Damascus under reconstruction for intl. fair
Syria’s capital is hosting large-scale reconstruction projects as it prepares to host the country’s major international exhibition after a six-year hiatus.
The last edition of the Damascus International Fair was held in 2011, when foreign-backed militancy began sweeping the country to bloody and devastating effects.
Major streets and buildings are now undergoing renovation and restoration in anticipation of the August 17-26 event, which would serve as its 59th edition, footage showed on Monday.
The projects comprise widening of several main roads, and refurbishment of old buildings and landmarks, including the Damascus Sword Statue in the capital’s Umayyad Square.
The event has been traditionally used as an occasion to market the country’s products and attract foreign investment.
Its expected renewal would mark a hard-earned victory which the country’s Army and allied forces have decisively scored against foreign-backed militants in recent months.
On Sunday, Syria’s Tourism Minister Beshr Yaziji said visits to the country had jumped by 25 percent so far this year.
Yaziji said 530,000 people had visited Syria during the first half of 2017, a 25 percent increase from the same period last year.
Also attracting foreign tourists to the country are a number of shrines, held in veneration among Shia Muslims worldwide. Defense of the sites has notably heartened the Shia fighters to join the Syrian forces in their counter-terrorism operations.
Now pilgrims are flooding back to the Arab country as relative calm has returned to Damascus and the country’s second-largest city of Aleppo thanks to the joint anti-terror operations.
Turkey police confront HDP party supporters
Police in Turkey have confronted a group of supporters of the Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (HDP) in Istanbul, preventing them from joining a march by the country’s biggest pro-Kurdish party.
The “Conscience and Justice” march was underway on Sunday, when law enforcement forces attacked participants with tear gas canisters and rubber bullets, AFP reported.
The demonstrators demanded the release of HDP parliamentarians and journalists.
The HDP is Turkey’s second-largest opposition party after the Republican People’s Party (CHP). It has come under increasing pressure since the government launched a crackdown on the outlawed anti-Ankara Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the country’s southeast two years ago.
The party says thousands of its supporters have been arrested since the onset of the government campaign.
The government says it has killed thousands of the militants since the launch of the operation. The HDP contests the claim, saying many of the fatalities are civilians.
Ankara has also imposed bans and prison sentences on four of the party’s parliamentarians, accusing them of links to “terror” organizations, including the PKK. The party denies having any links with the separatist militants.
The party is also critical of the administration’s ongoing sweeping crackdown on the people it accuses of links to Fetullah Gulen. Ankara says the US-based cleric masterminded a failed July 2016 coup against the government.
Thousands have been either imprisoned or dismissed from their jobs during the operations, in what is seen as, the authorities’ intolerance of all dissent.
Artsakh: The reconstruction of the Kindergarten Sossé Mayrig in pictures.
,The reconstruction of the kindergarten “Sossé Mayrig” in pictures.
The inauguration will take place on Wednesday, September 6, 2017.
If you are in Stepanakert, join us …
Blue Cross of the Armenians of France
Stéphane © armenews.com
“The Last Inhabitant” by Jivan Avetisyan to be screened at Venice Film Festival
Armenian filmmaker Jivan Avetisyan’s “The Last Inhabitant” will be screened during the Venice International Film Festival, following its global premier in the scope of Shanghai International Film Festival.
As the Fish Eye Art Cultural Foundation reported in a release, at the initiative of the organization’s Italian partner Blue Knowledge Association and personally its Director Orietta Trevisanato Zampieri the film will be screened on September 5 at the Venice production Bridge in Italy.
According to the source, the screening will be attended by the production staff and the film crew. The event in carried out under the high patronage and with the direct participation of Luca Zaia, Venetto Governor (Administrative center – Venice).
Apart from the screening, number of meetings, discussions with representative of the film industry, distributors and sale agents will be held for the second project of the Armenian film director called “Gate to Heaven.”
“It is of high importance to lay the ground for elevating the Armenia film industry to a qualitatively new level and promote its recognition on a global scale. I am trying to achieve that goal through my films, to bring worldwide attention to issues of Pan-Armenian relevance, including the Karabakh issue. The screenings of “The Last Inhabitant” at world-known film festivals, such as Shanghai and Venice, are just few tangible results of our efforts,” the Foundation quoted Jivan Avetisyan as saying, who also expressed readiness for collaboration and proposals with not only interested individuals but also state agencies.
