by tyler | May 31, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
Two journalists responsible for breaking the story of Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish-Iranian woman killed after being held in custody by Iran’s morality police last year, stood trial in an Iranian court this week.
Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi have been imprisoned in Iran for the past eight months and face charges of “conspiracy and rebellion against national security” and “anti-state propaganda” – charges carrying a possible death penalty, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
The two women separately stood trial on Monday and Tuesday in a revolutionary court presided over by notorious judge Abolghasem Salavati, according to Iranian pro-reform outlet SharghDaily.
The trial comes after nationwide protests rocked Iran last fall, as anger over the regime’s treatment of women and other issues flared up after the death of 22-year-old Amini.
Authorities violently suppressed the months-long movement, which had posed one of the biggest domestic threats to Iran’s ruling clerical regime in more than a decade.
Hamedi was arrested after visiting Amini in hospital and reporting on her serious medical condition and coma after she was in police custody, according to RSF.
SharghDaily said Hamedi was denied access to lawyers for most of her detention, while the UN said the journalist has been held in solitary confinement in the notorious Evin Prison since September.
In her trial on Tuesday, Hamedi denied all accusations and highlighted her journalistic duties within the law, her husband, Mohammad Hossein Ajorloo, wrote on Twitter.
Mohammadi, who also stood trial in a separate hearing, was arrested after reporting on Amini’s funeral in September, according to RSF and the UN.
The families of the journalists were informed of the charges seven months after the arrests were made, RSF said.
Hamedi, Mohammadi and another detained journalist, Narges Mohammadi, were awarded the prestigious 2023 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize for outstanding contribution to press freedom.
“We are committed to honoring the brave work of Iranian female journalists,” Zainab Salbi, the jury Chair, said according to a UN statement, adding “They paid a hefty price for their commitment to report on and convey the truth.”
The Iranian government has continued to clamp down on dissent with several recent death sentences handed down to protesters. Critics say the regime has taken capital punishment to a new level.
by tyler | May 24, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
Saudi Arabia restored diplomatic relations with Canada on Wednesday, the country’s foreign ministry said in a statement, ending a five-year rift over Riyadh’s jailing of activists that damaged trade and relations with both countries.
The decision follows discussions between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last November on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum in Bangkok, the statement added.
“It has been decided to restore the level of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia to its previous level,” Canada foreign ministry said in a statement, which also announced the restoration of relations.
Both countries also announced Canada’s new ambassador in Saudi Arabia as being Jean-Philippe Linteau, and expressed their desire to restore diplomatic relations on the basis of mutual respect and common interests.
Canada’s relations with Saudi Arabia nosedived in 2018 after officials in Ottawa accused the kingdom of human rights violations and demanded the release of imprisoned activists.
Saudi Arabia responded by freezing new trade and investment deals, suspending flights to Canada, reassigning students studying there and expelling Canada’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, while recalling its own. The response at the time had struck some observers as a disproportionate overreaction to a relatively routine criticism of the country’s human rights record.
Saudi Arabia has lately been prioritizing economic growth at home, which requires regional stability to succeed. The $1 trillion economy has been on a quest to move away from its traditional reputation as a conservative, combative oil producer, and towards a global economic player and key regional tourism and business hub.
by tyler | May 18, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
Thousands of Israelis waving Star of David flags streamed into the Old City of Jerusalem Thursday, as part of a contentious march taking place at a time of high tensions in the region.
Some marchers – with a few carrying the flags of extremist organizations – hurled racist insults at journalists and chanted anti-Palestinian slogans as the Flag March got underway.
Most of the participants were peaceful, singing, waving flags and sometimes dancing.
But some pelted journalists in a press area near Damascus Gate with rocks, bottles and other objects as the number of marchers rose on Thursday afternoon. Two people were arrested in connection with the violence against journalists, an adult and a minor, Israel police said. Other people are under investigation, the force said.
Some teenaged marchers shouted taunts at journalists wearing hijabs, including “May your village burn,” CNN heard.
The march marks Jerusalem Day, when Israelis celebrate capturing east Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war. The event has been controversial in the past, and two years ago prompted Palestinian militant group Hamas to fire rockets on Jerusalem Day, helping to trigger an 11-day conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza.
Men and women take separate routes on the march, with men entering the Old City via Damascus Gate in the north, women entering through Jaffa Gate on the east side of the city, and the two groups meeting at the Western Wall.
Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir joined the marchers on Thursday evening, arriving at the Damascus Gate entrance and entering the Old City with a police escort.
Some of the marchers chanted: “Who is here? The prime minister is here,” suggesting that they think Ben Gvir, not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, controls Israel’s government.
There was a heavy police presence around the Old City, with 2,500 police devoted specifically to the Flag March and another 1,000 in the area, Chief Superintendent Yoram Segal told reporters on Wednesday, before the event.
