Region

BEIRUT — Lebanon's army said on Wednesday it detained 16 people during a third night of violence across the country, as tensions increased following more than 40 days of unprecedented protests.

Clashes erupted on Tuesday evening in Tripoli, the northern port city where protests have maintained momentum since anti-government demonstrations began on October 17.

On the outskirts of Beirut, clashes shook the neighbourhoods of Ain Al Remmaneh and Chiyah. 

"Army units arrested 16 people following incidents that shook several areas of Lebanon", a statement read, adding that 51 troops were wounded.

In Tripoli, dozens of people were wounded when "dissenters" attacked banks, breaking windows and destroying money machines, the official ANI news agency reported.

They had previously tried to attack offices of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a Christian party founded by President Michel Aoun, and the army fired in the air to disperse them, ANI said.

However, activists on social networks blamed thugs for "infiltrating" protests.

The army said 33 soldiers in Tripoli were wounded by stones and petrol bombs. A grenade hurled at soldiers failed to explode, the statement said.

South of Beirut, the military intervened to end clashes between inhabitants of the Christian district of Ain Al Remmaneh and the Shiite Muslim suburb of Chiyah, local media reported.

The trouble began after a video circulated on WhatsApp showing Ain Al Remmaneh residents insulting the head of powerful Shiite movement Hizbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. The clip was later shown to be old.

Tensions regularly erupt in this area which saw the first clashes of the 1975-1990 civil war.

On Wednesday, dozens of people assembled in Ain Al Remmaneh to denounce the nocturnal violence.

In the east Beirut district of Bikfaya, clashes erupted between backers of two rival Christian parties, after Phalangist supporters blocked a march organised by FPM supporters, ANI reported.

Since the start of protests against a ruling class deemed inept and corrupt, demonstrations have remained largely peaceful, despite sporadic clashes with security forces or attacks by supporters of various political factions.

Tensions have grown since Sunday, with attacks by supporters of Shiite parties Hizbollah and Amal on protests in central Beirut, Tyre in the south and Baalbek in the east.

BAGHDAD — A protester was shot dead Tuesday in the Iraqi capital and dozens more were wounded across the country's south, where burning tyres blocked highways and thick black smoke blanketed its restive cities.

The casualties in clashes with security forces were the latest episode of violence in the nearly two-month-old grassroots movement demanding the total overhaul of Iraq's political class.

At least 350 people have been killed and around 15,000 wounded since the protests broke out on October 1 in Baghdad and the Shiite-majority south.

The latest victim fell in Baghdad, shot by a rubber bullet near Al Ahrar bridge, which leads to a cluster of government buildings on the west bank of the river Tigris.

Fearing protesters would cross it to storm those offices, security forces have sealed off Al Ahrar and used volleys of tear gas, rubber bullets and live fire to keep crowds back.

Demonstrators — most of them teenagers — throw rocks from behind their own makeshift barricades in daily skirmishes that have transformed the historic heart of Baghdad into a flashpoint.

The clashes left another 18 demonstrators wounded near Al Ahrar on Tuesday, according to a medical source.

Many of the young men had been there for days or weeks without going home, with one telling AFP: “We won’t leave unless it’s in coffins”.

‘No family, no home’ 

“Either way, I’ve got no job, no money, so whether I stay here or go home, it’s all the same,” said another.

An Iraqi tricolour tied around his shoulders, he went on bitterly: “I’ll never be able to get married without work or a salary, so I’ve got no family and no home anyway.”

Coloured smoke bombs went off all around them, filling the colonnaded streets with puffs of orange, green and purple.

In the south, it was protesters themselves who were responsible for smoke.

They burned tyres along highways outside the city of Diwaniyah, blockading main bridges and one of the province’s three power stations.

In the city itself, massive crowds marched through the streets, tearing down posters of politicians and drumming on them with their shoes to insult them.

“It’s been two months, we’re sick of your promises,” they chanted.

Schools and public buildings have been shut in Diwaniyah for the past month by strikes and road closures, but skirmishes with riot police have been rare.

In nearby Hillah, the usually peaceful sit-ins took a violent turn overnight when security forces fired tear gas grenades at protesters, wounding around 60, medics said.

Demonstrators and security forces in the Shiite holy city of Karbala lobbed Molotov cocktails at each another.

Nighttime skirmishes have become routine in the city, but on Tuesday they carried on into midday and live fire could be heard ringing out in the afternoon, an AFP reporter said.

In Dhi Qar, arteries linking key cities and the three oilfields of Garraf, Nasiriyah and Subba were shut.

Clashes with police guarding the fields left 13 officers wounded.

Glimpses of looming crisis 

The three oilfields together produce around 200,000 of Iraq’s roughly 3.6 million barrels a day.

Iraq is ranked OPEC’s second-biggest crude producer and, according to Transparency International, the world’s 12th most corrupt country.

The turmoil since the start of October has not significantly impacted oil production or exports, which fund virtually all of the country’s state budget.

Iraq’s Cabinet is currently discussing the 2020 budget before it is submitted to parliament and government sources say it is expected to be one of the country’s largest yet.

That is mostly due to the enormous public sector, which has ballooned in recent years as the government has hired tens of thousands of new graduates in a country with a severely under-developed private sector.

But experts say that model is unsustainable for a country of nearly 40 million people, set to grow by another 10 million in the next decade.

Indeed, public anger over a lack of jobs fueled the latest grassroots protests, which are Iraq’s most widespread — and deadliest — in decades.

One in five people lives below the poverty line and youth unemployment hovers at a staggering 25 per cent, according to the World Bank.

ISTANBUL — A car bomb killed at least 17 people and wounded 20 others in the Turkish-controlled region of northern Syria on Tuesday, Turkey's defence ministry said.

