NIAMEY, Niger: Niger’s army said on Thursday it had recovered four lorries used by Moroccan drivers who went missing near the border with Burkina Faso, in an area where militants operate.
Four Moroccan truckers were reported missing in mid-January and have not been found.
The army said in its latest bulletin that the drivers “were abducted by unidentified individuals on January 18” on the road linking Tera in western Niger to Dori in northeastern Burkina.
It said that during a reconnaissance operation in the Tera area last week, soldiers had recovered the lorries and taken them back to the capital Niamey as part of the probe into the incident.
The vehicles were carrying equipment destined for Niger’s state power company NIGELEC and had been traveling “without a security escort.”
The army said it would intensify search and reconnaissance missions in the region and monitor sensitive border areas in collaboration with neighboring Mali and Burkina.
The leaders of the three west African nations formed a defense pact known as the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) after seizing power in coups between 2020 and 2023 and leaving the region’s main political and trade group ECOWAS.
Missing Moroccan drivers’ lorries found in Sahel conflict area
https://arab.news/8nb8r
Missing Moroccan drivers’ lorries found in Sahel conflict area
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- Four Moroccan truckers were reported missing in mid-January and have not been found.
- The army said in its latest bulletin that the drivers “were abducted by unidentified individuals on January 18“
Bibas mother confirmed dead as Gaza hostage-prisoner swap set to go ahead
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- Red Cross had earlier confirmed the transfer of more human remains to Israel
- Militant group Hamas affirms its ‘full commitment’ to the ongoing ceasefire deal
Bibas and her two young sons, whose bodies were returned by Hamas to Israel on Thursday, had become symbols of the ordeal suffered by Israeli hostages since the Gaza war began.
Hamas had said the mother’s remains were among those returned Thursday, but Israeli analysis concluded they were not in fact hers, sparking an outpouring of grief and anger.
“Kibbutz Nir Oz announces with deep pain and sorrow the murder of Shiri Bibas, of blessed memory, who was abducted from her home on October 7 and killed in captivity in Gaza,” her community said in a statement, adding “she will be laid to rest in the land of Israel alongside her two young sons.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross had earlier confirmed the transfer of more human remains to Israel “at the request of both parties” but did not say whose they were.
On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “ensure that Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement” and accused the Palestinian militant group of murdering young Ariel and Kfir Bibas.
The group admitted “the possibility of an error or mix-up of bodies,” which it attributed to Israeli bombing of the area.
Hamas also affirmed its “full commitment” to the ongoing ceasefire deal, which has so far seen 19 living Israeli hostages freed from Gaza in exchange for more than 1,100 Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli jails.
The group’s armed wing confirmed it would release six living Israelis Saturday in the seventh swap since the ceasefire began.
They are the last living hostages eligible for release under the truce deal’s first phase, which is due to expire in early March. Hamas has also promised to hand over four more bodies next week.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club advocacy group said Friday that Israel would free 602 inmates on Saturday as part of the exchange.
A spokeswoman for the NGO said that 445 were Gazans arrested after the war began, while 60 were serving long sentences, 50 were serving life sentences and 47 were re-arrested after being freed in a 2011 prisoner exchange.
She added that 108 of the prisoners would be deported outside of Israel and the Palestinian territories after their release.
Military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said after an analysis of the remains that Palestinian militants had killed the Bibas boys “with their bare hands.”
Hamas, however, has long maintained an Israeli air strike killed them and their mother early in the war.
Shiri’s sister-in-law, Ofri Bibas, said Friday that the family was “not seeking revenge right now,” while levelling a measure of the blame at Netanyahu, telling him there would be “no forgiveness” for abandoning the mother and her young sons.
A fourth body, that of Oded Lifshitz, a veteran journalist and long-time defender of Palestinian rights, was also returned Thursday.
Hamas and its allies took 251 people hostage during the October 7 attack that sparked the war. There are 67 hostages still in Gaza, including more than 30 the Israeli military has said are dead.
The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,214 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally until Friday of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 48,319 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory that the United Nations considers reliable.
