Region

BEIRUT — Flipping the hot coals on his green hookah in a crowded Beirut cafe, Abbas Nasreddine says Lebanon’s new austerity budget has spoilt his daily treat of smoking a water pipe.

“It’s how we deflate stress,” says the 26-year-old university student, a long drag of mint-scented smoke rising overhead.

“But now our tool for coping with our worries has become a worry itself,” he said, fiddling with the hookah’s long hose.

Nasreddine is among many regular smokers who are displeased with a government decision to impose a new tax on water pipes as part of a larger austerity package.

They will soon have to pay an additional 1,000 Lebanese pounds ($0.66) for every water pipe they order in a cafe or restaurant, at a time when job opportunities are scarce and the economy is in decline. 

“For politicians, 1,000 LBP may be of no value,” Nasreddine says. 

“But, for me, 1,000 LBP has a value — I get to university for 1,000 LBP,” he adds. 

After decades of civil war and political crises made Lebanon one of the world’s most indebted countries, the government adopted a new austerity budget on Monday to combat a ballooning budget deficit.

It reduced benefits and pensions in the public sector and introduced a series of tax hikes, including on personal firearm licences and permits for tinted windows.

For some, the new levy on water pipes has provoked particular ire.

Taxes should not be raised “on something most people use to just relax”, Nasreddine says. 

The World Health Organisation has warned that a full hookah is equivalent to smoking 20 to 30 cigarettes at once, and has linked the practice to lung damage and cancer.

But in much of the Middle East, sharing a water pipe — also called shisha or nargileh — is often conceived as a social occasion during which smokers spend hours in cafes chatting and passing the hose around.

‘They’re ruining us’ 

This is especially the case in Lebanon.

Lebanon has the highest rate of shisha smokers in the region among teenagers, according to a 2016 study in the medical journal Ethnicity & Disease, which found that roughly a third of 13 to 15-year-olds it surveyed had smoked at least once in the past month.

Hussam Shuman, 28, sits outside a bustling cafe in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a hookah complete with apple-flavoured tobacco burning at his side.

The young accountant says he smokes more than once a day, “out of boredom” and “mainly after work”.

But now, leisure is set to become more costly. 

“Let them get money from somewhere else. Why are they targeting us water pipe smokers?” he says, trying to calculate how much more he will now be spending on shisha every month.

‘They’re ruining us’

Shuman and many Lebanese are disillusioned with the ruling class, whom they accuse of nepotism and graft, and the latest austerity measures have compounded this situation. 

The government has been criticised for raising prices and limiting benefits and pensions rather than fighting corruption, tax evasion and smuggling to reduce the deficit. 

On a nearby table, Fayyad Mustafa shuffles a deck of playing cards, a water pipe gurgling beneath him. 

The 24-year-old technician says the shisha tax is not the only problem.

“We are living in a state that wants to make everything more expensive,” he says. 

“They started with water pipes but we don’t know what other things will become more costly later on.” 

He believes that not reacting to the hookah tax would encourage the government to raise other goods. 

“If we are silent when they raise the price of a water pipe, we will have to be silent when they raise the price of a loaf of bread... or a sack of potatoes.”

LONDON — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani signalled on Wednesday that talks with the United States might be possible if Washington lifted sanctions, days after US President Donald Trump said a deal with Tehran on its nuclear programme was conceivable.

Washington withdrew last year from an international nuclear deal signed with Tehran in 2015, and it is ratcheting up sanctions in efforts to shut down Iran’s economy by ending its international sales of crude oil.

Trump said on Monday: “I really believe that Iran would like to make a deal... and I think that’s a possibility to happen.”

Rouhani said in remarks carried by state television: “whenever they lift the unjust sanctions and fulfill their commitments and return to the negotiations table, which they left themselves, the door is not closed.”

“But our people judge you by your actions, not your words.” 

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said on Tuesday that Iran saw no prospect of negotiations with the United States.

Last week the Pentagon announced the deployment of 900 additional troops to the Middle East, and extended the deployment of another 600 service members in the region.

Speaking with reporters en route to Indonesia on Wednesday, acting US Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan said the additional troops announced last week would be going to Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Without giving details or evidence, Shanahan said that while the Iranian posture had changed recently, the threat remained. 

He added that sending military assets into the region, like deploying bombers, Patriot missiles and accelerating the movement of an aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East, had helped deter attacks against Americans in Iraq.

CAIRO/BENGHAZI — Top Egyptian militant suspect Hisham Ashmawy was transferred to Egypt from eastern Libya in a military aircraft, Egyptian state television said on Wednesday.

