Iraqi FM: Iran threat of violence unacceptable, calls for Kuwait meeting on waterways dispute

Hussein said another meeting had been scheduled with Raisi in New York, during the UN General Assembly. (FILE/AFP)
Short Url
Updated 19 September 2023
Follow

Iraqi FM: Iran threat of violence unacceptable, calls for Kuwait meeting on waterways dispute

  • Fuad Hussein said policy adopted by Iraqi government was non-violent
  • Conceded Iraq had problems both internally and with neighbors, though

NEW YORK: Iraq’s Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein has told Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi that any threat of violence against the Kurdistan Region or violation of Iraqi sovereignty is unacceptable to the government in Baghdad.

“The threat of attack or violence against the Kurdistan region and the violation of Iraqi sovereignty is unacceptable, a fact we have explicitly mentioned in Tehran. (The) Kurdistan Regional Government and (the) Kurdistan Region have adhered to the security agreement,” Hussein said in an interview with Al Arabiya’s Diplomatic Avenue.

“Therefore, we need Iran to adhere to the agreement and not use violence against Iraqi sovereignty.

0 seconds of 1 minute, 39 secondsVolume 90%
Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts
00:00
01:39
01:39
 

 

“I do not expect any Iranian attack and I wish for even violent language not to be directed towards Iraq.”

He said he had attended separate meetings with Raisi and the Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, in which they discussed the security agreement between the two countries, made to prevent any cross-border clashes in the future.

Iraq, Hussein said, had upheld its part of the agreement.

“It is clear that the federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government have taken the necessary measures towards the implementation of the security agreement, including the return of those who were in the border regions to camps, for whom five camps were established to live in,” Hussein said, adding that the task was completed in less than a week.

“Iran is well aware of this matter,” he added. “Second, we let them (the Kurds) choose between leaving, staying as refugees in the camps, or benefiting from the Iranian amnesty and returning there.”

0 seconds of 52 secondsVolume 90%
Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts
00:00
00:52
00:52
 

 

He said the Iraqi contingent had invited the representatives of the Iranian Embassy and Tehran’s consulate in Erbil, in addition to Iranian, Iraqi and international media representatives, to visit the sites to witness first-hand what happened during the process and in the campsite.

Hussein said another meeting had been scheduled with Raisi in New York, during the UN General Assembly.

On relations with Kuwait, he said efforts would be made for a meeting in New York between Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani and Kuwaiti Prime Minister Ahmad Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah to clarify the situation over access to the Khor Abdullah waterway.

The estuary is Iraq’s only entrance to the Gulf, through which most of its oil exports and imported goods are shipped.

Iraq and Kuwait had previously struck a maritime border deal where the two countries shared access to the Khor Abdullah.

0 seconds of 1 minute, 1 secondVolume 90%
Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts
00:00
01:01
01:01
 

 

The deal drew a line down the middle of the estuary, stipulating that each country would exercise its sovereignty over the part which lay within their territorial waters.

But critics say the agreement is unfair and that Kuwait has no right to control any part of Khor Abdullah, which was historically Iraqi.

In 2013, the Iraqi Parliament approved the shared waterway agreement with a simple majority.

But earlier this month the deal was struck down by the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court, which annulled the law ratifying the 2012 agreement. The judges ruled the 2013 law was unconstitutional and would have required two thirds majority in the Iraqi Parliament instead of a simple majority.

“The federal court is an independent entity and its decisions stem from this independence,” Hussein said.

“However, its decisions in general, and this decision in particular, will be revised in all aspects, namely the legal and political aspects, as well as revising the agreement relevant to these decisions.

“I believe that the correct way to resolve the problems between the two countries is dialogue as we have no other options,” he explained.

He said negotiations would be resumed.

0 seconds of 1 minute, 6 secondsVolume 90%
Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts
00:00
01:06
01:06
 

 

“Our policy lies in building distinguished relationships with our neighboring countries. If problems emerge, we have no way to overcome them except through dialogue and negotiations.”

Hussein reiterated his commitment to peaceful resolution.

“This government and all Iraqi governments, after the changes, stress the fact that enjoying distinguished relations with the neighboring countries is the priority, namely those it went through wars and conflicts with. If issues arose back then, and some problems now exist, I believe they could be resolved through dialogue and negotiations.”

He said the policy adopted by the government was non-violent, “as we have no intention of going back to the old policies that have been buried. We are about to resolve all problems through negotiations and dialogues.”

Hussein conceded that Iraq had problems both internally and with its neighbors, though.

