BEIRUT: Attacks by two extremist groups killed at least 17 Syrian government troops and militiamen in the northern province of Aleppo early on Saturday, a war monitor said.
Thirty others were wounded in the assaults by Al-Qaeda’s former Syria branch, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), and its ally Hurras Al-Deen, which remains affiliated to the global extremist network, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The attacks in the southern and southwestern countryside of Aleppo province were launched shortly after midnight and triggered clashes that continued until dawn, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
He said the fighting subsided after Russian aircraft struck extremist positions in the area, prompting the fighters to pull back.
Eight terrorists were killed, he added.
Russia aircraft also carried out strikes in neighboring Hama province early on Saturday, killing five civilians, the Observatory said.
On Friday, Russian strikes killed 10 civilians in Idlib province, the hub of territory held by the extremists of HTS in northwestern Syria.
Russia and rebel-backer Turkey in September inked a buffer zone deal to avert a massive government offensive on the Idlib region, but the deal has never been implemented.
The region of some three million people has come under increasing bombardment since HTS took full control of it in January.
The latest Russian air raids came after two days of talks on the Syrian conflict between Turkey, Russia and fellow government backer Iran in Kazakhstan earlier this week.
The three governments expressed concern over the growing power of HTS in Idlib and parts of adjacent provinces, and determination to cooperate to eliminate the extremist group.
The civil war in Syria has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions since it began with the bloody repression of anti-government protests in 2011.
Extremist attacks kill 17 Syria pro-regime fighters: monitor
Extremist attacks kill 17 Syria pro-regime fighters: monitor
- Al-Qaeda branches in Syria wounded 30 government troops in attacks
- Fighting subsided after Russian fighters attacked extremist positions
Lebanon orders probe into torture of detained Syrians
- Amnesty’s report published last week accused Lebanese authorities of "cruel and abusive" treatment of more than 20 Syrians tortured in prison or during interrogation
- Military court to "open an investigation into claims made by Amnesty concerning the arrest and torture of Syrian refugees held over terrorism-related charges”
Lebanese authorities were accused of “cruel and abusive” treatment of more than 20 Syrians, according to Amnesty that published last week a report saying those arrested had been tortured in prison or during interrogation.
It blamed in particular Lebanon’s military intelligence bureau and said the abuse was mostly at a military intelligence center in east Lebanon’s Ablah district, the General Security bureau in Beirut or at the defense ministry.
Oueidat called on the government representative at the military court to “open an investigation into claims made by Amnesty International concerning the arrest and torture of Syrian refugees held over terrorism-related charges,” the official National News Agency reported.
Amnesty cited detainees as saying they faced some of the same torture techniques routinely used in Syrian prisons.
They were hung upside down, forced into stress positions for prolonged periods and beaten with metal rods and electric cables, according to the rights group.
At least 14 of the 26 cases it reported were detained on terrorism-related accusations made on discriminatory grounds, including political affiliation, it said.
Lebanon says it hosts 1.5 million Syrians — nearly a million of whom are registered as refugees with the United Nations.
Nine out of ten Syrians in Lebanon live in extreme poverty, the UN says.
Lebanese authorities have systematically pressured Syrians to return even though rights groups warn Syria is not yet safe.
EU chiefs to see Erdogan in Turkey next week
- EU leaders agreed to improve cooperation with Ankara if Turkish president maintains a current "de-escalation" after spike in tensions over eastern Mediterranean
- EU has warned it could slap sanctions on its southeastern neighbor if it backtracks
BRUSSLES – European Union chiefs Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen will travel to Turkey to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on April 6, an EU spokesman said Monday.
The trip comes after EU leaders agreed at a summit on Thursday that they were ready to improve cooperation with Ankara if Erdogan maintains a current “de-escalation” after a spike in tensions over the eastern Mediterranean last year.
The bloc has been encouraged by the resumption of talks involving Turkey and Greece over a disputed maritime border and by plans to restart UN peace efforts for divided EU member state Cyprus.
But leaders remain deeply wary of Erdogan and there are major concerns over Ankara’s recent moves to shut down an opposition party and its departure from a treaty on violence against women.
Last week’s summit conclusions said the 27-nation bloc was “ready to engage with Turkey in a phased, proportionate and reversible manner to enhance cooperation in a number of areas of common interest.”
But that was only if “the current de-escalation is sustained and that Turkey engages constructively.”
