Turkiye FM calls for regional cooperation to fight PKK

Turkiye FM calls for regional cooperation to fight PKK
Turkish FM Hakan Fidan and and his Iraqi counterpart Fuad Hussein. (Reuters)
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Updated 26 January 2025
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Turkiye FM calls for regional cooperation to fight PKK

Turkiye FM calls for regional cooperation to fight PKK
  • Two Iraqi border guards were killed Friday near the Turkish border in a shooting that Iraq blamed on the PKK

BAGHDAD: Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called for combined regional efforts to combat outlawed Kurdish fighters in Iraq and neighboring Syria during a visit to Baghdad on Sunday.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, also known as PKK, which has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state, holds positions in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, which also hosts Turkish military bases.

The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkiye and its Western allies, and Ankara accuses Kurdish forces in Syria of links to the outlawed group.

“I want to emphasize this fact in the strongest way: The PKK is targeting Turkiye, Iraq and Syria,” Fidan said in a press conference with his Iraqi counterpart Fuad Hussein.

“We must combine all our resources and destroy both Daesh and the PKK,” he added.

Fidan’s visit comes after two Iraqi border guards were killed Friday near the Turkish border in a shooting that Baghdad blamed on the PKK. After the attack, Ankara vowed to work with Iraq to secure their common frontier.

Turkiye regularly launches strikes against the PKK in Iraq and Kurdish fighters in Syria.

Baghdad has recently sharpened its tone against the PKK, and last year it quietly listed the group as a “banned organization” — though Ankara demands the Iraqi government do more in the fight against the militant group.

“Our ultimate expectation from Iraq is that it recognizes the PKK, which it has declared a banned organization, as a terrorist organization as well,” Fidan said.

In August, Baghdad and Ankara signed a military cooperation deal to establish joint command and training centers with the aim of fighting the PKK.

The foreign ministers also discussed the fight against Daesh on the Iraqi-Syrian border, Hussein said during the press conference, as well as the situation in Syria, where former leader Bashar Assad was toppled in December.

“There are clear understandings between ... Turkiye and Iraq on how to address” the situation there, he said, adding that Baghdad was in contact with the new Syrian authorities and was “trying to coordinate on many issues.”

Earlier this month, Fidan threatened to launch a military operation against Kurdish forces in Syria, where Turkiye has carried out successive ground operations to push the fighters away from its border.

The Kurdish forces there are seen by the West as essential in the fight against Daesh.


Polio still circulating in Gaza, mass vaccination to resume: WHO

Updated 52 sec ago
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Polio still circulating in Gaza, mass vaccination to resume: WHO

Polio still circulating in Gaza, mass vaccination to resume: WHO
The UN health agency said no more polio cases had been reported since a 10-month-old child was paralyzed in Gaza last August
“The presence of the virus still poses a risk to children with low or no immunity, in Gaza and throughout the region“

GENEVA: The World Health Organization said Wednesday that mass polio vaccination would resume in Gaza on Saturday, targeting nearly 600,000 children, after the virus was again detected in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
The United Nations health agency said no more polio cases had been reported since a 10-month-old child was paralyzed in Gaza last August.
But it said that poliovirus had been found again in wastewater samples taken in the Gaza Strip in December and January, “signalling ongoing circulation in the environment, putting children at risk.”
“The presence of the virus still poses a risk to children with low or no immunity, in Gaza and throughout the region.”
A new campaign would therefore take place from February 22 to 26, with the aim of reaching more than 591,000 children with oral polio vaccines, it said.
The aim was to reach all children under 10, including those previously missed, “to close immunity gaps and end the outbreak,” it said, adding that another vaccination round was planned for April.
Poliovirus, most often spread through sewage and contaminated water, is highly infectious and potentially fatal.
It can cause deformities and paralysis and mainly affects children under the age of five.
After the August case was reported, brief localized pauses in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza were agreed to allow for two vaccination rounds in the territory in September and October.
Those rounds reached more than 95 percent of the children targeted, WHO said.
But it warned that some areas in the north, including Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, were inaccessible for the second vaccination round.
As a result around 7,000 children had not received their necessary second dose.
The ceasefire in effect since January 19 “means health workers have considerably better access now,” WHO said.
The agency stressed that “pockets of individuals with low or no immunity provide the virus an opportunity to continue spreading and potentially cause disease.”
“The current environment in Gaza, including overcrowding in shelters and severely damaged water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure, which facilitates fecal-oral transmission, create ideal conditions for further spread of poliovirus,” it warned.
It warned that the movement of people after the current ceasefire could help spread the virus.
WHO stressed that there are no risks to vaccinating a child more than once.
“Each dose gives additional protection which is needed during an active polio outbreak.”