“The internal problem resides in the presence of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) in Iraq, whereas the Iraqi constitution prohibits the presence of such operatives or categories on Iraqi territory and the use of weapons against a neighboring country,” he said.

“This is part of the Iraqi constitution to which we adhere. However, this has been the case since 1991 or 1992. Nonetheless, this does not give the neighboring country Turkiye the right to military intervention and violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

“Once again, regarding Turkiye, we are holding a continuous dialogue and we will also be meeting here with the (Turkish) minister of foreign affairs to ensure the continuity of the discussions regarding the issue to resolve it.”


Rights advocates urge Morocco to annul activist’s prison term

Fouad Abdelmoumni. (AFP file photo)
Updated 5 sec ago
Follow

Rights advocates urge Morocco to annul activist’s prison term

  • The signatories said the sentence was part of a “repressive policy” by governments across the region, “aimed at silencing any voices advocating for freedom of expression, respect for human rights and democracy”
  • Prosecutors argued that his statements constituted “allegations harmful to the kingdom’s interests” and went “beyond the limits of freedom of expression, amounting to criminal offenses punishable by law”

TUNIS: Nearly 300 rights advocates and experts from countries in North Africa and France have signed a petition calling on Morocco to free activist Fouad Abdelmoumni, sentenced to jail for “spreading false allegations” online.
Abdelmoumni, a human rights advocate, was sentenced in early March to six months in prison for charges related to a post he had shared on Facebook, alleging that Morocco had spied against France.
A petition, which by Monday has gathered 295 signatures, said that “Abdelmoumni should have been prosecuted under the press code, which does not provide for prison sentences. But he was charged under the penal code.”
He would be taken into custody “if the verdict is upheld” by an appeals court, said the petition shared on Abdelmoumni’s Facebook page.
The signatories said the sentence was part of a “repressive policy” by governments across the region, “aimed at silencing any voices advocating for freedom of expression, respect for human rights and democracy.”
They called for “the annulment of his sentence and the release of all political prisoners held in Morocco and other Maghreb countries.”
The signatories include former Doctors Without Borders president Rony Brauman, French-Tunisian historian Sophie Bessis, and Tunisian activists Mokhat Trifi and Sana Ben Achour.
In his Facebook post last year, Abdelmoumni echoed accusations of Moroccan espionage against France.
Prosecutors argued that his statements constituted “allegations harmful to the kingdom’s interests” and went “beyond the limits of freedom of expression, amounting to criminal offenses punishable by law.”
Abdelmoumni shared the post during a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron, which had marked a thawing of diplomatic ties between Rabat and Paris after three years of strained relations, partially over the espionage allegations.
In 2021, Morocco was accused of deploying Israeli-made Pegasus spyware to monitor prominent figures including Macron.
The allegations were based on a report by investigative outlet Forbidden Stories and rights group Amnesty International, which Morocco called “baseless and false.”
The spyware, developed by Israeli firm NSO Group, can infiltrate mobile phones, extracting data and activating cameras.
 

 


Lebanon and Syria agree to ceasefire after 2 days of border clashes, defense ministry says

Updated 6 min ago
Follow

Lebanon and Syria agree to ceasefire after 2 days of border clashes, defense ministry says

  • Lebanon’s president earlier Monday ordered troops to retaliate against source of gunfire from Syrian side
  • Fighting happened after Syrian government accused Hezbollah militants of crossing border

