Category Archives: Middle East and North Africa

‘Still going through hell’: the search for Yazidi women seven years on

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As two women are rescued in Syria after being kidnapped by Isis years earlier, Yazidis renew calls for international help to find the thousands still unaccounted for

For seven years, their families waited and hoped for news. In July, they finally received it. Two young women, kidnapped by Islamic State as teenagers, had been found alive in Syria.

Salma*, now 25, was located in Deir el-Zour province, in the east of the country. She had “suffered all kinds of injustice”, said the Yazidi House in the Al-Jazira region, an organisation that assisted with the rescue of both women.

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Johnson: Iran must face consequences of ‘outrageous’ ship attack – video

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Boris Johnson has said Iran must face up to the consequences of its 'outrageous' attack on an oil tanker in the Arabian Sea that killed two crew, including a British national. The Liberian-flagged Mercer Street, which is linked to an Israeli tycoon, was hit off the coast of Oman late on 29 July in what is thought to have been a swarm attack involving multiple drones

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Palestinians facing eviction from East Jerusalem offered deal

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Judge proposes compromise to settle dispute over home ownership with Israeli settlers in Sheikh Jarrah

Palestinian residents of the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah facing forcible eviction from their homes have been offered a compromise deal with Jewish settlers by Israel’s supreme court, in an unexpected development in the high-profile case.

The session on Monday, which was supposed to reach a final decision on whether to accept an appeal from four Palestinian families over eviction orders in the decades-old legal battle, was instead met with a surprise entreaty from the judges for the two sides to accept a “practical solution”.

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Fruit baskets from fourth century BC found in ruins of Thonis-Heracleion

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‘Incredible’ discoveries at submerged ancient city off coast of Egypt have lain untouched

Wicker baskets filled with fruit that have survived from the 4th century BC and hundreds of ancient ceramic artefacts and bronze treasures have been discovered in the submerged ruins of the near-legendary city of Thonis-Heracleion off the coast of Egypt.

They have lain untouched since the city disappeared beneath the waves in the second century BC, then sunk further in the eight century AD, following cataclysmic natural disasters, including an earthquake and tidal waves.

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The Guardian view on Fortress Europe: a continent losing its moral compass

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The increasingly draconian approach to irregular migration betrays the spirit of the 1951 refugee convention

Seventy years ago, the 1951 UN refugee convention established the rights of refugees to seek sanctuary, and the obligations of states to protect them. Increasingly, it seems that much of Europe is choosing to commemorate the anniversary by ripping up some of the convention’s core principles.

So far this year, close to 1,000 migrants have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean, more than four times the death toll for the same period in 2020. Many will have been economic migrants. Others will have been fleeing persecution. Increasingly, Europe does not care. All were “irregular”. And all must be discouraged and deterred through a strategy of cruelty.

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‘Parents are dressing up their children to be buried’: Syria’s war on young escalates

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Mural artist Hussein Sabbagh, 13, one of 27 children killed in government attacks in north-west Syria in two months

Amid the rubble of bombed homes in Binnish, a town in north-west Syria, a brightly painted mural stands out. The image shows an intact house, with love hearts streaming from the windows. Overhead, however, the dark silhouettes of birds are accompanied by helicopters, warplanes and missiles, and the garden’s red and yellow flowers look like flames.

Related: Syria: Assad shells former opposition stronghold Deraa

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‘Highly likely’ Iran was behind fatal oil tanker attack – Dominic Raab

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Foreign secretary backs Israeli PM’s claims Iran was behind drone strike that killed Briton and Romanian

The UK has said it is “highly likely” that Iran carried out an “unlawful and callous attack” on a ship in the Middle East, which left a Briton dead.

The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said the government believed the drone attack on the oil tanker off the coast of Oman was “deliberate, targeted, and a clear violation of international law by Iran”.

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Israel supreme court decision expected on Sheikh Jarrah evictions

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Verdict due in case that could lead to Palestinians being forcibly displaced to make way for Jewish settlers

Israel’s supreme court is due to make a decision on whether to evict Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, in a final hearing in the controversial case that helped spark communal violence inside Israel and a new war with Hamas earlier this year.

A verdict in the deeply contentious case, which could lead to the neighbourhood’s current residents being forcibly displaced to make way for Jewish settlers in a decades-old dispute, is expected on Monday morning.

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Tunisia shows that democracy will struggle if it can’t deliver prosperity

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Political liberty has been overturned – with majority support. That will delight authoritarians everywhere

Implicit in US and western support for pro-democracy movements and transitions around the world is an assumption that, given a free choice, a system of elected, representative government is what people will always naturally prefer. But what if this assumption is wrong? What if a majority believes democracy doesn’t work for them?

Emerging testimony from Tunisia, the latest country to face a crisis over how it is run, suggests many citizens welcomed the forceful suspension of a democratically elected parliament that had failed to address people’s problems and was widely reviled as a self-serving oligarchy.
Mohammed Ali, 33, from Ben Guerdane, seems to typify this view. “I think what happened is good. I think that’s what all the people want,” he told the Guardian after last week’s surprise move by Kais Saied, Tunisia’s president, to seize power and impose a state of emergency. Local politicians and western critics called it a coup.

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A year after Beirut blast, Lebanon sinks deep into mire of corruption

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The response to the explosion in August 2020 has been marked by chaos and paralysis in what is now a failed state

At ground zero of Lebanon’s apocalypse a stench of dead rats seeps from hulking piles of rotting grain. Broken silos teeter above, their sides ripped apart by the catastrophic blast that also broke the soul of Beirut; the contents that should have fed a nation still lie spilt over the gaping ruins of its main port.

