Region

ARIHA, Syria — At least 17 civilians were killed on Monday as Syria's regime intensified its bombardment of Idlib province, the last extremist stronghold in the country's northwest, a monitor said.

Idlib and parts of the neighbouring provinces of Aleppo, Hama and Latakia are under the control of Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, an extremist group led by Syria's former Al Qaeda affiliate.

"Seventeen civilians, including five children, were killed on Monday in air strikes and missile attacks on Idlib province," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Nine of them, including three children, died in the town of Ariha, he told AFP, adding that at least 47 people were wounded across the province.

The deaths come a day after regime air strikes killed 12 civilians in the same province, according to the Britain-based observatory.

An AFP correspondent in Ariha said White Helmet first responders were seen searching for survivors in the rubble of a building hit in Monday's bombardment.

Supported by civilians, they were lifted to an upper floor of the badly damaged building in the bucket of an excavator machine to rescue a child who had been buried under blocks of concrete.

The observatory says more than 250 civilians have been killed in the spike in violence since the end of April.

More than 200,000 civilians have already been displaced by this upsurge of violence, the United Nations has said.

Idlib is supposed to be protected from a massive government offensive by a September buffer zone deal, but the extremist bastion has come under increasing bombardment by the regime since late April.

The pro-government forces have since recaptured several towns in the south of Idlib province and the north of Hama.

The UN has warned an all-out offensive on the northwestern region would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe for its nearly three million residents.

A total of 20 health facilities have been hit by the escalation — 19 of which remain out of service, according to the UN.

ATME, Syria — Outside her makeshift tent, Syrian mother Mona Mutayr lays out a frugal meal of potatoes and cucumber as her family marks their first Ramadan since being displaced by war.

The holy Islamic month is usually one of celebration, with Muslims fasting from dawn to dusk and gathering around a family meal after sunset.

But regime bombardment forced Mutayr and her family to flee their home earlier this month and set up camp in an olive grove near the Turkish border.

“The days are long and hard,” said 31-year-old Mutayr, wearing a long red and black dress and matching headscarf as she prepared the evening meal.

“We’re spending Ramadan here against our will,” she said, as small barefoot children waited for their food under a canvas tent strung up around a tree trunk.

More than a third now live outside in the open after failing to find shelter in formal camps for the displaced.

‘We have nothing’ 

Under her tent in the area of Atme, Mutayr sits cross-legged on the dry red earth, stooped over a potato she peeled with a small knife.

“I made a little less potatoes for them today,” she said, before laying out a plate of fries and two others of diced cucumber in what appeared to be thinned down yoghurt.

It’s a far cry from Ramadans past in their hometown of Humayrat in the north of Hama province, she said, when she and her family would break their fasts with a feast in the garden under a canopy of grapevines.

“There was plenty of water and electricity. It was a good life,” she said.

“Look what’s become of us now... Sometimes there’s not enough food.”

Charities sometimes donate Ramadan meals of rice and chicken to those at the makeshift camp, but Mutayr says her family has not received such aid in four days.

“Our life has become heat and dust,” she said.

All around her, families have pitched shelters made of canvas strung between trees, their tops tied to branches and bottoms weighed down with clumps of earth.

A lone goat rummages for food as a woman hangs clothes out to dry on a line.

Not far off, 42-year-old Hussein Al Nahar, his pregnant wife and their six children are also spending their first Ramadan homeless.

“How is someone supposed to feel when they’re forced from their home during Ramadan?” said the agricultural worker.

“It’s so tragic. We have nothing.”

No clothes for Eid

Nahar arrived in Atme a little more than two weeks ago after fleeing regime barrel bombs being pelted down on his hometown of Kafr Nabuda, in the north of Hama province.

Surrounded by her children, Nahar’s wife, 30-year-old Rihab, strokes the hair of a small boy resting his head in her lap. 

Pregnant with a seventh child, she has no idea how the family will celebrate Eid Al Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan when many children receive new clothing.

“The children want new clothes for Eid, but we don’t have the money,” she said, dressed in a long grey robe and beige headscarf.

“We don’t even have enough blankets.”

As the sun sets, Rihab’s family gathers around a small portion of chicken and rice donated by a charity, and a second plate of fried potatoes she has prepared.

In previous Ramadans, “we wouldn’t want for anything”, she said.

But today, “we sit around waiting for meals from charities, though sometimes we don’t get any”, she said.

The day before there was nothing to cook, she said.

“We had bread and tea.”

