Tag: InternationalNews

{Emergency services were able to rescue 12 people from the burning building.}

A fire has killed 17 people in a Moscow printing warehouse, the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations has confirmed.

“Sixteen bodies were found in a room, four injured were brought to hospitals in Moscow,” a ministry spokesman said. According to the Russian news agency Interfax, a seventeenth person later died in hospital.

All victims were originally from Kyrgyzstan, the ministry said, adding that they were in the country legally.

Emergency services were able to rescue 12 people from the four-floor warehouse located in an industrial zone in Moscow’s north. In total, more than 30 people were present at the time of the fire.

“The incident happened when people were changing shifts at the printing house. It is very hard for us,” Abdygany Shakirov, the Kyrgyz representative told the Reuters news agency.

Criminal probe

Authorities have started a criminal investigation to see if fire safety regulations were followed.

The head of the Moscow branch of the emergency ministry, Ilya Denisov, said the fire was thought to have been caused by a broken lamp in a room containing large quantities of flammable liquids and paper products.

“The fire spread from the first floor through the elevator shaft to the room in which the people were killed,” Interfax quoted Denisov as saying.

About 500,000 citizens of Kyrgyzstan are working in Russia. They often live in appalling conditions.

{On soldier killed in rocket attack on Turkish tanks as clashes spike between Turkey-backed Syria rebels and Kurdish YPG.}

Turkish jets and artillery have targeted Kurdish forces south of the strategic town of Jarablus, according to a monitor and local sources, as Turkey continues a major military offensive inside northern Syria.

Turkey first sent tanks across the border on Wednesday as part of a two-pronged operation against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fighters, as well as Kurdish-led forces.

The strikes came as Turkish-backed Syrian rebels clashed with Kurdish fighters on the ground.

The Jarablus Military Council, which is allied with the SDF, said the air strikes in Amarneh marked an “unprecedented and dangerous escalation” after Turkish artillery shelling targeted Kurdish YPG forces, the backbone of the SDF alliance, on Friday.

The council said there were injuries, without giving any further details, but warned that the escalation threatened to “endanger the future of the region” and vowed to stand its ground.

Wladimir van Wilgenburg, an analyst based in the nearby Kurdish-controlled city of Qamishli, told Al Jazeera that the clashes had increased throughout Saturday.

“There have been reports that SDF fighters have blown up a Turkish tank. The fighting is ongoing,” he said.

Later on Saturday, one Turkish soldier and three others were wounded in a rocket attack on a Turkish tank south of Jarablus late on Saturday, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency, in the military’s first fatality since the launch of its offensive to partly help Syria rebels capture Jarablus from ISIL, also known as ISIS.

Turkish military sources said the rocket was fired from territory held by the Kurdish YPG.

Earlier on Saturday, the Northern Sun Battalion, an SDF faction, had said in a statement that it was heading to “Jarablus fronts” to help the council against “threats made by factions belonging to Turkey”.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Saturday’s air strikes and shelling hit the village of Amarneh, which was captured recently by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Ankara has long accused the YPG, or the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, of being linked to Kurdish fighters in its own southeast.

It has ordered the group, a well-trained force that has been the US-led coalition’s most effective ground partner in the war against ISIL, to withdraw to the east bank of the Euphrates River, which crosses the Syria-Turkey border at Jarablus.

ISIL has controlled territory along the Syria-Turkey border since 2013. And in 2014, US-backed Kurdish forces began a push to retake the border area.

After the Kurdish-led SDF seized the nearby city of Manbij from ISIL earlier this month, it left ISIL with Jarablus as its only border stronghold.

The Turkish offensive pre-empted an attempt by the Kurdish-led forces to take control of Jarablus first.

John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, said on Wednesday during a visit to Turkey that the YPG should withdraw east of the Euphrates, and that a refusal to do so would mean an end to Washington’s support for the group.

Emin Bozoglan, head of the Syrian Turkmen Assembly, told Turkish media on Saturday that the operation in Jarablus is aimed at taking ISIL-controlled al-Bab, near the divided city of Aleppo.

The Kurds have also set their sights on al-Bab.

Their forces aim to connect the main part of Kurdish-controlled territory to the east of the Euphrates with the Kurdish-controlled town of Efrin to the West.

Manbij and al-Bab lie directly in between the two Kurdish de-facto autonomous zones.

