KIRKUK: Police deployed in the northern Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk to prevent any outbreak of ethnic violence ahead of an independence referendum strongly opposed by the central Baghdad government and Western and regional powers.
The Kurdish region plans to hold the Sept. 25 vote despite an Iraqi government warning it is “playing with fire” and US declarations it could undermine the fight against Daesh.
The referendum could raise particular tension in Kirkuk, where Kurds vie with Turkmen and Arabs for power. Turkey, which has moved a detachment of tanks and troops to its border with northern Iraq, said the breakup of Iraq or Syria where Kurds have gained territory and influence in the war against Daesh could stir global conflict.
Kurdish security and the city police erected checkpoints across Kirkuk after a Kurd was killed in a clash with the guards of a Turkmen political party office in the city.
Two other Kurds and a Turkmen security guard were wounded in the clash that broke out when a Kurdish convoy celebrating the referendum, carrying Kurdish flags, drove by the Turkmen party office, according to security sources. The Kurdish dead and wounded were among those celebrating, they said.
Turkey has long seen itself as the protector of Iraq’s Turkmen minority.
Turkey’s defense minister warned on Tuesday that the breakup of Iraq or Syria could have dire consequences.
“A change that will mean the violation of Iraq’s territorial integrity poses a major risk for Turkey,” Nurettin Canikli said in Ankara.
“The disruption of Syria and Iraq’s territorial integrity will ignite a bigger, global conflict with an unseen end.”
Turkey, with a large Kurdish population of its own in the south of the country, fears the referendum could embolden the outlawed PKK which has waged an insurgency in the southeast since the 1980s.
Canikli said Ankara could not allow the formation of an ethnic-based state in the south of the country.
“Nobody should have any doubt that we will take every step, make every decision to stop the growth of risk factors,” he said.
Tensions rose after the Kurdish-led provincial council in Erbil voted this month to include Kirkuk in the referendum despite the fact that the city lies outside the official boundaries of the autonomous Kurdistan region.
Kurdish peshmerga fighters prevented Kirkuk’s oilfields falling into Daesh’s hands when they seized the city and other disputed territories as the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of an IS advance in 2014. In recent months, Daesh has been driven back across Iraq, but remains dug in close to Kirkuk.
Iraq announced on Tuesday the start of an attack to dislodge Daesh from the town of Ana as they push westward toward Al-Qaim, the border post with Syria.
Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias, highlighting the broader perils emanating from the vote, have threatened to remove peshmerga from Kirkuk should the Kurds persist in holding the vote.
The Kurdish authorities are showing no sign of bowing despite intense international pressure and regional appeals, not least from allied Washington, to call off the vote, which Baghdad says is unconstitutional and a prelude to breaking up the country.
Friction between Irbil and Baghdad has simmered for years. The Kurds complain central government has not paid the salaries of civil servants in Kurdistan, while Baghdad has strongly opposed Kurdish sales of oil without its consent.
The two sides cooperated in the battle against Islamic State but many Iraqis wonder whether the central government can unite a country that has suffered sectarian and ethnic violence since a US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Iraqi Kurdish President Massoud Barzani said on Monday he would proceed with the vote in the absence of any international guarantee that Baghdad would hold talks on Kurdish independence,
Although US-backed Iraqi forces have dislodged Islamic State from its urban stronghold of Mosul and dashed its dreams of a caliphate, security officials say the jihadists will now wage guerrilla war in a new attempt to destabilize Iraq.
Three people were killed and 34 injured when two suicide bombers targeted a restaurant on the road between the northern towns of Tikrit and Beiji on Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said. Security forces killed a third suicide bomber outside the restaurant.
Police deploy in Kirkuk as tensions rise
Police deploy in Kirkuk as tensions rise
UK urged to evacuate hospitalized children from Gaza
- British charity Project Pure Hope: ‘We are witnessing a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions’
- Kamal Aswan Hospital has just 2 doctors to look after more than 150 patients
LONDON: A British charity has urged the UK government to evacuate 21 critically ill children currently in a hospital in northern Gaza, Sky News reported.
