DOHUK, Iraq: Khari Hasan Kalo peered out of the window of the repatriation flight as it touched down in northern Iraq.
It’s a place he and his family had hoped never to see again after they left for Belarus two months ago, driven by dreams of a new life in Europe.
Kalo, 35, had begged for loans and spent his savings on the ill-fated journey to the Belarusian capital of Minsk, the first stop on a journey to the West.
His wife, 30-year-old Zena, had sold her few belongings on the gamble that left the family of six stranded for days in a cold forest on the border of Belarus and Poland. In the end, they returned home, fearing they were endangering the life of Kalo’s ailing 80-year-old mother.
Yet they say they would do it all again to escape their hopeless life, spent in a camp for displaced persons for the past seven years. The Kalos are Yazidis, a religious minority that was brutalized by Daesh militants when they overran northern Iraq in 2014.
Years after their lives were torn apart, Yazidis are still unable to return home or locate hundreds of women and children who had been snatched by the extremists. The Kalos’ home lies in ruins.
“If it wasn’t for my children and my mother, I would never have returned, I would have stayed in that forest at all costs rather than return to this tent,” Kalo said Friday, speaking to AP from the Karbato camp in Dohuk province in the autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region.
His mother, looking frail, slept throughout the interview.
The Kalos, including three children ages 5, 7, and 9, had returned from Belarus a day earlier.
“It’s not even our tent; it’s his sister’s,” his wife interjected. “It’s no place to raise children, have a life.”
The region is considered the most stable part of conflict-scarred Iraq, yet Iraqi Kurds made up a large group among thousands of migrants from the Middle East who had flown to Belarus since the summer. Even in Iraq’s more prosperous north, growing unemployment and corruption is fueling migration, and the Yazidi community has endured particular hardship.
On Thursday, hundreds of Iraqis returned home from Belarus after abandoning their hopes of reaching the European Union. The repatriation came after thousands of migrants became stuck at the Poland-Belarus border amid rising tensions between the two countries.
Kalo’s family was among 430 people who flew from Minsk back to Iraq, where 390 got off at Irbil International Airport before the flight continued to Baghdad.
The West has accused Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko of using the migrants as pawns to destabilize the EU in retaliation for its sanctions imposed on his authoritarian regime following a harsh crackdown on internal dissent. Belarus denies engineering the crisis, which has seen migrants entering the country since summer, lured by easy tourist visas, and then trying to cross into Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, all EU members.
Kalo didn’t mind if a geopolitical game was being played at his expense if it got his family out of Iraq.
“So what if I was a pawn in someone’s hands if it gets me to Germany?” he said.
Since being displaced, the family had gotten increasingly desperate. Their tent burned down in an accidental fire in June that ravaged the Sharia camp, also in Dohuk. They tried to return to their original home in Sinjar but found their house uninhabitable.
He heard from friends about Kurds finding their way to Germany after Belarus eased visa requirements last spring. He begged his brother in Australia to wire him $9,000 to pay the smugglers’ asking price for his wife, three young children and mother.
He also had saved money from his time as a policeman — cash that was hard-won because he endured discrimination as a Yazidi.
“What good is a job if it’s still not enough to feed your family?” he said of his decision to quit.
The Kalos took the land route to Istanbul in September, and boarded flights to Minsk the following month. There, they headed straight to the Polish border. With two other Iraqi families, the Kalos dug under the border fence, reaching the other side in darkness.
They walked for four days in search of a GPS point where they were promised a car would meet them and take them straight to Germany.
But that never happened.
Instead, on the fourth day, Kalo’s family ran out of food as temperatures dropped in the dense and soggy forest.
Polish authorities found them and sent them back across the border. They were greeted by an encampment of hundreds of migrants. Belarusian authorities were handing out wire cutters and pushing the migrants back through the razor wire.
Polish authorities used water cannons to repel them. But this did not deter Belarusian authorities, who beat and threatened them, Kalo said. He said they shouted: “Go (to) Poland!”
Still, husband and wife fought to stay, agreeing that anything was better than their life in a tent.