“Syrian Kurdish civilians here are worried that it won’t be possible to connect the two sides and make one region,” said van Wilgenburg.

“Now, as both sides push toward al-Bab, things could deteriorate.”

Kerry said late on Friday in Geneva that the US had supported Kurdish fighters on a “limited basis” and remained in close coordination with Turkey.

“We are for a united Syria. We do not support an independent Kurd initiative.”

And while battles between Turkish-backed rebels and Kurdish forces increase to the west of the Euphrates, Kurdish sources said Turkey had also crossed into Syria near Kobane, a symbolic town to the east of the Euphrates, to begin constructing a wall.

“Basically the aim is to shut down all cross-border activity. To stop the cross-border smuggling and to strangle the Kurdish administration,” said van Wilgenburg.

{Over 50 groups of farmers and aid workers seek to stop planned 500-tonne shipment that US officials term a donation.}

Peanut producers in Haiti have united to block the delivery of a 500-tonne shipment of nuts from the US.

They say the shipment threatens to undermine the livelihood of thousands of people in the country.

According to the World Bank, extreme poverty in the country has fallen from 31 to 24 percent over the last decade but remains the poorest country in the Americas and one of the poorest in the world (with a GDP per capita of $846 in 2014).

The US Department of Agriculture argues the shipment is a donation to alleviate hunger among Haitian schoolchildren but the locals are strongly opposing the move.

“Our peanuts are natural, we can use them over and over again,” farmers’ leader Josapha Antonice Guillaume told Al Jazeera.

“We don’t modify our crops. We will not accept anyone or any institution that tries to destroy them. We will fight. Peanuts are part of our heritage.”

More than 50 groups of farmers and aid workers, both Haitian and foreign, have issued a joint statement calling on the US to stop the shipment.

“The dumping of these peanuts will create a big catastrophe, even bigger than the destruction of our rice production,” said Jean Pierre Ricot, an agriculture expert.

“Hundreds of thousands of families lost their livelihoods because of those policies. To face the problem, we need a fundamental battle to stop these policies.”

Some international aid experts warn that the US peanut donation could eventually become another cautionary tale about humanitarian aid from a wealthy nation that undermines a flimsy economy in a poor one.

{At least 24 killed in barrel bomb attack, bringing the death toll of Aleppo civilians in recent days to more than 60.}

At least 24 funeral mourners have been killed and 30 others wounded in a barrel bomb attack in a rebel-held area of Aleppo, according to activists, taking the death toll of civilians in the northern Syrian city in recent days to more than 60.

The Syrian civil defence, a volunteer rescue group also known as the White Helmets, told Al Jazeera that Syrian government and Russian warplanes hit on Saturday a group of people gathered in the al-Maadi neighbourhood to mourn the death of 15 women and children killed in a raid earlier this week.

“The first round of barrel bombs came down during the funeral,” said Ibrahim al-Hajj, the media centre director for the Syria civil defence.

“Those who survived headed in the direction of the shelter nearby. They were about to enter the shelter when they were hit with another round of barrel bombs, and they all dropped to the floor,” said al-Hajj.

The latest deaths bring the number of Aleppo civilians killed in raids in recent days to at least 62, activists said.

Syria’s White Helmets – Witness

On Thursday, at least 15 women and children, all from the same family, were killed when warplanes targeted their home in Bab al-Nairab.

“They were having breakfast together when their home was hit with barrel bombs.

“There were 11 children and four women, all dead,” said al-Hajj, who accompanies the volunteers during their rescue efforts to document the details of each attack.

A civilian death toll of 23 was also recorded on Friday in Syrian and Russian air raids across Aleppo, monitoring groups said.

Aleppo has been divided between opposition control in the eastern half and government control in the west since mid-2012.

Government forces launched an offensive to retake the rebel-held half of the city in July 2016, imposing a month-long siege that was eventually broken by the rebels.

Since then, residents in the city say the Russia-backed Syrian government forces have intensified their bombardment and have been indiscriminately targeting civilian neighbourhoods, with hundreds of civilians being killed on a weekly basis.

“There is very intense round-the-clock shelling, 24 hours a day,” Moataz Hamouda, an Aleppo-based activist with the Local Coordination Committees, a grassroots network that monitors daily developments in Syria, told Al Jazeera.

Despite the breaking of the siege, activists say the government has blocked off Ramosa, one of the main exit routes for residents in the eastern half of the city.

They say the shelling has prevented many from leaving, and turned Aleppo into a besieged city again.