The Kamal Aswan Hospital is besieged by Israeli forces and was recently raided by troops, who detained staff and left the facility with only two doctors to care for more than 150 patients.
It was also targeted by an Israeli airstrike on Thursday. Its supplies are reportedly running low and many of its facilities are no longer operational.
Project Pure Hope has called on the UK to facilitate the evacuation of vulnerable children trapped inside.
“We are witnessing a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions,” it said in a statement. “With each passing hour, the children’s chance of survival diminishes without advanced medical intervention — intervention that cannot be provided under the hospital’s current, catastrophic conditions.”
The charity said it has sufficient money to fund an evacuation of 21 children in critical condition at the hospital.
It added that it held a meeting with UK Foreign Office staff this week to discuss its plans, but so far the government has not agreed to take in patients.
“While other countries ... have opened their doors to these paediatric cases, the UK remains a notable outlier, having yet to implement any such programme,” the charity said.
The US, Switzerland, Italy Ireland and the UAE have taken in hospitalized children from Gaza since the start of the conflict over a year ago.
Fears for the safety of people in the area around the hospital have grown in recent weeks amid an uptick in Israeli military activity and Israel’s refusal to allow sufficient aid to reach displaced civilians.
Charities have warned of famine and disease, and aid workers struggle to move around Gaza, especially to the scene of military strikes to help civilian casualties.
Project Pure Hope’s concerns about the fate of patients at Kamal Aswan Hospital have been echoed by medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, which said it is “deeply concerned” by the situation after one of its staff members was detained by Israeli forces.
Israel claims that Hamas has been using the hospital, located in the Jabaliya refugee camp, as a base, and that it has found weapons stored at the facility. The hospital denies the allegation.
WHO ‘deeply concerned’ about ‘rising attacks’ on Lebanon health care
- ‘… We are again and again and again emphasizing that health care is not a target; health workers are not a target’
GENEVA: The World Health Organization said Friday it is deeply concerned about Israeli attacks hitting health care workers and facilities in Lebanon, in its war against Hezbollah.
“We are really, really concerned, deeply concerned, about the rising attacks on health workers and the facilities in Lebanon, and we are again and again and again emphasizing that health care is not a target; health workers are not a target,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told a media briefing in Geneva.
Lebanese ‘orphaned of their land’ as Israel blows up homes
- Aerial footage shows simultaneous explosions rock a cluster of buildings on a lush hill
- Israeli troops dynamited buildings in at least seven border villages last month
BEIRUT: The news came by video. Law professor Ali Mourad discovered that Israel had dynamited his family’s south Lebanon home only after footage of the operation was sent to his phone.
“A friend from the village sent me the video, telling me to make sure my dad doesn’t see it,” Mourad, 43, said.
“But when he got the news, he stayed strong.”
The aerial footage shows simultaneous explosions rock a cluster of buildings on a lush hill.
Mourad’s home in Aitroun village, less than a kilometer from the border, is seen crumpling in a cloud of grey dust.
His father, an 83-year-old paediatrician, had his medical practice in the building. He had lived there with his family since shortly after Israel’s 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon ended in 2000.
The family fled the region again after the Israel-Hezbollah war erupted on September 23 after a year of cross-border fire that began with the Gaza war.
South Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold, has since been pummeled by Israeli strikes.
Hezbollah says it is battling Israeli forces at close range in border villages after a ground invasion began last month.
For the first 20 years of his life, Mourad could not step foot in Aitroun because of the Israeli occupation.
He wants his two children to have “a connection to their land,” but fears the war could upend any remaining ties.
“I fear my children will be orphaned of their land, as I was in the past,” he said.
“Returning is my right, a duty in my ancestors’ memory, and for the future of my children.”
According to Lebanon’s official National News Agency, Israeli troops dynamited buildings in at least seven border villages last month.
Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast footage appearing to show one of its presenters blow up a building while embedded with soldiers in the village of Aita Al-Shaab.
On October 26, the NNA said Israel “blew up and destroyed houses... in the village of Odaisseh.”