But with his mother struggling to survive as conditions grew increasingly squalid, Kalo sought the pity of the Belarusian authorities. They allowed them to return to Minsk to seek medical help.
Kalo heard the Iraqi government had agreed to repatriate citizens free of charge. He turned to his wife and they considered their choices: Return to their desperate lives in Iraq, or bear the responsibility if his mother died.
Reluctantly, they put their names on the list.
But their hope is not lost, Kalo said, as his 5-year old daughter, Katarin, dug her face into his chest at the Karbato camp.
“I have two priorities now,” he said. “The first (is) to get a tent of our own. The second, to get back on my feet and leave this country. I will make it this time.”
He added: “If it was my last day on this Earth, I will spend it trying to leave.”
Yazidi family abandons EU dream, reluctantly returns to Iraq
https://arab.news/6vztg
Yazidi family abandons EU dream, reluctantly returns to Iraq
- Kalo, 35, had begged for loans and spent his savings on the ill-fated journey to the Belarusian capital of Minsk
- The family returned home, fearing they were endangering the life of Kalo’s ailing 80-year-old mother
Israeli forces kill young Palestinian, arrest 60 during night raids in West Bank
- Moataz Al-Hajjleh, 21, killed in raid near Bethlehem
- Israel forces have arrested 160 Palestinians this week
LONDON: Israeli forces killed a 21-year-old Palestinian and arrested at least 60 people during night raids on Tuesday across various towns in the occupied West Bank, including a woman, children, and former political prisoners.
The Palestinian Authority’s affiliated groups, the Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, announced on Wednesday that Israeli forces have arrested 160 Palestinians in the West Bank so far this week.
Some of those arrested were later released following interrogation.
Moataz Al-Hajjleh, 21, from the town of Al-Walaja village near Bethlehem, was killed during an Israeli raid of the area overnight.
Israeli forces conducted arrests and investigations during raids in several Palestinian governorates, including Nablus, Jenin and Ramallah.
Israeli forces have turned dozens of Palestinian houses into military points after forcibly expelling their inhabitants in the Jenin environs, the Wafa news agency reported.
At the same time, several villages had their entrances closed with earth mounds or gates.
The prisoners’ groups added that ongoing mass detention operations by Israeli forces “continue to be the most prominent, consistent, and systematic policies employed by the occupation to undermine any escalating resistance against it.”
Iranians buying supplies in Iraq tell of fear, shortages back home
- Shortages in Iran were mostly due to panic-stricken Iranians who rushed to markets to stockpile basic supplies following the Israeli attacks, citizens say
PENJWEN, Iraq: Near the once-bustling Iraqi border crossing of Bashmakh, Iranian driver Fatah stocked up on rice, sugar and tea, staples that have become increasingly hard to get back home.
Fatah — who like others in this story is being identified by a pseudonym — was among dozens of truck drivers waiting impatiently to cross back into Iran from Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, hauling not only their commercial cargo, but also essential goods for their families after days of Israeli attacks.
AFP spoke with at least 30 Iranians near the Bashmakh crossing. They all refused to be interviewed on camera, and the few who agreed to describe life back home asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals back in Iran.
“There are shortages of rice, bread, sugar and tea,” Fatah said Tuesday.
Finding fuel has also become a major problem, with long queues of cars waiting hours in front of gas stations hoping the fuel did not run out, the 40-year-old driver added.
A long journey awaits Fatah, who must deliver his load of asphalt to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas about 1,700 kilometers (1,060 miles) away, before turning around and driving almost the same distance back to the western city of Marivan, where his family lives and which has so far been spared bombardment.
But “my route passes near the Natanz nuclear facility,” Fatah said, referring to one of Iran’s underground uranium enrichment sites that Israel has struck several times since the start of its campaign last week.
Surprise attack
Israel launched a devastating surprise attack on Friday targeting Iran’s military and nuclear sites and killing top commanders and scientists.
Israel says its attacks are aimed at preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, an ambition Tehran denies.
At least 224 people, including women and children, have been killed in the Israeli strikes, according to official figures.
