Region

BAGHDAD — Iraq on Tuesday began exhuming the remains of dozens of victims, including children, likely killed during Saddam Hussein's campaign against the country's Kurds, a forensics official told AFP.

The mass grave was uncovered in Tal Al Sheikhiya, about 300 kilometres south of Baghdad, said Zaid Al Youssef, the head of Baghdad's Medico-Legal Directorate which is tasked with identifying the remains.

Those remains were recovered from the surface layer of the site, he said, but “there could be a second deeper layer” with additional bodies.

“The evidence collected indicates they were summarily executed in 1988,” said Youssef, which coincides with Saddam's brutal “Anfal” campaign against Iraq's Kurds.

The operation took place between 1987 and 1988 and saw nearly 180,000 Kurds killed and more than 3,000 villages destroyed.

“The female victims were blindfolded and killed by gunshots to the head, but also have traces on various parts of their bodies of bullets that were fired randomly," Youssef said.

The grave lies in the southern province of Mutahanna, also home to the notorious Nigrat Salman prison camp.

Many Kurds and political opponents of the previous regime were held there, and survivors shared tales of humiliaa

Iraq has been hit by wave after wave of conflict in recent decades, culminating in the fight against the Daesh group which ended in late 2017.

Those years of conflict left grave sites all across the country where the remains of thousands of victims from Iraq's diverse ethnic and religious communities have been uncovered.

Daesh alone left behind an estimated 200 mass graves that could hold up to 12,000 bodies, the United Nations has said.

Authorities are testing remains from the most recent conflict as well as wars dating back three decades in an effort to identify the fates of missing Iraqis.

According to Iraqi authorities, Saddam's regime forcefully disappeared more than 1 million people in the 1980s and 1990s, and many of their families are still trying to find out what happened to them.

KHARTOUM — Hundreds of Sudanese university students chanting “civilian rule, civilian rule” rallied in downtown Khartoum on Tuesday seeking justice for fellow pupils killed in months of political unrest.

The rally follows a power sharing deal signed last week between protest leaders and army rulers, but negotiations have yet to address accountability for hundreds killed since demonstrations first erupted in December.

Tuesday's protest was called by the Sudanese Professionals Association, the group that initially spearheaded the campaign against the now ousted ruler Omar Al Bashir.

“Blood for blood, we don't want compensations,” chanted the students, many holding photographs of comrades killed in seven months of protest while others waved Sudanese flags.

Riot police deployed in the area but did not clash with protesters.

“We are in the streets because we want those responsible for the sit-in massacre to be held accountable,” said student Malaz Eizzeddine.

She was referring to a June 3 crackdown on a protest camp in the capital Khartoum, in which dozens of demonstrators were killed and hundreds wounded.

Ismail Al Taj, one of the protest leaders, addressed the students before the rally dispersed.

“You're the soul of the revolution. We are loyal to you and we are loyal to the martyrs,” he said as protesters chanted revolutionary slogans.

Doctors close to the protest movement say that 246 people have been killed nationwide in protest-related violence, while Sudanese officials have given a lower death toll.

Although protest leaders and the generals who took over following Bashir's ouster have inked a power sharing deal, three rebel groups backing the demonstrators have expressed reservations about the agreement.

Talks are currently under way in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa between protest leaders and the rebel groups, who have said the July 17 deal is “unacceptable”.

They insist the accord must make peace negotiations for Sudan's war zones a priority, as well as address the needs of those affected by the conflicts.

The accord signed earlier this month aims to set up a joint civilian-military ruling body that would then establish an overall civilian administration, the main demand of demonstrators.

More talks between the generals and protest leaders to thrash out some pending issues have been suspended since the rebel groups raised their concerns.

No date has been fixed yet for resuming the talks mediated by African Union and Ethiopian diplomats.

LONDON — Britain on Monday said it was planning a European-led protection force for shipping in the Gulf after Iranian authorities seized a British-flagged tanker in a dramatic escalation of tensions in the region.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt made the announcement following an emergency ministerial meeting to respond to Friday's incident.

"We will seek to establish this mission as quickly as possible," Hunt said, condemning Iran's actions as "state piracy" while at the same time emphasising that Britain did not want confrontation.

The mission "will not be part of the US maximum pressure policy on Iran because we remain committed to preserving the Iran nuclear agreement," Hunt told parliament.

The United States pulled out of the nuclear deal last year.

The foreign minister also said a second warship that Britain has sent to the region would arrive by July 29.

In a dramatic escalation of tensions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized the Stena Impero on Friday in the Gulf's strategic Strait of Hormuz.

