Refugee Bahraini footballer returning to Melbourne after extradition case dropped
The refugee Bahraini footballer Hakeem al-Araibi has boarded a flight to Australia after Thai authorities withdrew an extradition case against him.
Thai authorities said the Bahraini government had decided to end its pursuit of Al-Araibi, who fled Bahrain in 2014 before being granted permanent residence in Australia, where he has lived since.
Continue reading...Foreign fighters reportedly executed after launching attack against Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Fresh details have emerged of the coup attempt against Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, with witnesses claiming foreign members of the terror group lost a two-day battle with his bodyguards before being rounded up and executed.
A witness who spoke to the Guardian after being smuggled from the last hamlet in eastern Syria held by Isis, said the clash took place in al Keshma, a village next to Baghouz in September, three months earlier than regional intelligence officials believed it had taken place.
Continue reading...Simon Tisdall’s denunciation of the US-led western involvement in Afghanistan as “17 or so years of ultimately pointless, criminal mayhem” (The US ruined Afghanistan. It can’t simply walk away now, Opinion, 8 February) is about as far wide of the mark as it is possible to be, unless you are Donald Trump. Even more curious, Tisdall then enjoins the US, presumably the “criminals” in this enterprise, not to scuttle away.
I served in Iraq and Afghanistan and am not naive enough to believe that one was the “good war”, while the other one wasn’t. But Tisdall seems to forget why we intervened in Afghanistan in the first place: to remove a monstrous regime, the Taliban, that had allowed the perpetrators of 9/11 to set up camp in their country and also terrorised its own people. Destroying the Taliban regime was the right thing to do.
Continue reading...Hind Mohammed al-Bolooki could be sent home after North Macedonia rejected her claim
An Emirati woman who fled her family and is now trapped in a detention centre in North Macedonia is begging to be allowed to claim asylum elsewhere instead of being deported back home, the Guardian has learned.
Hind Mohammed al-Bolooki, 43, says she was locked in a room at her home in Dubai in October last year by family members after she asked for a divorce, but she managed to escape and leave the country.
Continue reading...Tory strategist’s pitch detailed how CTF Partners would spread negative stories and press Fifa to ‘restart bidding process’
Sir Lynton Crosby offered to work on a campaign to cancel the 2022 Qatar World Cup and get it awarded to another country in return for £5.5m, according to a leaked plan that gives a rare insight into the activities of one of the world’s best-known political operatives.
The detailed pitch document – “a proposal for a campaign to expose the truth of the Qatar regime and bring about the termination of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar” – was written in April last year and personally signed by Crosby.
Continue reading...Wearing a baseball hat and smoking a shisha pipe in a cafe in Cairo, Dawitt tells me he is 19, but looks years younger. He explains that he escaped Eritrea aged 13 to avoid forced, indefinite conscription into military service.
His family helped him pay smugglers to travel via Sudan to Egypt. Struggling with debt and desperate to make the sea crossing to Europe, he looked in vain for regular work. Then he met a Sudanese man who suggested a “safe and easy way” to raise the cash – selling a kidney.
Continue reading...The divers, who were named 2019 Australians of the Year, have written to the Thai prime minister to free the refugee
The Thailand cave rescue diving heroes and Australians of the Year, Dr Richard Harris and Dr Craig Challen, have joined the campaign to save the refugee footballer Hakeem-al Arabi, a Bahraini refugee and resident of Australia who is being detained in Bangkok.
Harris, an anaesthetist and diver from Adelaide, and Challen, a champion diver from Wangara, Western Australia, were part of the global team that freed the trapped Wild Boars football team in July 2018. They have been friends and cave diving partners for years.
Continue reading...Fighting between UN-backed GNA and Libyan National Army over field closed since December
Fighting has broken out over the future of Libya’s largest oil field, as forces loyal to the UN-recognised Tripoli-based government battle Libyan National Army (LNA) forces led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the leading figure in fractured Libya’s east.
Al-Sharara field, 560 miles south of Tripoli, is capable of producing 315,000 barrels of crude a day – about a third of Libya’s total current output. But it has been closed by the Libyan National Oil Corporation (NOC) since December when the installation was seized by local tribes demanding the Tripoli government did more to lift the area out of poverty.
Continue reading...US media quotes intelligence sources who intercepted a conversation between Mohammed bin Salman and an aide in 2017
Saudi Arabia’s crown prince told a senior aide he would go after Jamal Khashoggi “with a bullet” a year before the dissident journalist was killed inside the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate, according to a US media report.
US intelligence understood that Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s 33-year-old de facto ruler, was ready to kill the journalist, although he may not have literally meant he planned to shoot him, according to the New York Times ($).
Continue reading...Jihadist group placed bounty on head of foreign fighter after plot, say intelligence officials
The Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, survived a coup attempt last month launched by foreign fighters in his eastern Syrian hideout, intelligence officials believe, and the terrorist group has since placed a bounty on the main plotter’s head.
The incident is believed to have taken place on 10 January in a village near Hajin in the Euphrates River valley, where the jihadist group is clinging to its last sliver of land. Regional intelligence officials say a planned move against Baghdadi led to a firefight between foreign fighters and the fugitive terrorist chief’s bodyguards, who spirited him away to the nearby deserts.
