Region

BEIJING — Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif kicked off his Asian tour in Beijing on Monday, presenting a 25-year plan to cement Iran’s ties with its biggest Asian trading partner amid biting US sanctions.

Zarif’s Asian tour — which also includes stopovers in Japan and Malaysia — comes fresh on the heels of a surprise visit to the G-7 summit in France over the weekend.

The summit in Biarritz saw a dramatic shift of focus when Zarif flew in at the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the diplomatic deadlock on Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme.

Iran’s top diplomat did not meet US President Donald Trump, French diplomats said, but the presence of the two men in the same place at least sparked hopes of detente. 

Zarif was a key architect of the 2015 nuclear deal reached between Iran, the United States, European powers, Russia and China. 

In Beijing, Zarif met with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi and said the pair had discussed a 25-year road map to strengthen economic cooperation between the two countries.

China has continued to purchase Iranian crude despite sanctions.

“We reject actions of interference by others in the affairs of progressive countries including Iran and China,” China’s foreign minister told reporters after the meeting with Zarif.

“We have stood together in dealing with these interventions and interferences and rejecting them as a major threat to international peace and security and friendly relations among countries.”

Trump’s policy of applying “maximum pressure” on Tehran via crippling sanctions has been criticised by European powers and China and is seen as raising the risk of conflict in the Middle East.

In July, the US government imposed heavy sanctions seeking to hamper Zarif’s travel, and effectively banning him from the United States.

Zarif tweeted that he was heading to Japan and Malaysia in the next leg of his Asian tour without offering details.

BEIRUT — Lebanon condemned an Israeli "aggression" on Sunday after two drones targeted the Beirut stronghold of the Iran-backed Shiite group Hizbollah, warning of further regional tensions.

Hizbollah, considered a terrorist organisation by Israel and the United States, is a major political actor in Lebanon and a key backer of the Damascus regime in war-torn Syria.

The early morning incident in south Beirut came hours after Israel said it had conducted air strikes in neighbouring Syria “to prevent an Iranian force from launching an attack” on Israel.

A war monitor said the air raids in the southeast of Damascus killed five fighters, including two Hizbollah members and an Iranian.

The Shiite movement and Israel have upped their belligerent rhetoric in recent months, after fighting several wars, the last of them in 2006.

Lebanon's army said "two drones belonging to the Israeli enemy violated Lebanese airspace... over the southern suburbs of Beirut", a Hizbollah stronghold in the capital.

"The first fell while the second exploded in the air causing material damage," he said.

A Hizbollah spokesman, Mohamed Afif, insisted his movement did not shoot down either of the two drones, but said the second aircraft had damaged a Hizbollah media centre in a residential building.

It "was laden with explosives and exploded causing huge damage to the media centre", Afif said, adding that shards from shattered window panes had caused "minor injuries".

'Threat to regional stability' 

"The first drone did not explode and it is now in the possession of Hizbollah which is analysing it."

He said the drone had a target, but that it had not yet been determined.

An AFP correspondent saw security forces deployed in the area of the incident.

Hizbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who has repeatedly warned Israel against carrying out attacks, was expected to speak at a pre-scheduled event later on Sunday.

Israeli forces declined to comment on the Lebanese claim about the drones, but Israeli commentators have suggested the drones could be Iranian.

“Another possibility is that the... drones that fell were not Israeli, but rather Iranian,” military correspondent Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz newspaper. 

Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun, an ally of Hizbollah, said the drone incursion targeted “stability and peace in Lebanon and the region”.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who is one of the Shiite group’s most prominent political opponents, condemned a “blatant attack on Lebanon’s sovereignty”.

“This new aggression... forms a threat to regional stability and an attempt to push the situation towards more tension,” he said.

Hariri also charged that it was in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon’s Hizbollah.

That 33-day war killed 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 in Israel.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later on Sunday called Hariri to stress the “necessity to avoid any escalation”, the premier’s office said.

‘Iran has no immunity anywhere’ 

Just hours before, the Israeli military claimed it had been able late Saturday to thwart an attempt by an Iranian force to attack northern Israel with drones using explosives.

Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria in 2011, Israel has conducted hundreds of strikes in Syria, most of them against what it says are Iranian and Hizbollah targets, but it rarely acknowledges its actions so swiftly.

