Region

RIYADH — Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians agreed on Thursday to establish a joint economic committee and a business council, as the Palestinian Authority faces a financing gap that could top $1.8 billion.

The PA has been in deep financial crisis since February when Israel froze transfers of VAT and customs duties it collects on the Palestinians' behalf.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' administration had to impose austerity measures, cutting almost half the salaries of its employees.

Abbas, who arrived in Riyadh on Wednesday, met with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, according to the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

It added that the leaders reached "an agreement on the establishment of a joint economic committee and on a Saudi-Palestinian business council".

The report did not elaborate further.

The announcement came days after Saudi Arabia's football team played Palestine in the occupied West Bank for the first time on Tuesday, with the Saudi side having previously refused to enter the territory as part of its boycott of Israel.

Israel’s cuts have hit hard on the Palestinian occupied territories, already suffering unemployment of around 26 percent in the second quarter of 2019, the World Bank said last month in a report.

Israel collects around $190 million a month in customs duties levied on goods destined for Palestinian markets that transit through its ports, and it is supposed to transfer the money to the PA.

In February, Israel decided to deduct around $10 million a month from the revenues — the sum the PA paid inmates in Israeli jails or their families — prompting the Palestinians to refuse to take any funds at all.

US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner during a conference in Bahrain dangled the prospect of $50 billion of investment into a stagnant Palestinian economy.

But the plan so far fails to address key issues such as an independent Palestinian state, Israeli occupation and the Palestinians’ right to return to homes from which they were expelled after Israel’s creation in 1948.

BEIRUT — Kurdish authorities in north-eastern Syria on Thursday called for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians from a flashpoint border town encircled by Ankara's forces, as Turkey's offensive entered its ninth day.

Turkish troops and their Syrian proxies have fully encircled Ras Al Ain, a key border town where Kurdish fighters have been putting up stiff resistance.

"It is the first real advance of the Turkish forces inside the city, following fierce resistance by the Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF]," the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.

Massively outgunned by the Turkish army and its airforce, the Kurdish administration pleaded to allow civilians to exit the town that Turkey aims to capture.

It called for "urgent intervention to open a safe humanitarian corridor to evacuate dead and wounded civilians trapped in Ras Al Ain".

Ankara's Syrian proxies — mostly Arab and Turkmen former rebels they use as a ground force — hit a hospital in the town on Thursday, trapping patients and staff inside, the observatory said.

The monitor said the extent of damage in the facility was not yet clear.

The attack came as violent clashes raged inside the town, according to the observatory and Syrian rebel fighters.

"The battles are at their most intense," said Abu Imran Al Homsi, a rebel commander fighting alongside Ankara's forces.

"We have surrounded [Ras Al Ain] from all sides and cut off supply lines," another rebel commander told AFP.

Observatory head Rami Abdul Rahman said that Ankara's forces had taken about half of the town by Thursday morning.

"There have been intensive air strikes on Ras Al Ain over the past three days," he said.

Kurdish-led SDF forces quickly lost a long stretch of border when Turkey launched its assault on October 9.

They organised a defence of Ras Al Ain, however, with a network of tunnels, berms and trenches that held off Turkish forces and their proxies for about a week.

An AFP correspondent on the Turkish side of the Ras Al Ain front line said there was constant gunfire and blasts from artillery and air strikes.

Turkey aims to create a 30-kilometre-deep buffer on the Syrian side of the border to keep Kurdish militias at bay and set up a resettlement zone for some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees living on its soil.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has so far ignored international pressure to halt the offensive, which the observatory says has left dozens of civilians dead and displaced more than 300,000 people.

AL ZAWAIDA, Palestinian Territories — It was the summer of 2014, when a deluge of steel fell on Gaza. His back burned, his body covered in bandages, Yamin screamed from his hospital bed.

The boy had just lost 19 members of his extended family in a bombing.

Bursts of shrapnel were trapped in his body and nurses spread ointment on his raw skin as he lay in the burns unit of Al Shifa Hospital preparing for plastic surgery.

It was during yet another war between Gaza militants — led by Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the enclave, and Islamic Jihad — and the Israeli military.

Just after midnight on the Muslim celebration of Eid Al Fitr, an Israeli plane dropped a bomb on a building where Yamin's family had gathered in the centre of the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military maintained it housed a Hamas command centre with militants inside.

In an instant, 19 people were killed, including six children. Yamin, just three at the time, and his sister Geina, only several months old, survived. But they are orphans.

Five years later, AFP found Yamin.

The door at a home in central Gaza opened, and behind it appeared a boy with sparkling eyes and brown hair.

His new parents appear. Yamin, with a mischievous smile, runs, plays, laughs and dances in the courtyard of the house with sand-coloured walls.

Yamin's uncle, Adnan, has become his father and his aunt, Yasmine Abu Jabbar, who was his mother's best friend, became his new mum.

