BAGHDAD: Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) on Friday reached an agreement for the handover of airports and border crossings to Baghdad, and the redeployment of federal forces, within 24 hours, federal officials told Arab News.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi’s media office said he had ordered a halt to the movement of federal forces for 24 hours so a technical team of federal and regional forces can work to deploy federal forces in all disputed areas and the Habur border crossing.
A senior federal security official told Arab News that the agreement was supervised by the US-led coalition fighting Daesh in Iraq.
The KRG has agreed to withdraw all Kurdish forces from disputed areas next to Irbil and Duhok provinces, hand over airports and border crossings to federal security forces, and publically announce the cancelation of the results of last month’s independence referendum.
This will be followed by the formation of a high-level Kurdish political delegation in order to start talks with Baghdad based on the constitution.
“A federal security delegation will travel to Irbil to discuss mechanisms to implement the agreement and the handover of airports and border crossings,” an official said on condition of anonymity.
“If the terms of the agreement aren’t implemented in 24 hours, federal troops will resume action and push to achieve the last targets of the military campaign.”
Federal security forces repositioned near the outskirts of Irbil, and were pushing to gain control of the northern border triangle between Syria, Iraq and Turkey.
The area contains an oil pipeline used by the KRG to export oil. Clashes erupted there last week between advancing federal troops and Kurdish forces, with fatalities on both sides.
Field military sources told Arab News that the situation on the frontlines is calm, and federal forces have not left their positions since Thursday night.
“Generally there’s calm on all fronts, and there have been no movements or clashes between federal forces and Kurdish forces today (Friday),” Lt. Gen. Jabar Yawar, general secretary of the Peshmerga Ministry, told Arab News.
Friday’s cease-fire was agreed amid US pressure on Al-Abadi, sources told Arab News. The deal was reached after a 15-minute phone call between KRG President Masoud Barzani and Al-Abadi. The call followed a meeting of military leaders from both sides, sources said.
Another high-level security meeting, headed by Al-Abadi, was held in Baghdad to discuss the agreement, and resulted in the formal announcement of the cease-fire, a source involved in the meeting told Arab News.
“The cease-fire is holding,” said Vahal Ali, director of Barzani’s media office. “Diplomatic efforts are underway to set a date for the beginning of talks between Irbil and Baghdad.”
In an interview with Kurdish TV Rudaw, the spokesman of the US-led anti Daesh coalition in Baghdad, Col. Ryan Dillon, called on the two sides to extend the deal to a complete halt in hostility and “refocus our efforts on defeating ISIS (Daesh).”
He added: “We are encouraging dialogue, we are trying to get the tensions down.”
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Al-Abadi urging for dialogue to start, the Iraqi central government said in a statement.
Iraqi government forces, Iranian-backed militias and Kurdish troops fought alongside each other to defeat Daesh, but the alliance has faltered with the militants largely defeated in the country.
Iraqi government forces and the Tehran-backed Popular Mobilization launched a surprise offensive on Oct. 16 in retaliation to the Sept. 25 independence referendum organized by the KRG.
The offensive aims to capture disputed territories, claimed by both the KRG and the Iraqi central government, as well as border crossings and oil facilities.
The city of Kirkuk, which lies in an oil producing area, fell to Iraqi forces without much resistance on Oct. 16 but the Peshmerga began to fight back as they withdrew closer to the Kurdish autonomous region.
The most violent clashes happened in the northwestern corner where Peshmerga are defending land crossings to Turkey and Syria and an oil hub that controls KRG crude exports, located in the region of Fish-Khabur.
Baghdad, Kurdistan Regional Government agree to end disputes
Baghdad, Kurdistan Regional Government agree to end disputes
‘No food, nothing’: Famine grips Sudan
- Country’s economy bludgeoned by war and mismanagement
CAIRO: Mona Ibrahim has already buried two of her children.
In the span of just two months, the Sudanese mother watched helplessly as severe malnutrition killed her 10-year-old daughter, Rania, and her eight-month-old son, Montasir, in the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp.