“The Ramosa road has been shut in the face of civilians trying to leave,” said Hamouda, adding that those who tried to escape were killed.

“Movement within Aleppo is practically non-existent”.

The United Nations estimates that up to 275,000 people in eastern Aleppo have been cut off from essential food and aid supplies for over a month, while 1.5 million other civilians in the western parts of the city are also facing difficult access.

The Syrian conflict began as a mostly unarmed uprising against Assad in March 2011, but quickly escalated into a full-blown civil war.

More than 280,000 Syrians have been killed throughout the five years of bloodshed, 4.8 million who fled the country, and 6.6 million who have become internally displaced by the violence, according to the UN.

{The chilling image of five children staring into the camera with guns in their upraised arms as five grown men dressed in orange jumpsuits kneel in front of them, about to be executed, was posted by Islamic State extremists almost as a badge of honor.}

According to the SITE counterterrorism website where the image was released Friday, the young boys were British, Egyptian, Kurdish, Tunisian and Uzbek — and featured in an IS video from Raqqa, Syria.

IS has increasingly featured children in its constant barrage of propaganda, a deeply disturbing sign of the extremist group’s profound level of psychological warfare.

The exact number of children who have been put through the Islamic State’s child soldier boot camp is unknown. The German magazine Der Spiegel quoted experts as saying about 1,500 boys were serving the militant group in Iraq and Syria.

One of the experts VOA talked with suspects there are that many in Iraq alone.

As the Iraqi Security Forces, with Kurdish troops and U.S.-led coalition support, converge on the IS stronghold of Mosul, there are growing concerns about what will happen to the children who have been forced to live under IS.

“There is no way we are prepared to manage the scale of what we see in front of us,” John Horgan, a professor at Georgia State University and an expert on terrorism and political violence, told VOA. “We are looking at a level of [child] mobilization that is unprecedented and increasing.”

Snipers and suicide bombers

According to Farah Dakhlallah, UNICEF’s Middle East and North Africa spokeswoman, child recruitment has increased across the Middle East, and the roles that children are recruited into are changing.

“In previous years, children were in support roles,” Dakhlallah told VOA by phone from Jordan. “But in the past two years, they are taking on much more active roles, carrying weapons, manning checkpoints, being used as snipers and as suicide bombers.”

In Syria, children are increasingly being used in armed and combat roles by different parties to the conflict, at times recruited as young as seven years old, Dakhlallah said.

“Often we think this is happening without parental consent,” she said. But there may be instances where the parents have been complicit, further complicating the psychological picture.

“I’ve been studying terrorism for 20 years; I have seen nothing like this,” Horgan said. “This is altogether different.”

{{Unprepared}}

While organizations like UNICEF provide a level of psychosocial services to children who have escaped the conflict, experts warn that some children may have been severely brutalized.

“I don’t think we have a real understanding of what these kids have been through,” Horgan told VOA. “We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.”

IS has been grooming, training and indoctrinating children for several years and has also widened its recruitment approach to include children, encouraging entire families to join IS.

Children who have escaped have described the horror they have been through.

“Some children were sexually assaulted as part of their training. Some were beaten by sticks. They slept on flea-ridden mattresses and were beaten and bullied if they faltered even for a second,” Horgan said.

“IS executed children who showed signs of disillusionment or of missing their parent,” he added.

“These children did not emerge out of the ether in the last couple of months,” Horgan said. “[IS militants] have been grooming and indoctrinating kids for a few years now. I think it’s an investment in their future.”

UNICEF efforts

In Iraq, UNICEF says it is working with the Iraqi government to improve juvenile detention centers and programs for children in detention, including those on security-related charges.

The U.N. agency is also advocating for training front-line security forces on child rights.

But Amnesty International has criticized Iraq’s judiciary structure as weak and opaque, and security officials as barely coping with the flood of people fleeing IS control. Hundreds of males have already disappeared from unofficial security screening points.

Asked whether the humanitarian agencies were prepared for the wave of children who will be emerging from Mosul as security operations ramp up to retake the IS stronghold, Horgan had only one word to say:

“No.”

{The U.N. Security Council has unanimously condemned North Korea’s latest ballistic missile launch. The strong denunciation was backed by China, North Korea’s main ally.}

The 15-member Council said late Friday in a statement drafted by the United States that it would “continue to closely monitor the situation and take further significant measures.” The statement did not say what those measures might be.

