MOSUL, Iraq: The demolition of a wrecked building in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul where Daesh used to execute men they said were gay is already in its third month.
Homeless boys who hunt for scrap in the remains of the former National Insurance Company building work quicker some days than the lone digger perched on its crumbling carcass.
Two years after the battle in which Iraqi forces recaptured Mosul from Daesh, the authorities do not own enough equipment to clear the rubble littered across the city.
Hundreds of Mosul council’s vehicles were destroyed in fighting or used by Daesh as suicide bombs. Few have been replaced.
Companies hired by the governor on lucrative contracts to make up the shortfall work deliberately slowly, or sometimes do not exist, lawmakers and locals say.
Mosul was held by Daesh for three years. Under the militant group’s strict interpretation of Islamic law, homosexuality is a grave sin punishable by death. But rights activists say those executed in the seven-story insurance building, now reduced to two floors, were often Daesh opponents who were falsely accused.
The digger on top of the building is hired for $300 a day, a laborer at the site said. It often stands idle.
The regional governor denies allegations of fraud and says not enough money is coming to his office to fund rehabilitation.
Many residents are struggling financially. Families forced to build their own homes go into debt, borrowing from friends and living off charity. Others cram into increasingly expensive rented homes. Foreign-funded projects also suffer delays.
“There’s no strategic plan. It’s chaos,” lawmaker Mohamed Nuri Abed Rabbo said.
Poor planning allows mismanagement of reconstruction efforts and alleged corruption, making recovery slow and haphazard. In this environment, residents fear the remnants of Daesh will again exploit resentment.
“The city’s being rebuilt only on paper,” said Abu Ali Neshwan, a 52-year-old shopkeeper. “There’s no state here. Corruption’s everywhere.”
Abdelsattar Al-Hibbu, who is in charge of the municipal government — and is still recognized by Baghdad as such, despite the governor’s attempts to remove him — said the little money allocated to Mosul was being misspent.
“With the amount spent so far on removing rubble, the city could have been completely cleared by now,” he said by telephone. Of an estimated 7 million tons of debris, more than half remains, he said.
Hibbu warned last year that there was simply not enough money to rebuild.
The 2019 state budget allocates $560 million for Mosul’s reconstruction, according to two Mosul lawmakers. A UN adviser in the city said one estimated cost for one year of rebuilding work was $1.8 billion.
“It’s mostly international organizations getting things done. It’s ridiculous that money has to come from outside, with Iraq’s oil wealth,” the adviser said. “Authorities overspend and work takes ages. It should take a few days at most to demolish a large building and cost a few thousand dollars, tops.”
Fears that Daesh could re-emerge
Nawfal Hammadi Al-Sultan, governor of Nineveh province which includes Mosul, dismissed the allegations of mismanagement and overspending.
“Clearing rubble is not being done haphazardly ... but there are some neighborhoods that are so destroyed that there’s no solution,” he said. “People shouldn’t be asking why (reconstruction) is slow. They should be asking why hurry it?“
The clearance work looks anything but organized. Grubby children, who outnumber workmen, load steel rods and window frames onto donkey-drawn carts to sell at scrapyards.
Wheelbarrows are displayed outside shops for residents wanting to do their own work.
Some Mosul families are rebuilding by themselves. Younes Hassan, 67, borrowed $9,000 from friends to rebuild his purple-walled home at the highest point of the Old City, overlooking a bank of the Tigris river strewn with rubble.
“We’ve borrowed everything — there’s no money from the government, and certainly no bank loans,” he said.
Bank transfers to Mosul, which was a Sunni Islamist stronghold even before Daesh arrived, are banned by authorities over fears over the financing of extremists.
“Ten people live here, but my daughter hasn’t come back yet. She’s renting in east Mosul for $100 a month that she can’t afford,” Hassan said.
Hassan’s family is among those returning to west Mosul, which suffered the worst damage from air strikes in its crowded Old City streets.
Nearly 2 million Iraqis are still displaced by the fight against Daesh, according to a survey by REACH, a non-governmental organization. Many say they are not ready to go home because of the destruction and lack of services.
Residents worry that the longer it takes to fix Mosul, the easier it will be for groups such as Daesh to re-emerge and recruit. Conditions that helped Daesh take over Mosul and other cities in 2014, including corruption and the neglect of Sunni Muslim communities by a Shiite-dominated government, remain.
A policeman manning a makeshift checkpoint said he worried most for the children picking around in the rubble.
“They’ll be the next generation of Daesh — it thrives on corruption and chaos,” he said.
No plan for Mosul: Chaos and neglect slow Iraqi city’s recovery
No plan for Mosul: Chaos and neglect slow Iraqi city’s recovery

