Region

MOSUL, Iraq — In a workshop in a bombed-out factory in Mosul, Najlaa Abdelrahman joins scores of other women on a production line as they sew garments and try to knit their lives back together.

The mother of three lost her husband during the war against Daesh, which occupied the northern Iraqi city as the capital of its self-declared caliphate until government forces recaptured it in summer 2017.

Abdelrahman also lost her Mosul home and now spends half of the salary she earns at the garment factory on getting to work.

“I have been working here for a while, this is my only work opportunity,” said Abdelrahman who, like many of her colleagues, is her family’s sole breadwinner.

Most of the site was destroyed in the fighting, but the International Organisation for Migration has managed to restore one section, where around 150 people — of whom 80 per cent are women — now work a fraction of the 1,020 it used to employ.

The factory’s foreman, Nathem Sultan, said the salaries it provides may not always be enough. But for now it is all that the business, which has a contract with the state to manufacture hospital clothing, can afford.

“This salary they receive sometimes isn’t enough to feed them, but it is hope for a better life,” he said.

Most Mosul residents are struggling financially. 

Families who build their own homes go into debt while others cram into increasingly expensive rented accommodation. Foreign-funded projects suffer delays.

The 2019 state budget has allocated $560 million for the city’s reconstruction, according to two Mosul lawmakers. A UN adviser cited $1.8 billion as one estimate for a year’s rebuilding work.

Nearly 2 million Iraqis remain displaced due to the war against Daesh, according to a survey by non-governmental organisation REACH. 

BEIRUT — The head of Syria’s former Al Qaeda affiliate in a video released Sunday urged supporters to “take up weapons” to defend his group’s bastion of Idlib against increased bombardment.

The Damascus regime and its Russian ally have in recent weeks upped shelling and air strikes on the north-western region held by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), despite a Russian-Turkish buffer zone deal intended to protect it.

“We call for anybody able to take up weapons... to head to the battlefield,” HTS chief Abu Mohammad Al Jolani said.

The spike in violence against the Idlib region since late April signalled “the death of all previous agreements and conferences”, he said during an interview with a local media activist in a countryside setting.

It shows that “only extremists and military might can be relied on”, said Jolani, wearing a camouflage uniform and sitting cross-legged in the grass.

The activist said the interview was recorded in the northern Hama countryside, although it was not immediately possible to verify this.

It appeared to have been made in recent days after a regime advance.

Idlib, a region of some 3 million people, is supposed to be protected from a massive regime assault by a September buffer zone deal signed by Russia and rebel backer Turkey.

But that ageement was never fully implemented after militants refused to withdraw from the planned buffer area.

Damascus and its allies have increased their deadly bombardment of the southern part of the extremist bastion in recent weeks, killing dozens of civilians and causing tens of thousands more to flee.

They have taken control of several towns from the militants in recent days.

The uptick in air strikes and shelling has displaced 180,000 people between April 29 and May 9, the United Nations says.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, says around 120 civilians have been killed in the bombardment.

Damascus has not announced a wide offensive, but instead regularly announces targeting “terrorist” — meaning jihadist or rebel — positions.

Analysts believe the offensive will be limited.

The regime and Russia have accused the jihadists of targeting the main Russian airbase of Hmeimim to the west of Idlib.

“It’s the right of the revolutionaries to bombard this base which causes the death of... women and children,” Jolani said.

“If the Russian leadership wants the bombardment on Hmeimim to stop, it simply needs to stop supporting the regime and killing the Syrian people and civilians,” he added.

Russia intervened in the war in 2015, and has since helped the government to regain large parts of the country.

The civil war in Syria has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions since it started with the brutal repression of anti-government protests in 2011.

BEIRUT — A pale woman rides through the desert, flanked by armed men on camels, a palace shimmering in the distance. This is Lebanon — or so someone thought in the 1950s.

At a Beirut cultural centre, Lebanese film buff Abboudi Abu Jawdeh is exhibiting vintage film posters from his collection that show off a lost art, but also offer insight into decades of Western cliches of the Arab world.

On a guided tour, the collector gestures towards the desert scene, which is an Italian poster for the 1956 French movie “The Lebanese Mission”.

“This is from the artist’s imagination,” the 61-year-old says, standing beside the image featuring the camel riders and a palace resembling India’s Taj Mahal.

“He knew Lebanon was in the east, so he did this,” he says, despite the country having ski slopes and sand only on its Mediterranean beaches.