The attack took place in the Tall Halaf village west of the city of Ras Ayn, which is now controlled by the Turkish military after its offensive in October, the ministry said on its official Twitter account.

It blamed the attack on the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara accuses of being the Syrian offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has waged an insurgency against Turkey since 1984.

“The PKK/YPG terror group continues its car bombings aimed at civilians. The child murderers this time detonated a car bomb in Tal Halaf village west of Ras Al  Ayn, killing 17 people and wounding more than 20,” the defence ministry said on Twitter.

Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the attack but gave a lower toll, saying 11 people — including at least three civilians — had been killed.

But it said the death toll is likely to climb due to the severity of some of the injuries suffered.

Turkish forces and their proxies — former Syrian rebels hired as a ground force by Ankara — launched an offensive against Kurdish forces in Syria on October 9.

The military action came after US President Donald Trump ordered his troops to withdraw in a move that observers condemned as a betrayal of their Kurdish partners in the war against the Daesh terror group in Syria.

In its operation, Turkey secured a strip of land in northern Syria after signing separate deals with the US and Russia.

Ankara says it wants to establish a “safe zone” in which to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees it hosts on its soil.

RIYADH — The Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen's Houthi rebels said Tuesday it will release 200 insurgents, as efforts pick up pace to end the conflict in the impoverished country.

Patients needing medical care will also be allowed to be flown out of Sanaa airport, which has been closed to commercial flights since 2016, coalition spokesman Turki Al Maliki said, quoted by the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

The coalition had decided "to release 200 prisoners of the Houthi militia" and to facilitate "in cooperation with the World Health Organisation flights carrying people in need of medical care from Sanaa".

The initiative coincides with a lull in Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and after a senior official in Riyadh said the kingdom had established an "open channel" with the rebels.

"We have had an open channel with the Houthis since 2016. We are continuing these communications to support peace in Yemen," the official told reporters in the Saudi capital.

"We don't close our doors with the Houthis," he said.

The official declined to be identified and did not elaborate, but the development came after a lull in recent weeks following a spike in rebel missile and drone attacks on Saudi cities over the summer.

The comment came after Saudi Arabia separately brokered a power-sharing agreement between the Yemeni government and southern separatists.

Last Friday, UN envoy Martin Griffiths said the rate of coalition air strikes had sharply fallen over the past two weeks, in an apparent sign that "something is changing in Yemen".

On Monday, however, coalition air raids killed eight Houthi rebels near the key western port of Hodeida, local officials said.

Yemen's warring parties agreed under a deal brokered in Sweden last December to exchange 15,000 prisoners, but the accord has not been fully implemented.

The coalition freed seven Houthi prisoners in January, and the rebels released 290 coalition fighters in September.

The Houthi rebels hold the capital Sanaa while the Saudi led-military coalition controls Yemen’s maritime borders and airspace.

Sanaa airport has been closed for the past three years, with only UN and humanitarian flights allowed in and out.

Last year, wounded rebels were flown out of Sanaa for treatment, in what was seen as a key step ahead of the December peace talks.

Maliki said on Monday the coalition’s latest initiative was an attempt to resolve the crisis in Yemen, where it intervened in 2015 in support of the country’s internationally recognised government.

GENEVA — A Yemeni lawyer who exposed secret prisons and torture, a Mexican champion fighting femicide and a South African women's rights activist were nominated on Tuesday for a top human rights prize.

This marks the first time that the Martin Ennals Award jury has presented three women finalists to be in the running for the prestigious award.

The winner will be announced in Geneva on February 19, 2020.

Among the finalists for the award — often referred to as the Nobel Prize for human rights — is 42-year-old Yemeni lawyer Huda Al Sarari, who has worked with a range of rights organisations to expose a network of secret prisons run by foreign governments in Yemen since 2015.

That year, the Saudis intervened in Yemen at the head of a military coalition against Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who had seized control of the capital Sanaa.

Since then, tens of thousands have died in the conflict, most of them civilians, and millions more have been driven to the brink of famine, according to humanitarian organisations.

Al Sarari has in recent years unveiled the existence of several secret detention centres where "the worst violations of human rights were committed: Torture, disappearances or even extrajudicial executions", the award organisers said in a statement.

She "collected evidence on more than 250 cases of abuse taking place within the prisons and succeeded in convincing international organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to take up the cause", they said.

The lawyer was hailed for pushing on with her pursuit of justice despite threats and defamation campaigns against her and her family

 Fighting femicide 

Another finalist is Norma Ledezma, a 53-year-old Mexican human rights activist who began working to fight femicide and support the families of victims after her daughter, Paloma, disappeared on her way home from school in Chihuahua.

Mexico has the most femicides of any country in Latin America, according to Amnesty International.

There are more than nine such murders in the country every day, according to UN Women.

Ledezma is one of the founders and the director of Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas, a local organisation that offers legal counsel and support to ongoing cases, and is involved with a range of other victims' assistance organisations.

She has supported over 200 investigations into cases of femicide and disappearances, on behalf of both male and female victims, and is also responsible for the creation of a Special Prosecutor for Women Victims of Violence in Chihuahua.

"In spite of having received numerous death threats, she continues with her human rights work," organisers said.

The third finalist is Sizani Ngubane, a 73-year-old South African activist for women's and indigenous people's rights.

She began her career as an activist with the ANC, before going on to found the Rural Women's Movement, which works against gender-based violence and for women's rights to land, education, property and inheritance.

The Geneva-based Martin Ennals Foundation is named after the first secretary general of Amnesty International, who died in 1991.

The prize is judged by 10 leading rights groups, including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.