Swedish telecoms giant Ericsson suspects some of its employees in Iraq may have bribed members of the ISIL (ISIS) armed group to gain access to certain roads in the country, the company’s chief executive has said.

Ericsson’s share price tumbled by more than seven percent in opening trade on Wednesday on the Stockholm stock exchange after the news.

“What we see is that people have paid for road transport through areas controlled by terrorist organisations, including ISIS,” Borje Ekholm told Swedish financial daily Dagens Industri.

“With the means we have, we haven’t been able to determine the final recipients of these payments,” he added.

Ekholm’s comments came hours after the company released a statement late on Tuesday admitting “serious breaches of compliance rules and the company’s code of business ethics” regarding Ericsson employees, vendors and suppliers in Iraq between 2011 and 2019.

It said an internal investigation conducted in 2019 had revealed “evidence of corruption-related misconduct”.

It included “making a monetary donation without a clear beneficiary; paying a supplier for work without a defined scope and documentation; using suppliers to make cash payments; funding inappropriate travel and expenses; and improper use of sales agents and consultants”.

In addition, it found violations of Ericsson’s internal financial controls, conflicts of interest, non-compliance with tax laws and obstruction of the investigation.

Ericsson said payment schemes and cash transactions that “potentially created the risk of money laundering were also identified” but “the investigation could not identify that any Ericsson employee was directly involved in financing terrorist organisations”.

Several employees left the company as a result of the probe, “and multiple other disciplinary and other remedial actions were taken”, Ericsson said in the statement.

The company said it had chosen to disclose details of the now two-year-old investigation due to “detailed media inquiries from Swedish and international news outlets”.

Swedish public broadcaster SVT said its investigative news show Uppdrag granskning had put questions to Ericsson, in collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Further measures

Ekholm told Dagens Industri that Ericsson had shared the conclusions of its investigation with authorities in the United States.

In 2019, Ericsson had agreed with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to pay more than $1bn to resolve a separate series of probes into corruption, including the bribing of government officials that took place over many years in countries including China, Vietnam and Djibouti.

In October last year, it received correspondence from the DoJ stating that the company breached its obligations under a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) by failing to provide certain documents and factual information.

When asked by Reuters news agency if Ericsson had disclosed its 2019 internal investigation to the DoJ, Ekholm said: “We are under the DPA with the US authorities which limits our ability to comment on what is disclosed or not disclosed.

“If new facts come to light or new information, we will for sure reopen the investigation and run it full speed ahead to investigate those matters,” Ekholm said.

Ericsson said it was working with external counsel to review the findings resulting from the investigation to identify any additional measures that it should take.

“We invested significant resources to complete the investigation, but as a company we have limited powers to investigate,” Ekholm said. “We tried to do the best we could, took guidance from external legal counsel and other external support.”

The Syrian Archive, a Berlin-based group that digitally monitors and documents human rights violations in Syria, released a report on Tuesday that indicates the use of new methods targeting anti-government rebels in the country, as well as civilians living under their rule.

The report, obtained exclusively by DW, details the bombing of the Arshani water pumping station in northwestern Syria, near the last enclave of opposition fighters in Idlib. Russian planes are suspected to be behind the strikes. Russia has backed the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad since the conflict started more than a decade ago.

The attack on the water pumping station, which took place on January 2 around midday, was widely reported at the time, but the Syrian Archive has since used open-source verification techniques and almost 100 pieces of visual evidence, including videos and pictures, to come up with a more complete picture of what happened that day.

The damaged water pump in Arshani village supplies about 225,000 people in Idlib. The area is home to around 2.8 million people, around half of whom fled fighting elsewhere but who don't want to live under the Assad regime.

About 1.7 million of them are internally displaced, and many live in tent cities that have sprung up around Idlib. Human Rights Watch has said that three-quarters of the population rely on regular humanitarian assistance because of damaged infrastructure and economic hardship.

