Tag: InternationalNews

{Conditions rapidly deteriorate as city completely surrounded by Iraqi government forces and militias, aid groups say.}

More than 50,000 people were trapped in Fallujah as an offensive to push the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group from the Iraqi city intensified.

Hundreds of people fled on Friday as humanitarian conditions rapidly deteriorated with Iraqi forces continuing to surround the city, determined to flush out the ISIL fighters inside.

The United Nations said nearly 800 people had escaped over the past week, but most of those from the outskirts of the city, where ISIL control was weaker.

“The situation inside Fallujah is getting critical by the day,” Nasr Muflahi, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Iraq director, said.

Iraqi military officials insisted that safe corridors would be established to allow civilians to flee, but residents said ISIL checkpoints along the city’s main roads have made escape nearly impossible.

“Our forces evacuated 460 people … most of them women and children,” police Lieutenant General Raed Shakir Jawdat said.

Tens of thousands of Iraqi forces – made up of military, police and militias, and backed by air power from a US-led coalition – last week launched an offensive to retake the city.

Fallujah, along with Mosul, is one of only two major Iraqi cities still controlled by ISIL, which is also known as ISIS. It became in January 2014 the first Iraqi city to be captured by the group, six months before it declared its caliphate.

General Saad Harbiya, head of Fallujah operations for the Iraqi army, said keeping civilians safe was a priority.

“Our plans are humanitarian plans,” Harbiya said. “The most important thing is to get the civilians out unharmed.”

Baghdad-based US Colonel Steve Warren said that over the last four days, 20 strikes in the city had destroyed ISIL fighting positions and gun emplacements.

“We’ve killed more than 70 enemy fighters, including Maher al-Bilawi, who is the commander of ISIL forces in Fallujah,” Warren said.

“This, of course, won’t completely cause the enemy to stop fighting, but it’s a blow. And it creates confusion and it causes the second-in-command to have to move up. It causes other leadership to have to move around,” he added.

Some in Fallujah, a predominantly Sunni city, were reported to have welcomed the takeover of the city by ISIL as an alternative to what they considered their marginalisation at the hands of Iraq’s Shia-dominated government. Locals, though, say conditions there have deteriorated under the group’s control.

Coalition officials estimated earlier this week that 500-700 IS fighters remain in the city, according to a US military estimate, hiding amongst the civilian population.

Located 65km west of Baghdad, Fallujah has a history of anti-government sentiment in post-2003 Iraq.

The city on the Euphrates River had a prewar population of about 300,000. Known as the City of Minarets and Mother of Mosques, it was badly damaged in two assaults by the US army against suspected al-Qaeda fighters in 2004.

{MSF “terribly concerned” about thousands caught in crossfire as ISIL battles rebels near closed Turkish border crossing.}

More than 100,000 Syrians were trapped near the Turkish border as fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group advanced on two strategically-vital towns.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) evacuated most of its staff and patients from al-Salamah hospital – the organisation’s largest facility in the country – near the town of Azaz in Aleppo province on Friday as ISIL neared.

“We are terribly concerned about the fate of our hospital and our patients, and about the estimated 100,000 people trapped between the Turkish border and active frontlines,” Pablo Marco, MSF operations manager for the Middle East, said in a statement.

“For some months, the frontline has been around seven kilometres away from the hospital. Now it is only three kilometres from al-Salamah town. There is nowhere for people to flee to as the fighting gets closer.”

ISIL, also known as ISIS, has cut off a key road between rebel-held Azaz, close to the Turkish border, and nearby Marea, journalist Maamoun Khateeb told the AFP news agency from Azaz.

“This is a disaster,” Khateeb said, adding that some 15,000 people were now besieged in Marea.

Turkey has closed its border to all but seriously wounded Syrians.

Marea and Azaz fell to opposition forces in 2012 and have been vital stops along a rebel supply route from Turkey.

ISIL has tried to advance on the towns for months. In a statement on Friday, it said it had launched a “surprise attack” and seized a series of villages near Azaz.

Patchwork of territories

Also on Friday, a government bombardment on rebel-controlled areas in Aleppo province left at least 15 people dead, rescue workers told AFP.

At least two people were killed in barrel bomb attacks on an opposition-controlled eastern district of Aleppo city, a civil defence group known as the White Helmets said.

Air strikes also killed nine people in the town of Hreitan and four in Kfra Hamra.

READ MORE: Aleppo patients ‘have nowhere to go’

Since fighting intensified there in 2012, Aleppo province has been transformed into a patchwork of territories held by the government, rebels, Kurds and other fighters.

