Saturday, May 06, 2023

Inequality and exploitation: Iraqi workers' battle for rights and dignity

2023-05-06 00:30

Shafaq News / On the occasion of International Workers' Day, it is imperative to shed light on the challenges that Iraqi workers face concerning their legal rights, social and health security. The current situation necessitates the consolidation of efforts to develop concrete plans that address the deteriorating conditions of workers and the industry in Iraq.

Each year on May 1st, the world commemorates International Labor Day, an annual event celebrated in numerous countries to honor workers. This day is an official holiday in over one hundred nations.

In keeping with this tradition, the Iraqi government ordered the suspension of official working hours on May 1st, coinciding with International Labor Day. Despite this gesture, many Iraqi workers continue to struggle with a lack of rights and job opportunities, making them vulnerable to exploitation by employers.

Ali Karim, a 33-year-old worker from Karbala governorate, is one such victim of the absence of rights and job opportunities. Employers often exploit workers by increasing working hours, lowering wages, and crowding out foreign workers in various labor sectors. Karim urged the government, parliament, and labor unions to take decisive action to improve the situation. He suggested that the government distribute financial grants to young people to start their own projects and reduce the number of foreign workers so that Iraqi workers can work.

MP Razan Saleh confirmed that workers in Iraq are currently facing several challenges. She emphasized the need for the government to create job opportunities to reduce unemployment, provide economic assistance to the country's agriculture and industry sectors, activate local factories and grow all sectors, and determine a suitable wage rate for workers to meet their living needs and solve their problems.

Activist and human rights defender Sarah Jassim warned that Iraqi workers' lack of awareness of their rights and the scarcity of job opportunities have led to them waiving their rights. She pointed out that the percentage of workers in the government sector is 37%, meaning that the total labor force exceeds 12 million. There are approximately 4-5 million workers in the private sector, of whom only 650,000 workers are registered in the social security law, indicating the need for fundamental solutions.

Jassim further called for the application of laws to reduce many phenomena, including workplace harassment and illegal child labor. She also advocated for the utilization of the country's energies, competencies, and wealth to achieve industrial and productive growth, which requires state institutions to issue sound decisions to prevent economic collapses that may threaten the Iraqi economy.

Ahmed Eid, an expert researcher in economic affairs, affirms that the situation of the working class in Iraq is challenging due to various challenges and problems regarding their legal rights, social and health security. He further highlights that despite the passage of Law 37 of 2015, Iraqi workers still suffer from issues such as discrimination, employer greed, and weak laws that have contributed to the marginalization and denial of workers' basic rights.

To alleviate pressure on government sectors, Eid suggests that the state should impose a limit on insurance and pension deductions, open up investments, provide job opportunities in productive sectors, and raise workers' salaries to ensure the possibility of paying insurance dues.

Furthermore, Sattar Danbous, the president of the General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq, agrees that raising the minimum wage, amending labor codes to address sexual harassment and arbitrariness, passing laws governing union organization, and passing the retirement and social security law are essential steps. The latter has been suspended for over six years. Danbous also highlights the issue of foreign workers in Iraq, which has resulted in disorderly entries, lack of oversight by the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, and harm to Iraq's unemployment rate.

It is worth noting that the unemployment rate in Iraq is 16.5%, according to a survey conducted by the Ministry of Planning in 2022 of the labor force in Iraq in collaboration with the International Labor Organization.

Legal expert Ali al-Tamimi explains the legality of the presence of foreign workers in Iraq, stating that no specific law on foreign workers has been enacted, and Labor Law 37 of 2015 and the Foreigners' Residence Law 118 of 1978 are applicable. These laws require workers to obtain a work permit, passport, entry visa, and other security conditions for their presence.

Violators are typically fined an amount not exceeding $500 and then deported based on the decision of the investigative court. Al-Tamimi emphasizes that the presence of foreign workers has an impact on the economy, criminal security, unemployment, and the outflow of funds. He advocates for a special law to detail all aspects of their presence, existence, and deportation, as many work without residency, and the only solution before the judiciary is to deport them to their countries.

Syria’s Kurds turn to UAE to ease tensions with Assad


2023-05-05 

Shafaq News/ The Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria is seeking the United Arab Emirates’ help to broker a deal with the Syrian regime amid fading confidence in the United States and Arab outreach to Damascus, Al-Monitor has learned.

