IRBIL: Waiting at home in Iraqi Kurdistan, Khadija Hussein holds faint hope of hearing word of further survivors from the shipwrecked vessel that carried 11 of her family members from neighboring Turkiye.
Khadija’s nephew Rebwar, his sister-in-law Mojdeh and both their families were aboard a sailing boat that sank overnight between Sunday and Monday off the Italian coast.
Twelve people were plucked from the water after the boat sank around 120 nautical miles off Calabria, one of whom died after disembarking. More than 60 remain unaccounted for after six bodies were retrieved on Wednesday from the sea by the Italian coast guard.
“What’s clear is that Mojdeh survived. We spoke to her on the phone,” the 54-year-old housewife told AFP.
Mojdeh’s son and another child from the family are also known to have survived — the eight other relatives of Khadija who were onboard are still unaccounted for.
“We have no further details,” Khadija said, a black veil draped over her hair.
On a moldering wall at the entrance to the family home in Irbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, a poster announces a vigil organized on Wednesday to receive condolences.
Two family photos on display showed the victims, parents and children smiling broadly and dressed in their best clothes. Mojdeh is with her husband Abdel Qader, a cab driver. Her sister Hiro is pictured with her husband Rebwar, a blacksmith.
The two couples had almost changed their minds and decided not to depart.
“They had informed the parents, and everyone was relieved,” Khadija explained, but after an insistent intervention by a people smuggler, the group had a change of heart.
They were supposed to make contact with the family in Irbil when they arrived in Europe to start their new life.
“Hours went by, and we heard nothing more,” Khadija said.
The smuggler, meanwhile, had switched off their phone
News of deaths like these on Europe’s migrant routes has become all too common in the autonomous Kurdish region. The area has been touched by other tragedies, whether on the English Channel or in the frozen forests of Belarus.
In the Irbil schoolyard requisitioned for the vigil, dozens of women huddle together, seated under a tent, all dressed in black, their features drawn, in a silence broken by the cries of children.
At the mosque, the men of the family welcomed dozens of visitors who had come to pay their respects in a reception room, listening to verses from the Qur'an.
Kamal Hamad, Rebwar’s father, explained that he spoke to his son on Wednesday, 12 June, when he was already on the boat. His grief is compounded by incomprehension.
“They knew full well that traveling by sea in this way meant certain death,” the 60-year-old said. “Why leave? In our country it’s better than elsewhere.”
In an unstable Iraq, the Kurdish region has always presented an image of relative prosperity and stability. Property developments, highways, universities and private schools are all under construction.
But the autonomous region, like the rest of the resource-rich country, also suffers from endemic corruption, the cronyism of the ruling clans and an economic stasis that has left its young people disillusioned.
A Gallup poll from 2022 showed two out of every three Kurdish residents thought it would be difficult to find a job.
According to the International Organization for Migration, some 3,155 migrants died or disappeared in the Mediterranean last year.
The president of the Association of Migrants Returned from Europe, Bakr Ali, told AFP that the sailing boat was carrying a “majority of Kurds from Iraq and Iran.”
“There were also a number of Afghans,” he said, adding that the boat had set sail from Bodrum in Turkiye.
Bakhtiar Qader, Rebwar’s cousin, said some 30 people from autonomous Kurdistan were among those traveling on the vessel.
He also doesn’t understand the stubbornness of the two couples. Especially as they “had their own house, car, children and jobs.”
“I, like their parents and friends, tried to talk them out of it,” he said.
“But they wouldn’t listen,” the 40-year-old, wearing a black shirt and a salt-and-pepper beard explained.
“They didn’t know that death was waiting for them.”
Iraqi Kurds mourn loved ones lost on Mediterranean migrant route
https://arab.news/zvkzf
Iraqi Kurds mourn loved ones lost on Mediterranean migrant route
- In unstable Iraq, Kurdish region has always presented image of relative prosperity and stability
- But autonomous region, like rest of the resource-rich country, also suffers from endemic corruption
‘No food, nothing’: Famine grips Sudan
- Country’s economy bludgeoned by war and mismanagement
CAIRO: Mona Ibrahim has already buried two of her children.
