Tag: InternationalNews

{The graves containing bones and identity cards discovered near Shababit junction in northwestern Iraq.}

Two mass graves with bodies of at least 18 members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority, thousands of whom have been killed and kidnapped by ISIL fighters, have been discovered in the northwestern part of the country.

Kurdish Peshmerga forces found the grave near the Shababit junction in northwestern Iraq while scouting the area as security forces fight to dislodge the rebels from Mosul, a local official said.

The graves contained bones and identity cards that appeared to have been covered with sandy earth by a bulldozer.

Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford, reporting from Makhmour, southeast of Mosul, said: “We understand that a medical team of Peshmerga are on their way to the area to try and establish how many bodies there are in those graves.”

Mahma Xelil, mayor of Sinjar, said the latest discovery brought the number of Yazidi mass graves found so far to 29, estimating the total would rise to more than 40 as the ISIL fighters are driven back further.

ISIL (also known as ISIS) systematically killed, captured and enslaved thousands of Yazidis in the summer of 2014 as they overran the Sinjar area, where many of them lived. UN investigators have said that constitutes genocide.

The Office of Kidnapped Affairs in Duhok, a department backed by the Kurdistan regional government, says about 3,500 Yazidis – many of them women and children – are believed to still live in areas controlled by ISIL.

Last Wednesday, 18 escaped from the town of Tal Afar in northern Iraq as Shia paramilitaries cut it off from the south and west.

{Government forces capture largest rebel-held district of Aleppo as rebels admit to a collapsing frontline.}

The Syrian army said it had taken control of an important district in rebel-held eastern Aleppo on Saturday after fierce fighting, with rebels blaming intense air strikes and lack of hospitals for their collapsing frontline.

Government forces advanced with a ground and air assault on the edge of the besieged eastern half of the city into the Hanano housing area, a move designed to split the rebel-held east in two.

Aleppo, which was Syria’s biggest city before the start of a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, is divided between the government-held west and rebel-held east, where UN officials say at least 250,000 people are under siege.

Capturing all of Aleppo would be a major victory for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after five and a half years of fighting.

The army said in a statement it had, alongside its allies, taken full control over the Hanano housing district, which is on the northeast frontline of the eastern sector.

“Engineering teams are removing mines and improvised explosive devices planted by terrorists in the squares and streets,” the statement said.

The Syrian government calls all forces fighting against it “terrorists”.

An official in an Aleppo rebel group said a map circulated by pro-government media showing government forces in control of the Hanano area was largely accurate.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the army had established control over Hanano, which was the first part of Aleppo taken over by armed opposition groups in 2012.

A renewed air assault on residential and frontline parts of east Aleppo began last Tuesday after a weeks-long pause in air strikes and shelling there.

“Every day there are a lot of attacks, helicopters dropping barrelbombs and war planes dropping bunker-buster bombs and cluster munitions,” Modar Shekho, an emergency nurse in al-Shaar neighbourhood, told Al Jazeera.

An official from Jabha Shamiya, one of the biggest groups fighting against Assad in northern Syria, told Reuters news agency: “The revolutionaries are fighting fiercely but the volume of bombardments and the intensity of the battles, the dead and the wounded, and the lack of hospitals, are all playing a role in the collapse of these frontlines.”

Members of Jabha Shamiya have taken part in the fighting in Hanano.

He condemned the “international silence” and said the government and its allies were trying to exploit the period before the next US administration took over.

“The Iranians, Russians and regime know there is a vacuum and they are trying to exploit it using all means,” he said.

“We are in touch with the friendly states but unfortunately Aleppo is being left to be slaughtered.”

Yasser al-Yousef, from the political office of the Nour al-Din al-Zinki rebel group, said rebel fighters had fought fiercely for more than 48 hours to defend Hanano and the southern front of east Aleppo from heavy government bombardment.

A Syrian state television reporter broadcast live from a part of Hanano on Saturday as government forces sought to establish full control over the area. Gunshots could be heard and behind him damaged buildings and rising smoke could be seen.

Rebels say much of Hanano has been empty of residents for some months.

Syrian state media said the army had secured the safe passage of at least 150 people out of Hanano, and showed pictures of people it said were evacuated residents in a reception centre.

In the 12 days since the renewed bombardment on east Aleppo, at least 201 civilians, including 27 children, have died in the besieged sector, the Observatory said. There were 134 rebel fighter deaths.