The assault has prompted retaliatory barrages of missiles from Iran that have killed at least 24 people in Israel, according to the prime minister’s office.
Aram, 28, keeps calling his wife, fearing for his family’s safety after they had to flee their home when a strike hit a military site nearby in the city of Sanandaj.
“My family is safe, but they had to move in with relatives in a village,” Aram said.
His wife told him that many families who lived near military sites in the area had been similarly displaced.
The father of two said the shortages back home were mostly due to panic-stricken Iranians who rushed to markets to stockpile basic supplies.
Fear of shortages mounts
Back in Iran, car dealer Shwan recalled how Israeli jets struck several military sites near his city of Bukan in the west.
“People are shocked and distraught, they don’t know what they should do,” the 35-year-old told AFP via a messaging app from inside Iran.
“We have a major problem with bread shortages,” he said.
People were queuing at bakeries for hours to get loaves of bread, sometimes to no avail, Shwan said.
“Sometimes four members of one family go around bakeries looking for bread,” he added.
“It is also difficult to find rice or oil,” and many civil servants have not received their salaries yet, he said.
Avin, a 38-year-old seamstress, told AFP via a messaging app that the war “has spread fear among residents,” even though the bombs have not touched her town of Saqqez in northwest Iran.
“Some families with children left to villages outside the city,” she said.
Like others, she fears more shortages to come.
“Most of the provisions come from Tehran,” which has seen a massive exodus and is also grappling with scarcity.
“Because of this, the market in our city came to a standstill.”
Fear stalks Tehran as Israel bombards, shelters fill up and communicating grows harder
- Thousands have fled, spending hours in gridlock as they head toward the suburbs, the Caspian Sea, or even Armenia or Türkiye
- Israeli strikes on Iran have killed at least 585 people and wounded over 1,300, a human rights group says
NEW YORK: The streets of Tehran are empty, businesses closed, communications patchy at best. With no bona fide bomb shelters open to the public, panicked masses spend restless nights on the floors of metro stations as strikes boom overhead.
This is Iran’s capital city, just under a week into a fierce Israeli blitz to destroy the country’s nuclear program and its military capabilities. After knocking out much of Iran’s air defense system, Israel says its warplanes have free rein over the city’s skies. US President Donald Trump on Monday told Tehran’s roughly 10 million residents to evacuate “immediately.”
Thousands have fled, spending hours in gridlock as they head toward the suburbs, the Caspian Sea, or even Armenia or Türkiye. But others — those elderly and infirm — are stuck in high-rise apartment buildings. Their relatives fret: what to do?
Israeli strikes on Iran have killed at least 585 people and wounded over 1,300, a human rights group says. Local media, themselves targets of bombardment, have stopped reporting on the attacks, leaving Iranians in the dark. There are few visible signs of state authority: Police appear largely undercover, air raid sirens are unreliable, and there’s scant information on what to do in case of attack.
Shirin, 49, who lives in the southern part of Tehran, said every call or text to friends and family in recent days has felt like it could be the last.
“We don’t know if tomorrow we will be alive,” she said.
Many Iranians feel conflicted. Some support Israel’s targeting of Iranian political and military officials they see as repressive. Others staunchly defend the Islamic Republic and retaliatory strikes on Israel. Then, there are those who oppose Iran’s rulers — but still don’t want to see their country bombed.
To stay, or to go?
The Associated Press interviewed five people in Iran and one Iranian American in the US over the phone. All spoke either on the condition of anonymity or only allowed their first names to be used, for fear of retribution from the state against them or their families.
Most of the calls ended abruptly and within minutes, cutting off conversations as people grew nervous — or because the connection dropped. Iran’s government has acknowledged disrupting Internet access. It says it’s to protect the country, though that has blocked average Iranians from getting information from the outside world.
Iranians in the diaspora wait anxiously for news from relatives. One, an Iranian American human rights researcher in the US, said he last heard from relatives when some were trying to flee Tehran earlier in the week. He believes that lack of gas and traffic prevented them from leaving.
