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Jailed Kurdish militant leader Abdullah Ocalan’s call to disarm sparked relief but also fears for the future among Kurds in Syria and Iraq, who long for peace after fighting hard for autonomy.In a potentially seismic shift in Kurdish history, veteran leader Ocalan sent a message this week from his Turkish prison, calling on his Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to dissolve and disarm.But the PKK, mostly based in the mountains of northern Iraq, has yet to respond, and its members have not seen their leader for decades except for a few photos from his jail cell.The Kurds, an ethnic minority with a distinct culture and language, are rooted in the mountainous region spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.They have long fought for their own homeland, but for decades suffered defeats on the battlefield and massacres in their hometowns.Today, millions of Kurds live in relative safety in the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq and under the semi-autonomous administration in northeastern Syria.Both areas have been embroiled in the decades-long PKK insurgency against the Turkish state.In Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan’s second-biggest city, 31-year-old Rebaz Hassan waited impatiently for Ocalan’s message Thursday.”It is a historic day,” Hassan said, though others did not share his enthusiasm.”I saw people crying and I also saw someone dancing,” he said, adding that the consequences of the call should be explained.”Some people did not understand if they should be happy or angry.”- ‘Positive impact’ -In the city Qamishli in neighbouring Syria, Akid Farouk, 35, said the call was “a good step to solve the Kurdish issue in Turkey”.”It will have a positive impact on the region if the PKK implements it,” he added.Ocalan’s call, if heeded by his fighters, would be a massive win for Turkey, strengthening its status as a regional power as it claims a historic victory.It “would radically change both the Kurdish movement and the geography and geopolitics of the Middle East, placing Turkey at the centre”, said Adel Bakawan, director of France-based think tank the European Institute for Studies on the Middle East and North Africa.While for Iraq the execution of Ocalan’s call would solve a major source of tension with neighbouring Turkey, Syria’s situation is much more complicated.Oppressed for decades, Syria’s Kurds took advantage of the weakness of Bashar al-Assad’s government during the civil war to carve out a de facto semi-autonomous region in the northeast.But following his overthrow by Islamist fighters with ties to Turkey, the Kurds are left navigating an uncertain future.Turkey sees Syrian Kurdish forces, who make up the bulk of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as an offshoot of the PKK and has long rejected their dream of self-rule.But some Kurds in Syria hope a deal with the PKK might soften Turkey’s stance.A peace process would transform the SDF “from being the enemy we must fight” into an ally Turkey can rely on to better mark its influence, Bakawan said.Renad Mansour, of the Chatham House think tank in London, said that relations with the Kurds have been the key obstacle to the new Syrian authorities’ efforts to consolidate their power countrywide.A new Turkey-PKK dynamic “would impact the development of the political system and power-sharing in Syria”, Mansour said.The SDF have repeatedly refused calls for their dissolution, insisting on remaining a distinct entity under the new Syrian authorities and army.While SDF leader Mazloum Abdi welcomed Ocalan’s statement as a step towards peace, he said that the call for disarmament did not concern his forces.The SDF spearheaded the fight that defeated the Islamic State group (IS) in Syria in 2019 and is still seen by the United States, which maintains presence in the northeast, as crucial to prevent a jihadist resurgence.- A relief -When IS invaded swathes of land in Iraq, the PKK joined the fight against the jihadists, who were defeated by US-backed Iraqi forces in 2017.The Kurdish militants have since expanded their presence in Iraq beyond the autonomous region to areas nearby.Their presence has long been a source of tension between Iraq and Turkey, which also maintains military bases in Kurdistan and carries out ground and air operations against the Kurdish militants.Although Baghdad has recently sharpened its tone against the PKK, listing it as a “banned organisation”, Ankara wants it to go further and declare it a terrorist group.Political scientist Ihassan al-Shemmari said that a peace process would “relieve the Iraqi government from Turkey’s pressure to take action against the PKK” and improve relations between the neighbouring countries.burs-rh/ser/ami

Palestinian militant group Hamas called on Friday for international pressure on Israel to enter the next phase of a ceasefire that has largely halted the war in Gaza, as negotiations were resuming in Cairo.With hours to go before the first phase of the truce is due to expire, mediator Egypt said on Thursday that Israeli, Qatari and US delegations were in the capital Cairo for “intensive” talks on a second phase that should bring a permanent end to the war.In Israel, a day after the military acknowledged its “complete failure” to prevent the 2023 Hamas attack that sparked the war, mourners gathered for the funeral of Tsachi Idan, a hostage whose remains have been returned from Gaza.Hamas said in a statement that “with the end of the first phase of the ceasefire”, the group “affirms its full commitment to implementing all the provisions of the agreement in all its stages and details”.”We call on the international community to pressure the Zionist occupation (Israel) to… immediately enter the second phase of the agreement without any delay,” it said.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday “instructed the negotiation delegation to depart for Cairo”, his office said shortly after Hamas handed over the remains of Idan and three other hostages under the truce, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli custody.The ceasefire, reached following months of gruelling negotiations, has largely halted the war that erupted with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.Militants broke through Gaza’s security barrier that day, launching a deadly attack on residential communities, army bases and other sites, and seizing dozens of hostages.Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas and to bring home all the hostages after the attack that resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.The Israeli retaliation has killed more than 48,000 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures the UN has deemed reliable.- ‘Too many civilians died’ -An internal Israeli army probe into the October 7 attack, released on Thursday, acknowledged the military’s “complete failure” to prevent it, according to a military official who briefed reporters about the report’s contents on condition of anonymity.”Too many civilians died that day” in Israel when the military failed to protect them, the official said.A senior military official said at the same briefing that the military acknowledges it was “overconfident” and had misconceptions about Hamas’s military capabilities before the attack.Following the scathing probe’s release, Israel’s military chief General Herzi Halevi said: “The responsibility is mine.”Halevi had already resigned last month citing the October 7 “failure”.On Friday a crowd gathered at a football stadium in Israel’s commercial hub of Tel Aviv to bid a final farewell to former hostages Idan, 49, waving flags and holding scarves of the local team he supported.After his body was repatriated, Israeli authorities said that he was “murdered while held hostage in Gaza”.Israel Berman, a businessman who lived in the Nahal Oz kibbutz community where Idan was abducted, has said that “until the very last moment, we were hoping that Tsachi would return to us alive”.- ‘We were in hell’ -The hostage-prisoner swap early Thursday was the final one under the initial stage of the truce that took effect on January 19.Israel’s Prison Service said that 643 inmates were released after Hamas returned the bodies of four hostages.Among those freed was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in an Israeli jail, Nael Barghouti, who spent more than four decades behind bars including for the murder of an Israeli officer.AFP images showed some inmates, back in Gaza, awaiting treatment or being assessed at a hospital in Khan Yunis after their release. Several freed Palestinian prisoners were hospitalised following earlier swaps.Yahya Shraideh, released on Thursday, said: “We were in hell and we came out of hell.”Over the past several weeks, Hamas freed in stages 25 living Israeli and dual-national hostages and returned the bodies of eight others.Israel, in return, was expected to free around 1,900 Palestinian prisoners.Gaza militants also released five Thai hostages outside the deal’s terms.