Ashmawy, a former Egyptian special forces officer, was apprehended in the Libyan city of Derna late last year and has been long sought by Cairo on charges of orchestrating a deadly desert ambush on police and other high-profile attacks.

At least two private Egyptian television channels showed live footage of the military aircraft landing in Cairo airport and a presenter climbed inside to film a blindfolded and ear-muffed Ashmawy. 

“You’re in Egypt, Hisham,” the anchor said as an intelligence officer removed the ear-muffs. “Welcome back.”

Another unidentified detainee could also be seen handcuffed, blindfolded and ear-muffed. Two intelligence sources told Reuters the man was Safwat Zeidan, Ashmawy’s personal guard.

Ashmawy was then filmed limping towards a black vehicle parked on the tarmac while flanked by two security officers. 

The transfer came following a visit by Egyptian Intelligence Chief Abbas Kamel to Benghazi where he met with Libyan eastern commander Khalifa Haftar. 

Egyptian authorities say Ashmawy heads the Ansar Al Islam network, which claimed responsibility for an ambush against police in Egypt’s Western Desert in 2017. Egyptian officials also accuse the network, which they link to Al Qaeda, of an assassination attempt on a former interior minister in 2013.

Ashmawy has been convicted in absentia to death in Egypt for attacks in Egypt, including a 2014 raid in which 22 Egyptian military border guards were killed near the frontier with Libya.

Egypt, along the United Arab Emirates, is a supporter of Haftar’s Libya National Army (LNA), which has been for two months battling to take the capital Tripoli, held by the internationally recognised government.

The LNA has not been able to breach defences in southern Tripoli suburbs. The conflict is part of chaos gripping Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Qadhafi in 2011.

KHARTOUM — Sudan's alliance of opposition and protest groups held a general strike on Tuesday as tensions mounted with the country's military rulers over the transition to democracy.

Dozens of Sudanese crowded outside their workplaces, including banks and hospitals, in the capital Khartoum while holding signs and chanting.

"As companies, we provide services to citizens. We have announced our apologies for not providing these services today and tomorrow, in support of the revolution, in support of freedom, and in support of justice," said Mohamed El Tayeb, a private-sector worker.

Most staff in the medical sector, electricity offices and at the central bank as well as commercial banks observed the strike but other sectors were only partially affected.

"We study the developments that have taken place in [other countries]. That is why we have demands, that is why our martyr brothers have given so much," said Abdallah Othman, a worker at an aviation company. "That is why we have been subjected to arrests, some of whom are our colleagues here at the company. We have to fulfill our demands and achieve civilian rule."

Talks between the ruling Transitional Military Council (TMC) and the Declaration of Freedom and Change Forces (DFCF) alliance are at a standstill despite weeks of negotiations over whether civilians or the military will have the upper hand in a sovereign body to lead the country during a three-year transition to democracy.

Discussions are continuing at a lower level to try to work towards an agreement and there will be no backing down from what has already been agreed, TMC spokesman General Shams El Din Kabbashi told Al Hadath TV on Tuesday.

The DFCF had said an initial two-day strike would encompass public and private enterprise, including the civil aviation, railway, petroleum, banking, communications and health sectors.

If an agreement was not reached with the TMC, the DFCF said it would escalate by calling for an open strike and indefinite civil disobedience until power is handed to civilians.

The TMC’s deputy head, Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who is known by his nickname Hemedti, repeated on Tuesday that the council was ready to hand over power swiftly.

“If we find trust, we would hand over power tonight before tomorrow,” he said.

Many shops remained open while buses were still transporting residents, a Reuters witness said. The airport in Khartoum was operating normally, a civil aviation authority source and state news agency SUNA said. 

MAALULA, Syria — Hunched over a thick book, George Zaarour uses a magnifying glass to decipher Aramaic script — the biblical language of Jesus that is starting to disappear from everyday use in his village. 

The 62-year-old is one of the last in Syria to specialise in the ancient language, which has survived for 2,000 years in the village of Maalula — one of the world's oldest Christian settlements. 

In the mountain village, Aramaic was once widely used, but today few people still speak the tongue.

"Aramaic is in danger," Zaarour said. 

"If things continue like this, the language will disappear within five to 10 years."

Zaarour collects books and encyclopedias on Aramaic in his small shop, where he sells religious icons, crucifixes and even household products.

He spends his days studying and translating this ancient Semitic language, which was widespread in the Middle East at the beginning of the Christian era and whose origins date back to the 10th century BC.

