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Iraq says announcement on date for end to US-led coalition mission postponed

Iraq says announcement on date for end to US-led coalition mission postponed
Iraq said on Thursday that an announcement on the date for an end to the U.S.-led coalition's mission has been postponed due to the "latest developments", the foreign ministry said in a statement without elaborating. (Reuters/File)
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Updated 15 August 2024
Reuters
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Iraq says announcement on date for end to US-led coalition mission postponed

Iraq says announcement on date for end to US-led coalition mission postponed
  • Iraq hosts 2,500 US troops and has Iran-backed militias linked to its security forces
Updated 15 August 2024
Reuters
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CAIRO: Iraq said on Thursday that an announcement on the date for an end to the US-led coalition’s mission has been postponed due to the “latest developments,” the foreign ministry said in a statement without elaborating.
A rare ally of both the US and Iran, Iraq hosts 2,500 US troops and has Iran-backed militias linked to its security forces. It has witnessed escalating tit-for-tat attacks since the Israel war in Gaza erupted in October.

Topics: War on Gaza US-led coalition Iraq

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Starmer says US ‘understands’ UK decision to partly suspend Israeli arms sales

Britain’s PM Keir Starmer can be seen during a recording inside 10 Downing Street.
Britain’s PM Keir Starmer can be seen during a recording inside 10 Downing Street.
Updated 34 sec ago
Arab News
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Starmer says US ‘understands’ UK decision to partly suspend Israeli arms sales

Britain’s PM Keir Starmer can be seen during a recording inside 10 Downing Street.
  • Prime minister denies reports move sparked anger in Washington
  • UK leader will meet President Biden next week to discuss Middle East, Ukraine
Updated 34 sec ago
Arab News

LONDON: UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer says the US “understands” his government’s decision to partly suspend arms sales to Israel.

His comments to the BBC followed reports that Washington had been angered by the move, according to The Independent.

However, Starmer said that the Biden administration “understands the decision we have taken” and was forewarned about the suspension.

The UK suspended about 30 of its 350 arms export licenses to Israel earlier this week after a review that warned of a “clear risk” of British weapons or parts being used by Israel to breach international humanitarian law in its war in Gaza.

After the suspension was announced by Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned what he described as a “shameful decision.”

Starmer told the BBC: “We have been talking to the US. We have been talking to the US beforehand and afterward, and they’re very clear that they’ve got a different legal system, and they understand the decision that we’ve taken.

“So, that’s very clear.”

Starmer will make his second visit to the US next week.

He is expected to meet President Joe Biden in Washington on Sept. 13 to discuss an “ever more pressing situation” in the Middle East and Ukraine.

“What I want to have the opportunity for is a more strategic discussion about the next few months in relation to Ukraine and in relation to the Middle East,” he said.

Topics: War on Gaza UK British Prime Minister Keir Starmer Israeli Arms export

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Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians

Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians
Updated 08 September 2024
AFP
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Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians

Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians
Updated 08 September 2024
AFP

PORT SUDAN: Sudan has rejected a call by UN experts for the deployment of an “independent and impartial force” to protect millions of civilians driven from their homes by more than a year of war.
The conflict since April last year, pitting the army against paramilitary forces, has killed tens of thousands of people and triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The independent UN experts said Friday their fact-finding mission had uncovered “harrowing” violations by both sides, “which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
They called for “an independent and impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians” to be deployed “without delay.”
The Sudanese foreign ministry, which is loyal to the army under General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, said in a statement late Saturday that “the Sudanese government rejects in their entirety the recommendations of the UN mission.”
It called the UN Human Rights Council, which created the fact-finding mission last year, “a political and illegal body,” and the panel’s recommendations “a flagrant violation of their mandate.”
The UN experts said eight million civilians have been displaced and another two million people have fled to neighboring countries.
More than 25 million people — upwards of half the country’s population — face acute food shortages.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on a visit to Sudan on Sunday, said: “The scale of the emergency is shocking, as is the insufficient action being taken to curtail the conflict and respond to the suffering it is causing.”
In Port Sudan, where government offices and the United Nations have relocated to due to the intense fighting in the capital Khartoum, Tedros called on the “world to wake up and help Sudan out of the nightmare it is living through.”
The Sudanese foreign ministry statement accused the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Burhan’s former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, of “systematically targeting civilians and civilian institutions.”
“The protection of civilians remains an absolute priority for the Sudanese government,” it said.
The statement added that the UN Human Rights Council’s role should be “to support the national process, rather than seek to impose a different exterior mechanism.”
It also rejected the experts’ call for an arms embargo.

