We hear much about Yemen’s crisis, but far less about the hypocrisy of states fuelling the very conflict they condemn
During his historic recent visit to the United Arab Emirates, Pope Francis condemned the war in my home country, Yemen, as a terrible humanitarian crisis.
Addressing the world he said: “Let us pray strongly, because there are children who are hungry, who are thirsty – they don’t have medicine and they are in danger of death”.
Continue reading...Report finds UK arms ‘highly likely to be cause of significant civilian casualties in Yemen’
The UK is on “the wrong side of the law” by sanctioning arms exports to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen and should suspend some of the export licences, an all-party Lords committee has said.
The report by the international relations select committee says ministers are not making independent checks to see if arms supplied by the UK are being used in breach of the law, but is instead relying on inadequate investigations by the Saudis, its allies in the war.
Continue reading...Family calls for her return to UK and considers legal action to stop government blocking it
The UK’s most senior counter-terrorism officer has said that Shamima Begum, who left the UK to join Islamic State as a 15-year-old, had “potentially criminalised” herself as her family considers court action to stop the government blocking her return to Britain.
Government and counter-terrorism officials are still considering what to do after Begum, now 19, was discovered in a Syrian refugee camp after fleeing Isis’s last stronghold and said she wanted to return to Britain.
Continue reading...Wives of jihadist fighters wounded as they flee Baghuz, the final Isis enclave in Syria
Islamic State fighters shot and wounded fleeing family members trying to escape from its besieged enclave in Syria, according to a coalition commander, as Kurdish forces continued to tighten the noose on the remaining extremists.
The battle to recapture the group’s last speck of territory is now only days from completion, Kurdish commanders said, with perhaps several hundred hardcore members dug into the centre of Baghuz village, a hamlet on the banks of the river Euphrates.
Continue reading...The remarks made by the 19-year-old British Islamic State recruit Shamima Begum to a journalist in a refugee camp in eastern Syria are horrifying. She described being unmoved by the sight of a severed head, showed no sympathy for executed hostages, and said she had no regrets about her decision to leave the UK. We do not yet know whether she played any role during her four years with Islamic State other than that of a wife and mother. Other western recruits have acted as propagandists and recruiters. Ms Begum, who is heavily pregnant, wants to return to the UK and is entitled to do so, as security minister Ben Wallace has acknowledged. Bernard Hogan-Howe, who was Metropolitan police commissioner when the teenager and two friends left their homes in Bethnal Green, east London, in 2015, said then that the girls had “no reason to fear” returning, provided they had not committed terrorist offences. The official tone has now changed, with Mr Wallace saying on Thursday that he would not risk British lives to rescue UK citizens from Syria.
Ms Begum, who married a Dutch Islamic State fighter 10 days after arriving in Raqqa, told the Times she had lost two young children to illness, lived through six months during which her husband was imprisoned and tortured, and witnessed unimaginable brutality. Whatever her degree of culpability, she and her friends, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, were children when they left the UK and are thought to have been groomed. Ms Sultana is reported to have wanted to return, but been too afraid following the murder of another jihadi bride who tried to escape. Mr Sultana is thought to have been killed in an airstrike three years ago.
Continue reading...I cannot agree more with Amr Darrag’s opinion on the failure of the Egyptian government – shown in extravagant projects that were meant to lift President Sisi’s status rather than serve the population and in the establishment of an autocratic regime that has seen an abundance of human rights violations (If Sisi’s brutality in Egypt continues, the results could be dire for Europe, 11 February). And it is likely, in light of the proposals for a constitutional amendment, that Sisi will be in office until 2034.
However, the call for the west to address the autocracy of Sisi’s government is problematic. Democracy is established and sustained by collective action, and can only thrive when people are able to be force themselves into the conversation and the decision-making process. Thus, democracy can be imagined differently in different countries and can often be used to reject rather than affirm western values.
Continue reading...Facts on the ground as much as ethical and legal factors may come into play in repatriating
US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria have almost completely dismantled Islamic State’s once sprawling “caliphate”, with Isis fighters making their last stand in an area smaller the one sq km in the eastern desert near the border with Iraq.
Wives and children of Isis fighters, along with thousands of civilians unconnected to the group, have left for al-Hol refugee camp, where dozens of people, mostly children, have died in squalid and freezing conditions in recent weeks.
Continue reading...Israeli leader bets on antipathy toward Iran to overshadow Palestine issue in Warsaw
They are images that will infuriate the Palestinian leadership: the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, smiling and joking with Arab leaders at an international conference on the Middle East.
Israel has formal diplomatic relations with only two Arab states, Egypt and Jordan. For decades, one price the country has paid for its occupation of the Palestinian territories has been snubs by the majority of its neighbours.