KHARTOUM — With talks suspended between protest leaders and Sudan’s military over a transfer of power to civilian rule, Islamist movements are backing the army in the hope it will keep Sharia law in place.

Islamist parties stayed on the sidelines during the months of nationwide protests that led to the April ouster of a ruler Omar Bashir.

They have since not joined the protest alliance at loggerheads with the generals over the makeup of a new governing body, which would rule the country for a three-year transitional period.

But hundreds of Islamists have rallied in the capital in recent days, warning they would reject any deal that would exclude Sharia — Islamic law — from the country’s political roadmap.

They have also backed the army’s demands that the head of Sudan’s new governing body be a military figure — putting them at odds with protesters who want civilian rule.

“We agree with [protesters] that there will be a Cabinet of civilian technocrats,” said Hassan Rizk, deputy head of the Islamist Reform Now Movement, a breakaway group from the National Congress Party formerly led by Bashir.

“But the sovereign council should be headed by the armed forces because there is a security problem.”

Bashir came to power in an Islamist-backed coup in 1989 and Sudanese legislation has since been underpinned by Islamic law.

But the protest leaders have remained silent on whether Sharia has a place in Sudan’s future, arguing that their main concern is installing a civilian administration.

‘Stole the revolution’ 

A preacher Abdelhay Yousef, a leader of the Nusrat Al Sharia movement, drew large crowds on Friday at a mosque in the capital’s southern Jabra district.

He used his sermon to champion Islamic law and to rail against the prospect of secular rule.

Buses then transported worshippers to a courtyard outside Khartoum’s presidential palace where they broke their daytime fast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan before rallying against the roadmap.

“Free revolutionaries will not be ruled by the forces of the left,” they chanted.

Nusrat Al Sharia chief Mohamed Ali Jazuli justified the rejection by Islamists, saying the negotiations between the protesters and the generals were for an agreement that was “purely bilateral and excluding” the Islamists and other political forces.

While the protest alliance could be a “partner in change”, he said, it was not “the only leader of the revolution”.

“The revolution was not against ideology but against corruption and tyranny,” he said.

Tayeb Mustafa, who heads a coalition of conservative parties, said Islamists were opposed to the transition plan because it “ignored the application of Islamic law”.

The protest alliance “stole the revolution in broad daylight”, said Mustafa, whose 2020 coalition brings together Islamist groups, including the Popular Congress Party, a long-time ally of Bashir.

Analysts say Islamists’ close ties to Bashir have made it difficult for them to join forces with protesters and their Alliance for Freedom and Change umbrella group.

“It’s impossible to equate a party that has always been opposed to the regime with another side that was with the regime until its fall,” said prominent Sudanese journalist Khaled Tijani.

“Freedom and Change therefore has the right to lead.”

KHARTOUM — Sudan's main opposition group and supporter of the protest movement on Sunday rejected its call to stage a two-day general strike, in the first sign of a rift within the movement negotiating the launch of civilian rule.

Talks between leaders of the umbrella protest movement, the Alliance for Freedom and Change, and army generals who seized power after ousting autocrat Omar Al Bashir last month are deadlocked over who should lead a new governing body — a civilian or soldier.

In a bid to step up pressure on the generals, the protest movement has called for a general strike starting Tuesday, but the National Umma Party, a key backer of the movement, rejected the measure.

"We reject the general strike announced by some opposition groups" in the Alliance for Freedom and Change, Umma said in a statement.

"A general strike is a weapon that should be used after it is agreed upon by everybody," the party said.

"We have to avoid such escalated measures that are not fully agreed."

The National Umma Party led by former premier Sadiq Al Mahdi said any such decision should be taken by a council of leaders of the protest movement.

Such a council was still not in place and “will be composed in a meeting on Monday”, it said.

It was Mahdi’s elected government that Bashir, who himself was deposed on April 11, toppled in an Islamist-backed coup in 1989.

In a recent interview with AFP, Mahdi warned protesters not to “provoke” the army’s rulers as they had been instrumental in ousting Bashir.

‘Negative development’ 

Sudanese political analyst Faisal Mohamed Saleh said the Umma party’s stand was a “negative development”.

“It will not only threaten relations between Umma party and the Freedom and Change alliance, but it will also threaten unity inside the Umma party itself,” Saleh told AFP.

“I believe this is not the party position, it is Mahdi’s position because there were representatives of the party in meetings that decided on the strike call.”

