Tag: InternationalNews

{Nearly 200 people have been killed in Aleppo in the past week.}

The Syrian army was preparing an offensive on Thursday to retake Aleppo, as escalating fighting in the divided second city killed dozens of civilians in a new blow to a tattered truce.

Nearly 200 people have been killed in Aleppo in the past week as rebels have pounded government-held neighbourhoods with rocket and artillery fire and the regime has hit rebel areas with air raids.

UN envoy Staffan de Mistura warned the hard-won February 27 ceasefire was now “barely alive” and pleaded for urgent action by its co-sponsors Russia and the United States to rescue it.

But pro-government newspaper Al-Watan said the army was poised for “decisive battle” for Aleppo and the surrounding province while a source close to the regime said the campaign was imminent.

“Now is the time to launch the battle for the complete liberation of Aleppo,” the paper said, adding that it “will not take long to begin, nor to finish.”

The regime source told AFP that “the army is preparing a huge operation in the coming days to push the rebels away from the city by encircling it and creating a security zone”.

REBEL CONTROL

Rebels have controlled eastern districts of Aleppo since 2012, while western neighbourhoods are held by the regime.

Control of the surrounding province is divided between a myriad of armed groups – jihadists of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, Kurdish militia and various rebel factions as well as the army.

Further north in the province, rebels including the powerful Islamist Ahrar al-Sham group and Kurdish forces fought fierce battles Wednesday and early Thursday that left 64 fighters dead, a monitor said.

The upsurge in violence in and around Aleppo has severely strained the February truce between the government and non-jihadist rebels and cast a shadow over the UN envoy’s hopes of convening a new round of peace talks next month.

Rebel rocket and artillery fire on government-held neighbourhoods on Thursday killed 22 civilians, including two children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Regime air strikes on rebel-held districts, including the densely populated Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood, killed 31 civilians, including three children, according to the British-based monitor, which relies on a network of sources on the ground.

An AFP correspondent said every building in sight in Bustan al-Qasr had had its windows blown out.

{Local government of Pazardzhik adopts measure to fine those from the Muslim minority who defy the ban.}

The central Bulgarian town of Pazardzhik has banned the wearing of full-face veils in public in a move the local government said would prevent tension among communities and boost security.

The ban on Wednesday, the first of its kind in the Balkan country, was backed from politicians across the political spectrum in the town of some 70,000 people, where wearing full-face veils had become common among some women from the Muslim Roma minority.

“I am tired to hear that Pazardzhik is the town of the burqas. We want to say aloud that we are not that, but a town of responsible people and we will be associated with other achievements,” Mayor Todor Popov told national radio.

Muslims make up about 12 percent of Bulgaria’s 7.2 million population and most belong to a centuries-old community, largely ethnic Turks, among whom full-face veils are not common.

Popov said fines would be imposed on anyone who defies the ban, which police said was needed because the veils, which cover all but the eyes, hampered quick identification.

Part of the Roma minority practices a conservative form of Islam and its women have started wearing full-face veils in recent years, angering nationalists.

Many Bulgarians are concerned that the refugee inflows into Europe may pose a threat to their predominantly Orthodox Christian culture and help radicalise part of the country’s long-established Muslim minority.

ISIL trial

In February, 13 men – most from Pazardhik’s Roma minority -went on trial charged with helping people join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in Syria, propagating an extremist ideology and inciting to war.

Earlier this month, the nationalist Patriotic Front coalition, which backs the government, proposed a nation-wide ban on full-face veils, arguing that such clothing was not typical for Bulgarian Muslims.

The nationalists argued that such veils presented a national security risk and the issue had grown in importance in the wake of the violent Islamist attacks in Paris and Brussels.

{Negotiator for the Syrian opposition Mohammed Alloush rejects Russian move against Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham.}

Russia has asked the United Nations to blacklist two major Syrian rebel groups, one of which is playing a key role in talks to end the conflict.

Vitaly Churkin, the country’s ambassador to the UN, on Tuesday asked the world body to list Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, on a blacklist that includes the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

Mohammed Alloush, a leading figure in Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam), is the chief negotiator for the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), the war-torn country’s main opposition group, at UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva.

Churkin said that the two groups are “closely linked to terrorist organisations, primarily ISIL and Al-Qaeda.”

