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Okay, every topic that has even remotely to do with the middle east keeps getting more general news put into it which removes focus from the original topic.

As such, I'm creating this thread as a general middle east and north africa topic. That means anything to do with the Arab Spring, Israel or Palestine should be kept to those threads and anything to do with more generic news (for example, new Saudi regulations on the number of foreign workers or the Lebanese elections next year, etc.) should be posted here.

I hope the mods will find this a clear enough statement of intent to open the thread.

Mod edit: The Israel and Palestine thread has been locked since October 2023. Discussion about Palestine and/or Israel remains off-topic for this thread. This also bans discussion of any military conflict, terrorism or extrajudicial actions involving one of them and a third country (e.g. Israel's air strikes in Yemen).

Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 28th 2024 at 12:26:59 PM

AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
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#2152: Jul 27th 2022 at 10:05:55 AM

AP: Protesters enter Iraqi parliament, chant curses against Iran.

    Article 
BAGHDAD (AP) — Hundreds of Iraqi protesters breached Baghdad’s parliament Wednesday, chanting curses against Iran, in a protest against the selection of a nominee for prime minister by Iran-backed parties.

Many protesters were followers of an influential cleric. Some were seen walking on tables and waving Iraqi flags.

No lawmakers were present. Only security forces were inside the building and they appeared to allow the protesters in with relative ease.

The breach came amid the biggest protest since Iraqi elections were held in October. The demonstrators were protesting the recent nomination of Mohammed al-Sudani as the official nominee of the Coordination Framework bloc, a coalition led by Iran-backed Shiite parties and their allies.

Earlier Wednesday, demonstrators, many among them the followers of an influential cleric, breached Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone to protest the selection of a nominee for prime minister by Iran-backed parties.

Riot police used water cannons to repel demonstrators pulling down cement blast walls. But many breached the gates to the area, which houses government buildings and foreign embassies.

The demonstrators walked down the zone’s main thoroughfare, with dozens gathering outside the doors to the parliament building.

Riot police assembled at the doors to the main gates. Demonstrators crowded around two entrances to the Green Zone, with some scaling the cement wall and chanting, “Sudani, out!”

Caretaker Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi called for calm and restraint, and for protesters to “immediately withdraw” from the area.

The demonstrators were largely followers of influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who recently stepped down from the political process despite having won the most seats in the October federal election. Protesters carried portraits of the cleric.

In 2016, al-Sadr supporters stormed the parliament in a similar fashion. They staged a sit-in and issued demands for political reform after then-Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi sought to replace party-affiliated ministers with technocrats in an anti-corruption drive.

Al-Sudani was selected by State of Law leader and former premier Nouri al-Maliki. Before al-Sudani can face parliament to be seated officially as premier-designate, parties must first select a president.

Al-Sadr exited government formation talks after he was not able to corral enough lawmakers to get the majority required to elect Iraq’s next president.

By replacing his lawmakers, the Framework leader pushed ahead to form next government. Many fear doing so also opens the doors to street protests organized by al-Sadr’s large grass roots following and instability.

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
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#2153: Aug 4th 2022 at 3:40:57 PM

Guardian: Spiritual union: why Gulf migrants are turning to evangelical Christianity.

    Article 
Evangelical Christianity is quietly flourishing among migrant groups in the Gulf as churches provide low-paid workers facing horrific abuse with aid in times of crisis, according to pastors and parishioners across the region.

About 30 million migrant workers live in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – the muscle transforming oil-based economies into glittering 21st-century metropolises.

In some Gulf states, migrants make up most of the population, and about 80% are employed in construction, hospitality and domestic jobs.

The Guardian has interviewed pastors and parishioners of churches in all six Gulf countries and found that migrants, including those from Hindu and Catholic communities, are converting to Pentecostalism, one of the fastest-growing religions on Earth with more than 600 million followers.

To cope materially and spiritually, many attend Pentecostal churches because they focus on people’s needs in the here and now – namely health and wealth – as well as the ever after.

Pastor John, who like everyone spoken to for this article asked to use a pseudonym as Gulf governments are suspicious of Christian movements and proselytising is often illegal, said his church was helping migrants who faced exploitation, financial hardship, domestic servitude and sexual abuse.

“Rape is a very, very common problem across the entire domestic help industry,” the pastor said. “And it’s not just females – males come to us because they get raped as well.”

Pentecostal churches tend to bring in people from ethnic and national groups whose governments are reluctant to take up cases of human rights violations with wealthy Gulf states for fear they will damage generous aid and trade packages.

Instead, spirit-led churches like this have become de facto unions for migrant workers, often acting as their first point of call in a crisis.

“If you go to the embassy, they will talk to your employer and get the local police involved,” the pastor said. “That’s a very intimidating situation for your normal person. In my experience, most of the brethren that face those challenges are labourers and they are very, very vulnerable to abuse.”

In cases of rape, the pastor said, the person would contact the church first, which would then coordinate with the embassy to arrange a way to escape.

“They have this special rescue team that communicates to get out of the building at a certain time and the car would be waiting for her,” the pastor said. “Obviously, in order for her to be able to trust this process, it needs to be arranged through someone who she actually knows – usually, that’s a church.”

Due to secrecy around conversion in the Gulf, the exact number of Christians in the region is not possible to ascertain, but church leaders and researchers agree there are significant numbers of migrant workers converting in Gulf countries. While they are expressly forbidden from proselytising to Muslims, it is understood that some Islamic workers choose to be “born again”.

In Qatar, home to 2.1 million migrant workers who make up about 75% of the population, Google Maps lists scores of Pentecostal churches. Yet, as with other Gulf nations, many churches choose to remain as underground “house” churches for fear that conditions may change.

At one such house church, which tells only trusted people its location via a WhatsApp dropped pin and a compound door left slightly ajar, the sisterhood is working overtime. On a hot Friday morning, a women’s apostle network explained how they had tried to look after rape victims.

“If an unmarried woman shows up [pregnant] in hospital, they will look for her marriage contract. If she can’t show anything, she is reported to the police and put in jail – and they’ll take her children,” said one of the group’s leaders, who asked to be called Sister Mary.

“Let’s just say that some churches have helped to hide the kids from the police. The pastor’s wife will look after them and she will try to get out while her tummy is still small. But you can’t hide kids for long.”

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
Ominae Since: Jul, 2010
#2154: Aug 12th 2022 at 9:10:14 AM

Related since it's Salman Rushdie (and Iran giving him the fatwa), but he was attacked in NY while giving a talk.

eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
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#2155: Aug 15th 2022 at 8:37:02 PM

Bloomberg: World Cup Demand Surge Sees Some Qatar Landlords Bump Rents 40%.

    Article 
World Cup host Qatar has tried everything from cruise ships, desert camps and regional shuttle flights to ensure a limited supply of accommodation can meet an expected 1.2 million visitors during the month-long tournament. Local landlords have a simpler plan — raise the rent.

Residents in popular neighborhoods say they’re being forced to agree to rent hikes of as much as 40% and contract periods stretching two years. Faced with rents they can no longer afford, some residents say they’ve been forced to move even after years of tenancy.

Many hotels have been forced to get long-term occupants to vacate and make room for teams and officials, leaving residents with few options in a country that has an 88% expatriate population and low rates of home ownership.

That’s helped engineer a turnaround in the property market after more than seven years of slumping demand, when entire buildings sat vacant as new residential, commercial and hospitality supply poured into the market.

First-quarter rents rose 3.3%, helped by the recent surge in demand, according to data compiled by ValuStrat, while average prices on the Pearl — an artificial island neighborhood popular with white-collar expats — surged 19%. Housing was the second-biggest contributor to a June inflation rate of 5.4% in Qatar, where costs are climbing faster than any other Gulf Arab state.

FIFA alone has reserved thousands of rooms in hotels and their attached residences for players, staffers and other officials. Local organizers have also struck deals with property owners to earmark about 60,000 apartments for fans.

Landlords are eager to benefit. An Airbnb search shows most one-bedroom apartments in the Pearl advertised at more than $1,000 a night during the tournament. These apartments currently rent for an average of 9,500 riyals ($2,580) per month, according to ValuStrat, up from 8,000 riyals in the fourth quarter.

A Qatari government official said the country’s real estate rental market “caters to a range of preferences and budgets” and that with “increased demand for accommodation during the World Cup, landlords and tenants are required by law to observe the terms and conditions of their lease agreement.”

Temporary Blip

“This is, to my mind, a relatively temporary blip caused by the World Cup and its related effects,” Commercial Bank of Qatar Chief Executive Officer Joseph Abraham said in a Bloomberg TV interview last month. After the World Cup, “you’ll see that pressure come off rentals — as there will be increased supply too — so that component of the inflationary index will come down,” he said.

Even with the recent surge, the Qatar Central Bank’s index of real estate prices is 30% lower than it was in 2015. And beyond the World Cup, the future of Qatar’s economy outside oil and gas is uncertain.

The government expects the population of low-income laborers to decline after the major World Cup projects have been completed, but it’s not clear how many white-collar residents will also leave.

A massive LNG expansion project could draw new talent, but QatarEnergy CEO Saad Sherida Al Kaabi estimated that the number of new people needed to support the project was likely to number in the tens, not hundreds, of thousands.


Washington Post: A man took hostages at a bank in Lebanon. People came to support him.

    Article 
BEIRUT — An armed man took hostages at a bank branch in Beirut on Thursday, quickly becoming a folk hero for a tired and angry nation.

A man identified as Bassam al-Sheikh Hussein entered the Federal Bank of Lebanon in the Hamra neighborhood with a can of gasoline, threatening to set himself on fire if he couldn’t access the money in his account, amounting to about $210,000. He later brandished a rifle, leading to hours of tense hostage negotiations.

As the day wore on, a crowd gathered outside the bank to cheer him on. “Give him his money, give him his money,” they shouted in unison, pressing up against a line of soldiers.

The incident reflected a deep frustration in Lebanon over an ever-worsening economic crisis. Since 2019, there have been ad hoc limits on the amount of hard currency depositors can withdraw, an effort to avoid a run on the banks and a collapse of the financial system. The policy has led to waves of nationwide protests, demanding accountability for the country’s dynastic political class and an end to endemic corruption.

But the country has only sunk deeper into economic malaise, with the pound losing more than 20 times its value against the U.S. dollar since 2019. The World Food Programme estimates 46 percent of Lebanese households don’t have enough to eat.

Al-Sheikh Hussein burst into the bank saying he needed the money in his account to pay his father’s medical bills, a claim later corroborated by his brother. Banks currently allow depositors to take out a maximum of $400 per month.

Among those who gathered outside the bank to show their solidarity was Sandy Chamoun, a 35-year-old artist.

“Every one of us has been robbed from different directions, from banks and from the government,” she said. “I thought we should be outside, supporting him, so he doesn’t give up, so he doesn’t feel alone or besieged.”

“This is called self-defense,” Chamoun added. “It’s been three years that they’ve been depriving us from our money, and he’s telling them ‘my father is sick.’ What more can they want?”

Chamoun’s late father and her mother were both bank employees. Her mother retired two years before the crisis hit, and she watched as their life savings was locked away in an institution she had worked at for more than 40 years.

“What’s more insulting is that this is happening to someone who, for her whole life, worked in a bank,” Chamoun said.

Hassan Moghnieh, the head of the Association of Depositors in Lebanon, who also served as a mediator in the negotiations, said the gunman took eight hostages: six employees, the bank branch manager and one customer. He rejected the bank’s offers of $5,000, $10,000 and $30,000, finally accepting $35,000 be given to his brother in exchange for turning himself in and releasing the hostages.

After a nearly seven-hour standoff, Al-Sheikh Hussein was escorted out into a white van. Some clapped for him, others cheered. It was unclear what, if any, criminal charges he might face.

Although elections in May ushered in new independent candidates that sparked hope in the country, the government is still largely ruled by the same families and parties that fought each other during a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990.

Lebanon’s central bank governor, Riad Salameh, is facing investigation, charged in March with illicit enrichment and money laundering. Last month, the central bank was raided by security personnel. But with judicial authorities frequently on strike, corruption investigations tend to drag on without resolution.

Dina Abou Zour, a lawyer with the Depositors’ Union, predicted people would continue resorting to desperate measures if the banks and politicians failed to address their demands.

“We are truly trapped. We are the hostages, not the [bank] employees, or as it is being portrayed, the banks,” she said. “We are the victims; we are not the criminals.”

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
FFShinra Since: Jan, 2001
#2156: Aug 22nd 2022 at 2:55:07 PM

[up]Well if we ever gonna get a foreign remake of A Dog Day Afternoon, Lebanon would definitely be it...

eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
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#2157: Aug 29th 2022 at 7:44:12 PM

Reuters: Deadly clashes rage in Baghdad in Shi'ite power struggle.

    Article 
BAGHDAD, Aug 29 (Reuters) - Heavy clashes erupted in Baghdad, killing almost 20 people on Monday, after powerful Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said he would quit politics, prompting his loyalists to storm a government palace and fight with rival groups.

As night fell, machine-gun fire and explosions rang out, with tracer fire rising into the sky above the Green Zone that houses government headquarters and foreign embassies, in the worst fighting the Iraqi capital has seen in years.

It followed a day of violence prompted by Sadr's announcement that he would withdraw from all political activity - a decision he said was in response to the failure of other Shi'ite leaders and parties to reform a corrupt and decaying governing system.

Sadr later said he was staging a hunger strike in protest against the use of weapons by all sides.

A political standoff between Sadr and Shi'ite Muslim rivals who are mostly backed by Iran has sent Iraq spiralling into yet another round of violence as it struggles to recover from decades of war, sanctions, civil strife and endemic corruption.

Since 2003, Iraqi groups have engaged in sectarian conflict and, more recently, intra-sectarian, intra-ethnic political competition.

The latest round of violence pits Sadr's supporters, which include a heavily armed militia, against Iran-aligned rival paramilitaries and the security forces.

Sadr's win in an October election, his attempts to form a government free of Iran-backed groups, and his eventual withdrawal from parliament in favour of street protests and occupying government buildings to block political activity have all featured in the build-up of tensions that finally erupted into new violence on Monday.

Security officials said some of the clashes were between Sadr's Peace Brigades fighters and members of the Iraqi security forces tasked with protecting the Green Zone, but that Iran-aligned militias were also likely to have been involved.

Reuters could not independently verify who was shooting at who on Monday night.

Sadr announced earlier in the day he was quitting politics. "I hereby announce my final withdrawal," he said on Twitter, criticising fellow Shi'ite political leaders for failing to heed his calls for reform.

Sadr loyalists who had been occupying the parliament building for weeks then charged a government headquarters in the Green Zone, once a palace of dictator Saddam Hussein, where some jumped into a swimming pool at the palace, cheering and waving flags.

Clashes then took place between young men loyal to Sadr and supporters of the pro-Iran militias, who threw stones at each other near the Green Zone, before the nighttime armed fighting.

At least 17 people were killed and scores injured, police and medical workers said.

Iraq's military declared an open-ended nationwide curfew and urged the protesters to leave the Green Zone.

Sadr, who has drawn broad support by opposing both U.S. and Iranian influence on Iraqi politics, was the biggest winner from an October election but withdrew all his lawmakers from parliament in June after he failed to form a government that excluded his rivals, mostly Tehran-backed Shi'ite parties.

Sadr has insisted on early elections and the dissolution of parliament. He says no politician who has been in power since the U.S. invasion in 2003 should hold office.

Impasse

Many Iraqis worry that moves by each Shi'ite camp could lead to new civil conflict.

"The (Iran) loyalists came and burned the tents of Sadrists, and attacked protesters," said Kadhim Haitham, a supporter of Sadr.

