Tag: InternationalNews

{Security forces say all three attackers killed, 11 hours after they took over Pamlarena’s offices in a residential area.}

Afghan security forces have ended hours-long siege at the offices of an international aid group in Kabul and killed all three attackers, the Afghan Ministry of Interior said.

The attackers had taken hostages during Tuesday’s siege of the Pamlarena, the aid group’s compound, that lasted 11 hours.

“The police special forces operation has ended, the terrorists who attacked Pamlarena, Care International last night have been killed,” spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, Sediq Sediqqi, said on Twitter.

Armed gunmen holed themselves up in Pamlarena building in the centre of Kabul after staging a suicide bombing in front of it late on Monday, just hours after a Taliban suicide double bombing near the defence ministry building killed at least 24 people, including a number of senior Afghan security officials.

Security officials evacuated civilians from their offices and homes near the explosion site.

An interior ministry official said initial reports indicated one person had been killed and six wounded in the attack on the aid group’s offices, with 31 people rescued from the area.

Monday’s double bombing in Kabul, which killed 24 people and wounded 91 others, targeted an afternoon crowd near the defence ministry building.

The Taliban immediately claimed responsibility for that attack.

An army general and two senior police commanders were among the dead, a defence ministry official said.

Another official said the deputy head of President Ashraf Ghani’s personal protection force had also been killed.

The Taliban’s ability to conduct coordinated deadly attacks in Kabul has piled pressure on Ghani’s government, which has struggled to reassure a war-weary population that it can guarantee security.

Two weeks ago, fighters attacked the American University in Kabul, killing 13 people.

At least 80 people were killed by a suicide bomber who targeted a demonstration on July 23 in an attack claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

Outside Kabul, the fighters have stepped up their military campaign, threatening Lashkar Gah, capital of the strategic southern province of Helmand, as well as Kunduz, the northern city they briefly took last year.

{UK parliament debates petition signed by more than four million people calling for a second referendum on EU membership.}

UK politicians have debated a petition signed by more than four million people demanding a second referendum on whether Britain should leave or remain within the European Union.

The debate, which took place in the British parliament’s second debating chamber on Monday, did not give MPs legal authority to decide on a second referendum, but idemonstrated that the Brexit debate is still raging in the country.

British MPs are obliged to consider for debate any petition which receives more than 100,000 signatures.

“Almost half of those who voted in the June referendum wanted Britain to stay in the EU and some are still marching and protesting,” said Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips, reporting from London.

“Not many believe a second referendum is likely, but they want Britain to keep close ties with Europe.”

Prime Minister Theresa May has ruled out a second referendum, saying that she is preparing to trigger the formal divorce proceedings that would eventually take Britain out of the club it first joined in 1973.

{{‘Brexit must mean Brexit’}}

During the June 23 referendum, 17.4 million people, or 51.9 percent of the electorate, voted to leave the EU while 48.1 percent, or 16.1 million people, voted to stay. Some 4.14 million people have now signed the petition calling for a second referendum.

During Monday’s debate, David Davis, Britain’s newly appointed Brexit minister, made it clear that the UK is leaving the EU.

“There will be no attempt to stay in the EU by the back door,” he said. “No attempt to delay, frustrate or thwart the will of the British people. No attempt to engineer a second referendum because some people didn’t like the first answer,” he said.

Some MPs argued that even discussing a second referendum undermined the will of the British people.

“Brexit must mean Brexit and it is up to every red-blooded democrat, no matter which side they were on before the result was known, to accept the clear electoral verdict and to pull together to deliver it as best we can,” said John Penrose, a Conservative politician.

David Lammy, of the opposition Labour Party, said the public had been “lied to” during the referendum campaign and a second vote on the Brexit deal was the only way out of a “constitutional crisis”.

He said the meaning of Brexit was unclear, as were the terms whereby Britain would have access to the European single market.
“David Davis has come under some criticism not only from Labour MPs but also from the MPs from the governing Conservative Party,” said Al Jazeera’s Phillips.

“They were mainly asking for more details. They were saying that the government is badly prepared for Brexit and it still does not have a clear plan for the way forward.”

The Brexit result unleashed immediate political and financial market turmoil in Britain.

The vote has also raised questions about the future of Britain and post-World War II European integration, though the initial economic effect of the Brexit vote has been less negative than was predicted by those who campaigned to remain within the EU.

Several lawsuits have been launched to force the government to accept that parliament should decide on whether Britain should trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which would begin the formal exit process from the EU, rather than allowing the prime minister to decide alone.

