US President Joe Biden was confused between Syria and Libya multiple times in a G7 media conference on Sunday, as he spoke of possible points of collaboration between the US and Russia, beyond the long-standing tensions between them.
“In Libya, we should be opening up the passes to be able to go through and provide… food assistance and economic – I mean vital assistance – to a population that’s in real trouble,” Biden said.
Analysts cannot offer any definitive indications about the fate of the Syrian issue after the summit between president Joe Biden, and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Reports hinted, however, at the possibility of cooperation between the two countries.
Some reports described the Biden-Putin meeting as a pragmatic summit, while other analysts described the meeting as a “red line summit” that was demanded by the two presidents, asserting that the Syrian issue was at the bottom of the agenda.
Iranians will go to the polls this Friday to choose the successor to centrist President Hassan Rouhani, who is winding down his second four-year term and cannot run for reelection. The polls will take place in an atmosphere of widespread public apathy, as voters choose from a list of presidential candidates that has been heavily vetted beforehand. Of the seven contenders approved last month by the Guardian Council—an oversight body of 12 clerics who are closely aligned with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—five are regarded as hard-liners, while the other two are uncharismatic moderates with relatively low profiles. Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line jurist, is widely seen as the front-runner.
Iran and Venezuela appear to be expanding military ties, even beyond joint efforts to evade U.S. economic sanctions.
An Iranian flotilla carrying drones, assault helicopters, and fast-attack boats has entered the Atlantic Ocean, apparently bound for Venezuela.
Iran’s possible introduction of drone technology to Venezuela would enhance Iran’s efforts to project hard power into the Western Hemisphere.
In retrospect, Germany’s much-vaunted Hezbollah ban appears to have been little more than a publicity stunt aimed at silencing critics of the German government’s pro-Iran foreign policy.
Hezbollah has effectively evaded the ban by transferring many of its activities to charities and cultural centers controlled by Iran.
Few Canadians have been brought home from camps for Islamic State families in northeast Syria, and many remain there.
A Canadian parliament committee has recommended the government repatriate Canadians from Islamic State (IS) camps in northeast Syria.
Syria’s northwestern city of Idlib, which is under the control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, witnessed the opening of its first female coffee shop in what some deemed a type of discrimination against women. Others saw it as an outlet for women to escape the prevailing patriarchy in the Syrian opposition areas.
Israel’s new government on Monday approved a contentious parade by Israeli nationalists through Palestinian areas around Jerusalem’s Old City, setting the stage for possible renewed confrontations just weeks after an 11-day war with Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. Hamas called on Palestinians to “resist” the march.
The parade, scheduled for Tuesday, creates an early test for the fledgling government led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — a patchwork of parties that includes hard-line nationalists as well as the first Arab party to sit in a governing coalition.
Every year, Israeli ultranationalists hold the boisterous march, waving blue-and-white flags and chanting slogans as they march through the Old City’s Damascus Gate and into the heart of the Muslim Quarter to celebrate Israel’s capture of east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians consider the march a provocation.
The parade was originally scheduled for May 10. At the time, tensions already were high following weeks of clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian demonstrators around the Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites, as well as attempts by Jewish settlers to evict dozens of Palestinians from their homes in a nearby neighborhood.
As thousands of Jewish activists began the procession, police ordered a change in the route to avoid the Damascus Gate. Hamas militants in Gaza then fired a barrage of rockets toward Jerusalem, igniting the war that took over 250 Palestinian lives and killed 13 people in Israel.
U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said U.N. officials have made clear “the need for all sides to refrain from unilateral steps and provocations, for them to exercise restraint and allow for the necessary work to be done to solidify the current cease-fire.”
Omer Bar-Lev, the new Cabinet minister who oversees police, said he met with police, military and top security officials to review the plan.
“I got the impression that the police are well-prepared and a great effort is being made to preserve the delicate fabric of life and public security,” Bar-Lev said.
His statement gave no details on the parade route. But Israeli media said the crowd would walk past the Damascus Gate but not enter the Muslim Quarter.