The most heartbreaking interaction, he said, was when his older cousins — with whom he grew up in Iran — told him “we don’t know where to go. If we die, we die.”
“Their sense was just despair,” he said.
Some families have made the decision to split up.
A 23-year-old Afghan refugee who has lived in Iran for four years said he stayed behind in Tehran but sent his wife and newborn son out of the city after a strike Monday hit a nearby pharmacy.
“It was a very bad shock for them,” he said.
Some, like Shirin, said fleeing was not an option. The apartment buildings in Tehran are towering and dense. Her father has Alzheimer’s and needs an ambulance to move. Her mother’s severe arthritis would make even a short trip extremely painful.
Still, hoping escape might be possible, she spent the last several days trying to gather their medications. Her brother waited at a gas station until 3 a.m., only to be turned away when the fuel ran out. As of Monday, gas was being rationed to under 20 liters (5 gallons) per driver at stations across Iran after an Israeli strike set fire to the world’s largest gas field.
Some people, like Arshia, said they are just tired.
“I don’t want to go in traffic for 40 hours, 30 hours, 20 hours, just to get to somewhere that might get bombed eventually,” he said.
The 22-year-old has been staying in the house with his parents since the initial Israeli strike. He said his once-lively neighborhood of Saadat Abad in northwestern Tehran is now a ghost town. Schools are closed. Very few people even step outside to walk their dogs. Most local stores have run out of drinking water and cooking oil. Others closed.
Still, Arshia said the prospect of finding a new place is too daunting.
“We don’t have the resources to leave at the moment,” he said.
Residents are on their own
No air raid sirens went off as Israeli strikes began pounding Tehran before dawn Friday. For many, it was an early sign civilians would have to go it alone.
During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Tehran was a low-slung city, many homes had basements to shelter in, and there were air raid drills and sirens. Now the capital is packed with close-built high-rise apartments without shelters.
“It’s a kind of failing of the past that they didn’t build shelters,” said a 29-year-old Tehran resident who left the city Monday. “Even though we’ve been under the shadow of a war, as long as I can remember.”
Her friend’s boyfriend was killed while going to the store.
“You don’t really expect your boyfriend — or your anyone, really — to leave the house and never return when they just went out for a routine normal shopping trip,” she said.
Those who choose to relocate do so without help from the government. The state has said it is opening mosques, schools and metro stations for use as shelters. Some are closed, others overcrowded.
Hundreds crammed into one Tehran metro station Friday night. Small family groups lay on the floor. One student, a refugee from another country, said she spent 12 hours in the station with her relatives.
“Everyone there was panicking because of the situation,” she said. “Everyone doesn’t know what will happen next, if there is war in the future and what they should do. People think nowhere is safe for them.”
Soon after leaving the station, she saw that Israel had warned a swath of Tehran to evacuate.
“For immigrant communities, this is so hard to live in this kind of situation,” she said, explaining she feels like she has nowhere to escape to — especially not her home country, which she asked not be identified.
Fear of Iran mingles with fear of Israel
For Shirin, the hostilities are bittersweet. Despite being against the theocracy and its treatment of women, the idea that Israel may determine the future does not sit well with her.
“As much as we want the end of this regime, we didn’t want it to come at the hands of a foreign government,” she said. “We would have preferred that if there were to be a change, it would be the result of a people’s movement in Iran.”
Meanwhile, the 29-year-old who left Tehran had an even more basic message for those outside Iran:
“I just want people to remember that whatever is happening here, it’s not routine business for us. People’s lives here — people’s livelihoods — feel as important to them as they feel to anyone in any other place. How would you feel if your city or your country was under bombardment by another country, and people were dying left and right?”
“We are kind of like, this can’t be happening. This can’t be my life.”
Far-right Erdogan opponent slams opposition graft probes
- Umit Ozdag was placed in pre-trial detention on charges of inciting public hatred on Jan. 20
- A court sentenced him to two years and four months behind bars
ISTANBUL: A far-right political opponent of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday slammed ongoing graft probes into Turkiye’s opposition as unfair, a day after being released from jail.