"All the neighbours witnessed it. Yamin cried night after night," said Yasmine, her brown eyes peering from behind her niqab.

"For a year, Yamin asked me 'where is my mother? How to get to her?' The concept of death is already difficult to understand for an adult. Imagine for a three-year-old boy."

 'Not alone' 

Yasmine teaches at a primary school in Al Nuseirat, where children dressed in worn jerseys kick up dust at sunset playing football.

She said she tried everything possible to help Yamin find some form of normality.

"The first step was to tell him, 'Yamin, look around you. You are not alone. Many children have lost their parents and their families, but you still have a family. We are your family.'"

Yamin now lives surrounded by his new parents and his five brothers and sisters. He attends the primary school where his adopted mother teaches.

He likes Galaxy chocolate, Lionel Messi and PUBG, a combat video game rivalling Fortnite. He also likes school. But not too much.

His back is scarred, his skin still burns sometimes, and his left forearm remains deformed, which has occasionally led to mockery.

"When he began pre-school, the children made fun of him," Yasmine said.

"One day he came to the house crying 'I don't want to wear t-shirts anymore.' I ran to the pre-school and I asked the children: 'Which one of you has super powers?'

"No one said a word. Then I said: 'Yamin has them. He has an iron arm. He can fight a rocket with his bare hands.' After that, Yamin began to believe that he was a superhero like Iron Man."

 'Climb all walls' 

The 2014 war left 2,251 dead on the Palestinian side, the majority civilians, and 74 on the Israeli side, most of them soldiers.

Five years later, broken asphalt and residential towers have been replaced in Gaza, but the story is not over for survivors.

In his glossy offices overlooking the Mediterranean, Raji Sourani and his army of lawyers keep records of around 1,000 Palestinians killed.

Sourani, founder of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, who has demanded Israel open a war crimes investigation, said Yamin and his relatives had the right to know what happened.

"There was no reason whatsoever to legitimise any harm for this family, either bombing them, killing them, or injuring them," he said.

But "until this moment, we didn't receive a single answer in the last five years".

Contacted by AFP, Israel's army said a preliminary inquiry had been carried out, but "there was no reasonable suspicion of committing a criminal offence".

The strike targeted a Hamas "active command and control centre", and those killed included "at least four military operatives belonging to terror organisations", it said.

It said militants there were "involved in military activities that endangered" Israeli soldiers.

"It was assessed that civilians were likely to be present in the building, but that the extent of the collateral damage expected to result from the attack would not be excessive in relation to the significant military advantage that was anticipated," the army said.

In the family home in Al Zawaida, Yasmine wiped away tears when remembering.

"You sink back into a nightmare, but at the same time I'm proud of myself when I look at Yamin," she said.

The little "Iron Man" of Gaza now says he actually prefers another superhero: Rajul Al Ankabut, or Spiderman in Arabic.

"Because with his superpowers, he can climb all walls."

By Guillaume Lavallee

CEYLANPINAR, Turkey — Turkey rebuffed international pressure to curb its military offensive against Kurdish militants in Syria on Wednesday as US President Donald Trump dispatched his deputy Mike Pence to Ankara to demand a ceasefire.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Turkey's operation — which has been facilitated by the withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria — would continue.

The only way to solve Syria's problems, Erdogan told parliament, was for the Kurdish forces to "lay down their arms... destroy all their traps and get out of the safe zone that we have designated".

But clashes continued across the region, with Kurdish fighters in the border town of Ras Al Ain burning tyres in a bid to blind Ankara’s warplanes and digging in against a ground offensive by Turkish-backed Syrian rebels.

“We are fully prepared to wage battles,” an official from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) told AFP. “The real battle has yet to start.”

Having struck a deal with Damascus over the weekend, Kurdish forces have joined with Syrian troops to take an abandoned US base between Kobani and Ain Issa, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Turkish operation, now in its second week, has triggered a flurry of diplomacy among major powers.

Trump sent Pence along with his top diplomat Mike Pompeo to Turkey amid the greatest crisis in relations for decades between the NATO allies, with talks due in Ankara early Thursday.

Facing a barrage of criticism in Washington for abandoning the Kurds, Trump has slapped sanctions on three Turkish ministers and raised tariffs on its steel industry.

Pence’s office said the US would pursue “punishing economic sanctions” unless there was “an immediate ceasefire”.

But Trump again dismissed the idea that pulling out 1,000 troops — practically the entire US contingent in the region — had been a betrayal of Kurdish militants who bore the brunt of the fight against Daesh in recent years.

“The Kurds are very well protected,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “By the way, they are not angels.”

Russia steps in 

Moscow has stepped into the void left by the US withdrawal, deploying patrols to prevent clashes between Syrian and Turkish forces.