'It's more than an attack'

Idlib is now mostly controlled by Islamist militia groups opposed to the Assad government. But in its report, the Syrian Archive showed that the water pumping station was far from any sites that could possibly be considered military targets.

"It's really in the middle of nowhere," said Hamoud, the Syrian Archive's primary researcher on the report. He preferred not to give his full name for security reasons.

In January, news agency Reuters and other media reported that eye witnesses said Russian warplanes had bombed the water station. The Syrian Archive cross-checked those reports with flight tracking data from various sources, all of which showed that a Russian plane, most likely a Russian Air Force Su-34, was in the area at the time of the attack.

Russia's Defense Ministry and the Russian Embassy in Syria did not respond to DW's request for a statement on the incident.

Two bombs were dropped, and one worker at the station was injured. According to DW's sources on the ground, the station has since been repaired and is working again.

It is likely that attacking infrastructure, like this water pump, is a tactic to pressure or force civilians to leave the area, Haneen, the Syrian Archive's project manager responsible for the report, told DW. She also did not give her full name for security reasons.

"It's more than an attack," Haneen said. "It has a significant negative impact on the possibility of life in such an area."

Haneen explained that such strikes worsen the already difficult humanitarian plight of Idlib's displaced people.

Targeting chickens

January's bombing is not an isolated incident, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) recently confirmed.

"At the start of 2022, there has been an increase in airstrikes on infrastructure, including farms and water pumping stations," UNOCHA noted in one of its most recent situation reports.

In particular, poultry farms had been targeted by Russian warplanes, the Syrian Civil Defense group — more commonly known as the White Helmets — said in a January 5 field report.

From November 11 through January 4, there were aerial attacks on seven farms around Idlib, the organization wrote. Most were poultry farms, but one also had cows. As a result, eight civilians were killed and 11 others wounded. Tens of thousands of chickens also died.

Bombing these farms "poses a threat to the incomes of hundreds of families," the Syrian Civil Defense said in its report. Destroying agricultural facilities also leads to a general rise in prices for basic goods, the organization noted, something that the millions of displaced Syrians in the area, many of whom do not have jobs, can hardly afford.

War crimes?

This is not the first time warplanes have targeted civilian infrastructure during the Syrian civil war. Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, recorded dozens of attacks on civilian infrastructure during a Syrian-Russian military campaign to retake opposition-held areas around Idlib beginning in April 2019.

That included attacks on schools, hospitals and even popular markets. In July 2019, a handful of attacks on water pumping stations and water tanks were also recorded.

An estimated 1,600 civilians were killed during the campaign, which only ended in March 2020, when Russia and Turkey, which supports opposition forces in the area, brokered a cease-fire for Idlib.

Attacks on civilian infrastructure appear to have increased again at the beginning of this year.

The bombing of the water station, and even the chicken farms, could potentially be prosecuted as war crimes in the future. International humanitarian law rules out deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure in armed conflict zones — that includes water pumping stations.

Tracking human rights violations

The same principle about not attacking civilian infrastructure could ostensibly apply to the farms in Idlib, said Anne Schroeter, a legal researcher and project coordinator at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, or ECCHR, based in Berlin.

"[Those attacks] could constitute war crimes if the farms can be seen as civilian objects or infrastructure, and they were not used for military purposes," said Schroeter, adding that recent Saudi airstrikes on farms, factories and warehouses in Yemen have also been described as possible war crimes.

Although Tuesday's report by the Syrian Archive would be helpful in encouraging prosecuting authorities to take a closer look at a war crime, it's not enough to base a whole case on, said Schroeter.

"These kinds of reports are helpful, but they need to be accompanied with additional material, which in turn will depend on the framework the specific investigation takes place in," she added.

The investigators at the Syrian Archive will now add their latest report to a database they are compiling, which already includes about 3.5 million videos.