Military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said the Israeli attack struck in Aqraba, southeast of Damascus, and targeted “terror targets and military facilities belonging to the Quds force [of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard] as well as Shiite militias”.

Conricus said while Iranian forces had launched rockets and missiles at Israel from Syria three times during 2018, the use of “kamikaze” attack drones was a new and “different tactic”.

“We’ve been tracking the Quds force attempt for... multiple weeks,” he said.

On Saturday, the military believed “that another attempted attack was imminent and that was what led to the decision to attack”, he claimed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said five fighters were killed, but a high-ranking official in Tehran denied Iranian positions had been hit.

A Syrian military source quoted by the state news agency SANA said anti-aircraft defences detected “enemy targets” late Saturday and responded.

Just minutes after Israel announced its raid, Netanyahu hailed what he termed a “major operational effort” in thwarting an attack.

“Iran has no immunity anywhere,” Netanyahu said. “Our forces operate in every sector against the Iranian aggression.”

BIARRITZ, France — Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif flew into Biarritz in southwestern France for the  G-7 summit on Sunday in an unexpected and dramatic attempt to break a diplomatic deadlock over Tehran's disputed nuclear programme.

Zarif's presence had not been announced and represented a risky attempt by French host Emmanuel Macron to find a way to soothe spiralling tensions between Iran and the United States.

He was not expected to hold face-to-face talks with US President Donald Trump, but the presence of the two men in the same place sparked hopes of a detente.

Zarif will “continue talks regarding the recent measures between the presidents of Iran and France”, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi tweeted, after flight tracking sites spotted that Zarif’s plane had landed in Biarritz.

The French presidency confirmed his arrival, but emphasised no talks were planned with the American side.

A French diplomat also suggested — without confirming — that Trump had been made aware of the arrival during an impromptu two-hour lunch with Macron on a hotel terrace on Saturday.

“We work with full transparency with the Americans,” the diplomat told reporters on condition of anonymity.

Also speaking in Biarritz, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that Trump had in the past said that if Iran “wants to sit down and negotiate he will not set preconditions”. 

‘Moving in right direction’ 

Macron held talks with Zarif in Paris on the eve of the  G-7 summit and has been leading efforts to bring Tehran and Washington back to the negotiating table.

Trump’s policy of applying “maximum pressure” on Tehran via crippling sanctions has been criticised by European powers and is seen as raising the risk of conflict in the Middle East.

Macron has urged the US administration to offer some sort of relief to Iran, such as lifting sanctions on oil sales to China and India, or a new credit line to enable exports.

“To start this approach we need President Trump to agree with the idea that we need to make a pause [in the ‘maximum pressure’ policy],” a French diplomat told reporters last week.

This is seen as a first step to get Iran back to the negotiating table, which could then lead to a new international agreement to limit its nuclear programme.

Speaking to AFP last week, Zarif said that Macron’s suggestions were “moving in the right direction, although we are not definitely there yet”.

Last year, Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of a landmark deal, of which Zarif had been a key architect, on the nuclear programme reached in 2015 between Iran, the US, European powers, Russia and China. 

Trade war doubts? 

Trump proclaimed Sunday that the  G-7 summit was going “beautifully”, but there was no masking over cracks between the US president and his allies on many issues.

Leaders of the  G-7 countries — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States — put on a united front as they spent a second day in the high-end French surfing town of Biarritz.

Trump arrived in Biarritz fresh from having drastically upped the ante in the trade war with China. 

European leaders lined up to press for caution and on Sunday Trump gave a glimmer of hope that he was reconsidering his all-or-nothing approach to the dispute between the world’s two biggest economies.

Asked whether he was having second thoughts about the trade war, Trump, in a rare moment of public self-doubt, replied: “I have second thoughts about everything.”

Then in an extraordinary turnaround, Trump’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said just hours later that the president had been understood.

He did have regrets, she said, but not what everyone thought.

“He regrets not raising the tariffs higher,” she explained.

At a breakfast meeting, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson became the latest of the  G-7 partners to urge Trump to step back from a trade war that critics fear could tip the world economy into recession.

“Just to register a faint, sheep-like note of our view on the trade war — we are in favour of trade peace on the whole,” Johnson told Trump.