The move came two weeks after British authorities seized an Iranian tanker off its overseas territory of Gibraltar on suspicion of breaching EU sanctions against Syria against a backdrop of brinkmanship between Washington and Tehran.

Iran impounded the tanker after claiming it failed to respond to distress calls and turned off its transponder after hitting a fishing boat.

“Seizing the British tanker was a legal measure by Iran,” a spokesman for the Iranian government, Ali Rabiei, told a news conference in Tehran on Monday.

However, Britain has said there was no evidence of a collision and said the vessel was in Omani waters, with its transponder switched on.

Hunt spoke to his French and German counterparts on Sunday.

The EU has already expressed its “deep concern” at the move, and on Monday, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said: “We don’t want any further escalation”.

There have been a number of attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz since May, when the United States boosted its military presence in response to what it called indications of a “credible threat” from Iran.

Oil prices jumped Monday on fresh concerns about supplies and a possible conflict in the crude-rich Middle East.

The British government had warned its ships to avoid the shipping channel, a chokepoint for about a third of the world’s sea-borne oil.

Hunt on Monday said all British-flagged ships travelling through the strait should contact the government first “to enable us to offer the best protection we can”.

But he said the volume of shipping made it impossible to protect every vessel individually.

Questions are being asked in London about why the government was not more proactive in protecting ships after the Gibraltar incident, which provoked fury and a threat of retaliation in Tehran.

The stand-off comes at a sensitive time for Britain, with Prime Minister Theresa May stepping down on Wednesday over her failure to deliver Brexit.

Former foreign minister Boris Johnson is the overwhelming favourite to replace her and there have been calls for stronger action against Iran, such as financial sanctions.

But Finance Minister Philip Hammond said on Sunday: “We’ve already got a wide raft of sanctions against Iran, particularly financial sanctions, so it’s not clear that there are immediate things we can do”.

Iranian authorities have said the crew — 18 Indians, including the captain, three Russians, a Latvian and a Filipino — are all in good health.

Tehran said at the weekend that the fate of the Stena Impero depends on an investigation into its alleged breach of international maritime rules.

The incident on Friday began hours after a court in the tiny British territory of Gibraltar extended by 30 days the detention of the Iranian-chartered tanker, Grace 1, which was seized on July 4.

“To all the countries that are calling on Iran to release the tanker, we ask them to tell Britain the same thing,” the Iranian spokesman said on Monday.

Hunt has said Britain would be content with the release of Grace 1 if there were sufficient guarantees that the oil was not bound for Syria.

The incidents come amid escalating tensions between Tehran and Washington, which have left European nations caught in the middle.

In May 2018, President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the landmark 2015 deal that put curbs on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief.

Britain, France and Germany were also signatories and have been trying to keep the deal alive.

But the US administration reimposed tough sanctions on Iran, which retaliated by increasing its enrichment of uranium beyond limits set in the nuclear accord.

Last month, Trump called off air strikes against Iran at the last minute after Tehran downed a US drone.

BAGHDAD — Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Monday warned of a repeat of last year's deadly water crisis in Iraq's oil-rich southern province of Basra unless authorities correct decades of management failures.

Nearly 120,000 people were hospitalised last summer after drinking polluted water, in a mass health crisis that sparked deadly protests against the dire state of public services.

In a damning report, HRW found the generally poor state of water quality was likely compounded by algae that rapidly spread last year in the Shatt Al Arab waterway that runs through Basra and provides it with its primary water source.

It indicated that the algae, pollution and high salination could together have sparked the mass health crisis. 

"These combined failures violate Basra residents' rights to water, sanitation, health, information and property guaranteed under international and national law," it said.

HRW slammed Iraqi officials as "short-sighted", saying they had not properly communicated with citizens about the emergency at the time, nor released the results of probes in the year since or dealt with underlying causes. 

"What our research brought out very clearly is that the crisis in Basra has not ended," said Belkis Wille, HRW's senior Iraq researcher. 

She told AFP that officials had an obligation to communicate to all Iraqi citizens about the state of their drinking water. 

"As a result it is unacceptable that the government is refusing to make public the reports that they did about why people got sick and the contaminants found in the environment.

“This is the right of citizens,” Wille said.

‘Basra will suffer’ 

The report relies on dozens of interviews with residents of Basra, experts and government officials as well as analysis of satellite imagery.

Those images revealed evidence of oil spills and algal bloom in the Shatt Al Arab and other waterways that contaminated the water which, when consumed, could cause abdominal pain, fever, vomiting and bloody diarrhoea.

Besides the direct health impact, the water crisis forced families to flee Basra in search of potable water, buy expensive bottled water or keep their children at home if there was no plumbing in schools. 

