After liberation from Daesh, Fallujah struggles to rebuild

Sheikh Talib Al-Hasnawi, head of the municipal council, speaks during the opening ceremony of a water station in Fallujah recently. (AP)
Updated 04 June 2017
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After liberation from Daesh, Fallujah struggles to rebuild

FALLUJAH, Iraq: Even as Iraqi forces in Mosul close in on the last pockets of urban territory still held by the Daesh group, residents of Fallujah in Iraq’s Sunni heartland are still struggling to rebuild nearly a year after their neighborhoods were declared liberated from the extremists.
After declaring the city liberated last June, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi called the victory a major step toward unifying Iraq more than two years after nearly a third of the country fell to Daesh.
“Fallujah has returned to the nation,” he declared in a speech broadcast nationwide.
But in the months that followed, while the Iraqi government compiled databases and set up tight checkpoints on the main roads in and out of Fallujah to screen residents for suspected ties with IS, it provided little in the way of reconstruction money, local officials say.
Sheikh Talib Al-Hasnawi, the head of Fallujah’s municipal council, said international aid is what has provided electricity, repaired water pumps and built filtration systems.
“We have a real problem with Daesh sleeper cells,” he said, adding that what Fallujah needs most is a strong security force to prevent the extremists from re-establishing a foothold in the city some 65 km west of Baghdad. “Honestly the support from Baghdad has been very weak,” he added, noting that his repeated requests for more equipment and arms for the city’s local police have gone unheeded.
“So mostly we are relying on the civilians to alert us to threats,” he said. “All we can provide are the very basics.”
Dr. Mahdi Al-Alak, the Secretary-General of the Iraqi Cabinet, said the government has budgeted about $19.5 billion for stabilization-related projects in Anbar Province, where Fallujah is located.
Al-Alak said two new water plants in the Al-Baghdadi and Fallujah area have been built, with seven others “rehabilitated.” He also said some roads and bridges have been reconstructed, without elaborating.
Al-Alak acknowledged the budget does not cover health care infrastructure, for which about $39.8 million is needed to repair 22 damaged health centers in the area.
Located in the heart of the province, Fallujah has a long history of anti-government sentiment. After the US-led invasion in 2003 toppled Saddam Hussein, many of the city’s residents supported a Sunni insurgency that rose up against US forces and the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
In 2014, many in Fallujah welcomed IS when the militants took over following a bloody government crackdown on thousands of protesters camped out on the city’s outskirts to challenge the increasingly sectarian rule of then-Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki.
After the fight to retake Fallujah from IS, the city was left a ghost town. It had been entirely emptied of its civilian population by Iraqi security forces and IS fighters had left behind hundreds of explosives rigged to kill those who tried to return.
“I had never seen anything like it and I can assure you no one else has,” said Pehr Lodhammer, a demining expert with the UN’s Mine Action Service who has worked in the field for decades. In Fallujah he said his team cleared 289 explosive remnants and 333 so-called improvised explosive devices, bombs that IS now produces on an industrial scale.
In Mosul — a city more than eight times the size of Fallujah — he said he expects neighborhoods will be littered with far more explosives.
On Fallujah’s main streets, shops and buildings are a patchwork of destruction and revival.
On a visit this week one shop owner was installing shiny new signs and tall glass storefronts on a building still stained black by smoke and punctured by artillery rounds. In nearby residential neighborhoods, families who had returned were plastering over bullet holes and repairing collapsed terraces. In the past nine months alone, more than 370,000 people have returned, but many streets remain blighted with abandoned houses, often partially destroyed or burned.
“Those houses, they have (the words) ‘Daesh house’ painted on the walls outside,” said Abdul Hassan, a blacksmith from the Al-Askari neighborhood, using the Arabic acronym for IS. He said most of the still-abandoned houses belonged to families who supported IS and fled with the fighters. “In my neighborhood we had very few Daesh families, maybe just four out of 100.”
He insisted it would be impossible for IS fighters to return because their neighbors would immediately turn them over to the police, though he acknowledged that he hasn’t brought his wife and children back yet. When asked if he was concerned about security he shrugged.
“Once there are enough schools, I’ll bring my children. Until then I’ll keep them in Baghdad,” he said.
A dozen schools have been reopened in Fallujah with help from the United Nations, along with pumping and filtration stations that now provide more than 60% of the city with running water.
“What we learned ... is you need to get people electricity and water first and fast,” said Deputy Special Representative of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq Lise Grande.
“We did that in Anbar but we want to do it even more quickly,” she added, saying it was a lesson she hoped would be applied to Mosul reconstruction.
As the fight for Mosul continues — closely backed by the US-led coalition and heavily reliant on airpower to clear territory — reconstruction costs will only mount.
Rebuilding Mosul will cost between $50 billion and $100 billion, according to initial estimates from the Nineveh governor’s office and the provincial council. And as Iraq continues to battle an economic crisis exacerbated by entrenched corruption and a bloated public sector, it is unlikely the government will be in a position to provide more monetary help any time soon.
Khaldoon Ibrahim, a teacher from Fallujah’s Shurta neighborhood said he returned to the city with his family last September, the day he heard civilians were being allowed back in.
“Of course not everything is available,” he said.
“But if we waited for everything to be fixed we would never be able to come home.”