Pro-Iran groups blamed the Sadrists for the clashes and denied having shot at anyone. "It's not true - if our people had guns why would they need to throw rocks?" said one militia member, who declined to be identified by name.

Sadr has withdrawn from politics and the government in the past and has also disbanded militias loyal to him. But he retains widespread influence over state institutions and controls a paramilitary group with thousands of members.

He has often returned to political activity after similar announcements, although the current deadlock appears harder to resolve than previous periods of dysfunction and has given Iraq its longest run without a government.

Supporters of the mercurial cleric first stormed the Green Zone in July. Since then, they have occupied parliament, halting the process to choose a new president and prime minister.

Sadr's ally Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who remains caretaker prime minister, suspended cabinet meetings until further notice after protesters stormed government buildings and has publicly pleaded with Sadr to intervene to stop the violence.

Iraq, OPEC's second-largest producer, has struggled to recover since the defeat of Islamic State in 2017 because political parties have squabbled over power and its vast oil wealth.

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
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#2158: Aug 30th 2022 at 6:05:30 AM

AP: Iraqi cleric tells loyalists to leave streets after clashes.

    Article 
BAGHDAD (AP) — An influential Iraqi cleric called on his supporters to withdraw Tuesday from the capital’s government quarter, where they have traded heavy fire with security forces in a serious escalation of a monthslong political crisis gripping the nation.

In a televised speech, Muqtada al-Sadr gave his supporters an hour to leave — and minutes later some could be seen abandoning their positions on live television. Iraq’s military announced an end to a curfew, further raising hopes that there might be a halt to the street violence.

The unrest began Monday, when al-Sadr announced he would resign from politics and his supporters stormed the Green Zone, once the stronghold of the U.S. military that’s now home to Iraqi government offices and foreign embassies. At least 30 people have been killed, officials said.

“This is not a revolution,” al-Sadr said in a televised address, which followed pleas for restraint and peace from several Iraqi officials and the United Nations.

Iraq’s government has been deadlocked since al-Sadr’s party won the largest share of seats in October parliamentary elections but not enough to secure a majority government — unleashing months of infighting between different Shiite factions. Al-Sadr refused to negotiate with his Iran-backed Shiite rivals, and his withdrawal Monday catapulted Iraq into political uncertainty.

Iran closed its borders to Iraq on Tuesday — a sign of Tehran’s concern that the chaos could spread, though even before al-Sadr’s order, streets beyond the capital’s government quarter largely remained calm. The country’s vital oil continued to flow, with global benchmark Brent crude trading slightly down.

Earlier Tuesday, supporters of al-Sadr could be seen on live television firing both machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades into the heavily-fortified area through a section of pulled-down concrete walls. Security forces armed with machine guns inside the zone sporadically returned fire.

Some bystanders filmed the gunfight with their mobile phones, though most hid behind still-standing segments of wall, wincing when rounds cracked nearby. As al-Sadr’s forces fired, a line of armored tanks stood on the other side of the barriers that surround the Green Zone, though they did not use their heavy guns.

At least one wounded man from al-Sadr’s forces was taken away in a three-wheel rickshaw, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry visible in the background. Heavy black smoke at one point rose over the area, visible from kilometers (miles) away.

At least 30 people have been killed and over 400 wounded, two Iraqi medical officials said. The toll included both al-Sadr loyalists killed in protests the day before and clashes overnight. Those figures are expected to rise, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release the information to journalists.

Members of Iraq’s majority Shiite Muslim population were oppressed when Saddam Hussein ruled the country for decades. The 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam, a Sunni, reversed the political order. Just under two-thirds of Iraq is Shiite, with a third Sunni.

Now, the Shiites are fighting among themselves after the Americans largely withdrew from the nation, with Iranian-backed Shiites and Iraqi-nationalist Shiites jockeying for power, influence and state resources.

It’s an explosive rivalry in a country where many remain way of the Iranian government’s influence even though trade and ties remain strong between its peoples. Iraq and Iran fought a bloody war in the 1980s that saw a million people killed.

Al-Sadr’s nationalist rhetoric and reform agenda resonates powerfully with his supporters, who largely hail from Iraq’s poorest sectors of society and were historically shut out of the political system under Saddam.

Al-Sadr’s announcement that he is leaving politics has implicitly given his supporters the freedom to act as they see fit.

Iranian state television cited unrest and a military-imposed curfew in Iraqi cities for the reason for the border closures. It urged Iranians avoid any travel to the neighboring country. The decision came as millions were preparing to visit Iraq for an annual pilgrimage to Shiite sites, and Tehran encouraged any Iranian pilgrims already in Iraq to avoid further travel between cities.

Kuwait, meanwhile, called on its citizens to leave Iraq. The state-run KUNA news agency also encouraged those hoping to travel to Iraq to delay their plans.

The tiny Gulf Arab sheikhdom of Kuwait shares a 254-kilometer- (158-mile-) long border with Iraq.

The Netherlands evacuated its embassy in the Green Zone, Foreign Affairs Minister Wopke Hoekstra tweeted early Tuesday.

“There are firefights around the embassy in Baghdad. Our staff are now working at the German embassy elsewhere in the city,” Hoekstra wrote.

Dubai’s long-haul carrier Emirates stopped flights to Baghdad on Tuesday over the ongoing unrest. The carrier said that it was “monitoring the situation closely.” It did not say when flights would resume.

On Monday, protesters loyal to al-Sadr pulled down the cement barriers outside the government palace with ropes and breached the palace gates. Many rushed into the lavish salons and marbled halls of the palace, a key meeting place for Iraqi heads of state and foreign dignitaries.

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
nrjxll Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: Not war
#2159: Aug 30th 2022 at 8:56:31 AM

What exactly is al-Sadr trying to achieve here, anyway?

eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
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#2160: Aug 30th 2022 at 2:40:21 PM

Showing the Framework bloc what real power looks like on the street level, I reckon.

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
Ramidel Since: Jan, 2001
#2161: Aug 30th 2022 at 4:55:34 PM

It sounds like he's going "fuck this shit, I'm out" because the parties that rely on his acquiescence have comprehensively failed to govern Iraq.

eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
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#2162: Sep 8th 2022 at 8:13:35 AM

Not the whole story. The Sadrist bloc and their allies got a decent plurality in last year's parliamentary election, the Coordination Framework tried to block a government from forming, and Sadr went ahead to call their bluff by announcing his "resignation" and then having his followers occupy the Green Zone and engage the (uncharacteristically passive) PMF militias in armed clashes until Sadr called them off behind the scenes — basically showing his rivals what's waiting if they try to force him out for real.

All said and done, the image of armed goons firing rockets at government buildings downtown isn't really helping Sadr's public image beyond his groupies — remember that the PMFs, for all their numerous crimes, have built a real support base (deservedly or not) around their record of fighting against ISIS. Iraq still doesn't have a government; the post-ISIS backlash muzzled a lot of political activism from Sunni communities, and the 2019 broad-tent protest movement, for all the fifteen minutes it had in the limelight, didn't exactly strike up a warm friendship with the Sadrists (never mind the pro-Iran Framework establishment they were protesting against).

Neither Iran nor the US have been interested in brokering a good-faith deal between the rival Shi'a blocs, and the only Shi'a leader whom both sides respect as the "adult in the room" (Sistani) is 92 and not completely there. Unless any of that changes, the Persian Gulf region is probably looking at yet another trip into cool zone before too long.


Washington Post: Climate migrants flee Iraq’s parched rural south, but cities offer no refuge.

    Article 
BASRA, Iraq — What happens when the land dries up?

The world is facing this question; Iraq is already learning the answers.

First the farmers and the fishermen try to stay. Then, one by one, they reach their breaking point. Migration starts slowly, but the exodus to towns and cities soon swells, and as temperatures rise, so do tensions.

The United Nations describes Iraq as the fifth-most-vulnerable country to climate change. Temperatures have increased by 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in three decades, according to Berkeley Earth, well above the global average, and in the summers, the mercury now regularly hits 50 Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). The heat is burning crops and desiccating marshes. As upstream dams in Turkey and Iran weaken the flows of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a salty tide is creeping north from the Persian Gulf, poisoning the land — and the jobs it once created.

In Iraq, especially the south, the changing climate is forcing families to sell off their livestock and pack up for urban centers such as the region’s largest city, Basra, in search of jobs and better services.

But they find little welcome here.

When asked recently about the new arrivals, one Basra shopkeeper frowned in disapproval. “We don’t get involved with those people,” he said.

Embedded in Basra’s troubles is a warning: As hotter, more-crowded cities become the future of a warming world, a lack of preparedness will only exacerbate the discontent already fraying the social fabric.

Basra was once one of Iraq’s jewels, a thriving trade hub where the 14th-century traveler Ibn Battuta observed: “No place on earth excels it in quantity of palm groves.” More recently, its freshwater canals and elegant walkways drew comparisons to Venice.

But decades of U.S.-backed sanctions and war, combined with the weight of corruption and neglect, have left Basra’s infrastructure unable to adequately support the 2 million people the city already houses — let alone the rising tide of newcomers.

Oil powers Iraq’s economy, and Basra is at the heart of where most of it is produced, but little of that money seems to trickle down to its inhabitants. Swaths of the city lack streetlights or paved roads. In 2018, the water supply was so polluted that it became toxic.

According to official figures, Basra province has a population of over 3 million — an increase of at least 20 percent in 10 years. And most of that growth has been in its urban areas.

Iraqi authorities have neither tried to connect a growing constellation of informal settlements in the cities to any service grid, nor taken meaningful steps to address the water mismanagement and scarcity that are causing the migration.

For longtime residents of the swelling cities, new arrivals often represent an extra strain on the already faltering infrastructure. Politicians have seized on blaming “infiltrators” — rather than their own failures — for the mess.

Crumbling crops, drying marshlands

Across rural sweeps of the south, families say their migration is existential: Any chance of survival here is evaporating with the water. In a survey by the Norwegian Refugee Council last year, nearly 40 percent of farmers across the country reported an almost total loss of their wheat crop.

With each passing summer, families try new things to buy a few more years on their land. Abandoning one crop to focus on the survival of another, or last-ditch attempts to grow new ones altogether. In the town of Abu al-Khaseeb on a recent day, Malik Ali Abdulkareem crumbled a husk from his beloved okra plants between his fingers as he nodded toward a pile of metal carcasses on the river shore.

“These boats are how we’re making money now,” he said. “We cut these up and we sell them as scrap, but the money …” he trailed off. “Really, it’s nothing. I have 16 people to feed.”

His sunburned arms had been further scorched by the cutting torch and one friend had lost a finger. The men also knew that their supply of broken ships wasn’t endless.

Social media has been awash with photos showing water buffaloes lying dead on the cracked mudflats of southern Iraq’s dried-out marshlands, and Abu al-Khaseeb’s farm has been no exception. Many here have lost animals.

“There’s no future here,” farmer Ammar Jassim Mohammed said in a tone more exasperated than his friend’s. “Everyone is leaving.”

Life on the edges

Accurate migration figures for the city of Basra are hard to come by, because in many ways, the newcomers live in the shadows: Their makeshift housing is built on parched land cut off from any water or electricity services, and aid groups say they are less likely to have access to the city’s schools or health infrastructure.

In one recent survey, researchers from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration found that 12 percent of residents were newcomers who had settled in Basra over the past decade, mostly because of water scarcity and a lack of economic opportunities. The number is even higher in other southern Iraqi cities, such as Shatrah and Amarah.

Although measures such as better irrigation management, a hydraulic dam and a water treatment plant have been proposed to alleviate the region’s water crisis, officials say there aren’t enough funds.

“The ministries are neither serious nor fast. We’ve been discussing that dam since 2009,” said Dergham al-Ajwadi, deputy governor of Basra province.

Figures compiled by the South Basra Environmental Directorate suggest that water degradation in the province cost Iraq $400 million in lost animals, palm trees and crops in 2018 alone.

And as temperatures keep climbing, the flight from the countryside is only accelerating.

“The families bring blocks and plastic ceilings and then they build,” said Kadhim Atshan, who oversees Dour al-Qiyada, a sprawling shantytown in Basra city built by waves of migration. “But then they find there aren’t jobs, there’s no services. They have to rely on themselves.”

On a baking hot night in the city’s densely packed Hayyaniyah district, 45-year-old Raed Awdeh was at a loss as to how. He said he had moved to Basra the week before, but although his family had a roof over their heads, they had no idea what came next. “We don’t know how to settle,” he said, picking nervously at his thumbnail. The family of six would depend on his ability to find construction work, but he’d already suffered heatstroke on the job.

“We’re suffocating,” he said. “I’m finding work maybe one day out of seven. How are we going to manage here?”

Everybody hurts

But all across town, longtime residents had the same worries.

Qusay Ali, 40, said he had worked for the state oil company for three months before his job, along with hundreds of others, was terminated.

Now bills were mounting and he could barely afford to feed his family, even after pulling two daughters out of school. Hoping to get his job back, the father of five had joined protests outside Basra’s state-run oil company at 5 a.m. each day — a last resort.

“What do you expect from a man who has told his girls they can’t go to school anymore, a man who can’t even pay for an operation that his father really needs,” Ali said, in the sweltering old yellow-brick house his family shares with four others.

As he saw it, migration was only making the situation worse, and he felt that the slow tide of arrivals was changing his city. “Their mind-set is different; we don’t know how to deal with them,” he said. “They don’t respect the laws here.”

Decades of government neglect in rural areas, particularly in the education sector, have left many of the migrants illiterate. Farmers who grew up working the land often struggle to access the city’s formal labor market and instead rely on temporary employment as construction workers or truck drivers, or hawking goods from carts in the street. And their habits and attitudes clash with those of their urban cousins.

The informal areas where they live also experience higher rates of crime, according to security officials. The head of Basra’s investigative court, Ammar Shaker Fajr, estimated that about 60 percent of the drug cases it received involved arrests in the city’s new shantytowns.

Political scapegoats

As the issue of newcomers grows more contentious, political leaders in southern Iraq have started blaming the city’s crime rate — as well as other problems — on its migrants.

In 2018, the governor of Basra province, Asaad Abdulameer al-Eidani, gained popularity by barring legal residency in the city without proof of homeownership. In the years since, his pronouncements have sounded a steady drumbeat of hostility toward the newcomers.

That rhetoric has provided an escape valve of sorts for the city’s politicians, who are increasingly unpopular. A few years ago, huge demonstrations decrying corruption and unemployment were crushed with deadly force. Since then, every summer has brought scattered daily protests over authorities’ failure to provide basic services.

“Local politicians use the flow of immigrants to justify their poor governance,” said Maha Yassin, a climate researcher at the Netherlands-based Clingendael Institute, who is from Basra.

When a raid against an alleged drug dealer turned deadly in the summer of 2019, Eidani vowed that the city would demolish “every home that harbors a criminal from outside the province,” and said the action was for “the people of Basra.”

“All the crimes in the city are being done by people who immigrated,” he said in televised comments. “We need to stand against it.”

But Yassin echoed what other officials in the province have long argued: that the marginalization of the people in the city’s informal areas is pushing up the crime rate.

“This is how you drive these people into criminality, by discriminating,” she said. “They move to irregular neighborhoods where there’s no proper public services and no employment. And then social issues will emerge.”

In Dour al-Qiyada, Atshan, the community leader, worried that the authorities’ stance was making things worse.

“When they call them ‘infiltrators,’ the impact feels as bad as racial discrimination,” he said. “No one provides us with anything. Trust me, everyone here is just trying to make a living.”

