A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China
Continue reading...Category Archives: Iraq
‘Desperate’: wife of Australian engineer held in Iraq says he feels betrayed by both countries
Embassy officials first visited Robert Pether on day 26 of his detention in Baghdad, his wife says
An Australian citizen has still not been told what charge he is facing, has only just been seen by Australian officials and is yet to meet his lawyer, despite spending 30 days behind bars in Baghdad.
Australian officials visited Robert Pether for the first time on Monday, day 26 of his detention, and are now asking if he can get a meeting with his lawyer.
Continue reading...Wife of Australian engineer arrested in Iraq begs foreign minister to help
Robert Pether’s wife says he is being kept in jail as ‘leverage in a dispute’ with country’s central bank
The wife of an Australian man arrested in Iraq has pleaded with the foreign minister, Marise Payne, to intervene and help her husband, who she says is being kept in jail as “leverage” to help the country’s central bank.
Mechanical engineer Robert Pether, 46, remains behind bars in Baghdad without the means to contact his family after being arrested without warning three weeks ago.
Continue reading...Covid live: Indian PM Narendra Modi says ‘storm’ of coronavirus infections has shaken country
Latest updates: Modi urges all citizens to take vaccines and exercise caution after India suffers a fourth straight day of record coronavirus cases
- US promises India Covid aid after fourth straight day of record cases
- India’s Covid death toll at record high, but true figure likely to be worse
- Mallorca man arrested for infecting 22 people with Covid
- UK mental health patients ‘missed out on care’ during Covid
- See all our coronavirus coverage
Western Australia’s international arrivals cap for the next month will be halved, officials said on today, as the state is battling a coronavirus outbreak that forced more than two million people into a three-day lockdown from Saturday, Reuters reports.
The lockdown was ordered after a traveller likely became infected while in quarantine in a hotel and unknowingly passed it on to two other people in the community.
Australia closed its borders more than a year ago and allows mostly only its citizens and permanent residents to return. All, except from New Zealand, must undergo two weeks of mandatory hotel quarantine at their own expense.
A Spanish man with Covid symptoms who coughed on work colleagues and told them “I’m going to give you all the coronavirus” has been charged with intentionally causing injury after allegedly infecting 22 people, AP reports:
Spanish police said their investigation began after a coronavirus outbreak at the company where the 40-year-old man worked on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca.
Days before the outbreak, the man showed Covid symptoms but refused his colleagues’ suggestions to go home and self-isolate, police said in a statement.
Continue reading...Kurds in ‘mountain prison’ cower as Turkey fights PKK with drones in Iraq
As decades-old battle intensifies, civilians count cost in lives and livelihoods
It took 10 days to find Muhsin Speri’s body. The 64-year-old had left his town in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan along with friends Hassan Sadiq and Safar Sini on a dry, windy day in December last year to fish and forage for wild honey and mushrooms.
Life in the Amedi region of the Zagros mountains is hard and physical, but the area has been home to Kurdish and Assyrian communities in sync with the rhythms of the mountains for thousands of years. Many locals like to roam and camp for several days at a time, but after Speri’s family failed to reach him by phone for more than a week, a search party was launched.
Continue reading...Cast out: the Yazidi women reunited with their children born in Isis slavery
Yazidi elders disown former slaves of Islamic State, forcing them to choose between their children and their community
Bundled up in oversized scarves and coats, and squirming over lounge chairs, the 12 young children seemed startled as nine strange women with outstretched arms hurried towards them.
Some of the women sobbed as they embraced the bemused toddlers, who stared at them blankly not recognising their mothers, or understanding what the fuss was about. One mother stood motionless with her head in her hands, while another stared intently into her tiny daughter’s eyes.
Continue reading...‘Salam, salam, salam’: thousands attend Pope’s mass at Irbil stadium – video
Thousands of people filled a sports stadium in the northern Kurdish-Iraqi city of Irbil for an open-air mass held by Pope Francis. An estimated 10,000 people erupted in cheers when he arrived and did a lap around the track in his open-sided popemobile, the first and only time he has used it on this trip due to security concerns. During the mass, which was the final event of the Pope’s visit to Iraq, the pontiff declared that the church in the country was ‘alive’.
