Ship barely avoids Houthi missile in Gulf of Aden

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Houthi supporters commemorate Eid Al-Ghadir in Sanaa on June 24, 2024. (AFP)
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New Houthi recruits parade in a show of support for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in Sanaa, Yemen, February 1, 2024. (Reuters)
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Updated 26 June 2024
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Ship barely avoids Houthi missile in Gulf of Aden

  • Incident in the Gulf of Aden came after the Houthis claimed on Tuesday night to have attacked the “Israeli” MSC Sarah ship in the Arabian Sea
  • Houthis have increased assaults on ships in international seas off Yemen, the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, issuing almost daily announcements claiming fresh strikes

AL-MUKALLA: A missile apparently launched by Yemen’s Houthi militia landed near a ship south of Yemen’s southern port city of Aden on Wednesday, hours after the Houthis claimed to be deploying a new long-range missile in their anti-ship campaign.

The UK Maritime Trade Operations said it received an alarm from a ship’s master regarding a missile impacting waters near the vessel, 52 miles south of Aden, adding that the ship and its crew were safe.

“The vessel is proceeding to its next port of call,” the UKMTO said in its alert, advising ships navigating the Gulf of Aden to take vigilance and notify the authority of any suspicious activities.

The incident in the Gulf of Aden came after the Houthis claimed on Tuesday night to have attacked the “Israeli” MSC Sarah ship in the Arabian Sea using a newly deployed long-range missile.

The MSC Sarah is a Liberian-flagged container ship heading from Panama to the UAE and was seen in the Gulf of Oman on Wednesday morning, according to ship monitoring website marinetraffic.com.

“The Yemeni Armed Forces maintained that this qualitative operation was carried out with a new ballistic missile that went into service after the successful conclusion of testing operations. The missile is distinguished by its ability to attack targets precisely and across vast distances,” Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea said in a televised statement.

The Houthis were referring to an incident reported by the UKMTO on Monday, in which the master of a ship reported a nearby explosion 246 nautical miles southeast of Nishtun, a coastal town in the government-controlled Yemeni province of Mahra.

This month, the Houthis have increased assaults on ships in international seas off Yemen, the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, issuing almost daily announcements claiming fresh strikes, as opposed to the weekly claims of the past.

The US Central Command and the UK maritime agencies provide comparable daily statements regarding Houthi attacks on ships using drones, ballistic missiles and explosive-laden drone boats, as well as the shooting down of such weapons before they reach their intended targets.

The Houthis maintain that their actions are purely aimed at Israeli-linked ships and those traveling to Israeli ports to put pressure on Israel to end its war in the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

Separately, the Yemeni government has accused the Houthis of holding four Yemenia Airways planes in Sanaa, preventing hundreds of Yemeni pilgrims from returning home.

In a post on X, Yemeni Minister of Endowments and Guidance Mohammed Shabebah said that the Houthis had prevented four Yemenia aircraft from departing Sanaa airport for Jeddah to bring back Yemeni pilgrims, and that he has requested pilgrims to wait in their Makkah hotels until the planes are released.

“The Houthis are holding four aircraft at Sanaa International Airport, preventing them from returning to Jeddah Airport to take pilgrims to Sanaa,” the minister said. Yemenia said a few days ago that the Houthis are holding one of its planes at Sanaa airport and preventing maintenance, as well as refusing to allow the airline to access the more than $100 million in bank accounts held by the Houthis in Sanaa.

At the same time, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday that the Houthis have abducted and forcibly disappeared over 60 Yemeni staffers from UN agencies, international missions and organizations since May 31, denying them access to lawyers, contacting their families or receiving life-saving drugs.

Citing relatives and experts, the international rights group asserted that the most recent Houthi crackdown is intended to divert attention from the militia’s failure to provide basic services, exert pressure on the central bank in Aden to revoke sanctions on Sanaa-based banks, and seize complete control over critical financial streams from the health, education and corporate sectors, as well as humanitarian aid agencies.

“The Houthis should immediately release all of these people, many of whom have spent their careers working to improve their country,” Niku Jafarnia, Yemen and Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch said in a statement, urging the international community to intervene and exert pressure on the Houthis to secure the release of the abducted Yemenis.

“The international community should be doing everything in their power to ensure that these people are immediately released.”