Today, "80 per cent of Maalula's inhabitants don't speak Aramaic, and the remaining 20 per cent are over 60 years old", said the expert.

Etched out in the cliff face, and full of churches, convents and monasteries, Maalula is considered a symbol of Christian presence in the Damascus region.

Pilgrims from the entire world once visited the village to see its religious buildings, and to hear Aramaic spoken on the streets. 

But the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011 changed everything. 

Rebels linked to Al Qaeda seized Maalula in late 2013, forcing most of its Christian inhabitants to flee.

Regime forces recaptured it in April 2014, seven months after the insurgents first entered the village.

But two-thirds of its inhabitants have yet to return.

 ‘Last people on earth’

Many of Maalula's residents have found refuge in and around Damascus, which is about 55 kilometres away, or even abroad. 

"The war generation was born outside Maalula, in Damascus or in other areas, and they learned Arabic first," Zaarour said.

An author of some 30 books on the Aramaic language and its history in Maalula, Zaarour is well-known in Syrian academic circles. 

He regularly supervises student dissertations in Damascus. In 2006, he helped set up a centre in Maalula to teach Aramaic, but it closed after war broke out.

The village's mayor, Elias Thaalab, hailed Zaarour as a source of true local pride.

"I think George Zaarour must be the only teacher and specialist of the Aramaic language in Syria," said the 80-year-old, leaning on his cane.

"Some young teachers are trying to learn the language, but Mr Zaarour is the only one who knows the language in depth," he added. 

Preserving the language is of utmost importance, he says. 

"For more than 2,000 years, we have kept the language of Christ in our hearts," he said. 

"We are among the last people on earth who have the honour of mastering it." 

But of the more than 6,000 people who lived in the village before the conflict, only 2,000 have returned, he said.

Maalula, which means "entrance" in Aramaic, is the most famous of three villages around Damascus where the language is still used.

In Syria's northeast, Syriac, which is derived from Aramaic, is also still spoken. 

Other Aramaic dialects that have evolved from the original historic version of the language are also used across the Middle East today, especially in Turkey and northern Iraq, according to Jean-Baptiste Yon, an ancient language specialist.

 ‘From father to son’

In Maalula today, the vast majority of houses remain empty, only chirping birds interrupting the calm.

The village has fared better than other parts of Syria, but it has not been spared completely. 

Several churches and monasteries were looted or damaged by artillery fire, and religious icons destroyed or stolen.

Al Nusra terrorists kidnapped 13 nuns from the village in December 2013, only releasing them three months later.

Today, in the monastery of Saint Sergius and Bacchus, gilded candles stand once again on the chapel's white marble altar. 

But in the village's only kindergarten, numbers have plummeted since the war started.

The number of students enrolled has dropped from more than 100 in 2010 to less than 30 in 2019, the administration says. 

To ensure their ancient language survives, its pupils have an Aramaic class every day. 

In a classroom with white and pink walls, children aged five to six sit behind wooden desks reciting Aramaic poems, under the watchful eye of their teacher, Antoinette Mokh.

"Aramaic in Maalula is inherited from generation to generation, from father to son... It's the language of the home," she said. 

"But these children were born outside Maalula during the years of exile." 

At age 64, she has been teaching for over a quarter of a century. 

But "I cannot give up my job and retire," she said. 

ALGIERS — Algeria's armed forces chief on Tuesday called for "mutual concessions" between the country's interim leaders and protesters demanding broader changes nearly two months after long-serving president Abdelaziz Bouteflika resigned.

General Ahmed Gaid Salah said the priority was to "move towards a productive dialogue that will help our country" out of the crisis and to ensure elections are held as soon as possible.

Gaid Salah, who has emerged as a de facto strongman since Bouteflika quit on April 2 in the face of massive protests, has repeatedly called for a constitutional solution through a July 4 presidential election.

But only two little-known figures submitted their candidacies on time for the disputed poll, raising doubts about the interim rulers' plans to stage it.

The election is strongly opposed by protesters who reject any vote held under authorities they say are tarnished by corruption from the rule of Bouteflika

They want regime figures including Gaid Salah and interim president Abdelkader Bensalah to step down ahead of any poll, and demand new independent institutions to oversee voting.

"Establishing dialogue means the willingness of all to listen to each other... and a sincere desire for the need to find appropriate solutions without delay," Gaid Salah said, quoted by the defence ministry.

The general called for constructive dialogue in which "mutual concessions" can be agreed and "differences are overcome, or at least gaps between contradictory points of view are reduced".

Gaid Salah warned against a drawn-out transition and referred to the country's 1990s civil war as he urged Algerians to "learn from previous experiences and past events". 