Bashing the EU 

The meeting with Johnson, who is sometimes compared to a British version of the populist, nationalist Trump, underlined the White House’s dislike for the powerful European Union.

Trump has repeatedly threatened the EU with trade wars and right before his departure from Washington he warned that he would slap wine import tariffs on France if Macron does not retreat on a tax against US tech giants.

The jovial breakfast with Johnson, who is trying to steer the Brexit process taking Britain out of the EU, emphasised that budding new alliance.

Predicting that Johnson would manage to untangle the mess of Brexit, Trump described in typically undiplomatic terms the EU as “an anchor around their ankle”.

The 73-year-old US leader then promised Johnson a “very big trade deal, bigger than we’ve ever had”.

AL KHAZER, Iraq — Her tent is bare, she’s unemployed and her family relies on food donations. But Nihaya Issa was forced to pick an Iraqi camp over the unliveable ruins of her native city Mosul.

The northern city was freed from the Daesh group’s grip more than two years ago, but tens of thousands of Iraqis who fled Mosul into sprawling displacement camps have yet to move back home.

Many, like Issa, say they tried returning but were shocked by what they saw.

“When I went back to Mosul I didn’t find my house. It was destroyed,” said Issa, speaking from her stuffy tent in the Khazer camp about 30 kilometres east of Mosul. 

“I also couldn’t afford renting a house, so I came back to this camp again,” she told AFP, clapping her hands in exasperation. 

Dark circles have formed under her eyes, and the widow and mother of eight girls said she and her children “live a tough life” in Khazer.

But the 33-year-old feels she has little choice.

“We stay in the camp because of the food rations we get every 30 to 40 days,” she admitted. 

Across Iraq, more than 1.6 million people remain displaced, among them nearly 300,000 from Mosul alone, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

They are spread out across a handful of displacement camps in the broader Nineveh province that have developed into fully-fledged tent cities.

Amenities provided by NGOs include schools and training centres, health clinics and shops, football fields and hair salons — all mostly unavailable in Mosul and other towns ravaged by Daesh and the ensuing fighting.

‘My house was unlivable’ 

Ghazwan Hussein, 26, hails from Sinjar, a region west of Mosul that was overrun by Daesh five years ago as it waged a brutal campaign against the district’s Yazidi minority.

The father of four fled the region to the Khazer camp, where he eked out a living until his son fell ill a few months ago.

He sold his meagre belongings in the camp to afford the required surgery and tried to return to Sinjar.

“I found that my house was unliveable. It was demolished and the area didn’t have basic services,” said Hussein, his toddler perched quietly on his lap outside their tent.

“I couldn’t stay and came back to Khazer once again.”

Only a sliver of Sinjar’s native population of 500,000 Yazidis has returned, with the rest saying persistent destruction, the lack of services and the tense security situation have kept them in camps.

Hussein said the Iraqi government should speed up reconstruction efforts and compensate displaced citizens. 

“Does it make sense to keep us in the camp without work for three years, as if in jail?” he asked. 

“We just eat, sleep and live on food baskets without any hope the situation will improve so we can go home.”

Mosul’s migration office said up to 25 families a day are leaving their destroyed homes to return to displacement camps to access better services.

“For the past 18 months, we have also seen ‘reverse migration’ back to the camps or to the Kurdish region,” said office head Khaled Ismail. 

“The reasons for reverse displacement are varied according to the regions: It might be tied to the security situation, the family’s financial conditions or the fact that their destroyed homes are unsuitable for living.”

‘Not a life’ 

According to the migration office, about 72,000 families have returned to Nineveh since the fighting against Daesh ended two years ago.

Many are returning to the eastern side of Mosul, which was left more intact when fighting ended and where returning residents find restaurants and shops reopening.

But across the Tigris River in the Old City, mountains of rubble still seal off many streets and unexploded ordnance, rocket remnants and even decomposing bodies lie under ruined homes.

For the most desperate families, those ruins will have to do.

IOM says nearly 30,000 returnees in Mosul are living in vulnerable conditions including destroyed homes, schools and other public buildings — the highest number of any location in Iraq. 

Shaking from a medical condition, Sabiha Jassem made her way through her tiny home, the grimy walls dotted with bullet holes and flies. 