Continue reading...Six years after his death, youth idol Mahmoud Abdelaziz remains an influential symbol of a very different Sudan
When Mahmoud Abdelaziz, one of Sudan’s most popular singers, died in Amman in January 2013, his fans mobbed the runway of Khartoum airport as his body was flown home, forcing the cancellation of flights.
Others poured out on to the city’s streets, forming one of the biggest crowds witnessed in Sudan’s recent history.
Continue reading...The Syrian Democratic Forces, the multi-ethnic secular forces in northern Syria primarily made up of the Kurdish YPG as well as other local Assyrian, Arab and Turkmen groups, have never sought the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad as your article suggests (British hostage Cantlie, seized by Isis in 2012, is alive, says Home Office, 6 February). Their military aim is the defeat of Islamic State and their political goal is secular democracy and autonomy in northern Syria as seen by the multi-ethnic, feminist, democratic socialist, commune-based society they have been constructing in the areas they have liberated from Isis. There have been no major battles with regime forces and in fact they have worked with the Syrian Arab Army in the Kurdish Aleppo district of Sheikh Maqsood, which was liberated from al-Nusra jihadists in 2016.
Rosa Gilbert
Co-secretary, Kurdistan Solidarity Campaign
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Continue reading...A Labour MP’s grotesque take on Yemen war casualties serves only to show the sordid and politicised nature of body counts
Counting the bodies in conflicts is a necessary, confusing and too often sordid business.
Body counts are necessary for obvious reasons. Numbers supply a moral reference point. They tell us about the scale of a conflict as well as if civilians were targeted and how. They provide evidence for different kinds of human rights advocacy in an international setting, and assist in setting policy for emergency assistance.
Continue reading...The young children of an Islamic State fighter were abandoned in Syria after his death. But with the help of human rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith and reporter Joshua Surtees, the boys have been reunited with their mother. Also today: columnist Gary Younge on the storm over Liam Neeson’s race comments
In 2014, Mahmud and Ayyub Ferreira were abducted by their father in Trinidad and taken to Syria to live under Islamic State rule in the so-called caliphate. After the death of their father and the liberation of the Isis stronghold of Raqqa, the boys, now aged 11 and seven, were abandoned before being picked up and taken into Kurdish custody.
Mahmud and Ayyub had been apart from their mother for four years but a combined effort from the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, Guardian reporters, including Joshua Surtees, and the Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters tracked down Felicia Perkins-Ferreira in Trinidad and reunited the family.
Continue reading...Show of public Christian worship considered largest ever seen on the Arabian peninsula
Marivic Sorita’s eyes filled with tears as she spoke of her daughters back in the Philippines. She has seen them only three times in the 11 years she has worked as a housemaid in Abu Dhabi. Her eldest, now 21, had recently completed her studies “thanks to the sacrifice” Sorita has made by the separation, sending almost all her salary back home.
Maybe one day, when her 14-year-old daughter has also finished her studies, Sorita will be able to go back to Manila and be reunited with her family. But for now, she was enjoying a rare day off work for what she described as a “very, very special” occasion.
Continue reading...Comments come after Donald Trump suggested US forces in Iraq were monitoring activity in Iran
Iraq’s president has hit back at comments made by Donald Trump, saying that the US president did not ask Iraq’s permission for US troops stationed there to “watch Iran”.
A day after Trump said US soldiers in Iraq would be tasked with monitoring Iran, Barham Salih told reporters at a forum in Baghdad that the US military presence in the country was the result of a bilateral agreement with the specific goal of fighting terrorism.
Continue reading...Al-Shabaab says it carried out Mogadishu bombing and shot manager of Bossaso port
Islamic militants in Somalia have shot dead a senior manager running the port of Bossaso in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, and a car bomb has killed at least 11 in Mogadishu.
The assassination of Paul Anthony Formosa, a Maltese citizen who worked for the Dubai government-owned P&O Ports, and the bombing in the capital, were both claimed by the extremist group al-Shabaab extremist group.
Continue reading...Trump said he wanted to maintain a military presence, despite saying the invasion of Iraq was ‘one of the greatest mistakes’
Donald Trump wants to keep US troops in Iraq, in order to “watch” Iran.
Related: Super Bowl: Donald Trump would have 'hard time' letting son play football
Continue reading...Almost one-third in UK see rift, finds survey ahead of pope’s visit to Arabian peninsula
Large numbers of people in Christian-majority countries in the west see a fundamental clash between Islam and the values of their nation, according to a survey.
However, significantly fewer people in the Middle East and North Africa view Christianity in the same way.
Continue reading...Pope Francis’s visit to the United Arab Emirates this week will be greeted enthusiastically. Some 120,000 people are expected to turn out for his mass in a sports stadium in Abu Dhabi – as many as turned out in Dublin when he travelled to historically Catholic Ireland last year. The first visit by a pontiff to the Arabian peninsula, the birthplace of Islam, highlights the complications of the religious situation in the Middle East, and more widely the issues of Christian-Muslim relations.
There may be as many as 2 million Christians in the Middle East today. Despite nearly 16 years of war and sometimes brutal persecution in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, many remain in the lands that were the cradle of Christianity. In part this is because it is still made as hard as possible for them to leave the region. The Christians of Iraq have largely been driven from their homes by persecution, as have some of the Christians of Syria, where a number have taken the side of the Assad dictatorship. But they have ended up in refugee camps rather than reaching notionally Christian Europe.
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