That day, Israel’s military said 400 tons of explosives detonated in a Hezbollah tunnel, which it said was more than 1.5 kilometers (around a mile) long.
It is in Odaisseh that Lubnan Baalbaki fears he may have lost the mausoleum where his mother and father, the late painter Abdel-Hamid Baalbaki, are buried.
Their tomb is in the garden of their home, which was levelled in the blasts.
Baalbaki, 43, bought satellite images to keep an eye on the house which had been designed by his father, in polished white stone and clay tiles.
But videos circulating online later showed it had been blown up.
Lubnan has not yet found out whether the mausoleum was also damaged, adding that this was his “greatest fear.”
It would be like his parents “dying for a second time,” he said.
His Odaisseh home had a 2,000-book library and around 20 original artworks, including paintings by his father, he said.
His father had spent his life savings from his job as a university professor to build the home.
The family had preserved “his desk, his palettes, his brushes, just as he left them before he died,” Baalbaki said.
A painting he had been working on was still on an easel.
Losing the house filled him with “so much sadness” because “it was a project we’d grown up with since childhood that greatly influenced us, pushing us to embrace art and the love of beauty.”
Lebanon’s National Human Rights Commission has said “the ongoing destruction campaign carried out by the Israeli army in southern Lebanon is a war crime.”
Between October 2023 and October 2024, locations “were wantonly and systematically destroyed in at least eight Lebanese villages,” it said, basing its findings on satellite images and videos shared on social media by Israeli soldiers.
Israel’s military used “air strikes, bulldozers, and manually controlled explosions” to level entire neighborhoods — homes, schools, mosques, churches, shrines, and archaeological sites, the commission said.
Lebanese rights group Legal Agenda said blasts in Mhaibib “destroyed the bulk” of the hilltop village, “including at least 92 buildings of civilian homes and facilities.”
“You can’t blow up an entire village because you have a military target,” said Hussein Chaabane, an investigative journalist with the group.
International law “prohibits attacking civilian objects,” he said.
Should civilian objects be targeted, “the principle of proportionality should be respected, and here it is being violated.”
Lebanon PM says expanded strikes suggest Israel’s ‘rejection’ of ceasefire
- Mikati said in a statement after overnight raids hit Beirut’s southern suburbs
- US asked Lebanon to declare unilateral ceasefire with Israel, two sources say
Beirut: Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Friday criticized Israel’s “expansion” of its attacks on his country, saying they indicated a rejection of efforts to broker a truce after more than a month of war.
“The Israeli enemy’s renewed expansion of the scope of its aggression on Lebanese regions, its repeated threats to the population to evacuate entire cities and villages, and its renewed targeting of the southern suburbs of Beirut with destructive raids are all indicators that confirm the Israeli enemy’s rejection of all efforts being made to secure a ceasefire,” Mikati said.
Mikati’s statement came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met visiting US officials to discuss a possible deal to end the war in Lebanon.
The Lebanese premier added that Israel’s diplomatic behavior suggested it was rejecting a ceasefire.
US asked Lebanon to declare unilateral ceasefire with Israel
The office of Lebanese caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati on Friday denied that the US had asked Lebanon to declare a unilateral ceasefire, after two sources told Reuters that a US envoy had made the request to inject momentum into stalled talks on a deal to end hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel.
In a statement to Reuters, Mikati’s office said the government’s stance was clear on seeking a ceasefire from both sides and the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the last round of conflict between the two foes in 2006
“Israeli statements and diplomatic signals that Lebanon received confirm Israel’s stubbornness in rejecting the proposed solutions and insisting on the approach of killing and destruction,” Mikati said in a statement.
Since fighting in Lebanon escalated on September 23, the war has killed at least 1,829 people in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of health ministry figures.
On Wednesday, Mikati said US envoy Amos Hochstein had signalled during a phone call that a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war was possible before US elections are held on November 5.
The same day, Hezbollah’s new leader said the group would agree to a ceasefire with Israel under acceptable terms, but added that a viable deal has yet to be presented.