Gerry Simpson, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said Turkey should open the border and allow safe passage to those fleeing the ISIL offensive.

“The fact Turkey is generously hosting more than 2.5 million Syrians does not give it a right to shut its border to other endangered Syrians,” he wrote in a HRW statement on Friday.

Staffan de Mistura, UN special envoy for Syria, has estimated that more than 400,000 have been killed in the five-year war. The UN stopped keeping an official count in 2014.

More than 4.8 million Syrians have become refugees in neighbouring countries – Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq – as well as Europe, according to the UNHCR. At least 7.6 million Syrians have been forced from their homes within the country’s borders.

At least 77 people arrested across the country as thousands rally against labour reforms.

At least 77 people have been detained across France during labour reform protests, which attracted an estimated 18,000 demonstrators in the French capital.

In Paris, demonstrators shouted anti-government slogans and sirens wailed in the background, as the march advanced on Thursday from the Bastille plaza through eastern part of the city.

Police fired tear gas at demonstrators and made several arrests of people accused of property damage.

Earlier, workers from all 19 nuclear power stations in the country voted to join employees from oil refineries and railways in the strike, which already shut down refineries and forced the government to tap into its strategic fuel reserves.

The strike have also led to rolling blackouts across the country.

The protesters are angry at a reform that gives employers more flexibility to hire and fire and weakens the power of unions.

The marchers said “there could be no compromise” until the government retracts the new labour law, Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler reported from Paris.

Similar protests were also held in major cities across France.

Manuel Valls, France’s prime minister, denounced violence while speaking to the Senate, even as he hinted that there could be amendments to the law.

Valls’ willingness to change the law signifies that the government knows that “the crisis is escalating and they want it to stop”, Al Jazeera’s Butler said.

“On all sides, the government really has suffered from this law,” she said.

Pressure is rising on the government as queues at petrol stations lengthen by the day and with football fans due to flood into the country in two weeks for the Euro 2016 championships.

‘Forced return’

As protests continued, the head of France’s oil industry lobby said the government is considering forcing workers to return work if the stoppages drag on.

In an interview with AP news agency, Francis Duseux said on Thursday that the French government has used four days’ worth of its strategic fuel reserves to compensate for oil shortages.

Duseux, of industry coordinating group UFIP, said only two of the country’s eight refineries are working normally.

Duseux said about 20 percent of petrol stations were suffering shortages on Thursday, compared with 30 percent earlier in the week. Police have been sent to force open fuel depots blocked by strikers.

The country has nearly four months of fuel reserves and President Francois Hollande told a cabinet meeting that “everything will be done to ensure the French people and the economy are supplied”.

Worried drivers were using online apps to find petrol stations that still had fuel, with many limiting drivers to only 20 litres each.

{The AP news agency’s delegate count suggests the Republican presidential hopeful already gained 1,238 votes.}

Donald Trump has reached the number of delegates needed to win the US Republican presidential nomination, says an Associated Press news agency count.

A small number of the party’s unbound delegates told AP on Thursday that they will support him at the convention in Cleveland in July. With their support counted, Trump has 1,238 delegates, one vote above the minimum delegates needed.

“I think he has touched a part of our electorate that doesn’t like where our country is,” said Pam Pollard, Oklahoma Republican party chairperson.

“I have no problem supporting Mr Trump.”

However, Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from Washington DC, said it was too early to assume Trump’s victory.

“It is not official. He still has to get 1,237 bound delegates and he is not there yet. By my calculation, he is eight short.” he said.

“So when it comes to the primaries in New Jersey and then California, he will easily cross that threshold.

“What the AP is reporting is that the number of unbound delegates have said that they will support Donald Trump. But they are not tied into that decision. They can change their mind at any point,” he said.

A triumphant Trump unleashed attacked Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday on her policies on energy, guns, the economy and international affairs.

In North Dakota, he unveiled an energy plan he said would unleash unfettered production of oil, coal, natural gas and other energy sources to push the United States toward energy independence.

“She’s declared war on the American worker,” Trump said of Clinton. He later said he’d subject any proposed policy to a simple test: “Is this best for the American worker?”

Trump announced his decision to compete for the Republican presidential nomination on June 16 last year.

Trump’s critics say he is the least prepared candidate for president in modern American history; a man whose isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric is alarming to many at home and abroad.

He called Mexicans “rapists”, promised to build a wall between the US and Mexico and proposed banning most Muslims from the US for an indeterminate time. He criticised women for their looks.

Yet his message resonates with many Americans.