{At least 40 killed and dozens wounded in five explosions in mostly government-held areas, including Tartous and Homs.}

At least 40 people have been killed and dozens wounded in five explosions across mostly government-controlled areas of Syria, according to state media reports.

Monday morning’s blasts hit the coastal city of Tartous, the central city of Homs, the suburbs of the capital Damascus as well as the northeastern city of Hasaka, which is mostly controlled by Kurdish forces but where the government maintains a presence.

The blast in Hasaka was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

State media said at least 11 people were killed and 45 injured in a double bomb attack just outside Tartous, in the coastal province of the same name, which is a base of President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

“Two terrorist blasts on Arzuna bridge, the first a car bomb and the second a suicide bomber who detonated his explosive belt when people gathered to help the wounded,” Syrian state television said.

State media also reported five people killed in Hasaka, in the northeast of the country.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a Britain-based monitor, said the blast hit a checkpoint belonging to the Kurdish Asayesh security forces.

And state media also reported a car bomb at the entrance to the Al-Zahra neighbourhood in Homs, which is controlled by the government.

It said at least two people were killed and four wounded in the bombing, which is the latest in a series of attacks targeting Al-Zahra, where most residents are Alawite, the sect to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs.

State media also reported another bomb attack on a road west of the capital Damascus, but gave no immediate toll in the blast.

That attack targeted a checkpoint and left three people dead, said the SOHR.

Top diplomats from the US and Russia on Monday failed to reach a deal to ease fighting in Syria amid the string of bomb attacks in the country.

As blasts maimed and killed in Syria, a senior State Department official said fresh crisis talks between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the margins of the G20 summit in China had ended without agreement.

A deal to provide aid to Aleppo’s ravaged civilians and at least partially halt Russian and Syrian bombardments had looked likely on Sunday, before talks collapsed.

US officials accused Russia of backtracking on already agreed issues which Washington refused to revisit, but the talks seemed to have been overtaken by developments on the ground.

Syrian government troops renewed their siege of Aleppo on Sunday, with state media saying they had taken an area south of the city, severing the last opposition-held route into its eastern neighbourhoods.

Once Syria’s economic powerhouse, Aleppo has been ravaged by the war that began with protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s government in March 2011.

{Travellers and brokers say Egypt is charging up to $10,000 to give Palestinians permission to cross at Rafah.}

Gaza Strip – Egyptian officers are asking for bribes of up to $10,000 from Palestinians in Gaza desperate to leave the besieged coastal enclave, according to Gaza brokers who coordinate the bribe payments, former Palestinian border officials and travellers.

Typically, an adult in Gaza must pay a bribe of $3,000 to get permission from Egypt to cross the border, two Palestinian brokers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera. The brokers said that they took a 20 percent cut of the bribe, sending 80 percent to the Egyptian soldier or officer who coordinated it.

Sometimes, Egyptian officers put the names of Palestinians on a blacklist, declaring them to be a “security threat”, both brokers said. The list forbids entrance to Egypt for those whose names are on it, but a $10,000 payment can have it removed.

Occasionally, the Egyptians want bribes paid in goods, not cash, the brokers said.

“Sometimes, they want iPhones or even gold,” said one of the brokers, known in Gaza as the “King of the Border” for his ability to get almost anyone across.

During a two-hour interview at his Gaza City office, this broker received six phone calls from people asking him for help getting into Egypt.

“My phone never rests,” he said.

The willingness to pay such high fees to leave Gaza may reflect residents’ desperation to escape the coastal enclave, which has endured three major Israeli military operations since 2008, leaving the most densely populated place on earth in ruins.

Gaza’s infrastructure is so damaged that a United Nations report last year predicted that, if current trends persist, the enclave would become “uninhabitable” by 2020.

The Egyptian government of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has imposed extreme restrictions on Gaza’s Rafah border crossing since the military coup in 2013.

Sisi considers Hamas, the governing body in Gaza, to be an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – declared a terrorist organisation in 2013 – and has accused Hamas of carrying out attacks on Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula. Hamas has repeatedly denied any role in those attacks.

In the first half of 2013, when former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was in office, an average of 40,816 people crossed between Gaza and Egypt each month. Since Sisi took power, Egyptian officials have rarely opened the border, allowing it to operate for a few days every month or two. This year, the average number of people who cross the border each month is 1,896, according to the Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, an Israel-based non-profit organisation.