Mazlum Kobane, commander in chief of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the United States’ premier ally in the fight against the Islamic State (IS), recently traveled to the UAE, four well-informed sources and officials in the region speaking on condition of strict anonymity told Al-Monitor. Kobane met with UAE officials, two of the sources said, in order to seek Abu Dhabi’s help to press the Syrian Kurds’ case with the Assad regime. One of the regional sources said that Kobane met with the UAE’s national security adviser Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, who was named deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi on March 29.

The UAE denied that any such meeting had occurred.

"The claims referenced in your email are false and unfounded,” a UAE official said in an emailed response to Al-Monitor’s request for comment on the UAE's alleged mediation effort between the SDF and the regime.

The officials briefing Al-Monitor insisted that Kobane had indeed gone to the UAE between late March and early April. None provided specific dates. “It is one hundred percent true,” one of the officials said. Two of the officials briefing Al-Monitor said that Bafel Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the second largest party in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq that shares power in the Kurdistan Regional Government, had traveled with him.

Talabani’s office did not respond to Al-Monitor’s request for comment.

Badran Ciya Kurd, the de facto foreign minister of the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration in Northeast Syria, confirmed that the UAE had expressed interest in helping the Syrian Kurds strike an agreement with the Assad regime. “They said they are ready to help, but so far we do not have a program (roadmap) for this,” Kurd told Al-Monitor in an April 28 interview in Qamishli. "We want them to play a role in the talks with Damascus, Kurd added. He declined to comment on whether Kobane had recently traveled to the UAE.

Ankara strikes

Kobane’s alleged trip to the UAE capital came before he was targeted by a Turkish drone as he was traveling in a convoy from the PUK’s intelligence headquarters known as the Counter Terrorism Group, or CTG, in Sulaimaniyah on April 7. The officials briefing Al-Monitor said the drone strike took place following Kobane’s return from the UAE.

The convoy was headed toward Sulaimaniyah International Airport. Kobane was to fly back to northeast Syria on a plane operated by the US-led coalition against IS. The CTG chief, Wahab Halabji, and three US military personnel were in the motorcade, as was Ilham Ahmed, a top Syrian Kurdish official. The Turkish drone is widely believed to have deliberately missed the target, and Kobane made it home. The goal was to telegraph Ankara’s fury over the shuttling of Kobane by the PUK leader to the UAE, one of the officials briefing Al-Monitor speculated.

On April 5, Turkey announced that it had sealed its airspace to planes taking off from and landing at the Sulaimaniyah airport, ostensibly after hearing of Kobane's assignation in Abu Dhabi, the sources said. The Turkish Foreign Ministry said the measure stemmed from an alleged “intensification of the PKK terrorist organization’s activities in Sulaimaniyah [and] infiltration by the terrorist organization into the airport.” The PKK is the acronym for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the outlawed militant group that has been waging an armed campaign for Kurdish autonomy against the Turkish state since 1984. Ankara insists that the SDF and Kobane, who also goes by the surname “Abdi,” are all PKK “terrorists” because of his previous role in the PKK.

Turkey said it would reassess its decision on the airport on July 3 based on measures the PUK takes to curb the PKK’s activities in Sulaimaniyah. Turkey is the Kurdistan Region’s main gateway to Europe.

The PKK was instrumental in the early days of the US-led coalition’s battle against IS, wresting thousands of Yazidis from the jihadis’ jaws in Iraq’s Sinjar region and training fighters for the SDF. However, it was listed as a terrorist entity by the State Department in 1997, hence Ankara’s ire over Washington’s effective collaboration with the group.

Washington insists that the SDF and the PKK are different and says some 900 US special forces stationed in northeast Syria as part of the anti-IS campaign will not be withdrawn. However, confidence in the United States is waning.

The first big shock came in 2019 when the Trump administration greenlighted a Turkish invasion of large swathes of Kurdish-controlled territory, including the key towns of Tell Abyad and Rais al-Ain, also known as Serekaniye. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan was another wake-up call, said Fawza al-Yusuf, a leading official in northeast Syria. “Our relations with the United States have been in decline since 2019. Serekaniye and Afghanistan provided lessons,” she told Al-Monitor in an April 27 interview in Hasakah.

Yusuf acknowledged that while the United States' presence gave the Syrian Kurds leverage in their relations with Damascus, there was also a flip side. The Syrian regime insists that the Kurds sever ties with Washington and tell the Americans to leave as a prerequisite to any deal.

“Thus, the presence of the US forces provides the regime with an excuse to not engage with us,” Yusuf explained.