The monitor also documented 19 civilian deaths, including 11 children, and dozens of injuries as a result of rebel shelling of government-held west Aleppo.

Rebel shelling into the Sheikh Maqsoud district, which is under the control of the Kurdish YPG militia, has killed three people, it said.

Syrian state news agency SANA said three people died and 15 were injured on Saturday when rebels fired rockets into government-held west Aleppo.

{State officials encourage protesters to leave after US government says it will close area to public on December 5.}

North Dakota officials are encouraging hundreds of Dakota Access oil pipeline protesters to respect a directive to leave a sprawling, months-old encampment on federal land, but one organiser says that is not likely.

According to Standing Rock Sioux tribal leader Dave Archambault, the US Army Corps of Engineers sent him a letter on Friday that said all federal lands north of the Cannonball River will be closed to public access starting on Dec. 5 for “safety concerns,” including the oncoming winter and the increasingly contentious clashes between protesters and police.

{{}}The Oceti Sakowin camp is on Corps land in southern North Dakota and is where the vast majority of the several thousand people fighting against the four-state, $3.8bn pipeline have created a self-sustaining community and put up semi-permanent structures in advance of the harsh winter.

The encampment is near the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers, and more than a mile from a Missouri River reservoir under which the pipeline will pass.

That final large segment is yet to be completed, held up while the Corps consults with the tribe, who believe the project could harm drinking water and Native American cultural sites.

“They’re saying this is their land and they will stay on this land, that they have a right to it because there are burial rights here… There’s about 8,000 people here, staying in tents, teepees and also wooden structures,” Al Jazeera’s John Holman said, reporting from the Oceti Sakowin camp.

The Corps’ letter, according to Archambault, said that those who stay on the land after the deadline may be prosecuted, and that there’ll be a free speech zone south of the river.

But Dallas Goldtooth, a protest organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, believes many people will chose not to move to another site, and that protesters are building shelters and teepees to prepare for the winter.

Goldtooth said the government’s request is likely to escalate already rocky tensions, calling the directive “an atrocious example that colonization has not ended for us here as indigenous people”.

On Friday, Archambault, whose tribe offered protesters land on its reservation south of the river earlier this fall, said “our resolve to protect our water is stronger than ever”.

Representatives from the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t immediately return multiple messages on Friday or Saturday seeking comment and verification of the letter.

Last month, the Corps said it would not evict the encampment, which started as overflow from smaller private and permitted protest sites nearby and began growing in August.

President Barack Obama raised the possibility of rerouting the pipeline in that area earlier this month, something Kelcy Warren, CEO of Texas-based pipeline developer Energy Transfer Partners, told The Associated Press news agency is not an option from the company’s standpoint.

Obama said his administration is monitoring the “challenging situation” but would “let it play out for several more weeks.”

Some of the protests have resulted in violent confrontations and more than 500 people have been arrested since August.

It’s the federal government’s job to peacefully close the camp because it allowed people to stay there in the first place, North Dakota Governor Jack Dalyrmple said in a statement Saturday.

“Our state and local law enforcement agencies continue to do all they can to keep private property and public infrastructure free from unpermitted protest activities, and its past time that the federal government provides the law enforcement resources … to enforce their own order to vacate,” the Republican said.

Republican US Senator John Hoeven and Democratic US Senator Heidi Heitkamp said the protesters need to move for public safety.

“The well-being and property of ranchers, farmers and everyone else living in the region should not be threatened by protesters who are willing to commit acts of violence,” Hoeven said in a statement Friday.

He also called on the Obama administration to let work on the pipeline move forward, saying, “this difficult situation has gone on too long and we need to get it resolved.”

Heitkamp said the Corps’ order is “a needed step to support the safety of residents, workers, protesters and law enforcement.”

{EU urges Ankara to respect refugee pact, as Erdogan lashes out at EU Parliament for freeze on talks over membership bid.}

The head of the European Commission has said that the EU-Turkey refugee deal must be respected.

“We made an agreement, it must be respected and it will be,” Jean-Claude Juncker, commission chief, said in an interview with Belgium’s La Libre Belgique newspaper, published on Saturday.

Juncker was commenting on threats by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to end the deal after the European parliament’s voted to freeze talks on Turkey’s EU membership.

