DAKAR: Hussein Hachem hugged his injured daughter as she arrived in Senegal on a flight repatriating citizens escaping the escalating conflict in Lebanon. His 14-year-old son was not with her — killed, he said, when their home was bombed.
As Israeli forces pounded southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs in a broadening offensive against Hezbollah, Hachem’s daughter Mariam, 11, who had suffered a broken foot, was among 117 Senegalese flown to Dakar on a government-organized flight.
“I lost everything. I lost my son. I lost my house. All my dreams,” he said, speaking amid emotional scenes outside the Leopold Sedar Senghor International Airport, where families were reunited with loved ones late on Saturday.
“We have a 14-and-a-half-year-old son who just disappeared like that. Ten minutes before, I was talking to him. ‘Hello?’ He said, ‘Dad, you’re going to come get me?’ I told him ‘yes’ ... Ten minutes later, they called me: ‘there’s no more house, no more son’.”
Senegal has a significant Lebanese diaspora community, and has historical ties to both Lebanon and Palestine.
“The Senegalese government, of course, is condemning the Israeli army’s bombardment in Lebanon, the bombardment of civilians... the destruction of infrastructure,” the country’s foreign minister, Yassine Fall, said in an interview with Reuters on Saturday evening.
She said there had been about 1,000 Senegalese nationals in Lebanon but that some had left by their own means before the repatriation flight.
Fall also highlighted her country’s longstanding relationship with the Palestinian people, dating back to 1975 when Senegal chaired the United Nations Committee for the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.
“We are very, very disappointed to see the world watching a genocide happen under our eyes, children being killed, children being shot in the head, hospitals being bombarded, sick people not being able to be evacuated, people in refugee camps that are not fighting, that are civilians, being maimed and killed,” she said in reference to the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
“So Senegal, with other countries, we are really side by side condemning this and calling it what it is: it is a genocide.”
Israel has strongly rejected accusations of genocide, including in a case brought by South Africa at the World Court.
It says it is acting in self-defense after an Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Palestinian Hamas militants. The Hamas attack killed 1,200 people with about 250 also taken as hostage, according to Israeli tallies, and triggered a conflict that has since spread from Gaza to Lebanon.
Earlier on Saturday, demonstrators marched through Dakar to protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon and call for a ceasefire in the widening Middle East conflict. (Reporting by Portia Crowe and Ngouda Dione; Editing by Alex Richardson)

IRBIL: Voters in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region will head to the polls on Sunday to elect a new parliament for the oil-rich region where voters express disenchantment with the political elite.
Iraqi Kurdistan presents itself as a relative oasis of stability in the turbulent Middle East, attracting foreign investors due to its close ties with the United States and Europe.
However, activists and opposition figures contend that the region, autonomous since 1991, faces the same issues affecting Iraq as a whole: corruption, political repression and cronyism among those in power.
Originally scheduled for two years ago, the vote has been postponed four times due to disputes between the region’s two historic parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
Each party is controlled by a powerful Kurdish family — the KDP by the Barzanis and the PUK by the Talabanis.
Despite holding election rallies and mobilizing their patronage networks, experts say there is widespread public disillusionment with the parties, exacerbated by the region’s bleak economic conditions.
“I am against this government,” said Dilman Sharif, a 47-year-old civil servant in Sulaimaniyah, the second-largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan and a stronghold of the PUK.
“I urge everyone to mobilize and vote against this regime,” he said before the election, saying he planned to vote for the opposition.
Opposition parties such as New Generation and a movement led by Lahur Sheikh Jangi, a dissident from the Talabani clan, may gain from a protest vote, said Sarteep Jawhar, a PUK dissident and political commentator.
More than 1,200 polling stations across four constituencies will open at 7:00 am (0400 GMT) and close at 6:00 pm.
Political analyst Shivan Fazil, a researcher at US-based Boston University with a focus on Iraq, noted that there was “a growing fatigue with the region’s two ruling parties.”
“People’s living conditions have deteriorated over the last decade,” he said, citing erratic payment of salaries for the region’s 1.2 million civil servants as problematic because the money serves as “a vital source of income for households.”
This issue is tied to ongoing tensions between Kurdistan and the federal Iraqi government in Baghdad. The two administrations have also disputed control of the region’s lucrative oil exports.
Turbulent elections
The creation of the four new constituencies for this election — a change from only one previously — “could lead to redistribution in vote shares and seats in the next parliament,” Fazil said.
He still predicted, however, that the KDP would maintain its majority due to its “internal discipline and cohesion.”
The KDP is the largest party in the outgoing parliament, with 45 seats against 21 for the PUK.
The KDP’s majority was assured by an alliance with deputies elected via a quota reserved for Turkmen, Armenian and Christian minorities.
Iraqi court rulings have reduced the number of seats in the Kurdish parliament from 111 to 100, but with five seats still reserved for the minorities.
Of the region’s six million inhabitants, 2.9 million are eligible to vote for the 100 representatives, including 30 women mandated by a quota.
In the last regional elections in 2018, voter turnout was 59 percent.
Once elected, the new representatives will need to vote for a new president and prime minister, with both roles currently filled by KDP figures Nechirvan Barzani and his cousin, Masrour Barzani.
Mohamed Al-Hassan, the United Nations special representative in Iraq, welcomed the election as an opportunity for the Kurdistan region to “reinvigorate democracy and inject new ideas into its institutions.”
However, 55-year-old teacher Sazan Saduala says she will boycott the election.
“This government cannot be changed by voting,” she said. “It maintains its power through force and money.”