- Pope Francis visits churches destroyed by Isis in northern Iraq
- Pope Francis and Grand Ayatollah Sistani call for unity at Iraq meeting
Pope Francis gives speech on first papal visit to Iraq – video
Pope Francis urges Iraq’s Muslim and Christian religious leaders to put aside animosities and work together for peace during an interfaith meeting on Saturday in the traditional birthplace of the Prophet Abraham, the patriarch of both faiths. The pope met with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, 90, spiritual leader of most of the world’s Shia Muslims, and travelled to the ruins of Ur in southern Iraq
Continue reading...Pope Francis and Grand Ayatollah Sistani call for unity at Iraq meeting
Catholic and Shia leaders strengthen dialogue between their faiths on first ever papal visit to the country
Two of the most influential faith leaders in the world reached across a religious divide on Saturday to promote peace and unity in a historic meeting.
Pope Francis, 84, the head of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, 90, the spiritual leader of most of the world’s Shia Muslims, talked for almost an hour during the first ever papal visit to Iraq, the pontiff’s first trip abroad since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Continue reading...Notturno review – lives scarred by Isis and the west in haunting cine-poem
Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary depicts a Middle East emerging from trauma, but it is self-conscious at times
Documentary film-maker Gianfranco Rosi has created a very characteristic cine-poem of sadness, about the Middle East as it emerges from Isis terror, but remaining scarred by the intervention of western powers who had promised so much. It’s an intensely considered curation of scenes: glimpses, perhaps, into a collective mind or soul. Rosi has assembled this from years of filming in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. It’s similar in its observational procedures to films such as Sacro GRA, his 2013 study of those who live on the periphery of Rome, near the “GRA” ring road, and also his masterly Fire at Sea from 2016, about the lives of desperate migrants who arrive in Lampedusa, Sicily, and the locals who are coming to terms with them.
The title means “night” or “of the night”, and many scenes seem to be happening at nightfall (or possibly at daybreak), particularly the opening, extended sequence of soldiers drilling, jogging around in a circle. There are many striking moments and beautifully realised images and vignettes here, a rhetorical structure that is perhaps inspired by the play that, in one scene, psychiatric patients are shown rehearsing about the lives of people in Iraq. But I worried a little that Rosi’s techniques are becoming a self-conscious mannerism, and furthermore that the film is a little too diffuse, taking in four different places and effectively homogenising them.
First papal visit to Iraq to go ahead despite Covid and terrorism concerns
Visit from Pope Francis will start in Baghdad on Friday and is his first trip abroad in 15 months
Despite the twin threats of Covid-19 and terrorism, the first ever papal visit to Iraq is due to begin on Friday, during which Francis will meet beleaguered Christian communities and one of the world’s most influential Muslim leaders.
For 84-year-old Pope Francis, it will be his first trip abroad for 15 months as the pandemic has curtailed his movements. New Covid restrictions came into effect in Iraq last week, with overnight curfews and a full three-day lockdown at weekends, as daily recorded cases doubled in less than a week.
Continue reading...Yazidis have been forgotten during Covid. They need justice, jobs and a return home | Nadia Murad
Survivors of Islamic State brutality are pushed further into the margins as the pandemic causes the world to turn inward
Staring at the same four walls day after day, unable to find work, reunite with relatives, or send your children to school. The Covid pandemic has rendered this bleak picture a reality for many people across the globe. Yet for many who have survived or are living through conflict, these hardships are hardly novel.
For the Yazidi ethnic minority in Iraq, Islamic State’s 2014 genocide created adversity long before the pandemic ever did. For more than six years, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis have been in camps for internally displaced people (IDP) staring at the same four walls of their tents. They are unable to find work because Isis razed their farms and businesses. They cannot reunite with relatives still in Isis captivity or attend the burials of family members whose bodies remain in mass graves.
Continue reading...Rocket attack on Iraqi airbase where US defense company operates
- One wounded at base where US firm services Iraqi warplanes
- Little-known Shia militant group claims responsibility
At least four rockets struck an airbase in Balad, north of Baghdad, on Saturday, the Iraqi military said in a statement. Other officials said one person was wounded at the base where a US defense company services combat aircraft.
Related: After rocket attack, Biden faces first real test on Iran
Continue reading...After rocket attack, Biden faces first real test on Iran
Analysis: Fiery rhetoric of Trump era is gone, but flare-up in northern Iraq is a microcosm of tension to come
Joe Biden faces his first real test with Iran. A barrage of 15 rockets in northern Iraq that struck a US base, killing a military contractor and wounding a soldier, were likely aimed as much at testing the new president’s mettle as they were at causing damage.