The EU has warned it could slap sanctions on its southeastern neighbor if it backtracks.
On the table for discussion is a raft of key Turkish ambitions including modernizing a customs union with the EU, liberalising visa rules and more support for hosting millions of refugees from Syria.
Turkey is pressing Brussels to update a deal struck five years ago to stop large-scale arrivals of migrants in the EU, many of them fleeing war in Syria, in return for billions of euros in aid.
The bloc is refusing to reopen the agreement but last week’s summit told the European Commission to come up with a proposal on more funding for Ankara.
EU leaders said they will discuss Turkey’s progress at a summit in June and could take “further decisions” on cooperation.
The bloc’s members are divided over their approach to Ankara, with Cyprus, Greece and France urging a tough line while others, led by economic powerhouse Germany, pushing for more engagement.
Lebanon could sink like Titanic, parliament speaker says
- The assembly was due to discuss a $200 million emergency fund to pay for fuel for Lebanon’s electricity company
- The energy ministry has said there are no funds to pay for imports beyond March
“We will all sink, with no exceptions,” MTV television quoted him as saying at the opening of a session of parliament.
Prime minister-designate Saad Al-Hariri and President Michel Aoun have been at loggerheads over a new cabinet for months, dashing hopes of a reversal of Lebanon’s deepening financial meltdown.
The assembly was due to discuss a $200 million emergency fund to pay for fuel for Lebanon’s electricity company.
The energy ministry has said there are no funds to pay for imports beyond March.
The Zahrani power plant, one of Lebanon’s four main electricity producers, has shut down after its fuel ran out.
Ship ‘partially refloated,’ but still stuck in Suez Canal
SUEZ: Engineers on Monday “partially refloated” the colossal container ship that continues to block traffic through the Suez Canal, authorities said, without providing further details about when the vessel would be set free.
Satellite data from MarineTraffic.com showed that the ship’s bulbous bow, once lodged deep in the canal’s eastern bank, had been partly wrested from the shore — although it remained stuck at the canal’s edge. The ship’s stern had swung around and was now in the middle of the waterway, tracking data showed.
The MV Ever Given was successfully re-floated at 04:30 lt 29/03/2021. She is being secured at the moment. More information about next steps will follow once they are known. #suezcanel #maritime pic.twitter.com/f3iuYYiRRi
— Inchcape Shipping (@Inchcape_SS) March 29, 2021
Although the development marked the vessel’s most significant movement since getting stuck last week, the salvage crew urged caution as obstacles loomed.
“Don’t cheer too soon,” Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, the salvage firm hired to extract the Ever Given, told Dutch NPO Radio 1.
Last Tuesday, the skyscraper-sized Ever Given got stuck sideways in the crucial waterway, creating a massive traffic jam. The obstruction has held up $9 billion each day in global trade and strained supply chains already burdened by the coronavirus pandemic. At least 367 vessels, carrying everything from crude oil to cattle, were still waiting to pass through the canal, while dozens were taking the alternate route around the Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s southern tip — a detour that adds some two weeks to journeys and costs ships hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel and other costs.
With canal transits stopped, Egypt already has lost over $95 million in revenue, according to the data firm Refinitiv. If the ship is freed in the next few days, clearing the backlog of ships already waiting to pass through the canal would take at least 10 days, Refinitiv added.
The partial freeing of the vessel came after intensive efforts to push and pull the vessel with 10 tugboats when the full moon brought spring tide, canal services firm Leth Agencies said, raising the canal’s water level and hopes for a breakthrough. Videos shared widely on social media showed tugboats in the canal sounding their horns in celebration of the Ever Given being partly wrenched from the shore.
However, the rescue team said the ship’s bow remained stuck in the sandy clay at the canal’s edge.
“The good news is that the stern is free but we saw that as the simplest part of the job,” said Berdowski, noting that the toughest challenge remained at the front of the ship, where workers would struggle to haul the fully laden 220,000-ton vessel over the clay of the canal bank.
An official at Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd., the company that owns the Ever Given, confirmed the vessel’s bow had moved slightly, but warned the bottom of the ship was still touching the seafloor. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
On Monday morning, an Associated Press journalist could see that the ship’s position had distinctly changed — where previously only the ship’s stern was visible, the ship’s side could now be seen.
Lt. Gen. Osama Rabei, the head of the Suez Canal Authority, said the vessel had responded well to “pull-and-push maneuvers” early Monday. He said that workers had straightened the vessel’s position by 80% and that the stern had moved 102 meters (334 feet) from the canal bank.