She and her children could not afford to pay rent in east Mosul and returned to their home in the ravaged Old City.

“This house is a danger to us — its roof and walls could collapse. But we’re poor and have no other solution but to live in it,” said Jassem, 61. 

“This is not a life we are living here.”

KHARTOUM — Sudan's deposed longtime president Omar Al Bashir appeared in court on Saturday for the second hearing of his corruption trial, during which his defence asked for his release on bail.

Bashir, wearing a traditional white gown, sat in the same metal cage he appeared in Monday when his trial on graft charges opened.

The judge in Khartoum on Saturday heard three witnesses, two of them investigators who searched Bashir's residence after his ouster and the other a banker.

"We ask the court to release the accused on bail," Bashir's lawyer Hashem Abu Bakr said, to which the judge answered he would examine a written request.

After the hearing, as a massive security convoy escorted the 75-year-old Bashir back to prison, two opposing groups of demonstrators staged protests.

One group of a few dozen protesters chanted slogans for Bashir to face justice not just over corruption but for his role in the country's deadly conflicts.

"Bashir is a killer" and "He has to face justice", they chanted.

“Bashir has committed a number of crimes that he should be prosecuted for as a priority, not for these sums of money,” said one demonstrator who gave his name as Yasser Mohamed.

Another smaller group turned out in support of the deposed Islamist leader, who was forced from power by relentless protests in April after 30 years in power.

“We came here to support the legitimate president of the country,” said Abdel Rahman Omar, one of the pro-Bashir demonstrators.

While the sight of Bashir sitting inside a cage in a courtroom was unthinkable only months ago, many in Sudan and abroad have warned that the graft trial should not distract from the more serious indictments he faces.

The former Sudanese leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague over his role in mass killings in the western region of Darfur.

A landmark deal was signed on August 17, setting a roadmap for Sudan’s transition to civilian rule and democratic elections in 2022.

In the interim, the country will be led by a Sovereign Council that includes six civilians and five members of the military.

While the generals in the transitional bodies eventually sided with the protests that brought down Bashir, they rose up the ranks in Bashir’s regime and many Sudanese are wary of their commitment to the transition.

The next hearing in Bashir’s corruption trial was set for August 31.

HASAKEH, Syria — Syria's Kurds said on Saturday they would support the implementation of a US-Turkey deal to set up a buffer zone in their areas along the Turkish border.

The so-called "safe zone" agreed by Washington and Ankara earlier this month aims to create a buffer between the Turkish border and Syrian areas controlled by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG).

The YPG have played a key role in the US-backed battle against the Daesh group in Syria, but Ankara views them as "terrorists". 

On Saturday, Mazloum Kobani, the head of the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces, said his alliance would back the deal.

“We will strive to ensure the success of [US] efforts towards implementing the understanding... with the Turkish state,” he said.

“The SDF will be a positive party towards the success of this operation,” he told journalists in the north-eastern town of Hasakeh.

US Central Command said late Friday that the SDF — which expelled the Daesh group from their last patch of territory in eastern Syria in March — had destroyed outposts in the border area.

“The SDF destroyed military fortifications” on Thursday, it said in a statement on Twitter.

“This demonstrates [the] SDF’s commitment to support implementation of the security mechanism framework.”

On Wednesday, the US and Turkish defence ministers “confirmed their intent to take immediate, coordinated steps to implement the framework”, said a statement by the US Department of Defence.

Also on Saturday, a representative of the US-led coalition fighting Daesh said the buffer area sought to “limit any uncoordinated military operations”.

“We believe that this dialogue is the only way to secure the border area in a sustainable manner,” Brig. Gen. Nicholas Pond said.

On August 7, Turkish and US officials agreed to establish a joint operations centre to oversee the creation of the “safe zone”.

Little is known about its size or how it will work, but Ankara has said there would be observation posts and joint patrols.

Damascus has rejected the agreement as serving “Turkey’s expansionist ambitions”.

Syrian Kurds have established an autonomous region in northeast Syria amid the country’s eight-year war.

But as the fight against Daesh winds down, the prospect of a US military withdrawal had stoked Kurdish fears of a long-threatened Turkish attack.

Turkey has already carried out two offensives into Syria in 2016 and 2018, the second of which saw it and allied Syrian rebels overrun the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in the northwest.