BEIRUT: Lebanese and Syrian defense officials reached an agreement late Monday for a ceasefire to halt two days of clashes along the border, Syria’s state-run SANA news agency reported.
The agreement also stipulates “enhanced coordination and cooperation between the two sides,” the statement from the Syrian Ministry of Defense said.
Lebanon’s president earlier Monday ordered troops to retaliate against the source of gunfire from the Syrian side of the border after more deadly fighting erupted overnight along the frontier. Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported that seven Lebanese citizens were killed and another 52 injured in the clashes, including a 4-year-old girl.
The fighting happened after Syria’s interim government accused militants from Lebanon’s Hezbollah group of crossing into Syria on Saturday, abducting three soldiers and killing them on Lebanese soil. Hezbollah denied involvement and some other reports pointed to local clans in the border region that are not directly affiliated with Hezbollah but have been involved in cross-border smuggling.
It was the most serious cross-border fighting since the ouster of former Syrian President Bashar Assad in December.
Syrian News Channel, citing an unnamed Defense Ministry official, said the Syrian army shelled “Hezbollah gatherings that killed Syrian soldiers” along the border. Hezbollah denied involvement in a statement on Sunday.
Information Minister Paul Morkos said Lebanon’s defense minister told a Cabinet meeting that the three killed were smugglers.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said five Syrian soldiers were killed during Monday’s clashes. Footage circulated online and in local media showed families fleeing toward the Lebanese town of Hermel.
Lebanon’s state news agency reported that fighting intensified Monday evening near Hermel.
“What is happening along the eastern and northeastern border cannot continue and we will not accept that it continues,” Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun said on X. “I have given my orders to the Lebanese army to retaliate against the source of fire.”
Aoun added that he asked Lebanon’s foreign minister, who was in Brussels for a donors conference on Syria, to contact Syrian officials to resolve the problem “and prevent further escalation.”
Violence recently spiked in the area between the Syrian military and armed Lebanese Shiite clans closely allied with the former government of Assad, based in Lebanon’s Al-Qasr border village.
Lebanese media and the observatory say clans were involved in the abductions that sparked the latest clashes.
The Lebanese and Syrian armies said they have opened channels of communication to ease tensions. Lebanon’s military also said it returned the bodies of the three killed Syrians. Large numbers of Lebanese troops have been deployed in the area.
Lebanese media reported low-level fighting at dawn after an attack on a Syrian military vehicle. The number of casualties was unclear.
Early on Monday, four Syrian journalists embedded with the Syrian army were lightly wounded after an artillery shell fired from the Lebanese side of the border hit their position. They accused Hezbollah of the attack.
Meanwhile, senior Hezbollah legislator Hussein Hajj Hassan in an interview with Lebanon’s Al Jadeed television accused fighters from the Syrian side of crossing into Lebanese territory and attacking border villages. His constituency is the northeastern Baalbek-Hermel province, which has borne the brunt of the clashes.
Lebanon has been seeking international support to boost funding for its military as it gradually deploys troops along its porous northern and eastern borders with Syria as well as its southern border with Israel.
Speaking from the southern border on Monday, UN envoy Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert also warned the Security Council that the sustained presence of Israeli forces on Lebanese territory, alongside ongoing Israeli strikes, could easily lead to “serious ripple effects.”
On Monday, Israeli strikes hit several sites in southern Syria, including in the city of Daraa. The Israeli military said it was hitting “command centers and military sites containing weapons and military vehicles belonging to the old Syrian regime, which (the new army) are trying to make reusable.” Since the fall of Assad, Israeli forces have seized territory in southern Syria, which Israel said is a move to protect its border.
Syria’s Civil Defense said that three people were killed and 14 injured in the strikes, including four children, a woman and three civil defense volunteers.


Sudan army inches closer to retaking Khartoum

Updated 47 min 26 sec ago
Follow

Sudan army inches closer to retaking Khartoum

  • Shelling by Rapid Support Forces kills six civilians, including two children

OMDURMAN: Shelling by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces killed six civilians, including two children, in Khartoum’s twin city of Omdurman, a doctor said Monday, as the army inched closer to the capital’s presidential palace.

Sunday’s attack also wounded 36 civilians, half of them children, the doctor at Al-Nao Hospital said.

The bombardment struck residential areas in northern Omdurman, hitting civilians inside their homes and children playing on a football field, the Khartoum regional government’s media office said.

The war between the RSF and the army, which began in April of 2023, has escalated recently, with army forces seeking to reclaim territory lost to the RSF early in the conflict in the capital, Khartoum, and beyond.

The army says its units are now less than a kilometer from the presidential palace, which the RSF seized at the war’s outset. In a video address shared on Telegram on Saturday, RSF commander Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo vowed his troops “will not leave the Republican Palace.”

AFP journalists saw thick plumes of smoke rising over central Khartoum as fighting raged across the capital, with gunfire and explosions heard in several areas.

Nationwide, the conflict has killed tens of thousands, uprooted more than 12 million, and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises.

In Khartoum alone, at least 3.5 million people have been forced from their homes due to the violence, according to the UN.

Further southwest, in the North Kordofan state capital of El-Obeid — roughly 400 km from Khartoum — two civilians were killed and 15 others wounded after RSF forces shelled residential neighborhoods on Monday morning, a medical source at the city’s main hospital said.

Last month, the military broke through a nearly two-year RSF siege of the southern city, a key crossroads linking Khartoum to the vast Darfur region, which is under near-total RSF control.

Across North Kordofan, more than 200,000 people are currently displaced, while nearly a million are facing acute food insecurity, according to UN figures.