In the hours after the attack on Erbil airport, where much of the remaining US presence in Iraq is based, a Shia group loyal to Iran felt emboldened enough to claim it. Although the boast was from a hitherto unknown group, it left no doubt who was behind the first such barrage since Biden’s inauguration.
Continue reading...Erdoğan vows to expand fight against PKK after deaths of 13 hostages
More than 700 alleged supporters of Kurdish militants held following failed attempt to rescue Turkish soldiers and police
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has vowed to expand operations against the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) as the fallout from the deaths of 13 Turkish soldiers and police officers abducted by the militant group continued to reverberate at home and abroad.
The bodies of 13 victims, 12 shot in the head and one who died of a bullet wound to his shoulder, were discovered in a cave complex in Gare in Kurdish-run northern Iraq during a Turkish military operation designed to free them, officials said on Sunday. The PKK said the hostages had been killed in Turkish airstrikes.
Continue reading...Rocket attack on US airbase in Iraq kills civilian contractor
Eight others injured in blast that is expected to be first serious test of Joe Biden’s Iran policy
A rocket attack on a US airbase in the Kurdish region of Iraq has killed one civilian contractor and injured nine other people, sparking fears of escalation in the first serious test of Joe Biden’s policy towards Iran.
A volley of approximately 14 rockets was fired at the base hosting US troops next to the airport in the region’s main city of Erbil late on Monday, which witnesses told local television appeared to come from an area to the south.
Continue reading...‘Making our home safe again’: meet the women who clear land mines
After decades of war, more and more women are working to remove lethal mines and IEDs from the fields and cities of their homelands. It’s dangerous, but it’s helping to rebuild their lives
As a child, Hana Khider dreamed of Sinjar. Born and brought up in Syria, she remembers her mother telling her stories about the district in northern Iraq where her relatives lived. “I always imagined it in my mind,” she says, smiling over our video call. “It was beautiful and peaceful.” Today, Sinjar is her home. She lives with her husband and three children in a village close to Mount Sinjar, which she describes as “very special to our community”. Khider is Yazidi and they believe the mountain was the final resting place of Noah’s Ark. The rocky peak has long been considered a sacred refuge for persecuted people.
It was the mountain that saved her and more than 40,000 other Yazidis when they fled Islamic State in August 2014. Driven from their villages, they camped on the mountain for months – some for years – after a genocide that, according to the UN, saw 5,000 Yazidis massacred and up to 7,000 women and girls captured and sold as sex slaves to Isis members. “We feared for our lives,” Khider, now 28, says, explaining how Isis fighters surrounded the mountain. Luckily, she escaped to Kurdistan, where she lived in an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp until her village was liberated. Her family returned in May 2016. A few months later, she applied to work as a deminer at the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a charity that finds and clears mines in places of conflict.
Continue reading...Australia’s air attacks in the Middle East ended three years ago – or did they? | Paul Daley
Defence is refusing to provide details about the Australians piloting deadly British air force drone strikes in Iraq and Syria
Australian air attacks on enemy ground targets in the Middle East ended three years ago. Or so the Australian military told us.
But undisclosed to either the Australian public or the federal parliament, this country’s air force personnel have been piloting deadly British air force drone strikes on enemy combatants in Iraq and Syria.
Continue reading...How the Arab spring engulfed the Middle East – and changed the world
An era of uprisings, nascent democracy and civil war in the Arab world started with protests in a small Tunisian city. The unrest grew to engulf the Middle East, shake authoritarian governments and unleash consequences that still shape the world a decade later
A decade ago this month, protests forced Tunisia’s authoritarian president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, to flee his country. It was a quick and relatively peaceful revolution, coming after decades of stagnant but entrenched regimes across the Arab world.
Few at the time understood the power of the images of unrest being broadcast online and into homes across the Middle East. Within weeks, other significant protest movements would emerge, and by the middle of 2011, leaders in Cairo, Tripoli, Sana’a, Damascus and elsewhere were under serious pressure or had been swept away by a tidal wave of peaceful demonstrations and armed resistance.
Continue reading...Two suicide bombers kill at least 32 shoppers in Baghdad
Attack wounded more than 100 people and raises fear of return to violence in Iraqi capital
Two suicide bombers have killed at least 32 people and wounded more than 100 at a Baghdad market, raising fears of a return to the militant violence seen for years in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion and during the Islamic State era.
In the worst such attack in three years, bombers lured shoppers towards them and set off devices they were carrying at a secondhand clothes bazaar. It happened in mid-morning when the market was teeming with people after the lifting of nearly a year of Covid-19 restrictions across the country.
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