FALLUJAH: The road was dirty, bumpy and winding and the car jolted up and down. Some of the homes on either side were partially damaged, others had been turned into piles of rubble.
The area of destruction increased deeper into Al-Shuhadaa, the eastern district of Fallujah city, the first Iraqi city to fall into the hands of Daesh in Jan. 2017.
The streets seemed deserted, except for a few families who have recently returned to their homes, and the area is littered with booby traps.
The recent visit by Arab News revealed the scale of the challenge faced by Iraq as it embarks on repairing the damage inflicted by the extremists during their short rule over large tracts of the north and west.
On Monday, at least 2,300 international and local companies from 70 countries, will gather in Kuwait for a conference on reconstructing Iraq. The three-day event, organized by Baghdad in coordination with Kuwait and the International Monetary Fund, will launch more than 150 projects and drum up investment from the international community to contribute to the $100 billion that Iraq says it needs to repair all the damage.
But in many areas, before any major rebuilding projects can get underway, residents are facing a deadly and more immediate problem — unexploded bombs left behind by Daesh.
“Anything here may be booby-trapped,” police officer Maj. Yasser Rabah told Arab News as he stood 20 meters from a one-floor house still under construction and partially damaged in Fallujah.
He said the house had been laced with improvised explosive devices, two of which had already exploded. One of the blasts killed two brothers as they stood at the entrance.
“No one can get closer as we know there is still a series of linked unexploded IEDs,” Rabah said.
“They (Daesh) booby-trapped everything. Even the land has been planted with improvised explosive devices.”
Al-Shuhadaa and Al-Nuimaya districts are near the highway that linked Fallujah to Baghdad and were turned into one of the main Daesh front lines.
They were used by the extremists to stop the advance of Iraqi security forces to retake the city and witnessed some of the fiercest battles during the military operations launched in May 2016 that lasted for almost five weeks.
Houses in the area were either bobby-trapped or surrounded by IEDs planted in the dirt. Rusted square steel plates with a diameter of about 25cm, connected by wires, and 90cm-long wooden panels stand out of the dirt on the roadside every two meters.
Ziyad Khalaf, a resident who returned to his home in the area with his family a few months ago, said his wife and sister were killed after they returned when one of these devices detonated.
“They went out to get some firewood to for the oven,” he told Arab News. “My sister pulled on a palm frond and an explosion took place,” Khalaf said, trying to stop his tears. “She (his sister) was blown to pieces while my wife was badly injured. She died at the hospital.”
Some of the devices in the area have been defused by the army but left behind, while others have been disarmed by the rain, but the rest are still live, he said.
Families have returned to their homes in eastern districts of Fallujah despite military maps that show much of the area is still covered with mines.
More than 20 civilians were killed just in Al-Shuhadaa in the past few months, local officials in Fallujah told Arab News.
“We have not allowed any of these families to go back to the area but they sneaked there without our permission,” Essaa Al-Sayer, the mayor of Fallujah, said. “We have no control over them so we cannot prevent them from going back.”
Sayer said the army could not do that much in the “mine-contaminated area” because of lack of experience and because Baghdad’s government does not have enough money to get foreign specialized companies to treat the 300 houses booby trapped in Fallujah. “We are relying on international donors to deal with this (the mines) problem. It’s beyond our abilities.”
Many other cities and towns are still contaminated with improvised explosive devices, such as the old city of Mosul, some neighborhoods in Ramadi, Saqlawiya, Naimiya and Rawa in Anbar, Jarf Al-Sakhr in Babil and Baiji in Salahuddin.
Two-and-a-half-million people are still displaced and some of them are living in camps on the edge of their cities. Those people cannot go back to their homes, mainly because of the IEDs.
UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) said the Iraqi government, the UN, and other national and international stakeholders should prioritized the clearance of “explosive hazards” as an essential first step before any rehabilitation or reconstruction work can be carried out.
“The explosive hazards problem is complex, extensive, and exceeds the capacity of the existing resources to address it,” according to the UNMAS website.
Iraq is seeking $147 million to support operations in removing unexploded bombs in the country in 2018, UNMAS said.
Deadly Daesh legacy blights Iraq reconstruction plans
Deadly Daesh legacy blights Iraq reconstruction plans
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
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
- 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
- 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
- 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.