There are about 30,000 cases of people in Gaza needing to urgently travel abroad for humanitarian reasons, many in order to obtain medical care, Gisha spokesperson Shai Grunberg told Al Jazeera.

Mohamed Abu Abdelqader, a cancer patient in southern Gaza, told Al Jazeera that he would soon die if he were unable to go to a hospital in Egypt to receive proper treatment for his condition. But he says he is unable to, as he cannot afford the $2,000-$3,000 bribe to a broker to arrange his travel.

“I don’t have the money,” the 55-year-old flower farmer said, appearing on the verge of tears.

Palestinians’ only other option for leaving the Gaza Strip, which has been under a joint Israeli and Egyptian-imposed air, land and sea blockade since 2007, is via the Erez crossing to Israel and then over the Allenby Bridge to Jordan. Both Israel and Jordan impose severe restrictions, however, on who is permitted to use the Erez and Allenby crossings.

Al Jazeera made repeated requests to the Egyptian government for comment, both by telephone and email, but did not receive a response.

But allegations of corruption at the Egyptian border crossing are nothing new.

A former high-ranking Hamas official who worked for the Hamas Crossings Authority, which oversees the Rafah terminal, confirmed to Al Jazeera that such bribe-taking occurs frequently, and that the business has become “a real moneymaker”.

Over the course of only two days last year, when he was working at the Rafah border, the official said that nearly half a million dollars in bribes were paid by 150 Palestinians in exchange for permission to travel to Egypt.

{South Korea says medium-range Rodong-class missiles flew about 1,000km before landing in the waters of the Sea of Japan.}

North Korea has fired three ballistic missiles off its east coast, according to South Korea’s military, in a show of force apparently timed to coincide with the ongoing G20 economic summit in China.

South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said in a statement on Monday that the three missiles, launched from the western North Korean town of Hwangju, flew across the country before splashing in the Sea of Japan off its east coast.

All three missiles were medium-range Rodong class and flew about 1,000km, South Korea’s military said.

At least one of the missiles fell into Japan’s Air Defence Identification Zone, a South Korean military official told Reuters news agency by telephone.

The development came as world leaders gathered for the G20 summit of advanced and emerging economies in Hangzhou in eastern China.

It also came four days before the 68th anniversary of the founding of North Korea’s government, and just days after South Korean and US troops ended annual joint military drills.

Earlier on Monday, speaking in Hangzhou, South Korean President Park Geun-hye criticised the North for what she called provocations that were hurting South Korea-China ties.

Shortly after the missile launches, she and Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, met and agreed to cooperate on monitoring the situation, according to a Japanese statement.

Al Jazeera’s Adrian Brown, reporting from Hangzhou, said: “This latest [missile] incident came as China expressed unhappiness over Seoul’s threats to deploy a defence shield in response to Pyongyang’s continued attempts to refine and perfect its nuclear missile programme.

“China regards this missile-defence shield as a threat to its sovereignty. But we have got a reminder this morning of why South Korea feels so vulnerable.”

{{Regular missile tests}}

North Korea regularly engages in missile and rocket tests, especially when international attention is turned to Northeast Asia.

It has staged several missile tests this year, the most recent being a submarine-launched ballistic missile that flew 500km towards Japan on August 24.

That launch, which was widely condemned, marked what weapons analysts described as a clear step forward for North Korea’s nuclear-strike ambitions.

China is the North’s only major ally, but ties between the neighbours have frayed amid a number of nuclear and missile tests and what many outsiders see as other provocations in recent years.

Last month, worries about the North’s weapons programmes deepened after a missile from a North Korean submarine flew about 500km, the longest distance achieved by the North for such a weapon.

The UN Security Council in late August strongly condemned four North Korean ballistic missile launches in July and August.

It called them “grave violations” of a ban on all ballistic missile activity.

{With almost all of the votes counted, results show Merkel’s Christian Democrats overtaken by AfD in regional poll.}

A year after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open the country’s borders to refugees, an anti-immigrant party has made huge gains in a state election, according to official results.

With most of Sunday’s ballots counted, Alternative for Germany (AfD) received about 21 percent of votes in the eastern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region, beating Merkel’s party to take second place.

Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats came third with 19 percent, the party’s worst result yet in the state that includes the chancellor’s own electoral district.

The centre-left Social Democrats gained the support of 30 percent of voters.

Frauke Petry, the head of AfD, said her party’s success in the state election was a result of Merkel’s “catastrophic migration policies”, according to the DPA news agency.