A number of Palestinian shopkeepers told CNN before the event that they would close their shops in the Old City for fear of attacks by far-right Jewish nationalists.
At one point, Israeli police officers shoved two CNN journalists. CNN senior international correspondent Ben Wedeman and producer Kareem Khadder were pushed away from the location where they were trying to film after police told them to move.
One officer told Wedeman to move five steps back. Wedeman did, and another officer said: “Don’t be clever.” Officers then began pushing them back as CNN photojournalist Matthias Somm and Khadder filmed.
“Why are you pushing us? We’re journalists,” Khadder asked the officers several times during the brief scuffle.
Police had said in a briefing on Wednesday that there would be no restrictions on where journalists could operate during the high-tension event.
Master Sgt. Dean Elsdunne, an Israel Police spokesperson, told CNN that there were no restrictions but that journalists had to “obey instructions from the police. They have to let the police do their jobs. When they asked him to move, he kind of a made a joke out of it. There needs to be joint respect.”
by tyler | May 18, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
Salah Nsaif was 32 years old when American soldiers imprisoned him in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003.
Twenty years later, he has left his country and settled in faraway Sweden with his wife and three children, but the horrors of the war there continue to haunt him.
“What happened to me was very painful. It impacted my personal relationships when I left Iraq,” Salah told CNN, adding that he felt like he was in a prison of his own mind. “I didn’t want to see my baby or anyone else and I isolated myself. It took me a long time to stop having nightmares.”
Two decades after the start of the US-led war in the country, Iraqis say that while some of the physical wounds may have healed over time, the psychological trauma from the conflict and its aftermath persists to this day.
On March 20, 2003, US President George W. Bush announced the beginning of the invasion of Iraq under the pretext of disarming it from weapons of mass destruction, a claim that was later debunked.
The invasion of Iraq evolved into an eight-year occupation with American military bases, checkpoints and soldiers dotted all over the country. It was followed by a civil war and a brutal Islamist insurgency that saw Iraq overwhelmed by sectarian violence and communal divisions.
For Salah and his family, the scars of imprisonment are felt to this day, both physically and mentally.
He was stripped naked several times, deprived of food, beaten, taunted by dogs and kept in solitary confinement, he told CNN.
Seeking professional mental health treatment is less common in Arab countries than in Western societies due to a social stigma. That’s why Salah didn’t consult a psychiatrist, he said. Instead, he sought comfort from his family, but it wasn’t always easy.
“You know, in Iraq, we have this culture of not talking to a doctor or a psychiatrist. We don’t even think about it,” he told CNN. “I needed to get out of this circle of fear and anxiety and move forward. At home things were difficult during the first few years with my wife – she became like an alien to me.”
Salah was working as a journalist with the Qatar-based news channel Al Jazeera in Diyala, northeastern Iraq when US forces detained him.
He was never charged with a crime, according to Katherine Gallagher, a lawyer from the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights representing him in a 2008 lawsuit against a US government military contractor that was responsible for the interrogations in Abu Ghraib.
In the years that followed the invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s government, over 20,000 Iraqi prisoners of war were detained by US army officials.
Approximately 120,000 civilians were killed between the US military invasion and withdrawal, according to Iraq Body Count, an online database that tracks official statements, reports from hospitals and non-governmental organizations to document casualties from the Iraq war.
The Abu Ghraib prison scandal shook the world when it was exposed in 2004. Images of naked, leashed prisoners piled on top of each other in fetal positions as American soldiers smiled at the camera came to define the brutality of the war for many Iraqis.
“They would put a black bag over my head and force me to take my clothes off. They would leave me naked in my cell for days,” Salah said.
In the years that followed, documents that came to be known as the Torture Memos revealed such methods were authorized by the Bush administration under enhanced interrogation techniques. Human Rights Watch said this generally meant torture, sexual assault, and rape.
Abu Ghraib was first used by Hussein to detain Iraqis. The US military took over control from 2003 until 2006. Iraqi officials officially closed it in 2014.
Salah and his family immigrated to Sweden in 2017 and now hold Swedish citizenship. He and his children don’t talk about his ordeal. “They know what happened to me and that I was tortured… but never discussed the details. They just know it from Google.”
Alexandra Chen, a UK-based trauma specialist, told CNN that the trauma of war can be passed down generations, decades after the conflict ends.
“(If) one’s hypervigilance was a key element of them surviving a particularly traumatic period of their life,” she said, then that may “become methylated in your DNA so that your children and your grandchildren, in particular, have that ability to survive.”
Escaping these memories remains difficult for Salah. Twenty years later, he is still waiting for justice.
When the United States withdrew its forces from Iraq in 2011, many Iraqis thought it was the dawn of a new era, one that would heal the horrific remnants of war.