When a heat wave forced the shutdown of Basra’s power grid in August, the homes of newcomers and longtime residents alike were plunged into darkness as millions spent sleepless nights drenched in sweat. At midnight, it was still 100 degrees. The children were crying in Ali’s cramped house, he said, and relations among the adults felt tense. In Awdeh’s shantytown, the heat seemed to smother every breath he took.

Authorities blamed extreme heat and surging demand for the outages. But even when the grid was working again, residents of the home of Iraq’s lucrative energy industry were still relying mostly on private generators that belched fumes as they powered the bare minimum: weak fans and white lights that flickered on the unsteady current.

Asked about plans to upgrade the grid, officials did not respond to requests for comment. But residents said that without improvements, they fear what future summers will bring.

Recently, as heat shimmered on the city’s asphalt, a motorized rickshaw edged slowly out of a makeshift neighborhood and onto gridlocked roads. On the canvas of the rickshaw’s cabin, the owner had summed up his situation.

“My dreams in this country are being lived by a dog in Europe,” the neat white lettering read.

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#2163: Sep 28th 2022 at 3:28:53 PM

BBC: Dozens of migrants killed as boat sinks off Syrian coast.

    Article 
At least 86 migrants have died after the boat they were travelling in sank off Syria's coast on Thursday, the country's state-run media reported.

Twenty survivors were taken to hospital, while rescuers continue to search for missing passengers.

Officials said Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian nationals - including women and children - were believed to be among the 120 to150 people on board.

It is not clear what caused the accident.

Officials added that the vessel had departed from Minyeh, a city near the Lebanese port city of Tripoli, before it sank near the Syrian island of Arwad, close to Tartus.

The boat is believed to have been heading to Cyprus when it sank.

Tartus, where survivors have been transported, is about 30 miles (50 km) north of Tripoli. Syrian news agency Sana said authorities would transfer the bodies of unidentified victims to the border crossing to hand them over to the Lebanese Red Cross.

Victims' families mourn in Tripoli

In a small dark room in a poor neighbourhood, a family mourns.

Mustafa Mesto, 35, died with his two daughters and son, while his wife and her father are still in a critical condition in a hospital in Syria.

Mustafa, was a Lebanese taxi driver, married to a Syrian Kurd who had fled the war the country's vicious civil war. One family fleeing devastation in two countries. They had hoped to reach Italy, dreaming of a better life.

But now their families, like those of others who lost their lives on this boat, are in shock.

Mustafa's mother, Adla, sits in the middle of a big room filled with grieving relatives. She wails out loud, blaming the Lebanese government for her son's fate.

"He ran away from poverty and the terrible conditions they left us in. These politicians could not care less about our lives. Nothing will bring him back to me, nothing will bring his little children back to me."

2px presentational grey line Lebanon hosts an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees, and almost 14,000 from other countries, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) - the largest number of refugees per capita in the world.

However, the country is facing a severe economic crisis, fuelled by Covid-19 and the 2020 Beirut port explosion, with more than 80% of the population struggling to afford food and medicine.

The situation is having a severe impact on the country's migrant population, many of whom are choosing to flee elsewhere, including to Europe.

Last year, Lebanon saw a major spike in the number of migrants using its shores to travel to Europe. According to UN figures, departures from the country nearly doubled in 2021 from 2020.

And this year crossings have risen by more than 70% compared with the same time last year, international observers said.

Earlier this month, six people, including children, were killed when a boat carrying migrants from Lebanon to Europe sank off the coast of Turkey. The country's coast guard said 73 migrants from four boats had been rescued.


Reuters: Qatar conscripts civilians for World Cup security.

    Article 
DOHA, Sept 27 (Reuters) - Qatar has called up hundreds of civilians, including diplomats summoned back from overseas, for mandatory military service operating security checkpoints at World Cup stadiums, according to a source and documents seen by Reuters.

The deployment of conscripts, some of whom would normally defer national service because their work is considered vital, highlights the logistical challenge faced by the tiny Gulf Arab state hosting one of the world's biggest sports tournaments.

The conscripts are training to manage stadium security queues, frisk fans and detect contraband like alcohol, drugs or weapons concealed in ponytails, jacket linings or even false bellies, according to training materials seen by Reuters.

Qatar has a population of 2.8 million - of which barely 380,000 are Qatari nationals - and expects an unprecedented influx of 1.2 million visitors for the tournament. It already has an agreement with Turkey which is supplying 3,000 riot police.

In early September the civilians were ordered to report for pre-dawn duty at the national service camp north of the Qatari capital Doha, according to order papers seen by Reuters, less than three months before the 29-day tournament kicks off.

The civilians were told they had been called up to assist with the World Cup and that it was their "patriotic duty" to do so, the source said. "Most people are there because they have to be - they don't want to get in trouble," the source said.

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#2164: Sep 29th 2022 at 6:16:32 PM

SOHR: Russian airstrikes | Jets hit area hosting camps of displaced people near border with Iskenderun north of Idlib.

    Article 
SOHR activists have reported that Russian fighter jets executed at least three airstrikes on areas in Bab Al-Hawa area and Sarmada perimeter on the Syrian border with Iskenderun, north of Idlib,

It is worth noting that the targeted areas are crowded areas of displaced person camps, and hosts headquarters of Jayish Al-Izzah faction.

Russian aerial bombardment comes amid an intensive flight of reconnaissance aircraft over the area. No further details have been reported about the number of casualties and material damage caused by the airstrikes so far.

On September 17, Russian airstrikes hit Bab Al-Hawa, an area crowded with displaced persons’ camps on the Syrian-Turkish border.

On September 17, SOHR activists reported seeing Russian fighter jets flying over Idlib province while executing airstrikes on areas to the west of Idlib city. However, no casualties were reported. Meanwhile, Russian fighter jets are still flying over the area.

Ironically, the Russian airstrikes came a few hours after the Israeli strikes on Rif Dimashq and nine days after the latest massacre committed by Russian jets in Idlib, which left nearly 25 civilian casualties. According to SOHR sources, the positions which were targeted by Russian jets today are close to the site where the latest massacre was committed.

On September 8, SOHR activists documented the death of seven civilians and the injury of 15 others in Russian airstrikes which targeted a stone saw mill and a house on the outskirts of Al-Sheikh Youssef and Hafsarjah villages and other positions in Sahl Al-Roj, west of Idlib city.

The area was also hit by a surface-to-surface missile loaded with cluster bombs.


Middle East Eye: Syria: Cholera surge sparks fears of uncontrollable outbreak in Idlib camps.

    Article 
Cholera cases in Syria continue to surge, with the population having no choice but to rely on the contaminated Euphrates river for drinking water supplies.

The ministry of health in the areas controlled by the government of President Bashar al-Assad said on Monday that the cholera outbreak has killed at least 29 people, while the total number of confirmed infections through rapid testing has reached 338 since the outbreak of the disease was first recorded last month.

Meanwhile, a health official in the Kurdish-controlled Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria announced last week that the number of suspected cholera cases reached 2,867, of which 78 were confirmed, while the number of deaths reached 16.

The official, Joan Mustafa, told reporters that the outbreak is linked to the presence of bacteria responsible for cholera in the waters of the Euphrates river, the river's water level has suffered a serious decline because of climate change and is, in many areas, transforming into swamp land.

“I tried as much as possible to protect my family from cholera, but I failed,” said Nader, a 40-year-old civilian who lives in the city of al-Hasakah in northeast Syria. “The lack of treated drinking water through water stations and the irrigation of vegetables from the Euphrates river were the main cause of cholera infecting my wife and child.”

Nearly 30 percent of the population in Syria relies on the Euphrates for drinking water, according to the UN.

Cholera usually appears in residential areas that suffer from scarcity of drinking water or lack of sanitation systems, and is often caused by eating contaminated food or water and leads to diarrhoea and vomiting.

Nader said that he had taken his wife and child to the hospital after they had spent two days experiencing severe diarrhoea and vomiting, in addition to suffering from excessive dehydration, only to find that they had cholera. His wife and child were placed on a five-day treatment journey with antibiotics and intravenous fluids.

"We do not have potable water because of the interruption of pipe water, which makes us buy water from tanks filled from surface wells, which are not subject to sanitary control at all," Nader told Middle East Eye.

The cholera crisis is partly a result of the effects of climate change but also a consequence of the civil war, which has been raging for more than a decade.

According to the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), the war has damaged two-thirds of water treatment plants, half of pumping stations and one-third of water towers.

Nearly half the population relies on alternative and often unsafe sources of water while at least 70 percent of sewage goes untreated, Unicef said.

Water station not functional

The Alouk water station northwest of al-Hasakah has stopped pumping drinking water because of alleged electricity cuts, affecting al-Hasakah governorate and the surrounding countryside which rely on its supplies for drinking water.

The station is under the control of the Turkish-backed Syrian opposition. Several international organisations said that stopping the work of the station is one of the major causes of cholera outbreak in the region.

"Three months ago, the water of Alouk station did not reach the city of Hasakah," said Zubair Sarhan, chairman of the North Charity Association for Relief and Development operating in the city, which is under the control of the SDF.

The US-backed SDF are predominantly Kurdish fighters that Turkey accuses of being linked to terror groups.

Turkey and the SDF have exchanged accusations on the other side’s responsibility for the station’s halt.

Turkey has justified stopping the pumping of the station, claiming it was due to the cutting off of electricity by the SDF, which controls the power station in al-Darbasiyah, which feeds the Ras al-Ain and Tal Abyad regions.

Sarhan told MEE that Russia has tried several times, in agreement with Turkey, to pump water from the Alouk station, but these attempts were unsuccessful.

"We demanded several times that Alouk station come under international auspices and that a UN flag be raised on it in order [for it] not to be bombarded and interrupted," Sarhan said. "The conflict between Turkey, Russia, the SDF and Assad should not be at the expense of vulnerable people."

A source close to the local council in Ras al-Ain, controlled by Syrian opposition and supported by Turkey, told MEE that they do not have information about Alouk station except what is circulating on the street because the Turkish army is in charge of it.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said earlier this month that cholera had spread in western parts of Deir Ezzor in northeast Syria after local SDF authorities stopped distributing chlorine to water pumping stations.

Fears in Idlib

On Monday, the Early Warning and Response Network, a local NGO, confirmed the first three cases of cholera in Idlib governorate, northwest of Syria, prompting fears of the spread of the disease among the displaced residents of camps.

The network recorded 20 new cases in the northwest region of Syria, 15 new cases were in Jarablus region, three in Afrin and two in Azaz, while the total number of cases reached 39.

“Our concerns are not about the spread of cholera within cities, but its spread within the camps, which are an incubator environment for infectious diseases due to the weak humanitarian response in them,” said Mohamed Hallaj, director of Response Coordination Group, a local group collecting statistics on displaced civilians.

Hallaj told MEE that about 590 camps in the Idlib region suffer from a lack of clean drinking water and 226 camps suffer from meagre amounts of clean water. In addition, more than half of the camps suffer from an open sewage system, which is an incubator for the spread of infectious diseases such as cholera.

"The camps at the present time have entered the stage of danger after the positive cases were recorded, and we warn against the spread of the disease further and the inability to control it due to the weak capabilities necessary to confront the disease as a result of the fragile medical reality in the region," Hallaj said.

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#2165: Oct 11th 2022 at 3:43:47 PM

The National: Saudi Arabia says female Umrah pilgrims will no longer need a male guardian.

    Article 
Saudi Arabia has announced that a male guardian, or mahram, is no longer required to accompany a female pilgrim who wishes to travel to Saudi Arabia to perform Umrah from any part of the world.

Speaking at the Saudi embassy in Cairo, the Minister of Hajj and Umrah Dr Tawfiq Al Rabiah also announced that the kingdom is lifting all health restrictions for Egyptian Umrah pilgrims, upon a directive from King Salman.

He said that there is no quota or ceiling for the number of Umrah visas to be issued for Muslims from all over the world.

“Any Muslim coming to the kingdom with any type of visa can perform Umrah,” the Saudi Gazette reported.

The minister also referred to the efforts made by the kingdom regarding the introduction and use of modern technologies and the digitisation of services for those who wish to visit the Two Holy Mosques, the Saudi Press Agency reported.

These included using robots to provide some services to pilgrims, as well as developing the Nusk platform, which makes available many facilities for those visiting the Grand Mosque.

"It is possible to book an Umrah permit through the platform within a short period of time, and after that, the visa can be obtained within 24 hours,” Dr Al Rabiah added.

The minister also spoke about rapid developments at the Two Holy Mosques and other holy sites regarding the infrastructure and organisation to receive the expected increases in the number of pilgrims and visitors.


Vice: Saudi Arabia Sentences 3 Men to Death For Refusing to Vacate NEOM Development Site.

    Article 
Saudi Arabia has quietly sentenced three indigenous men to death after they refused to move out of their homes to make way for the new futuristic city of NEOM, a pet project of the kingdom’s young Crown Prince, according to a UK-based rights group.

The three members of the Howeitat tribe were given death sentences by Saudi Arabia’s special courts on the 2nd of October

The men were first arrested in 2020 for protesting against being evicted from their homeland, which will be the setting for NEOM, a sprawling, $500 billion mega-project.

ALQST, an independent group monitoring human rights in Saudi Arabia, reported that Shadli, Attaullah and Ibrahim al-Howeitat – of the Howeitat tribe from the northern Tabuk province – were sentenced to death earlier this month at a Saudi criminal court. In September, other Howeiti people were sentenced to 50 years in prison by Saudi Arabia's Specialised Criminal Court, which tries terror-related cases, but it is mainly used to charge human rights activists and dissidents in the oil-rich kingdom.

Their brother, Abdul Rahim al-Howeitat, was shot dead by Saudi special forces in April 2020 after he criticised the compulsory eviction in his final social media post, in which he accused Saudi Arabia of “state terrorism”. Howeitat, 43, became a prominent figure in Saudi for his vocal opposition to NEOM, and his refusal to give up his land. He started by putting out a series of videos on social media decrying the order, and his cousins followed suit.

The government described his death as the result of a shootout with the security forces, saying that he had to be “neutralised” after “he barricaded himself in his house” and threw “molotov cocktails” at the security forces. The authorities kept his body for weeks before handing it over to his family.

But reports citing eyewitness accounts claim his death was an “extrajudicial execution”. The Saudi government has closed the case without releasing any further details, and had offered to pay other figures in the community to condemn Howeitat’s actions.

Those who spoke out against the compensation scheme were quickly silenced. The country, which has zero tolerance for public dissent, has cracked down on people voicing concern and arrested an estimated 150 members of the community of 20,000. The Howeitat people live in small villages and towns in the northwest of Saudi Arabia.

The utopian city of NEOM is the brainchild of Mohammed bin Salman, the 37-year-old Saudi Crown Prince and de-facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.

NEOM will take up 26,500km of Saudi territory, and will include an airport, high-speed train and 24/7 surveillance by the Saudi government using the latest artificial intelligence. It will cost an estimated $500 billion to complete.

The video-game-loving prince has intensified his efforts to build the city, which he claims will wean the country off its dependency on oil, and make it a destination for foreign investment and tourism. Most of the technology that will be used is yet to be developed, and some funds for the mega real-estate project will come from outside investors.

Flashy 3D videos of NEOM created by the project managers have raised questions about how realistic it is to build a linear city across the desert. Despite the disruption the city will cause to the environment and the desert ecosystem, NEOM’s management has insisted it will be “a zero-carbon city.”

Crown Prince Mohammed was praised at the start of his tenure for introducing liberalising policies, such as allowing women to drive cars, but the positive atmosphere soured after he was accused by of ordering the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Despite denying any involvement in the gruesome killing of the Washington Post columnist, repeated reports, including by intelligence agencies such as the CIA, said the future Saudi king had ordered the assassination of one of his most vocal critics.