To remind, the film depicts the life in an Armenian village, evicted in the result of the Karabakh conflict. Abgar, the main character, stays behind all alone in a gradually shrinking enemy ring. He is waiting for his daughter, who has become a witness to her husband’s murder by an angry mob and was hospitalized with a mental disorder. An Azerbaijani named Ibrahim, for finding and bringing Abgar’s daughter, suggest that he work on the construction of a mosque. A few days later, Ibrahim finds the girl, named Yurga, in one of the psychiatric hospitals of Baku and brings her to Abgar.
Belgian Kurd minister Zuhal Demir renounces Turkish citizenship
Belgium’s state secretary for socioeconomic affairs Zuhal Demir, a Kurd with roots in Turkey, announced Friday she was going to renounce her Turkish citizenship.
“It’s not a good time to say goodbye. Yet a little over 37 years after my birth, my Kurdish identity is still a thorn in the eye for Turkey,” Demir said in a statement she titled “Goodbye” on her personal Facebook page.
“But, unlike my parents, I am free of the tentacles of Ankara,” she added.
In her post, Demir, born and raised in Belgium to migrant parents from the Kurdish province of Dersim, highlighted her love for Turkey but stated the love was unrequited.
“A country that had no love for that other identity I was given at birth, for which there is no passport,” Demir said of Turkey, reminding of the Turkish state’s assimilationist policies against the Kurds and her people’s statelessness.
She said “Kurdishness” was an identity she “secretly had to bring together, despite Turkey and [her] intimidated parents” who she said Turkey did not allow to be free Kurds.
“We have grown apart, Turkey and I. I have become a Flemish woman with proud Kurdish roots. Everything Turkey did not want,” she wrote.
“I studied here, lived, found the love of a Flemish man. I have had the opportunity to grow here and to do politics. This is home. Flanders has adopted me, and I am Flanders,” she added.
Last February, Demir was sworn in as “Minister for Poverty Reduction, Equal Opportunities, People with Disabilities, Urban Policy, and Scientific Policy” by King Philippe of Belgium.
Her rise in politics with the Belgium secessionist Flanders Party, the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), caught the attention of the Turkish media.
Pro-government media accused Demir of being a supporter of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group waging a decades-long guerrilla warfare against Turkish troops for Kurdish rights and self-rule.
“The gap has become too big. The growing influence of Islam, the position of women, democracy and minorities: it’s all the wrong way,” she said in an interview with the Flemish daily De Morgen.
Demir revealed she recently sent a letter to the Turkish Embassy in Brussels for the process of the annulment of her citizenship and passport.
US spent over $1 billion on CIA war in Syria: NYT, instate helping 45 million poverty-stricken Americans
BEIRUT, LEBANON (2:05 P.M.) – The U.S. spent over $1 billion since 2013 to have the C.I.A. train and arm the militants fighting the Syrian government forces, a new report by the New York Times (NYT) claimed.
“Critics in Congress had complained for years about the costs — more than $1 billion over the life of the program — and reports that some of the C.I.A.-supplied weapons had ended up in the hands of a rebel group tied to Al Qaeda further sapped political support for the program,” the report said.
This covert operation by the C.I.A. has proven to be one of the costliest and least successful in U.S. history, despite the fact it was also aided by Gulf allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
“The shuttering of the C.I.A. program, one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s, has forced a reckoning over its successes and failures,” the NYT report added.
The operation has since been cancelled by U.S. President Donald Trump, causing outrage among Syrian opposition activists and rebels.
source: https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/us-spent-1-billion-cia-war-syria-nyt/
Fire breaks out in another Dubai skyscraper
Khaleej Times reported that barely a few minutes after a minor fire was seen in Pinnacle Tower skyscraper in Dubai, also known as Tiger tower, the Dubai Civil Defence took the situation under control and allowed residents back inside, reported RIA Novosti news agency of Russia.
There was smoke emanating from an apartment in the upper levels of the tower, and emergency units, arrived on the scene.
In a statement, Dubai Civil Defence said the minor fire had started in a balcony, but it was quickly put out thanks to the rapid response of emergency units.
The cause of this fire is being investigated.
This is the second such incident in the same week in Dubai.
Earlier in the week, a blaze ripped through The Torch, which is one of the highest skyscrapers in Dubai.
