Mandalay: Hundreds of grieving Muslims gathered for Eid prayers in the street in Mandalay on Monday, the death and destruction of Myanmar’s huge earthquake casting a pall of anguish over the occasion.
The watching women were the first to weep. A tear, a sniffle, a cry. The emotion spread among hundreds of men lined up in the street outside two mosques where 20 of their fellow believers died.
Sobs and sighs haunted the air in the gentle morning light. Finally the imam’s voice broke as he prayed for the souls of the dead.
“May Allah grant us all peace,” he intoned. “May all the brothers be free from danger.”
The Muslims of Mandalay gathered for a somber first prayer of the Eid Al-Fitr festival, marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, three days after a devastating 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck during Friday prayers.
The minaret of the Sajja South mosque in the Muslim neighborhood of Mawyagiwah crashed to the ground in the quake, killing 14 children and two adults, locals said.
Four more people were killed at the neighboring Sajja North mosque when its tower came down.
Many of the dead were from Win Thiri Aung’s family, close and extended.
“In normal times, it is full of joy when it is Eid,” the 26-year-old told AFP.
“Our hearts are light. This year, we are not like that. All of our minds are with the dead children. I see their faces in my eyes.
“We believe the souls of children and everyone we know who died have reached Paradise. We believe they were blessed deaths,” she said, breaking down.
“It is a test from Allah. It is a reminder from him that we need to turn toward him. So we need to pray more.”
Outside the alley leading to the mosques, the Eid worshippers, many wearing the new clothes that are the traditional gift for the festival, lined up on plastic sheeting laid on the road, held in place by bricks.
A plastic bucket served for ritual washing.
“We have to pray on the road, feeling sadness and loss,” said Aung Myint Hussein, chief administrator of the Sajja North mosque.
“The situation is so dire that it’s hard to express what is happening.
“We were terrified when we saw the destruction. It feels as if our entire lives have been shattered by this series of tremors and fears.”
The pattern of destruction in Myanmar’s second city is variable, with some buildings utterly devastated and a few areas of concentrated damage.
Down the street from the mosques, a resident said six people were killed when a dessert shop collapsed, as well as two people in a restaurant across the road.
But much of the city appeared unharmed, with traffic on the streets, some restaurants reopening and daytime life beginning to return to normal for many.
That is a distant prospect for those who have lost loved ones.
Sandar Aung’s 11-year-old son Htet Myet Aung was seriously injured at Friday prayers and died that evening in hospital.
“I am very sad, my son was very excited for Eid,” the 37-year-old said tearfully. “We got new clothes that we were going to wear together.
“We accept what Allah has planned,” she said. “Allah only does what’s good and what’s right and we have to accept that.”
Prayers and tears for Eid in Myanmar’s quake-hit Mandalay
https://arab.news/c6vb9
Prayers and tears for Eid in Myanmar’s quake-hit Mandalay
- The Muslims of Mandalay gathered for a somber first prayer of the Eid Al-Fitr festival, three days after a devastating 7.7-magnitude earthquake
- The minaret of the Sajja South mosque in the Muslim neighborhood of Mawyagiwah crashed to the ground in the quake, killing 14 children and two adults
Near record number of small boat migrants reach UK in 2025
- The second-highest annual number of migrants arrived on UK shores in small boats since records were started in 2018, the government was to confirm Thursday
LONDON: The second-highest annual number of migrants arrived on UK shores in small boats since records were started in 2018, the government was to confirm Thursday.
The tally comes as Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party Reform UK surges in popularity ahead of bellwether local elections in May.
With Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer increasingly under pressure over the thorny issue, his interior minister Shabana Mahmood has proposed a drastic reduction in protections for refugees and the ending of automatic benefits for asylum seekers.
Home Office data as of midday on Wednesday showed a total of 41,472 migrants landed on England’s southern coast in 2025 after making the perilous Channel crossing from northern France.
The record of 45,774 arrivals was recorded in 2022 under the last Conservative government.
The Home Office is due to confirm the final figure for 2025 later Thursday.
Former Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak vowed to “stop the boats” when he was in power.
Ousted by Starmer in July 2024, he later said he regretted the slogan because it was too “stark” and “binary” and lacked sufficient context “for exactly how challenging” the goal was.
Adopting his own “smash the gangs” slogan, Starmer pledged to tackle the problem by dismantling the people smuggling networks running the crossings but has so far had no more success than his predecessor.
Reform has led Starmer’s Labour Party by double-digit margins in opinion polls for most of 2025.
In a New Year message, Farage predicted that if Reform got things “right” at the forthcoming local elections “we will go on and win the general election” due in 2029 at the latest.
Without addressing the migrant issue directly, he added: “We will then absolutely have a chance of fundamentally changing the whole system of government in Britain.”
In his own New Year message, Starmer insisted his government would “defeat the decline and division offered by others.”
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, meanwhile, urged people not to let “politics of grievance tell you that we’re destined to stay the same.”
- Protests -
The small boat figures come after Home Secretary Mahmood in November said irregular migration was “tearing our country apart.”
In early December, an interior ministry spokesperson called the number of small boat crossings “shameful” and said Mahmood’s “sweeping reforms” would remove the incentives driving the arrivals.
A returns deal with France had so far resulted in 153 people being removed from the UK to France and 134 being brought to the UK from France, border security and asylum minister Alex Norris said.
“Our landmark one-in one-out scheme means we can now send those who arrive on small boats back to France,” he said.
The past year has seen multiple protests in UK towns over the housing of migrants in hotels.
Amid growing anti-immigrant sentiment, in September up to 150,000 massed in central London for one of the largest-ever far-right protests in Britain, organized by activist Tommy Robinson.
Asylum claims in Britain are at a record high, with around 111,000 applications made in the year to June 2025, according to official figures as of mid-November.
Labour is currently taking inspiration from Denmark’s coalition government — led by the center-left Social Democrats — which has implemented some of the strictest migration policies in Europe.
Senior British officials recently visited the Scandinavian country, where successful asylum claims are at a 40-year low.
But the government’s plans will likely face opposition from Labour’s more left-wing lawmakers, fearing that the party is losing voters to progressive alternatives such as the Greens.