But by the end of that year, a fanatical militant group reemerged that would wreak havoc in the country and far beyond it. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had by 2014 taken over large swathes of Iraq and Syria, imposing its radical version of Islamic law in the territories it governed.
Abbas Al Dulaimi was five years old when the US occupied Iraq. He lived in Baghdad for the first few years until his family fled to Syria in 2007 to escape the carnage. Although he was young, he said he was robbed of a childhood.
Chen says this is prevalent in younger Iraqis.
“We assume that when they’re so young they don’t remember anything”, said Chen, adding that science shows the first five years of life are the most sensitive for brain growth.
Abbas returned to Baghdad with his family in 2011 hoping to start over, but ISIS threatened that new life with more upheaval, leading them to move again.
Now finishing his education in the United Arab Emirates, he said nightmares of war continue to haunt him.
“Growing up during these years was hard because I was a kid watching people being kidnapped or killed on the streets for years. It stays with me,” he told CNN.
For those who weren’t fortunate enough to escape, the trauma became a permanent part of their lives.
Ghofran Mohammed, 28, who still lives in Baghdad, was eight years old when the US invaded. She recalls watching soldiers arrest people daily.
She never spoke about the war with a mental health professional and said her family encouraged her to move on from the trauma.
“My parents told me to forget what I saw and continue my life and education after they saw I was traumatized,” she told CNN.
Chen, the trauma specialist, says children can absorb their parents’ distress when they start believing that they are the cause of the distress. That can affect their romantic relationships and their relationships with children, she says.
While therapy helps, she adds, it’s not the solution. “This is not rocket science. And the solution… in addition to the prevention of traumas, is for the wars to stop.”
Netanyahu government makes first climbdown on plan to weaken Israel’s judiciary
The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a change Monday to a key part of its controversial plans to overhaul the country’s judicial system. Opposition leaders inside and outside the legislature immediately rejected the proposed changes as insufficient. The concession would give Israeli governments less power to select new judges – but still more power than it has now. The lawmaker leading the overhaul process, Simcha Rothman, announced the change to government plans, and also said parliament would delay passage of other elements of the plan until after the parliament’s Passover holiday in April.
Iranian president invited to visit Riyadh by Saudi king – Iranian official
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz has written to Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi inviting him to Riyadh, Deputy Chief of Staff for Political Affairs to Iran’s President Mohammad Jamshidi tweeted on Sunday, adding that Raisi welcomed the invitation and stressed Iran’s readiness to expand cooperation. There has been no confirmation by Saudi Arabia of the letter or invitation. Separately, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said during a news conference on Sunday that the two countries had agreed to hold a meeting between their top diplomats.
Yemen’s Houthis and government say prisoner exchange deal reached
The two sides in Yemen’s conflict on Monday said they had agreed to exchange some 880 detainees after talks in Switzerland facilitated by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, Reuters reported. Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group said it would release 181 detainees, including 15 Saudi and three Sudanese, in exchange for 706 prisoners from the government, according to statements on Twitter by the head of the Houthis’ prisoner affairs committee Abdul Qader al-Murtada and the group’s chief negotiator Mohammed Abdulsalam.
A group of archeologists in the United Arab Emirates on Monday found what they believe to be the oldest pearling town in the Persian Gulf on Siniya Island, just east of the Umm al-Quwain emirate.
The 12-hectare (30-acre) town functioned between the late 6th and mid-8th centuries, predating the Islamic civilization, according to the Umm al-Quwain Department of Tourism and Archeology.
The findings show the town to be one of the “largest surviving urbanized settlements ever found” in what is today the UAE, and is believed to have housed thousands of residents, many of whom relied on the pearling industry. The houses were built from local beach rocks and materials from the surrounding environment and roofs were made of palm trunks.
While other pearling settlements are known to have existed in the region, this one is particularly unique, said Timothy Power, associate professor of archaeology at UAE University. Not only because of its age and size, but also because it was not seasonal, but rather operated year-round, he said.
“This is a different order of settlements, this is a proper town,” Power told CNN, adding that it was densely populated with a range of housing types, and included various socio-economic groups.
Residents of the town were likely Christian, as the settlement is located near an ancient Christian monastery that was discovered just last year, Power said.
The practice of pearling, where divers recover pearls from oysters or mussels from seas and lakes, has been part of the region’s heritage for more than 7,000 years, according to the Umm al-Quwain Department of Tourism.
“We know from historical clauses that there were other important pearling markets in this period,” Power said, but it was clear that pearling was a key industry for this town.
At peak times of the pearling market, huge numbers of people were involved in the industry, Power said. In neighboring Abu Dhabi, he added, almost two-thirds of the male population were involved in pearling in the 19th century.
By Nadeen Ebrahim
by tyler | May 17, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
“Journalists come, take pictures and go home!” shouted Bilal Nabhan, his voice hoarse, his eyes bloodshot. “They come, take pictures and go home.”