In Saudi Arabia, any form of opposition to the royal family is punishable by death or lengthy jail sentences.

In 2022 alone, the Saudi authorities carried out 122 executions, according to rights groups. In March, 104 prisoners were executed, including 81 on a single day, ALQST says.

Saudi Arabian state media rarely reports on court decisions, and the cases that led to the young prince are kept quiet.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Oct 12th 2022 at 1:05:19 AM

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#2166: Oct 16th 2022 at 4:09:08 AM

Guardian: Qatar World Cup accused of imposing ‘chilling’ restrictions on media.

    Article 
International television crews in Qatar for the Fifa World Cup could be banned from interviewing people in their own homes as part of sweeping reporting restrictions that could have a “severe chilling effect” on media coverage.

Broadcasters, such as the BBC and ITV, will effectively be barred from filming at accommodation sites, such as those housing migrant workers, under the terms of filming permits issued by the Qatari government.

According to the terms, recording at government buildings, universities, places of worship and hospitals is also prohibited, along with filming at residential properties and private businesses.

The restrictions are within a list of conditions that outlets must agree to when applying for a filming permit from the Qatari authorities to “capture photography and videography of the most popular locations around the country”. They also apply to photographers but do not explicitly refer to print journalists who do not film their interviews.

The rules do not prohibit reports on specific subjects, but restricting where crews can film – “including but not limited to houses, apartment complexes, accommodation sites” – is likely to make it difficult for them to investigate reported abuses, such as the mistreatment of migrant workers, or to conduct interviews on subjects people may be reluctant to discuss in public, such as LGBTQ+ rights.

Last night, Qatar’s supreme committee denied imposing “chilling” restrictions on media freedoms and said “several regional and international media outlets are based in Qatar, and thousands of journalists report from Qatar freely without interference each year.”

It said it had updated an earlier version of its film permit application terms that appeared on its website to relax the rules for broadcasters attending the World Cup, including removing a rule that said they must ‘’acknowledge and agree” they will not produce reports that may be “inappropriate or offensive to the Qatari culture, Islamic principles”.

But while the newer rules say filming is allowed across the state of Qatar, they still appear to impose strict restrictions, including that by applying for a permit, broadcasters agree “not to capture film/photography at excluded locations”. Places where filming is not allowed under the permit are “residential properties, private businesses and industrial zones” or government, educational, health and religious buildings.

The rules also say that broadcasters must “respect the privacy of individuals” and not film them or their properties without their “express prior approval”.

Fifa said it was “working with the supreme committee and relevant organisations in Qatar to ensure the best possible working conditions for media attending the tournament, as well as ensuring that broadcasters continue to report freely without any restrictions”.

A spokesman said it would be “important to clarify that filming on private property in any country remains subject to approval of the owner/operator of the property”. He did not comment on why the terms include an outright ban on filming on private property.

Journalists have previously been detained in Qatar for reporting on issues deemed contentious by the authorities. In 2015, a group of BBC reporters was arrested in Doha and spent two nights in prison while investigating housing conditions for migrant workers. Last November, two Norwegian journalists investigating conditions for migrant labourers working on World Cup venues were arrested and detained for 36 hours as they tried to leave the country.

James Lynch, from FairSquare, a London-based human rights group, said the rules were an “extraordinarily sweeping range of restrictions” that would make it difficult for TV crews to pursue non-football related stories. He said: “It would be incredibly difficult to fully comply with these terms, if even filming near to private or government property violates the terms of a permit.

“This is likely to have a severe chilling effect on free expression. How many organisations will authorise reporting on Qatar’s social issues if to do so puts them at risk of ending up in court?”

The restrictions present an ethical dilemma for broadcasters.

The BBC and ITV’s stringent editorial guidelines promote impartiality and are designed to protect against undue influence, including from governments. BBC guidelines, which apply to all content, say broadcasts should not unnecessarily offend but stress the importance of free expression.

Jemimah Steinfeld, editor-in-chief at Index on Censorship, said the film permit conditions were a “definite cause for concern” and appeared to be “purposely ambiguous” so that broadcasters would “err on the side of caution”.

She said her gut feeling was she felt they should not agree to such terms but said it was “extremely difficult terrain” to navigate. “The question is whether there might be stories that they can still do within the realms of that agreement, and is it more important that they do those stories?” she said. “If the BBC is basically being shoved into a position where all they can cover is the glory of it, then that would be a bad outcome.”

Qatar is an Islamic country with an authoritarian system of government. Swearing, public displays of affection and dressing immodestly are seen as offensive. Homosexual behaviour is illegal. Posting material that appears to insult, slander or is culturally insensitive may also be considered a crime, according to travel advice from the UK government.

In recent months, Qatar appears to have softened its stance on several issues in an attempt to convince visitors that it is safe and tolerant. It is allowing the sale of alcohol at stadiums, for instance, and has said that gay fans will be able to display affection during the World Cup. It has not eased rules restricting freedom of speech, which include a law against spreading “fake news” online.

The BBC did not say if it had agreed to or challenged the film permit rules. A spokeswoman said it had a “proven record of addressing topical issues as part of our coverage. This World Cup will be no different.”

ITV said its news and current affairs team had carried out “extensive reporting of the decision to award the tournament to Qatar and the questions surrounding the host nation’s human rights record and will continue to do so”.

“Our journalism will be robustly independent. ITV’s World Cup tournament coverage will focus on the football, but will not shy away from the controversies off the pitch,” a spokesman said.

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#2167: Oct 20th 2022 at 4:25:45 PM

AP: WHO Syria boss accused of corruption, fraud, abuse, AP finds.

    Article 
LONDON (AP) — Staffers at the World Health Organization’s Syrian office have alleged that their boss mismanaged millions of dollars, plied government officials with gifts — including computers, gold coins and cars — and acted frivolously as COVID-19 swept the country.

More than 100 confidential documents, messages and other materials obtained by The Associated Press show WHO officials told investigators that the agency’s Syria representative, Dr. Akjemal Magtymova, engaged in abusive behavior, pressured WHO staff to sign contracts with high-ranking Syrian government politicians and consistently misspent WHO and donor funds.

Magtymova declined to respond to questions about the allegations, saying that she was “prohibited” from sharing information “due to (her) obligations as a WHO staff member.” She described the accusations as “defamatory.”

Complaints from at least a dozen personnel have triggered one of the biggest internal WHO probes in years, at times involving more than 20 investigators, according to staffers linked to the investigation.

WHO Syria boss accused of corruption, fraud, abuse, AP finds By MARIA CHENG today FILE - Dr. Akjemal Magtymova, the World Health Organization's representative in Syria, speaks during an interview at her office in Damascus, Syria, Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2021. Staffers at the WHO’s Syrian office have alleged that their boss mismanaged millions of dollars, plied government officials with gifts — including computers, gold coins and cars — and acted frivolously as COVID-19 swept the country. (AP Photo) 1 of 3 FILE - Dr. Akjemal Magtymova, the World Health Organization's representative in Syria, speaks during an interview at her office in Damascus, Syria, Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2021. Staffers at the WHO’s Syrian office have alleged that their boss mismanaged millions of dollars, plied government officials with gifts — including computers, gold coins and cars — and acted frivolously as COVID-19 swept the country. (AP Photo) LONDON (AP) — Staffers at the World Health Organization’s Syrian office have alleged that their boss mismanaged millions of dollars, plied government officials with gifts — including computers, gold coins and cars — and acted frivolously as COVID-19 swept the country.

More than 100 confidential documents, messages and other materials obtained by The Associated Press show WHO officials told investigators that the agency’s Syria representative, Dr. Akjemal Magtymova, engaged in abusive behavior, pressured WHO staff to sign contracts with high-ranking Syrian government politicians and consistently misspent WHO and donor funds.

Magtymova declined to respond to questions about the allegations, saying that she was “prohibited” from sharing information “due to (her) obligations as a WHO staff member.” She described the accusations as “defamatory.”

Complaints from at least a dozen personnel have triggered one of the biggest internal WHO probes in years, at times involving more than 20 investigators, according to staffers linked to the investigation.

WHO confirmed in a statement that it has been reviewing charges made against Magtymova and said it has also enlisted the help of external investigators.

“It has been a protracted and complex investigation, with the situation in the country and the challenges of gaining appropriate access, while ensuring the protection of staff, bringing additional complications,” WHO said. The agency said progress has been made in recent months in assessing the complaints regarding Magtymova and gathering relevant information.

“In view of the security situation, confidentiality and respect for due process do not allow us to comment further on the detailed allegations,” WHO said. It gave no timeline for when the investigation was expected to be completed.

WHO’s Syria office had a budget of about $115 million last year to address health issues in a country riven by war — one in which nearly 90% of the population lives in poverty and more than half desperately need humanitarian aid. For several months, investigators have been probing allegations that Syrians were badly served and WHO staffers were ill-treated:

  • Financial documents show Magtymova once threw a party costing more than $10,000 — a gathering held mostly to honor her own achievements at WHO’s expense, staffers say, at a time when the country was struggling to obtain coronavirus vaccines.

  • In December 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, she tasked the more than 100 WHO personnel in the country with learning a flash mob dance, asking officials to film themselves performing the choreographed steps for a U.N. party, according to videos and messages seen by the AP.

  • Six Syria-based WHO public health experts said Magtymova called staffers “cowards” and “retarded” on multiple occasions. Even more concerning, the officials told agency investigators that Magtymova “provided favors” to senior politicians in the Syrian regime and met surreptitiously with the Russian military, potential breaches of WHO’s neutrality as a U.N. organization. The staffers asked not to be named for fear of retribution; three have left WHO.

In one complaint sent to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in May, a Syria-based staffer wrote that Magtymova hired the incompetent relatives of government officials, including some accused of “countless human rights violations.”

“Dr. Akjemal’s aggressive and abusive actions are negatively impacting WHO’s performance to support Syrian people,” the staffer wrote, adding: “Vulnerable Syrian people are losing a lot due to favoritism, frauds and scandals instigated and supported by Dr. Akjemal, which is breaking all trust (and) pushing donors away.”

Tedros did not respond to the staffer’s complaint. In May, WHO’s regional director in the Eastern Mediterranean appointed an acting representative in Syria to replace Magtymova after she was placed on leave. But she is still listed as the agency’s Syria representative in its staff directory and continues to draw a director-level salary.


Magtymova, a Turkmenistan national, previously served in a number of roles, including as the agency’s representative to Oman and as emergency coordinator in Yemen. She assumed her position in Syria in May 2020, just as COVID swept around the world.

“What we (at WHO) do is noble,” she said in a statement upon her appointment. “We gain respect by competency, professionalism and the results we accomplish.”

Numerous WHO staffers in Syria have told the agency’s investigators that Magtymova failed to grasp the severity of the pandemic in Syria and jeopardized the lives of millions.

“During COVID-19, the situation in Syria was deplorable,” one former WHO staffer said. “However, WHO was not providing adequate aid to Syrians.” Medical supplies were “usually focused on Damascus only, and not covering other areas in Syria,” where there was an acute shortage of medicines and equipment.

Syria’s health care system has been devastated by more than a decade of war; for years, the country relied almost exclusively on international health assistance. WHO’s presence in areas controlled by the government has often raised criticism that its aid is directed by Damascus, which is sanctioned by the US and the EU. Nearly 7 million people are displaced by the war inside Syria and most live in tented camps in areas beyond government control.

Staffers also questioned some of Magtymova’s own behavior and directives to staff as coronavirus cases spiked worldwide — and even as WHO’s chief claimed that the entire organization was working “tirelessly” to stop COVID-19.

At least five WHO personnel complained to investigators that Magtymova violated WHO’s own COVID-19 guidance. They said she did not encourage remote working, came to the office after catching COVID and held meetings unmasked. Four WHO staffers said she infected others.

In December 2020, deep in the first year of the pandemic, Magtymova instructed the Syria office to learn a flash mob dance popularized by a social media challenge for a year-end U.N. event. At the time, senior WHO officials in Geneva were advising countries to implement coronavirus measures including the suspension of any non-essential gatherings.

“Kindly note that we want you to listen to the song, train yourself for the steps and shoot you dancing over the music to be part of our global flash mob dance video,” wrote WHO communications staffer Rafik Alhabbal in an email to all Syria staff. Magtymova separately sent a link to a YouTube website, which she described as “the best tutorial.”

Multiple videos show staffers, some wearing WHO vests or jackets, performing “the Jerusalema challenge” dance in offices and warehouses stocked with medical supplies. Magtymova praised the “very good looking and beautiful people” in videos made in Aleppo and the port city of Latakia.

The following October, when the country was enduring one of its worst waves of COVID, Magtymova hired a choreographer and film company to produce a video of staffers performing another dance to mark U.N. Day. Photos and video show there was no social distancing during the party Magtymova held for dozens of unmasked people, which included a “cake-eating ceremony.”

Magtymova posted one of the dance videos on WHO Syria’s social media accounts, but it elicited so much criticism that her superiors ordered her to remove it. The video was “disgraceful,” said Anas al-Abdah, a leading Syrian opposition politician: “The organization should have (instead) filmed the catastrophic condition of our people and demanded justice.”

Magtymova, however, was unrepentant.

“My message here is to ask you not to be discouraged,” she told staff. “We have an important job at hand to perform and a huge responsibility for people, we have done something really out of (the) box: we dared to shine.”


Internal documents, emails and messages also raise serious concerns about how WHO’s taxpayer-provided funds were used under Magtymova, with staffers alleging she routinely misspent limited donor funds meant to help the more than 12 million Syrians in dire need of health aid.

Among the incidents being probed is a party Magtymova organized last May, when she received a leadership award from Tufts University, her alma mater. Held at the exclusive Four Seasons hotel in Damascus, the party included a guest list of about 50, at a time when fewer than 1% of the Syrian population had received a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

A hotel invoice shows the reception’s menu included Singaporean-style beef satay, fried goat cheese with truffle oil croquettes and sriracha chicken sliders, alongside a selection of seasonal mocktails. A production company was hired to film the event and make a promotional video, according to an internal WHO summary.

The evening’s agenda featured remarks by the Syrian minister of health, followed by a reception and nearly two hours of live music. WHO documents show while the event was called to celebrate WHO’s designation of 2021 as the Year of Health and Care Worker, the evening was devoted to Magtymova, not health workers. The cost, according to a spreadsheet: more than $11,000.

Like many other U.N. expatriate staff in Syria, Magtymova lived at Damascus’ ornately decorated Four Seasons hotel. But unlike other staffers, she chose to stay in a spacious, multi-room suite with two washrooms and a panoramic view of the city. U.N. documents suggest she stayed in the suite from October 2020 to this past May at a discounted cost of about $450 per night, more than four times the price of rooms occupied by other U.N. staff. A hotel staffer said such suites normally cost about $940 a night.

The hotel was sanctioned by the U.S. and U.K. because of its owner’s role in financing the regime of Bashar Assad; the U.N. is estimated to have spent $70 million there since 2014.

Other WHO officials were concerned with the agency’s inability to track its support of health facilities in Syria. In correspondence from January, staffers wrote about a worrisome “spot check” made to a health project in northern Syria, noting discrepancies between what WHO paid for and what was found.

Among the issues identified: “the medicines quantities checked were not matching the invoices,” the staff did not have medical training, there were missing items including wheelchairs, crutches and hearing devices, and most of the building rented to store such supplies was empty.

Dr. Ahmed Al-Mandari, WHO’s regional director in the eastern Mediterranean and Magtymova’s boss, also chastised her for the Syria office’s failure to account for its spending.