A police official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said about 2,000 police would be deployed.
Israel annexed east Jerusalem after the 1967 war and considers the area, home to the city’s most sensitive religious sites, to be part of its capital. The competing claims to the holy city by Palestinians and Israelis lie at the heart of the conflict and have sparked many rounds of violence.
Hamas issued a statement calling on Palestinians to show “valiant resistance” to the march. It urged people to gather in the streets of the Old City and at the Al-Aqsa Mosque to “rise up in the face of the occupier and resist it by all means to stop its crimes and arrogance.”
Israeli Channel 13 TV said the military was on heightened alert in the occupied West Bank and along the Gaza front to prepare for possible violence.
The military said it was “conducting ongoing situational assessments and is prepared for a variety of developments and scenarios.” It said, however, there were no reinforcements of troops.
Israeli lawmakers on Sunday narrowly approved Bennett’s new governing coalition, ousting Benjamin Netanyahu after 12 years in power.
On Monday, Bennett held a brief handover meeting with his predecessor, but without the formal ceremony that traditionally accompanies a change in government — a sign of Netanyahu’s lingering anger and hostility toward the new government.
Bennett presides over a diverse and fragile coalition comprised of eight small and midsize parties with deep ideological differences — but promised to try to heal the divided nation. Netanyahu serves as the opposition leader.
David Bitan, a Likud lawmaker, told Kan public radio that Netanyahu did not hold a formal handover ceremony with Bennett because he feels “cheated” by the formation of the Bennett-Lapid government and “doesn’t want to give even the slightest legitimacy to this matter.”
The coalition includes three parties that are headed by politicians who used to be Netanyahu allies, including Bennett. Although they share Netanyahu’s hard-line ideology on many issues, the three leaders clashed with the divisive former prime minister over his personality and leadership style.
Under a coalition agreement, Bennett will hold the office of premier for the first two years of the term, and then Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, the architect of the coalition, will become prime minister.
Bennett, 49, became prime minister after Sunday’s 60-59 vote in Knesset, capping a chaotic parliamentary session. The motion passed after a member of the coalition was taken by ambulance from hospital to the parliament building to cast her vote, and despite an abstention by a coalition member from the Islamist Raam party.
Bennett faces a challenge of holding the tenuous coalition together and said he is prioritizing mending the many rifts dividing Israeli society.
In an investigative report for RIA Novosti titled “Acting as if It Owned the Place, Turkey Occupies Foreign Lands” Kseniya Melnikova describes how Turkey is consolidating its control over Northern Syria. Turkey was making the region part of Turkey by imposing its curriculum, connecting the region to the Turkish power grid and distributing identity cards while invalidating Syrian issued documents. The Assad government protests but is basically helpless. Melnikova hopes that Russia will curb Turkey’s actions and compel it to leave Syria. Middle East expert Gevorg Mirzayan considers Turkey to be a rival of Russia and has no love for Turkish President Recep Erdogan. However, instead of advocating Russian intervention like Melnikova, he diabolically recommends allowing Turkey to strengthen its hold in Idlib Province. This would prod the Iranians, who have been happy to see Russia do the heavy lifting, to deter Turkey not only in Syria but in the Caucasus. The Arabs will be up in arms against Turkey as they see Turkey encroaching on Arab land. Turkey will be under constant threat of a war, in which its NATO allies will abandon it.
Twice in recent months, the Iranian regime mouthpiece Kayhan, which is close to ideological circles, published articles warning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan not to interfere in the war in Yemen in support of Saudi Arabia. In a March 17, 2021 article, Kayhan wrote, referring to missiles fired by the pro-Iran Shi’ite Houthi rebels in Yemen into Saudi Arabia, that if Turkey did so, “there is not a shadow of a doubt that the catastrophe caused by the long-range missiles of Ansar Allah [i.e. the Houthis] will happen to Turkey as well.” It added that Erdoğan must “take into account [that there will be] a clash” with Iran’s “powerful resistance axis.”