SOUSA: Kurdish-led fighters pressed their assault against the Daesh group in eastern Syria Monday, boxing the extremists into a tiny last pocket of land along the Euphrates River.
Bad weather and reduced visibility delayed the launch of yet another push to flush out the few hundred die-hard extremists battling to defend the remnants of their once-sprawling “caliphate.”
With support from a US-led military coalition, the Syrian Democratic Forces are in the final stages of an assault launched more than four months ago against the jihadists’ last bastion.
A dwindling number of Daesh fighters, led mostly by Iraqi commanders, are now defending only a handful of hamlets in the Euphrates Valley, SDF commander Heval Roni said.
“Geographically speaking, there are only four square kilometers left under Daesh control, stretching from Baghouz to the Iraqi border,” he told AFP in the Baghouz area.
“There are some high-ranking Daesh leaders among them... but we don’t know who exactly,” said Heval Roni, who heads SDF operations in the area.
The SDF is a Kurdish-led force that also includes Arab fighters from the region and which has spearheaded the fight against Daesh in Syria since it was formed in 2015.
The commander said he had no information about Daesh supremo Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who is believed to still be alive and is the world’s most wanted man.
In an interview to AFP last week, the top commander of the SDF said the battle was winding up but that his forces would need about a month to assert full control over the area and declare victory.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 1,200 extremists and around half as many SDF fighters have been killed since the start of the offensive on September 10.
The Britain-based monitoring group says more than 400 civilians have also perished, many of them killed by coalition air strikes.
The SDF has warned that perilous sweeping operations would follow the conquest of Daesh’s last fixed position in the area.
US President Donald Trump announced in December that he had ordered a complete troop withdrawal from Syria, a move that left the SDF feeling betrayed and exposed to Turkish threats.
Trump justified the decision by claiming that Daesh had been defeated, a claim described as premature by most, including by members of his own administration.
The White House’s special envoy to the fight against Daesh resigned after the announcement.
The main US partner on the ground in Syria has said that the final demise of the “caliphate” as a statehood experiment will not eliminate the threat posed by Daesh as an armed group.
“There is no end to IS as an organization. They’ve been trying to finish Al-Qaeda for 20 years and they didn’t manage. It’ll be the same with IS,” said Heval Roni, using an acronym for Daesh.
Daesh in Syria boxed in to shrinking pocket
Daesh in Syria boxed in to shrinking pocket
Funeral procession for Iran’s President Raisi starts
- Mourners set off from a central square in the northwestern city of Tabriz
TEHRAN: Thousands of Iranians walked sombrely through the streets on Tuesday for the funeral procession of President Ebrahim Raisi and seven members of his entourage who were killed in a helicopter crash.
Waving Iranian flags and portraits of the late president, the mourners set off from a central square in the northwestern city of Tabriz, where Raisi was headed when his helicopter crashed on Sunday.
Israeli army raids West Bank’s Jenin, Palestinians say seven killed
- Among the Palestinians killed was a surgical doctor, the head of the Jenin Governmental Hospital said
JENIN: Israeli forces raided Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday in an operation that the Palestinian health ministry said killed seven Palestinians, including a doctor, and left nine others wounded.
The army said it was an operation against militants and that a number of Palestinian gunmen were shot. There was no immediate word of any Israeli casualties.
The health ministry account of the casualties was quoted by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.
Among the Palestinians killed was a surgical doctor, the head of the Jenin Governmental Hospital said. He was killed in the vicinity of the hospital, the director said.
The West Bank is among territories Israel seized in a 1967 Middle East war. The Palestinians want it to be the core of an independent Palestinian state. US-sponsored talks on a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict broke down in 2014.
Dubai DXB airport sees record 2024 traffic after 8.4% rise in Q1
- Dubai airport welcomed around 23 million passengers in January-March period, operator says
- India, Saudi Arabia and Britain were top three countries by passenger volumes in first quarter
DUBAI: Dubai’s main airport expects to handle a record passenger traffic this year after an 8.4% rise in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, operator Dubai Airports said on Tuesday.
Dubai International Airport (DXB), a major global travel hub, welcomed around 23 million passengers in the January-March period, the operator said in a statement, noting that the uptick was partly driven by increased destination offers by flagship carrier Emirates and its sister low-cost airline Flydubai.
“With a strong start to Q2 and an optimistic outlook for the rest of the year, we have revised our forecast for the year to 91 million guests, surpassing our previous annual traffic record of 89.1 million in 2018,” CEO Paul Griffiths said in the statement.
Dubai is the biggest tourism and trade hub in the Middle East, attracting a record 17.15 million international overnight visitors last year.
Its ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum last month approved a new passenger terminal in Al Maktoum International airport worth 128 billion dirhams ($34.85 billion).