With increasingly scarce water, climate change, pollution and poor water usage, “Basra will suffer from acute water crises in coming years in the absence of strategic solutions”, HRW warned. 

It urged authorities compensate those affected and develop comprehensive strategies to prevent pollution and illegal water tapping.

It also said the government should create a health advisory system to keep citizens aware of water quality standards, impending crises and how to deal with them. 

“While solving Basra’s water crisis will take serious planning, time, and money, it is possible to address so long as authorities take their responsibilities seriously,” said Lama Fakih, HRW’s acting Middle East director. 

“The alternative is deadly.”

In July 2018, mass protests over corruption and government neglect erupted in Basra, swelling in the following weeks and eventually turning deadly, with 12 demonstrators killed.

TEHRAN — Iran arrested 17 suspects and sentenced some to death after dismantling a CIA spy ring, an official said on Monday, as tensions soar between the Islamic republic and arch-enemy the United States.

US President Donald Trump dismissed the report as “totally false”.

Security agencies “successfully dismantled a [CIA] spy network”, the head of counter-intelligence at the Iranian intelligence ministry, whose identity was not revealed, told reporters in Tehran.

“Those who deliberately betrayed the country were handed to the judiciary... some were sentenced to death and some to long-term imprisonment.”

The suspects were arrested between March 2018 and March 2019.

“The report of Iran capturing CIA spies is totally false. Zero truth,”  Trump Tweeted.

Tehran has been at loggerheads with Washington and its allies since May 2018, when Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from a landmark 2015 deal putting curbs on Iran's nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief.

The US administration reimposed biting sanctions on Iran, which retaliated by increasing its enrichment of uranium beyond limits set in the nuclear accord.

Trump called off air strikes against Iran at the last minute in June after the Islamic republic downed a US drone, one of a string of incidents including attacks on tankers in the Gulf.

The tensions have escalated since British authorities seized an Iranian oil tanker on July 4 on suspicions it was shipping oil to Syria in breach of EU sanctions.

In what was seen by Britain as a tit-for-tat move, Iran's Revolutionary Guards seized a British-flagged tanker in the strategic Strait of Hormuz on Friday, angering the US ally.

‘The Mole Hunt’ 

Iran said last month it dismantled a network linked to the US Central Intelligence Agency, state news agency IRNA said at the time, saying it was conducted in cooperation with “foreign allies”.

On Monday, the counter-intelligence chief said 17 people suspected of espionage had been identified, all of them Iranians.

The suspects had been “employed at sensitive and crucial centres and also the private sector related to them, working as contractors or consultants”, said the official.

The intelligence ministry released a CD with images of what it said were CIA operatives abroad as well as business cards of US diplomats in Austria, Finland, India, Turkey and Zimbabwe allegedly involved in the network.

The announcement came as state television started broadcasting a “documentary" titled "The Mole Hunt”, a trailer of which was on the disc.

It shows re-enactments of spy meetings with an action movie edit plus interviews with officials like Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi.

Some of the spies had been recruited by falling into a “visa trap” set by the CIA for Iranians seeking to travel to the United States.

“Some were approached when they were applying for a visa, while others had visas from before and were pressured by the CIA in order to renew them.”

Others were “lured” by promises of cash, high-paying jobs and even medical services for seriously ill family members.

Their mission was to collect classified information and carry out “technical and intelligence operations at important and sensitive centres using advanced equipment”, he said.

‘Major defeat’ 

The top security official alleged the CIA used special stone-like containers to send communications tools and identity documents to its network.

“The forgery was clumsy, showing that it was done by the CIA itself,” he said, adding that this "proves" it was government-sanctioned.

“After they were discovered, CIA officers ordered the spies to destroy all the documents,” he added.

The official said the CIA had informed the suspects to go to “emergency exits” in cities near the border in case they felt they were in danger.

“Of course, they instead met the intelligence ministry's agents and were arrested.”

He hailed the operation as a “second major defeat of the CIA” following a similar one five years earlier.

“They will naturally try to restore and rebuild themselves, and of course we are always vigilant.”

On June 22 Iran announced it had executed a “defence ministry contractor” convicted of spying for the CIA.

Concern over foreign interference is nearly as old as the Islamic republic. The US embassy in Tehran was stormed by students in November 1979 and called the “spy nest”.

State television recently aired a 30-episode series called “Gando” (an Iranian crocodile species) dramatising with Hollywood flair the Iranian counter-espionage operations.

Its first season is inspired in part by the case of Jason Rezaian, the Iranian-American correspondent for the Washington Post in Tehran jailed for 544 days over charges of espionage. Gando portrays him as a spymaster.

Rezaian was released in 2016 as part of a prisoner exchange with Washington.