In an email last October, he told her there were many unresolved audit and compliance issues. Al-Mandari said Magtymova had not completed several long overdue reports detailing how money was being spent in Syria that needed “urgent attention.” Without those reports, donors had little evidence Syria and WHO were using their resources as intended.

Three WHO officials involved in procurement told investigators that Magtymova was involved in several questionable contracts, including a transportation deal that awarded several million dollars to a supplier with whom she had personal ties. Another staffer said to be close to Magtymova reportedly received $20,000 in cash to buy medicines, despite the lack of any request from the Syrian government, which was normally required to trigger such a purchase.

At least five staffers also complained Magtymova used WHO funds to buy gifts for the Ministry of Health and others, including “very good servers and laptops,” gold coins and expensive cars. The AP was not in a position to corroborate their allegations. Several WHO personnel said they were pressured to strike deals with senior members of the Syrian government for basic supplies like fuel at inflated prices, and were sidelined if they failed to do so.

The accusations regarding WHO’s top representative in Syria come after multiple misconduct complaints at the U.N. health agency in recent years.

Last May, the AP reported that senior WHO management was informed of sex abuse during the 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak in Congo but did little to stop it; a panel later found more than 80 workers under WHO’s direction sexually exploited women.

And in January, the AP reported that staffers at WHO’s Western Pacific office said the region’s director, Dr. Takeshi Kasai, used racist language to berate staff and improperly shared sensitive coronavirus vaccine information with his home country, Japan. In August, WHO removed Kasai from his post indefinitely after an initial investigation substantiated some of the claims.

Javier Guzman, director of global health at the Center for Global Development in Washington, said the latest charges regarding WHO’s Magtymova were “extremely disturbing” and unlikely to be an exception.

“This is clearly a systemic problem,” Guzman said. “These kinds of allegations are not just occurring in one of WHO’s offices but in multiple regions.”

He said though Tedros is seen by some as the world’s moral conscience during COVID-19 — he repeatedly decried vaccine inequity and called for countries to act in solidarity — the agency’s credibility was severely damaged by reports of misconduct. Guzman called for WHO to publicly release any investigation report into Magtymova and the Syria office.

WHO said investigation reports are “normally not public documents,” but that “aggregated, anonymized data” are shared with its Executive Board and made publicly accessible.


Washington Post: Crystal meth pours into Iraq across porous borders with Iran.

    Article 
BASRA, Iraq — Inside the dilapidated headquarters of Basra’s drug unit, the colonel’s stack of case files rarely shrinks. Yet every night below the flickering fluorescent lights, chatter thrums before a new round of raids. The officers sound exhausted.

Iraq is in the throes of an addiction epidemic as parts of a generation impoverished by war and neglect is turning to the drugs that are now flooding the country. Basra’s understaffed and underfunded counternarcotics squad is overwhelmed.

At the center of this blight is the cloying heat and crushing poverty of Basra, where jail cells are full and dealers have police on their payroll so kingpins remain untouched. But the origins are far away, in the cool mountains of Afghanistan and the underground laboratories of Iran where new supplies and techniques have led to a flourishing trade.

“We have a disaster here,” said Col. Ehab, a career intelligence officer who was directing the house raids on a recent night. He spoke on the condition that only his first name be used over concerns for his security.

Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion opened Iraq’s border with Iran, there has been a constant flow of people, religious pilgrims, trade — and smuggling, including of drugs. But it was around 2017 that a new menace appeared: crystal meth.

A domestic crackdown on Iran’s own growing drug problem was making the basic ingredients difficult to come by when producers in Afghanistan unlocked the secret to extracting a key component of methamphetamine, ephedrine, from the local ephedra plant.

Today, the fruits of that discovery are found throughout the region.

On the night that Washington Post reporters accompanied Basra’s drug squad on its raids, there were almost 700 people crammed into the unit’s three holding cells, built for 200 in total.

As Ehab and his drug squad snaked toward the shanty districts on Basra’s northeastern edge, they worried that their nightly arrests were only magnifying the problem, as dealers used their time on the inside to recruit more people.

New supplies, old routes

Seizures of crystal meth from Afghanistan and Iran have increased dramatically across the Middle East in recent years, according to regional officials and experts, as it has followed the well worn path of the older opium and heroin trade.

In Turkey, security forces seized more than 5½ tons of methamphetamine last year with raids along the Iranian border and in Istanbul. In just the first seven months of 2022, the number jumped to 8.6 tons.

Turkish authorities report that the smuggling network involves Iranian nationals with links to domestic organized crime networks, and parts of the supply are intended for onward shipment to the European Union, Southeast Asia and Australia.

Jordan anti-narcotics department, meanwhile, reported seizures of methamphetamines soared to more than 45 tons in the first nine months of 2022 — more than 20 times more than the same period last year.

“[The year] 2017 was a game changer,” said David Mansfield, an expert on Afghanistan’s illicit economy whose work draws from fieldwork and aerial imagery. Local producers shifted from using over-the-counter medicines — used in the rest of the world to make ephedrine — to the widely available ephedra, growing wild on Afghan hillsides.

“Suddenly you’ve got this new player on the block that is producing methamphetamine at half the price,” Mansfield said.

With a booming market for the drug already existing in Iran, the producers decided to start using the cheaper materials imported from Afghanistan, said Alexander Soderholm, an analyst at the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

“So the logic is effectively: why don’t we outsource all this to let us focus on the distribution side of things and also possibly production for external markets,” he said.

The sudden surge in crystal meth supplies was soon spilling into Iraq where decades of conflict, corruption and dysfunctional governance have left the country in crisis.

Reports of drug seizures top news broadcasts almost daily. While the reported annual seizures of hundreds of kilograms are likely a deep undercount, even these numbers are doubling every year.

The trade is protected by powerful armed groups, some of them linked to Iran, as well as tribal networks and corrupt officials, according to Iraqi security, border and judicial officials.

“We’ve had officers arrested for this. They covered for criminals and they were on the dealers’ monthly payrolls,” said Ammar Shaker Fajr, a judge in Basra’s Third Investigative Court.

In February, gunmen killed a senior judge in next-door Maysan province. In September, a general from the region’s anti-drug squad was shot dead outside a restaurant.

Basra’s drug squad is receiving a growing tide of thrThe flow of drugs is accelerating what civil society workers and health officials describe as a growing crisis of despair among Iraq’s youth.

Public services have been ruined by corruption and mismanagement, and unemployment is rising as the farmlands dry up and cities offer little succor.

“Our young people want an escape but they don’t understand what they’re taking,” said Enas Kareem, the founder of Iraq’s only charity dedicated to helping users. She said there are no solid figures for addiction rates, but some officials estimate that up to 40 percent of Iraqi’s youth in some areas have tried drugs.eats, too. “There are days I just think about quitting,” Ehab said. “I already feel like a dead man.”

Seeking escape

Crystal meth floods the user with a sense of euphoria and invulnerability. When addiction sets in, paranoia takes over and the immune system breaks down as organs are pushed to failure.

In many cases, former addicts say that they started using drugs as solace from troubled lives. They spoke on condition that only their first names be used, due to the social stigma that comes with addiction.

Maher, 30-year-old baker in Baghdad, said that he fell in with the crowd that introduced him to alcohol and amphetamines after growing cripplingly lonely at home. His sister was killed during the U.S. invasion, his brothers during the subsequent sectarian civil war, and his parents, three years later, in a car crash.

In Basra, a 37-year-old taxi driver, Firas, was struggling to stay awake on long journeys when a dealer showed him a white powder — it turned out to be methamphetamine — that he promised would unlock the secret to longer work hours and better earnings.

He used for three years before his wife begged relatives to intervene after he began physically assaulting her, he said.

In recognition of the growing problem, a law was passed in 2017 ordering the establishment of government-run rehabilitation facilities for addicts within the next two years, but five years later there are only three across the whole country, and only one in Basra.

“Say we have 30,000 addicts in Basra, and there are just 22 beds in which the patients need three months each to recover. Well, how does anyone get a place in those beds?” asked Gen. Ismail Ghanem, the head of Basra’s anti-drug unit.

When Firas went to bed at night, he’d ask himself whether he could ever stop using. When he woke in the morning, he would buy his next dose from the taxi hangar, where he worked.

He said that it was a volunteer with Kareem’s charity who saved him. The young man, Hassan Majeed al-Maliki, visited and said the nearby hospital had a spare bed.

And if there hadn’t been a bed?

“Then, I tell them that there is nothing we can do,” Maliki said.

Below the chandeliers of a luxury hotel in Baghdad in June, officials from all major ministries outlined their thoughts for how to tackle the crisis at its root. They spoke of the need to provide young people with spaces for sport and social activities, of the need to improve the education system and launch awareness campaigns. But no further action was taken in the months that followed, as political factions squabbled over the shape of a new government, preventing ministries from carrying out any new initiatives.

“Iraqis are very good at talking, but where’s the action? We don’t see it,” Ghanem said. “All we do is arrest people.”

That is precisely why many Maher’s friends have been scared to seek help for their addiction. “If they arrest someone taking drugs, they will beat the crap out of them,” he said.

New raids, more detainees

The drug squad’s first target was down an unpaved road without streetlights. They said that an informant had identified the location, and when the SWAT team stormed out with guns readied, a man in his 40s surrendered without a fight. Inside his one-story house, the unit found dozens of small pouches containing a white crystal-like substance that the officers believed to be meth, a set of small measuring scales and a loaded gun in each of the three rooms.

But at a house several districts to the north, the scene grew messier. Two women were already screaming obscenities at the police force by the time they reached the front gate. Four young men were pulled out for questioning, and a 17-year-old with messy hair was sobbing.

Inside the house, an officer found three tabs of captagon, an amphetamine, and one of the women began pleading with him. “It’s not drugs, it’s for his injury,” she kept saying.

Around the corner, another officer was scrolling through the teenager’s phone as the boy nodded frantically through his tears. The unit later said that he had been asked to cooperate with future investigations — a new informant to fuel the cycle of arrests.

It was past midnight by the time the convoy finally finished for the night. The streets were empty and the vehicles drove fast now, gliding down the highways and making sharp turns on street corners hung with pictures of the clerics and politicians.

Back at the station, the suspects were placed in a holding cell and brought for interrogation one by one. Last up was Moslem Dawoud, the alleged dealer whose home, police said, contained 16 doses of crystal meth. He kept his eyes on the floor for the most part and had stopped protesting his innocence.

An officer looked down at a faint tattoo on the man’s forearm and asked if he’d been in prison before. Dawoud nodded.

“We can help you, you know,” the officer told him.

Downstairs, the yells of other prisoners were floating out through the night air. After a long silence, Dawoud shared what he said was the name of his dealer.

Ehab looked down at the stack of case files on his desk.

“It’s like this every night,” he said blankly. “You do the raids, you do the paperwork, you’re in a loop. Then you lie down, you wake up and you start again.”

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
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#2168: Oct 26th 2022 at 4:31:52 PM

OCCRP: Millions in UN Funding Flow to War Profiteers and Human Rights Abusers in Syria, Study Shows.

    Article 
The United Nations has paid out tens of millions of dollars to Syrian companies linked to war profiteers, human rights abusers, and sanctioned figures linked to the Bashar Al-Assad regime, a new study shows.

The United Nations paid out roughly $137 million to Syrian companies linked to human rights abusers, war profiteers, sanctioned people, and other figures connected to the Bashar Al-Assad regime in 2019 and 2020, a new study has found.

Among the companies that received U.N. procurement money in Syria was one owned by a sanctioned militia leader linked to a massacre outside Damascus and another owned by the family members of a businessman who allegedly profited from trading the rubble of buildings shelled by government forces, the study said.

“When humanitarian assistance is systematically abused and distorted, under the pretext of protecting the neutrality of humanitarian operations, it may become a dangerous weapon in the hands of the government against its people,” the report’s authors wrote.

The U.N. has long been known to contract companies linked to the Assad regime, which has overseen a decade-long civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and forced around seven million to flee their homes.

U.N. staff have spent tens of millions of dollars staying at the Damascus Four Seasons hotel, which is partly owned by regime-allied businessman Samer Foz, for instance. The United States sanctioned Foz in 2019, saying he had “leveraged the atrocities of the Syrian conflict into a profit-generating enterprise” and was “directly supporting the murderous Assad regime.”

But the new study — published on Tuesday by the London-based Syrian Legal Development Program (SLDP) and the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks (OPEN) — was the first major attempt to analyze just how much U.N. procurement money is going to human rights abusers or figures who are sanctioned or connected to the Assad regime and the conflict.

In total, the United Nations paid out around $406 million in procurement spending in Syria in 2019 and 2020, covering a wide variety of goods and services such as food, accommodation, medical equipment, security, training, IT services, chemicals, and office materials. About $75 million went to companies which were not identified for “privacy reasons” or “security reasons.”

Of the remaining amount, the report analyzed the money that went to the U.N.’s top 100 known suppliers in Syria — and found that about $137 million went to what the report called “high” or “very high” risk companies, including those owned by war profiteers, sanctioned people, and prominent regime allies.

Reporters from OCCRP and its media partner, Syrian Investigative Reporting For Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ), assisted with research, were granted advance access to the report, and carried out their own analysis of the U.N. procurement database, which corroborated many of the report’s key findings. They also found examples of problematic disbursements before 2019.

In one of the more striking cases, about $1.4 million in UN funding was also provided to the Syria Trust for Development, a foundation established and run by Syria’s First Lady Asma Al-Assad, in 2015 and 2017, ostensibly for emergency shelter and “non-food items,” according to the U.N. Financial Tracker Service.

Carsten Wieland, a German policy adviser and author of a book about humanitarian aid in the Syrian conflict, expressed alarm at the findings.

“It is very appalling that there has not been sufficient due diligence inside the U.N. where these organizations came from, or are a hidden arm of someone else,” he told OCCRP.

Francesco Galtieri, a senior U.N. official based in Damascus, said that the United Nations provided assistance “with strict adherence to humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, independence, and impartiality.”

He said that internal due diligence procedures had been strengthened over the past two years and that donor states could ask for details of contracts through a formal audit process. The U.N. also continuously reviews allegations and “disengages” if evidence suggests “the involvement of vendors and suppliers in proscribed practices,” he said.

“All U.N. agencies apply diligent effort to ensuring an in-depth understanding of the breadth of factors relevant to conflict sensitivity and due diligence practices in Syria, to ensure that programming and related operational procedures are risk aware and do no harm,” Galtieri told OCCRP.

The Rise of War Profiteers

Syria’s government has maintained a tight grip over the economy for decades, with allies and relatives of the ruling Assad family dominating key sectors such as telecommunications, infrastructure, and real estate.

Since the 2011 uprising and the ensuing civil war, the Syrian regime has become even more reliant on a new class of war profiteers and proxies to help it skirt sanctions and maintain control over its last few remaining sources of foreign currency.

At the same time, Syria has become one of the world’s largest recipients of humanitarian assistance. Since 2011, over $40 billion of aid money has flowed into the country, more than half of that through the U.N., according to researchers.

The SLDP and OPEN study shows that many in the regime’s inner circle have benefited from this influx of cash.

For instance, a company called Desert Falcon LLC, run by pro-regime commander Fadi Ahmad, received over $1 million in 2019 and 2020 from the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and its refugee agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, under a variety of categories including “apparel,” “office equipment,” “electronics,” and “manufacturing components.”

In 2012, Ahmad, also known as Fadi Saqr, took command of the pro-government National Defense Forces militia in Damascus. The following year, the militia took part in a massacre of dozens of people in the Syrian capital’s Tadamon district.

