Ashraf Ghani in UAE, says did not leave Afghanistan with money 

This image grab taken from a recorded video message broadcast on the Facebook page of former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani on August 18, 2021 shows him speaking. (AFP)
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Updated 19 August 2021
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Ashraf Ghani in UAE, says did not leave Afghanistan with money 

  • Ghani’s whereabouts were unknown until Wednesday when the UAE said it is hosting him 
  • Russian embassy officials have told media the Afghan president fled with a helicopter full of cash

ISLAMABAD: Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Wednesday denied reports he took large sums of money as he fled Afghanistan when the Taliban took over.
Ghani was speaking in a video streamed on Facebook, his first public comments since it was confirmed he was in the United Arab Emirates.
The UAE said on Wednesday it is hosting Ghani and his family on humanitarian grounds.
Ghani’s whereabouts had been unknown after he left Kabul on Sunday. Russian embassy officials told the media on Monday the Afghan president had fled with cars and a helicopter full of cash.
“Accusations I took money with me are complexly baseless, they are lies,” Ghani said in the video stream, as quoted by Reuters.
Bitterly criticized, also by his former cabinet members, for leaving the country, Ghani said he would continue his efforts for Afghanistan and had left to avoid bloodshed.
“I am in consultation with others until I will return so that I can continue my efforts for justice for Afghans,” he said. “If I had stayed, I would be witnessing bloodshed in Kabul.”
The collapse of the Afghan government capped a lightning advance by the Taliban who have seized most of Afghan cities in just 10 days, with relatively little bloodshed.
The takeover came as US President Joe Biden moved to complete the withdrawal of US troops from the war-battered country.
The Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, when they were ousted by a US-led invasion for protecting Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on America.
The two decades of war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.


Israel PM says okayed Lebanon pager attacks

Updated 4 sec ago
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Israel PM says okayed Lebanon pager attacks

JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he okayed a deadly September attack on Hezbollah communications devices which exploded in Lebanon, the first time Israel has admitted involvement.
Hezbollah had previously blamed its arch-foe for the blasts that dealt a major blow to the Iran-backed militant group, and vowed revenge.
“Netanyahu confirmed Sunday that he greenlighted the pager operation in Lebanon,” his spokesman Omer Dostri told AFP of the attacks.
Hand-held devices used by Hezbollah operatives detonated two days in a row in supermarkets, on streets and at funerals in mid-September.
They killed nearly 40 people and wounded nearly 3,000, and preceded Israel’s ongoing military operation in Lebanon.
Hezbollah began low intensity strikes on Israel in support of Hamas following its ally’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel which triggered the Gaza war.
Strikes have intensified since war broke out in Lebanon in late September, when Israel escalated its air campaign against Hezbollah and later sent ground troops into south Lebanon.

Netanyahu says spoke again with Trump about Iran ‘threat’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday he had spoken three times with US president-elect Donald Trump.
Updated 44 min ago
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Netanyahu says spoke again with Trump about Iran ‘threat’

  • “We see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in every aspect,” Netanyahu said
  • Analysts believe Netanyahu had hoped for a Trump return to the White House

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday he had spoken three times with US president-elect Donald Trump over the past few days about the “Iranian threat” to Israeli security.
“In the last few days, I have spoken three times with President-elect Donald Trump... Talks designed to further tighten the strong alliance between Israel and the US,” Netanyahu said, quoted in a statement issued by his office.
“We see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in every aspect,” he added during a weekly cabinet meeting, according to the statement.
Netanyahu also said he had talked to Trump about “great opportunities before Israel in the field of peace and its expansion.”
The United States is Israel’s top ally and military backer, and the election came at a critical time for the Middle East amid wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Analysts believe Netanyahu had hoped for a Trump return to the White House, given the longstanding personal friendship between the two as well as the former president’s hawkishness on Israel’s arch-foe Iran.
During his first term, Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights and helped normalize ties between Israel and several Arab states under the so-called Abraham Accords.