Saleh said a “harsh reaction” could not be ruled out from alliance supporters at the sit-in outside the army complex.

Minutes after Umma’s statement, another key member of the protest movement, the Sudanese Congress Party, said the strike would go ahead as planned.

The strike was a new measure “to complete the mission of the revolution, which definitely will achieve its victory”, it said.

The military toppled Bashir after months-long protests across Sudan led by the Alliance for Freedom and Change against his iron-fisted rule of three decades.

But the generals who seized power have resisted calls from protesters and the international community for civilian rule.

Talks deadlocked 

Talks between the generals and protest leaders remain deadlocked over who should lead a new governing body to oversee the formation of a civilian administration.

On Sunday, the military council said the talks were “proceeding at a weak pace”.

“If the situation continues like this, it might lead to many options for safeguarding the interests of Sudanese citizens and for the country’s protection,” spokesman of the army council Lieutenant General Shamseddine Kabbashi told soldiers in Omdurman, the twin city of Khartoum.

Protest leaders insist a civilian must head a new sovereign council and that civilians should make up the majority of its members, proposals rejected by the ruling generals.

The new ruling body when finalised is expected to install a transitional civilian government for three years after which the first post-Bashir election would be held.

Before suspending talks last Monday, the two sides had agreed on several key issues, including the three-year transition period and the creation of a 300-member parliament, with two thirds of lawmakers coming from the protesters’ umbrella group.

On Sunday, the chief of the ruling military council General Abdel Fattah Al Burhan travelled to the United Arab Emirates after a visit to Cairo.

The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are seen as backing the generals, while Western powers led by Washington have called for a swift transition to civilian rule.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi leaders have warned of the risks of war during a visit by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, whose country is locked in a tense standoff with the United States.

Zarif's visit to neighbouring Iraq — which is caught in the middle of its two allies, the US and Iran — follows a decision by Washington to deploy 1,500 additional troops to the Middle East.

"We are currently repelling all the efforts of war against Iran, whether economic or military," Zarif said at a joint news conference with his Iraqi counterpart Mohammed Ali
Al Hakim.

"We will face them with strength and we will resist," he added.

For his part, Hakim said: "We stand by our neighbour Iran, and economic sanctions are unnecessary and cause great suffering to the Iranian people."

Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi warned of the "danger of a war" during a meeting with Zarif on Saturday night, his office said.

Abdel Mahdi pleaded for the "stability of the region and the upholding of the nuclear deal", it said, referring to a 2015 agreement between Tehran and major powers.

Iraqi President Barham Saleh discussed with Zarif "the need to prevent all war or escalation", his office said.

On Saturday, Zarif called the deployment of extra US troops to the region "very dangerous and a threat to international peace and security".

It follows a US decision in early May to send an aircraft carrier strike force and B-52 bombers in a show of force against what Washington's leaders believed was an imminent Iranian plan to attack US assets.

Washington says the latest reinforcements are in response to a “campaign” of recent attacks including a rocket launched into the Green Zone in Baghdad, explosive devices that damaged four tankers near the entrance to the Gulf, and drone strikes by Yemeni rebels on a key Saudi oil pipeline.

Iran has denied any involvement.

Visits to Oman, 

Kuwait, Qatar 

On May 15, the United States ordered the evacuation of non-emergency staff from its Baghdad embassy and Erbil consulate, citing an “imminent” threat from Iranian-linked armed groups in Iraq, two of which rejected the claim.

During the three-year battle to oust the Daesh group from Iraqi cities, Iran-backed Shiite militias on the ground effectively fought on the same side as US-led coalition warplanes in the skies.

But since Iraq declared victory over the extremists in December 2017, relations between Washington and Tehran have deteriorated sharply.

In May last year, US President Donald Trump pulled out of the landmark nuclear deal with Iran and later reinstated tough sanctions.

Zarif was due to meet representatives of Iraq’s different political forces as well as religious dignitaries in the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf in southern Iraq during his visit through Monday.

On Friday night, thousands of Iraqis staged anti-war demonstrations in Baghdad and the southern oil city of Basra, waving flags and carrying placards calling for a US-Iranian confrontation to be averted.

Iraq is trying to act as a mediator in the deeply fractured Middle East, particularly because it borders Iran and regional arch-rival Saudi Arabia, which is also at the centre of a dispute with Qatar.

Also on Sunday, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi began a tour of Oman, Kuwait and Qatar, his ministry said, while its spokesman “categorically denied” reports of talks between Americans and Iranians.