar Assad has chipped away territory under extremist control in the four provinces, despite several ceasefire agreements.

Assad has repeatedly vowed to reassert control over the whole of Syria.

An AFP correspondent said Maaret Al Numan had become a ghost town, but the observatory maintained that some civilians had remained in the area despite the escalation.

Fearing further regime advances, residents of several towns and villages located north of Maarat Al Numan, have started to flee, the observatory and an AFP correspondent said.

Pick-up trucks carrying entire families from the town of Saraqib and the Jabal Al Zawiya region packed a road leading north towards the border with Turkey, said an AFP correspondent.

The vehicles were crammed with mattresses, clothes and household appliances, many belonging to families who had previously fled Maaret Al Numan.

‘Towards the unknown’ 

Sitting in the front seat of a pick-up truck, Umm Hussein used a tissue paper to dab tears off her face, her watery blue eyes glistening from behind the car window.

“I have left behind my relatives and even my daughter... who is on the verge of giving birth” said the mother of seven from the Jabal Al Zawiya region, her voice breaking as she spoke.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to them, I don’t know what’s going to happen to my daughter,” she added, saying there weren’t enough vehicles to get them out.

Since December 1, some 358,000 Syrians have been displaced from their homes in the Idlib region, most of them women and children, the United Nations says.

Some 38,000 of those fled violence between January 15 and 19 alone.

A ceasefire announced by Moscow earlier this month was supposed to protect Idlib from further attacks, but never took hold.

Aid agencies and relief groups have warned that further violence could fuel what may potentially become the largest wave of displacement seen during Syria’s civil war.

“This latest escalation will only add to the humanitarian catastrophe that is already unfolding in Idlib,” the International Rescue Committee’s Misty Buswell said.

Syrian government forces now control around 70 per cent of the country.

BAGHDAD — Anti-government demonstrators rebuilt torched protest camps across Iraq on Monday, seeking to keep up their movement's momentum after a rocket attack on the US embassy in Baghdad threatened an escalation.

The attack, which wounded one person, marked a dangerous shift after volleys of rockets in recent months targeted Iraqi military bases where American troops are deployed.

No faction has claimed responsibility, but the US has repeatedly blamed Iran-backed military factions for previous incidents.

The latest attack sparked renewed fears that Baghdad could be dragged into a conflict between Tehran and Washington, weeks after tensions spiked following the US killing in Baghdad of a top Iranian general.

Anti-government activists fear such a conflict would derail their movement, the largest grassroots campaign Iraq has seen in decades.

They also fear a crackdown after losing the support of powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, who backed the rallies when they first erupted then abruptly changed his mind Friday after holding his own anti-US rally.

University students have carried the torch, gathering in the thousands in Baghdad and the Shiite-majority south to insist on their demands and affirm their political independence.

“When we first came out to protest and hold sit-ins, we didn’t commit to the narrative of the Sadrist movement or any other political party,” said Zainab Mohammad, a university student in the shrine city of Karbala.

“We came out on our own, and we will continue until our demands our met,” she said.

Funeral march in Najaf 

Protesters are demanding snap elections, an independent successor to resigned prime minister Adel Abdel Mahdi and the prosecution of those implicated in corruption or recent bloodshed.

Angered by a lack of progress, they began ramping up pressure a week ago, sealing streets with burning tyres and metal barricades. Riot police have responded with live rounds and tear gas.

Early on Monday, unidentified gunmen stormed a protest camp in the flashpoint southern city of Nasiriyah and torched tents, an AFP correspondent there said.

The attackers fired on activists who had been sleeping there, killing one and wounding four others, a medic said.

But hours later, determined protesters had erected new tents and even built a one-room cement installation, signalling their determination to stay put.

In the oil-rich but impoverished port city of Basra, student protesters reerected tents dismantled by authorities over the weekend, AFP’s reporter said.

The main protest camp in the Shiite holy city of Najaf was also burned down overnight by unidentified gunmen, but protesters jumped into action on Monday morning, blocking roads with burning tyres.

In the early afternoon, a funeral march made its way through the city to mourn the young man killed earlier in the day in Nasiriyah, identified as 14-year-old Ali Zuweir.

Relatives carried Zuweir’s coffin through Najaf, a favoured burial place for Iraqi Shiites, holding up his portrait and weeping loudly.

This week’s uptick in violence has killed 21 protesters, bringing the toll since October close to 480 dead, the vast majority demonstrators, according to an AFP tally compiled from medics and security sources.

PM warns of broader war 

Sadr’s march on Friday saw thousands turn out to demand American troops leave the country, after the US used Iraqi airspace to carry out a drone strike on top Iranian and Iraqi officials on
January 3.

Outraged, Iraq’s parliament voted on January 5 in favour of ousting all foreign forces, including the 5,200 US troops deployed in Iraq.