Umit Ozdag, who heads the small anti-immigrant Victory party, was placed in pre-trial detention on charges of inciting public hatred on January 20.
A court on Tuesday sentenced him to two years and four months behind bars, but ordered his release on grounds of time already served.
He is also being tried on a separate charge of insulting the president — a charge often used to silence Erdogan’s critics — with the next hearing on September 10.
Speaking to Anka news agency on Wednesday, Ozdag said the barrage of legal probes targeting municipalities run by the main opposition CHP was one-sided and “harmful.”
“The application of one law for (Erdogan’s AKP) ruling party and another for the opposition, is causing an extraordinarily harmful fragmentation within society,” he said.
“You cannot convince the public that only CHP municipalities are involved in corruption and that there is no corruption worth prosecuting in AKP municipalities.”
Over the past nine months, there has been a surge in legal cases against CHP mayors and municipal officials on graft charges, with observers seeing it as a government move to weaken the party which scored a huge victory against Erdogan’s AKP in 2024 local elections.
The most controversial move was the removal of Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, Erdogan’s biggest political opponent and the CHP’s candidate for the 2028 presidential race.
He was arrested on March 19 in connection with a graft probe and allegations of terror ties which critics say was designed to prevent him from running.
His arrest sparked protests across the country in the worst street unrest since 2013.
Firms led by US military veterans deliver aid in Africa and Gaza, alarming humanitarian groups
- In South Sudan and Gaza, two for-profit US companies led by American national security veterans are delivering aid in operations backed by the South Sudanese and Israeli governments
- The American contractors say they’re putting their security, logistics and intelligence skills to work in relief operations
SOUTH SUDAN: Swooping low over the banks of a Nile River tributary, an aid flight run by retired American military officers released a stream of food-stuffed sacks over a town emptied by fighting in South Sudan, a country wracked by conflict.
Last week’s air drop was the latest in a controversial development: private contracting firms led by former US intelligence officers and military veterans delivering aid to some of the world’s deadliest conflict zones, in operations organized with governments that are combatants in the conflicts.
The moves are roiling the global aid community, which warns of a more militarized, politicized and profit-seeking trend that could allow governments or combatants to use life-saving aid to control hungry civilian populations and advance war aims.
In South Sudan and Gaza, two for-profit US companies led by American national security veterans are delivering aid in operations backed by the South Sudanese and Israeli governments.
The American contractors say they’re putting their security, logistics and intelligence skills to work in relief operations. Fogbow, the US company that carried out last week’s air drops over South Sudan, says it aims to be a “humanitarian” force.
“We’ve worked for careers, collectively, in conflict zones. And we know how to essentially make very difficult situations work,” said Fogbow President Michael Mulroy, a retired CIA officer and former senior defense official in the first Trump administration, speaking on the airport tarmac in Juba, South Sudan’s capital.
But the UN and many leading non-profit groups say US contracting firms are stepping into aid distribution with little transparency or humanitarian experience, and, crucially, without commitment to humanitarian principles of neutrality and operational independence in war zones.
“What we’ve learned over the years of successes and failures is there’s a difference between a logistics operation and a security operation, and a humanitarian operation,” said Scott Paul, a director at Oxfam America.
“‘Truck and chuck’ doesn’t help people,” Paul said. “It puts people at risk.”
‘We don’t want to replace any entity’
Fogbow took journalists up in a cargo plane to watch their team drop 16 tons of beans, corn and salt for South Sudan’s Upper Nile state town of Nasir.
Residents fled homes there after fighting erupted in March between the government and opposition groups.
Mulroy acknowledged the controversy over Fogbow’s aid drops, which he said were paid for by the South Sudanese government.
But, he maintained: “We don’t want to replace any entity” in aid work.
Shared roots in Gaza and US intelligence
Fogbow was in the spotlight last year for its proposal to use barges to bring aid to Gaza, where Israeli restrictions were blocking overland deliveries. The United States focused instead on a US military effort to land aid via a temporary pier.
Since then, Fogbow has carried out aid drops in Sudan and South Sudan, east African nations where wars have created some of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises.