Syria’s new president meets Chinese envoy for first time since Assad’s fall
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- Syria’s state news agency SANA reported Sharaa’s meeting with Ambassador Shi Hongwei but gave no details of what was discussed
DAMASCUS: Syria’s new President Ahmed Al-Sharaa met China’s ambassador to Damascus in the first public engagement between the two countries since the overthrow of Bashar Assad in December, Syrian state media said on Friday.
China, which backed Assad, saw its embassy in Damascus looted after his fall, and Syria’s new Islamist rulers have installed some foreign fighters including Uyghurs, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority in China that Western rights groups say has been persecuted by Beijing, into the Syrian armed forces. Beijing has denied accusations of abuses against Uyghurs.
Syria’s state news agency SANA reported Sharaa’s meeting with Ambassador Shi Hongwei but gave no details of what was discussed.
The decision to give official roles, some at senior level, to several Islamist militants could alarm foreign governments and Syrian citizens fearful of the new administration’s intentions, despite its pledges not to export Islamic revolution and to rule with tolerance for Syria’s large minority groups.
In 2015, Chinese authorities said many Uyghurs who had fled to Turkiye via Southeast Asia planned to bring jihad back to China, saying some were involved in “terrorism activities.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping had vowed to support Assad against external interference. He offered the veteran Syrian leader a rare break from years of international isolation since the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011 when he accorded him and his wife a warm welcome during a visit to China in 2023.
Assad was toppled a year later in a swift offensive by a coalition of rebels led by the Sharaa-led Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), a former Al-Qaeda affiliate, that ended 54 years of Assad family rule.
Syrian Jews hope for revival of ancient heritage
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- Syria’s millennia-old Jewish community was permitted to practice their faith under Assad’s father, Hafez, and had friendly relations with their fellow countrymen
DAMASCUS: Syria’s tiny Jewish community and Syrian Jews abroad are trying to build bridges after Bashar Assad’s ouster in the hope of reviving their ancient heritage before the community dies out.
This week, a small number of Jews living in Damascus, along with others from abroad, held a group prayer for the first time in more than three decades, in the Faranj synagogue in Damascus’s Old City.
“There were nine of us Jews (in Syria). Two died recently,” community leader Bakhour Chamntoub told AFP in his home in the Old City’s Jewish quarter.
“I’m the youngest. The rest are elderly people who stay in their homes,” the tailor in his sixties added in a thick Damascus accent.
After Islamist-led rebels finally toppled Assad in December last year after nearly 14 years of conflict, the country’s dwindling community has recently welcomed back several Syrian Jews who had emigrated.
Syria’s millennia-old Jewish community was permitted to practice their faith under Assad’s father, Hafez, and had friendly relations with their fellow countrymen.
But the strongman restricted their movement and prevented them from traveling abroad until 1992. After that, their numbers plummeted from around 5,000 to just a handful of individuals, headed by Chamntoub, who oversees their affairs.
AFP correspondents met with Chamntoub, known to neighbors and friends as “Eid,” after he returned from burying an elderly Jewish woman.
“Now there are seven of us,” he said, adding that a Palestinian neighbor had looked after the woman during her final days.
The 1967 Arab-Israeli war cast a heavy cloud over the Jewish communities in several Arab countries.
Syria lost most of the strategic Golan Heights to Israel, which later annexed them in a move never recognized by the international community as a whole.
Chamntoub said the community did not experience any “harassment” under Bashar Assad’s rule.
He said an official from the new Islamist-led administration had visited him and assured him the community and its properties would not be harmed.
Chamntoub expressed hope of expanding ties between the remaining Jews in Syria and the thousands living abroad to revive their shared heritage and restore places of worship and other properties.
On his Facebook page, he publishes news about the community — usually death notices — as well as images of the Jewish quarter and synagogues in Damascus.
He says nostalgic Syrian Jews abroad often make comments, recalling the district and its surroundings.
At the Faranj synagogue, Syrian-American Rabbi Yusuf Hamra, 77, led what he said was the first group prayer in decades.
