Tunisia’s Saied toward landslide win in election, supporters celebrate

Supporters of Tunisian President Kais Saied, celebrate as exit poll shows Saied won the presidential election in Tunis, Tunisia October 6, 2024. (REUTERS)
Supporters of Tunisian President Kais Saied, celebrate as exit poll shows Saied won the presidential election in Tunis, Tunisia October 6, 2024. (REUTERS)
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Updated 07 October 2024
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Tunisia’s Saied toward landslide win in election, supporters celebrate

Tunisia’s Saied toward landslide win in election, supporters celebrate
  • Saied, 66, has rejected criticism of his actions, saying he is fighting a corrupt elite and traitors, and that he will not be a dictator

TUNIS: Supporters of current Tunisian President Kais Saied began celebrations in the capital on Sunday night after an exit poll broadcast on state television showed him winning, beating two rivals, one of whom is now in prison
Saied on Sunday faced two election rivals: his former ally turned critic, Chaab Party leader Zouhair Maghzaoui, and Ayachi Zammel, who was jailed last month.
Turnout stood at 27.7 percent, the election commission said after the close of polls — just half what it was in the runoff round of the 2019 presidential election.
Official results are not expected until Monday evening but an exit poll by Sigma company, a polling agency, showed Saied in the lead with 89.2 percent of votes, according to state television.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Main rival was jailed last month

• Rights groups say Saied has undone democratic gains

• Saied says he is fighting a corrupt elite

• Exit poll puts Saied in the lead with 89.2 percent of votes

In his first comment, Saied told state television, “This is a continuation of the revolution. We will build and will cleanse the country of the corrupt, traitors and conspirators.”

Zammel and Maghzaoui’s campaigns rejected the exit poll results saying the real results will be different.
On the main avenue of Habib Bourguiba in the capital city of Tunis, celebrants raised pictures of Saied and the Tunisian flag, chanting “The people want to build and develop.”
“We rejoice for a person because he served the state and not for his own benefit, he serves for the benefit of the people and the state,” Mohsen Ibrahim said when he was celebrating.
Tunisia had for years been hailed as the only relative success story of the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings for introducing a competitive, though flawed, democracy following decades of autocratic rule.

However, rights groups now say Saied, in power since 2019, has undone many of those democratic gains while removing institutional and legal checks on his power. Saied, 66, has rejected criticism of his actions, saying he is fighting a corrupt elite and traitors, and that he will not be a dictator.
Senior figures from the biggest parties, which largely oppose Saied, have been imprisoned on various charges over the past year and those parties have not publicly backed any of the three candidates on Sunday’s ballot. Other opponents have been barred from running.
“The scene is shameful. Journalists and opponents in prison, including one presidential candidate.” said Wael, a bank employee in Tunis, who gave only his first name.
CANDIDATES DISQUALIFIED
Political tensions have risen since an electoral commission named by Saied disqualified three prominent candidates last month, amid protests by opposition and civil society groups.
Lawmakers loyal to Saied then approved a law last week stripping the administrative court of authority over election disputes. This court is widely seen as the country’s last independent judicial body, after Saied dissolved the Supreme Judicial Council and dismissed dozens of judges in 2022.
While elections in the years soon after the 2011 revolution were fiercely contested and drew very high participation rates, public anger at Tunisia’s poor economic performance and corruption among the elite led to disillusionment.
Saied, elected in 2019, seized most powers in 2021 when he dissolved the elected parliament and rewrote the constitution, a move the opposition described as a coup.
A referendum on the constitution passed with turnout of only 30 percent, while a January 2023 runoff for the new, nearly powerless, parliament he created with that constitution had turnout of only 11 percent.
Although tourism revenues are on the rise and there has been financial help from European countries worried about migration, state finances remain strained. Shortages of subsidised goods are common, as are outages of power and water.

 

 


Explosions heard near Damascus, Syrian state news agency says

Explosions heard near Damascus, Syrian state news agency says
Updated 4 sec ago
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Explosions heard near Damascus, Syrian state news agency says

Explosions heard near Damascus, Syrian state news agency says

DAMASCUS: Explosions were heard in the areas surrounding Syria’s capital Damascus and authorities were investigating, the Syrian state news agency said on Sunday.