The Al Maktoum International Airport will be the largest in the world with a capacity of up to 260 million passengers, and five times the size of DXB, he said, adding all operations at Dubai airport would be transferred to Al Maktoum in the coming years.
DXB is connected to 256 destinations across 102 countries. In the first quarter, India, Saudi Arabia and Britain were the top three countries by passenger numbers, Dubai Airports added. ($1 = 3.6729 UAE dirham)
Israel, Hamas reject bid before ICC to arrest leaders for war crimes
- Israel slams as a ‘historical disgrace’ the demand to arrest their leaders for war crimes
- US President Joe Biden denounces the ICC bid as ‘outrageous’
RAFAH, Palestinian Territories: Israel and Hamas, engaged in heavy fighting in the Gaza Strip, both angrily rejected on Monday moves to arrest their leaders for war crimes made before an international court.
The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor Karim Khan said he had applied for arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders over the conflict.
Israel slammed as a “historical disgrace” the demand targeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, while the Palestinian militant group Hamas said it “strongly condemns” the move.
Israel’s top ally the United States joined the condemnation, while France said it supported the court’s independence and its “fight against impunity.”
Netanyahu said he rejected “with disgust The Hague prosecutor’s comparison between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas.”
Khan said in a statement that he was seeking warrants against the Israeli leaders for crimes including “wilful killing,” “extermination and/or murder,” and “starvation.”
He said Israel had committed “crimes against humanity” during the war, started by Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack, as part “of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population.”
Khan also said the leaders of Hamas, including Qatar-based Ismail Haniyeh and Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, “bear criminal responsibility” for actions committed during the October 7 attack.
These included “taking hostages,” “rape and other acts of sexual violence,” and “torture,” he said.
“International law and the laws of armed conflict apply to all,” Khan said. “No foot soldier, no commander, no civilian leader — no one — can act with impunity.”
The warrants, if granted by the ICC judges, would mean that any of the 124 ICC member states would technically be obliged to arrest Netanyahu and the others if they traveled there, a point noted by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.
However, the court has no mechanism to enforce its warrants.
US President Joe Biden denounced the ICC bid as “outrageous” and said “there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.”
Germany agreed, with a foreign ministry spokesman saying the warrants gave “a false impression of equivalence.”
Biden also rejected accusations in a separate tribunal, the UN International Court of Justice, where South Africa has alleged that Israel’s war in Gaza is genocidal.
“What’s happening is not genocide,” Biden told a Jewish American Heritage Month event at the White House on Monday.
South Africa welcomed the move at the ICC.
The war ground on unabated, with Israeli forces battling Hamas in Gaza’s far-southern city of Rafah, as well as in other flashpoints in central and northern areas.
Israel defied international opposition almost two weeks ago when it sent troops into Rafah, which is crowded with civilians and which the military has described as the last Hamas stronghold.
Netanyahu has vowed to keep fighting Hamas in Gaza until the Iran-backed Islamist group is defeated and all remaining hostages are released.
The United Nations said more than 812,000 Palestinians had fled Rafah, near the Egyptian border.
“The question that haunts us is: where will we go?” said Sarhan Abu Al-Saeed, 46, a desperate Palestinian resident. “Certain death is chasing us from all directions.”
Witnesses said that Israeli naval forces had also struck Rafah, and medics reported an air strike on a residential building in the city’s west.
The military said Israeli troops were “conducting targeted raids on terrorist infrastructure” in eastern Rafah, where they had found “dozens of tunnel shafts” and “eliminated over 130 terrorists.”
The war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Hamas also took about 250 hostages during the attack, of whom 124 remain in Gaza including 37 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 35,562 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
The Israeli military said on Monday the bodies of four hostages retrieved from Gaza last week had been found in tunnels under Jabalia in the north.
Israeli forces have been fighting in northern and central areas previously declared largely cleared of militants, with the military saying its troops had killed 200 militants in Jabalia.
Israel has imposed a siege on the long-blockaded Gaza Strip, depriving its 2.4 million people of normal access to clean water, food, medicines and fuel.
The suffering has been eased only by sporadic aid shipments by land, air and sea, but truck arrivals have slowed to a trickle amid the Rafah operation.
The European Union warned that 31 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are no longer functioning and that the rest are “on the verge of collapse, with more than 9,000 severely injured people at risk of dying.”
Air strikes continued across Gaza, including on Gaza City in the north, the military said.
Gaza’s civil defense said the bodies of eight dead, along with several wounded, were retrieved after an air strike on the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met Netanyahu on Sunday and told him Israel must link the military operation against Hamas with a “political strategy” for Gaza’s future.
Washington has pushed for a post-war plan for Gaza involving Palestinians and supported by regional powers, as well as for a broader diplomatic deal under which Israel and Saudi Arabia would normalize relations.