Israeli strike near Damascus kills seven: war monitor

An Israeli strike on an apartment belonging to Hezbollah killed seven people Sunday in a stronghold of pro-Iran groups.
Updated 11 min 10 sec ago
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Israeli strike near Damascus kills seven: war monitor

  • “An Israeli strike killed seven people and wounded 14, including women and children, in the Sayyida Zeinab area,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights official says

BEIRUT: An Israeli strike on an apartment belonging to the Lebanese Hezbollah group killed seven people Sunday in a stronghold of pro-Iran groups south of Damascus, a war monitor said.
“An Israeli strike killed seven people and wounded 14, including women and children, in the Sayyida Zeinab area,” Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP, revising an earlier toll of three dead.
The Britain-based monitor, which has a network of sources inside Syria, earlier said that “the Israeli attack targeted (Hezbollah) figures in the building where Lebanese families and members of the movement live.”
Syria’s official SANA news agency reported an “Israeli aggression targeting a residential building in the Sayyida Zeinab” area, home to a major Shiite shrine, that killed and injured an unspecified number of people.
On Saturday, four pro-Iran fighters were among five people killed in Israeli strikes in north and northwest Syria, the Observatory reported.
Since Syria’s civil war broke out in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria, mainly targeting army positions and fighters including from Hezbollah.
The strikes have increased since Israel entered an all-out war with Hezbollah in Lebanon on September 23.
Israeli authorities rarely comment on the strikes, but have repeatedly said they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in Syria.


Lebanon says 7 children among 23 dead in Israeli strike north of Beirut

People inspect a site of an Israeli strike, in the town of Almat in Jbeil district, Lebanon November 10, 2024. (Reuters)
Updated 10 November 2024
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Lebanon says 7 children among 23 dead in Israeli strike north of Beirut

  • The Shiite Muslim majority village of Almat, about 30 kilometers from Beirut, is located in a mostly Christian region
  • It is outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds of south Beirut and south and east Lebanon

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli strike on Sunday killed 23 people, including seven children, in the village of Almat north of the capital Beirut.
AFPTV footage showed rescuers rummaging with their bare hands through the wreckage of a house that had been completely razed, pulling out bodies wrapped in blankets while an excavator moved the rubble.
The Shiite Muslim majority village of Almat, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Beirut, is located in a mostly Christian region. It is outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds of south Beirut and south and east Lebanon, which Israel has heavily bombed since late September in its war against the Iran-backed movement.
“The Israeli enemy strike on Almat in the Jbeil district killed 23 people including seven children, in an updated but not final toll,” the health ministry said in a statement.
It also said body parts had been recovered from the site and were being identified.
A pile of broken concrete and the twisted metal structure that made up the roof lay at the bottom of a staircase leading to the destroyed house, AFP images showed.
Hezbollah lawmaker Raed Berro, one of the members of parliament representing the Jbeil district, was at the site of the strike and denied Israeli claims that Hezbollah members or weapons were embedded among civilians.
“Important military and security figures are usually on the frontlines... not at the rear,” he told AFP,
“Under the rubble, there are only children, elderly men and women,” he said.
Facebook user Ali Haydar posted a picture of the home, which he said belonged to his family, before it was destroyed. He added that people displaced from the eastern Baalbek region had sought refuge there.
“There were 35 relatives of ours from Baalbek in the house” including women and children, he said.
“Most of them have been martyred” in the strike, Haydar added.
The area was cordoned off by Lebanese security forces and Hezbollah members in civilian clothing, an AFP correspondent at the scene saw.
Dozens of people packed their belongings in their cars and fled the village, the correspondent said.
The health ministry also said Israeli strikes killed three Hezbollah-affiliated rescuers in south Lebanon.
Earlier, Lebanese official media reported an Israeli strike on a house in the main eastern city of Baalbek, which was not preceded by an Israeli army evacuation warning.
“Enemy aircraft launched a strike on a house in the Al-Laqees neighborhood” of the city, the state-run National News Agency said.
Israel intensified its air campaign mainly targeting Hezbollah bastions in Lebanon on September 23 and a week later sent in ground troops.
The escalation came after nearly a year of low-intensity, cross-border attacks by Hezbollah in support of its ally Hamas following the Palestinian Islamists’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war.
More than 3,130 people have been killed in Lebanon since the cross-border exchanges began, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, most of them since September 23.


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

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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