Syrian soldier killed in Israeli strike on Damascus

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Charred vehicles litter a parking area in the aftermath of Sunday’s Israeli strike in the neighborhood of Kafr Sousse in Damascus. (AFP)
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In this file photo taken on November 11, 2019 a US F-16 fighter jet takes part in the "Blue Flag" multinational air defence exercise at the Ovda air force base, north of the Israeli city of Eilat. (AFP file photo)
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Updated 14 July 2024
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Syrian soldier killed in Israeli strike on Damascus

  • Sunday’s strikes targeted “a number of our military sites in the southern region and one of the residential buildings in the Kafar Souseh area in the city of Damascus,” the Syrian army said in a statement
  • Aerial defense systems intercepted and downed several missiles ‘despite their intensity,’ Syria says

DAMASCUS: A Syrian soldier was killed on Sunday and three others wounded in Israeli strikes on several positions in and around Damascus, Syrian state media said.

The Israeli military, meanwhile, said it had targeted a Syrian military command center as well as targets and infrastructure belonging to the Syrian army and air defense in response to two drones launched toward Israel from Syrian territory.
The statement was a rare acknowledgment by the Israeli military of action in Syria, where it has launched hundreds of strikes since the country’s civil war erupted in 2011, mainly targeting army positions and fighters.

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The facade of an eight-story building was damaged, with its windows shattered, while around 30 cars were left charred or damaged around the impact site.

“A soldier was killed and three others injured following an aerial aggression launched by the Israeli enemy after midnight” on Sunday, Syria’s SANA news agency reported.
The strike “was launched from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights,” which Israel seized in 1967, and targeted “several military positions in the southern region and a residential building in the Kafr Sousa district of Damascus,” it added.
SANA said that aerial defense systems had intercepted and downed several missiles “despite their intensity.”
The news agency published a photo showing a fire in what appeared to be a crater caused by the blast.
A journalist visiting the scene said the strike caused a crater about 30 meters long and 10 meters wide.
The facade of an eight-story building was damaged, with its windows shattered, while around 30 cars were left charred or damaged around the impact site.
Police cordoned off the vicinity while firefighters attempted to extinguish the fire.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a Syrian pro-government fighter had been killed and six others wounded in Israeli strikes targeting a building in Kafr Sousa and a military headquarters south of Damascus.
Local radio station Sham FM had reported “the explosion of a munitions depot following an Israeli attack that targeted a position near the capital.”
“The blasts were very strong and came in succession,” a resident of the eastern Damascus neighborhood of Mazzeh told AFP, adding that this was followed by “the strong odor of gunpowder.”
The Israeli army meanwhile said that two drones launched “from Syrian territory ... were successfully intercepted” on Saturday.
In response, the military said it struck overnight “a Syrian military command center and infrastructure sites. Additionally, terror targets used by the Syrian military’s Aerial Defense Unit were struck.”
“The Syrian regime is responsible for all terror activities occurring within its territory and will be held accountable for it,” the army added.
Syria’s Foreign Ministry condemned the strikes in a statement carried by SANA.
It warned that Israeli attacks in Syria and other countries in the region risked leading to “a dangerous escalation” with “dire, unpredictable consequences.”
Israel’s strikes on Syria had intensified after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel sparked war in the Gaza Strip, then eased after an April 1 strike blamed on Israel hit the Iranian consular building in Damascus.
Israel has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran to expand its foothold in Syria.
The attack came as Syria prepares to hold parliamentary elections on Monday, in a vote expected to return power to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s ruling Baath party.

 


Egypt condemns killing of activist by Israeli forces in the West Bank

Activists mourn the body of slain Turkish-American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi at the Rafidia hospital morgue in Nablus.
Updated 5 sec ago
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Egypt condemns killing of activist by Israeli forces in the West Bank

  • Ministry extends condolences to government of Turkiye and its people

CAIRO: Egypt condemned the killing of US-Turkish activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi by Israeli forces in the West Bank.

Ahmed Abu Zeid, spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, condemned the killing of Eygi, which occurred south of Nablus.

In a statement issued by the ministry, Abu Zeid extended his condolences to the Turkish government and people and offered his sympathies to the family of the deceased.

He said the death is a further example of the daily Israeli violations against Palestinian civilians and their supporters, adding to the various forms of violence and disregard for human rights they face in the occupied Palestinian territories.

He also condemned the moral crisis faced by the international community due to the atrocities committed against civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories over decades.

Eygi, 26, was shot and killed on Friday in the village of Beita, near Nablus, during a nonviolent protest against settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and escalating settler violence against Palestinian homes and landowners.

 


Eight-year-old found dead in Turkiye after national search effort

The body of Narin Guran was found in a bag in a river in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir.
Updated 53 min 21 sec ago
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Eight-year-old found dead in Turkiye after national search effort

  • “Narin Guran was found dead wearing the same clothes as the last time she was seen,” said Zorluoglu

ANKARA: The body of an eight-year-old girl who had been missing in Turkiye for 19 days has been found after an enormous manhunt, the interior minister said on Sunday.
The body of Narin Guran was found in a bag in a river in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir, around one kilometer from the village where she lived with her family, Diyarbakir governor Murat Zorluoglu told reporters.
“Unfortunately, the lifeless body of Narin, who went missing in the village of Tavsantepe... has been found,” Turkish interior minister Ali Yerlikaya wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
She disappeared on August 21, sparking a huge search effort in Turkiye, with a number of well-known figures joining a social media campaign called “Find Narin.”
“Narin Guran was found dead wearing the same clothes as the last time she was seen,” said Zorluoglu.
“Based on the first observations, she was put into a bag after she was killed. The bag was then placed in the river, hidden under branches and rocks so as not to raise suspicion,” he added.
Diyarbakir prosecutors have detained 21 people, said Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc.
The girl’s uncle was arrested last week on suspicion of murder and “deprivation of liberty.”
“Our president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is following the case closely to guarantee that the ongoing investigation continues thoroughly and that those who took Narin’s life answer before the law,” the president’s communications director Fahrettin Altun said on X.
Turkiye’s pro-Kurdish party DEM has called for a march to take place in Diyarbakir on Sunday evening.
“Narin was killed in an organized manner. Those responsible for this murder, which has saddened us all, must be revealed and held accountable before an impartial and independent justice system,” DEM wrote on X.
Tunc said on X that “those responsible for Narin’s death will be brought to justice.”


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

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

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.


Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip

Updated 08 September 2024
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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

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.”


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

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

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.