The price of international benchmark Brent crude dropped some 2% to just over $63 on the news.
When high tide returns at 11:30 a.m. local time on Monday, salvage crews will resume their attempts to tow the ship into the middle of the waterway and toward the Great Bitter Lake, a wide stretch of water halfway between the north and south end of the canal, where it will undergo technical examination, Rabei said.
Overnight, several dredgers had toiled to vacuum up 27,000 cubic meters of sand and mud around the ship. Another powerful tugboat, the Italian-flagged Carlo Magno, arrived at the scene to join the work Monday, and the flotilla would now focus its efforts on the front of the ship, said Berdowski.
Although the vessel is vulnerable to damage in its current position, the vessel’s owner dismissed concerns on Monday, saying that the ship’s engine was functional and it would head north when freed. It wasn’t decided whether the Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned ship, hauling goods from Asia to Europe, would continue to its original destination of Rotterdam or if it will need to enter another port for repairs, the Shoei official said.
Ship operators did not offer a timeline for the reopening of the crucial canal, which carries over 10% of global trade, including 7% of the world’s oil. Over 19,000 ships passed through last year, according to canal authorities. Millions of barrels of oil and liquified natural gas flow through the artery from the Arabian Gulf to Europe and North America. Goods made in China — furniture, clothes, supermarket basics — bound for Europe also must go through the canal, or else take the detour around Africa.
The unprecedented shutdown has threatened to disrupt oil and gas shipments to Europe from the Middle East and raised fears of extended delays, good shortages and rising costs for consumers.
Canal authorities have desperately tried to free the vessel by relying on tugs and dredgers alone, even as analysts warned that 400-meter-long ship may be too heavy for such an operation. As a window for a breakthrough narrows with high tide receding this week, fears have grown that authorities would be forced to lighten the vessel by removing the ship’s 20,000 containers — a complex operation, requiring specialized equipment not found in Egypt, that could take days or weeks.
The salvage team’s next step is dredging beneath the vessel’s bow with high pressure water jets to wrench the ship from the clay, said Berdowski.
“If that doesn’t work, then in the end you will have to remove weight and that can only happen by removing containers from the front,” he added. “But that is a process that will take time.”
Middle East weighs agri-tech solutions as pandemic underscores urgency of food security
- GCC countries avoided nightmare scenario of mass food shortages during the peak of the coronavirus crisis
- Challenges loom as farming methods and climate change deplete freshwater stocks and turn soil to dust
DUBAI: In an age of plentiful food, it is often easy to forget just how fragile supply chains are until disaster strikes. One bloc taking stock of its pantry is the GCC, whose members import some 90 percent of their food.
Although the GCC countries managed to avoid the nightmare scenario of mass shortages during the worst days of the coronavirus pandemic, the crisis has certainly given Arab capitals plenty to chew over concerning their long-term food security.
“Ministries really got a wake-up call during this time of distress and are trying to escalate their own initiatives, being able to have more local produce and be more food secure in the years to come,” Atle Idland, general manager of Desert Control Middle East, told Arab News.
“The pandemic has been a catalyst for many countries and governments to get their plans up from the table and into action.”
Desert Control is among a crop of agri-tech firms that will showcase their innovations at Expo 2020 Dubai in October this year.
The Norwegian start-up has patented Liquid NanoClay (LNC), an agri-technology that binds a mineral-rich solution to grains of desert sand, converting once unusable land into arable soil, reducing water irrigation by 50 percent and radically improving crop yields.
“The region has been producing a very limited number of agricultural crops, due to the climate itself, and also due to the water scarcity in the region,” Idland said.
“Give that both Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries are running low on their aquifers of fresh water, and that agriculture is using 75 percent of the world’s freshwater resources, this is not a sustainable process. It cannot continue.”
According to the UN, some 135 million people could lose their homes and livelihoods to creeping desertification by 2030. Inhabitants of the Middle East and North Africa are more vulnerable than most.
Unless societies change their farming practices, Idland warns, the world has just 60 years of agricultural opportunities left before fresh water runs dry and desertification claims the last of its fertile soils.
“Adopting new technologies for agriculture and food security is definitely something that is on the table right now and is being implemented as we speak,” he said.
Growing food at a local level has the added benefit of reducing the industry’s carbon footprint by cutting the amount of air freight needed to meet demand.