The statement was approved after several rounds of negotiations with China, which has not agreed to previous drafts, expressing concern of an increase in tensions in the region.

North Korea’s latest ballistic missile launch Tuesday was fired from a submarine. The missile flew toward Japan. It was North Korea’s first successful launch from a submarine and the most recent in a string of such tests and launches over the past few months in defiance of U.N. resolutions.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the the missile launch was an “unforgivable, reckless act” that threatened Japanese security.

Jon Min Dok, an official with the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Saturday “The U.S. and its allies have called our test-firing a violation of (U.N.) resolutions and brought it up to the U.N. Security Council for discussion. This is really a terrible provocation, it’s like the guilty accusing the innocent.”

He went on to say, “The best way for the U.S. to escape a deadly strike from us is by refraining from insulting our dignity and threatening our security . . . .”

The United States and Japan requested an emergency meeting of the Security Council Wednesday. Afterward, council President Ramlan bin Ibrahim of Malaysia said there was a “general sense of condemnation by most members,” but that there would be discussions about how to phrase a statement to reporters.

“This is the fourth time that an incident has occurred in recent times, and up until this point on [these] last four, something has not been agreed” to by the council, Britain’s Deputy U.N. Ambassador Peter Wilson told reporters Thursday. “We want to see a press statement agreed.”

Main obstacle

The main obstacle to council consensus has been China. Traditionally Pyongyang’s closest and most powerful ally, Beijing did express its frustration in March, supporting a new round of the toughest international sanctions on North Korea to date.

Since then, Pyongyang has launched more than a half-dozen missiles in defiance of the international community.

Charles Armstrong, Korean studies professor at Columbia University in New York, said the uptick in launches is due to the adoption of “[Resolution] 2270, then the THAAD deployment and then, generally, the North Koreans showing they can get away with it.”

THAAD, or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, is the advanced U.S. anti-missile system that is soon to be deployed in South Korea to defend against North Korean missile threats. It has both Pyongyang and Beijing on edge.

Armstrong said on a recent visit to the Chinese capital that he heard a lot of anti-THAAD talk from government officials and in the official media.

“The Chinese were completely obsessed with this,” he noted. “They really see THAAD as not directed against North Korea, but really a threat to China.”

Bill Brown, a former U.S. official and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, said the Chinese are overreacting to THAAD.

“I think it is probably caught up in a bad U.S.-China atmosphere. They think we have provoked them in the South China Sea; we think they are being too aggressive in the South China Sea,” Brown said.

{{Regional issues}}

There is also the issue of the annual joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises involving thousands of air, ground, naval and special operations forces, further irritating the Chinese and North Koreans.

All of these factors have affected U.S.-Chinese cooperation on North Korea in the U.N. Security Council.

Brown said that it is a “delicate game” because the more noise the U.S. makes about the missile launches, the more some Chinese officials might think it’s in their interest to let Pyongyang antagonize the Americans.

He said Washington also tends to blame Beijing for sanctions failures and hope they will toughen their implementation of them — an unlikely prospect.

“China has different goals with respect to North Korea, some of which coincide with ours, but many of which do not,” Brown said.

But in the end, a loud Security Council condemnation is unlikely to change the situation in either direction.

“It is really about the enforcement of sanctions already on the books and whether that will move the situation in a positive direction,” Armstrong said.

{WASHINGTON -The White House says that President Barack Obama will expand a national monument off the coast of Hawaii, creating the world’s largest marine protected area.}

Obama’s proclamation will quadruple in size a monument originally created by President George W. Bush in 2006. The Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument will contain some 1.5 million square kilometers, more than twice the size of Texas.

Obama will travel to the monument next week to mark the designation and cite the need to protect public lands and waters from climate change.

The designation bans commercial fishing and any new mining, as is the case within the existing monument. Recreational fishing will be allowed through a permit, as will be scientific research and the removal of fish and other resources for Native Hawaiian cultural practices. Some fishing groups have voiced concerns about what an expansion of the marine national monument would mean for their industry.

Sean Martin, the president of the Hawaii Longline Association, said he was “disappointed” by Hawaii Gov. David Ige’s decision to support expanding the monument. He said the monument’s expansion would be based on political and not scientific reasons.

Hawaii’s longline fishing fleet supplies a large portion of the fresh tuna and other fish consumed in Hawaii. Martin has previously estimated the fleet catches about 900,000 kilograms of fish annually from the proposed expansion area.