Trump fought 16 other Republican contenders in the primary race. They fell one by one – leaving Trump the sole survivor of a riotous Republican primary.

Trump, 69, the son of a New York City real estate magnate, had risen to fame in the 1980s and 1990s, overseeing major real-estate deals, watching his financial fortunes rise, then fall, hosting The Apprentice TV show and writing more than a dozen books.

{Has the world failed to learn any lessons from the 1945 US atomic strikes on Japan?}

Lagrangeville, New York, US – Of all her painful memories from August 6, 1945, what vexes Tomiko Morimoto West the most is how she argued with her mother on that fateful day, trumpeting her role in Japan’s war effort and slamming the door on her way out.

It was an eventful morning in Hiroshima. The world’s first deployed atomic bomb burst into a 4,000C fireball and flattened the city with a hurricane-like blast, killing thousands instantly and some 140,000 by the end of the year.

West, now 84, recalls a B-29 bomber painting “beautiful” vapour trails above Hiroshima. A “bright, bright light” and the thud of buildings falling. A red flare, looming like a setting sun. A city-wide inferno. Black rain. Charred flesh. Riverbeds full of corpses.

But her overriding memory is how she, as a hot-headed 13-year-old, left her mother on bad terms. At the time, lessons were cancelled and schoolchildren worked in farms and factories or trained to fight off gun-toting US infantrymen with bamboo sticks.

Pumped up with pride and nationalist fervour, her parting words were: “I’m working every day for the government.” The door slammed. It was weeks before she found her mother’s body, under a crushed building, only identifiable by her clothing.

“When you leave the house you have to hug. You never know, you might not see each other again. Had I known she would have died that day, would I have argued? I never would have done that,” West said.

“So, every morning I go pray. I say: ‘Mum, I’m sorry. I was not very nice’.”

It was a tough lesson, but not the only one that month. Nagasaki’s people learned the destructive power of atomic weapons on August 9 and, six days later, Japanese Emperor Hirohito and his generals agreed to surrender, ending World War II.

{{No apologies}}

As Japan picked itself out of the rubble, West left the blighted area, studied and got a job with the occupying US forces. She later married a US serviceman. Nowadays, they live in the leafy Hudson Valley, in an all-American home with Japanese cherry blossoms growing at the front.

Like Tomiko and Melvin West, the US and Japan get on fine these days. On Friday, Barack Obama will become the first sitting US president to tour Hiroshima’s ground zero, accompanied by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

It is a big deal for both countries and revives a thorny question: was the US right to drop apocalyptic bombs on civilians, ostensibly to hasten Japan’s surrender and avert a land invasion that would prove costly in US lives?

Critics of that decision say Japan would have surrendered anyway, and that Washington was more interested in showing off its new city-killers to the Soviet Union, pre-empting the coming Cold War and its nuclear arms race.

This puts Obama on the spot. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is warier of deploying military hardware than many of his predecessors and his decision to lay a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial suggests remorse over the double doomsday bombings.

White House officials say Obama will not apologise during his remarks. Fifty-six percent of Americans believe the atomic strikes were justified under the circumstances, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll.

{{Disarmament and upgrades}}

Joseph Gerson, an anti-war activist, said a formal US apology would “upset the debate in the coming presidential election” and give Republicans ammunition against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, who pledges to advance Obama’s legacy.

“But, at some point, you have to face history,” Gerson, from the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, told Al Jazeera.

Obama’s problems do not end there. In April 2009, upon taking office, he delivered a speech in Prague calling for a world without nuclear weapons. Now his presidency is winding down, critics question his efforts on nuclear disarmament.

There have been gains. The New START deal with Russia, ratified in 2010, limited the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550. Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit meetings have reduced global stockpiles of weapon-making isotopes.

His 2015 nuclear deal with Iran may have helped avert a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. According to Ben Rhodes, his deputy national security adviser, the administration has “bent the curve in the right direction”.

But the gains may be dwarfed by the setbacks.

The US is spending as much as $1 trillion over three decades to modernise its nuclear arms stockpiles. Britain plans to renew its missile-launching submarines. North Korea is now believed to be able to mount a small nuclear warhead on missiles capable of striking neighbours.

Pakistan is deploying small, tactical nuclear weapons that are vulnerable to theft or misuse. Kenneth Luongo, president and founder of the Center for a Secure Nuclear Future, a policy group, described the situation as a “free-for-all in South Asia”.

According to Setsuko Thurlow, 84, a Japanese peace activist who was 1.8km from the hypocentre of Hiroshima’s blast, Obama is a “decent human being” but he “hasn’t done enough to be complimented” on his nuclear disarmament efforts.