“I could only hold them as they faded away,” Ibrahim, 40, said via video call, sitting outside her straw-and-plastic shelter near North Darfur state’s besieged capital El-Fasher.
Rania was the first to succumb. In El-Fasher’s only functioning hospital, understaffed and unequipped, she died in November just three days after being admitted with acute diarrhea.
Her baby boy Montasir followed weeks later, his tiny body bloated from severe malnutrition.
El-Fasher, under paramilitary siege since May, is only one grim battlefield in the 21-month war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces.
In July, a UN-backed review declared famine in Zamzam, a decades-old displacement camp home to between 500,000 and a million people.
By December, it had spread to two more camps in the area, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam, as well as parts of the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification determined.
Now, Ibrahim fears for her four-year-old daughter, Rashida, who battles severe anemia with no access to medical care.
“I am terrified I will lose her too,” she said. “We’re abandoned. There is no food, no medicine, nothing.”
At Salam 56, one of Zamzam’s 48 overcrowded shelters, exhaustion was etched onto mothers’ faces as they cradled their children, too weak to stand.
Multiple families gathered around bowls with a few scraps of peanut residue traditionally used as animal feed. “It’s all we have,” said Rawiya Ali, a 35-year-old mother of five.
Contaminated water collects in a shallow reservoir during the rainy season, which the women trudge 3 km to fetch.
“Animals drink from it and so do we,” Ali said.
Salam 56 is home to over 700 families, according to its coordinator Adam Mahmoud Abdullah.
Since war began in April 2023, it has received only four food aid deliveries, the most recent in September, a mere 10 tonnes of flour, he said. “Since then, nothing has come,” Abdullah said.
The desolation in Zamzam lays bare the true cost of the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted over 12 million others, and created the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,” according to the International Rescue Committee. About 700 km southeast of Zamzam, the situation was just as dire.
Outside one of the last functioning community kitchens in the town of Dilling in South Kordofan state, queues stretched endlessly, according to Nazik Kabalo, who leads a Sudanese women’s rights group overseeing the kitchen.
Photos show men, women and children standing hollow-eyed and frail — their bellies swollen and skin pulled taut over fragile bones.
After days without a single morsel, “some collapse where they stand,” Kabalo said. “For others, even when they get food ... they vomit it back up,” she said.
In South Kordofan state, where agriculture once thrived, farmers are eating seeds meant for planting, while others boil tree leaves in water to stave off hunger.
“We are seeing hunger in areas that have never seen famine in Sudan’s history,” Kabalo said.
With vast oil and gold reserves and fertile agricultural land, Sudan has had its economy bludgeoned by war and decades of mismanagement, and now, hunger is everywhere.
Jordan hospital offers injured Gazans hope for recovery
- Israel’s 15-month offensive in Gaza left the coastal enclave a wasteland of rubble that will take years to rebuild
AMMAN: Karam Nawjaa, 17, was so badly injured when an Israeli strike hit his home in Gaza nearly a year ago that his own cousin, pulling him from the rubble, did not recognize him.
After rushing Karam to hospital he returned to continue searching for his cousin all night in the rubble.
In that strike on Feb. 14, 2024, Karam lost his mother, a sister and two brothers. As well as receiving serious burns to his face and body, he lost the ability to use his arms and hands.
Now, the burns are largely healed and he is slowly regaining the use of his limbs after months of treatment at a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the Jordanian capital Amman which operates a program of reconstructive surgery.
“I only remember that on that day, Feb. 14, there was a knock on our door ... I opened it, my brother came in, and after that ... (I remember) nothing,” he said.
“Before the war I was studying, and thank God, I was an outstanding student,” Karam said, adding that his dream had been to become a dentist. Now he does not think about the future.
“What happened, happened ... you feel that all your ambitions have been shattered, that what happened to you has destroyed you.”
Karam is one of many patients from Gaza being treated at Amman’s Specialized Hospital for Reconstructive Surgery, Al-Mowasah Hospital. He shares a room there with his younger sister and their father.
“All these patients are war victims ... with complex injuries, complex burns ... They need very long rehabilitation services, both surgical but also physical and mental,” said Moeen Mahmood Shaief, head of the MSF mission in Jordan.
