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LONDON: The United States said Monday it would stop funding scientific research with Israeli academic institutions in the West Bank, taking a new step away from validating the occupation of Palestinian territories.
The decision by President Joe Biden’s administration reverses a move made under Donald Trump that rejected the wide international consensus that Israel illegally occupies the West Bank, which it seized in the 1967 Six-Day War.
New guidance to US government agencies advises that “engaging in bilateral scientific and technological cooperation with Israel in geographic areas which came under the administration of Israel after 1967 and which remain subject to final-status negotiations is inconsistent with US foreign policy,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
He stressed that the United States “strongly values scientific and technological cooperation with Israel” and said the restriction on West Bank funding “is reflective of the long-standing US position going back decades.”
The decision will most visibly apply to Ariel University, a major academic institution founded in 1982 on what was then a new settlement in the West Bank.
Members of the rival Republican Party swiftly attacked the decision.
Senator Ted Cruz, known for his outspoken criticism of Biden, slammed the administration for what he called “anti-Semitic discrimination” against Jews in the West Bank, and said it was “pathologically obsessed with undermining Israel.”
David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel and champion of Ariel University, accused the Biden administration of embracing the activist movement to boycott Israel.
The administration however says it opposes the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which calls for severing ties with Israel as a whole, not just settlements.
Under Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Washington took actions to normalize Israeli settlements in the West Bank including by letting their products be labeled as “made in Israel.”
The Biden administration has gone back to the long-standing US position of calling for a two-state solution with the Palestinians and criticizing settlement expansion under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Washington has stopped short of any substantive effort at negotiating a peace deal, seeing prospects as highly unlikely with Netanyahu, who is leading the most right-wing government in Israeli history.
BAGHDAD: Iraqi police recovered 250,000 captagon tablets from a school building site on Wednesday, the government said, a seizure that highlights a surge in consumption of the amphetamine-like stimulant.
The seizure was carried out in Al-Anbar province on the border with Syria, a country considered the hub for production and trafficking of captagon which has flooded the Middle East.
Police “seized 250,000 captagon pills and one kilogram of cannabis resin from a school being renovated in the city of Ramadi,” the interior ministry said on Facebook.
Efforts were being made to track down and arrest those responsible, it added, without elaborating.
Iraq has long been transit country for captagon, but officials say it is increasingly becoming a consumer market for the illicit drug.
The country’s security forces have intensified narcotics operations in recent months, with several high-profile seizures reported.
In March, the authorities announced the seizure of three million captagon pills at the Al-Qaim border crossing with Syria.
Syria said at an Arab foreign ministers meeting in May that it was ready to “strengthen cooperation” with Jordan and Iraq, “affected by drug-trafficking and smuggling across the Syrian border.”
The three countries also pledged to “take the necessary measures to put an end to smuggling operations.”
QAMISHLI, Syria: A 13-year-old Kurdish girl went missing on her way home from a school exam last month, after being approached by a man from an armed group. Her parents immediately feared the worst — that she had been persuaded to join the group and was taken to one of its training camps.
The girl, Peyal Aqil, was with friends when she encountered the man who turned out to be a recruiter for a group known as the Revolutionary Youth. She followed him to one of the group’s centers in the city of Qamishli in northeast Syria. Her friends waited for her outside, but she never emerged.
Peyal’s mother, Hamrin Alouji, said she and her husband complained to local authorities, to no avail.
The group later said Peyal joined willingly, a claim rejected by Alouji. “We consider that at this age, she cannot give consent, even if she was convinced” by the group’s program, Alouji said, sitting for an interview in her daughter’s room, filled with stuffed animals and school texts.
Armed groups have recruited children throughout the past 12 years of conflict and civil war in Syria. A new United Nations report on recruitment, released Tuesday, says the use of child soldiers in Syria is growing, even as fighting in most parts of Syria is winding down.
The number of children recruited by armed groups in Syria has risen steadily over the past three years — from 813 in 2020 to 1,296 in 2021 and 1,696 in 2022, the UN says.
Among those allegedly recruiting children is a US ally in the battle against Islamic State extremists — the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, according to the UN In 2022, the UN attributed half the cases, or 637, to the SDF and associated groups in northeast Syria.
The report also said the UN had confirmed 611 recruitment cases by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, which has clashed with the SDF in the past, and 383 by the Al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al Sham in northwest Syria. The report cited 25 cases of child recruitment by Syrian government forces and pro-government militias.
Children are being recruited across Syria, said Bassam Alahmad, executive director of Syrians for Truth and Justice, an independent civil society organization.
