Foreign News
Iran warns Hezbollah leader’s death ‘will not go unavenged’
Iran’s supreme leader has said the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah “will not go unavenged”, a day after he was killed in an Israeli air strike in Lebanon.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced five days of mourning in Iran in response to what he called the “martyrdom of the great Nasrallah”, describing him as “a path and a school of thought” that would continue.
Iranian media reported that a Iranian Revolutionary Guards general was also killed in the Israeli strikes in Beirut on Friday.
Israel’s military said Nasrallah had “the blood of thousands… on his hands”, and that it targeted him while he was “commanding more imminent attacks”.
There are fears that the strike could plunge the wider region into war, after nearly a year of cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah sparked by the 7 October attacks and war in the Gaza Strip.
Key to what happens next in the Middle East is what Ayatollah Khamenei decides.
So far, he and other senior Iranian figures have refrained from vowing to retaliate for the series of severe and humiliating blows that Israel has dealt Hezbollah in recent weeks, seemingly because Iran does not want a war with its arch-enemy.
Iran also has not carried out its threat to avenge the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Hanniyeh in Teheran in July, which Iran and Hamas blamed on Israel.
Both Hezbollah and Hamas are designated as terrorist organisations by Israel, the US, UK and other countries.
Earlier on Saturday, Ayatollah Khamenei urged Muslims to stand by Hezbollah “with their resources and help” but did not promise to retaliate for the strike that killed Nasrallah.
“The fate of this region will be determined by the forces of resistance, with Hezbollah at the forefront,” he said.
Reuters news agency meanwhile cited two regional officials as saying that the supreme leader had been transferred to a secure location inside Iran with heightened security measures. They also said Iran was in constant contact with Hezbollah and other allies to determine their next steps, according to the report.
Friday’s Israeli strike levelled several buildings in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahieh, underneath which the Israeli military said Hezbollah’s central headquarters was located.
Hezbollah confirmed Nasrallah’s death on Saturday. But it did not comment on the Israeli military’s claim that Ali Karaki, the head of the group’s Southern Front, and other commanders were killed alongside Nasrallah.
Gen Abbas Nilforoushan, deputy commander of operations for Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), was also “martyred” in Dahiyeh on Friday, according to the IRGC-linked Saberin News outlet.
It provided nor further details, although the moderate Didban news website said he was “assassinated along with” Nasrallah.
However, there has been no official confirmation from Iranian authorities.
Iran uses the IRGC to provide Hezbollah with most of its funding, training and weapons, which have allowed the Shia Islamist group to build a military wing stronger than the Lebanese army.
The US says the IRGC also oversees the co-ordination of Iran’s network of allied armed groups across the Middle East, which are all opposed to the US and Israel and sometimes refer to themselves as the “Axis of Resistance”. Besides Hezbollah, they include Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.
On Saturday, there were air raid sirens in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv after the Houthis launched a missile in support of Hezbollah. The Israeli military said the missile was intercepted.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iraqi militias, also claimed new drone attacks on northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.
Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East programme at the UK-based think tank Chatham House, said Iran’s reputation among its allies was “certainly damaged” and that it would be “looking for some way to turn the tables and save some face”.
“This could result in a co-ordinated axis response, including from Iraq and the Houthis, or another direct Iranian strike on Israel itself,” she said.
“By maintaining pressure or even escalating, Tehran is aware that this will invite further attacks, but it will choose to do so keep pressure on Israel.”
(BBC)
More than 80 people have been killed in renewed sectarian violence in north-west Pakistan, officials say.
Another156 are said to have been wounded in three days of fighting in the tribal district of Kurram, near the Afghan border.
The violence began on Thursday, when gunmen attacked convoys of Shia Muslims travelling through the area under police escort. More than 40 died in that incident, which triggered revenge attacks.
Shia and Sunni Muslims have engaged in tribal and sectarian rivalries over land disputes for decades.
On Sunday a local administration official told AFP news agency: “The clashes and convoy attacks on November 21, 22, and 23 have resulted in 82 fatalities and 156 injuries.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said that 16 of the dead were Sunni and 66 belonged to the Shia community.
Those killed in Thursday’s attacks on convoys included women and children. Passenger Saeeda Bano described to BBC Urdu how she feared she would be killed as she hid under the car seats with her children.
Hundreds of residents fled amid escalating violence Friday and on Saturday.
It comes after dozens of people died in attacks over the past few months, prompting calls for a ceasefire from a tribal council.
On Saturday provincial officials began talks with both Shia and Sunni community leaders, AFP reported.
A security official in the provincial capital Peshawar told AFP that the negotiators’ helicopter had come under fire as it arrived in the region.
Singapore has carried out its third hanging of a convicted drug trafficker in a week despite appeals for clemency from the United Nations.
Rosman Abdullah, 55, was executed for trafficking 57.43 grams of heroin into the Southeast Asian city-state, Singapore’s drug enforcement agency said on Friday.