Fogbow says ex-humanitarian officials are also involved, including former UN World Food Program head David Beasley, who is a senior adviser.
Operating in Gaza, meanwhile, Safe Reach Solutions, led by a former CIA officer and other retired US security officers, has partnered with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-backed nonprofit that Israel says is the linchpin of a new aid system to wrest control from the UN, which Israel says has been infiltrated by Hamas, and other humanitarian groups.
Starting in late May, the American-led operation in Gaza has distributed food at fixed sites in southern Gaza, in line with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated plan to use aid to concentrate the territory’s more than 2 million people in the south, freeing Israel to fight Hamas elsewhere. Aid workers fear it’s a step toward another of Netanyahu’s public goals, removing Palestinians from Gaza in “voluntary” migrations.
Since then, several hundred Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded in near daily shootings as they tried to reach aid sites, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Witnesses say Israeli troops regularly fire heavy barrages toward the crowds in an attempt to control them.
The Israeli military has denied firing on civilians. It says it fired warning shots in several instances, and fired directly at a few “suspects” who ignored warnings and approached its forces.
It’s unclear who is funding the new operation in Gaza. No donor has come forward, and the US says it’s not funding it.
In response to criticism over its Gaza aid deliveries, Safe Reach Solutions said it has former aid workers on its team with “decades of experience in the world’s most complex environments” who bring “expertise to the table, along with logisticians and other experts.”
South Sudan’s people ask: Who’s getting our aid drops?
Last week’s air drop over South Sudan went without incident, despite fighting nearby. A white cross marked the drop zone. Only a few people could be seen. Fogbow contractors said there were more newly returned townspeople on previous drops.
Fogbow acknowledges glitches in mastering aid drops, including one last year in Sudan’s South Kordofan region that ended up with too-thinly-wrapped grain sacks split open on the ground.
After gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan has struggled to emerge from a civil war that killed nearly 400,000 people. Rights groups say its government is one of the world’s most corrupt, and until now has invested little in quelling the dire humanitarian crisis.
South Sudan said it engaged Fogbow for air drops partly because of the Trump administration’s deep cuts in US Agency for International Development funding. Humanitarian Minister Albino Akol Atak said the drops will expand to help people in need throughout the country.
But two South Sudanese groups question the government’s motives.
“We don’t want to see a humanitarian space being abused by military actors ... under the cover of a food drop,” said Edmund Yakani, head of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, a local civil society group.
Asked about suspicions the aid drops were helping South Sudan’s military aims, Fogbow’s Mulroy said the group has worked with the UN World Food Program to make sure “this aid is going to civilians.”
“If it wasn’t going to civilians, we would hope that we would get that feedback, and we would cease and desist,” Mulroy said.
In a statement, WFP country director Mary-Ellen McGroarty said: “WFP is not involved in the planning, targeting or distribution of food air-dropped” by Fogbow on behalf of South Sudan’s government, citing humanitarian principles.
A ‘business-driven model’
Longtime humanitarian leaders and analysts are troubled by what they see as a teaming up of warring governments and for-profit contractors in aid distribution.
When one side in a conflict decides where and how aid is handed out, and who gets it, “it will always result in some communities getting preferential treatment,” said Jan Egeland, executive director of the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Sometimes, that set-up will advance strategic aims, as with Netanyahu’s plans to move Gaza’s civilians south, Egeland said.
The involvement of soldiers and security workers, he added, can make it too “intimidating” for some in need to even try to get aid.
Until now, Western donors always understood those risks, Egeland said. But pointing to the Trump administration’s backing of the new aid system in Gaza, he asked: “Why does the US ... want to support what they have resisted with every other war zone for two generations?”
Mark Millar, who has advised the UN and Britain on humanitarian matters in South Sudan and elsewhere, said involving private military contractors risks undermining the distinction between humanitarian assistance and armed conflict.
Private military contractors “have even less sympathy for a humanitarian perspective that complicates their business-driven model,” he said. “And once let loose, they seem to be even less accountable.”