Pro-Iran factions in Iraq, particularly those tied to the Hashed Al Shaabi military force, had long lobbied for the ouster of American forces.

On Monday, top Hashed commander Qais Al Khazali said any candidate being considered to replace Abdel Mahdi, who has stayed on in a caretaker capacity, must pledge to execute parliament’s vote and oust foreign troops.

Other conditions for the new premier included holding snap parliamentary elections by the end of the year and implementing a landmark development deal with China.

Washington has blamed hardline Hashed factions, including Khazali’s Asaib Ahl Al Haq for rocket attacks on the US embassy and American troops in recent months.

On Sunday evening, three rockets slammed into the US embassy in Iraq’s capital, wounding one person, according to a senior Iraqi official and a US diplomatic source.

No details were available on whether the casualty was a US national or an Iraqi member of staff at the mission.

The US embassy did not respond to requests for comment, while the US State Department called on Iraq to “fulfil its obligations to protect our diplomatic facilities”.

Iraq’s foreign ministry said the attack would not impact US-Iraqi relations, although Abdel Mahdi and parliament speaker Mohammed Halbusi said the incident risked dragging their homeland into war.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi security forces shot live rounds to clear protests in Baghdad and the south for a second day on Sunday, but thousands of determined students flooded the streets to keep up their movement. 

Violence has resurged in the capital and Shiite-majority south this week, with more than 15 people killed as anti-government activists ramped up their road closures and sit-ins while security forces sought to snuff out the campaign.

On Saturday, four demonstrators were shot dead as riot police stormed protest camps across the country, according to medics, stoking fears of a broader crackdown. 

But thousands of students rallied on Sunday, waving Iraqi flags and holding up two fingers in a victory sign. 

“Only for you, Iraq!” read a sign held by a young protester in the shrine city of Karbala, hinting at the movement’s insistence on not being affiliated with any political party or outside backer. 

In Basra, hundreds of students gathered to condemn the riot police’s dismantling of their main protest camp the previous day, according to an AFP correspondent.

They also led the way in Kut, erecting new tents to replace those taken down the previous day, and in Najaf, blocking off main roads with burning tyres. 

In Baghdad, university students marched from a campus in the city centre to the main rally area of Tahrir Square. 

Riot police fired live rounds and tear gas at clusters of young protesters in the nearby Khallani and Wathba squares, but protesters threw rocks and Molotov cocktails to keep them back. 

At least 17 protesters were wounded, a police source said.

Security forces have stopped short of entering Tahrir Square itself, where many tents have been dismantled but remaining protesters have pledged to stand their ground. 

UN urges action 

In the southern city of Nasiriyah, security forces Sunday also fired live rounds to disperse protesters who were angered by authorities pushing them out of roads around their main protest camp in Habbubi Square. 

At least 75 protesters suffered bullet wounds and around 100 were impacted by tear gas in brief skirmishes, a medical source told AFP. 

The youth-dominated protests erupted on October 1 in outrage over lack of jobs, poor services and rampant corruption.

They spiralled into outraged calls for a government overhaul after they were met with violence.

Protesters are now specifically demanding snap elections, the appointment of an independent premier and the prosecution of anyone implicated in corruption or recent bloodshed.

Parliament has passed a new electoral law and Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi submitted his resignation in December, but he still serves in a caretaker role and authorities have otherwise failed to act on the protesters’ demands.

“Unaccountability and indecisiveness are unworthy of Iraqi hopes, courageously expressed for four months now,” the United Nations’ top Iraq official, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said on Saturday.

“While death and injury tolls continue to rise, steps taken so far will remain hollow if not completed.”

Sadr drops support 

Activists have long worried that their movement could be snuffed out after firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr dropped his support on Friday.

The notoriously fickle militia leader-turned-politician backed the protests when they first started and called on the government to resign — even though he controls the largest bloc in parliament and top ministerial posts. 

Sadr’s supporters had widely been recognised as the best-organised and well-stocked protesters in Tahrir Square. 

But after holding an anti-US rally in Baghdad on Friday that was attended by thousands, Sadr said he no longer wanted to be involved in the separate regime change movement.

Within hours, his supporters were dismantling their tents in protest camps across the country and riot police began moving in. 

Analysts said Sadr was striving to both maintain his street credibility and win favour with Iraq’s powerful neighbour Iran.

Sadr has complex ties with Tehran. He is completing advanced religious studies in the Iranian holy city of Qom, but has often worked against Iranian-backed parties in Iraqi politics.

Iran holds tremendous political and military sway in Iraq and will likely have a major say in who Abdel Mahdi’s replacement will be. 

Talks over the next premier remain deadlocked in the absence of two key brokers — Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi military powerhouse Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis.

Both were killed in a US drone strike on Baghdad on January 3, which outraged Iraq and fuelled calls for the 5,200 US troops deployed there to leave.