- Two years after the battle in which Iraqi forces recaptured Mosul from Daesh, the authorities do not own enough equipment to clear the rubble littered across the city
- Companies hired by the governor on lucrative contracts to make up the shortfall work deliberately slowly, or sometimes do not exist
Lebanese PM to visit Syria, discuss disappearance of prisoners

- Nawaf Salam lays wreath at Martyrs’ Monument in Beirut to commemorate 50th anniversary of Lebanese Civil War
LONDON: Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam is scheduled to visit the Syrian Arab Republic on Monday to discuss common interests with the new leadership in Damascus.
It will be Salam’s first visit to Syria since he formed a government in February, and he is scheduled to discuss the issue of Lebanese citizens who disappeared in Syrian prisons during the Bashar Assad regime that collapsed in December. It has been reported that 622 Lebanese nationals remain forcibly disappeared in Syrian prisons.
“I hope to return with good news about those missing in Syria, and I will update the Lebanese people on this issue tomorrow,” Salam said, according to the National News Agency.
Salam laid a wreath at the Martyrs’ Monument in Beirut on Sunday to commemorate the anniversary of April 13, the date when Lebanon’s Civil War began in 1975.
Salam wrote on X: “We pause not to reopen wounds, but to recall lessons that must never be forgotten. All victories were false, and all parties (from the war) emerged as losers.”
He added: “There can be no true state unless legitimate armed forces have the exclusive right to bear arms.”
Aid worker missing after deadly attack on colleagues is held by Israel, ICRC says

- PRCS demanded the immediate release of Nsasrah, who it said was “forcibly abducted” while carrying out humanitarian duties
CAIRO: A Palestinian Red Crescent staff member who went missing in late March when 15 humanitarian workers were killed by Israeli fire is being detained by Israeli authorities, the rescue service and the Red Cross said on Sunday.
Hisham Mhana, the spokesperson for the ICRC in Gaza, confirmed to Reuters that it had received information that the Palestine Red Crescent Society paramedic Assad Al-Nsasrah was being held in an Israeli place of detention.
“As per standard practice, we informed the families immediately. In this case, we also informed the Palestine Red Crescent Society as they have special standing as a partner of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement,” he said.
The Israeli army did not immediately comment.
Mhana said the ICRC has not been granted access to Nsasrah, who until Sunday had been declared missing, and also has not been able to visit any of the Palestinian detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails since October 7, 2023.
In a post on X, The PRCS demanded the immediate release of Nsasrah, who it said was “forcibly abducted” while carrying out humanitarian duties.
It added that Nsasrah and his colleagues came under heavy gunfire, which led to the killing of eight of them in a “grave violation” of international humanitarian law.
The bodies of 15 emergency and aid workers from the Red Crescent, the Civil Emergency Service and the UN were found buried in a mass grave in southern Gaza in March.
The UN and the Red Crescent accused Israeli forces of killing them after they were dispatched to respond to reports of injuries from Israeli airstrikes.
The Israeli military referred Reuters to its statement from Monday, in which it said that a thorough inquiry into the incident was still underway and that it would provide further details only once the investigation is complete.
It said that a preliminary inquiry indicated that “the troops opened fire due to a perceived threat following a previous encounter in the area, and that six of the individuals killed in the incident were identified as Hamas terrorists.”
The Israeli military has provided no evidence of how it determined that the six were Hamas militants, and the Islamist faction has rejected the accusation.
The only known survivor of the incident, PRCS paramedic Munther Abed, said soldiers had opened fire on clearly marked emergency response vehicles.
Moroccans demonstrate in support of Palestinians