Nabhan was sitting under a tree next to the rubble of the four-story apartment that once was his home in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza, hit by Israeli jets just five hours before Saturday night’s ceasefire ended five days of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and Islamic Jihad rockets towards Israel.
I first noticed Nabhan when relatives were trying to console him on top of the rubble that once contained his home. Nabhan was a day worker, every day venturing out to earn enough money to feed his wife and four children.
His relative, Husam, echoed the same frustration with journalists. “What we need is someone to show us some mercy,” he told me.
This unhappy land has settled into a grim routine. Three times in the last three years there have been flare ups between militants in Gaza and Israel. This latest was the 15th of its kind since Israeli troops and settlers pulled out of Gaza in mid-2005.
This round, yet again, Egyptian mediators managed to wring a ceasefire understanding to restore, temporarily, relative quiet.
Gaza wasted no time getting back into the rhythm of daily life. The morning after the ceasefire went into effort, the markets were open again. The day after, schools were back in session.
After five days of air strikes and missile attacks, nothing fundamentally changed.
The residents of Gaza are still “living in a can of sardines,” as someone told me long ago.
Israel now allows around 18,000 Gazan workers into Israel. But other than that, access into Israel or Egypt is tightly controlled.
Long ago a sense of resignation took root, that ordinary people have no control over or a say in the course of events. And it has only deepened.
“Political leaders must understand: this war is pointless,” Gaza City resident Salah Al-Ajouli told me after his house was damaged by gunfire. “Generation after generation, killing one another, there is no end to this.”
Those words were spoken not now, but rather nineteen years ago. And, indeed, it seems there is no end to it.
The day after the latest ceasefire, Mussalim, a butcher in Gaza City’s main market, put it this way: “This conflict will continue until Judgement Day.”
There is no attempt underway to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. There is no longer a so-called “Middle East peace process” and all the fanfare that went with it. There are no negotiators shuttling back and forth between the region’s capitals to iron out a lasting and just peace.
As the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote in the daily Ha’aretz the day after the ceasefire started, “the appalling banality of this latest war makes it so dangerous… Rain in the winter and war in the summer. A war each year, with no cause, with nothing to gain, with no results, no winners and no losers, just periodic bloodshed.”
How much longer can this cycle go on?
The world has largely turned its back on the conflict. During the 1990s it was CNN’s top story. As a young producer and later correspondent based first in Amman then in Cairo, I was a regular traveler to Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Since then the war on terror, the war in Iraq, ISIS, and now Ukraine have distracted us.
Now I come once a year for the annual flare up between Gaza militants in Israel. The flare up lasts a few days, maybe a week. I cover it. I leave.
Bilal Nabhan was right. We come. We take pictures. We leave.
by tyler | May 12, 2023 | CNN, middleeast
A massive new US embassy complex in Lebanon is causing controversy for its sheer size and opulence in a country where nearly 80% of the population is under the poverty line.
Located some 13 kilometers (about 8 miles) from the center of Beirut, the US’ new embassy compound in Lebanon looks like a city of its own.
Sprawling over a 43-acre site, the complex in the Beirut suburb of Awkar is almost two-and-a-half times the size of the land the White House sits on and more than 21 soccer fields.
Many Lebanese on Twitter questioned why the US needs such a large embassy in their capital. Lebanon is smaller than Connecticut and has a population of just six million. Few American tourists go to the country as the State Department has placed it on the third highest travel advisory level, but it does have a sizeable population of Lebanese American residents.
“Did the US move to Lebanon??” tweeted Sandy, a social media activist.
“Maybe you’ll have enough room to work on all those pending visa applications,” tweeted Abed A. Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, responding to the grandiosity of the new complex.
Computer-generated images published by the embassy show an ultra-modern compound, hosting multi-story buildings with high glass windows, recreational areas, and a swimming pool surrounded by greenery and views of the Lebanese capital. The compound includes a chancery, representational and staff housing, facilities for the community and associated support facilities, according to the project’s website.
From the pandemic to the 2020 Beirut blast, Lebanon has been assailed by a number of crises that have left its economy in ruins. Many Lebanese are unable to afford basic commodities, including food, medicine and electricity.
“Let them eat concrete,” another user tweeted.
Plans for the embassy complex were announced in 2015 and it is reported to have cost $1 billion.
Its construction is overseen by the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), which supervised the building of a number of other US embassies around the world.
The US embassy in Lebanon did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
The US has had a turbulent history with Lebanon. It is the home of Iran-backed Hezbollah, the most powerful group in the country, but has nonetheless enjoyed friendly relations with the US.
Last month marked 40 years since the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, including 52 Lebanese and embassy employees. In October that year, a bomb struck barracks in Beirut housing American and French peacekeepers, killing 299 people.