Desert Falcon’s co-owner is Bilal Al-Naal, who has been a member of Syrian parliament since 2020. Another company owned by Naal, Al-Naal LLC, received over $1.2 million in funds, also from UNICEF and UNRWA, listed under categories including “apparel,” “paper materials,” and “medical equipment,” the study found.

Another company, Jupiter for Investments SA, which received over half a million dollars from UNICEF for “management and admin services,” is owned by relatives of regime ally Mohammad Hamsho, including four who are under sanctions. Hamsho, who is also sanctioned by the United States and the European Union, has been accused of trading in the rubble from destroyed homes and acting as a front for Assad’s brother, Maher, who heads the army’s elite Fourth Armored Division.

Cham Wings, a Syrian airline sanctioned by the United States, received over half a million dollars from the World Food Program, the study said. The airline was also sanctioned along with its owner and chairman by the European Union for exacerbating the refugee crisis on the borders of Belarus in 2021 and 2022, but the sanctions were lifted earlier this year.

A variety of other companies receiving U.N. funds were linked to the Assad family, including multiple relatives and partners of Assad’s cousin, the sanctioned business tycoon Rami Makhlouf. Many of Makhlouf’s assets were stripped and he was put under house arrest in a conflict with Syrian authorities over the past two years.

Earlier this month, the Associated Press separately reported that staff members at the U.N.’s World Health Organization in Syria had accused their boss of mismanaging millions of dollars and using the agency’s funds to buy gifts for Syrian government officials.

The Report

The influx of foreign currency brought by humanitarian aid spending is a boon for the Syrian government, which has struggled to procure cash amid international sanctions, the collapse of its most productive economic sectors, and a financial crisis in neighboring Lebanon.

U.N. agencies that spend money in Syria are required by the government to exchange currency at the official exchange rate, which is far below the black market rates. Karam Shaar, the co-author of the report, said that in his research he found the U.N. exchanged some $340 million at the official rate in 2020, which was on average 50 percent lower than the black market rate that year.

The differential resulted in $170 million of “diverted” donor money, although it is not exactly clear how or where the government diverted these amounts, he said.

The SLDP and OPEN study analyzed about $294 million in procurement funding, representing the amount that went to the U.N.’s top 100 suppliers in Syria in 2019 and 2020, and including companies that are fully private or those with both public and private shareholders.

Drawing on business directories which rely on the official Syrian gazette, as well as news websites and social media, they divided the suppliers into four levels of risk, based on a guide written by SLDP and Human Rights Watch.

“Very high risk” companies included companies with links to human rights abuses, paramilitary groups, the private security industry, the destruction of civilian property, the development of land where people were forcibly displaced, and support for the Syrian armed forces and government since 2011.

“High risk” included companies which have received Syrian state contracts or held monopolies over certain sectors, were owned by members of parliament or other local officials, had donated to Syrian entities, or taken part in economic blockades of opposition-held areas.

The study found that about 36 percent of the funds it analyzed went to “very high risk” companies, while another 10 percent went to “high risk” companies, 30 percent to “medium,” and 23 percent to “low risk” companies.

Wieland, the policy adviser, said that thorough reform would be needed to get out of the “neutrality trap” and make sure that U.N. money was not going to suppliers like those listed in the report.

“It is something so tricky, and so politically relevant, that it has to come from somebody so far up,” he told OCCRP. “This has not been done. I have not seen any real will to tackle such issues.”

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
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#2169: Nov 8th 2022 at 4:30:53 AM

CNBC: Jailed British-Egyptian activist escalates hunger strike by refusing water as COP27 gets underway.

    Article 
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Jailed British-Egyptian citizen Alaa Abdel-Fattah stepped up his hunger strike by refusing water, ratcheting up fears for the life of one of the country’s leading rights activists just as world leaders arrive in Egypt for the start of the COP27 climate summit.

Amnesty International chief Agnes Callamard said Sunday that authorities had less than three days to save Abdel-Fattah’s life, warning that failure to intervene would overshadow the U.N.’s flagship climate conference.

It comes amid growing fears over the deteriorating health of Abdel-Fattah. The 40-year-old has stopped drinking water in a desperate attempt to pressure Egyptian authorities to allow him U.K. consular access.

The escalation of Abdel-Fattah’s hunger strike has prompted grave concerns for the prominent human rights activist and writer, who had consumed just 100 calories a day for more than 200 days.

Egypt is hosting the COP27 climate summit in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh through to Nov. 18. The event has shone a global spotlight on Egypt’s human rights record, with campaigners condemning President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s policy of “mass arbitrary detention to crush dissent.”

Egypt’s el-Sisi has long claimed that there are no political prisoners in the country.

“If they do not want to end up with a death they should have and could have prevented, they must act now,” Callamard said at a news briefing.

If authorities were to fail to intervene in the next 72 hours “at the most,” Callamard said Abdel-Fattah’s death “will be holding on to COP27, it will be in every single discussion, every single discussion there will be Alaa there.”

Abdel-Fattah acquired British citizenship last year and has since been seeking the right to a consular visit by representatives of the British embassy. The Free Alaa campaign says this right has so far been refused.

Abdel-Fattah rose to international prominence during Egypt’s 2011 uprising and has been imprisoned for most of the past eight years.

He was sentenced most recently in December last year to a further five years in prison for allegedly spreading false news via social media after sharing a post highlighting human rights abuses in Egyptian jails.

“I’m here to do my best to try and shed light on my brother’s case and to save him,” Sanaa Seif, Alaa Abdel-Fattah’s sister, said on arriving in Sharm el-Sheikh in the early hours of Monday, according to Reuters.

“I’m really worried. I’m here to put pressure on all leaders coming, especially [U.K.] Prime Minister Rishi Sunak,” Seif said. She had until recently been leading a sit-in outside the British Foreign Office in London.

UK PM ‘very concerned’ about the situation

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in a letter to Seif that he was “very concerned” about the situation, adding that the government was “totally committed” to swiftly resolving his case.

“Ministers and officials continue to press for urgent consular access to Alaa as well as calling for his release at the highest levels of the Egyptian government,” Sunak said.

Tasneem Essop, head of the Climate Action Network, which includes more than 1,500 civil society groups, appealed to Sunak’s government to do all they can to help free Abdel-Fattah.

“Sunak, the U.K. PM, he’s coming to Egypt. And there has been a massive global campaign to call on the U.K. government to help free Alaa Abdel-Fattah,” Essop said on Monday at COP27.

“They should come here and do that. He should come here in addition to making statements on climate,” she added. “Come and help free Alaa.”


Syria Direct: Seeds of Syria: How a birthplace of agriculture lost troves of its native crops, and why we should all worry.

    Article 
AL-HASAKAH — In a small coffee shop in downtown Hasakah city, northeastern Syria, Mahmoud Muhammad’s eyes flicker with energy as he recounts the early days of 2013.

The Syrian regime was pulling out, abandoning its offices and institutions to a nascent coalition of armed groups and independent political parties—led by Kurds, Syriacs and Arabs from the area—that would eventually morph into the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), the de facto government still ruling the region. While all eyes turned to the raging war between the Syrian state and opposition groups, as well as emerging jihadist influence in the Syrian desert, Muhammad was fighting on another front.

“It was the very beginning of a new era, and we were trying to preserve the resources we had at hand,” Muhammad said, his expressive face broken by a broad smile. “It was a very important matter, a matter of food security and food sovereignty.”

For days on end, he and other agricultural engineers crisscrossed northeastern Syria to salvage wheat seeds, visiting agricultural research centers, seed multiplication organizations, and contracted seed breeders. Their efforts would give birth to the Agricultural Community Development Company (KPJ), established in the early years of the war to fill the void left by regime institutions. Muhammad, who requested a pseudonym due to security concerns, was among its founders.

“Keep in mind this was wartime—nobody was preoccupied with the issue of seeds,” Muhammad said. “But really, if not for what we managed to do in those days, the agricultural crisis we are in now would be much worse. Without the resources collected then, we would not have been able to distribute seeds, plant them and feed people for so long.”

But, as Muhammad knows all too well, these efforts are reaching their limits.

In a strange twist of the threads of history, Syria—home to ancient varieties of wild wheat and barley, the cradle where humans first discovered the extraordinary potential of cereals and learned to harvest, plant and nurture grain—is struggling to grow its own wheat.

In 2021, the harvest plummeted to just above one million tons, compared to 2.8 million tons in 2020 and more than 4 million tons a year before the war. Across Syria, farmers report dwindling yields, which they attribute to a lack of rain, fertilizers and irrigation capacity—but also to the declining quality of seeds.

Syria was once home to world-renowned agricultural research centers and one of the world’s largest seed banks, hosting thousands of native cereals and wild plants. But war scattered these resources, and the seeds that were rescued nearly 10 years ago and repeatedly reproduced ever since are now reaching exhaustion. Institutions in charge of growing and distributing them lack the expertise and means to carry out their mission. At the same time, the climate is changing, and varieties developed decades ago can no longer meet the needs of farmers, who struggle to adapt to rapid changes in weather patterns and rainfall.

The story of Syria’s seeds is interwoven with that of its people and institutions. How did a nation once self-sufficient in cereals lose the means to produce them, leaving farmers empty-handed to face a changing climate and worsening droughts? And how did a once bountiful and diverse trove of genetic material shrivel to a few exhausted varieties?

Part I: Losing ground

The impact of climate change is now perceptible in Syria’s northeast, which is now about 0.8 degrees Celsius hotter than it was a century ago. Precipitation has also decreased, particularly in the past two years, amid a historic drought.

But climate change has also become a convenient scapegoat. In Iraq and Syria, political leaders eagerly point to plummeting rainfall as the main, inescapable source of farmers’ woes. Undoubtedly, rising temperatures and decreasing precipitation has hugely affected rainfed crops, decreased access to water for irrigation and compounded other challenges.

A closer look into Syrian agriculture shows that the seeds of its current decline were sown decades before the first impacts of climate change were felt—a decline that has more to do with shortsighted decisions and human-induced crises than with a few years of drought.

World-renowned institutions

In the 1960s, the Baath party rose to power in Syria with a political obsession: improving agricultural yields to ensure self-sufficiency, the prerequisite for a strong and sovereign state.

Historically, farmers in Syria and around the world grew landraces: local crop varieties selected and bred by farmers themselves. But since scientific plant breeding emerged in the nineteenth century, many countries have set their sights on producing “improved” varieties, selected more systematically, that can be reproduced and distributed on a wider scale. A “variety” is a population of individual plants from the same crop that have been selected for their common properties. They may have a certain height or color, a high yield or be well-adapted to a particular environment.

To this end, Syrian leaders established powerful institutions tasked with modernizing the agricultural sector. The country’s first scientific plant breeding program started in the 1960s with the establishment of the Department of Agricultural and Scientific Research (DASR) under the Ministry of Agriculture, and other state programs such as the government-operated Syrian Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform (SMAAR) seed bank in Douma.

Independent research centers were also invited to Syria to develop high-yield seed varieties. By 2011, two major institutions operated in the country: the Arab Center for the Study of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD)—founded in Damascus in 1968—and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which was founded in 1977 in Lebanon but moved to Syria during the Lebanese civil war.

The UN-affiliated ICARDA was tasked with developing key food crop varieties, such as barley and lentils, for developing countries, and wheat varieties for the Middle East and North Africa. As one of the top 15 agricultural research centers worldwide, it was one of the crown jewels of the Assad regime, which provided it with 1,000 hectares of land near the town of Tel Hadya in the Aleppo countryside. In exchange, ICARDA was expected to develop improved varieties well-adapted to the Syrian context.

And for the first few decades, this partnership succeeded. Between 1977 and 2011, Syria’s DASR approved and released more than 18 wheat varieties, many developed in partnership with ICARDA and ACSAD. Those varieties, developed until 2011, bear names that evoke their birthplace—Cham, Bohouth, Douma—and are still widely used by Syrian farmers today.

‘A difficult marriage’

Despite these apparent successes, “from the beginning, it was a difficult marriage,” recalled Dr. Salvatore Ceccarelli, a geneticist and plant breeder who worked with ICARDA in Syria from 1980 to 2011.

As a strategic element of Syria’s agricultural policy, the development and release of new crop varieties was tightly controlled and centralized. Researchers could not provide seeds to farmers directly, only to the state. The DASR “would conduct trials in various areas, and based on the results, they would decide whether the variety would be made available to farmers,” Ceccarelli added.

The work was also impacted by competition between different research centers, as well as a growing rift between government officials focused on improving yields in line with the national policy towards self-sufficiency, and independent experts with very different research interests.

The policy of Syria’s DASR “was somehow to forget about [arid and semi-arid] areas, and to produce all they needed in the wetter parts of Syria,” Ceccarelli remarked. “I of course disagreed with this, because they did not understand the ecological importance of farming in dry areas, as a sort of barrier to the desert.”

Ceccarelli’s research focused on barley, a rainfed crop that can grow in particularly harsh environments, and is often cultivated on dry, marginal land by farmers, usually for animal feed. To develop varieties adapted to these conditions, Ceccarelli started providing farmers with a range of high-quality seeds from ICARDA’s breeding program, asking them to plant them in the same field and select the plants that fared best.

This participatory approach quickly came into conflict with the Syrian government’s modernization policies. In 2008, Ceccarelli had to significantly downsize his research following direct pressure from the Ministry of Agriculture, which he says accused him of “threatening national food security.”

A centralized system

Ceccarelli views his own experience as illustrative of how Syrian authorities managed seeds at the time, by tightly controlling them from inception to distribution.

“My main objective was to provide farmers in different areas of Syria with the best variety adapted to their area, while the philosophy of the Syrian government was to plant the same variety all across Syria,” Ceccarelli said. “It is much easier to produce and control a large amount of seeds from a few varieties, than small amounts of seeds from many varieties.”

Once a new variety was launched, seeds were distributed to farmers by the General Organization for Seed Multiplication (GOSM), a state organization established in 1976 as the sole supplier of certified seeds. From 1994 to 1999, wheat accounted for 94 percent of the roughly 170,000 tons of agricultural crop seeds GOSM distributed each year. And by the early 2000s, the organization claimed to provide up to 300,000 tons of certified wheat seeds to Syrian farmers yearly.

A vast network of agricultural centers across Syria managed the distribution of seeds, while also promoting new farming methods, irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides. From the 1980s onwards, this aggressive government strategy led to the fast-paced modernization of agriculture, complete with the mass adoption of machinery and fertilizers.

Improved seed varieties were sold at a subsidized price to encourage farmers to renew their stock on a frequent basis. Pushed by droughts and crop failures, and tempted by the promise of higher yields, farmers abandoned their landrace seeds. The proportion of Syrian wheat fields planted with modern varieties increased, from eight percent in 1973 to 55 percent in 1977 and 100 percent by the late 1990s.

Staggering success

At first, Syria’s agricultural transformation was applauded by scientists and policymakers, who were chiefly concerned with increasing food security in a world marked by skyrocketing population growth and catastrophic famines.

“Awareness and adoption of modern wheat varieties and associated technologies has increased spectacularly [in Syria],” one research paper remarked in 2011. By 1999, 87 percent of wheat farmers grew modern varieties, 99.5 percent applied commercial fertilizers, and more than 90 percent used pesticides and chemical treatments to improve the survival rate of seeds. “Within a short period the country has become self-sufficient in wheat, producing surpluses for export in good years,” researchers added.

But this fast-paced growth in productivity had drawbacks. It increased dependence on a centralized agricultural supply system, which was designed not to support the resilience of small and mid-sized farmers, but to boost yields.

Much like Ceccarelli’s locally-selected barley varieties, the sturdy landraces planted by local farmers for centuries were pushed aside to ensure a centralized, reliable supply of seeds controlled by the Syrian government.