Qataris search for bodies of Americans killed by Daesh in Syria

Updated 10 May 2025
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Qataris search for bodies of Americans killed by Daesh in Syria

  • Search mission discussed in Qatari trip to US, source says
  • Daesh beheaded a number of Western hostages
  • Qatari mission begins before Trump visit to Doha

A Qatari mission has begun searching for the remains of US hostages killed by Daesh in Syria a decade ago, two sources briefed on the mission said, reviving a longstanding effort to recover their bodies.
Daesh, which controlled swathes of Syria and Iraq at the peak of its power from 2014-2017, beheaded numerous people in captivity, including Western hostages, and released videos of the killings.
Qatar’s international search and rescue group began the search on Wednesday, accompanied by several Americans, the sources said. The group, deployed by Doha to earthquake zones in Morocco and Turkiye in recent years, had so far found the remains of three bodies, the sources said.
One of the sources — a Syrian security source — said the remains had yet to be identified. The second source said it was unclear how long the mission would last.
The US State Department had no immediate comment.
The Qatari mission gets under way as US President Donald Trump prepares to visit Doha and other Gulf Arab allies next week and as Syria’s ruling Islamists, close allies of Qatar, seek relief from US sanctions.
The Syrian source said the mission’s initial focus was on looking for the body of aid worker Peter Kassig, who was beheaded by Daesh in 2014 in Dabiq in northern Syria. The second source said Kassig’s remains were among those they hoped to find.
US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were among other Western hostages killed by Daesh. Their deaths were confirmed in 2014.
US aid worker Kayla Mueller was also killed in Daesh captivity. She was raped repeatedly by Daesh leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi before her death, US officials have said. Her death was confirmed in 2015.
“We’re grateful for anyone taking on this task and risking their lives in some circumstances to try and find the bodies of Jim and the other hostages,” said Diane Foley, James Foley’s mother. “We thank all those involved in this effort.”
The families of the other hostages, contacted via the Committee to Protect Journalists, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The extremists were eventually driven out of their self-declared caliphate by a US-led coalition and other forces.

APRIL VISIT
Plans for the Qatari mission were discussed during a visit to Washington in April by Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and the Minister of State for the foreign ministry, Mohammed Al Khulaifi — a trip also designed to prepare for Trump’s visit to Qatar, one of the sources said.
Another person familiar with the issue said there had been a longstanding commitment by successive US administrations to find the remains of the murdered Americans, and that there had been multiple previous “efforts with US government officials on the ground in Syria to search very specific areas.”
The person did not elaborate. But the US has had hundreds of troops deployed in northeastern Syria that have continued pursuing the remnants of Daesh.
The person said the remains of Kassig, Sotloff and Foley were most likely in the same general area, and that Dabiq had been one of Daesh’s “centerpieces” — a reference to its propaganda value as a place named in an Islamic prophecy.
Mueller’s case differed in that she was in Baghdadi’s custody, the person said.
Two Daesh members, both former British citizens who were part of a cell that beheaded American hostages, are serving life prison sentences in the United States.
Syrian interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who seized power from Bashar Assad in December, battled Daesh when he was the commander of another jihadist faction — the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front — during the Syrian war.
Sharaa severed ties to Al-Qaeda in 2016.


33 killed in Sudan strikes blamed on paramilitary RSF

Updated 10 May 2025
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33 killed in Sudan strikes blamed on paramilitary RSF

PORT SUDAN: At least 33 people have been killed in Sudan in attacks blamed on the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, at war with the army since April 2023, first responders said Saturday.
The attacks came after six straight days of RSF drone strikes on the army-led government’s wartime capital Port Sudan damaged key infrastructure including the power grid.
On Friday evening, at least 14 members of the same family were killed in an air strike on a displacement camp in the vast western region of Darfur, a rescue group said, blaming the paramilitaries.
The Abu Shouk camp “was the target of intense bombardment by the Rapid Support Forces on Friday evening,” said the group of volunteer aid workers, which also reported wounded.
“Fourteen Sudanese, members of the same family, were killed” and several people wounded, it said in a statement.
The camp near El-Fasher, the last state capital in Darfur still out of the RSF’s control, is plagued by famine, according to the United Nations.
It is home to tens of thousands of people who fled the violence of successive conflicts in Darfur and the conflict that has been tearing Africa’s third largest country apart since 2023.
The RSF has shelled the camp several times in recent weeks.
Abu Shouk is located near the Zamzam camp, which the RSF seized in April after a devastating offensive that virtually emptied it.
The United Nations says nearly one million people had been sheltering at the site.
On Saturday, an RSF strike on a prison in the army-controlled southern city of El-Obeid killed at least 19 people and wounded 45, a medical source said.
The source told AFP that the jail in the North Kordofan state capital was hit by a RSF drone.
The war, which began as a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has spiralled into what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
It has effectively divided the country in two with the army controlling the north, east and center while the RSF and its allies dominate nearly all of Darfur in the west and parts of the south.


