ANKARA, Turkiye: Turkish forces have killed the alleged mastermind behind a deadly Istanbul street bombing in an operation in northern Syria, Turkiye’s state-run news agency reported.
The man, identified as Halil Menci, was “neutralized” in an operation by Turkish intelligence agents, the agency said, without providing further details. HaberTurk television said the operation took place on Feb. 22 in the town of Qamishli.
The Nov. 13 bomb attack in Istanbul’s bustling Istiklal Avenue left six people dead, including two children. More than 80 others were wounded.
Turkish authorities blamed the attack on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, as well as Syrian Kurdish groups affiliated with it. The Kurdish militants have denied involvement.
At least 17 suspects have been jailed pending trial in connection with the attack, including a Syrian woman who is accused of leaving the TNT-laden bomb on Istiklal Avenue. Officials said at the time that the attack’s planner had fled Turkiye for Syria.
The PKK has fought an armed insurgency in Turkiye since 1984. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people since then.
Turkiye has launched three major incursions inside Syria targeting Syria’s main Kurdish militia since 2016 and controls a swath of Syrian territory along their joint border.
Istanbul bomb suspect killed in operation in Syria
https://arab.news/9jwpz
Istanbul bomb suspect killed in operation in Syria
- The man, identified as Halil Menci, was “neutralized” in an operation by Turkish intelligence agents
Iraqis sentenced to prison in $2.5-bn corruption case
- A criminal court in Baghdad specializing in corruption cases issued the prison sentences ranging from three to 10 years, a statement from Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said
BAGHDAD: An Iraqi court on Monday sentenced to prison former senior officials, a businessman and others for involvement in the theft of $2.5 billion in public funds — one of Iraq’s biggest corruption cases.
The three most high-profile individuals sentenced — businessman Nour Zuhair, as well as former prime minister Mustafa Al-Kadhemi’s cabinet director Raed Jouhi and a former adviser, Haitham Al-Juburi — are on the run and were tried in absentia.
The scandal, dubbed the “heist of the century,” has sparked widespread anger in Iraq, which is ravaged by rampant corruption, unemployment and decaying infrastructure after decades of conflict.
A criminal court in Baghdad specializing in corruption cases issued the prison sentences ranging from three to 10 years, a statement from Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said.
Thirteen people received sentences on Monday, according to member of Parliament Mostafa Sanad.
Most of them, 10, are from Iraq’s tax authority and include its former director and deputy, he added on his Telegram channel.
Iraq revealed two years ago that at least $2.5 billion was stolen between September 2021 and August 2022 through 247 cheques that were cashed by five companies.
The money was then withdrawn in cash from the accounts of those firms.
A judicial source told AFP that some tax officials charged were in detention, without detailing how many.
Businessman Zuhair was sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to the judiciary statement.
He was arrested at Baghdad airport in October 2022 as he was trying to leave the country, but released on bail a month later after giving back more than $125 million and pledging to return the rest in instalments.
The wealthy businessman was back in the news in August after he reportedly had a car crash in Lebanon, following an interview he gave to an Iraqi news channel.
Juburi, the former prime ministerial adviser, received a three-year prison sentence. He also returned $2.6 million before disappearing, a judicial source told AFP.
Kadhemi’s cabinet director Raed Jouhi, also currently outside Iraq, was sentenced to six years in prison — alongside “a number of officials involved in the crime,” according to the judiciary’s statement.
Corruption is rampant across Iraq’s public institutions, but convictions typically target mid-level officials or minor players and rarely those at the top of the power hierarchy.
Sudan women facing ‘epidemic of sexual violence’: UN
PORT SUDAN: The United Nations humanitarian chief raised the alarm on Monday over an “epidemic of sexual violence” against women in war-torn Sudan, saying the world “must do better.”
“I feel ashamed that we have not been able to protect you, and I feel ashamed for my fellow men for what they have done,” Tom Fletcher, who heads the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said on his first visit to Port Sudan.
The Red Sea city has become Sudan’s de facto capital since April 2023, when Khartoum was engulfed by war between the regular military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
The war has claimed tens of thousands of lives, displaced more than 11 million people and created what the UN says is the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.
Nearly 26 million people — around half the population — face the threat of mass starvation, as both warring sides have been accused of using hunger as a weapon of war.
During his visit, Fletcher met army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and discussed efforts to “increase the delivery of aid across borders and across conflict lines.”
Aid workers and humanitarian agencies say Burhan’s army-aligned government has enforced severe bureaucratic hurdles to their work.