But many of the modern varieties that replaced them were designed to succeed in “improved” conditions: in irrigated or more fertile parts of Syria, and on fertilized and chemically treated fields. Most were not suited for the extreme natural conditions their ancestors faced, and required a constant flow of inputs, leaving farmers reliant on state-controlled markets once they gave up their own landraces.

The collapse

By the time the Syrian revolution broke out in 2011, ICARDA had installed several experimental campuses across Syria, and its headquarters in Tel Hadya near Aleppo hosted around 1,000 staff, including many international researchers. It held one of the most important collections of seeds in the world, housing some 150,000 samples from the region—many of them from Syria, but also seeds rescued from conflict-stricken countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 2012, as revolution was met with brutal repression and descended into chaos, ICARDA withdrew its international staff from Syria. But throughout the first years of the war, its seed bank in Tel Hadya continued to operate, powered by generators keeping its refrigerated vaults at -20 degrees Celsius. The seeds remained and, for as long as possible, Syrian employees continued to operate the facility. Each day, they negotiated their way to the seed bank, which was in an area controlled by various Islamist opposition factions, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, until 2015.

“What was really original in this seed bank,” Ceccarelli said, “was the presence of wild plants from which our crops originated: wild wheat, wild barley, wild lentils, wild chickpeas.” This precious genetic material—the founding blocks of modern agriculture—was irreplaceable.

Aware of this, ICARDA had started to duplicate its seed collection in 1985. In 2008, it also began to deposit more than 116,000 samples in the Svalbard Seed Vault, dubbed the “Doomsday Vault” because it is dug into the frozen ground of the Norwegian Arctic to safely harbor copies of all known seeds on Earth.

So when ICARDA finally left Syria in 2015, the tens of thousands of seeds collected over 40 years of research were not entirely lost. But what was lost were decades of expertise and close partnerships between the international research center and Syrian experts, who formed the backbone of extremely powerful and centralized agricultural institutions.

In 2015, 2017 and 2019, ICARDA gradually withdrew its seeds from the Doomsday Vault and was able to restore its seed bank, now split between various locations across the Middle East. But the Syrian agricultural sector did not recover so easily.

Syria’s celebrated agricultural success, authors of the 2011 study remarked, hinged “on the existence of a strong wheat seed system where certified seed is available, affordable and regularly used by farmers.” When agricultural institutions and markets, including the GOSM’s centralized seed supply system, fell apart during the war, farmers began to feel the effects of their entrenched dependency. And to their dismay, they soon faced a seed problem.

Part II: Saving seeds

In recent years, harvests of all crops have shriveled across Syria, but the situation of wheat is probably the most dramatic: total production fell by roughly 75 percent between 2011 and 2021, and farmers continue to report declining yields.

The impact on food security is stark. In 2022, the AANES was able to purchase only 450,000 tons of wheat from farmers, 150,000 tons short of what it needs to feed people in northeastern Syria. The situation is much worse in government-held areas, since most wheat production is located in the northeast, outside the regime’s control.

Northeastern Syria, the country’s agricultural powerhouse, is where the fate of Syria’s wheat harvest is decided year after year. But between 2020 and 2021 alone, farmers reported decreases of 17 to 55 percent in yields, according to an October 2021 humanitarian assessment. In Hasakah province, the loss was 50 percent on average. Figures for 2022 are expected to fall within the same range. These numbers are only for irrigated crops, which have been least affected by the ongoing drought.

While decreasing rainfall is a big concern, farmers increasingly point to worsening seed performance as a main challenge, particularly in Deir e-Zor and Raqqa provinces, where there are fewer markets and agricultural institutions than in Hasakah.

“We are still planting the varieties developed in the days of the regime, but they no longer give the same results,” seed rescuer and KPJ founder Muhammad summarized. “For many years I grew Douma 4, but I recently stopped because its resistance to pests, diseases and weather conditions has decreased. Because of climate change, even seeds that worked well in the past may no longer be suitable to today’s conditions.”

Parallel institutions

When the AANES, the de-facto government in northeastern Syria, formed in November 2013, it chose the wheat sheaf as one of its emblems. Bread is a staple food in Syria, and for as long as people there can recall, fields of wheat covered the country’s vast northeastern plains.

The fledgling administration reopened agricultural research centers and grain silos abandoned by the Syrian government, and launched its own General Organization for Seed Multiplication (GOSM) to collect, store, multiply and distribute seeds to local farmers, taking over from the KPJ, which remains the most important agricultural company in the area.

Farmers who register with the AANES’ GOSM can access a limited quantity of subsidized seeds, fertilizers and agricultural credit. In turn, they must sell part of their harvest to AANES grain silos at set prices. The body also contracts with some farmers to multiply seeds, provided they meet criteria such as owning irrigated land that was not planted with wheat or corn in the previous year.

“Year after year, the number of seed multipliers we contract is increasing,” Mohamed Abdelhamid Younes, the director of Qamishli’s seed multiplication center, told Syria Direct. His center went from 30 contracted farms around Qamishli in 2020 to 80 in 2021, and 164 in 2022. This trend is driven in part by the difficult situation of farmers after two years of drought: contracting with the GOSM is a way to access seeds and inputs on credit. There are thousands more contracted seed multipliers across Hasakah province, where the GOSM is most active.

In 2022, according to Younes, the AANES was able to secure 75,000 tons of wheat seeds, enough to cover basic needs. Farmers can also purchase unsubsidized seeds from local markets or their neighbors, and a significant portion—between 30 and 50 percent, according to various studies—reuse seeds stored from the previous harvest. Others receive seed donations from NGOs, which buy them at an unsubsidized price from the AANES to ensure steady quality and avoid disrupting the seed supply.

“This year, we managed to produce an important quantity of wheat seeds, probably enough to cover the needs of irrigated areas, and we hope that next year, we will be able to cover northeastern Syria entirely,” Muhammad al-Dakhil, the co-chair of the AANES’ Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, told Syria Direct. “We have been working for years to reach the level we are at now.”

Others have also understood the crucial importance of a secure seed supply. In northwestern Syria, the Syrian Interim Government (SIG), formed by opposition forces in Aleppo province, established a parallel GOSM in 2013 to import seeds and multiply wheat seeds in opposition-held areas. The SIG’s GOSM currently maintains 17 varieties of wheat and does not develop new ones. In 2017, the organization produced about 9,400 tons of seeds.

The state of agricultural institutions is less clear in Damascus-held parts of Syria. Many pre-war organizations still formally exist but, like empty shells, are disconnected from the country’s main agricultural areas. Most agricultural research centers and silos have been taken over by de facto authorities in areas beyond the reach of Damascus. Still, the state continues to receive support from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In collaboration with ICARDA, in 2019 the FAO contracted an unknown number of seed breeders to multiply seeds on behalf of the regime’s GOSM.

A steady decline

But despite efforts on various sides, Syrian farmers are losing an uphill battle against the natural deterioration of seeds and varieties. Every year, the seeds they have grow a little less effective. Understanding why requires a dive into how seed multiplication works at its various stages.

Like any population of living beings, plant varieties have a natural tendency to diversify. Some “abnormal” individuals appear, others cross with another variety and produce offspring with different characteristics from the two parent populations.

To ensure that a variety remains true to its original, distinctive traits, a continuous process of selection, sorting and cleaning is necessary. Multiplying the variety—scaling up from a few parent seeds to thousands, then millions and billions of offspring, is a highly controlled process.

The best seeds, from which an entire variety is derived, are known as “nucleus seeds.” These are genetically pure and have not been mixed with other seeds or exposed to an open environment where they could mix with another variety.

To generate more seeds, researchers plant nucleus seeds under close scientific supervision. The next generation is harvested to obtain “basic” or “foundation” seeds, which are nearly genetically identical to the nucleus seeds, but available in greater numbers. Again, the environment is controlled as much as possible to preserve the variety’s desired properties.

Basic seeds are then planted and harvested on specialized farms, where the process is repeated. At every stage of seed multiplication, the chances that seeds will slightly diverge from the parent seeds, losing their genetic purity or mixing with other varieties, increase. This risk multiplies once seeds leave supervised agricultural research centers and are handed over to external “breeders,” farmers who have been contracted to produce a large quantity of seeds. At this point, the seeds have reached the “registered” stage and can be distributed to mainstream farmers, who produce wheat for consumption. The next and last stage are “certified” seeds, the progeny of “registered” seeds.

To maintain seed quality, best practice is to regularly “refresh” the variety by returning back to the earliest available seed stage and restarting the process to produce basic, registered and certified seeds that more closely resemble the parent population.

But in the case of Syria, the foundation of this multiplication process, the nucleus seeds, have been lost. “During the war, we have lost the source, the origin of our seeds—especially wheat,” seed rescuer Muhammad said regretfully.

Looking for the origins

“At every agricultural research center there were small seed banks. As soon as the AANES gained control of regime institutions, including agricultural centers, it tried to conserve everything that was there,” one employee at the Qamishli seed multiplication center told Syria Direct.

But they were, at best, able to recover basic seeds for a handful of wheat varieties out of 18—no nucleus seeds. Most other varieties are reproduced year after year from certified seeds that may already have diverged significantly from their origins, and whose productivity is steadily declining.

Some nucleus seeds were almost certainly kept in seed banks by their developers—ICARDA, ACSAD and the DASR—with copies sent to the Svalbard vault for safekeeping before 2015. But as a non-recognized governmental entity, AANES is not entitled to withdraw seeds from Svalbard. As for ICARDA, “we do not have any direct communication with them,” al-Dakhil of the AANES’ Agriculture Ministry said, despite repeated attempts to work with the research center.

As of 2019, ICARDA still implemented projects in Damascus-held parts of Syria. But it is likely unable or unwilling to work with either the AANES or the Syrian opposition. Syria Direct reached out to ICARDA for comment, but did not receive a response.

The AANES’ GOSM has tried to develop its own varieties in recent years, dubbed “Rojava” after the Kurdish name for Kurdish parts of Syria. But by their own admission, expertise and genetic materials are lacking. “We really hope that direct communication will be established with ICARDA in order to be able to develop and improve new seed varieties,” al-Dakhil said.

Importing seeds?

So far, northeastern Syria’s de facto authorities have resisted the idea of importing wheat seeds. Private traders regularly bring in vegetable seeds, but wheat seed imports have been limited and confined to three or four varieties, in part because of a lack of capacity for quality control.

“We cannot take the risk of contaminating the remaining Syrian varieties and losing them for good,” Muhammad said. “We will not be able to always import seeds, so we need to preserve the resources that we have.”

Not only are foreign seed varieties less adapted to Syria, they could, if improperly controlled, open the door to foreign diseases, nematodes or genetically modified crops, posing an even greater threat to food security.

“Our laboratories are not very developed: we can test seed quality based on a number of factors and check for diseases and nematodes, but we don’t have equipment to look into the genetic make-up of the crop,” al-Dakhil added. “We have one lab specialized in DNA testing, but it is not yet operational.”

In one exceptional case, NGOs funded by USAID brought in 3,000 tons of wheat seeds from neighboring Iraq in November 2021. According to sources in the NGO sector, two wheat varieties were distributed to local multipliers in order to adapt them to Syria over the course of several planting seasons.

NGOs have otherwise refrained from importing wheat seeds, but there may soon be no other solution in sight. “[Syria] needs experience, needs experts, needs labs,” Loren Burhan, the deputy coordinator of the Food Security and Livelihoods Working Group at the NES Forum—a coordination body for international and local NGOs working in Syria—told Syria Direct.

“I can see that [the AANES GOSM] are getting hopeless now,” she added. “They are thinking of importing wheat seeds, and one day, maybe after five years, we will no longer be talking about local wheat varieties. This is the high risk we face.”

Part III: Re-rooting

Over the past 15 years, since getting married and moving to Mashoq, a small village in the countryside of Qamishli, Amal has never bought a single vegetable. “Not even a single seed of black cumin!” she says proudly.

She grows everything she needs in her garden, on a vegetable plot behind her house and on eight dunums of rented farmland filled with a wide variety of vegetables and herbs: molokhia, cilantro, onions, eggplants, arugula, okra and more.

At first, Amal’s garden grew mostly out of the generosity of neighbors, who gave her seeds. But since then, like others in the village, each year Amal harvests and stores seeds for the next season, only buying them from the market for certain crops, or when there is nothing to harvest. “I prefer to prepare my own seeds because it is less expensive and generally more successful,” she said.

Farmers have always played an active role in managing the genetic resources of their crops, selecting seeds based on their observed properties, the quality of the harvest on a particular plot of land, or their perceived resistance to diseases and drought. From this continuous selection process, hundreds of landraces have emerged that are adapted to specific areas.

But now, decades of intensive agricultural policies, war and economic hardship threaten to erase what remains of Syria’s heirloom seeds. Over time, the rise of commercial varieties has led many to abandon seed selection and preparation for commercial seeds perceived—often rightfully—as more productive and readily available. As farmers stopped producing their own seeds, landraces disappeared faster than ever before—and with them, precious genetic resources.

Losing landraces

Across Syria, the decline of landraces is well under way. A 2022 study carried out by Syrian experts in opposition-held parts of northwestern Syria found that “amongst the 10 wheat landraces that were once widely cultivated, only five were still in use.” The number of legume landraces still used by farmers had dropped from 23 to 11. And only 14 out of 27 previously known vegetable landraces were still grown in the area.

When farmers were asked why they abandoned a particular breed, half said it was because they no longer had seeds. Part of it was also due to war and displacement, which led many farmers to lose their stocks.

Whatever the cause, farmers’ seeds are quickly being replaced by commercial varieties. Increasingly, these are imported from Turkey and beyond, since Syria’s remaining seed development and distribution infrastructure focuses on wheat.

“Imported seeds are better than Syrian ones because they are better prepared and chemically treated, so they give a better yield,” one agricultural shop owner in Qamishli said. His shelves include tomato and eggplant seeds from India.

These seeds are exponentially more expensive than local varieties, their prices subject to increase and the fluctuating exchange rate of the Syrian pound. For 1,000 tomato seeds from India, a farmer in Hasakah pays $24 (around SYP 100,000), compared to a few thousand Syrian pounds for an equivalent amount from Syria.

The seed smugglers

The decline of farmers’ heirloom varieties and the associated loss of genetic crop diversity is an issue of major concern worldwide.

With the eradication of many landraces, we are not only losing the chance to see, smell and taste crops developed over the course of centuries. We are also losing a trove of genetic material that could one day be used to develop varieties resistant to future diseases and emerging climate conditions, or that have yet-unknown medical properties.

Take for example Aegilops tauschii, a Syrian wild grass currently being studied by wheat breeders in the United States for its resistance to the Hessian fly, a pest spreading across the US due to climate change. If it had gone extinct in the wild, and if its seeds had not been preserved in ICARDA’s seed bank, Aegilops tauschii may never have been studied, and the genes resistant to the Hessian fly may have been lost forever.

Who can say how many other secrets lie dormant inside the genes of plants, awaiting discovery?

This is of particular concern in Syria, where, as Ceccarelli recalled, humanity’s most important crops appeared: wild wheat, barley, legumes, nuts and fruits, the basis of our current food system.

Since its creation in 2016, one organic farm school in a country bordering Syria has built a vast collection of landrace seeds—donated by farmers around the world, including Lebanon, Syria, southern Europe and as far as Colombia—and multiplied them.

For several years, the organization smuggled some of these farmers’ seeds across the border to Syria, where a handful of “friends” passed them on to seed multipliers and farmers in Homs, Aleppo, Idlib and Raqqa. “Wherever there’s farming, you can find our seeds. Or at least, I’d like to think that,” one of the farm’s co-founders said.