She added that trust in the Russians, the regime’s main ally alongside Iran, was diminishing in parallel with the Kremlin’s deepening ties with Ankara. The Kurds needed to take matters into their own hands and not be reduced to “objects” in regional power games. Diversifying their partners is part of that strategy.

Bridge building

The UAE has taken a lead role in building bridges between the Assad regime and fellow Arab states in recent years after reopening its own embassy in Damascus in December 2018, part of a race for regional influence aimed in part at thinning Turkey's and Iran’s grips over Syria. Engagement with the Syrian Kurds is part of that calculus.

“The anti-Iran and the anti-Islamist agenda have been the driving force for Emirati normalization with Assad,” said Dareen Khalifa, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group who follows Syria. The UAE justifies the outreach on the grounds that “Assad isn’t going anywhere and we are going to have to deal with him in one way or another if we want to preserve our interests in Syria,” Khalifa told Al-Monitor.

Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and director of its Syria program, contended that the UAE is "trying to be ‘friends’ with everyone, playing mediator everywhere possible and getting into the door of troubling places before anyone else to secure the competitive advantage."

“Ultimately, the UAE’s forward-leaning role in normalizing Assad was initially promoted by a desire to counter Turkish influence, but it’s now principally about securing a competitive advantage — being the Sunni Arab actor with Assad's regime in its pocket and, it no doubt hopes, the first to win large-scale economic contracts if and when Western sanctions are dropped or fail to have their deterrent effect,” Lister told Al-Monitor.

While the UAE may justify its rapprochement with Damascus on the grounds that this will help counter Iranian influence in Syria, the two are top trading partners and Abu Dhabi has hosted top Iranian officials, including Iranian National Security Advisor Ali Shamkani in March.

It remains unclear whether the UAE's efforts to secure approval for Syria’s return to the Arab League during a May 19 summit in Riyadh will succeed. But the UAE is unlikely to give up the push to legitimize Bashar al-Assad. Moreover, it is also believed to be involved in back-channel diplomacy between Ankara and Damascus. UAE meddling apparently angered Tehran, which reportedly leaned on Russia and Turkey to drop the Emiratis from an April 4 meeting with Syrian officials that was held in Moscow. The Iranians took part instead.

In 2018, around the same time the Emiratis reopened its embassy in Damascus, the Syrian Kurds began seeking engagement with the Assad regime. The Russian-induced effort has proved fruitless so far. The regime has rebuffed all of the Kurds' demands for linguistic and political rights. The most the regime offered according to sources familiar with the talks was two hours of Kurdish-language instruction per week.

A fresh sense of urgency appears to have set in as Arab governments, including heavyweight Saudi Arabia, weigh normalization with the Assad regime. Worse, Assad’s longtime nemesis Turkey is also courting Damascus in the hope of reviving a security alliance targeting the Kurds.

On April 18, the Kurdish-led self-administration issued a nine-point declaration reiterating its intention to reach an agreement with the regime. This included an offer to host millions of Syrian refugees currently residing in neighboring Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. “We need to reach out to the Syrian people wherever they are to erase negative feelings about our administration. This includes members of the Syrian opposition. We can build a new democratic Syria only if we are united,” a senior figure in the Kurdish movement told Al-Monitor on condition that he not be identified by name.

Kurd, the de facto foreign minister, said the Syrian Kurds would not compromise on two things. One was the administrative model that they had set up. “The regime has to recognize the self-administration,” he said. The second is the status of the SDF. While the Kurds are willing to fall under the overall command of the Syrian army, they insist on keeping their forces in their own region.

Seeds of an alliance

The UAE is part of the 85-member Global Coalition against IS. The sources briefing Al-Monitor said that formal contacts between the Kurdish-led self-administration and the UAE started in 2018 when Emirati officials traveled to northeast Syria to interrogate imprisoned UAE nationals who had joined IS. The ties were brokered in part by former PUK intelligence supremo Lahur Talabani, who was ousted in 2021 by his cousin, PUK leader Bafel, in a bloodless coup. Talabani lobbied the Emiratis to invest in Syria’s battered oil infrastructure that lies mainly in the Kurdish-controlled northeast, where most of the country’s oil is located. The top ask was an oil refinery. Talabani traveled to Abu Dhabi with Kobane a number of times to push his cause, sources familiar with the outreach said.

But the Emiratis were wary of upsetting Assad, the sources said. They would have been even more concerned about violating US sanctions on Syria.

