BAGHDAD: Iraq on Tuesday began exhuming the remains of dozens of victims, including children, likely killed during ex-dictator Saddam Hussein’s campaign against the country’s Kurds, a forensics official told AFP.
The mass grave was uncovered in Tal Al-Sheikhiya, about 300 kilometers (200 miles) south of Baghdad, said Zaid Al-Youssef, the head of Baghdad’s Medico-Legal Directorate which is tasked with identifying the remains.
“More than 70 bodies including women and children, ranging from newborns to 10 years old” have so far been exhumed, Youssef said.
Those remains were recovered from the surface layer of the site, he said, but “there could be a second deeper layer” with additional bodies.
“The evidence collected indicates they were summarily executed in 1988,” said Youssef, which coincides with Saddam’s brutal “Anfal” campaign against Iraq’s Kurds.
The operation took place between 1987 and 1988 and saw nearly 180,000 Kurds killed and more than 3,000 villages destroyed.
“The female victims were blindfolded and killed by gunshots to the head, but also have traces on various parts of their bodies of bullets that were fired randomly,” Youssef said.
The grave lies in the southern province of Mutahanna, also home to the notorious Nigrat Salman prison camp.
Many Kurds and political opponents of the previous regime were held there, and survivors shared tales of humiliation, rape and detention of minors as part of Saddam’s 2006 trial.
Iraq has been hit by wave after wave of conflict in recent decades, culminating in the fight against the Daesh group which ended in late 2017.
Those years of conflict left grave sites all across the country where the remains of thousands of victims from Iraq’s diverse ethnic and religious communities have been uncovered.
IS alone left behind an estimated 200 mass graves that could hold up to 12,000 bodies, the United Nations has said.
Authorities are testing remains from the most recent conflict as well as wars dating back three decades in an effort to identify the fates of missing Iraqis.
According to Iraqi authorities, Saddam’s regime forcefully disappeared more than one million people in the 1980s and 1990s, and many of their families are still trying to find out what happened to them.
Iraq exhumes bodies thought to be Kurds killed by Saddam
Iraq exhumes bodies thought to be Kurds killed by Saddam
- “More than 70 bodies including women and children, ranging from newborns to 10 years old” have so far been exhumed
- “The evidence collected indicates they were summarily executed in 1988,” said the head of Baghdad’s Medico-Legal Directorate
Syria appoints some foreign Islamist fighters to its military, sources say
- Thousands of foreigners joined Syria’s rebels early in the 13-year civil war to fight against the rule of Bashar Assad and the Iran-backed Shiite militias who supported him, giving the conflict a sectarian overtone
DAMASCUS: Syria’s new rulers have installed some foreign fighters including Uyghurs, a Jordanian and a Turk in the country’s armed forces as Damascus tries to shape a patchwork of rebel groups into a professional military, two Syrian sources said.
The move to give official roles, including senior ones, to several militants may alarm some foreign governments and Syrian citizens fearful about the new administration’s intentions, despite its pledges not to export Islamic revolution and to rule with tolerance toward Syria’s large minority groups.
A Syrian government spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment on the thinking behind the appointments.
The sources said that out of a total of almost 50 military roles announced by the Defense Ministry on Sunday, at least six had gone to foreigners.
Reuters was not able to independently verify the nationalities of the individuals appointed.
HIGHLIGHTS
• Some foreign rebel leaders given senior military roles in Syria
• Move is ‘token of recognition’ of war role, source says
• HTS leader Sharaa purged some foreign fighters, now offers others citizenship
• China labels TIP a terrorist group, concerned about Uyghur militants
Thousands of Sunni Muslim foreigners joined Syria’s rebels early in the 13-year civil war to fight against the rule of Bashar Assad and the Iran-backed Shiite militias who supported him, giving the conflict a sectarian overtone.
Some foreign fighters formed their own armed groups while others joined established formations such as Daesh as it rampaged across Iraq and Syria, briefly declaring a so-called caliphate before being routed by US and Iran-backed forces.
Other groups of foreign militants joined HTS, which disavowed previous links to Al-Qaeda and Daesh and fought bloody battles against them before going on to spearhead the lightning advance that toppled Assad on Dec. 8.
Ahmed Al-Sharaa, the HTS-leader-turned de facto ruler of Syria, has purged dozens of foreign jihadi fighters as part of a campaign to Syrianize and moderate his group.
In remarks broadcast on Sunday, Sharaa said the new Syria “cannot be run by the mentality of groups and militias.”