- Demonstrators marched through the streets of Rabat under pouring rain in response to a call from the National Action Group for Palestine
RABAT: Several thousand people demonstrated in Morocco’s capital on Sunday to show support for Palestinians in war-torn Gaza.
Under pouring rain, demonstrators marched through the streets of Rabat in response to a call from the National Action Group for Palestine, a coalition of several political organizations, including the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD).
“The Moroccans are with Gaza,” said the principal of a private school in Rabat who spoke to AFP.
The North African kingdom has officially called for “the immediate, complete and permanent halt to the Israeli war on Gaza,” but has not publicly discussed reversing the official establishment of ties with Israel in 2020 as part of the US-led Abraham Accords.
The latest protest followed another large rally held a week earlier, part of a spate of demonstrations across the country since the Israeli army resumed its offensive on March 18 against the Islamist group Hamas after a two-month truce in Gaza.
Israel denies entry to Jerusalem for Palestinian Christians marking Palm Sunday

- Israeli restrictions at checkpoints around Jerusalem require Palestinians to obtain security permits to access religious sites
- Only 6,000 permits were issued this year to the West Bank’s 50,000 Christians
LONDON: Israeli authorities prevented Palestinian Christian worshippers from entering Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank to participate in Palm Sunday.
Israeli authorities imposed strict restrictions on Jerusalem over the weekend, limiting the access of Palestinian Christians to the city, the Wafa news agency reported.
Only a limited number of worshippers, primarily residents of Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel, were able to attend religious services at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Wafa added.
Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week leading up to Easter. It commemorates the entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem and is observed by Eastern and Western Christian churches.
On Sunday, Patriarch Theophilos III of the Greek Orthodox Church and Latin Patriarch Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa led liturgies attended by the clergy and a small group of worshipers.
Israeli restrictions at checkpoints around Jerusalem require Palestinians — Muslim and Christian — to obtain permits to access religious sites, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Father Ibrahim Faltas, Vicar of the Custody of the Holy Land, noted that only 6,000 permits were issued this year to the West Bank’s 50,000 Christians. Permit issuance requires a security clearance and often asks that applicants download a mobile application managed by Israeli authorities.
“This is the second consecutive year that only a small number of pilgrims are able to participate in Holy Week and Easter celebrations in Jerusalem due to the ongoing conflict (in Gaza),” Faltas told Wafa.
“Churches would continue to pray for peace, justice, and freedom for all people in the Holy Land,” he added.
The Catholic Palm Sunday procession took place on Sunday afternoon, starting from Jerusalem's Church of Bethphage and ending at the Church of Saint Anne.
Christians gathered for services at the Holy Family Catholic Church and Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church in the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing Israeli attacks since late 2023. In the West Bank, Palm Sunday services were held in churches throughout Bethlehem, Jericho, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin.
Syrian President Sharaa heads to UAE on official visit - SANA

CAIRO: Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa will travel to the United Arab Emirates for his second visit to a Gulf state as president on Sunday, Syria's official news agency reported.
He will be accompanied by foreign minister Assad al-Shibani, who visited the UAE earlier this year.
They are expected to discuss issues of mutual interest, the SANA state news agency reported.
Sharaa visited Saudi Arabia in February on his first foreign trip since assuming the presidency in January.
His visit to the UAE comes as the new Syrian leadership attempts to strengthen ties with Arab and Western leaders following the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December at the hands of Sharaa's Sunni Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
(With Reuters)