“I believe that Erdogan and his government are in the process of ‘pre-blaming’ Europe for the failure of its accession negotiations,” he added.

On Friday, Erdogan threatened to walk away from the agreement, a day after the European Parliament angered Ankara by backing a freeze of its EU accession talks.

On Saturday, he stepped up his criticism of Europe, warning that Turkey could extend by at least another three months a state of emergency placed since the failed July coup, but which is opposed by Europe.

“Maybe the state of emergency will be extended by three months and then maybe another three months,” he said. “This is a decision for the government and the parliament.

“What’s it to you?” he told the European Parliament.

“Know your place!” he added, in an angry tirade.

In the Belgian newspaper interview, Juncker pointed to the period from 2003-2014 while Erdogan was prime minister, when Turkey “made a lot of progress in terms of the quality of its democracy”.

But in the past two years, the country has “distanced itself from European principles and values,” he said.

Junker said the current impasse between EU and Turkey stems from Ankara’s refusal to change its anti-terror legislation, a condition for membership laid down by the EU.

“Instead of putting this failure on the European Union and Commission, Mr Erdogan would do well to start by asking himself if he is responsible for Turks not being able to freely move on European territory,” he said.

{{Refugee deal}}

On March 18, Ankara and Brussels forged a deal for Turkey to halt the flow of refugees and migrants to Europe — an accord that has largely been successful in reducing numbers crossing the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), just over 171,000 have crossed to Greece so far this year, much lower than the comparable figure for 2015 of almost 740,000.

Hundreds of refugees and migrants drowned while trying to cross the Aegean in 2015 on unseaworthy boats, including three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi.

The images of his lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach spurred the international community into action, with the EU and Turkey reaching the refugee deal.

On Saturday, Juncker pointed out that the leaders of the 28 EU nations have the final say on Turkey’s bid to join the bloc and not the European Parliament.

Still, he said Thursday’s vote was a “warning sign that Turkey should not underestimate”.

But Erdogan lashed out at the decision calling out the European Parliament’s hypocrisy, noting that the body did not take any action when France put in place a state of emergency after it was hit by a string of attacks in 2015.

“Is the European Parliament in charge of this country or is the government in charge of this country? Know your place!” he added, in an angry tirade in Istanbul.

{Deadly offensive continues as residents of eastern Aleppo face harsh winter conditions and critically low food supplies.}

At least 39 people, including five children, have been killed in the latest round of air strikes and shelling in and around the Syrian city of Aleppo, Al Jazeera has learnt.

Witnesses and activists told Al Jazeera the air strikes on Friday destroyed two women’s hospitals in Aleppo and Idlib province, as the renewed government offensive to capture Aleppo city from opposition fighters stretched into its tenth day.

Both Syria and Russia have denied involvement in the bombardments.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said fuel is critically low in the besieged city, as residents faced a harsh winter without heating and electricity, and escalating food prices.

Some residents said meat now costs $50 per kilo, compared to $9 four months ago.

{{Journalist’s account}}

Mohamed Shbeeb, a freelance journalist trapped inside the besieged city, said conditions in Aleppo were rapidly deteriorating.

“Since the early [Saturday] morning, Russian warplanes attacked the city. Many people were killed. In the last 10 days in this campaign, more than 500 people have been killed by Russian air strikes and ballistic missiles,” he told Al Jazeera.

“All the hospitals in the city are out of service. So the injured are a risk as there is only limited medical aid available. The situation is becoming worse every day. Food supplies have almost dried up. All stores are closed. Some people sell vegetables that they grow in their garden. Other food is no longer available.”

On Friday, Raed al-Saleh, the head of the Syria Civil Defence, or White Helmets, said the inhabitants of east Aleppo have fewer than 10 days to receive aid or face starvation and death from a lack of medical supplies.

The volunteer group, which works in opposition-held territory and has rescued thousands of people from buildings bombed in the civil war, is also running out of basic equipment from lorries to diesel and gas masks.

With freezing winter conditions setting in, about 275,000 people are trapped in eastern Aleppo, where the last UN food rations were distributed on November 13.

Anti-government fighters in east Aleppo have agreed to a plan for aid deliveries and medical evacuations, according to UN officials, but the global body is awaiting a “green light” from Russia and the Syrian government before it can begin operations.