Russian TV showed its forces alongside Syrian government troops taking up positions in and around the town of Manbij.

The Kremlin said it would host Erdogan for a meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in the coming days, to ensure the operation does not turn into all-out war between Turkey and Syria.

The Turkish government can count on widespread support for its operation at home, where decades of bloody insurgency by Kurdish militants have killed tens of thousands of people.

But Western powers fear it will endanger the battle against the Daesh terror group. Thousands of Daesh prisoners are held in Kurdish-run camps in the region.

Europe has taken an increasingly tough line with Turkey and several countries, including Britain, France and Germany, have imposed arms embargoes on Turkey over the operation.

Battle for border town 

The Kurdish-led SDF has mounted a desperate defence to the east of Ras Al Ain, using tunnels, berms and trenches.

A Syrian fighter serving alongside Ankara’s forces said his forces were trying to cut Kurdish supply lines from nearby Hassakeh to facilitate their advance on the town.

Since launching their assault on October 9, Turkey and its Syrian rebel proxies have secured more than 100 kilometres of border, but Ras Al Ain has held out.

Erdogan, who like Trump faces political difficulties at home, wants to create a buffer zone stretching 30 kilometres from the border into Syrian territory.

He wants to destroy Kurdish hopes of an autonomous enclave that could serve as a launching pad for attacks in Turkey, and to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees Ankara is hosting.

Erdogan said that once the safe zone was established, “stretching from Manbij to the Iraqi border”, then the operation would have “ended on its own”.

The offensive has left dozens of civilians dead, mostly on the Kurdish side, and displaced at least 160,000 people.

JUBA — Sudan peace talks stalled before they began in Juba on Wednesday as a key rebel grouping said it refused to negotiate with Khartoum, claiming government forces were still bombarding its territory.

Juba is hosting talks between the government of new prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, and representatives from two umbrella groups of rebels that fought forces of now ousted president Omar Bashir in Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan states.

The talks were launched on Monday in the presence of heads of state from Ethiopia, Egypt, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan.

The first face-to-face meeting between the adversaries was to take place in the South Sudan capital on Wednesday.

But Amar Amoua, secretary general of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement North (SPLM-N), told journalists his group would not continue unless the government withdrew from the area of the fighting, in the Nuba Mountains.

"Our coming back to negotiate... is bound by government decisions to clear all these things," Amoua, who is representing three different rebel movements, told journalists.

He said that for the past 10 days government forces had continued to attack their territory despite an unofficial ceasefire.

A chief was killed in the Nuba Mountains and several businessmen had gone missing, he charged.

"The government should withdraw its forces and stop... occupying new areas, we will not allow that," he said.

Dhieu Mathok, a member of the South Sudan mediation team, told AFP they were investigating the SPLM-N's complaints.

"We are still investigating it whether there are really attacks in those areas or not, but this will not stop the peace process. Usually in a negotiation these things happen but we are here to resolve the problems."

Mohammed Hassan, a spokesman for the Sudan delegation, attributed the fighting to an attack by herders on local merchants.

“The government regrets and condemns in the strongest terms these unfortunate events that keep happening in the area and in other parts of the country,” he said.

“We also regret that these events took place at a time when people are entering peace negotiations, and the country and the whole of the region is united for the cause of peace in Sudan.”

The new peace initiative comes after Bashir was toppled by the military in April.

Hamdok has been tasked with leading Sudan back to civilian rule, but he has said he also wants to end Khartoum’s conflicts with the rebels.

The years-long bloodshed has left hundreds of thousands of dead and forced millions to flee their homes.

BEIRUT — The prospect that thousands of the world’s most radical terrorist could break out in the chaos caused by Turkey’s invasion of north-eastern Syria is causing widespread alarm.

The Kurdish administration guarding those suspected members of the Daesh group is crumbling and their fate has never seemed more uncertain.

This is what we know about the detainees, whose fate has been a security and diplomatic hot potato for months:

How many

According to the Kurdish administration, there are around 12,000 suspected Daesh fighters in the custody of Kurdish security forces across north-eastern Syria.

At least 2,500 of them are non-Iraqi foreigners of more than 50 different nationalities. Tunisia is thought to have the biggest contingent.

Officials in Paris say 60 to 70 French nationals are among those held.

The rest are around 4,000 Syrians and roughly the same number of Iraqis.

Where

The fighters, who were detained mostly in the course of operations led by Kurdish forces and backed by the US-led coalition against Daesh, are detained in at least seven facilities.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) do not reveal the exact locations but some of them are known, including in Roj, in Dashisha, Jerkin, Navkur, Qamishli and Derik.

Given the high value of some of the detainees, the security levels at these facilities is poor. “They are only buildings” and not heavily fortified, said one top official.

Breakout risk

The SDF have warned its erstwhile coalition allies for months that if they needed to mobilise against a Turkish threat, guarding foreign prisoners would become “a second priority”.

