KFEIR: On a mountain slope in south Lebanon, agricultural worker Assaad Al-Taqi is busy picking olives, undeterred by the roar of Israeli warplanes overhead.
This year, he is collecting the harvest against the backdrop of the raging Israel-Hezbollah war.
He works in the village of Kfeir, just a few kilometers (miles) from where Israeli bombardment has devastated much of south Lebanon since Israel escalated its campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah in September.
“But I’m not afraid of the shelling,” Taqi said, as he and other workers hit the tree branches with sticks, sending showers of olives tumbling down into jute bags.
“Our presence here is an act of defiance,” the 51-year-old said, but also noting that the olive “is the tree of peace.”
Kfeir is nine kilometers (six miles) from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, in the mixed Christian and Druze district of Hasbaya, which has largely been spared the violence that has wracked nearby Hezbollah strongholds.
But even Hasbaya’s relative tranquillity was shattered last month when three journalists were killed in an Israeli strike on a complex where they were sleeping.
Israel and Hezbollah had previously exchanged cross-border fire for almost a year over the Gaza conflict.
The workers in Kfeir rest in the shade of the olive trees, some 900 meters (3,000 feet) above sea level on the slopes of Mount Hermon, which overlooks an area where Lebanese, Syrian and Israeli-held territory meet.
They have been toiling in relative peace since dawn, interrupted only by sonic booms from Israeli jets breaking the sound barrier and the sight of smoke rising on the horizon from strikes on a south Lebanon border village.
Hassna Hammad, 48, who was among those picking olives, said the agricultural work was her livelihood.
“We aren’t afraid, we’re used to it,” she said of the war.
But “we are afraid for our brothers impacted by the conflict,” she added, referring to the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese displaced by the fighting.
Elsewhere in south Lebanon, olive trees are bulging with fruit that nobody will pick, after villagers fled Israeli bombardment and the subsequent ground operation that began on September 30.
A World Bank report this month said that “the disruption of the olive harvest caused by bombing and displacement is expected to lead to $58 million in losses” in Lebanon.
It said 12 percent of olive groves in the conflict-affected areas it assessed had been destroyed.
Normally, the olive-picking season is highly anticipated in Lebanon, and some people return each year to their native villages and fields just for the harvest.
“Not everyone has the courage to come” this time, said Salim Kassab, who owns a traditional press where villagers bring their olives to extract the oil.
“Many people are absent... They sent workers to replace them,” said Kassab, 50.
“There is fear of the war of course,” he said, adding that he had come alone this year, without his wife and children.
Kassab said that before the conflict, he used to travel to the southern cities of Nabatiyeh and Sidon if he needed to fix his machines, but such trips are near impossible now because of the danger.
The World Bank report estimated that 12 months of agriculture sector losses have cost Lebanon $1.1 billion, in a country already going through a gruelling five-year economic crisis before the fighting erupted.
Areas near the southern border have sustained “the most significant damage and losses,” the report said.
It cited “the burning and abandonment of large areas of agricultural land” in both south and east Lebanon, “along with lost harvests due to the displacement of farmers.”
Elsewhere in Kfeir, Inaam Abu Rizk, 77, and her husband were busy washing olives they plan to either press for oil or jar to be served throughout the winter.
Abu Rizk has taken part in the olive harvest for decades, part of a tradition handed down the generations, and said that despite the war, this year was no different.
“Of course we’re afraid... there is the sound of planes and bombing,” she said.
But “we love the olive month — we are farmers and the land is our work.”
Defiant Lebanese harvest olives in the shadow of war
https://arab.news/g74wf
Defiant Lebanese harvest olives in the shadow of war
- A World Bank report this month said that “the disruption of the olive harvest caused by bombing and displacement is expected to lead to $58 million in losses” in Lebanon
As Iran conflict spills over, Iraq’s Kurds say ‘this war is not mine’
- The Kurds, an ethnic minority with a distinct culture and language, are rooted in the mountainous region spread across Turkiye, Syria, Iraq and Iran
- American bases there have come under fire, as have positions held by Iranian Kurdish parties — the same ones US President Donald Trump said it would be “wonderful” to see storm Iran
SORAN, Iraq: On a deserted road not too far from the border between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan, Satar Barsirini looked up at the sky, now streaked with jets and drones.
Iraq’s Kurdish region has found itself caught in the crossfire of a regional war triggered by US and Israeli attacks on the Islamic republic.
Dressed like the Kurdish fighters he once served alongside, Barsirini still wears the khaki shalwar, fitted jacket and scarf wrapped around his waist.
Though recently retired, he refuses to give up his peshmerga uniform as he tills his small plot of land.
The rumble of jets and hum of drones “come from everywhere. Especially at night,” he told AFP in the hamlet of Barsirini, dozens of kilometers from the border.
He described the “shiver in our flesh” as the drones hit the ground outside.
“I feel bad for the people, because we have paid a lot in blood to liberate Kurdistan... We just want to live.”
Irbil, the autonomous region’s capital, and the valleys leading to the border have been targeted by Tehran and the Iraqi armed groups it supports.
American bases there have come under fire, as have positions held by Iranian Kurdish parties — the same ones US President Donald Trump said it would be “wonderful” to see storm Iran.
But Iran warned on Friday it would target facilities in Iraqi Kurdistan if fighters crossed into its territory.
“This isn’t my war,” said 58-year-old Barsirini.
He recalled the brutal repression and flight into the snowy mountains after the 1991 Kurdish uprising that followed the first Gulf War.
- ‘Dangerous people’ -
The uprising was repressed, leading to an exodus of two million Kurds to Iran and Turkiye.
“When we fled the cities for our lives, we went to Iran. They helped us, they gave us shelter and food,” he said.
The Kurds would not forget that, Barsirini stressed, adding that they could not just “turn against them” now to support the US and Israel.
“I don’t trust (Americans). They are dangerous people,” he said.
The Kurds, an ethnic minority with a distinct culture and language, are rooted in the mountainous region spread across Turkiye, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
They have long fought for their own homeland, but for decades suffered defeats on the battlefield and massacres in their hometowns.
They make up one of Iran’s most important non-Persian ethnic minority groups.
A week of war has gripped daily life in Iraqi Kurdistan, residents told AFP.
“People are afraid,” said Nasr Al-Din, a 42-year-old policeman who, as a child, lived through the 1991 exodus — “thrown on a donkey’s back with my sister.”
“This generation is different from the older ones” that have seen “seen fighting.”
Now, he said, you could be “sitting down in your home... and all of a sudden a drone hits your house.”
“We may have to go into town or somewhere safer,” said Issa Diayri, 31, a truck driver waiting in a roadside garage, his lorry idle for lack of deliveries from Iran.
- ‘Shouldn’t get involved’ -
Soran, a small town of 3,000 people about 65 kilometers (40 miles) from the border, was hit Thursday by a drone that fell in the middle of a street.
There, baker Yussef Ramazan, 42, and his three apprentices, hurriedly made bread before breaking their fast.
But, living so close to the Iranian border, he said “people are afraid to come and buy it.”
He told AFP he did not think it was a good idea “for the Kurdish region to get involved in this war.”
“We are not even an independent country yet. We would like to become one, but we are nothing for now, so we shouldn’t get involved in these situations.”
Across the street, Hajji watched from his empty dry cleaning shop as the road cleared.
Before the war, the town was crowded as evening fell, he said, declining to give his full name.
“But after the drone explosion, no one was here. In five minutes, everyone left the street and no one was out.”