At an event in a Port Sudan school to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Fletcher said the world “must do better” by the women of Sudan, who have been exposed to systematic sexual violence.
The UN’s independent international fact-finding mission for Sudan last month documented escalating sexual violence, including “rape, sexual exploitation and abduction for sexual purposes as well as allegations of enforced marriages and human trafficking.”
“The sheer scale of sexual violence we have documented in Sudan is staggering,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, chair of the fact-finding mission.
“The situation faced by vulnerable civilians, in particular women and girls of all ages, is deeply alarming and needs urgent address,” he added.
EU offers Morocco €200 million in quake reconstruction aid
- Relations between Morocco and the EU are strained after the European Court of Justice annulled fishing and agricultural deals between the two parties over products from disputed Western Sahara
RABAT: The European Union plans to offer Morocco 200 million euros ($210 million) to help with post-earthquake reconstruction, EU commissioner for neighborhood and enlargement Oliver Varhelyi said on Monday, as the two parties navigate judicial headwinds.
The 6.8 magnitude quake, Morocco’s deadliest since 1960, struck on Sept. 8, 2023, killing more than 2,900 people and damaging vital infrastructure. Morocco said it would invest In a post-earthquake reconstruction plan that includes the upgrade of infrastructure in five years.
The EU will increase its total quake reconstruction aid to Morocco to 1 billion euros, Varhelyi told a press conference in Rabat following talks with foreign minister Nasser Bourita.
Morocco was a “reliable” partner, receiving 5.2 billion euros in EU investments over the last five years, he said.
Relations between Morocco and the EU are strained after the European Court of Justice annulled fishing and agricultural deals between the two parties over products from disputed Western Sahara.
The long-frozen conflict, dating back to 1975, pits Morocco, which considers Western Sahara its own territory, against the Algeria-backed Polisario Front independence movement, which seeks a separate state there.
Following the verdict, the European Council and the Commission said they attached “high value” to relations with Morocco.
The EU’s relationship with Morocco needs to be protected from judicial harassment, Bourita said, adding that “there will be no partnerships at the expense of Morocco’s territorial integrity.”
The challenges facing Morocco-EU relations contrast with the stronger economic and political ties Rabat has forged with Madrid and Paris, after the two former colonial powers backed a Moroccan autonomy plan for Western Sahara. ($1 = 0.9499 euros)
‘Netanyahu is not Dreyfus,’ Palestinian envoy tells UN Security Council
- Riyad Mansour rejects Israeli PM’s claim of antisemitism over ICC arrest warrant, says ‘either Gaza becomes the graveyard of international law or land of its resurrection’
- US envoy warns annexation of West Bank and settlements in Gaza would create ‘new obstacles for Israel’s integration in the region’
NEW YORK CITY: The warrant issued last week by the International Criminal Court for the arrest of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has “nothing to do with his faith and everything to do with his crimes,” the Palestinian envoy to the UN told the Security Council on Monday.
Riyad Mansour urged council members to stand up to what he described as Netanyahu’s “diversions and distortions, to his smearing, his threats and his attacks.”
Netanyahu has denounced the ICC decision as “antisemitic,” comparing it to the Dreyfus affair in France more than a century ago. Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish descent, was wrongfully convicted in 1894 of treason based on fabricated evidence.
“No, Netanyahu is not Dreyfus,” Mansour told the Security Council. “The ICC, the ICJ (International Court of Justice), this council and the General Assembly, the secretary-general and the United Nations are not antisemitic, and Netanyahu’s efforts to frame efforts to uphold international law as antisemitic must be firmly rebuked.”
The council must “act now to restore primacy to international law, to the humanitarian and human rights laws that Israel is shredding to the detriment of all,” he added.
He warned that the “genocide” in Gaza is transforming the Middle East for generations to come, with “the gravest” repercussions for the region and the wider world.
“This fire will devour everything in its path if it is not urgently stopped,” Mansour said, and so states are faced with a “quite simple” choice: defend the rule of international law or defend “the massacres perpetrated by this Israeli government.”
He called on politicians who have “difficulties making the right choice” to stop “playing political games with our people’s lives,” and added: “Our children should not be sacrificed for the sake of your political calculations and ambitions.”
Palestinians in Gaza are bracing themselves to endure another winter living in makeshift tents, besieged and bombed, without any of the essential infrastructure required to sustain life, while famine continues to loom over the war-ravaged enclave, Mansour warned.