Thurlow has her own horror stories from the carnage of 1945. She recalls “thick, black liquid” oozing from sickened relatives as their organs rotted. When dressing, she scoured her skin for “purple spots” of radiation poisoning that were a “sure sign you were to die”.

A witness to such terrors, the Toronto resident argues fervently for wholesale nuclear disarmament. Her views are shared by many younger people who endured the Cold War, fearful of nuclear Armageddon. For millennials, however, the threat is less palpable.

{{The modern nuclear age
}}

“People went back to sleep,” Thurlow told Al Jazeera.

Prospects for more deals between the world’s top nuclear hoarders – Russia and the US – are bleak, given tensions over Ukraine and Syria. Instead, activists focus on a so-called “humanitarian initiative” to stigmatise nuclear arms via UN talks in Geneva.

Others call for unilateral disarmament – a move that requires more courage than most politicians can stomach.

“The pathway to ultimate nuclear disarmament is filled with hairpin twists, and is a very long road,” Luongo said. Belt-tightening in Washington, Moscow and other cash-strapped capitals may hasten arms reductions more quickly than pressure groups, he added.

Army chiefs want weapons they can use on battlefields, not locked up in missile silos. “At some point, decision-making will be driven by dollars, not necessarily by ideology or by arms control calculations,” Luongo said.

This would, of course, fall short of the universal scrapping of nuclear weapons demanded by Thurlow, West and other survivors of Little Boy – the oddly innocent codename for the bomb that levelled their city. But it may be the best deal on offer in an unstable world.

West learned her lesson from Hiroshima. Her mother’s memory looms large. Instead of rowing with her husband, she turns the other cheek. “I just say: ‘OK’. My mother should just see me now,” said West, who doesn’t have children. “I’m like a different person.”

But broader lessons from the calamity have not been learned. Seven decades since mushroom clouds towered over southern Japan, it seems as though humanity will still have enough weapons to wipe out life on the planet for many years to come.

“School systems are failing; media is failing; governments are failing to help young people understand the world they live in,” said Thurlow. “They don’t know what it means to live in a nuclear age.”

{UN envoy says more progress needed to strengthen ceasefire and deliver humanitarian aid before peace talks can resume.}

The UN has called for greater humanitarian access in Syria amid fears that many civilians risk starvation in besieged areas of the war-torn country.

Speaking in Geneva on Thursday, Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy, said there “are plenty of civilians at the moment in danger of starvation” in Syria, where more than 400,000 are trapped in areas besieged by the government or armed groups across the country.

The UN also estimates that upwards of four million people are trapped in “hard-to-reach” areas.

Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council and special adviser to the UN envoy, said plans to reach a million Syrians with humanitarian assistance have fallen short.

“Of the one million people that we have planned and have tried to reach by land in May, we’ve only so far reached 160,000,” he said.

“Even in areas where we had full approval from the government, there have been infinite problems in actually reaching the places, and in others where we had conditional approvals, like Daraya, we haven’t been able to reach the people at all.”

Daraya and Moadamiyah near Damascus and al-Waer in Homs were the three places where the situation was “horrendously critical”, he said.

“Children are so malnourished in these places that they will be dying if we’re not able to reach them.”

The UN has resorted to airdrops of food to reach 110,000 people besieged by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS) group in the town of Deir Az Zor, and is considering airdrops to places besieged by government forces if it does not get permission to go in by land.

De Mistura said those airdrops would still need government approval, but if that was denied, he expected the United States and Russia to find a way to ensure everyone could be reached.

The five-year Syrian conflict has killed more than 270,000 people in the past five years, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

{{Peace talks}}

De Mistura said that he has no plans to convene a new round of talks in the next two or three weeks as fighting flares on the ground.

He told a closed session of the Security Council that more progress was needed to strengthen a ceasefire and deliver humanitarian aid before talks can resume.

The envoy “briefed on his intention to start the next round of talks as soon as feasible but certainly not within the next two/three weeks,” said a statement from his office.

Two weeks of UN-brokered talks between the Syrian government and opposition groups in Geneva ended on April 27 with no breakthrough.

A new round had been expected for the end of May, but no new date has been announced.

Time is running out before an August deadline for the peace talks, and some diplomats had expected the timetable would be even tighter because talks might not be scheduled during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which starts on June 6.

But de Mistura said earlier on Thursday that Ramadan would “not be a factor”, saying that if people were able to keep fighting during Ramadan, they could be expected to conduct peace talks.