At least 23 killed in Israeli strike on Lebanon's Almat, ministry says

At least 23 killed in Israeli strike on Lebanon's Almat, ministry says
Updated 10 November 2024
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At least 23 killed in Israeli strike on Lebanon's Almat, ministry says

At least 23 killed in Israeli strike on Lebanon's Almat, ministry says
  • Strike on Sunday occurred in the village of Aalmat, north of Beirut, and far from the areas in the south and east of the country where the Hezbollah militant group has a major presence

BEIRUT: At least 20 people, including three children, were killed and six others injured in an Israeli strike on Almat in Lebanon’s Mount Lebanon province, the country’s health ministry said on Sunday.
Three people were also killed and two others wounded in an Israeli strike on Mashghara in the western part of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley late on Saturday, while one person was killed and four others injured in a strike on Sahmar, also in western Bekaa, that occurred the same night, the health ministry added.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which says it is targeting Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.


UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media

UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media
Updated 10 November 2024
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UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media

UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media

TEHRAN: The chief of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, will visit Iran in days for talks with senior officials, Iranian state media reported on Sunday.
“The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency will arrive in Iran on Wednesday ... at the official invitation of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the official IRNA news agency reported.
Grossi will meet Iranian officials on Thursday, the agency added.
The IAEA confirmed Grossi’s visit to Iran this week, without specifying the date in a post on X.
It said the visit would include talks with Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi.
The agency also quoted Grossi as calling for “substantive progress” on a March 2023 deal that had outlined basic cooperation, including on safeguards and monitoring.
In a September interview with AFP, Grossi said Iran was showing “willingness” to re-engage on the nuclear issue, but it was not willing to walk back on a decision it took to ban some of the IAEA’s inspectors.
Iran withdrew the accreditation of several inspectors last year, a move the UN agency described at the time as “extreme and unjustified.”
Tehran had said then its decision was a consequence of “political abuses” by the United States, France, Germany and Britain.
Grossi last visited Iran in May, when he called for “concrete” measures to help bolster cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program at a news conference in Isfahan province, home to the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.
His visit this month will come after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.
During his first term in office, Trump unilaterally withdrew Washington from a pivotal nuclear deal that aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.
Efforts mediated by the European Union have failed to bring Washington back on board and to get Tehran to again comply with the terms of the accord.
Iran has rolled back its commitments to caps on nuclear activities under the deal, and tensions have repeatedly flared between Tehran and the IAEA over its compliance.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, who took office in July, has favored reviving that agreement and called for ending his country’s isolation.
On Tuesday, Trump told reporters he was “not looking to do damage to Iran” but noted that Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
Iran has always denied having ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon, insisting its activities are entirely peaceful.
On Saturday, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Javad Zarif urged Trump to reassess his “maximum pressure” policy which has seen the US impose punishing sanctions on Tehran.
He blamed that policy for leading to the surge in enrichment levels “to reach 60 percent from 3.5 percent.”
Enrichment levels of around 90 percent are required for military use.
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Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum

Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum
Updated 10 November 2024
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Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum

Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum
  • They managed to capture 3D footage of around 50 former Daesh jails and 30 mass graves before they were transformed
  • In total they have documented 100 prison sites, interviewed more than 500 survivors and digitised over 70,000 Daesh documents.