Syria’s ‘large quantities’ of toxic arms serious concern: watchdog

Updated 7 sec ago
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Syria’s ‘large quantities’ of toxic arms serious concern: watchdog

  • The war has killed more than half a million people, displaced millions, and ravaged the country’s infrastructure and industry

THE HAGUE: The world’s chemical watchdog said Monday that it was “seriously concerned” by large gaps in Syria’s declaration about its chemical weapons stockpile, as large quantities of potentially banned warfare agents might be involved.
Syria agreed in 2013 to join the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, shortly after an alleged chemical gas attack killed more than 1,400 people near Damascus.
“Despite more than a decade of intensive work, the Syrian Arab Republic chemical weapons dossier still cannot be closed,” the watchdog’s director-general Fernando Arias told delegates at the OPCW’s annual meeting.
The Hague-based global watchdog has previously accused President Bashar Assad’s regime of continued attacks on civilians with chemical weapons during the Middle Eastern country’s brutal civil war.
“Since 2014, the (OPCW) Secretariat has reported a total of 26 outstanding issues of which seven have been fulfilled,” in relation to chemical weapon stockpiles in Syria, Arias said.
“The substance of the remaining 19 outstanding issues is of serious concern as it involves large quantities of potentially undeclared or unverified chemical warfare agents and chemical munitions,” he told delegates.
Syria’s OPCW voting rights were suspended in 2021, an unprecedented rebuke, following poison gas attacks on civilians in 2017.
Last year the watchdog blamed Syria for a 2018 chlorine attack that killed 43 people, in a long-awaited report on a case that sparked tensions between Damascus and the West.
Damascus has denied the allegations and insisted it has handed over its stockpiles.
Syria’s civil war broke out in 2011 after the government’s repression of peaceful demonstrations escalated into a deadly conflict that pulled in foreign powers and global jihadists.
The war has killed more than half a million people, displaced millions, and ravaged the country’s infrastructure and industry.


Syria state TV says Israel struck bridges near border with Lebanon

Updated 26 November 2024
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Syria state TV says Israel struck bridges near border with Lebanon

  • The defense ministry said “the Israeli enemy launched an air aggression from the direction of Lebanese territory, targeting crossing points that it had previously hit” between the two countries

DAMASUS: Syrian state television reported Israeli strikes on several bridges in the Qusayr region near the Lebanese border on Monday, with the defense ministry reporting two civilians injured in the attacks.
Israel’s military has intensified its strikes on targets in Syria since its conflict with Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon escalated into full-scale war in late September after almost a year of cross-border hostilities.
“An Israeli aggression targeted the bridges of Al-Jubaniyeh, Al-Daf, Arjoun, and the Al-Nizariyeh Gate in the Qusayr area,” state television said, with official news agency SANA reporting damage in the attacks.
The defense ministry said “the Israeli enemy launched an air aggression from the direction of Lebanese territory, targeting crossing points that it had previously hit” between the two countries.
The attacks “injured two civilians and caused material losses,” it added.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, based in Britain, said the attacks had “killed two Syrians working with Hezbollah and injured five others,” giving a preliminary toll.
Earlier, the monitor with a network of sources in Syria had said the “Israeli strikes targeted” an official land border crossing in the Qusayr area and six bridges on the Orontes River near the border with Lebanon.
Since September, Israel has bombed land crossings between Lebanon and Syria, putting them out of service. It accuses Hezbollah of using the routes, key for people fleeing the war in Lebanon, to transfer weapons from Syria.

 

 


Iraqis sentenced to prison in $2.5bn corruption case

Updated 26 November 2024
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Iraqis sentenced to prison in $2.5bn 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.
 

 


11 killed in Kurdish-led attacks in north Syria: war monitor

Updated 26 November 2024
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11 killed in Kurdish-led attacks in north Syria: war monitor

  • Seven Turkiye-backed militants were also killed in the attack and in an operation by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces that control swathes of northeast Syria.

BEIRUT: The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said Monday 11 people including civilians were killed in attacks by a Kurdish-led force on positions of Turkiye-backed militants in north Syria.
“A woman, her two children and a man were killed... in the bombing of a military position... used by Ankara-backed factions for human smuggling operations to Turkiye,” the Britain-based monitor said.
It said seven Turkiye-backed militants were also killed in that incident and in an operation by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that control swathes of northeast Syria.
SDF special forces infiltrated a Turkiye-backed group’s military position and killed three militants, said the monitor with a network of sources inside Syria.
The SDF also booby-trapped a military position as they withdrew, in an attack that killed another four pro-Turkiye militants but also four civilians including a woman and her two children, the Observatory said.
On Sunday, 15 Ankara-backed Syrian militants were killed after the SDF infiltrated their territory, the monitor reported earlier.
The SDF is a US-backed force that spearheaded the fighting against the Daesh group in its last Syria strongholds before its territorial defeat in 2019.
It is dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), viewed by Ankara as an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Turkish troops and allied armed factions control swathes of northern Syria following successive cross-border offensives since 2016, most of them targeting the SDF.


Sudan women facing ‘epidemic of sexual violence’: UN

Updated 25 November 2024
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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.