Continue reading...Ben Wallace says ‘actions have consequences’ as schoolgirl who joined Isis is found in Syria
The security minister, Ben Wallace, has said he would not put officials’ lives at risk to rescue UK citizens who went to Syria and Iraq to join Islamic State, insisting “actions have consequences”.
“I’m not putting at risk British people’s lives to go looking for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Continue reading...The extremist group’s enduring influence in Mogadishu makes the Somali capital a dangerous place to live and work
Once every other month, journalist Hassan Dahir, 28, leaves his hostel in central Mogadishu under the cover of darkness to visit his mother in Yaqshid district, north-east of the capital.
He will spend the night with her and return to his rented room before dawn.
Continue reading...In rebuke of Trump’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, resolution would force administration to withdraw US troops
Asserting congressional authority over war-making powers, the US House of Representatives approved a resolution Wednesday that would force the Trump administration to withdraw US troops from involvement in Yemen, in a rebuke of Donald Trump’s alliance with the Saudi-led coalition behind the military intervention.
Lawmakers in both parties are increasingly uneasy over the humanitarian crisis in Yemen and are skeptical of the US partnership with that coalition, especially in light of Saudi Arabia’s role in the killing of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the royal family.
Continue reading...Shamima Begum, 19, in refugee camp in Syria after fleeing last territory held by Islamic State
An east London schoolgirl who left the UK in 2015 to join Islamic State has been tracked down in Syria where she said has no regrets about joining the group, but now wants to come home as she is nine months pregnant.
Shamima Begum, 19, said she fled the jihadists’ last remaining enclave in Baghuz, eastern Syria, as she was tired of life on a battlefield and feared for her unborn child after her two other children died.
Continue reading...Youssef heard the shots that killed his boyfriend. Resettled in Australia, his is one of four stories told in a new documentary
“I tried to escape, and then one of them hit me. Hazem never allowed anyone to lay a hand on me.”
Youssef’s breath shortens with each word, his face disguised from the camera as he relives the moment his partner sought to shield him from a group of men on a Baghdad street.
Continue reading...Monica Witt, who defected in 2013, worked as a cryptologist and a counter-intelligence investigator for more than 10 years
A former US air force intelligence officer who defected to Iran in 2013 has been charged with espionage, giving away the identity of a US agent and other secrets.
Monica Witt, aged 39, was a cryptologist and a counter-intelligence investigator for the US air force for more than 10 years before working as an intelligence analyst for the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton for five months in 2008 and doing other private sector work.
Continue reading...Plaintiff’s lawyers wanted to suspend case after argument about his identity came unstuck in Canberra high court
The high court has rejected an attempt to reopen a controversial ruling which effectively enabled indefinite immigration detention in Australia.
The full bench in Canberra took the highly unusual step of delivering an immediate judgement, after a tumultuous day which saw the plaintiff’s lawyers seek to stop them hearing the case and have it sent back to a single judge for reassessment.
Continue reading...Small enclave of extremists holds out in Syria against intensive bombardment
Clamouring up dirt berms, clutching babies and blankets, the newest refugees of the Islamic State could well be the last.
Inside the nearby enclave they fled are perhaps no more than 500 people – nearly all of them fighters who are refusing to leave a two square kilometre corner of eastern Syria that is all that remains of the group’s so-called caliphate.
Continue reading...Lack of participation at Middle East event reflects anger over US policy on Iran and Syria
Key European powers will offer only limited participation in a high-profile Trump administration summit on the Middle East starting on Wednesday, reflecting their growing anger over unilateral US policymaking on Iran and Syria.
The UK foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, will leave the Warsaw summit early, pleading Brexit Commons business, while France is sending a civil servant and Germany its junior foreign minister.
Continue reading...Hundreds of thousands of Iranians march through capital to mark 40th anniversary of Islamic revolution
Iran’s president has insisted “enemy” plots against the country will fail and called President Donald Trump an “idiot” as vast crowds marked 40 years since the Islamic revolution.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including soldiers, students, clerics and chador-clad women holding small children, marched through the capital in freezing rain on Monday to mark the anniversary.
Continue reading...Hundreds of thousands of students, clerics, soldiers and black-clad women holding small children thronged streets across Iran to mark the toppling of the shah – many carrying portraits of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who died in 1989, and Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Continue reading...A Commons committee is scrutinising UK arms export controls – yet the Yemen conflict isn’t even on the agenda
Seated in front of a tapestry embroidered with words from the lexicon of “British values” – freedom, equality, tolerance, liberty – ten MPs spent an hour last week taking evidence from NGOs on an issue that calls these values into question: UK arms export policy.
This is the Parliamentary committees on arms export controls (CAEC) in action: a body responsible for scrutinising government policy and holding it to account.
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