The White House is describing the expansion as helping to protect more than 7,000 species and improving the resiliency of an ecosystem dealing with ocean acidification and warming. A fact sheet previewing the announcement states that the expanded area is considered a sacred place for Native Hawaiians.

Shipwrecks and downed aircraft from the Battle of Midway in World War II dot the expansion area. The battle marked a major shift in the war. Obama will travel to the Midway Atoll to discuss the expansion.

With the announcement, Obama will have created or expanded 26 national monuments. The administration said Obama has protected more acreage through national monument designations than any other president.

The White House said the expansion is a response to a proposal from Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz and prominent Native Hawaiian leaders. The federal government will also give Hawaii’s Department of Natural Resources and Office of Hawaiian Affairs a greater role in managing the monument, an arrangement requested by Schatz and Gov. David Ige.

{Kerry and Lavrov say there are issues that need to be addressed before finalising a deal to end hostilities.}

The United States and Russia are ‘close’ to reaching an agreement to end the war in Syria, with both nations saying they would try and finalise a deal in the coming days.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said late on Friday that talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Swiss city of Geneva had “achieved clarity on the path forward”, but together they offered few details on how they planned to renew a February cessation of hostilities and improve humanitarian assistance.

“We don’t want to have a deal for the sake of the deal,” Kerry said. “We want to have something done that is effective and that works for the people of Syria, that makes the region more stable and secure, and that brings us to the table here in Geneva to find a political solution.”

President Bashar al-Assad’s future was not part of the talks. Instead, discussions were focused on finding an effective and lasting solution to end the violence, which would open negotiations on a political transition in Syria.

“If the remaining details can be completed, we believe we will be able to address the two primary challenges to the cessation of hostilities – the regime violations and the increasing influence of the al-Nusra Front,” Kerry said.

Last month, the Nusra Front, one of Syria’s most powerful anti-government groups, split from al-Qaeda and rebranded itself as Jabhat Fath al Sham, or The Front for Liberation of al Sham.

Al Jazeera’s James Bays, reporting from Geneva, said there were still several issues that needed to be resolved.

“The talks were aimed at getting a final deal on cooperation in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group, brokering a ceasefire for 48 hours to alleviate the suffering of the people in Aleppo, and to try and get the political process in Syria – the Geneva peace talks – back on track. They spoke for 12 hours but they failed to reach such an agreement.”

In the days ahead, technical teams comprising of US and Russian military and intelligence experts will decide which opposition groups they can work with, the Reuters news agency reported.

Friday’s talks came as opposition groups effectively surrendered the Damascus suburb of Daraya to the government after a grueling four-year siege.

Kerry said the Syrian regime had “forced the surrender” of Daraya in contravention of the February cessation of hostilities agreement, but Lavrov said the local accord was an “example” that should be “replicated”.

The Russian foreign minister said another besieged area was “interested in such an operation with mediation of the Russian Federation”. He did not name the area.

Residents and rebels in Daraya began to leave the besieged area where civilians had been trapped since 2012 and the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross expressed concern for their safety.

Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from Gaziantep near the Turkey-Syria border, said the general sentiment among the Syrian opposition is that Daraya’s evacuation was a “sad day for the opposition, and many military factions say they are going to continue the fight until Bahsar al-Assad is deposed”.

“Today the opposition is critical of the deal, saying the international community is silent…paving the way for the government to go ahead with systematic starvation of the people just to force the rebels out of the areas they control,” he said.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Jordan, Charmain Mohamed, advocacy adviser of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said the end of hostiles in Daraya was a positive step, but her team was “concerned about the protection of civilians” and that any evacuations “should be voluntary in nature”.

The Syrian opposition also criticised the evacuation, saying that the international community had failed the people of Daraya.

“Daraya did not fail today,” George Sabra of the opposition peace talks team told DPA news agency. “It was the international community who failed, and failed the people of Daraya.”

Some opposition groups called the deal a major setback as Sunnis would be forced from their homes, further fracturing the country along sectarian lines.

In 2015, there was a similar deal in Zabadani on the outskirts of the capital, Al Jazeera’s Ahelbarra said.

The Syrian civil war started as a largely peaceful uprising against President Assad in March 2011, but quickly developed into a full-scale war.

Earlier this year, the UN special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, estimated that at least 400,000 people had died over the last five years.