Abu Jawdeh moves along to another poster for the same film, this time featuring an oil well.

“I hope we will have some,” he says, as his country only this year starts exploration for the hydrocarbon off its coast.

A glance at the film’s synopsis reveals more inconsistencies.

A Frenchman falls for the daughter of a Lebanese nobleman while in Lebanon hunting for uranium, a metal not mined in the country.

 ‘Orientalists’ 

Abu Jawdeh first began collecting posters in his teens, starting with films starring American actors Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood.

Visiting old cinemas in Lebanon and across the region, he unearthed a world of images — for more foreign films, but also thousands of prints advertising films from the Arab world.

Some of his finds in this rare collection date back to 1930s Egypt or Lebanon in the late 1950s.

Today he owns some 20,000 posters, stacked up to the ceiling at his publishing house, their bright colours shielded from the sunlight.

Different versions of the same poster are especially revealing — indicating which country required a change in a film title or a bra to be painted over a naked back to avoid offence.

But as he collected, Abu Jawdeh also started noticing a trend in some of the Western posters for films set in the Middle East.

They “resembled the paintings that Orientalists painted of the region in the 18th and 19th centuries”, he says.

Dozens of these images are on show until May 25 at the Dar Al Nimer cultural centre in Beirut.

Titled “Thief of Baghdad”, after a much-remade fantasy film from 1924, the show is replete with turbaned men, flying carpets, snake charmers and belly dancers.

There is Elvis Presley starring in a film called “Harum Scarum”, and a British-Egyptian comedy reportedly inspired by late Egyptian King Farouk’s unrequited passions for a belly dancer.

With captions summarising often outlandish screenplays, the posters show a fantastical world far removed from the modern Middle East, but also gross misrepresentation.

‘We’re not all belly dancers’

“Come to savage seething Arabia on a terror search for forbidden treasures of the ages,” reads the tagline for the 1957 action film “Forbidden Desert”.

Late Lebanese-American academic Jack Shaheen analysed portrayals of Arabs in Hollywood films.

He watched more than 900 movies spanning a century to the early 2000s, and found only 5 per cent showed Arab roles as “normal, human characters”.

Instead, a whole people was systematically dehumanised or vilified. Often, all Arabs were Muslims, and all Muslims were Arabs, wrote the researcher of Christian descent.

Female characters were largely belly dancers or enchantresses, silent “bundles of black” or “terrorists”.

Abu Jawdeh says that he and others may not have always rejected such depictions

“We too liked seeing a belly dancer,” he says.

But the public now will likely see the posters differently, he adds, welcoming a fresh-eyed reevaluation of how the West has viewed the Arab world.

“They need to see them to reexamine these human relations,” he urged.

Round the corner, Rabbah Faqih, a masters student in archive management, looks at a poster featuring a skimpily dressed actress.

“I’m all for a good expressive poster to draw people in, but I’m against commodifying women like this,” she says.

“We’re not all belly dancers in Lebanon,” says the 30-year-old, dressed in a long black robe, her hair covered.

RAQQA, Syria — More than a year after Daesh fled, Syrian boys and girls are finally back on stage — bobbing to the rhythm of drums in the northern city of Raqqa.

At the first cultural centre to open since the terrorists' draconian rule ended, sunlight floods into the brand new library, while books line shelves along a wall that still smells of wet paint.

After almost four years under Daesh, which banned music and the arts, US-backed forces expelled the last terrorists from Raqqa in October 2017.

But it has taken a bit of time to resuscitate cultural life.

"I can't describe how happy I am," said Fawzia Al Sheikh at the centre's opening earlier this month, in the still largely devastated city.

"After all this destruction, and no arts or culture, we finally have a centre where we can listen to song and poetry" again, the Raqqa resident added.

In the Raqqa Centre for Arts and Culture's brightly lit gallery, paintings hang beside charcoal drawings, near sculptures of human figures.

In the concert hall, Malak Al Yatim stepped off stage after performing — exhilarated to finally be able to sing in public again.

"I feel like a bird sweeping through the spring sky," he said. 

Yatim added that Daesh smashed his instruments and banned him from singing.

"We were like nightingales in a cage," he lamented.

"If we did anything, they'd chop off our head or whip us."

Daesh overran Raqqa in 2014, making the city its de facto Syrian capital and imposing a brutal interpretation of Islam on everyone in its orbit.

 Books ‘saved
from the ruins’ 

Before Daesh arrived, the city had more than 20 cultural centres, the largest housing 60,000 books. 