UN’s top anti-racism body calls for immediate Gaza aid access

Updated 09 May 2025
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UN’s top anti-racism body calls for immediate Gaza aid access

  • Civilian population ‘at imminent risk of famine, disease and death,’ statement warns
  • Israel has blocked humanitarian aid entering Gaza since March in bid to ‘pressurize Hamas’

NEW YORK CITY: The UN’s top anti-racism body has called for immediate humanitarian access to Gaza in a bid to avoid “catastrophic consequences” for its civilian population.

The statement by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination — comprised of independent experts — came hours after the World Central Kitchen charity said it was forced to end operations in Gaza due to a lack of food.

It also follows a commitment by Israel to “conquer” almost all of the enclave, as well as disputes involving Israel, the UN and US over the appropriate way to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians there.

The CERD committee is convening in Geneva for its latest session, ending today.

Gaza’s civilian population, “especially vulnerable groups such as children, women, the elderly and persons with disabilities,” are “at imminent risk of famine, disease and death,” the committee said.

The warning follows an earlier appeal by the World Food Programme, the UN’s food agency, which said that almost all food aid operations in Gaza had collapsed.

Late last month, the agency announced that the entirety of its food reserves in the enclave had been depleted.

Since March, Israel has blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza in a bid to build pressure on Hamas, which still holds Israeli hostages.

Tom Fletcher, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, said last week: “Two months ago, the Israeli authorities took a deliberate decision to block all aid to Gaza and halt our efforts to save survivors of their military offensive.

“They have been bracingly honest that this policy is to pressurize Hamas.”

Expanded military operations by Israel in Gaza over the past two months “have dramatically worsened the humanitarian crisis and severely endangered the civilian population,” Friday’s CERD statement said.

The committee called on Israel to “lift all barriers to humanitarian access, allow the immediate and unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid, and cease all actions obstructing the provision of essential services to the civilian population in Gaza.”

The statement also highlighted worsening conditions across the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including in East Jerusalem, where Israel closed six UNRWA schools this week.

Philippe Lazzarini, the Palestinian refugee agency’s chief, reacted with fury over the move, describing it as an “assault on children.”

The CERD statement called on all UN states to “cooperate to bring an end to the violations that are taking place and to prevent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, including by ceasing any military assistance.”


UN committee warns of ‘another Nakba’ in Palestinian territories

Updated 09 May 2025
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UN committee warns of ‘another Nakba’ in Palestinian territories

  • During the 1948 war, around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in what became known as “the Nakba”

GENEVA: The world could be witnessing “another Nakba” expulsion of Palestinians, a United Nations committee warned Friday, accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and saying it was inflicting “unimaginable suffering” on Palestinians.

For Palestinians, any forced displacement evokes memories of the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement in the war that accompanied to Israel’s creation in 1948.

“Israel continues to inflict unimaginable suffering on the people living under its occupation, whilst rapidly expanding confiscation of land as part of its wider colonial aspirations,” warned a UN committee tasked with probing Israeli practices affecting Palestinian rights.

“What we are witnessing could very well be another Nakba,” it said, after concluding an annual mission to Amman.

During the 1948 war, around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in what became known as “the Nakba.”

The descendants of some 160,000 Palestinians who managed to remain in what became Israel presently make about 20 percent of its population.

The UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories was established by the UN General Assembly in December 1968.

The committee is currently composed of the Sri Lankan, Malaysian and Senegalese ambassadors to the UN in New York.

“What the world is witnessing could very well be a second Nakba. The goal of wider colonial expansion is clearly the priority of the government of Israel,” they said in their report.

“Security operations are used as a smokescreen for rapid land grabbing, mass displacement, dispossession, demolitions, forced evictions and ethnic cleansing, in order to replace the Palestinian communities with Jewish settlers.”


Iran, US to resume nuclear talks on Sunday after postponement

Updated 09 May 2025
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Iran, US to resume nuclear talks on Sunday after postponement

  • Fourth round of indirect negotiations, initially set for May 3 in Rome, postponed due to ‘logistical reasons’

DUBAI: Iran has agreed to hold a fourth round of nuclear talks with the United States on Sunday in Oman, Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi said on Friday, adding that the negotiations were advancing.

US President Donald Trump, who withdrew Washington from a 2015 deal between Tehran and world powers meant to curb its nuclear activity, has threatened to bomb Iran if no new deal is reached to resolve the long unresolved dispute.

Western countries say Iran’s nuclear program, which Tehran accelerated after the US walkout from the now moribund 2015 accord, is geared toward producing weapons, whereas Iran insists it is purely for civilian purposes.

“The negotiations are moving forward, and naturally, the further we go, the more consultations and reviews are needed,” Aragchi said in remarks carried by Iranian state media.

“The delegations require more time to examine the issues that are raised. But what is important is that we are on a forward-moving path and gradually entering into the details.”

The fourth round of indirect negotiations, initially scheduled for May 3 in Rome, was postponed, with mediator Oman citing “logistical reasons.”

Aragchi said a planned visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia on Saturday was in line with “continuous consultations” with neighboring countries to “address their concerns and mutual interests” about the nuclear issue.