Syria’s new rulers, drawn mainly from HTS, have indicated that foreign fighters and their families may be given Syrian citizenship and be allowed to stay in the country because of their contributions to the fight against Assad.
The Defense Ministry on Sunday announced 49 appointments to the army that included leaders of key Syrian armed factions.
Among them were several foreign fighters, three given the rank of brigadier-general and at least three others the rank of colonel, a Syrian military source said.
’TOKEN OF RECOGNITION’
“This is a small token of recognition for the sacrifices Islamist militants gave to our struggle for freedom from Assad’s oppression,” an HTS source told Reuters.
Chinese Uyghur militant Abdulaziz Dawood Khudaberdi, also known as Zahid and the commander of the separatist Turkistan Islamic Party’s (TIP) forces in Syria, was appointed a brigadier-general, a TIP statement said and the Syrian military source confirmed.
Two other Uyghur fighters, Mawlan Tarsoun Abdussamad and Abdulsalam Yasin Ahmad, were given the rank of colonel, said the TIP statement published on its website, congratulating them and the Uyghur community on the appointments.
All the names appear in Sunday’s Defense Ministry announcement, though the nationalities are not included.
The TIP is thought to have hundreds of fighters in Syria and aims to establish a Daesh in parts of China and central Asia, where there is a large Uyghur Muslim population.
Rights groups accuse Beijing of widespread abuses of Uyghurs, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority that numbers around 10 million in the western region of Xinjiang, including the mass use of forced labor in camps. Beijing denies any abuses.
There was no immediate comment from the Chinese foreign ministry.
China labels the TIP a terrorist organization responsible for plots to attack overseas Chinese targets. Beijing has said TIP “gravely threatens” China’s interests and security overseas and that combating the group was China’s “core concern” in its counter-terrorism effort.
Turkish citizen Omar Mohammed Jaftashi and Jordanian citizen Abdul Rahman Hussein Al-Khatib were also made brigadier-generals, the Syrian military source and the HTS source said.
Abdul Jashari, an ethnically Albanian fighter also known as Abu Qatada Al-Albani, was appointed colonel, the military source said.
Jashari head the Albanian militant group Xhemati Alban and was designated a militant by the US Treasury in 2016.
Egyptian Alaa Mohammed Abdel-Baqi was also given a military rank, the source said.
Egypt’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Israel army says intercepted missile launched from Yemen
- The latest warnings from top Israeli officials came after a missile fired by the Houthis wounded 16 people in Israel’s main commercial city of Tel Aviv
JERUSALEM: The Israeli military on Monday said that it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen before it crossed into Israeli territory.
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have been firing missiles and drones at Israel and ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in what they describe as solidarity with Palestinians since the war in the Gaza Strip broke out in October of last year.
In recent weeks, they have claimed to have fired several missiles at Israel, triggering retaliatory strikes from Israel targeting the rebels’ strategic assets and infrastructure.
“Following the sirens that sounded a short while ago in central Israel, a missile launched from Yemen was intercepted by the IAF (air force) prior to crossing into Israeli territory,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
Israel’s emergency service provider, Magen David Adom, reported that it had received no reports of any casualties so far.
On Saturday, Israel intercepted a similar missile launched from Yemen.
The Iran-backed Houthis have controlled large parts of Yemen since seizing Sanaa and ousting the government in 2014.
They have stepped up their attacks since November’s ceasefire between Israel and another Iran-backed group, Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel has also struck Yemen, including targeting Sanaa’s international airport on Thursday.
An Israeli statement said its targets included “military infrastructure” at the airport and power stations in Sanaa and Hodeida — a major entry point for humanitarian aid — as well as other facilities at several ports.
Houthis use these sites “to smuggle Iranian weapons into the region and for the entry of senior Iranian officials,” the statement said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned the Houthis, saying that Israeli strikes against them would “continue until the job is done.”
“We are determined to cut this branch of terrorism from the Iranian axis of evil,” he said in a video statement last week.
Defense Minister Israel Katz also recently declared: “We will hunt down all of the Houthis’ leaders — nobody will be able to evade the long arm of Israel.”
The latest warnings from top Israeli officials came after a missile fired by the Houthis wounded 16 people in Israel’s main commercial city of Tel Aviv.
That attack prompted strikes by the United States against the rebels in Sanaa.
American and British forces have repeatedly struck rebel targets in Yemen this year in response to Houthi attacks on shipping in Red Sea-area waters vital to global trade.