In some cases, children are forcibly conscripted, he said. In others, minors sign up because they or their families need the salary. Some join for ideological reasons, or because of family and tribal loyalties. In some cases, children are sent out of Syria to fight as mercenaries in other conflicts.
Attempts to end such recruitment have been complicated by the patchwork of armed groups operating in each part of Syria.
In 2019, the SDF signed an agreement with the UN promising to end the enlistment of children younger than 18 and set up a number of child protection offices in its area. The US State Department defended its ally in a statement, saying, that the SDF “is the only armed actor in Syria to respond to the UN’s call to end the use of child soldiers.”
Nodem Shero, a spokesperson for one of the child protection offices run by the SDF-affiliated local administration, acknowledged that children continue to be recruited in areas under SDF control.
However, the complaint mechanism is working, she said. Her office received 20 complaints in the first five months of the year, she said. Four minors were found in the SDF armed forces and were returned to their families. The others were not with the SDF, she said.
In some cases, she said, parents assume their children have been taken by the SDF when they are actually with another group.
Alahmad said recruitment by the group decreased after the 2019 agreement, but that the SDF has not intervened as other groups in its area continue to target children.
Among them is the Revolutionary Youth, a group linked to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, a Kurdish separatist movement banned in Turkiye. The Revolutionary Youth is licensed by the the local government linked to the SDF — although both groups denied any connection beyond that.
The UN report attributed 10 cases to the Revolutionary Youth in 2022, but others say the numbers are higher. In a January report, Alahmad’s group said Revolutionary Youth was responsible for 45 of 49 child recruitment cases it documented in northeastern Syria in 2022.
Alahmad said the SDF-affiliated administration is looking the other way. He called on it to “assume its responsibilities in order to stop these operations.”
An official with the Revolutionary Youth acknowledged that the group recruits minors but denied that it forcibly conscripts them. “We do not kidnap anyone, and we do not force anyone to join us,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with his group’s rules.
“They themselves come to us and tell us their intention to join the service of the nation,” he said. “We do not take minors if they are indecisive or unsure.”
Minors are not immediately sent to armed service, he said. Rather, they initially take part in educational training courses and other activities, after which “they are sent to the mountain if they want,” he said, referring to the PKK’s headquarters in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq.
Asked about Peyal, he said the girl had complained of being unhappy at home and that her parents forced her to wear the hijab.
Alouji said her daughter had given no signs of being unhappy at home, and the night before her disappearance had said she planned to study to be a lawyer.
A month after her May 21 disappearance, Peyal came home. She had run away from one of the group’s training camps, her mother said.
Since her daughter’s return, “her psychological condition has been difficult because she… was subjected to harsh training,” Alouji said. The family no longer feels safe, she said, and is looking for a way to get out of Syria.
JERUSALEM: Few places in Jerusalem speak of the larger conflict being waged over the city more than the apartment of 68-year-old Nora Ghaith-Sub Laban.
As the last remaining Palestinians in a building filled with Israeli settlers, the Ghaith-Sub Labans have battled Israeli attempts to evict them from their Old City home for over 45 years.
That labyrinthine legal battle ended earlier this year, when the Israeli Supreme Court struck down the family’s final motion for an appeal. Now, Israeli authorities have ordered the eviction of Nora and her husband Mustafa to take place by July 13. That includes one of the biggest holidays of the Islamic calendar, Eid Al-Adha, which began Tuesday night.
“I can’t sleep, I can’t eat,” Nora said from the apartment where she was born in 1955. From the outside, with its rough-hewed stones flattered by brilliant sunlight and its windows overlooking the golden Dome of the Rock, the 200-year-old home in the heart of the Muslim Quarter is a Jerusalem postcard. Inside, the paint has chipped and walls have peeled due to court orders barring the family from doing repairs.
In what she described as a campaign to make life so unbearable that she would simply leave, Nora said her Jewish neighbors spit and hurl stones and bottles at her. Israeli police turn up at her door, asking for IDs and demanding to know everyone who has passed in and out of her home.
“This is psychological war,” she said.
The Israeli police said the check-ins were “not meant to intimidate or harass but to gather the necessary information” ahead of the eviction.
The Ghaith-Sub Laban case is not a dispute over a single property, advocates say, but part of a wider effort by Israeli settlers, with government backing, to cement Jewish control over the contested city, especially the Old City, home to Jerusalem’s most important holy sites.