In the span of just two months, the Sudanese mother watched helplessly as severe malnutrition killed her 10-year-old daughter, Rania, and her eight-month-old son, Montasir, in the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp.
“I could only hold them as they faded away,” Ibrahim, 40, said via video call, sitting outside her straw-and-plastic shelter near North Darfur state’s besieged capital El-Fasher.
Rania was the first to succumb. In El-Fasher’s only functioning hospital, understaffed and unequipped, she died in November just three days after being admitted with acute diarrhea.
Her baby boy Montasir followed weeks later, his tiny body bloated from severe malnutrition.
El-Fasher, under paramilitary siege since May, is only one grim battlefield in the 21-month war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces.
In July, a UN-backed review declared famine in Zamzam, a decades-old displacement camp home to between 500,000 and a million people.
By December, it had spread to two more camps in the area, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam, as well as parts of the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification determined.
Now, Ibrahim fears for her four-year-old daughter, Rashida, who battles severe anemia with no access to medical care.
“I am terrified I will lose her too,” she said. “We’re abandoned. There is no food, no medicine, nothing.”
At Salam 56, one of Zamzam’s 48 overcrowded shelters, exhaustion was etched onto mothers’ faces as they cradled their children, too weak to stand.
Multiple families gathered around bowls with a few scraps of peanut residue traditionally used as animal feed. “It’s all we have,” said Rawiya Ali, a 35-year-old mother of five.
Contaminated water collects in a shallow reservoir during the rainy season, which the women trudge 3 km to fetch.
“Animals drink from it and so do we,” Ali said.
Salam 56 is home to over 700 families, according to its coordinator Adam Mahmoud Abdullah.
Since war began in April 2023, it has received only four food aid deliveries, the most recent in September, a mere 10 tonnes of flour, he said. “Since then, nothing has come,” Abdullah said.
The desolation in Zamzam lays bare the true cost of the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted over 12 million others, and created the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,” according to the International Rescue Committee. About 700 km southeast of Zamzam, the situation was just as dire.
Outside one of the last functioning community kitchens in the town of Dilling in South Kordofan state, queues stretched endlessly, according to Nazik Kabalo, who leads a Sudanese women’s rights group overseeing the kitchen.
Photos show men, women and children standing hollow-eyed and frail — their bellies swollen and skin pulled taut over fragile bones.
After days without a single morsel, “some collapse where they stand,” Kabalo said. “For others, even when they get food ... they vomit it back up,” she said.
In South Kordofan state, where agriculture once thrived, farmers are eating seeds meant for planting, while others boil tree leaves in water to stave off hunger.
“We are seeing hunger in areas that have never seen famine in Sudan’s history,” Kabalo said.
With vast oil and gold reserves and fertile agricultural land, Sudan has had its economy bludgeoned by war and decades of mismanagement, and now, hunger is everywhere.
Jordan hospital offers injured Gazans hope for recovery
- Israel’s 15-month offensive in Gaza left the coastal enclave a wasteland of rubble that will take years to rebuild
AMMAN: Karam Nawjaa, 17, was so badly injured when an Israeli strike hit his home in Gaza nearly a year ago that his own cousin, pulling him from the rubble, did not recognize him.
After rushing Karam to hospital he returned to continue searching for his cousin all night in the rubble.
In that strike on Feb. 14, 2024, Karam lost his mother, a sister and two brothers. As well as receiving serious burns to his face and body, he lost the ability to use his arms and hands.
Now, the burns are largely healed and he is slowly regaining the use of his limbs after months of treatment at a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the Jordanian capital Amman which operates a program of reconstructive surgery.
“I only remember that on that day, Feb. 14, there was a knock on our door ... I opened it, my brother came in, and after that ... (I remember) nothing,” he said.
“Before the war I was studying, and thank God, I was an outstanding student,” Karam said, adding that his dream had been to become a dentist. Now he does not think about the future.
“What happened, happened ... you feel that all your ambitions have been shattered, that what happened to you has destroyed you.”
Karam is one of many patients from Gaza being treated at Amman’s Specialized Hospital for Reconstructive Surgery, Al-Mowasah Hospital. He shares a room there with his younger sister and their father.