"If this information can be used to prevent targeting like this in the future, it will be amazing," said project manager Haneen.

Multiple rockets fell in Erbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq on Sunday, the state news agency said quoting Erbil’s governor.

Missiles landed in the vicinity of the United States consulate reported Al Arabiya, adding that a “series of explosions” impacted the city following missile attacks, citing Kurdish sources.

The target of the attack remains unclear.

No casualties have been reported after missiles reportedly struck Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, Reuters reports citing the Iraq state news agency who is quoting the Kurdistan health minister.

There were no US military casualties following the attack, a US official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

According to the latest update, the projectiles used in the attack are reported to be Iran’s Fateh-110, according to Al Arabiya citing Kurdish sources.

A social media report from a journalist at Kurdistan24 claims that the attack has caused damage to the offices and studios of the broadcast news station in Erbil.

On January 28, at least three rockets landed in the Baghdad International Airport compound and near an adjacent US air base, damaging one disused civilian airplane, Iraqi police sources said.

The US air base, known as Camp Victory, is located around the perimeter of Baghdad’s civilian airport.

Rocket attacks which US and some Iraqi officials blame on Iran-backed militia groups who oppose the US military presence in the region have regularly hit the complex in recent years.

RIYADH, March 12 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia executed 81 men including seven Yemenis and one Syrian on Saturday, the interior ministry said, in the kingdom's biggest mass execution in decades.

The number dwarfed the 67 executions reported there in all of 2021 and the 27 in 2020.

Offences ranged from joining militant groups to holding "deviant beliefs", the ministry said in a statement.

"These individuals, totalling 81, were convicted of various crimes including murdering innocent men, women and children," the statement read.

"Crimes committed by these individuals also include pledging allegiance to foreign terrorist organisations, such as ISIS (Islamic State), al-Qaeda and the Houthis," it added.

The ministry did not say how the executions were carried out.

The men included 37 Saudi nationals who were found guilty in a single case for attempting to assassinate security officers and targeting police stations and convoys, the statement added.

The mass execution is likely to bring back attention to Saudi Arabia's human rights record at a time when world powers have been focused on Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Rights groups have accused Saudi Arabia of enforcing restrictive laws on political and religious expression, and criticised it for using the death penalty, including for defendants arrested when they were minors. read more

"There are prisoners of conscience on Saudi death row, and others arrested as children or charged with non-violent crimes," Soraya Bauwens, deputy director of anti-death penalty charity Reprieve, said in a statement.

"We fear for every one of them following this brutal display of impunity," she added.

Saudi Arabia denies accusations of human rights abuses and says it protects its national security through its laws.

The state SPA news agency said the accused were provided with the right to an attorney and were guaranteed their full rights under Saudi law during the judicial process.

The kingdom executed 63 people in one day in 1980, a year after militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, according to state media reports.

A total of 47 people, including prominent Shi’ite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr, were executed in one day in 2016.

President Joe Biden has been reluctantly drawn into closer ties with Saudi Arabia’s king-in-waiting, forced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to rethink a standoffish approach as the U.S. struggles to curb soaring oil prices.

The problem is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman isn’t ready to play along.

The softening U.S. attitude, described by a dozen people familiar with the debate, follows months of efforts by some senior administration officials to convince a wary president that ignoring the de facto Saudi leader was hampering U.S. foreign policy goals. The need to isolate Moscow gave new impetus to that push. One official described Russia’s aggression as a paradigm-shifting event that changes the way the U.S. looked at Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is the Middle East’s economic powerhouse and for years has been a political heavyweight in the region’s affairs and a dominant force in OPEC+ — a powerful alliance between the oil-exporters’ cartel and Russia. It’s also one of the biggest buyers of American weapons.

The shift is in part an admission that Biden backed himself into a corner during his presidential campaign by calling Saudi Arabia a “pariah,” a reflection of his revulsion over the 2018 murder of critic Jamal Khashoggi and a desire to retreat from his predecessor’s cozier relations. Donald Trump deployed his son-in-law Jared Kushner to work directly with MBS — as the prince is usually called — often to the exclusion of his own top diplomat.