Jan Egeland, the head of a UN-backed humanitarian task force for Syria, said on Thursday that his team had received written approval from the fighters and “verbal support” from Russia for the UN plan reached earlier this month.

The four-point plan involves the supply of medical and food aid, the evacuation of 200 wounded or disabled civilians, and medical staff to rotate in and out of besieged areas.

{Curfew imposed in Mohmand Agency following assault on army facility claimed by a faction of the Pakistani Taliban.}

Pakistan’s army says a mosque has been targeted at an army facility in northwest Pakistan, resulting in a shootout in which four of the attackers and two soldiers have died.

The army said in a statement that 14 soldiers were wounded in Saturday’s suicide attack, claimed by a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, on Ghalani Camp in the Mohmand tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

It said the attackers wanted to enter the camp and started shooting after they reached the mosque, where residents and a large number of recruits were present.

A curfew has been imposed in Mohmand Agency following the attack, according to the statement.

The Pakistan army launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb under US pressure in 2014 in an effort to wipe out fighters and their bases in the North Waziristan tribal area.

{Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, a towering figure of 20th century history, died Friday aged 90, his brother, President Raul Castro, announced.}

One of the world’s longest-serving rulers and modern history’s most singular characters, he defied successive US administrations and assassination attempts.

He crushed opposition at home to lead the communist Caribbean island through the Cold War before stepping aside in 2006.

He eventually lived to see the historic restoration of diplomatic ties with Washington last year.

“The commander in chief of the Cuban revolution died at 22:29 hours this evening,” the president announced on national television just after midnight Friday (0500 GMT Saturday).

Raul Castro, who took power after his elder brother Fidel was hospitalized in 2006, said that the revolutionary leader’s remains will be cremated early on Saturday, “in compliance with his expressed will.”

{{POLITICAL SURVIVOR}}

The bearded, cigar-puffing leader, renowned for trademark army fatigues and hours-long public tirades, grabbed power in a January 1, 1959 revolution.

Living by the slogan ‘socialism or death,’ he kept the faith to the end, even as the Cold War came and went.

His rule endured numerous assassination attempts and the disastrous US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion attempt in 1961.

“If I am considered a myth, the United States deserves the credit,” he said in 1988.

Castro was at the centre of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, as the world stood on the brink of nuclear war until the Soviet Union blinked in its bid to station strategic missiles on Cuban soil.

Well into his old age, Castro unleashed furious diatribes against Washington until he was slowed by surgery in July 2006.

{{REVOLUTION}}

An energetic symbol of defiance for developing countries and a driving force behind the Non-Aligned Movement, Castro proved even a small sovereign nation could thumb its nose at the world’s biggest superpower.

Born August 13, 1926 to a prosperous Spanish immigrant landowner and a Cuban mother of humble background, Castro was a quick learner and a keen baseball player, reportedly once dreaming of a life in the US big leagues.

His political path was set when he formed a guerrilla opposition to the US-backed government of Fulgencio Batista, who seized power in a 1952 coup.

In 1953 Castro led a small rebel force that attacked a major military base, the Moncada Barracks, in a bid to oust Batista. The drive failed. Castro was put on trial, and in a long, now famous closing self-defense speech said he did not care if was convicted.

“History will absolve me,” he said.

After he was jailed for two years by the Batista regime, he went into exile in Mexico and organized followers for their ultimately triumphant uprising.

It was launched when, on December 2, 1956 they sailed to southeastern Cuba on the ship Granma. Twenty-five months later, they ousted Batista and Castro was named prime minister.

His power undisputed in 1959, the Jesuit-schooled lawyer threw Cuba’s lot in with the Soviet Union, which bankrolled his regime until 1989, when the Eastern Bloc’s collapse sent the economy into a tailspin.

{{CEDED POWER}}

He ceded power to Raul, 85, in July 2006 when Fidel underwent intestinal surgery and disappeared from public view.

Castro’s private life was just that. In 1948, he married Mirta Diaz-Balart, who gave him a son, Fidelito. The couple later divorced.

In 1952, Castro met Naty Revuelta, a socialite married to a doctor, and they had a daughter, Alina, in 1956.

He met Celia Sanchez, said to have been the love of his life, in 1957 and remained with her until her death in 1980.

Since the 1980s, Castro’s partner has been Dalia Soto del Valle, with whom he has had five children: Angel, Antonio, Alejandro, Alexis and Alex.