The groups “both give (ISIL and Nusra) and receive from them financial, material, technical and military support,” he said.

Both Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham have fought alongside the al-Nusra front against Assad forces but all are at war with ISIL (also known as ISIS).

{At least 16 killed – including children – in government attack as UN envoy says warring sides “far apart”.}

At least 16 people have been killed in a Syrian government air strike on a hospital in the city of Aleppo as the United Nations warned that a delicate ceasefire was crumbling.

The attack on the Al Quds hospital on Wednesday evening killed several medical staff and other civilians, including Dr Wasem Maaz, one of the last remaining pediatricians in the rebel-held part of the city.

Rescue workers were pulling bodies and survivors from the rubble of the building in the Sukkary neighbourhood into the evening and witnesses told Al Jazeera the number of dead was likely to rise.

Pictures seen by Al Jazeera showed rows of bloodied and charred bodies covered in plastic sheets. The images were too graphic to be published.

The attack was the latest in an intensification of government assaults on the city, with at least 100 civilians killed in air strikes, shelling and rocket fire since Friday.

“In the last 48 hours, we have had an average of one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes,” the UN special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said, warning that peace talks were almost out of steam.

On Tuesday, at least 35 people – including eight children – were killed in Aleppo in fighting between government forces and rebels, a monitoring group said.

The bloc representing the opposition at peace talks in Geneva, the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), on Wednesday threatened to boycott the next round of talks unless the government stopped its bombing campaign.

The HNC left formal negotiations last week, saying that it needed a “pause”, after at least 40,000 people fled fighting near Aleppo when government forces pressed on with an offensive against rebel fighters there.

{{A ceasefire unravelling
}}

De Mistura on Thursday said that the government and the main opposition group remained far apart in their competing visions of a political transition, despite some common ground.

In a seven-page document issued at the end of the two-week round of talks, he said the two sides shared a view “that the transitional governance could include members of the present government and the opposition, independents and others”.

But the potential presence of Assad in such an arrangement has been a sticking point.

De Mistura called on Russia and the United States to intervene and revive the negotiations.

“I really fear that the erosion of the cessation is unravelling the fragile consensus around a political solution, carefully built over the last year,” de Mistura said in a briefing to the UN Security Council, which was obtained by the Associated Press news agency.

“Now I see parties reverting to the language of a military solution or military option. We must ensure that they do not see that as a solution or an option.”

{The child, aged two and a half, fired the 40-caliber gun through the driver’s seat.}

A toddler riding in the back of a car accidentally shot dead his mother with a gun that slid out from under the driver’s seat, US police said Wednesday.

The 26-year-old victim, Patrice Price, was pronounced dead at the scene following Tuesday’s incident in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the local sheriff’s office said.
The child, aged two and a half and identified by local media as a boy, fired the 40-caliber gun through the driver’s seat.

Local broadcaster WISN quoted the victim’s father as saying that she was a mother of three.

“I have a knot in my chest,” Andre Price told the station.

The weapon apparently belonged to the victim’s security guard boyfriend, with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper reporting that she was driving his car because hers had been stolen.

The sheriff’s office said that deputies found a security officer’s gun belt belonging to the boyfriend on the floor of the front passenger seat.

The firearm was recovered on the floor behind the driver’s seat and an investigation is under way.

Also in the vehicle was another of Price’s children, aged one, and her mother. Neither of the children were in a car seat.

Following the shooting, fellow motorists stopped and pushed the car out of traffic before police arrived.

Last month, a four-year-old boy accidentally shot his mother in the back while she was at the wheel, leaving the passionately pro-gun woman badly wounded.

{One party member refused to shake hands with a female journalist, and another compared Israel to Nazi Germany.}

The behaviour of some Muslim members of Sweden’s Green Party – part of a coalition government – has sparked a debate in the country on whether the environmental group is becoming influenced by religious conservatives.

The party’s problems started when one member refused to shake hands with a female journalist. Another compared Israel to Nazi Germany. A third was seen doing hand signs associated with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in the background of a live TV broadcast.

Housing Minister Mehmet Kaplan, a Green Party member and former leader of a Swedish Muslim youth group, resigned last week after media reports that he had contacts with ultra-nationalists and Islamists in his native Turkey.