But the extremists forced all these facilities to close, burning and destroying books and paintings.

But in the new centre's library, hundreds of volumes that survived the extremists adorn shelves.

"These books you can see — we saved them from the ruins," said Ziad Al Hamad, the centre's director.

"During Daesh’s rule, residents hid them wherever they could," added the 62-year-old, dressed neatly in a brown V-neck jumper over a stripy white shirt.

"When the city was liberated, they gave them back to us," added Hamad, who also sits on the city council's culture and antiquities commission.

The Kurdish-led and US backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) expelled Daesh from the village of Baghouz, its last scrap of Syrian territory, in late March.

While the terrorists have continued to claim deadly attacks in areas controlled by the SDF — including Raqqa — local artists have returned to their easels.

In the cultural centre's gallery, painter Amal Al Attar has work on display after returning from exile in Beirut.

Among her works is a painting of a white boat adrift on an ocean, and another of a home on the shoreline.

"It's like a rebirth," the 37-year-old said of the centre's opening, sunglasses perched atop her dark shoulder-length hair.

Attar used to run a studio for artists, but when Daesh overran the city they told her art was forbidden. 

She left 50 works behind when she fled to neighbouring Lebanon.

"Daesh burned them," she said.

"I can't forget what happened back then, but this cultural centre will give us a new drive," she said.

BEIRUT — Lebanon's former Maronite patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, who wielded considerable political influence during the country's civil war and was an ardent advocate of a Syrian troop withdrawal, died on Sunday, the Church said. 

Sfeir, who was set to turn 99 on Wednesday, died at 3:00am (00:00 GMT) "after days of intensive medical care", said a statement by the Maronite Church. 

He became the leader of the Church in 1986 until he resigned in 2011 due to his declining health, and held the title "76th Patriarch of Antioch and the Whole Levant".

He was a respected power broker during the 1975-1990 civil war, which saw bitter infighting between rival militias including opposing Christian factions.

Sfeir, who spoke fluent Arabic and French, was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 1994.

Born in 1920 in Rayfoun, a village in Lebanon's Kesrwan Mountains, Sfeir studied theology and philosophy but was never shy to delve into Lebanon's tumultuous politics.

His backing of the 1989 Taif agreement that brought the 15-year civil war to an end bolstered Christian support for the accord, but reduced the powers of the presidency — a seat reserved for Lebanon's Maronite Christians under the country's confessional power-sharing.

Maronite Christians made up the most powerful single community prior to Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, but their influence has since waned as they have been outnumbered by Shiite Muslims in the multi-sectarian country.

Sfeir also spearheaded the opposition to Syria's three decades of military and political domination over Lebanon.

"His biggest struggle was to end the Syrian presence in Lebanon, which we all thought was impossible because of the divisions in Lebanon," his biographer Antoine Saad told AFP.

"But he worked on it steadily, objectively, meticulously and quietly," he said.

Sfeir refused to visit Syria during his time as patriarch, even when John Paul II made a trip to the country in 2001.

His outspokenness helped swell the anti-Syria movement in 2000.

It eventually led to the withdrawal of thousands of Syrian troops from the country five years later, following the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, whose murder the opposition blamed on Damascus.

Premier Saad Hariri, the son of Rafik, on Sunday called Sfeir a "national symbol" who had worked "to bring Lebanon back to its natural status as a free and independent sovereign country".

The Cabinet announced two days of national mourning set for Wednesday and Thursday.

President Michel Aoun said Lebanon had lost one of its "most prominent patriarchs".

After he stepped down, Sfeir's opinion and advice continued to be sought by politicians of all stripes, not only Christians.

"He was completely against war," Hariri said of the cleric who enjoyed hiking in nature until his late years.

"His loss can't be compensated for."

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — The United States moved its Israel embassy to Jerusalem nearly a year ago in the culmination of a diplomatic rupture that coincided with a bloodbath on the Gaza border.

As President Donald Trump's administration prepares to present its long-promised plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what has changed?

What is happening in Jerusalem? 

Ignoring global outcry, the US inaugurated its embassy in occupied Jerusalem with much pomp on May 14, 2018, using the move from Tel Aviv to manifest one of Trump's most controversial promises — the recognition of the holy city as Israel's capital.

The Palestinians, who envision East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, were livid.

The status of Jerusalem has been disputed since the war surrounding Israel's inception in 1948, when Israeli forces took control of the western sector of the city. 

Israel occupied mainly Palestinian East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community.