Rosman, a Singaporean, was “accorded full due process under the law, and was represented by legal counsel throughout the process,” the Central Narcotics Bureau said in a statement.
“Capital punishment is imposed only for the most serious crimes, such as the trafficking of significant quantities of drugs which cause very serious harm, not just to individual drug abusers, but also to their families and the wider society,” the CNB added.
UN experts had called on Singaporean authorities to spare Rosman, arguing that the death penalty does little to deter crime and that authorities had not made proper accommodations for his intellectual disabilities.
“We are gravely concerned that Mr. Rosman bin Abdullah does not appear to have had access to procedural accommodations, including individualised assistance, for his disability during his interrogation or trial,” the experts said in a statement released by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on Wednesday.
Amnesty International had condemned Rosman’s scheduled execution as “chilling” and “extremely alarming”.
Rosman’s hanging at Singapore’s Changi Prison comes exactly a week after the execution of a 39-year-old Malaysian and a 53-year-old Singaporean for drug trafficking.
Despite its reputation as a modern city-state and international business hub, Singapore ranks among only a handful of countries, including China and North Korea, that impose the death penalty for drug offences.
Under the country’s laws, anyone trafficking more than 500 grams of cannabis or 15 grams (0.5 ounces) of heroin faces mandatory capital punishment.
Since resuming executions in March 2022 following a hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Singaporean authorities have carried out 24 executions, including eight so far this year.
Singapore’s government, which keeps a tight rein on public protest and the media, has defended the death penalty as a deterrent against drug abuse, citing surveys that show most citizens support the law.
[Aljazeera]
A video of a fashion shoot in India has gone viral and unexpectedly turned a group of underprivileged school children into local celebrities.
The footage shows the children, most of them girls between the ages of 12 and 17, dressed in red and gold outfits fashioned from discarded clothes.
The teenagers designed and tailored the outfits and also doubled up as models to showcase their creations, with the grubby walls and terraces of the slum providing the backdrop for their ramp walk.
The video was filmed and edited by a 15-year-old boy.
The video first appeared earlier this month on the Instagram page of Innovation for Change, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the city of Lucknow.
The charity works with about 400 children from the city’s slums, providing them free food, education and job skills. The children featured in the shoot are students of this NGO.
Mehak Kannojia, one of the models in the video, told the BBC that she and her fellow students closely followed the sartorial choices of Bollywood actresses on Instagram and often duplicated some of their outfits for themselves.
“This time, we decided to pool our resources and worked as a group,” the 16-year-old said.
For their project, they chose wisely – a campaign by Sabyasachi Mukherjee, one of India’s top fashion designers who has dressed Bollywood celebrities, Hollywood actresses and billionaires. In 2018, Kim Kardashian wore his sequinned red sari for a Vogue shoot.
Mukherjee is also known as the “king of weddings” in India. He has dressed thousands of brides, including Bollywood celebrities such as Anushka Sharma and Deepika Padukone. Priyanka Chopra married Nick Jonas in a stunning red Sabyasachi outfit.
IMehak said their project, called Yeh laal rang (the colour red), was inspired by the designer’s heritage bridal collection.
“We sifted through the clothes that had come to us in donation and picked out all the red items. Then we zeroed in on the outfits we wanted to make and began putting them together.”
It was intense work – the girls stitched about a dozen outfits in three-four days but, Mehak says, they had “great fun doing it”.
For the ramp walk, Mehak says they studied the models carefully in Sabyasachi videos and copied their moves.
“Just like his models, some of us wore sunglasses, one drank from a sipper with a straw, while another walked carrying a cloth bundle under her arm.”
Some of it, Mehak says, came together organically. “At one point in the shoot, I was supposed to laugh. At that moment, someone said something funny and I just burst out laughing.”
It was an ambitious project, but the result has won hearts in India. Put together on a shoestring budget with donated clothes, the video went viral after Mukherjee reposted it on his Instagram feed with a heart emoji.
The campaign won widespread praise, with many on social media comparing their work to that of professionals.
The viral video has brought enormous attention to the charity and its school has been visited by several TV channels, some of the children were invited to participate in shows on popular FM radio stations and Bollywood actress Tamannah Bhatia visited them to accept a scarf from the children.
The response, Mehak says, has been “totally unexpected”.
“It feels like a dream come true. All my friends are sharing the video and saying ‘you’ve become famous’. My parents were full of joy when they heard about all the attention we are getting.
“We are feeling wonderful. Now we have only one dream left – to meet Sabyasachi.”
The shoot, however, also received criticism, with some wondering if showing young girls dressed as brides could encourage child marriage in a country where millions of girls are still married off by their families before they turn 18 – the legal age.
The Innovation for Change addressed the concern in a post on Instagram, saying they had no intention to encourage child marriage.
“Our aim is not to promote child marriage in any way. Today, these girls are able to do something like this by fighting against such ideas and restrictions. Please appreciate them, otherwise the morale of these children will fall.”
[BBC]
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