With the US pulling out of the area, jailbreaks — a signature component of resurgence drives by Daesh earlier iterations — have become a real possibility.

The Kurds said five Daesh suspects escaped from Navkur last week but Washington stressed that no “major breakout” had yet been reported.

France also said on Wednesday that Turkey’s assault was not yet a threat to the detention facilities’ security.

Transfers

Turkey’s invasion has lent some added urgency, however, to the search for a future solution for these prisoners, whom the Kurds warn they cannot keep, let alone prosecute.

Western governments such as France have been reluctant to take them back, for lack of a clear legal framework and fears of a public backlash.

France and other governments have sought instead to transfer some of them to neighbouring Iraq, an option French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was expected to discuss in Baghdad this week.

Apparently anticipating the risk of jailbreaks, the United States took control of two of the most-profile Daesh detainees in the early hours of the Turkish offensive and spirited them out of the country.

Daesh relatives

The detained fighters have thousands of relatives — mostly women and children — held in other facilities, such as the infamous Al Hol camp, which is so overcrowded that wardens are struggling to control riots.

Another major facility housing so-called “Daesh families” is Ain Issa, which has found itself in the heart of the battlefield and from which around 800 people escaped on Sunday, Kurdish authorities say.

Some of them are since thought to have ben reintegrated in the camp, others to have crossed over to the Turkish side of the front line and others to have joind up with Daesh cells operating in the area.

As recently as Tuesday, a breakout attempt was foiled in Al Hol, an SDF official said.

Resurgence

Whether large-scale jailbreaks are prevented or not, the redeployment of SDF fighters away from the detention facilities to defend against the Turkish assault creates a security vacuum for Daesh to fill in the area.

The past few months have seen an increase in the number and scope of attacks by Daesh sleeper cells, that never stopped being active after the terror group lost the final fragment of its once sprawling “caliphate” in March.

TUNIS — Tunisia’s president-elect Kais Saied has won a clear mandate to fight corruption and promote social justice, even though his role focuses on security and diplomacy.

Here is an overview of key policy challenges facing the conservative newcomer:

Change in foreign policy? 

A constitutional law professor by trade, Saied has no real experience in foreign policy.

So far, he has proposed “principles more than a concrete road map”, according to former diplomat Taoufik Ouanes.

“While sticking to fundamentals, he will make adjustments to Tunisian diplomacy,” he said.

Tunis, which currently chairs the Arab League, “could renew diplomatic ties with Syria [ceased in 2012] and play a role in the return” of the war-torn country to the bloc.

Saied has made strong statements against Israel, considering any ties with Israel to be “high treason” — an Arab nationalist position that earned him praise among supporters.

Tunis currently has no diplomatic relations with Israel.

Ouanes added that Saied could also “call for a revision of the rules concerning foreign investment in the country”.

Tunisia is currently negotiating a trade deal with the European Union. Ouanes said Saied could “ask that the negotiations take Tunisia’s interests more into account”.

France, the former colonial power in Tunisia, called for an “expansion” of ties during a phone call between President Emmanuel Macron and Saied.

What are the 

security challenges? 

While the security situation has significantly improved since a series of attacks in 2015, Tunisia has maintained a state of emergency for four years, with assaults against security forces persisting.

On June 27, a suicide attack killed two people in the heart of the capital Tunis, reviving the spectre of violence.

During a televised debate ahead of Sunday’s run-off vote, Saied said a key to fighting terrorism was education, arguing that improving primary education would “immunise” youth against extremism.

He also said he considers access to healthcare and water a part of national security, hinting that he would like to be involved directly in improving these.

Another significant task is reforming the police, which was a cog in the dictatorship toppled by the 2011 revolt and which continues to be accused of human rights abuses.

Room to manoeuvre on the economy? 

Under the constitution, it is the government’s role to take the lead on the economy.

But given his strong voter backing, Saied could intervene in negotiations to form a government, or even in devising its economic and social policies.

Saied could also launch presidential initiatives — proposing bills to parliament or funds for youth employment, for example.

Many Tunisians hope that their president-elect, a man who owes nothing to the country’s economic elites, will bring more social justice.

 Is radical decentralisation possible? 

Saied has advocated direct democracy via local councils to better reflect “what the people want” in place of the party system in force in parliament.

But the assembly would likely look unfavourably on voting for its own dissolution.

To an extent the decentralisation of power, a key demand of the 2011 revolution, is already under way.

But the process has so far been slow, given the lack of political will.

A code for local authorities was adopted before the 2018 municipal elections, but less than a sixth of its decrees have been approved.

“Elected officials and ministries were opposed to power-sharing,” said Nessryne Jelalia, director of Tunisian NGO Al Bawsala.

“We now have a president and parties in parliament who have made it their campaign centrepiece,” she said.