The moves coincided with spiraling tensions between Turkey and the UAE over the conflict in Libya where they backed opposing sides. These have since subsided, and it remains unclear whether the Emiratis would be willing to support the Syrian Kurds at the expense of their newly repaired ties with Ankara. The stiff Emirati rebuttal over Kobane’s trip suggests they are not.

Syrian Kurdish officials, however, remain upbeat about the relationship. Yusuf praised the UAE for its “constructive and positive approach." “We have good cooperation with them in intelligence sharing, in combating drug trafficking,” she said.

She noted that the UAE was the Arab country with the fewest nationals to have joined IS. “There were only 15 of them, and the Emiratis were very helpful in the fight against DAESH,” she said, using the Arabic language acronym for the jihadis.

Yusuf added that the UAE’s own system of seven separate monarchies united under the same flag bore some resemblance to the decentralized model the Kurds are seeking for Syria. “We have some common traits,” she said.

Source: Al-Monitor

Arab diplomats to hold emergency meeting on Syria's return to Arab League


2023-05-06 10:28

Shafaq News/ Diplomats from Arab countries are set to hold an emergency meeting to discuss the developments in Sudan and follow up on the situation in Syria and the prospect of it returning to the Arab League.

The meeting is scheduled to take place Sunday, according to Gamal Rushdy, the spokesman for the Arab League.

It is expected to discuss the lifting of the suspension of Syria's seat in the Arab League and its participation in the upcoming Arab summit in Riyadh on May 19.

Various countries, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have opened up relations with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Various foreign ministers have also visited Damascus in recent weeks.

Syria’s membership in the 22-member Arab League was suspended in the early months of the war 12 years ago, and Arab countries later imposed economic sanctions, reported the Associated Press.

The conflict has killed nearly a half million people since March 2011 and displaced half of the country’s pre-war population of 23 million.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told CNN that he believes there are enough votes among Arab League members for Syria to return to the organization.

The meeting in Cairo on Sunday by Arab foreign ministers will focus on restoring Syria’s membership and comes at the request of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, said Rushdy, the Arab League spokesman.

When asked about the vote count, Rushdy said Arab League decisions are resolutions usually made by consensus, but each country has the right to submit its reservations.

Ulyanov reacts to Jake Sullivan's remarks on Iran atomic case

Ulyanov reacts to Jake Sullivan's remarks on Iran atomic case

TEHRAN, May 06 (MNA) – A senior Russian diplomat has reatced to the recent remarks by the US national security adviser about alleged Washinton's sticking to diplomacy in dealing with Iran nuclear case.

Russia's permanent envoy to international organizations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov wrote in a post on Twitter on Saturday that "The #US National Security Adviser delivered a keynote speech on the Middle East. It’s section on #Iran is puzzling. Not clear what kind of message he wanted to send. However the positive sign is that the diplomatic option, judging by his words, still remains on the table."

Ulyanov reacts to Jake Sullivan's remarks on Iran atomic case

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan claimed on Thursday that Washiognton still seeks a diplomatic solution in nuclear talks with Tehran.

Announcing Biden administration's plan to send American officials to the West Asia region, Sullivan repeated US baseless accusations against Iran's peaceful nuclear program.

The US accusations against Iran's peacefull nuclear program come despite the fact that Tehran's program is monintored by the nuclear watchdog, IAEA, and that the US that unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal known as the JCPOA in 2018, and the Israeli regime possess a large number of warheads.

MNA


Comprehensive strike prevails in Palestinian city of Tulkarm, mourning souls of two martyrs
Comprehensive strike prevails in Palestinian city of Tulkarm, mourning souls of two martyrs
Comprehensive strike prevails in Palestinian city of Tulkarm, mourning souls of two martyrs
[06/May/2023]


TULKARM May 06.2023 (Saba) - The Palestinian National Action Factions in Tulkarm announced on Saturday a general and comprehensive strike in mourning for the souls of the two martyrs who were shot dead by the Zionist enemy in the city.
According to what was reported by the "Palestine Today" news agency, the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced the arrival of two martyrs, shot by the enemy, to Dr. Hospital. Thabet Thabet al-Hukoomi, in addition to a stable injury to the extremities, as a result of the Zionist aggression on the city of Tulkarm.
The ministry said: The martyrs of Tulkarm are the two young men: Samer Salah al-Shafei, 22, (wounded with gunshots in the neck, chest, and abdomen), and Hamza Jamil Khreyoush, 22, (wounded with gunshots in the chest, abdomen, and left foot).
It is noteworthy that the occupation forces assassinated the two martyrs amid armed clashes.
E.M