Algeria has been rocked by months of protests since the ailing Bouteflika announced in February that he would run for a fifth term. 

He quit office but protesters have kept up mass demonstrations calling for an overhaul of the "system" and departure of key Bouteflika-era figures.

Under the constitution, Bensalah has 90 days to organise a presidential election from the date of his appointment on April 9.

TEHRAN — Iran's foreign ministry on Tuesday insisted it did not currently see the need for mediation with the United States, as it played down the chances of a military clash with Washington. 

Spokesman Abbas Mousavi told a press conference that Tehran "does not feel any tension or [the possibility of] clashes" and said concerns had been "created by others".

He told journalists that the Islamic republic "does not presently believe in" mediation.

Iran is locked in a stand-off with the United States which has beefed up its military presence in the Middle East in response to alleged threats from the Islamic republic.

Washington has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group and B-52 bombers to the region in a show of force.

The moves are the latest spike since US President Donald Trump withdrew from a landmark 2015 deal on Iran's nuclear programme and reimposed sanctions. 

Iran earlier this month rolled back parts of its commitments under the nuclear deal and gave an ultimatum to the remaining world powers involved if they did not provide sanctions relief.

Mousavi warned that if sanctions relief is not offered Tehran "will with severity take the next steps", meaning it could turn its back on more substantial parts of the accord. 

The situation between Iran and the US has led a number of countries in the Middle East and others such as Japan and Switzerland to offer to mediate.

Tehran insists that it will not hold direct talks with the US government anytime soon despite Trump saying Washington would "like to talk" if Iran was ready. 

Mousavi said Iran was "listening to the views of countries" who have offered to mediate, but had not received or given any "special message" during a flurry of diplomatic visits in recent weeks. 

KIRKUK/MOSUL,Iraq — "Once upon a time" tales and folksy games from the pre-television days are making a comeback in Iraq during the long nights of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Traditional storyteller Abdel Wahed Ismail, a red fez atop his head, yellow scarf draped over his shoulders, in a black gallabia gown, captivates audiences in the northern metropolis of Mosul.

As in other Muslim countries, the annual month of dawn-to-dusk fasting is a time for evening gatherings in restaurants, coffee shops or homes of family and friends across Iraq.

While many spend the night in prayer at mosques between an evening feast and pre-dawn snacks, others take part in games that in Iraq are reserved for Ramadan-time.

Up until one or two generations ago, Ramadan nights were the preserve of the hakawati, or Arab storytellers, regaling audiences with fables as well as local news and historical stories.

Mosul, now a city of almost 2 million people, has for centuries been a commercial and intellectual hub of the Middle East.

With the arrival of television and radio in the 1960s, the hakawati vanished from the coffee shops and restaurants where families and friends gathered.

Two years after Mosul — a city gripped by violence following the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein — was freed from the stranglehold of the Daesh group, Ismail has been leading a revival.

The 70-year-old actor and local celebrity takes his seat each night on a white wooden bench on a platform to tell tales in the unmistakable Moslawi dialect.

"I've lived through so many different times, so I try to pass on stories of good things to young people," said Ismail, who witnessed the bloody overthrow of Iraq's monarchy as well as a succession of coups and wars.

While tales such as the chivalrous epic "Antar and Abla" put smiles on the faces of older members of the audience as they reminisce, Ismail slips in references to hip online games such as pubg for the younger ones.

Tray and ring games

In the oil city of Kirkuk, half-way between Baghdad and Mosul in northern Iraq, the game of "Sini wa Zarf" (the tray and the envelope, in Kurdish) has hundreds of Ramadan-time aficionados among its rival Kurdish, Turkmen and Arab communities.

"It's also known as the game of the communities because it really brings together all the communities," said Shano Askar, a Kurd in his 30s, absorbed in an encounter.

Around the city's citadel and across its historic districts, outdoor coffee and tea shops are packed with enthusiasts, their eyes glued on the metal trays and 11 upturned small gold cups used for the game.

A die is hidden under one of the cups and the players have to work out which one.

Another competition in which players must find a hidden object — "mheibess" (rings) — is extremely popular in Baghdad.

A player discreetly slips a ring to a member of his team, and their adversaries have to figure out who, reading their body language and facial expressions.

Such games form part of a wider social phenomenon as Ramadan nights turn once again, often for the first time since the 2013 invasion, into social events rather than a time to be hunkered down at home.

They also serve to show that "technological progress has not got the better of the good things of the past", said Iraqi sociologist Saad Ahmed.