Egypt says Gaza should be rebuilt without displacing Palestinians

Egypt says Gaza should be rebuilt without displacing Palestinians
Updated 25 min 4 sec ago
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Egypt says Gaza should be rebuilt without displacing Palestinians

Egypt says Gaza should be rebuilt without displacing Palestinians
  • “We stressed the importance of the international community adopting a plan to reconstruct the Gaza strip without displacing Palestinians,” President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi said
  • UNRWA said its operations in the Gaza Strip and West Bank will suffer

DUBAI: Egypt’s president called on the international community on Wednesday to adopt a plan to rebuild war-torn Gaza without displacing Palestinians, after a proposal by US President Donald Trump angered Arabs with his own vision for the enclave.
“We stressed the importance of the international community adopting a plan to reconstruct the Gaza strip without displacing Palestinians — I repeat, without displacing Palestinians from their lands,” President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi told a press conference with Spain’s prime minister in Madrid.
Trump has proposed a plan to redevelop the tiny enclave into an international beach resort after resettling its Palestinian inhabitants. He called on Jordan and Egypt to take in Palestinians.
Egypt and Jordan, along with other Arab states, rejected the plan and said they will work on an alternative to counter Trump’s proposal, but there are no signs they are making serious progress.
El-Sisi added that the UN Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA), which provides aid, health and education services to millions in the Palestinian territories and neighboring Arab countries of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, was indispensable for Palestinians.
UNRWA said its operations in the Gaza Strip and West Bank will suffer after an Israeli law banned it in October on Israeli land — including East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in a move not recognized internationally — and contact with Israeli authorities from Jan. 30.
The United Arab Emirates’ President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan told the United States’ secretary of state Marco Rubio on Wednesday that his country rejects a proposal to displace Palestinians from their land, the Emirati state news agency WAM reported.
The leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE and Qatar are expected to discuss the plan in Riyadh this month before it can be presented to an Arab League summit in Cairo in March.


Suspected Somali pirates seize a new Yemeni fishing boat in second recent attack

Suspected Somali pirates seize a new Yemeni fishing boat in second recent attack
Updated 19 February 2025
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Suspected Somali pirates seize a new Yemeni fishing boat in second recent attack

Suspected Somali pirates seize a new Yemeni fishing boat in second recent attack
  • Piracy off the Somali coast peaked in 2011 when 237 attacks were reported

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates: Suspected Somali pirates have seized another Yemeni fishing boat off the Horn of Africa, authorities said.
In a statement late Tuesday, a European naval force known as EUNAVFOR Atalanta said the attack targeted a dhow, a traditional ship that plies the waters of the Mideast, off the town of Eyl in Somalia.
It said the attack Monday remained under investigation. It comes 10 days after another pirate attack on another Yemeni fishing boat which ultimately ended with the pirates fleeing and the mariners on board being recovered unhurt.
Piracy off the Somali coast peaked in 2011 when 237 attacks were reported. Somali piracy in the region at the time cost the world’s economy some $7 billion — with $160 million paid out in ransoms, according to the Oceans Beyond Piracy monitoring group.
The threat was diminished by increased international naval patrols, a strengthening central government in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, and other efforts.
However, Somali pirate attacks have resumed at a greater pace over the last year, in part due to the insecurity caused by Yemen’s Houthi rebels launching their attacks in the Red Sea corridor over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
In 2024, there were seven reported incidents off Somalia, according to the International Maritime Bureau.


