Baghdad: In the sizzling Baghdad heat, Mussa Abdallah takes to the Tigris river during the day to cool off, while others opt for ice skating to escape the relentless temperatures.
“At the end of the day, I’m sweaty and exhausted because of the sun,” said Abdallah, a 21-year-old house painter in the Iraqi capital.
“At home, there’s no electricity. If I want to wash, the water is scalding hot,” he added, describing how water stored above ground virtually boils at this time of year.
Iraq is grappling with a blistering summer, with temperatures often exceeding 50 degrees Celsius, exacerbated by declining rainfall, rampant desertification and frequent dust storms.
The United Nations ranks Iraq among the world’s five most climate-vulnerable nations.
Almost every day after work, Abdallah retreats to the Tigris to escape the sweltering heat.
“We’re young and want to have a good time — where else can we go?” the decorator said on the banks of the river, traces of white paint still visible on his temples and long-sleeved T-shirt.
While Abdallah puts his sandals back on, nearby others are taking the plunge and two bathers are washing their hair with soap.
As night brings little relief from the sweltering gusts, residents of Baghdad flock to the city’s lone indoor ice rink to find respite.
The rink is in one of the air-conditioned shopping malls that have sprung up in the capital in recent years, attracting up to 100 visitors on busy days, 25-year-old instructor Sajjad Mohamed said.
“Twenty-four hours a day, the electricity never goes out. There’s a cooling system” for the ice, Mohamed said.
Abbas, 26, discovered ice skating in Turkiye. Now back in Iraq, he is pursuing it enthusiastically.
“When we finish work in the afternoon, it’s either go home, or go to shopping malls and other places where it’s cold,” he said.
The soaring seasonal temperatures have become a troubling fact of life for the overwhelming majority of Iraq’s 43 million inhabitants.
Although it is rich in oil, Iraq has seen its infrastructure suffer after decades of conflict and failed public policy that has resulted in long power cuts on the public grid with generators unable to handle the strain.
On the banks of the Tigris, Rashid Al-Rashed takes off his T-shirt to dive into the Tigris.
“At home it’s hot, I can’t stay there for long. The public electricity is inadequate,” the 17-year-old garbage collector said.
To escape the heat, “I bathe every day, for 10 minutes or a quarter of an hour,” he added.
Elsewhere on the river, a police boat moves along a dozen bathers from the water for their safety.
“When we make them leave, they come back,” said a policeman, seeking to explain everything was being done to prevent deaths from drownings.
But the danger is evident. On his phone, he displays the body of an 11-year-old boy found nearly 48 hours after drowning.
While the river — despite its danger — is free, those with more means can pay $10 for an afternoon with family or friends at Baghdad Aqua Park.
“This year summer came earlier, so we have more visitors,” one of the water park’s administrators Ali Yussef said. “People are coming after work or school,” he added.
Maitham Mahdi, 31, was on his second visit of the month. “I think I’ll be coming a lot during the summer,” the civil servant, still dressed in his swimsuit, said as he departed the indoor pool.
Mahdi also complained about the electricity at home. “We come here to get a bit of fresh air,” he explained.
Iraq has just gone through four years of drought, marked by water shortages and a drastic drop in river flow.
But on the back of a wet winter, officials are hoping the more generous rainfall will have a knock-on effect over the summer.
Despite those hopes, however, the thermometer continues to climb.
The meteorological service is forecasting 50 degrees Celsius this week in the capital and southern cities such as Basra and Nasiriyah.
Its director, Amer Al-Jaberi, said with its semi-desert climate, Iraq is expecting “heat waves,” particularly in the south, adding these intensifying phenomena are also the result of climate change.
Iraqis flock to river or ice rink to escape searing heat
https://arab.news/rj49d
Iraqis flock to river or ice rink to escape searing heat
- Iraq is grappling with a blistering summer, with temperatures often exceeding 50 degrees Celsius
- The United Nations ranks Iraq among the world’s five most climate-vulnerable nations
South Lebanon votes in municipal elections that will test support for Hezbollah
Hezbollah is running in an alliance with the Amal group of Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri and both are expected to win mayoral races and the majority of seats in municipal councils. Both groups already won many municipalities uncontested.
South Lebanon is the fourth and last district to vote in the elections since May 4. Among those who voted Saturday were Hezbollah members wounded in the Sept. 17, 2024, explosions of thousands of pagers that blew up near-simultaneously in an operation carried out by Israel. More than a dozen were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded.