He denied any wrongdoing and the party leadership defended him until the end, but he stepped down when a video surfaced of Kaplan comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to how the Nazis persecuted Jews.

Later, new images emerged in which Kaplan and other Muslim members of the Green Party were seen holding up four fingers, a hand gesture used by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Lars Nicander, director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, told Swedish TV4 last week he saw similarities with how the former Soviet Union tried to infiltrate parties during the Cold War, “as people close to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist party, obviously have gained a strong foothold in the Green Party”.

“I see a similarity to how Soviet communism was acting during the Cold War when it tried to infiltrate the various democratic parties,” said Nicander.

Green Party leaders said on Monday there was no evidence of Islamists influencing party policies.

Many Green Party members have questioned whether the Brotherhood’s conservative views are compatible with the feminist and gay-friendly platform of the Swedish Greens.

Too “intimate”

The biggest outcry came after Yasri Khan, a 30-year-old running for a seat on the Green Party’s executive board, refused to shake the hand of a Swedish TV reporter.

He said shaking hands with someone from the opposite sex is too “intimate”, and instead put his hand on his heart in a Muslim greeting.

A debate ensued in Sweden, with Khan’s critics calling his behaviour insulting to women and his supporters dismissing the criticism as Islamophobia.

Prime Minister Stefan Lofven weighed in, saying that in Sweden “you shake hands with both women and men”.

Khan withdrew his candidacy for the Green Party executive board and also quit his seats on a regional board and city council.

He told the AP news agency he was keeping his party membership for now, though he questioned whether practising Muslims are still welcome in the party.

“I think the Green Party needs to work on their inclusive values,” he said. “How do you combine diversity and religion with an ethnocentric and prejudiced idea of gender equality?”

Asked whether he would describe himself as an Islamist, he said he did not even know what the word meant.

“If it means a practising Muslim who is contributing to politics, then I’m an Islamist – or was, since I’m leaving. But if it means a terrorist or against gender equality then I am as far away from an Islamist as you can get,” Khan said.

{Two former prisoners have launched an environmentally friendly mobile kitchen in the occupied West Bank.}

Ramallah, occupied West Bank – “Six shekels for a pound!” yells a sweaty man holding an aubergine, his voice drowned out by cries from other vendors at the fruit-and-vegetable market in downtown Ramallah.

It is an unseasonably hot day, and a peddler selling bubble blowers shields himself from the sun with a piece of discarded cardboard as a colourful truck pulls up.

The vehicle immediately attracts the attention of several children who make a living helping shoppers carry their purchases. “I’ll take a hot dog,” a boy says to the two men who just parked, noting that at first glance, he mistook their van for an ice-cream truck.

Onlookers and elderly men sitting at a cafe across the street appear intrigued. “What is this?” someone yells. “It’s a food truck,” shouts back owner Khaldoun Barghouti, a 43-year-old from Kobar, a village near Ramallah.

This is the first mobile kitchen in the West Bank.

The truck is the brainchild of Barghouti and 35-year-old Abdel Rahman Bibi, both former political prisoners jailed by Israel for nine and eight years respectively. In the years leading up to their release, they mulled over the various ways they could make a living.

“We didn’t want to be a burden on society,” Barghouti, a married father of six, told Al Jazeera. “We wanted people to benefit from our work, to develop as individuals, and to provide a service. We didn’t want to subsist on welfare.”

Their vision of what the truck would look like was inspired by prison life: They hated stationary spaces, so they chose a mobile kitchen. They were so repelled by blue and brown, the Israel Prison Service’s colours of choice, that they had the truck painted in vibrant shades of red, orange and purple.

Having enjoyed a tuna-and-corn concoction for years behind bars, they developed this as one of their many specialties, along with traditional fast-food options such as shawarma, burgers, and sausage, turkey and schnitzel sandwiches loaded with fries and pickled vegetables.

“We only started about two weeks ago,” said Barghouti, who studied IT, history and marketing both in and outside prison. “Right now we are in a trial period, where we are scouting locations, deciding on the most appropriate prices, and figuring out what our running costs are.”

The cooking partners broke ground by being the first in the occupied West Bank to obtain a permit from Palestinian authorities for a mobile kitchen. But they wanted to take it further, looking for ways to make the truck as environmentally friendly as possible.