Armenia, Iran presidents meet in Tehran
President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, who is in Tehran on a working visit to attend Saturday’s swearing-in ceremony of reelected President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, on Sunday met with him.
At the beginning of the talk, the Iranian president expressed the hope that his Armenian colleague’s current visit to Iran will give new impetus to the expansion and development of bilateral relations.
Noting that the current year marks the 25th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Iran, President Sargsyan, for his part, recorded that during this time cooperation amongst them was developed and strengthened.
Subsequently, the two presidents discussed collaboration, and underscored the major projects being implemented in several domains and the carrying out of new and promising projects between the two countries.
Iraq eager to get back antiquities smuggled to US
By Adnan Abu Zeed,
BAGHDAD — Iraq is working to recover the thousands of ancient artifacts illegally imported into the United States by Oklahoma City-based arts-and-crafts retailer Hobby Lobby.
“Iraqi and US officials are in constant contact, and the smuggled artifacts are in safe hands now with the US Homeland Security and the US judiciary, which will issue a final verdict on the case,” Maysoon al-Damluji, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s Committee of Culture and Information, told Al-Monitor. “Meanwhile, the Iraqi Embassy is communicating with the US State Department to retrieve the artifacts.”
Hobby Lobby was fined $3 million in July for buying some 5,500 artifacts in 2010 that had been smuggled into the United States through a dealer based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to the US Justice Department. The company paid $1.6 million for the items, which were sent to three different addresses of the company in Oklahoma City. The antiquities include clay cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals and ancient clay bullae that were used to place authenticating seals on documents.
Damluji said, “The course of things is in favor of Iraq to recover its archaeological pieces. It is only a matter of the time needed for administrative and legal procedures in the United States.”
She was confident when she told Al-Monitor, “There is an atmosphere of optimism regarding positive responses from the United States to this effect, given the existent law … whereby the trade in Iraqi artifacts and antiquities is not allowed, unlike the Gulf countries, including the UAE. A UAE-based dealer was involved in the [latest] smuggling operation because the UAE is not among the list of countries acceding to the UNESCO convention on smuggling of antiquities.”
The Iraqi Embassy in London and a legal team will work with the US Justice Department, “which has the final decision on the issue of returning the stolen artifacts to their rightful owners,” Damluji said. Moreover, under a 2015 UN Security Council resolution, countries are required to return smuggled or looted antiquities to their countries of origin.
The Justice Department said the Hobby Lobby acquisition “was fraught with red flags” and Hobby Lobby even ignored the warning of an expert it had hired who said the items might have been looted from Iraq. The company never met with the dealer who claimed to own the artifacts. Rather, a different dealer had the company wire payment to the personal bank accounts of seven other people, the Justice Department said.
Iraq has a history of fighting to retrieve its stolen antiquities and has recovered 4,300 artifacts smuggled out of the country since 2014 after Islamic State (IS) militants seized control of vast areas of the country’s north, east and west.
The United States pledged a year ago to protect and restore historic sites and museums in Iraq, according to the US State Department’s top adviser on Iraqi cultural heritage, John Russell.
A source at the US Embassy in Baghdad, who asked not to be named, said that “the embassy’s instructions regarding smuggling cases are very strict.”
Even before the Hobby Lobby case, government sources revealed that the Iraqi Embassy in Washington was following up on more than 5,000 antiquities smuggled from Iraq after 2003. The Iraqi Embassy in Cairo also has sought to restore manuscripts and other items smuggled to Cairo from Iraqi monasteries and churches in Mosul. In 2016, Iraq recovered the head of the King Sanatruq I statue, which is one the significant monuments registered in the Iraqi Museum of Antiquities. The statute was stolen in 2003.
Iyad al-Shammari, rapporteur of the parliamentary Committee of Antiquities, told Al-Monitor that the Public Authority for Antiquities in Iraq has contacted UNESCO “to urge the United States to hand over [any] stolen Iraqi artifacts,” and he expressed great hope of solving the issue soon. “Iraq has been preoccupied for years in trying to retrieve antiquities smuggled outside,” he said, adding that “some of the archaeological pieces were lost and sold on the black market.”
In 2016, artifacts smuggled from Syria and Iraq were being sold on eBay. Shammari stressed that the “Iraqi Ministry of Culture addressed the US Embassy in Baghdad to start the official and necessary procedures to recover the smuggled artifacts.”
Iraq also plans investigations to obtain the names of smugglers.
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