Paris: After jihadists jailed him in 2014, Iraqi religious scholar Muhammad Al-Attar said he would sometimes pull his prison blanket over his head to cry without other detainees noticing.
Daesh group extremists arrested Attar, then 37, at his perfume shop in Mosul in June 2014 after overrunning the Iraqi city, hoping to convince the respected community leader to join them.
But the former preacher refused to pledge allegiance, and they threw him into prison where he was tortured.
In his group cell of at least 148 detainees at Mosul’s Ahdath prison, at times “there was nothing left but to weep,” Attar said.
But “I couldn’t bear the thought of the younger men seeing me cry. They would have broken down.”
So he hid under his blanket.
Daesh, also called Daesh, seized control of large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq and declared a so-called caliphate there in 2014, implementing its brutal interpretation of religion on inhabitants.
The militants banned smoking, mandated beards for men and head-to-toe coverings for women, publicly executed homosexuals and cut off the hands of thieves.
They threw perceived informants or “apostates” into prison or makeshift jails, many of whom never returned.
Attar’s story is one of more than 500 testimonies that dozens of journalists, filmmakers and human rights activists in Syria and Iraq have collected since 2017 as part of an online archive called the Daesh Prisons Museum.
The website, which includes virtual visits of former jihadist detention centers and numerous tales about life inside them, became public this month.
The project is holding its first physical exhibition, including virtual reality tours, at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the UN’s culture and education agency, until November 14.
Syrian journalist Amer Matar, 38, is director of the web-based museum.
“IS abducted my brother in 2013, and we started to look for him,” he told AFP.
After US-backed forces started to expel jihadists from parts of Syria and Iraq in 2017, “I and my team got the chance to go inside certain former IS prisons,” he said.
They found thousands of prison documents from the group whose caliphate was eventually defeated in 2019, but also detainee scratchings on the walls.
Etched inside the football stadium in the Syrian city of Raqqa, for example, the team found prisoner names and Qur’anic verses, as well as lyrics from a 1996 television drama about peace eventually prevailing.
Inside one solitary cell, they discovered exercise instructions to keep fit in English.
Matar says he was detained twice at the start of the Syrian civil war, in a government jail for covering protests against President Bashar Assad.
“I too would write my name on the wall because I didn’t know if I’d get out or if they’d kill me,” he said.
“People usually write their names, cries for help or stories about someone who was killed,” he added.
“They’re messages into the future so that people can find someone.”
Matar and his team decided to film the former prison sites and archive all the material within them before they disappeared.
“Many were homes, clinics, government buildings, schools or shops” that people were returning to and starting to repair, said Matar, who is now based in Germany.
They managed to capture 3D footage of around 50 former Daesh jails and 30 mass graves before they were transformed, he said.
In total they have documented 100 prison sites, interviewed more than 500 survivors and digitised over 70,000 Daesh documents.
Younes Qays, a 30-year-old journalist from Mosul, was in charge of data collection in Iraq.
“To hear and see the crimes inflicted on my people was really tough,” he said, recounting being particularly shocked by the tale of a woman from the Yazidi minority who was raped 11 times in IS captivity.
Robin Yassin-Kassab, the website’s English editor, said the project aimed to “gather information and cross-reference it” so it could be used in court.
“We want legal teams around the world to know that we exist so that they can come and ask us for evidence,” he said.
Matar has not found his brother.
But within the coming year, he hopes to launch a sister website called Jawab, “Answer” in Arabic, to help others find out what happened to their loved ones.


Dozens killed and wounded in Israeli strike on northern Gaza's Jabalia, medics say

Dozens killed and wounded in Israeli strike on northern Gaza's Jabalia, medics say
Updated 10 November 2024
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Dozens killed and wounded in Israeli strike on northern Gaza's Jabalia, medics say

Dozens killed and wounded in Israeli strike on northern Gaza's Jabalia, medics say
  • The first strike on a house in Jabalia in northern Gaza killed ‘at least 25’ people

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Dozens of people were killed and wounded in an Israeli strike on a house in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip at dawn on Sunday, Palestinian medics said.
Footage circulating on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed about a dozen bodies wrapped in blankets and laid to the ground at a hospital. Residents said the building that was hit had housed at least 30 people.
The Palestinian official news agency WAFA and Hamas media put the number of people killed at 32. There was no immediate confirmation of the tally by the territory’s health ministry.
The Civil Emergency Service says its operations have been halted by an ongoing Israeli raid into two towns and a refugee camp in northern Gaza that began on Oct 5. It also could not provide a figure for those killed in the attack.
Israel says it sent forces into Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun in the north of the enclave to fight Hamas militants waging attacks from there and to prevent them from regrouping. It says its troops have killed hundreds of militants in those areas since the new offensive began.
In Gaza City, an Israeli airstrike on a house in Sabra neighborhood killed Wael Al-Khour, an official at the Welfare Ministry, and seven other members of his family including his wife and children on Sunday, medics and relatives said.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the reports on the strike in Jabalia and in the Sabra neighborhood.