With the help of a local green firm, the truck’s roof was affixed with two solar panels, which on a clear day can power the vehicle’s freezer, display fridges and fans.

“We did our research online and saw how food trucks around the world are operating,” Bibi told Al Jazeera. “A generator would harm patrons and release hazardous fumes that affect the environment, in addition to the noise factor. We were looking for a solution, and the best one we found was solar power.”

For a second week now, the truck has been roaming the streets of Ramallah, stopping at several locations each day. In the mornings, they often park by al-Quds University; at noon, they head to Beitunia’s industrial area, where they cater to workers out on their lunch break; and in the late afternoon, the truck sits by the market, near mounds of potatoes, courgettes and freshly picked vine leaves stacked under large, colourful umbrellas. On weekends, the truck heads to various parks, tourist areas and cultural centres.

“So far we have generated a lot of interest,” Bibi said. “Turnout is high. Customers keep coming back. There are some people trying to replicate our idea [who] have asked us for tips. Our Facebook page is filled with messages of support, or questions about the truck.”

Since launching their business, the two men heard of another food truck debuting in Gaza City.

With four families relying on the truck for their livelihood, Barghouti and Bibi will need all the customers they can get. So far, they have taken out a $37,000 loan, payable over the next five years with a low interest rate, facilitated by the Palestinian Ministry of Detainees.

“We faced some hurdles, because this is the first project of its kind in Palestine,” Barghouti said. “I couldn’t find any appliances to fit inside the truck, so everything had to be custom-made. I think the only item we purchased from a store was a set of knives.”

The Ramallah and Bireh municipalities, under whose jurisdiction the truck operates, did not know how to categorise them for permit purposes, he said. “Are we under restaurants, stalls or trucks, they would ask. Thankfully, the governorate gave us a permit to park wherever we wanted, as long as we don’t impede traffic, or park on the sidewalk or in front of a restaurant.”

The truck is so far garnering attention for various reasons: curiosity, empathy for the former prisoners, and food prices, which the two have customised to their specific clients. At the market, where even young boys have to work to help their families, prices are low, with a sausage sandwich – piled high with French fries and vegetables – selling for about $2.

“Yesterday I bought two sandwiches,” said 14-year-old Rami, who wheels patrons’ bags in a shopping cart from the market to their cars. “It’s cheap and conveniently located, and I love the fact that they use solar power. It’s the first time I’ve seen this.”

The success thus far has encouraged the two men to hire a third person to help to prepare the food. With Bibi planning to get married in less than a month, they have also decided to split the workload into two shifts.

“At the beginning, curiosity attracted people to our truck,” Barghouti said. “Some people also wanted to support us because we are former prisoners. But now they are coming back for the food.”

{Security Council says status of the Golan will not change after Netanyahu vows it will remain part of Israeli territory.}

The UN Security Council has rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that the annexed Golan Heights in Syria would “forever” remain under Israeli control.

The 15-member council agreed on Tuesday that the status of the Golan, which Israel seized from Syria in 1967, “remains unchanged,” Chinese Ambassador Liu Jieyi, who holds this month’s council presidency said.

Liu recalled a 1981 resolution which states that Israel’s “decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights was nul and void and without any international legal effect.”

Liu said that the Council members “expressed deep concern” over Netanyahu’s remarks from earlier this month that “the Golan Heights will remain in the hands of Israel forever.”

Israel’s response

Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon issued a statement rejecting the council complaint.

“Holding a meeting on this topic completely ignores the reality in the Middle East,” he said. “While thousands of people are being massacred in Syria, and millions of citizens have become refugees, the Security Council has chosen to focus on Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East.”

“It’s unfortunate that interested parties are attempting to use the council for unfair criticism of Israel,” he added.

Netanyahu’s April 17 declaration came on the occasion of the first Israeli cabinet session on the Golan since the area was seized from Syria in a 1967 war and annexed in 1981.

Israel’s annexation of the Golan has never been recognised by the international community.

Past US-backed Israeli-Syrian peace efforts were predicated on a return of the Golan, where some 23,000 Israelis now live alongside roughly the same number of Druse Arabs loyal to Damascus. Liu said the council supported a negotiated arrangement to settle the issue of the Golan.