“How much more suffering must they endure?” he asked. “Their agony must be brought to an end and life and hope must be restored. Israel’s war machine must be stopped in Palestine and in Lebanon. It is sowing the conditions of insecurity and hatred for decades.”
He urged council members not to allow “a solvable political conflict to be transformed into an eternal religious conflict. This would have terrible, unimaginable consequences for our region and the world.”
He added: “The fate of our region is being determined in Gaza: either Gaza becomes the graveyard of international law or the land of its resurrection.”
Robert Wood, the deputy US ambassador to the UN, told fellow council members that Washington remains opposed to the annexation of the West Bank and the construction of settlements in Gaza.
Such actions would breach international law, he said, “sow the seeds of further instability and create new obstacles to Israel’s full integration into the region.” He also expressed concern about the “increasing extremist-settler violence in the West Bank.”
But Wood reiterated that the US rejects the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and blames Hamas for the failure to reach a ceasefire agreement. He added that the militant group must not be “let off the hook.”
Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy permanent representative, said: “The USA only demands, and continues to demand, that we all put pressure on Hamas,” yet it is “clear” that Israel’s plan is “to create yet another irreversible fact on the ground: a scorched, depopulated Gaza that has been emptied of Palestinians.”
He added: “How many more people need to die for Gaza to at last see peace? Or will the USA obstruct this until all the Palestinians have been exterminated and the question of the two-state solution falls away by itself?”
Moscow “will continue to insist on the adoption of the most decisive measures to stop the bloodshed in Gaza,” Polyanskiy said.
Those still in north Gaza ‘scavenging among the rubble’: UNRWA
- ‘There is no access to food and drinking water in besieged territory,’ spokeswoman says
JERUSALEM: With an intensive Israeli military operation in Gaza’s besieged north in its 50th day, remaining residents are left “scavenging among the rubble” for food, said UNRWA spokeswoman Louise Wateridge.
The Israeli army announced it would intensify operations in the ravaged north of the territory on Oct. 6, with troops encircling the northern city of Jabalia and adjacent areas at the time.
Speaking from Gaza City, where many of the north’s residents have fled since the operation began, Wateridge gave insights gleaned from talking to displaced Palestinians and colleagues from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
She said UNRWA estimates that between 100,000 and 130,000 people have fled north Gaza since the beginning of the operation, which Israel said aims to keep militants from regrouping in the area.
“There is no access to food, no access to drinking water. Eight of the UNRWA water wells in Jabalia stopped functioning weeks ago. They’ve been damaged and destroyed. They’ve run out of fuel.
“There were very horrific reports of continued strikes on hospitals, on shelters where people are.
“Here in Gaza City, I’m meeting people who have fled for their lives, and they’re showing me these appalling videos where they’re running through the streets, they’re navigating, you know, the rubble.
“There are bodies of children around them. There are bodies of people who have been killed everywhere that they have to walk and step over
to get out.
“Fifty days of siege, it’s unfathomable, the destruction, the death, the pain, the suffering that that will cause.
“I met some children just in the last few days; you can hear the planes going over, you can hear the drones, and they freeze, they completely freeze, they don’t have anything to say, their teeth start chattering, they’re absolutely paralyzed by fear from these experiences that they’ve had over the last few weeks.”
“(There are) around 65,000 people in these besieged areas. We hear that they are scavenging from residential buildings, scavenging among the rubble, trying to find any old tins of canned food, any kind of source of food already in these residential buildings or among the rubble.”
“It was around this time last year that there were reports from northern Gaza that was cut off, and people were going around. Our colleagues were going around eating animal food to stay alive. So, people are just eating anything that they can find at this point, and it really is complete survival.
“Hearing these stories of people’s families under the rubble and fleeing and having to leave them behind, people are traumatized, people who haven’t managed to escape, they’re absolutely traumatized.”
“(There are) around 100,000 to 130,000 more people forcibly displaced from Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and these besieged areas. And... they’re arriving (in Gaza City) to charcoal buildings, blown out buildings, it’s raining, cold, and freezing.
“They don’t have mattresses, they don’t have tarps, they don’t have tents, they don’t have blankets, families are crying, begging because their children don’t have clothes, they don’t have warm clothes, babies don’t have anything to keep them warm.
“It’s beyond appalling, the conditions people are forced to live in here. So they’re among the rubble in these facilities that should be protected by international law.
“Horrific stories of tanks arriving, of strikes on the schools, and then people being forced to go back and shelter there because they simply don’t have anywhere else to go.”