“The will of life is stronger than death and the will of construction is stronger than destruction,” President Joseph Aoun said during a tour of south Lebanon Saturday. He told reporters in his hometown of Aaichiyeh that he voted for the first time in 40 years.
Saturday’s vote came two days after Israel’s air force carried out intense airstrikes in different parts of south Lebanon.
Residents of villages and towns on the border with Israel, including the village of Kfar Kila that was almost completely destroyed during the war, cast their ballots at polling stations set up in the nearby city of Nabatiyeh. Residents of other border villages cast their ballots in the port city of Tyre.
“Southerners are proving again that they are with the choice of resistance,” Hezbollah legislator Ali Fayad, who represents border villages, said in Nabatiyeh.
Lebanon’s cash-strapped government has been scrambling to secure international funds for the war reconstruction, which the World Bank estimates at over $11 billion.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, one day after a deadly Hamas-led incursion into southern Israel sparked the war in Gaza. Israel responded with shelling and airstrikes in Lebanon that escalated into a full-blown war that left more than 4,000 dead in Lebanon and more than 80 soldiers and 47 civilians in Israel. A US-brokered ceasefire went into effect in late November.
Israeli settlers force Palestinian families to leave village
- Mughayyir Al-Deir in occupied West Bank was home to shepherds, farming families
- Settlers built illegal outpost under protection of Israeli police, military
LONDON: Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank have forced about 150 Palestinians from their village through a violent five-day campaign carried out under the protection of Israeli authorities.
Last weekend, the settler group had constructed an illegal outpost close to a Palestinian home in Mughayyir Al-Deir, east of Ramallah, The Guardian reported.
The village is home to shepherds and farmers, and by Friday this week dozens of villagers had moved their flocks away and had gathered their belongings to leave the area.
“Settlers stalked between Palestinian men who worked fast and largely in silence, grappling with the grim reality of leaving the place where most were born and grew up,” The Guardian reported. “A child cried as he was driven away on a truck loaded with the family’s red sofas.”
Israeli settlers belonging to the extremist group Hilltop Youth celebrated as Palestinian families left the village.
The group’s unofficial spokesperson, Elisha Yered, said: “This is what redemption looks like! This is a relatively large outpost that contained about 150 people from the enemy population, but it was broken.”
Several of the settlers involved in the illegal campaign, including Yered, are subject to UK and EU sanctions.
Yered was “part of a group of armed settlers” that carried out an attack in 2023 that killed Qusai Jammal Mi’tan, a 19-year-old Palestinian, sanctions files show.
Neria Ben Pazi and Zohar Sabah, two Israeli settlers under British sanctions, visited the illegal outpost at Mughayyir Al-Deir this week.
The hills surrounding the village are dotted with the ruins of other abandoned Palestinian homes, as settlers have waged a campaign to clear the area of locals.
In Mughayyir Al-Deir, Israeli police and military personnel stood guard and patrolled as the settlers began to build the outpost.
Zvi Sukkot, a far-right MP who said on TV last week that Israel “can kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody in the world cares,” visited the village to support the settlers.
A Palestinian family from Mughayyir Al-Deir filed a petition in Israel’s Supreme Court on Thursday.
They demanded an injunction and urgent hearing on the settler campaign, and asked why Israeli authorities had failed to intervene over the illegal outpost and evictions.
Many of the Palestinian families forced to leave the village had relatives who were forced to leave Beersheba during the Nakba in 1948, when some 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homeland.
An Israeli military spokesperson said troops worked “to ensure the security of the state of Israel and Judea and Samaria (Israel’s name for the occupied West Bank).” The military will respond to the Palestinian family’s petition in court, the spokesperson said.
A hearing is scheduled for next week, but all Palestinian families will have left Mughayyir Al-Deir by then.
Egypt flies home 71 nationals from Libya after unrest
- 71 Egyptians were flown back to Egypt following a rise in violence in Libya as a result of anti government protests.
- Protests calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah continue to grow amid deadly clashes with security forces.
CAIRO: Egypt has flown 71 nationals home from the Libyan capital Tripoli after deadly clashes between rival militias rocked the city earlier this month, the foreign ministry said.
Friday’s special flight by flag carrier EgyptAir “enabled the repatriation of 71 Egyptian citizens who had expressed a desire to come home,” the ministry said.