“I was the last rabbi to leave Syria,” he said, adding that he had lived in the United States for more than 30 years.
“We love this country,” said Hamra, who arrived days earlier on his first visit since emigrating.
“The day I left Syria with my family, I felt I was a tree that had been uprooted,” he said.
His son Henry, traveling with him, said he was happy to be in the synagogue.
“This synagogue was the home for all Jews — it was the first stop for Jews abroad when they would visit Syria,” the 47-year-old said.
When war erupted in Syria in 2011 with Assad’s brutal suppression of anti-government protests, synagogues shuttered and the number of Jews visiting plummeted.
In the now devastated Damascus suburb of Jobar, a historic synagogue that once drew pilgrims from around the world was ransacked and looted, with a Torah scroll believed to be one of the world’s oldest among the items stolen.
Chamntoub said his joy at publicly worshipping in the Faranj synagogue again was “indescribable.”
He expressed hope that “Jews will return to their neighborhood and their people” in Syria, saying: “I need Jews with me in the neighborhood.”
Hamra said that like many emigrants, he was hesitant about returning permanently.
“My freedom is one thing, my family ties are another,” he said, noting that many in the 100,000-strong diaspora were long established in the West and reluctant to give up their lives and lifestyles there.
Chamntoub said many Jews had told him they regretted leaving Syria but that he doesn’t expect “a full return.”
“Maybe they will come for trips or to do business” but not to stay, he said.
He expressed hope of establishing a museum in Syria to commemorate its Jewish community.
“If they don’t return or get married and have children here, we will end soon,” he said.
Syria’s national dialogue conference is in flux amid pressure for a political transition
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- Al-Daghim said the decisions taken in the meeting of former rebel factions in January dealt with “security issues that concern the life of every citizen” and “these sensitive issues could not be postponed” to wait for an inclusive process
DAMASCUS, Syria: An official with the committee preparing a national dialogue conference in Syria to help chart the country’s future said Friday that it has not been decided whether the conference will take place before or after a new government is formed.
The date of the conference has not been set and the timing “is up for discussion by the citizens,” Hassan Al-Daghim, spokesperson for the committee, told The Associated Press in an interview in Damascus on Friday.
“If the transitional government is formed before the national dialogue conference, this is normal,” he said. On the other hand, he said, “the caretaker government may be extended until the end of the national dialogue.”
The conference will focus on drafting a constitution, the economy, transitional justice, institutional reform and how the authorities deal with Syrians, Al-Daghim said. The outcome of the national dialogue will be non-binding recommendations to the country’s new leaders.
“However, these recommendations are not only in the sense of advice and formalities,” Al-Daghim said. “They are recommendations that the president of the republic is waiting for in order to build on them.”
After former President Bashir Assad was toppled in a lightning rebel offensive in December, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, or HTS, the main former rebel group now in control of Syria, set up an interim administration comprising mainly of members of its “salvation government” that had ruled in northwestern Syria.
They said at the time that a new government would be formed through an inclusive process by March. In January, former HTS leader Ahmad Al-Sharaa was named Syria’s interim president after a meeting of most of the country’s former rebel factions. The groups agreed to dissolve the country’s constitution, the former national army, security service and official political parties.
The armed groups present at the meetings also agreed to dissolve themselves and for their members to be absorbed into the new national army and security forces. Notably absent was the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which holds sway in northeastern Syria.
There has been international pressure for Al-Sharaa to follow through on promises of an inclusive political transition. UN special envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen said this week that formation of a “new inclusive government” by March 1 could help determine whether Western sanctions are lifted as the country rebuilds.
Al-Daghim said the decisions taken in the meeting of former rebel factions in January dealt with “security issues that concern the life of every citizen” and “these sensitive issues could not be postponed” to wait for an inclusive process.
In recent weeks, the preparatory committee has been holding meetings in different parts of Syria to get input ahead of the main conference. Al-Daghim said that in those meetings, the committee had heard a broad consensus on the need for “transitional justice and unity of the country.”