Conversations with people in Riyadh and Washington paint a picture of an administration that recognizes it must maintain a decades-old partnership that’s guaranteed U.S. clout in the world’s top energy-exporting region and yet also wants to punish Prince Mohammed, 36, over his human rights record.

The Call

Three people familiar with the matter said the two sides were trying to arrange a call between Biden and the crown prince for the first time, but strains were now so deep that it would take time.

A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said Monday it “is categorically false” that the White House made a formal request for a call with the crown prince, and denied that the Saudis have rebuffed the president.

NSC spokeswoman Emily Horne added: “The president spoke with King Salman on February 9th. In that call, they set forth an affirmative bilateral agenda from climate, to security, to energy cooperation. Since that important call, our teams have been engaged at every level. There have been no discussions of subsequent calls at the president’s level given this regular and ongoing engagement.”

A U.S. official who asked not to be identified said the Saudis agree with the protocol of the president speaking with his counterpart, the king. The official also said Biden has been open to conversations with Prince Mohammed, noting that if the crown prince had come to Rome in October during the G-20 gathering, Biden would have met with him.

A Serious Challenge

Biden set himself up for a serious challenge after taking office in January 2021 by promising to reorient his foreign policy away from the Middle East and make human rights a greater priority. At the time, his spokeswoman said his counterpart was King Salman and phrased the shift as a “recalibration” in ties.

Yet the U.S. relies on Saudi Arabia for 7% of its oil imports, a number that won’t budge much unless it spurs more domestic output –- something progressives in Biden’s party would resist. Saudi Arabia is also an important regional counterbalance to Iran, whose armed proxies launch near-daily attacks on U.S. allies across the Middle East. Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthis struck six sites in the kingdom as recently as Sunday, including some operated by state oil giant Aramco.

Biden’s cold shoulder has been particularly poorly received as he seeks to revive the 2015 nuclear accord that would hand the Islamic Republic an oil windfall without addressing such security concerns.

Saudi View

Saudi Arabia said in a statement Monday it refused to be held responsible for any shortage of oil on global markets as long as its energy facilities face attack from Iranian-backed Houthis, urging the international community to do more to secure supplies.

Now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine adds further complication. It has contributed to soaring gasoline prices, which the Biden administration is eager to bring down before voters head into midterm elections that could hand control of Congress to the Republicans.

But rebuilding ties won’t be easy. Biden’s decision to bypass Prince Mohammed and deal only with his aging father is seen in Riyadh as a personal insult — one that won’t be forgiven overnight.

The country’s leaders also resent the attention the U.S. has lavished on their tiny neighbor Qatar, and have griped that the U.S. only calls when it needs a favor.

This time, Saudi Arabia –- along with Israel and the United Arab Emirates — want the U.S. to address longer-term concerns over Iran’s support for armed groups and offer lasting security guarantees before they rally behind Biden’s effort to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin and relieve energy markets.

In a sign the message is filtering through, the U.S. condemned the latest attacks, with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan pledging the U.S. would “fully support our partners in the defense of their territory.”

The U.S. had transferred a significant number of Patriot anti-missiles interceptors to Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, acting on urgent requests amid tensions in the relationship, according to an official familiar.

One U.S. official said they’re having ongoing discussions on oil and the administration believes they’re heading to good place on price pressure cooperation.

In a recent interview with the Atlantic, when asked if Biden misunderstands him, the crown prince responded “simply, I do not care,” adding that it was “up to him to think about the interests of America.” Of the idea of alienating Saudi Arabia, he replied, “go for it.”

Administration officials are debating whether those remarks were just posturing or a genuine shift in outlook by Saudi Arabia, which has built deeper ties with Russia and China as the U.S. has sought to shift focus from the region. Even as those ties grow, most officials argue that the Saudis recognize Beijing is no substitute for Washington.