Topics: Sudan Unrest UN

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Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip

Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip
Updated 08 September 2024
AFP
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Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip

Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip
  • Pezeshkian will head a high-ranking Iranians delegation to Baghdad to meet senior Iraqi officials
Updated 08 September 2024
AFP

TEHRAN: Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian will visit neighboring Iraq on Wednesday, state media reported Sunday, in what will be his first trip abroad since he took office in July.
Pezeshkian will head a high-ranking Iranians delegation to Baghdad to meet senior Iraqi officials.
The visit comes at the invitation of Iraq’s premier, Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani, the official IRNA news agency quoted Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad Mohammad Kazem Al-Sadegh as saying.
The two countries will sign memoranda of understanding on cooperation and security, Sadegh said, without elaborating.
He said the agreements were to have been signed during a planned visit to Iraq by Iran’s late president, Ebrahim Raisi.
But Raisi was killed in May along with the then foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, when their helicopter crashed on a fog-shrouded mountainside in northern Iran.
Since taking office, Pezeshkian has vowed to “prioritize” strengthening ties with the Islamic republic’s neighbors.
Relations between Iran and Iraq, both Shiite-majority countries, have grown closer over the past two decades.
Tehran is one of Iraq’s leading trade partners, and wields considerable political influence in Baghdad where its Iraqi allies dominate parliament and the current government.
In March 2023 the two countries signed a security agreement covering their common border, months after Tehran struck Kurdish opposition groups in Iraq’s north.
They have since agreed to disarm Iranian Kurdish rebel groups and remove them from border areas.
Tehran accuses the groups of importing arms from Iraq and of fomenting 2022 protests that erupted after the death in custody of Iranian-Kurd woman Mahsa Amini.
In January, Iran launched a deadly strike in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, saying it had targeted a site used by “spies of the Zionist regime (Mossad).”
On Saturday, an exiled Iranian Kurdish group said one of its activists, Behzad Khosrawi, had been arrested in Iraq’s northern city of Sulaimaniyah and handed over to “Iranian intelligence.”
Local Asayesh security forces said Khosrawi was arrested “because he did not have residency” in the Kurdish region, and denied he had any connection to “political activism.”

Topics: Iran Iraq

Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations

Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations
Updated 08 September 2024
Reuters
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Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations

Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations
Updated 08 September 2024
Reuters

ALGIERS: Algerian presidential candidate Abdelaali Hassani Cherif’s campaign said in a statement on Sunday that it had recorded cases of violations in the country’s Saturday presidential election, initial results of which have yet to be announced.
The campaign said the violations included putting pressure on some polling station officials to inflate the results, failure to deliver vote-sorting records to the candidates’ representatives, and instances of proxy group voting.
Algerians voted on Saturday in an election in which military-backed President Abdulmadjid Tebboune is widely expected to win a second term.

Topics: Algeria Election Vote

Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing

Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing
Updated 08 September 2024
AP
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Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing

Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing
  • Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service confirmed the toll
  • Israeli police say ‘shooter’ killed, without providing further details
Updated 08 September 2024
AP

JERUSALEM: Three people have been shot and killed near the border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, Israeli first responders said Sunday.

Israeli police said the shooter was killed, without providing further details. The border crossing is used by Palestinians, Israelis and international tourists. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service was at the scene and confirmed the toll.

The Israeli-occupied West Bank has seen a surge of violence since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Israel has launched near-daily military arrest raids into dense Palestinian residential areas, and there has also been a rise in settler violence and Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

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