“There was a great rejection of the issue of quotas, cantons, federalization or anything like this,” he said.
But he said there was “disagreement on the order of priorities.” In the coastal cities of Latakia and Tartous, for instance, many were concerned about the low salaries paid to government workers, while in Idlib and suburbs of Damascus that saw vast destruction during nearly 14 years of civil war, reconstruction was the priority.
The number of participants to be invited to the national conference has not yet been determined and may range from 400 to 1,000, Al-Daghim said, and could include religious leaders, academics, artists, politicians and members of civil society, including some of the millions of Syrians displaced outside the country.
The committee has said that the dialogue would include members of all of Syria’s communities but that people affiliated with Assad’s government and armed groups that refuse to dissolve and join the national army — chief among them the SDF — would not be invited.
Al-Daghim said Syria’s Kurds would be part of the conference even if the SDF is not.
“The Kurds are a component of the people and founders of the Syrian state,” he said. “They are Syrians wherever they are.”
Thousands of supporters of Hezbollah’s slain leader Nasrallah fly into Beirut for his funeral
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- Crowds are expected to gather on Sunday at Beirut’s main sports stadium for a funeral ceremony before Nasrallah’s interment
BEIRUT: Nearly five months after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike, thousands of supporters of the longtime leader of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group have flown into Beirut for Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral on Sunday.
Nasrallah was killed on Sept. 27 when Israel’s air force dropped more than 80 bombs on Hezbollah’s main operations room in southern Beirut. It was the biggest and most consequential of Israel’s targeted killings in years.
The death of Nasrallah, one of the Iran-backed Shiite group’s founders and Hezbollah’s leader of more than 30 years, was a huge blow to the group he had transformed into a potent force in the Middle East.
Hezbollah, which the US and some of its allies has designated a terrorist organization, has suffered significant losses in the latest war with Israel, including the killing of several of its most senior military and political figures.
His cousin and successor Hashem Safieddine, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb a few days later, will be laid to rest in his hometown in southern Lebanon. The two had temporarily been buried in secret locations. Hezbollah earlier this month announced plans for their official funerals.
Crowds are expected to gather on Sunday at Beirut’s main sports stadium for a funeral ceremony before Nasrallah’s interment.
Flights from Iraq, where Hezbollah has a huge following among Iraqi Shiites, have been full for days on end. According to an Iraqi transportation ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the flights, up to 6,000 people have flown to Beirut over the past days.
Among those who arrived from overseas was also American commentator Jackson Hinkle, who regularly spreads false information on social media, especially in support of Russia and its war on Ukraine.
“I am honored to be attending the funeral,” Hinkle posted on the social media platform X after arriving this week in Beirut.
Hinkle posted a photo of himself visiting a war-wrecked southern Lebanese border village, waving a Hezbollah flag.
Nasrallah, idolized by his supporters and with large followings among the Shiites and the Islamic world, also held the title of sayyid, an honorific meant to signify the Shiite cleric’s lineage dating back to the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam.
However, Lebanese authorities have revoked permission for a passenger plane from Iran, leaving dozens who had wanted to attend the funeral stranded in Tehran and triggering protests by Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon.
The ban came after the Israeli army accused Iran of smuggling cash to Hezbollah by way of civilian flights, leading some in Lebanon to allege that their government had caved in the face of a threat from Israel.
Some of those who were expected to fly in from Iran were now coming to Lebanon via Iraq. Also, members of Iran-backed groups in the region also were traveling to Beirut to attend Nasrallah’s funeral.
Kazim Al-Fartousi, spokesman for the Iran-backed Kataib Sayyid Al-Shuhada group in Iraq, arrived on Friday. He said Nasrallah was “the father, commander and the book that we read every day to learn about freedom.”
US Republican Rep. Joe Wilson criticized Lebanese politicians who were planning to attend the funeral.
“Any Lebanese politician who attends the funeral of the murderous terrorist Hasan Nasrallah is standing with the Iranian Regime,” Wilson said on X.