Clashes have also erupted in Blue Nile state, which borders South Sudan and Ethiopia, and where the RSF claimed Sunday to have destroyed military vehicles and taken prisoners from the army and allied forces.

In almost two years, the war has nearly torn Sudan into two, with the RSF in control of almost all of Darfur in the west and parts of the south, while the army holds the country’s north and east.

The army has made gains in central Sudan and Khartoum in recent months and appears to be on the verge of reclaiming the entire capital.


Algeria rejects French deportation drive in latest row

Updated 17 March 2025
Follow

Algeria rejects French deportation drive in latest row

  • Algerian authorities would not accept a list handed over by France in recent days with the names of around 60 Algerians set for deportation
  • French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has said those selected were 'dangerous' or former convicts

ALGIERS: Algeria on Monday opposed a French bid to deport several dozen Algerians, rejecting “threats” and “ultimatums” by Paris as the two countries’ ties came under increasing strain.
The Algerian foreign ministry said in a statement that the authorities would not accept a list handed over by France in recent days with the names of around 60 Algerians set for deportation.
It cited procedural requirements but also said Algeria “categorically rejects threats and intimidation attempts, as well as.... ultimatums.”
In rejecting the French list, Algeria was “solely motivated by the wish to fulfil its duty of consular protection for its citizens” and to ensure “the rights of individuals subject to deportation measures,” the ministry’s statement said.
Hard-line French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has said those selected for deportation were “dangerous” or former convicts.
Relations between Paris and Algiers have been strained since French President Emmanuel Macron recognized Moroccan sovereignty of the disputed territory of Western Sahara in July last year.
But they have worsened since Algiers refused to accept the return of undocumented Algerian migrants from France.
Retailleau has led verbal attacks on Algeria in the media, fueling tensions between the countries.
In late February, Prime Minister Francois Bayrou warned Paris could revoke a special status given to Algerians in France, the former colonial power.
Macron has since voiced his support for “renegotiating,” though not annulling, the 1968 agreement Bayrou was referring to.
Algeria was a French colony from the mid-19th century until 1962 and for most of that period was considered an integral part of metropolitan France.
On February 28, the French president said that agreements mandating the automatic return of nationals, signed between the two countries in 1994, “must be fully respected.”
In recent months, France has arrested and deported a number of undocumented Algerians on suspicion of inciting violence, only for Algeria to send back one of those expelled.
France warned it could restrict visas as a result, as well as limit development aid.
Algeria’s government has previously criticized Macron for “blatant and unacceptable interference in an internal Algerian affair.”


Israel strikes southern Syria: state media, monitor

Israel struck area of Syria’s southern city of Daraa, the state news agency SANA reported Monday. (File/AFP)
Updated 17 March 2025
Follow

Israel strikes southern Syria: state media, monitor

  • “Israeli occupation jets launch air strikes targeting the surroundings of Daraa city,” said Damascus’s official news agency SANA
  • Monitor said Israel targeted military site once belonging to Assad’s army but now used by the forces of Syria’s new authorities

DAMASCUS: Israel struck the area of Syria’s southern city of Daraa, the state news agency SANA reported, with a war monitor saying the latest Israeli attack targeted a military site.
“Israeli occupation jets launch air strikes targeting the surroundings of Daraa city,” said Damascus’s official news agency SANA, without immediately providing further details.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said Israel targeted a military site once belonging to ousted president Bashar Assad’s army but now used by the forces of Syria’s new authorities.
The Britain-based Observatory reported that a fire broke out, with ambulances rushing to the scene amid reports of casualties.
Since Assad’s overthrow in December, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes in Syria and deployed troops to a UN-patrolled buffer zone on the strategic Golan Heights.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the air force conducted a strike on Damascus on Thursday, with the military saying it had hit a “command center” of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.
The Observatory reported one fatality in that strike, with SANA saying it targeted a building in the capital.
The Israeli military said the “command center was used to plan and direct terrorist activities by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad” against Israel.
A source in Islamic Jihad said a building belonging to the group had been hit by Israeli jets, adding there were “martyrs and wounded” in the strike.
Ismail Sindawi, Islamic Jihad’s representative in Syria, told AFP the targeted building had been “closed for five years and nobody from the movement frequented it.” Israel was just sending a message, Sindawi said.
Even before Assad’s fall, during the Syrian civil war that broke out in 2011, Israel carried out hundreds of strikes in the country, mainly on government forces and Iranian-linked targets.