One person familiar with the administration’s stance, who asked not to be named, described Prince Mohammed as pouting, a characterization indicative of U.S. attitude to a key ally at a time of international crisis.

“It’s not going well and it’s not likely to go well,” Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “There’s a strong tendency in American foreign policy to expect everybody else to drop what they’re doing, and immediately turn their attention to helping us address whatever we’re worried about.”

The Saudi Foreign Ministry and government communications center didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the kingdom’s relationship with the U.S. or potential for a call with Biden.

The Holdouts

People familiar with the matter said the biggest holdouts to softening the U.S. approach have been the president and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Biden, according to people familiar, is concerned about blowback in Washington, including from congressional Democrats who’ve lambasted him as too soft, and from the Washington Post, the influential newspaper that published Khashoggi’s columns.

Blinken frets that MBS is still doing things that warrant condemnation. The kingdom recently executed 81 people and civilian casualties have mounted in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been bombing the Houthis since they dislodged the internationally-recognized government in 2015.

Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, describing in an interview his call with Blinken, said that the U.S. diplomat “acknowledged the limitations that the government faces of their countervailing values and interests.”

Just as Biden may have run too hard away from the Saudis early in his tenure, now some in Washington worry he may overcompensate in the rush to align partners against Putin.

“It’s all fine and good to argue that we need to work with bad actors against even worse actors,” said Matt Duss, senior foreign policy adviser to Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders. “But we should remember that this was the same logic that led the U.S. to treat Vladimir Putin as a partner in the War on Terror.”

SHADADI, Syria — In the countryside around this market town, people prefer not to travel after dark. Rumors abound that militants stalk the roads then. Three years after the defeat of its self-declared caliphate, the Islamic State group is reconstituting itself in the Syrian shadows, and few villagers want to test their luck.

“It’s not safe out there,” said Khalifa Salim al-Jeddal, 64, his grave expression framed with deep wrinkles from years in the sun. “There are places I know I can’t just get in my car and drive to. There are sleeper cells.”

A farmer from the nearby village of Jallo, Jeddal knows the risks more than many. The militants tortured him when they ruled his village, he said. Now they’re growing in confidence again, sometimes wearing military fatigues that make them indistinguishable at a distance from the area’s U.S.-backed security forces.

This is the Islamic State in 2022. No longer holding territory, as the group did until 2019, but lying low in small groups, operating with increasing sophistication and exploiting the breathing spaced afforded by Syria’s fractured politics to rebuild. They are also taking advantage of the local Kurdish-led administration’s struggles to fully govern the broad swath of northeastern Syria it has come to control since the fall of the caliphate, recruiting informants from impoverished communities and intimidating individuals who work with local government.

The dangers were dramatically underlined last month when hundreds of Islamic State fighters assaulted a prison holding suspected militants in the northeastern city of Hasakah. American and British special forces were forced to join the 10-day battle to recapture it. More than 500 people died, about three quarters of them ISIS members, according to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

“These cells came from different places,” said Mazloum Kobane, who leads the U.S.-backed SDF in northeastern Syria. “They spread out people in neighborhoods around the prison to create chaos as soon as the attack began.”

As the violence unfolded in Hasakah, militants were carrying out attacks elsewhere in northeastern Syria.

At a rural checkpoint in Deir al-Zour province, Yasser was partway through another freezing night shift as a member of the region’s internal Kurdish-led security forces when he saw six men on motorcycles coursing down the otherwise empty road toward him. Two of them had suicide vests strapped to their chests, recounted Yasser, who described the event on the condition that his last name not be used because of safety concerns. He would later learn that similar attacks had unfolded at two other checkpoints.

As some members of Yasser’s unit fled the ensuing gun battle, no one in the village offered them shelter.