Other foreign capitals have resolved to maintain embassies in Israel outside of Jerusalem until the city's status is resolved through negotiations.

And in Gaza? 

In March 2018, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip launched the "Great March of Return" to claim land in Israel which they fled or were expelled from during the 1948 war.

They also rallied against the US embassy move and called on Israel to lift its crippling decade-long blockade of Gaza, which Israel says is a security necessity.

The border fence has since become the scene of weekly clashes, which Israel claims are orchestrated by Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas but which activists argue are led by a peaceful grassroots civilian movement. 

At least 62 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire during border clashes on the day of the embassy's inauguration.

That day’s clashes also coincided with the annual commemoration of the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, which marks the 1948 displacement of hundreds of thousands Palestinians.

What is the context? 

A seemingly insoluble rift, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been absent from any real diplomatic process since 2014. 

Hamas refuses to accept Israel’s existence and has fought three wars with the state since 2008. 

Israel has continued its blockade of Gaza, along with its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and expanded its settlement enterprise.

Trump entered the White House with the promise to be the most pro-Israel president in US history, with his administration increasing its pledges to Israel.

The unrest on Gaza’s border has since continued alongside an exchange of rounds of rocket attacks between the two sides, most recently this month, with each seeming to bring the sides closer to a full-blown confrontation.

Nearly 300 Palestinians and six Israelis have been killed in the violence in and around Gaza since March 2018.

What happened since? 

Two days after the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem, Guatemala did the same. 

Paraguay followed suit, but backtracked after less than four months. 

Other countries declared similar intentions to move their embassies, but none have yet followed through. 

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon has nevertheless been optimistic. 

He noted “a dynamic never before seen” of visits by foreign leaders and openings of missions — albeit lacking the rank of embassies. 

“The chaos which threatened to follow the US move has not materialised,” Nahshon said, brushing off its effect on diplomacy.

“For years there has been no peace process,” he said. 

The Palestinians, on the other hand, are experiencing “the worst period” ever in terms of relations with the US, said Ahmed Majdalani, adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. 

The US initiatives on Jerusalem have had “a major impact”, he said, adding that in the past year the Trump administration moved from “partial intermediary status to defending the Israeli occupation”.

And now? 

The Palestinian leadership suspended official contact with the US government in December 2017, and has rejected the moves of Trump’s Adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner to craft the “ultimate” peace deal long-flaunted by the US president. 

The plan is expected to be unveiled in June, giving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu time after winning last month’s snap elections to form a new government possibly even further to the right than the current one. 

The US administration has consistently said the plan will break with traditional efforts, and this month Kushner indicated it would ditch longstanding mentions of a two-state solution. 

The Jerusalem move “probably did what it needed to do in terms of domestic politics or calculations” for the US, said Hugh Lovatt, an analyst at the European Council for Foreign Relations, but it has “negatively impacted their peace plan”. 

“It made it more difficult for Gulf states to come out and support it,” he said, “because Jerusalem is one real red line that remains for them in terms of the Palestinian issue”.

The US State Department this month repeated the embassy move was merely a recognition of “the reality that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel”.

The promised peace plan, it said, was “fair, realistic, implementable, and offers a brighter future for all”.

UDIER, RUMBEK South Sudan — Weak rays of early morning sun seep through the smoke rising from smouldering piles of dried dung, keeping flies away from the precious cattle.

Children instinctively reach down for the white ash, a natural mosquito repellent, and rub it on their skin as women set to milking and men prepare for a long day seeking pasture at the peak of the dry season.

The passing of centuries seems to have changed little in the ebb and flow of life for herders in remote South Sudan, whose cattle serve as a bank account and play a core role in every aspect of life.

There has, however, been one devastating shift.

Instead of their traditional spears, cowherds now carry automatic rifles that have transformed cattle raids, a generations-old phenomenon, into massacres that have unleashed brutal cycles of vengeance.

"It is good to have a weapon because it helps you to protect the cattle," said Puk Duoth, 25, a herder from a camp outside the north-eastern village of Udier.

While South Sudan's elites signed a power-sharing truce in September 2018, cattle raids have worsened, highlighting the herculean task required to resolve local conflicts in a society shattered by war. 

According to the UN peacekeeping mission UNMISS, 218 members of herder communities were killed in January in tit-for-tat attacks — almost three times the toll of 73 in the four months from October 2017 to January 2018. 