WATCH: Europe’s refugees – An economic opportunity?

Sunday’s election was the first of five regional polls ahead of a national election expected in just over a year.

“The repercussions of this result will resonate across Germany because we know that within 12 months there will be a general election,” said Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane, reporting from Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region.

Kane said that the AfD had grown from a party that just a few years ago was struggling to get above the 5 percent threshold required in order be represented in any parliament in Germany – state or federal – to a political force that was persuading one in five voters in the area.

“So the question will be: will the government listen to this?” Kane said.

“The fact is that the government in this state was a mirror image of the government federally, of the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in coalition, and both parties until this point have maintained the fact that the refugee policy is the right one.”

{{Deciding factor}}

In the sprawling farming and coastal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern – Germany’s poorest and least populous – the issue of refugees and integration had become the deciding factor for one in three voters.

“I am voting AfD. The main reason is the question over asylum-seekers,” a pensioner and former teacher who declined to be named told AFP news agency.

“A million refugees have come here. There is money for them, but no money to bring pensions in the east to the same levels as those of the west,” he said, referring to the lower retirement payments that residents of former Communist states receive compared to those in the west.

Petry, the AfD leader, released a video on Friday urging voters to “make history not only in the state-region, but the whole of Germany” by backing the party massively in the polls.

Erlier this week, Merkel urged voters to reject AfD, which she said in an interview had “no solution for problems and which are built mainly around a protest – often with hate”.

In January, Germany’s interior ministry said that 1.1 million asylum seekers and migrants had entered Europe’s biggest economy in 2015 after fleeing war and poverty in their home countries.

Then, late last month, the head of Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees told a German newspaper that the country took in fewer migrants in 2015 than previously thought, because some were registered twice and others had moved on to other destinations.

“We’ll present the exact number soon but it’s certain that less than one million people came to Germany last year,” Frank-Juergen Weise told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

{Turkey sends in more tanks west of Jarablus, opening new front in battle against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.}

Turkey has sent more tanks into northern Syria to the west of a border town seized from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group last week, opening a new front in a cross-border intervention aimed at sweeping its fighters from the area.

Saturday’s development came after Turkish forces and allied Syrian rebels seized the strategic border town Jarablus from ISIL on August 25.

Turkey and Syrian rebel forces are now continuing an offensive against ISIL in the area, with rebels capturing several other towns on Saturday close to the border with Turkey.

“Today, the rebel factions managed to take control of the villages of Arab Ezza, al-Fursan, and have moved towards Lilwa,” Ahmed Othman, a commander in the pro-Turkey rebel group Sultan Murad, told Al Jazeera from Aleppo’s northern suburbs.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group that records daily developments in the war, confirmed that the rebels had taken several villages.

“Since Jarablus, we have headed west and managed to take over 17 villages from ISIL,” said Othman.

“The goal is to take control of all the villages between al-Rai and Jarablus”.

The Sultan Murad group and other rebel outfits affiliated with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), have already driven ISIL out of both towns.

“Today the tanks and armoured personnel started crossing in to Syria,” said Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra on Saturday, reporting from Gaziantep on the Turkish border with Syria.

“It seems the that the Turkish government is going to further move into al-Rai where there is the presence of the FSA with the aim of driving ISIL out of those areas,” around the town, said Ahelbarra.

“From Jarablus to al-Rai, there is some 90 kilometres of border area that was under ISIL control for quite some time.”

Turkey, continued Ahelbarra, was “paving the way for the FSA to take over”.

Last week, Turkey launched its first major incursion into Syria since the civil war began more than five years ago. Turkish tanks, fighter jets and special forces are backing rebels who are fighting separately against both ISIL and the Kurdish YPG group.

Turkish-backed rebels have been met with little resistance as they captured border villages, Othman said.

“There are no clashes, ISIL fighters flee as soon as they see us advancing, especially because we are supported by Turkish air power,” he said.

According to Othman, Turkish tanks “have not entered any of the villages, but have remained on standby on the Syrian side of the border”.

Last month’s operation was Ankara’s most ambitious during the five-and-a-half-year Syria conflict, and has since continued with tanks, fighter jets and special forces providing support to rebels.

After crossing the border on August 24, Turkish-backed Syrian rebels recaptured the border town of Jarablus from ISIL in 14 hours.

The strategic town had been controlled by ISIL, which is also known as ISIS, for two years. Al-Bab is not the group’s only stronghold in Syria’s northeast.