A year ago this week, one of the planet’s gravest industrial accidents caused one of its biggest ever explosions, shattering a city that was already at a tipping point. The mushroom cloud of chemicals that soared above the Lebanese capital on 4 August 2020 and the seismic force of the shock wave that ravaged its homes and businesses were carried around the world in high-definition horror. Even amid the chaos of a country that had allowed this to happen to its people, this was surely a moment of reckoning.

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Israel blames Iran for attack on tanker that killed Briton and Romanian

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Israeli foreign minister contacts Dominic Raab and says ‘Iran is not just an Israeli problem’

Israel has blamed Iran for a suspected drone attack on a tanker in the Arabian Sea that killed two crew, including a British national, and has vowed a harsh response.

The Liberian flagged Mercer Street, which is linked to an Israeli tycoon, was hit off the coast of Oman late on Thursday in what is thought to have been a swarm attack involving multiple drones.

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Israel to offer Pfizer Covid booster shots to people over 60

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Announcement makes Israel the first country to offer a third dose of a western vaccine to its citizens on a wide scale

Israel’s prime minister has announced that the country would offer a coronavirus booster shot to those people over 60 who have already been vaccinated.

The announcement by Naftali Bennett makes Israel, which launched one of the world’s most successful vaccination drives earlier this year, the first country to offer a third dose of a western vaccine to its citizens on a wide scale.

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The Guardian view on Arab democracies: the least worst option | Editorial

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Benevolent dictatorship is not the answer to the region’s real problems

This week has shown that Arab regimes are tough on dissent, but much less interested in its causes. This will create problems for years to come as these states struggle to recover from the pandemic. Tunisia’s presidential power grab is a test for Joe Biden’s democracy and human rights agenda. War has impoverished ancient centres of Arab civilisation. The UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia this week pointed out that poverty now affects 88% of the population in Syria and 83% in Yemen. Even nations once considered wealthy have been brought low by an unhappy meeting of leadership failures and Covid-19. Lebanon’s leaders are begging for foreign assistance after the local currency plummeted in value and the population ran short of food, fuel and medicine.

The Arab world is a varied place. The latest UN survey shows it diverging into wealthy Gulf absolute monarchies; a set of middle-income countries with more people than their oil reserves can comfortably afford; war zones in some of the largest nations such as Iraq; and very poor states. The oil-rich sheikhdoms are pulling ahead and using their financial and military clout to extend their influence, often with disastrous results. The Arab region, says the UN, hosts more than six million refugees and more than 11 million internally displaced persons. There is little coordinated action to deal with the numerous social challenges, including growing poverty, increased unemployment and persistent gender inequalities. Food insecurity has spread. One can be too downcast: the UN hopes for a silver lining in the prospect of peace in Libya.

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Syria: Assad shells former opposition stronghold Deraa

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President attempts to crush simmering insurrection with all-day offensive as rebels launch counterattack

Bashar al-Assad has attacked a former opposition stronghold with missiles and artillery shelling in an attempt to crush a simmering insurrection, in an unprecedented development in Syria’s decade-long war.

Deraa al-Balad and its surrounds, a district of Deraa city in the southern province of the same name, was targeted with heavy weaponry in tandem with a ground push on three axes from two Syrian army divisions and allied Iran-backed militias early on Thursday morning, in a large offensive which continued throughout the day.

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Tell us: how are you affected by the political situation in Tunisia?

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We’d like to hear from people living in Tunisia about the political situation

A decade after the revolution that sparked the Arab Spring, Tunisia’s president, Kais Saied, has suspended parliament for 30 days and dismissed the prime minister Hichem Mechichi in what critics have described as a coup. On Monday, Saied announced a month-long nationwide curfew.

We would like to hear from people in Tunisia who are affected by the current political situation – what are your concerns? Have you taken part in the protests last week? What is the political atmosphere where you live ?

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Denmark could face legal action over attempts to return Syrian refugees

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Activists fear a ‘dangerous precedent’ being set as Copenhagen uses a report that deems Damascus safe to deny residency status

Denmark’s attempt to return hundreds of Syrians to Damascus after deeming the city safe will “set a dangerous precedent” for other countries to do the same, say lawyers who are preparing to take the Danish government to the European court of human rights (ECHR) over the issue.

Authorities in Denmark began rejecting Syrian refugees’ applications for renewal of temporary residency status last summer, and justified the move because a report had found the security situation in some parts of the country had “improved significantly”. About 1,200 people from Damascus currently living in Denmark are believed to be affected by the policy.

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Tunisia in turmoil as president purges officials and seizes judicial power

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Days after PM’s overthrow fears grow that Kais Saied will undo democratic gains achieved by Arab spring

Tunisia’s president has launched a purge of senior officials, including prosecutors and judges, and taken on judicial powers, days after overthrowing the prime minister and imposing emergency law.

Kais Saied’s crackdown has dragged the country deeper into uncertainty days after its elected parliament was suspended for a month in a shock move that brought a decade of faltering democracy to a sudden halt.

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‘We will return’: the battle to save an ancient Palestinian village from demolition

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Activists say Lifta, abandoned during the 1948 war, must be preserved in the face of Israeli construction plans

The ancient Palestinian village of Lifta sits on a quiet hillside minutes from Jerusalem’s bustling modern centre. Abandoned when its residents fled during the 1948 war, it has been left unchanged – frozen in time – ever since.

Today, however, its overgrown domed stone houses with arched windows, built during the early Ottoman Empire and resting on even older ruins dating back to the Iron Age, are at risk of being demolished to make way for a luxurious resort of villas, hotels and shops.

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