Observers blame a deadly cocktail of factors for the rising body count: a breakdown of law and order in the war-torn nation, an influx of guns and inflation in the bride price — paid in cattle.

 Cash cows 

In these parts, cows are everything.

In the culture of the Nuer and Dinka peoples — South Sudan's largest herder communities — boys are named after a favoured bull, and songs are written to glorify the long-horned beasts.

"If you are sick, then the cow can be sold and the money used for treatment," says Beny Chuer, a Dinka chief from Amading camp outside the central city of Rumbek — one of the areas worst affected by raids and revenge killings.

"If a mother dies leaving a small baby, that child will live because a cow will be milked to feed it."

Cattle is currency — each head worth about $500. The more a man owns the more admiration he garners.

"If you are sitting in a community meeting and you are talking rubbish, but people know you have many cows, you will be honoured," said Peter Machar, of the NGO Saferworld working on local conflicts.

In his 1940 study of the Nuer people, British anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard found this single-minded preoccupation frustrating in his research efforts.

"I used sometimes to despair that I never discussed anything with the young men but livestock and girls and even the subject of girls led inevitably to that of cattle," he wrote.

Costly brides,
rampant guns

"For us, a cow is the source of money," said chief Chuer, well over 2 metres tall — a genetic legacy perhaps of tall women being viewed as more valuable in herder communities.

He boasts that his tallest daughter earned him a whopping 250 cows.

This is part of the cause of conflict, said Peter Machar's colleague Majok Mon, his own first name a Dinka word for the markings on a bull.

Bride prices soared as donor money poured into the country after independence from Sudan, allowing politicians, military men and the well-connected to enrich themselves and "get a lot of money" to pay for a wife, he said.

The average price went up from about 20 head of cattle to 100, in a country where the majority of people follow the tradition.

Suddenly, many young men could not afford to get married unless they raided cattle from other communities.

Guns flooded the country between the war for independence, achieved in 2011, and the internal conflict that erupted two years later as President Salva Kiir and rival Riek Machar fell out.

Both sides armed young herders and mobilised them to fight, said Peter Machar.

As any semblance of law and order collapsed, the warring also destroyed traditional systems, managed by tribal chiefs, for settling feuds.

"What brought the issue of cattle raids is the gun... if you don't have a gun, then you will be monitored slowly, slowly until you are shot and your cows taken, but if you have your gun, then you can shoot" in defence, said Chuer.

 Out of control 

While fighting has stopped in most of the country as a result of the peace deal, this has changed nothing for herder groups nursing long-standing grievances unrelated to the national tug of war for power.

And with the attention elsewhere, armed herders are launching increasingly deadly military-style attacks on rival camps, with women and children among the victims.

The reality in these remote communities "is very far from what is happening with the elites in Juba", United Nations special envoy David Shearer told AFP.

A report on the "militarisation" of cattle raiding in South Sudan, published last year in the Journal of International Humanitarian Action, warned that leaders like Kiir and Riek Machar, "having undermined the traditional mechanisms that once governed violence in order to further their individual political interests, no longer have control over these raiders either”.

All these factors bode ill for prospects of peace in a country whose youth has known nothing but conflict.

"This generation were born in the war and grew up in the war... they are a majority and they are the ones who are fighting, so how do we really transform that?" said Mon.

DAMASCUS — Rebel rocket fire killed four children and a woman Sunday in a regime-held town outside the embattled extremist bastion of Idlib in northwest Syria, state news agency SANA said.

The bombardment by "terrorist groups" on the Christian-majority town of Suqaylabiyah in Hama province also wounded six other children, SANA said, using its term for both rebels and extremists.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the rockets had been fired from the nearby Idlib region, which is controlled by former Al Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir Al Sham.

The Britain-based war monitor said it was unclear whether HTS or other insurgent groups were behind the attack.

That region of some three million people is supposed to be protected from a massive regime assault by a September buffer zone deal signed by government ally Russia and rebel backer Turkey.

But Damascus and its allies have upped their deadly bombardment of the edges of the extremist bastion in recent weeks, killing dozens and causing tens of thousands to flee, according to the Observatory.

They have also taken several towns this week from the extremists near Suqaylabiyah.

UN-linked aid groups have suspended activities in parts of the Idlib region, as the increased violence since late April has jeopardised the safety of humanitarian workers.

The uptick in air strikes and shelling also displaced 180,000 people between 29 April and 9 May, according to the UN.

The civil war in Syria has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions since it started with the brutal repression of anti-government protests in 2011.