Idland claims LNC is radical in the sense that it is a low energy and purely mineral-based product containing zero chemical agents. “It’s only clay, water and oxygen that is mixed together to produce a Liquid NanoClay solution,” he said.
The Middle East is described by Idland as a major potential marketplace for LNC to lay down roots. “We are one, and not the only one, that can be a catalyst for utilizing unused desert land and sandy soils to do large scale agriculture,” he said.
In its initial commercial trials in the UAE, according to Idland, Desert Control’s product was found to produce 20 percent more watermelons and 60 percent more pearl millet compared with traditional means, while using just half the water.
Saudi Arabia is next in line.
“I came back from the Kingdom in early February and we are having some interesting discussions there, both within the agricultural sector and the sporting field sector,” Idland told Arab News.
“Everybody has the need to go greener, more sustainable and with water savings. Water scarcity is really the main driver for this trend.”
INNUMBERS
75% - Proportion of global freshwater used by agriculture.
135 million - Livelihoods imperiled by desertification by 2030.
10 billion - Projected global population by the year 2050.
On the downside, agri-technologies such as vertical farming and greenhouse cultivation, which allow non-native crops to grow closer to sources of demand, are known to consume a lot of energy for lighting and warmth and to desalinate water for irrigation.
Scientists believe desertification and climate change are intricately connected, although human mismanagement is also responsible. Increasing atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations reduce the amount of heat radiation escaping to space and thus lead to a gradual increase in global temperatures.
Rising temperatures, coupled with changing precipitation patterns, are expected in turn to increase the rates of dryland degradation and desertification. Already, every year the world’s deserts encroach upon an area roughly 20 times the size of Denmark, swallowing up the rich biodiversity that lives in the soil.
“We will be in big trouble,” Idland said. “Based on research, knowledge, intent and visions, everybody now is putting serious effort into this. We are glad to be part of that journey and, hopefully, to be a part of that solution. Making Earth green again — that’s our slogan.”
By 2050, the world’s food systems will need to feed an estimated 10 billion people. But at the current rate of production, only half that number will be fed. Widespread famine is a real possibility.
At the same time, outmoded agricultural practices are a significant emitter of greenhouse gases.
“With climate change affecting food production, it’s not hard to see that we are in a vicious cycle,” said Mariam Almheiri, UAE minister of state for food security, while taking part in a recent pre-Expo 2020 Dubai Thematic Week session.
“In short, nothing short of an entire paradigm shift in how we produce food and deliver it from farm to fork is needed if we are to create sustainable food systems, no hunger, and food security for the world.”
The concerns were echoed by Reem Al-Hashimy, UAE minister of state for international cooperation and managing director of the Expo 2020 Dubai bid committee.
“Today, food security stands as a hallowed and unassailable tenet of true human dignity,” she said. “The capacity of all nations was tested in the early weeks and months of the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed the vulnerability of our global food value chain.
“Yet in the wake of that harsh examination, now we are presented with an opportunity to reimagine our chain and learn to eat and earn cleaner and smarter, and in a more sustainable fashion.”
Later this year, Expo 2020 Dubai will bring together stakeholders from every part of the chain, from producers to facilitators to consumers.
“Expo will be a marketplace for ideas and innovation, a chance to absorb best practice from more than 190 countries, and take it home with you, and apply it into pastures — learning global and practicing local, overcoming shared challenges through intelligent and transferable solutions,” Al-Hashimy said.
Another challenge is food waste, whereby one in three mouthfuls is wasted by producers, retailers and consumers. Poor farming practices are also responsible for deforestation, land degradation and pollution.
ALSO READ: How the Arab region can catch up with the future of food
“We know we must do better,” Al-Hashimy said. “We will actively seek fertile alternatives to antiquated practices that strip larger and larger stretches of arable land, while reaping ever decreasing economic benefits.
“We are already paying the price for encroaching too vigorously on the natural world, in the form of the zoonotic disease COVID-19 that has decimated lives and economies around the world.”
Future economic models must work for the benefit of billions of people whose quality of life depends on an equitable system that rewards responsible and productive practices and protects the land these communities call home, said Al-Hashimy.
“This is a moment in which meaningful and effective international cooperation can entirely recast antiquated structures founded on centuries-old imbalances — imbalances we can no longer sustain and under which we will never truly thrive.”
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• Twitter: @CalineMalek