Watching her granddaughter sleep in cramped quarters for displaced Palestinians, Sanaa Shraim hopes for a better life for the baby, born into a weeks-long Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank.Israeli forces searching for suspected militants have long carried out limited incursions into Jenin refugee camp, where Shraim and about 24,000 other Palestinians normally live.But with no end in sight to the ongoing military operation across the northern West Bank, “I worry about what will happen, when the children grow up in this reality of constant raids,” said Shraim.She had already lost her militant son Yusef in a previous Israeli raid, in 2023. More recently, forced to flee the escalating Israeli assault since late January, Shraim has watched her daughter give birth in displacement.”There have been so many repeated raids, and they won’t stop”, said the stern-faced grandmother, speaking to AFP in a crowded room at a community centre in Jenin city where the family have been sheltering for the past month.The sweeping military operation was launched around the time a ceasefire took hold in the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, a separate Palestinian territory.Israel has since announced that its troops would remain in Jenin and neighbouring camps for up to a year.- ‘Nothing left’ back home -Shraim and her family are among about 80 displaced residents of Jenin camp sharing the building in the city.Thaer Mansoura, confined to a wheelchair due to osteoporosis, said he had to be rescued in a cart after army bulldozers tore through the streets around his home.”We endured it as much as we could, but with so many children — my brothers’ kids, our neighbours’ children, my cousins’ children — we had no choice but to leave”, he told AFP.Mansoura said his family had remained home for three days as electricity and then phone lines were cut, engulfed by the sound of bombs, gunfire and helicopters, as well as army drone broadcasting calls for residents to “evacuate your homes”.Now, in the relative safety of the community shelter, he feels “stuck here — there’s no place to return to, nothing left”.Back in the camp, just five kilometres (three miles) away, the rubble-strewn streets are devoid of people as Israeli soldiers patrol the perimeter on foot or in armoured jeeps and personnel carriers.An AFP correspondent walls riddled with bullet holes, narrow streets littered with concrete slabs and facades torn by army bulldozers, and twisted metal storefronts barely hanging from their hinges.Awnings blackened by fire stand as a reminder of life in the camp that came to a standstill a little over a month ago, when the Israeli operation began.In the city centre, life has returned despite military presence, with some shops cautiously reopening — a sign of pressing economic concerns for many residents.”Normally, after an operation, everything shuts down. But this time it is different,” said the manager of one apparel shop who declined to be named.- ‘The same occupation’ -The ongoing Israeli raid is unusual not only in its duration, but also in the rare deployment of tanks to the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.Nathmi Turkman, 53, once jailed by Israel, carries a constant reminder of the last time Jenin saw such relentless military activity during the second Palestinian intifada, or “uprising” — a bullet from 2002 still in his flesh.While Israel maintains that its offensive targets militant groups long active in the northern West Bank, Turkman said that “their bullets don’t differentiate between civilians and fighters”.Before leaving the camp, he grabbed just one item from his home, a small Eiffel Tower figurine which he chose for its sentimental value.Now at the community centre in Jenin city, Turkman said that for people who did not witness the events of the second intifada, the current Israeli operation “was shocking”.”But for us, we lived through 2002 with tanks and warplanes”, he said.”There’s no difference between 2002 and 2025 — it’s all the same occupation.”In this reality, Shraim fears that her grandchildren will grow up knowing only war and displacement.On edge, she was startled when the stroller carrying her granddaughter tipped over in a park near the shelter, reacting as though the infant was in mortal danger before realising she was fine.”The fear is inside me, and I can’t shake it,” said the grandmother.

China missed a key climate target in 2024 and emissions in the world’s second-largest economy rose slightly as coal remained dominant despite record renewable additions, official data showed Friday.The figures mean the world’s biggest emitter is off-track on a key commitment under the Paris climate agreement, analysts said.Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said carbon …

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Patterned poop bags, frilly dog dresses and exotic animals including minks and meerkats were on display at a bustling pet expo in Beijing, where the industry continues to thrive despite a sluggish economy.China is battling slowing growth as a real-estate crisis, persistently low consumption and high youth unemployment plague the world’s second-biggest economy.Yet the pet …

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