From May 12 to 15, the Libyan capital was rocked by fighting between an armed group aligned with the Tripoli-based government and factions it has sought to dismantle.
The clashes, which saw artillery exchanges in the city center, killed at least eight people, according to the United Nations.
Although relative calm has since returned to the city, the situation remains highly volatile as calls grow for the resignation of Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah.
Turkiye evacuated 82 of its nationals from Tripoli on a similar repatriation flight last week.
Libya is split between the UN-recognized government in Tripoli led by Dbeibah, and a rival administration in the east.
The North African country has remained deeply divided since the 2011 NATO-backed revolt that toppled and killed longtime leader Muammar Qaddafi.
UK’s ruling Labour under internal pressure to recognize Palestine
- Holocaust survivor Lord Dubs among party grandees saying govt must take step ahead of any peace deal
- Saudi Arabia, France co-chairing conference on two-state solution next month
LONDON: The UK government is under pressure from senior Labour figures to recognize Palestinian statehood.
Ahead of a UN conference on a two-state solution in New York next month, Labour peer and Holocaust survivor Lord Dubs said such a move would strengthen the Palestinians’ hand in future peace talks with Israel, and would give them “self-respect.”
He told The Guardian: “Even if it doesn’t lead to anything immediately, it would still give Palestinians a better standing.”
Lord Hain, a former government minister, said “delaying recognition until negotiations are concluded simply allows Israel’s illegal occupation to become permanent,” and recognition should be “a catalyst, not a consequence” of peace negotiations.
The UN conference could see both the UK and France formally recognize a Palestinian state. Saudi Arabia, which is co-chairing the conference with France, urged countries to view Palestinian statehood as “a precondition for peace, and not its product.”
France and Saudi Arabia say the aim of the conference is not “to ‘revive’ or to ‘relaunch’ another endless process, but to implement, once and for all, the two-state solution.”
They have asked participants “to highlight the actions they are willing to undertake, individually or collectively, in fulfilment of their obligations and in support of the international consensus on the peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine and the two-state solution.”
French President Emmanuel Macron has previously hinted that his government would join the 147 states that already recognize Palestine.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy told Parliament that discussions are underway with French counterparts over recognition, but that Britain is angling for more than just a symbolic gesture at the conference.
Earlier in May, 69 Labour politicians — including a number of government ministers — signed a letter drafted by Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East calling on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to recognize Palestine, in what they called a “unique window of opportunity.”
Labour MP Alex Ballinger, a member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said: “We can no longer speak in platitudes about two states while blocking the very steps that could help make one of them real.”
Afzal Khan, a former Labour shadow minister, said: “Recognition would now be a positive first step towards securing a peaceful two-state solution, end unlawful settlement expansions and blockades, and unlock the diplomatic and humanitarian pathways to lasting justice.”
Syria hails US lifting of sanctions as ‘positive step’
- The United States lifted comprehensive economic sanctions on Syria on Friday
- Marks a dramatic policy shift following the December overthrow of Bashar Assad
DAMASCUS: Syria on Saturday hailed the formal lifting of sanctions by the United States as a “positive step” that will help its post-war recovery.
“The Syrian Arab Republic welcomes the decision from the American government to lift the sanctions imposed on Syria and its people for long years,” a foreign ministry statement said.
The United States lifted comprehensive economic sanctions on Syria on Friday, marking a dramatic policy shift following the December overthrow of Bashar Assad and opening the door for investment in the country’s reconstruction.
The ministry described the move as “a positive step in the right direction to reduce humanitarian and economic struggles in the country.”
It formalized a decision announced by US President Donald Trump during a visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this month.
The sanctions relief extends to Syria’s new government with conditions that the country does not provide safe haven for terrorist organizations and ensure security for religious and ethnic minorities, the US Treasury Department said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the waiver would “facilitate the provision of electricity, energy, water and sanitation, and enable a more effective humanitarian response across Syria.”
The authorization covers new investment in Syria, provision of financial services and transactions involving Syrian petroleum products.
“Today’s actions represent the first step on delivering on the president’s vision of a new relationship between Syria and the United States,” Rubio said.
The United States had imposed sweeping restrictions on financial transactions with Syria during the country’s 14-year civil war and made clear it would use sanctions to punish anyone involved in reconstruction as long as Assad remained in power.
Since Assad’s ouster, Syria’s new government, led by Islamist former rebels, some of them with past links to Al-Qaeda, has been looking to build relations with Western governments and roll back sanctions.