“All these patients are war victims ... with complex injuries, complex burns ... They need very long rehabilitation services, both surgical but also physical and mental,” said Moeen Mahmood Shaief, head of the MSF mission in Jordan.
“The stories around those patients are heartbreaking, a lot of them have lost their families” and require huge support to be reintegrated into normal life, he added.
Israel’s 15-month offensive in Gaza left the coastal enclave a wasteland of rubble that will take years to rebuild.
Displaced Palestinians have been returning to their mostly destroyed homes after a ceasefire came into effect on Jan. 19.
Leader of rebels who toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad is named country’s interim president
- Al-Sharaa would be authorized to form a temporary legislative Council until a new constitution is drafted
- Abdul Ghani announced the dissolution of the armed factions in the country
DAMASCUS: The leader of the former rebel group that toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad last month was named on Wednesday the country’s interim president, following a meeting of the former insurgent factions.
The appointment of Ahmad Al-Sharaa, a rebel once aligned with Al-Qaeda, as the country’s president “in the transitional phase,” was expected. The announcement was made by the spokesperson for Syria’s new, de facto government’s military operations sector, Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, the state-run SANA news agency said.
Abdul Ghani also announced the cancelation of the country’s constitution passed in 2012 under Assad’s rule and said Al-Sharaa would be authorized to form a temporary legislative Council until a new constitution is drafted.
He also announced the dissolution of the armed factions in the country, which he said would be absorbed into state institutions.
Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed Al-Golani, is the leader of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an Islamist former insurgent group that led the lightning offensive that toppled Assad last month. The group was once affiliated with Al-Qaeda but has since denounced its former ties, and in recent years Al-Sharaa has sought to cast himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance.
The United States had previously placed a $10 million bounty on Al-Sharaa but canceled it last month after a US delegation visited Damascus and met with him.
Since Assad’s fall, HTS has become the de facto ruling party and has set up an interim government largely composed of officials from the local government it previously ran in rebel-held Idlib province.
As the former Syrian army collapsed with Assad’s downfall, Al-Sharaa has called for creation of a new unified national army and security forces, but questions have loomed over how the interim administration can bring together a patchwork of former rebel groups, each with their own leaders and ideology.
Even knottier is the question of the US-backed Kurdish groups that have carved out an autonomous enclave early in Syria’s civil war, never fully siding with the Assad government or the rebels seeking to topple him. Since Assad’s fall, there has been an escalation in clashes between the Kurdish forces and Turkish-backed armed groups allied with HTS in northern Syria.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were not present at Wednesday’s meeting of the country’s armed factions Wednesday and there was no immediate comment from the group.
Al-Sharaa had been expected to appear in a televised speech following the meeting, but it remained unclear if he would. The exact mechanism under which the factions selected him as interim president was also not clear.
Jordan’s king meets Belgian monarch in Brussels
- Parties discuss recent developments in the Middle East
- King Abdullah expresses Jordan’s commitment to enhancing partnership with EU
LONDON: The King of Jordan Abdullah II met King Philippe of Belgium in Brussels on Wednesday, accompanied by Crown Prince Hussein.
The monarchs discussed recent developments in the Middle East and stressed their commitment to supporting efforts for peace and stability in the region, the Jordan News Agency reported.
King Abdullah spoke of Jordan’s commitment to enhancing its partnership with the EU during a meeting with top European officials, including Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission; Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament; and European Council President Antonio Costa.
Jordan and the EU signed a strategic partnership on Wednesday in which the EU pledged €3 billion in financing and investments for Jordan.
In his meeting with EU officials, the Jordanian monarch affirmed his country’s commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories and warned of the escalation of action in the West Bank, the Jordan News Agency added.
He emphasized the importance of increasing the flow of humanitarian aid and maintaining the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which ended the 15-month conflict in Gaza.
Lebanon official media reports Israeli strike in south
- “An enemy drone” carried out a strike targeting a house in Yohmor
BEIRUT: Lebanese official media said an Israeli strike hit south Lebanon on Wednesday, the second consecutive day to see such a raid despite a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
“An enemy drone” carried out a strike targeting a house that “had been destroyed in a previous raid” in south Lebanon’s Yohmor Al-Shaqeef, the National News Agency said.