In July, a Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv killed an Israeli civilian, prompting the first Israeli retaliation on Hodeida.
Ceasefire between Turkiye and US-backed SDF in northern Syria holding, Pentagon says
- Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants that it outlaws and who have fought the Turkish state for 40 years
WASHINGTON: The Pentagon said on Monday a ceasefire between Turkiye and the US-backed Kurdish Syrian forces around the northern Syrian city of Manbij was holding.
Washington brokered an initial ceasefire earlier this month after fighting that broke out as rebel groups advanced on Damascus and overthrew the rule of Bashar Assad. But on Dec. 19, a Turkish defense ministry official said there was no talk of a ceasefire deal between Ankara and the SDF.
“The ceasefire is holding in that northern part of Syria,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters.
The SDF is the main ally in a US coalition against Daesh militants in Syria. It is spearheaded by the YPG militia, a group that Ankara sees as an extension of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants that it outlaws and who have fought the Turkish state for 40 years.
Turkiye regards the PKK, YPG and SDF as terrorist groups.
The US and Turkiye’s Western allies list the PKK as terrorist, but not the YPG and the SDF.
The United States has about 2,000 US troops in Syria that have been working with the SDF to fight Daesh militants and prevent a resurgence of the group, which in 2014 seized large swathes of Iraq and Syria but was later pushed back.
Moroccan activists tried over earthquake response criticism: lawyer
- The earthquake razed tens of thousands of homes in central Morocco, including in the High Atlas mountain range, forcing families to sleep out in the open through the winter
RABAT: Four activists advocating for victims of the 2023 earthquake in Morocco appeared in court on Monday to face charges including defamation, their lawyer told AFP.
Said Ait Mahdi, the head of Al Haouz Earthquake Victims Coordination, was brought before a Marrakech court “on allegations of defamation, insult and spreading false claims intended to harm individuals privacy,” said his lawyer Mohamed Nouini.
While Ait Mahdi has been in custody for a week, the other three defendants others, who face charges of “insulting public officials,” remain free said Nouini.
The lawyer said charges came after local officials filed complaints against the activists over social media posts they deemed offensive.
Ait Mahdi’s defense filed a request for his release pending trial on January 6, said Nouini.
Al Haouz province, south of Marrakech, was the worst affected area when a 6.8-magnitude earthquake hit in September 2023, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring thousands more.
The earthquake razed tens of thousands of homes in central Morocco, including in the High Atlas mountain range, forcing families to sleep out in the open through the winter.
Ait Mahdi’s group has called for the acceleration of reconstruction efforts and greater support for the families affected by the earthquake.
As of early December, Moroccan authorities had issued some 57,000 reconstruction permits.
Over 35,000 houses have been completed or were underway, the government said in a statement on December 2.
Following the earthquake, the Moroccan authorities announced a five-year reconstruction plan with an estimated budget of $11.7 billion.
About $740 million of the funding was allocated to help affected families rebuild their homes, with the money to be distributed in instalments.
French ministers in Lebanon for talks month into Israel-Hezbollah truce
- Aoun has been tasked with deploying troops in the south of the country since the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire came into effect
BEIRUT: France’s top diplomat and defense chief arrived on Monday in Lebanon, where a fragile truce since late November ended intense fighting between Israel and militant group Hezbollah.
Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot and Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu met with Lebanon’s army chief Joseph Aoun, and on Tuesday are due to visit UN peacekeepers near the Israeli border.
A Lebanese army statement on social media said that Aoun and the visiting ministers discussed “ways to strengthen cooperation relations between the armies of the two countries and to continue support for the army in light of current circumstances.”
Aoun, who is being touted as a possible candidate for Lebanon’s president, has been tasked with deploying troops in the south of the country since the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire came into effect on November 27.
Lecornu said on X that he is also due to meet with a French general representing Paris “within the ceasefire monitoring mechanism.”
“Our armies are, and will remain, committed to the stability of Lebanon and the region,” he said.
The monitoring body brings together Lebanon, Israel, the United States, France and the United Nations’ UNIFIL peacekeeping mission. It is meant to support the implementation of the ceasefire and assess violations.
On Thursday, UNIFIL said it was “concerned” by “the continued destruction” carried out by the Israeli army in southern Lebanon, despite the truce.
Lecornu and Barrot are scheduled to meet on Tuesday with French soldiers deployed with UNIFIL in south Lebanon.