“People were whispering through the doors, telling us: ‘Please go. We can’t open the door for you,’” Yasser recalled. “They said, ‘If ISIS finds out, they will kill us.’”

The militants have taken advantage of Syria’s political divisions to rebuild their fighting capabilities. Under pressure from the SDF and the U.S.-led military coalition, some Islamic State cells had retreated in 2019 from northeastern Syria to territory controlled by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, where operations against the group were less sustained. Then, after the militants came under fire there, they slipped back into the Kurdish-led region.

“They had moved people to a more viable front for survival, and that was central Syria. Now the most viable front again is the northeast,” said Gregory Waters, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute.

Mazloum and other SDF officials noted that some of the attackers in Hasakah appeared to have spent time in ISIS training camps in areas controlled by Assad’s forces, and the militants who returned to northeastern Syria have demonstrated a greater ability to carry out complex attacks.

In the past, Kurdish officials had said there was little coordination among the small sleeper cells operating in the northeast. But officials suggested after the Hasakah assault that it had involved three separate cells operating with high-level coordination and that there had been a centralized decision to carry out the attack.

Waters said that the Islamic State in Syria has again become capable of carrying out sophisticated operations. The group has developed “a slimmer, centralized core of veteran fighters who are linked into broader regional networks planning less-frequent but larger, more-complex attacks, while the more peripheral, decentralized cells carry out the day-to-day low-level insurgency,” he said.

Intelligence gathered in U.S. surveillance of Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi in the months before he was killed in an American raid on Feb. 3 indeed indicated that he had stayed in touch with a network of underground cells in parts of Syria and Iraq.

Qurayshi’s death is likely to “disorient” the Islamic State group and reduce its effectiveness, at least for the time being, according to Hassan Hassan, the editor in chief of New Lines magazine. “For now, the group is in a weakened state, but that is not the same as not being dangerous,” Hassan said. He said that Qurayshi did not have wide appeal and that the selection of a new leader could enhance the “group’s odds at energizing its base and appealing to new people.”

As some Islamic State cells have returned to northeastern Syria, the SDF has found itself with less visibility into their operations than before. For one thing, it has little insight into militants’ activities in adjacent areas held by the Syrian government west of the Euphrates River or Turkish-backed forces in the north, and sometimes in neighboring Iraq.

“Everyone’s working in silo,” said Dareen Khalifa, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Islamic State militants have also capitalized on the Kurdish-led administration’s struggles to govern in majority-Arab areas that have fallen under its rule. Arab residents have protested over poor public services and what they describe as arbitrary detentions during anti-ISIS raids.

The militants exploit this discontent, paying some residents small sums to be informants, for instance supplying information about the activity of community leaders or the movement of security forces. In some cases, insurgents have intimidated and even killed people who cooperate with local government. As a result, Khalifa said, local authorities are finding it harder to generate intelligence about militant activities. “Some people don’t think [local] forces are capable of protecting them,” she said.

SDF officials point in particular to the region’s sprawling, ramshackle camps housing thousands of people displaced from their homes by fighting and poverty, where the militants might try to make inroads. Several dozen camp residents have been arrested in recent months, the SDF said, accused of offering support to the Islamic State in return for cash.

“ISIS is taking advantage of the poverty in this region,” said Farhad Shami, a spokesman for the SDF. “They have tried to use displaced people as a weapon,” he said.

The conditions in many of the camps are dire. Residents are at times short of bread and other food, wear threadbare clothes and burn trash for warmth against the winter cold.

Camps around the city of Raqqa, once the capital of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate, have swelled in recent years as climate change and drought have accelerated the immiseration of tens of thousands of pastoralists who say they have had no choice but to migrate toward cities in search of work.

But once they arrive, they find few opportunities. Many live in grinding poverty. For local notables and tribal elders who have acted as brokers between their communities and the SDF, the arrival of so many strangers has also limited visibility into what happens among the newcomers.