A similar dispute that could lead to evictions of Palestinian families in the nearby neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah stirred tensions that built up to a 2021 war between Israel and the Hamas militant group in Gaza that killed over 250 people.
The family’s struggle has sparked numerous protest rallies by Israeli left-wing activists, some of which have spiraled into scuffles with Israeli police who have arrested those waving Palestinian national flags.
“It’s more than just, ‘Oh, I have this problem with my neighbor downstairs.’ You are talking about a political and national conflict,” said Yonatan Mizrahi, the settlement watch director at Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that opposes settlements. “What happens in the Old City does not stay in the Old City.”
Captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed in a move not internationally recognized, east Jerusalem has long been a crucible in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Today, more than 220,000 Jews live in east Jerusalem, largely in built-up settlements that Israel considers neighborhoods of its capital. Most of east Jerusalem’s 350,000 Palestinian residents are crammed into overcrowded neighborhoods where there is little room to build.
Across the city’s eastern half, settler organizations and Jewish trusts are pursuing court battles against Palestinian families to clear the way for settlers.
An Israeli law passed after the annexation of east Jerusalem allows Jews to reclaim properties that were Jewish before the formation of the Israeli state in 1948. Jordan controlled the area between 1948 and the 1967 war.
Nearly 1,000 Palestinians, including 424 children, currently face eviction in east Jerusalem, the United Nations humanitarian office said.
During British rule over historic Palestine, before the war over Israel’s creation, the Ghaith-Sub Laban apartment was owned by a trust for Kollel Galicia, a group that collected funds in Eastern Europe for Jewish families in Jerusalem. Its legal representative, Eli Attal, declined to comment on the case, sending only an emoji with its mouth taped shut.
Arieh King, a settler leader and deputy mayor of Jerusalem, described the Ghaith-Sub Laban family as “squatters” and the case as a straightforward real estate dispute.
“It’s Jewish property and they want it back,” he said. “(The Ghaith-Sub Labans) don’t have any right to this property.”
There is no equivalent right in Israel for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes during the war surrounding Israel’s establishment to return to lost properties.
Nora’s case reflects the city’s volatile history. Hailing from the southern Palestinian city of Hebron, her parents moved to west Jerusalem in 1945, then to the Old City when the capital was divided in the 1948 war.
As residents of the same Muslim Quarter apartment for seven decades, Nora’s family gained the status of protected tenants, putting Israeli law on their side.
Nora shared with The Associated Press her Jordanian rental contract from 1953 that showed that she and Mustafa paid rent to a “General Custodian” for abandoned properties, first under Jordanian authorities and then under Israel after the 1967 war. She now pays rent — 200 Jordanian dinars, or $282 each year — to the lawyers of the Jewish trust.
The case has dragged on for decades, as the Israeli custodian and then the Kollel Galicia trust contested the family’s protected tenancy. Most recently, the Kollel Galicia endowment argued in 2019 that Nora’s absence from her house that year could clear the way for their eviction.
Nora said the house was empty at times in 2019 because she was hospitalized with a back injury and later recovered in the houses of her adult children, whom Israeli authorities had previously expelled from the Old City apartment.
Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the eviction order in late February, ending the saga that has subsumed almost her entire life and the lives of her five children. Two of her sons — Ahmad, a human rights researcher, and Rafat, a lawyer — have become full-time advocates for the case.
The Israeli police said that authorities “understand the emotions involved” but are “dedicated to upholding the rule of law” and enforcing the eviction.
Now in limbo, Nora feels her house has become a prison cell. Worried the settlers will seize on even a momentary absence to move in, she said she hasn’t stepped outside since May. Her windows — and their breath-taking view of the golden shrine — are covered with wire mesh to protect against her neighbors’ stones.
Last week, supporters and artists helped the family prepare their home for its future guests. They painted an olive tree in the living room with the words “We will remain,” written in its wild roots. There is a portrait of Nora, too, with her wire-rimmed glasses and careful smile.
“They don’t want peace, they want surrender,” she said.
DUBAI: Thousands of men who worked as intelligence operatives under former president Omar Al-Bashir and have ties to his Islamist movement are fighting alongside the army in Sudan’s war, three military sources and one intelligence source said, complicating efforts to end the bloodshed.
The army and a paramilitary force have been battling each other in Khartoum, Darfur and elsewhere for 10 weeks in Africa’s third largest country by area, displacing 2.5 million people, causing a humanitarian crisis and threatening to destabilize the region. Reinforcements for either side could deepen the conflict.