The Syrian government bans independently importing seeds, so activists paid smugglers to ferry them across the border. Once in Syria, those involved in their multiplication and distribution also worked undercover. “I don’t know exactly what kind of risk people faced if they had been caught by the Syrian government with those seeds,” he added. “People always told us it was better to send them small quantities, so we would smuggle them across by the kilo.”

In recent years, “it’s become too difficult to send seeds to Syria, too expensive to pay the smugglers,” he said. But enough seeds have been exchanged over the past years to constitute a small stockpile and reproduce several local varieties. “Now we focus on knowledge production: It’s much easier to send a book [on agroecology] to a Syrian farmer over WhatsApp, than a packet of seeds across the border.”

These activities stem from a deep belief that the global food system, built on intensive forms of agriculture that have proven destructive to soil and ecosystems, is ill-equipped to deal with climate change. In this context, empowering farmers with the knowledge to prepare their own seeds and select their own crops is essential.

“If we don’t do this, we are all going to die,” the source said. “Solely relying on commercial seeds means losing independence and losing food sovereignty.”

A cautionary tale

“When war ravages a country, the continuity of its agricultural systems is also destroyed. Farmers might keep their lives but lose land and seed stocks carefully stewarded for generations because they lack the resources for reconstruction,” Courtney Fullilove, a history professor, wrote in a 2015 piece about ICARDA’s seed bank—which was still running at the time.

These cautionary words were full of foresight. Eventually, this is exactly what happened to Syrian farmers: dependent on modern varieties and a centralized seed supply system after decades of aggressive agricultural policies, they have lost access to both over the course of the war.

“Before, no one was importing seeds from outside. The seeds of Syria were enough and fulfilled our needs,” Mahmoud Muhammad, who spent the early years of the war trying to salvage these seeds, lamented.

But the technical advances and policies that turned Syria into an agricultural powerhouse also sowed the seeds of its dependency today. The same varieties that once promised to free the country from hunger have also made farmers more reliant on fertilizers and irrigation systems that they can no longer afford in wartime.

And in the breadbasket of Syria, authorities unrecognized by the international community are unable to retrieve their own grains from the shelves of a faraway seed vault in Norway, powerless to act against the deterioration of improved varieties.

Meanwhile, the aid sector has little more to offer than a band-aid. Imported flour can stave off famine, but it cannot restore the complex agricultural value chains around wheat production, which is steadily declining.

Syria’s bitter harvest is a lesson for those who place blind faith in modernity, and expect a quick fix to pressing issues like global hunger and climate change. Too often, this optimistic view overlooks the vulnerability of the political and economic systems in which these quick fixes are embedded, and without which they become meaningless.

Amal knows this all too well. What little wealth she has—green fields, children who do not go to bed on an empty stomach—owes as much to luck as to local networks of resilience that successfully sheltered her community when the broader system failed.

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
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#2170: Nov 17th 2022 at 7:55:06 PM

AP: US moves to shield Saudi crown prince in journalist killing.

    Article 
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration declared Thursday that the high office held by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince should shield him from lawsuits for his role in the killing of a U.S.-based journalist, a turnaround from Joe Biden’s passionate campaign trail denunciations of Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the brutal slaying.

The administration said the prince’s official standing should give him immunity in the lawsuit filed by the fiancée of slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and by the rights group he founded, Democracy for the Arab World Now.

The request is non-binding and a judge will ultimately decide whether to grant immunity. But it is bound to anger human rights activists and many U.S. lawmakers, coming as Saudi Arabia has stepped up imprisonment and other retaliation against peaceful critics at home and abroad and has cut oil production, a move seen as undercutting efforts by the U.S. and its allies to punish Russia for its war against Ukraine.

The State Department on Thursday called the administration’s decision to try to protect the Saudi crown prince from U.S. courts in Khashoggi’s killing “purely a legal determination.”

And despite backing up the crown prince in his bid to block the lawsuit against him, the State Department “takes no view on the merits of the present suit and reiterates its unequivocal condemnation of the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” the administration’s court filing late Thursday said.

Saudi officials killed Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. They are believed to have dismembered him, although his remains have never been found. The U.S. intelligence community concluded Saudi Arabia’s crown prince had approved the killing of the widely known and respected journalist, who had written critically of Prince Mohammed’s harsh ways of silencing of those he considered rivals or critics.

The Biden administration statement Thursday noted visa restrictions and other penalties that it had meted out to lower-ranking Saudi officials in the death.

“From the earliest days of this Administration, the United States Government has expressed its grave concerns regarding Saudi agents’ responsibility for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder,” the State Department said. Its statement did not mention the crown prince’s own alleged role.

Biden as a candidate vowed to make a “pariah” out of Saudi rulers over the 2018 killing of Khashoggi.

“I think it was a flat-out murder,” Biden said in a 2019 CNN town hall, as a candidate. “And I think we should have nailed it as that. I publicly said at the time we should treat it that way and there should be consequences relating to how we deal with those — that power.”

But Biden as president has sought to ease tensions with the kingdom, including bumping fists with Prince Mohammed on a July trip to the kingdom, as the U.S. works to persuade Saudi Arabia to undo a series of cuts in oil production.

Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, and DAWN sued the crown prince, his top aides and others in Washington federal court over their alleged roles in Khashoggi’s killing. Saudi Arabia says the prince had no direct role in the slaying.

“It’s beyond ironic that President Biden has singlehandedly assured MBS can escape accountability when it was President Biden who promised the American people he would do everything to hold him accountable,” the head of DAWN, Sarah Leah Whitson, said in a statement, using the prince’s acronym.

Biden in February 2021 had ruled out the U.S. government imposing punishment on Prince Mohammed himself in the killing of Khashoggi, a resident of the Washington area. Biden, speaking after he authorized release of a declassified version of the intelligence community’s findings on Prince Mohammed’s role in the killing, argued at the time there was no precedent for the U.S. to move against the leader of a strategic partner.

The U.S. military long has safeguarded Saudi Arabia from external enemies, in exchange for Saudi Arabia keeping global oil markets afloat.

“It’s impossible to read the Biden administration’s move today as anything more than a capitulation to Saudi pressure tactics, including slashing oil output to twist our arms to recognize MBS’s fake immunity ploy,” Whitson said.

A federal judge in Washington had given the U.S. government until midnight Thursday to express an opinion on the claim by the crown prince’s lawyers that Prince Mohammed’s high official standing renders him legally immune in the case.

The Biden administration also had the option of not stating an opinion either way.

Sovereign immunity, a concept rooted in international law, holds that states and their officials are protected from some legal proceedings in other foreign states’ domestic courts.

Upholding the concept of “sovereign immunity” helps ensure that American leaders in turn don’t have to worry about being hauled into foreign courts to face lawsuits in other countries, the State Department said.

Human rights advocates had argued that the Biden administration would embolden Prince Mohammed and other authoritarian leaders around the world in more rights abuses if it supported the crown prince’s claim that his high office shielded him from prosecution.

Prince Mohammed serves as Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler in the stead of his aged father, King Salman. The Saudi king in September also temporarily transferred his title of prime minister — a title normally held by the Saudi monarch — to Prince Mohammed. Critics called it a bid to strengthen Mohammed’s immunity claim.


Reuters: Egypt's Nile Delta farmland salts up as temperatures, and seas, rise.

    Article 
DAMIETTA, Egypt, Nov 17 (Reuters) - Emad Attiah Ramadan has started planting rice on his 12-acre (5 hectare) plot on the edge of the Egyptian city of Damietta, giving up on tomatoes that would no longer grow well in the increasingly saline soil near the Mediterranean coast.

Rice sells for less but the irrigation used to cultivate it helps cleanse the earth of salt, allowing it to grow, he said, picking wild grass from his soil and checking for signs of saline build-up.

Ramadan is one of tens of thousands of farmers racing to adapt to encroaching salinity in the Nile Delta, a densely populated and fertile triangle of green that fans out towards the sea north of Cairo and accounts for more than a third of Egypt's agricultural land.

"If you leave the land 10 days without watering it, you'll find salt on the surface," he said.

A parched yellow field bordering his plot was left barren due to salinity, and he tried using chemicals to little effect: "Every year it gets worse."

Rising salinity in the Delta has multiple causes, experts and farmers say, including overextraction of groundwater and excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides.

But they say it is being made worse by climate change, which has already raised sea levels and temperatures in Egypt, and is the subject of the global COP27 United Nations talks the country is hosting this week.

The summit in Sharm el-Sheikh includes plans to help 4 billion people living in vulnerable areas withstand the impacts of global warming, along with setting tougher goals on planetary warming emissions.

For the farmers of the Delta, options for adaptation range from creating raised beds, or linear mounds of earth, to improve irrigation efficiency and drainage, to using new seed strains, said Aly Abousabaa, head of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).

Wael El Sayed, a farmer in the east of the Delta near the city of Zagazig, said raised beds had helped save fertilizer and water, and had doubled productivity for his wheat crop.

But others struggle to treat and rinse the soil, as they experiment with new crops or rotations.

Near Sidi Salem, some 28 km (17 miles) south of the sea and near the centrepoint of the northern Delta, Ibrahim Abdel Wahab, an agricultural engineer managing lands for 15 smallholder farmers, pointed to one plot pocked by patches of bald earth and cotton plants browned by salt burn.

Around a decade ago, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons and pineapples were grown on the land, but now more resilient cotton, beetroot and rice are planted in rotation. Irregular rainfall and a lack of fresh water for irrigation have made farming harder, he said.

Abdel Wahab said that because of the salinity, he needs to sow double the amount of seeds and use extra fertilizer to achieve normal crop density, but productivity still falls short.

Egypt, with a population of 104 million, is heavily dependent on imported food, and is typically the world's biggest importer of wheat. Its agricultural production is largely limited to the wider Nile Valley, where water can be scarce and authorities struggle to stop people building on arable land.

Globally, Egypt is the fifth most vulnerable country to the economic impact of sea level rise on cities, with risks to agriculture and drinking water from inundation, erosion, and saltwater intrusion, a World Bank report published this month said.

Yields for food crops in Egypt are expected to drop by more than 10% by 2050 due to higher temperatures, water stress and increased salinity of irrigation water, according to a paper published last year by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Some studies suggest the impact in the Delta could be much higher.

"It will go deeper"

Sea levels have been rising by 3.2mm annually since 2012 in Egypt, threatening to flood and erode the Delta's northern shore and pushing saltwater further into the soil and the groundwater that farmers use for irrigation. Hotter temperatures accelerate evaporation, further concentrating the salt.

Over the past 30 years, temperatures in Egypt have increased by 0.4 degrees Celsius per decade, according to data from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data shows North Africa warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius by mid century, relative to a 1995-2014 baseline.

Scientists say salinity varies from place to place and the exact contribution of climate change is hard to measure.

But it is already affecting 15% of the Delta's best arable land, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and is set to push further south.

"With time, with the sea level higher, that line of salinity will go down into the Delta. It will go deeper," said Mohamed Abdel Monem, a FAO senior advisor.

One study published last year in the journal Sustainability calculated that 60% of a 450km square area in the northeast of the Delta would be negatively affected by rising groundwater linked to sea level rise by the end of the century.

Evaporation

Sea water intrusion and salinity also threaten the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta in Bangladesh.

It is particularly challenging in the Nile Valley because of the arid, desert climate, said Claudia Ringler, a water resources and agricultural policy expert at IFPRI.

"You have to do much better job in a place like the Nile Delta because the water just evaporates quickly," she said.

Adaptation has limits. Rice cultivation helps wash the soil, but the government has imposed restrictions on the crop in parts of the Delta to conserve scarce water.

Near Mansoura, north-east of Cairo and about 70km (43 miles) from the coast, farm manager Hossam el-Azabawy said that even for a more resilient crop like beet, yields can drop by more than half in areas affected by salinity.

On some of the land he farms he has now turned to cotton, which has deeper roots that reach down to less saline soil. He has experimented this year with a new strain of rice that gives an 18% higher yield, in fields of cracked earth caked with salt.

"There is no quick, radical fix for salinity. It needs a lot of work," Azabawy said.

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
DrunkenNordmann from Exile Since: May, 2015
#2171: Nov 19th 2022 at 5:32:47 AM

World Cup 2022: FIFA chief Gianni Infantino hits out at Qatar criticism saying European countries should instead 'be apologising for the next 3,000 years'

     Full article 
The president of football's international governing body FIFA says the West should not criticise Qatar's hosting of the World Cup - adding that European nations should instead apologise for their own histories.

Gianni Infantino said critics were in no position "to give moral lessons to people" at a news conference to mark the opening of the tournament.

The small Middle Eastern nation has come under fire for its treatment of migrant workers and its attitude to LBGTQ+ rights.

The abrupt, eleventh-hour decision by the Qatar authorities to ban the sale of booze at all stadiums has also raised concerns about guarantees given on bigger, more significant issues.

But defending the host nation, Infantino said: "For what we Europeans have been doing around the world in the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.

"How many of these European or Western business companies who earn millions from Qatar, billions, how many of them have addressed migrant workers' rights with the authorities?

"None of them, because if you change the legislation it means less profit. But we did, and FIFA generates much less than any of these companies from Qatar."

He added: "Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arabic. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel (like) a migrant worker.

"Of course I am not Qatari, I am not an Arab, I am not African, I am not gay, I am not disabled.

"But I feel like it, because I know what it means to be discriminated, to be bullied, as a foreigner in a foreign country.

"As a child I was bullied - because I had red hair and freckles, plus I was Italian, so imagine.

"What do you do then? You try to engage, make friends.

"Don't start accusing, fighting, insulting, you start engaging.

"And this is what we should be doing."

Despite Qatar's last-minute U-turn on selling alcohol at the tournament's eight stadiums and the implications this could have for other assurances made, Infantino told Sky News: "I feel 200% in control of this World Cup, absolutely."

He also moved to downplay the about-turn, pointing out similar bans were in force at stadiums in Scotland, France and Spain.

Infantino said: "I think it's never too late to change. Maybe we will have to do other changes in between on other topics, I don't know.

"But when it comes to the security of people - you spoke about LGBT - everyone's security is guaranteed, from the highest level of the country. This is the guarantee that we gave and we stick to it."

Qatar's 'kafala system' is a set of labour laws which allow Qatari individuals or businesses to confiscate workers' passports and stop them leaving the country.

Human rights groups say this has given developers free rein to exploit them - exposing them to gruelling working conditions for little pay and not allowing them to go home until projects materialise.

There have been reports of migrant worker deaths that range from a few dozen to several thousand in the 12 years of preparation for the tournament.

Qatar's Sharia law means same-sex sexual activity has punishments ranging from seven years in jail to death by stoning.

FIFA playing apologist for an oppressive regime? What a surprise.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history
miraculous Goku Black (Apprentice)
Goku Black
#2173: Nov 19th 2022 at 6:41:14 AM

You missed the best part of his conversation.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino at news conference in Qatar: “Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker. ... I know what it feels to be discriminated … I was bullied because I had red hair.”


Tone deaf asshole.

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."
DrunkenNordmann from Exile Since: May, 2015
#2174: Nov 19th 2022 at 6:43:15 AM

He's really trying to earn that Russian Order of Friendship by being the of the most obnoxious apologists for oppressive regimes on the block. note 

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Nov 19th 2022 at 3:44:19 PM

We learn from history that we do not learn from history
miraculous Goku Black (Apprentice)
Goku Black
#2175: Nov 19th 2022 at 6:46:06 AM

Why did Qatar even take this world cup?

Like all they've done is now shone a light on how terrible the place is that people weren't aware off before this?

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."

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