“The stories around those patients are heartbreaking, a lot of them have lost their families” and require huge support to be reintegrated into normal life, he added.
Israel’s 15-month offensive in Gaza left the coastal enclave a wasteland of rubble that will take years to rebuild.
Displaced Palestinians have been returning to their mostly destroyed homes after a ceasefire came into effect on Jan. 19.
Leader of rebels who toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad is named country’s interim president
- Al-Sharaa would be authorized to form a temporary legislative Council until a new constitution is drafted
- Abdul Ghani announced the dissolution of the armed factions in the country
DAMASCUS: The leader of the former rebel group that toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad last month was named on Wednesday the country’s interim president, following a meeting of the former insurgent factions.
The appointment of Ahmad Al-Sharaa, a rebel once aligned with Al-Qaeda, as the country’s president “in the transitional phase,” was expected. The announcement was made by the spokesperson for Syria’s new, de facto government’s military operations sector, Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, the state-run SANA news agency said.
Abdul Ghani also announced the cancelation of the country’s constitution passed in 2012 under Assad’s rule and said Al-Sharaa would be authorized to form a temporary legislative Council until a new constitution is drafted.
He also announced the dissolution of the armed factions in the country, which he said would be absorbed into state institutions.
Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed Al-Golani, is the leader of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an Islamist former insurgent group that led the lightning offensive that toppled Assad last month. The group was once affiliated with Al-Qaeda but has since denounced its former ties, and in recent years Al-Sharaa has sought to cast himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance.
The United States had previously placed a $10 million bounty on Al-Sharaa but canceled it last month after a US delegation visited Damascus and met with him.
Since Assad’s fall, HTS has become the de facto ruling party and has set up an interim government largely composed of officials from the local government it previously ran in rebel-held Idlib province.
As the former Syrian army collapsed with Assad’s downfall, Al-Sharaa has called for creation of a new unified national army and security forces, but questions have loomed over how the interim administration can bring together a patchwork of former rebel groups, each with their own leaders and ideology.
Even knottier is the question of the US-backed Kurdish groups that have carved out an autonomous enclave early in Syria’s civil war, never fully siding with the Assad government or the rebels seeking to topple him. Since Assad’s fall, there has been an escalation in clashes between the Kurdish forces and Turkish-backed armed groups allied with HTS in northern Syria.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were not present at Wednesday’s meeting of the country’s armed factions Wednesday and there was no immediate comment from the group.
Al-Sharaa had been expected to appear in a televised speech following the meeting, but it remained unclear if he would. The exact mechanism under which the factions selected him as interim president was also not clear.
Jordan’s king meets Belgian monarch in Brussels
- Parties discuss recent developments in the Middle East
- King Abdullah expresses Jordan’s commitment to enhancing partnership with EU
LONDON: The King of Jordan Abdullah II met King Philippe of Belgium in Brussels on Wednesday, accompanied by Crown Prince Hussein.
The monarchs discussed recent developments in the Middle East and stressed their commitment to supporting efforts for peace and stability in the region, the Jordan News Agency reported.
King Abdullah spoke of Jordan’s commitment to enhancing its partnership with the EU during a meeting with top European officials, including Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission; Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament; and European Council President Antonio Costa.
Jordan and the EU signed a strategic partnership on Wednesday in which the EU pledged €3 billion in financing and investments for Jordan.
In his meeting with EU officials, the Jordanian monarch affirmed his country’s commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories and warned of the escalation of action in the West Bank, the Jordan News Agency added.
He emphasized the importance of increasing the flow of humanitarian aid and maintaining the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which ended the 15-month conflict in Gaza.
Lebanon official media reports Israeli strike in south
- “An enemy drone” carried out a strike targeting a house in Yohmor
BEIRUT: Lebanese official media said an Israeli strike hit south Lebanon on Wednesday, the second consecutive day to see such a raid despite a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
“An enemy drone” carried out a strike targeting a house that “had been destroyed in a previous raid” in south Lebanon’s Yohmor Al-Shaqeef, the National News Agency said.