During talks on Thursday, Israeli leader Netanyahu told US envoys Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk that any Lebanon deal must guarantee Israel’s longer-term security.
In east Lebanon, looming winter hints at stretched aid response
- Supplies running tight in Deir Al-Ahmar in eastern Lebanon
- Winter snow likely to cut off only safe route
Lebanon: Nerjes Hassan was so worried her children would fall ill from bathing in the frigid water of a displacement shelter in northeast Lebanon that she drove back into her hometown to give them a hot bath and pick up food preserves.
While at home on Wednesday morning in the town of Buday, near the eastern city of Baalbek, an Israeli air strike killed her, her husband and her two children, according to her coworkers and neighbors.
Hassan, who worked for the Lebanese Organization for Studies and Training (LOST) aid organization, was among thousands seeking refuge from Israeli strikes in the mountainous Christian town of Deir Al-Ahmar in eastern Lebanon.
The town was already hosting more than 10,000 displaced people before Israel escalated its strikes on predominantly Shiite Muslim Baalbek and nearby towns starting on Wednesday this week.
Thousands more are flowing into Deir Al-Ahmar as Israel’s bombardment continues. The needs are growing, temperatures are dropping, and supplies in the town are getting tight.
In one school now serving as a shelter, aid groups that once served two meals have cut breakfast to feed more at lunch. Townspeople have put together donation drives for winter clothes and blankets but are facing shortages, leaving displaced sharing blankets overnight.
“If we flee the bombing, are we meant to die of cold?” said Suzanne Qassem, a mother of two at one displacement center, whose home in Buday had been destroyed.
“I’m sick, I’ve been taking medicine for a week and I’m still coughing... If my son gets sick, am I going to be able to get him medicine?“
'Like a siege'
Temperatures in Deir Al-Ahmar are dropping to 6 degrees Celsius (43 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight even before winter fully sets in and the schools have no diesel to run central heating systems.
“At night, we’re shaking. I put my mattress up next to my daughter and tell her to hug me so that we can keep warm. But we’re not keeping warm,” said Neyfe Mazloum, 69.
Most families fled with just the clothes on their backs, rushing out of their homes after Israeli evacuation warnings for Baalbek and surrounding towns on Wednesday and Thursday.
More than 1.2 million people have been displaced by Israeli strikes on Lebanon over the last year in its campaign against militant group Hezbollah. That includes nearly 190,000 who have sought refuge in shelters. Others are staying with relatives, have rented out homes, or are sleeping in the streets.
Lebanon’s crisis management cell says that out of 1,130 accredited shelters, 948 have reached maximum capacity. Most of the displaced are in the districts of Mount Lebanon and Beirut — easy to reach for most aid organizations.
But Deir Al-Ahmar is much further afield.
The quickest routes run through the massive area that the Israeli military says must evacuate. To avoid it, aid groups planning to deliver supplies this week will travel further north through mountain peaks before cutting back down to the town.
Imran Riza, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon, told Reuters that aid deliveries to the Baalbek region had to be postponed this week due to Israeli air strikes. Other deliveries of medical aid to Lebanon from foreign countries have been delayed due to strikes near the airport.
“Access is becoming more and more difficult. The needs are growing in Deir Al-Ahmar. It’s up to us to try to get there, and to plan a way to be able to access in it a way that is reasonably safe,” he said.
Local volunteers are worried that the looming winter will cut off the only safe route into Deir Al-Ahmar, leaving them stranded.
“That road will close with the first snow. It will be like a siege,” said Khodr Zeaiter, a volunteer with LOST. Displaced himself, he is now helping to organize aid in Deir Al-Ahmar.
Beyond the immediate concerns of food and fuel, Zeaiter is worried about the education ministry’s directive that public schools — now hosting displaced — will need to reopen for students in three weeks.
Volunteers are studying the possibility of refurbishing an abandoned school to host morning and evening classes, he said.
“We’re grateful to the people of Deir Al-Ahmar so much. It’s their solidarity that has gotten us through this. But how long that will last — who knows.”