The army has long denied accusations by its rivals in the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that it depends on discredited loyalists of Bashir, an Islamist long shunned by the West, who was toppled during a popular uprising in 2019.
In response to a question from Reuters for this article, an army official said: “The Sudanese army has no relation with any political party or ideologue. It is a professional institution.”
Yet the three military sources and an intelligence source said thousands of Islamists were battling alongside the army.
“Around 6,000 members of the intelligence agency joined the army several weeks before the conflict,” said a military official familiar with the army’s operations, speaking on condition on anonymity.
“They are fighting to save the country.”
Former officials of the country’s now-disbanded National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS), a powerful institution composed mainly of Islamists, confirmed these numbers.
An Islamist resurgence in Sudan could complicate how regional powers deal with the army, hamper any move toward civilian rule and ultimately set the country, which once hosted Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, on a path for more internal conflict and international isolation.
Reuters spoke to 10 sources for this article, including military and intelligence sources and several Islamists.
In a development indicative of Islamist involvement, an Islamist fighter named Mohammed Al-Fadl was killed this month in clashes between RSF forces and the army, said family members and Islamists. He had been fighting alongside the army, they said.
Ali Karti, secretary general of Sudan’s main Islamic organization, sent a statement of condolences for Al-Fadl.
’OUR IDENTITY AND OUR RELIGION’
“We are fighting and supporting the army to protect our country from external intervention and keep our identity and our religion,” said one Islamist fighting alongside the army.
Bashir’s former ruling National Congress Party said in a statement it had no ties to the fighting and only backed the army politically.
The army accused the RSF of promoting Islamists and former regime loyalists in their top ranks, a charge the RSF denied. Army chief Abdel Fattah Burhan, who analysts see as a non-ideological army man, has publicly dismissed claims that Islamists are helping his forces. “Where are they?” he cried out to cheering troops in a video posted in May.
The military, which under Bashir had many Islamist officers, has been a dominant force in Sudan for decades, staging coups, fighting internal wars and amassing economic holdings.
But following the overthrow of Bashir, Burhan developed good ties with states that have worked against Islamists in the region, notably the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The Gulf states provided Khartoum with significant aid.
Nowadays, former NISS officers also help the military by collecting intelligence on its enemies in the latest conflict. The NISS was replaced by the General Intelligence Service (GIS) after Bashir was toppled, and stripped of its armed “operations” unit, according to a constitutional agreement.
Most of the men from that unit have sided with the army, but some former operations unit members and Islamists who served under Bashir entered the RSF, one army source and one intelligence source said.
“We are working in a very hard situation on the ground to back up the army, especially with information about RSF troops and their deployment,” said a GIS official.
BASHIR-ERA VETERANS
The army outnumbers the RSF nationally, but analysts say it has little capacity for street fighting because it outsourced previous wars in remote regions to militias. Those militias include the “Janjaweed” that helped crush an insurgency in Darfur and later developed into the RSF.
Nimble RSF units have occupied large areas of Khartoum and this week took control of the main base of the Central Reserve Police, a force that the army had deployed in ground combat in the capital. They seized large amounts of weaponry.
But the army, which has depended mainly on air strikes and heavy artillery, could benefit from GIS intelligence gathering skills honed over decades as it tries to root out the RSF.
On June 7, fire engulfed the intelligence headquarters in a disputed area in central Khartoum. Both sides accused the other of attacking the building.
After Burhan and RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, carried out a coup in 2021 which derailed a transition to democracy, Hemedti said the move was a mistake and warned it would encourage Islamists to seek power.
Regional heavyweights Saudi Arabia and the UAE had seen Sudan’s transition toward democracy as a way to counter Islamist influence in the region, which they consider a threat.
Publicly, the army has asserted its loyalty to the uprising that ousted Bashir in 2019.
But after the military staged a coup in 2021 that provoked a resurgence of mass street protests, it leaned on Bashir-era veterans to keep the country running. A taskforce that had been working to dismantle the former ruling system was disbanded.
Before the outbreak of violence, Bashir supporters had been lobbying against a plan for a transition to elections under a civilian government. Disputes over the chain of command and the structure of the military under the plan triggered the fighting.
About a week after fighting broke out in April, a video on social media showed about a dozen former intelligence officials in army uniforms announcing themselves as reserve forces.
The footage could not be independently verified by Reuters.
Several senior Bashir loyalists walked free from prison in Bahri, across the Nile from central Khartoum, during a wider prison break amid fighting in late April. The circumstances of their release remain unclear. Bashir is in a military hospital.