After decades in exile, Syria’s Jews visit Damascus

After decades in exile, Syria’s Jews visit Damascus
Updated 19 February 2025
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After decades in exile, Syria’s Jews visit Damascus

After decades in exile, Syria’s Jews visit Damascus
  • The new authorities have said all of Syria’s communities will play a role in their country’s future
  • The synagogues and Jewish school in the Old City remained relatively well-preserved

DAMASCUS: For the first time in three decades, Rabbi Joseph Hamra and his son Henry read from a Torah scroll in a synagogue in the heart of Syria’s capital Damascus, carefully passing their thumbs over the handwritten text as if still in awe they were back home.
The father and son fled Syria in the 1990s, after then-Syrian president Hafez Assad lifted a travel ban on the country’s historic Jewish community, which had faced decades of restrictions including on owning property or holding jobs.
Virtually all of the few thousand Jews in Syria promptly left, leaving less than 10 in the Syrian capital. Joseph and Henry — just a child at the time — settled in New York.
“Weren’t we in a prison? So we wanted to see what was on the outside,” said Joseph, now 77, on his reasons for leaving at the time. “Everyone else who left with us is dead.”
But when Assad’s son and successor as president Bashar Assad was toppled in December, the Hamra family began planning a once-unimaginable visit to Damascus with the help of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a US-based advocacy group.
They met with Syria’s deputy foreign minister at the ministry, now managed by caretaker authorities installed by the Islamist rebels who ousted Assad after more than 50 years of family rule that saw itself as a bastion of secular Arab nationalism.
The new authorities have said all of Syria’s communities will play a role in their country’s future. But incidents of religious intolerance and reports of conservative Islamists proselytizing in public have kept more secular-minded Syrians and members of minority communities on edge.
Henry Hamra, now aged 48, said Syria’s foreign ministry had now pledged to protect Jewish heritage.
“We need the government’s help, we need the government’s security and it’s going to happen,” he said.
Walking through the narrow passages of the Old City, a UNESCO-listed World Heritage Site, Henry and Joseph ran into their onetime neighbors — Palestinian Syrians — and later marveled at hand-painted Hebrew lettering at several synagogues.
“I want to see my kids come back and see this beautiful synagogue. It’s a work of art,” said Henry.
But some things were missing, he said, including a golden-lettered Torah from one of the synagogues that was now stored in a library in Israel, to where thousands of Syrian Jews fled throughout the 20th century.
While the synagogues and Jewish school in the Old City remained relatively well-preserved, Syria’s largest synagogue in Jobar, an eastern suburb of Damascus, was reduced to rubble during the nearly 14-year civil war that erupted after Assad’s violent suppression of protests against him.
Jobar was home to a large Jewish community for hundreds of years until the 1800s and the synagogue, built in honor of the biblical prophet Elijah, was looted before it was destroyed.


One person killed in Israeli strike in south Lebanon, Health Ministry says

One person killed in Israeli strike in south Lebanon, Health Ministry says
Updated 18 min 8 sec ago
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One person killed in Israeli strike in south Lebanon, Health Ministry says

One person killed in Israeli strike in south Lebanon, Health Ministry says
  • February 18 was the deadline for the withdrawal of Israeli forces
  • The Health Ministry also said two people were injured by Israeli gunfire

BEIRUT: One person was killed in an Israeli drone strike on the southern Lebanese border town of Aita Al-Shaab, the Lebanese Ministry of Health said on Wednesday, a day after the deadline for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
February 18 was the deadline for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanese towns under a US-mediated ceasefire agreement which ended the war between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militia last year.
Israeli officials said some forces would temporarily remain in five positions across the border, a move they said is deemed essential for the country’s security.
Hezbollah, which suffered significant losses during the war, said Israel was still occupying Lebanese land and that it held the Lebanese government responsible for a pull-out of all Israeli forces.
Israel had been due to withdraw by January 26, but this was extended to February 18 after it accused Lebanon of failing to enforce the terms. Lebanon at the time accused Israel of delaying its withdrawal.
The Health Ministry also said two people were injured by Israeli gunfire in the southern town of Al-Wazzani.