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The maneuvers are intended to demonstrate that Moscow has sufficient military might for massive drills, even as its troops are engaged in the special operation in Ukraine.
The Russian Defense Ministry said that the Vostok 2022 (East 2022) exercise will be held until 7 September at seven firing ranges in Russia's Far East and the Sea of Japan.
They will involve more than 50,000 troops and over 5,000 weapons units, including 140 aircraft and 60 warships.
The ISIS militants were arrested in a 10-day operation, during which five trenches have also been discovered and 16 mobile phones have been seized.
As part of the operation, 50 percent of the camp was searched and 121 suspects, including 15 women, were arrested, 14 of whom are ISIS militants.
More than 65,000 families of ISIS militants, 94 percent of whom are women and children, live in al-Hol camp, and more than 100 people have been killed since the beginning of last year, according to UN figures.
Security experts warn of the rise of another generation of ISIS from Camp Hall.
In a meeting with directorates of Sulaimani province on Sunday, the Deputy PM expressed his concerns that many investors are in recession due to recklessness of Sulaimani’s related directorates and offices. He said “it is unacceptable to increase the burden on citizens and investors… the manager who neglects his work should go home.”
The meeting, came after Qubad Talabani met with investors in Sulaimani on June 26, in which investors had criticism and complaints about the behavior and treatment of the directorates of Sulaimani.
Qubad Talabani said that trade movement in Sulaimani will not be allowed to be weakened further and investors will not be forced to invest abroad, because this has caused great damage to Sulaimani and the residents of the city have lost thousands of jobs.
“When an investor's project comes to you, you see it as a simple piece of paper, but the lives of hundreds of people are linked to that simple piece of paper and hundreds of jobs may be lost just because of the negligence of a manager.”
In this context, the Deputy Prime Minister warned the directorates of Sulaimani that he will no longer accept this situation and openly said that he will not accept any negligence from any director and official.
Qubad Talabani decided to form a monitoring team and he will supervise the team.
He asked them to work as a team to create full coordination among themselves to start all projects in less than a month. He stressed that he will be directly aware of the projects and will not accept bribes from anyone.
In another part of the meeting, the Deputy Prime Minister expressed his support for the departments to use all their powers according to the law to facilitate and handle the affairs of investors and citizens to put pressure on the departments for illegal activities and interfere in their work.
He said that if a director or employee cannot faithfully carry out the work of citizens and adhere to his working hours, let him resign, because there are other loyal people to serve the citizens in their place.
The suspect was killed during a clash and nine security forces were wounded.
There is one citizen among the wounded who was transferred to Shar Hospital in Sulaimani. None of the wounded are seriously injured, according to sources who spoke to Kurdsat News.
Riding a motorcycle, the gunman initially passed through a checkpoint in Qaradagh refusing to show his ID to the police. He later escaped and used a house as shelter in Qaradagh where he confronted the police and security forces.
Russia halted gas supplies via a major pipeline to Europe on Wednesday, raising the prospect of a recession, and energy rationing in some of the region's richest countries. And it is not the first time for Russia to withhold energy from Europe since the war in Ukraine.
The outage through Nord Stream 1 is for maintenance and means no gas flows into Germany between 01:00 GMT on August 31 and 01:00 GMT on September 3, according to Russian energy giant Gazprom.
Data from the pipeline operator's website showed flows dropped to zero between 02:0, and 03:00 GMT on Wednesday.
European governments fear Moscow will extend the halt in response to Western sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine, and have accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of using energy supplies as a "weapon of war". A claim Moscow continues to deny.
Increased restrictions on European gas supplies will exacerbate an energy crisis that has already sent wholesale gas prices up by over 400% since August last year, causing a painful cost-of-living crisis for consumers, increasing costs for companies and forcing governments to spend billions to ease the burden.
It has also emboldened right-wing parties to adopt more pro-Russian policies and calling for an end to their governments support to Ukraine.
Unlike the last month's 10-day maintenance of the pipeline, the new maintenance was announced just less than two weeks ago.
Moscow has already cut supplies via Nord Stream 1 to 40% in June, and 20% in July, blaming maintenance problems for sanctions on Moscow. It prevents equipment and installations from being returned, Moscow says.
Gazprom said the new shutdown is necessary to carry out maintenance on the pipeline's only remaining compressor.
Russia has completely cut off supplies to Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Poland and reduced flows through other pipelines since launching what Moscow calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry has said that the only solution to overcome the crisis in Iraq is through negotiations.
“Iran welcomes the calming of the situation in Iraq and believes that the only way to overcome the crisis is through negotiations, protecting the rights of citizens, and respecting the country's legal institutions, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
"All parties must abide by the constitution and political mechanisms and create a favorable environment for the formation of a new government," the statement said.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry also reiterated its full support for Iraq and stressed that Iran wants a strong Iraq that is secure and stable.
Iraq was on a collision course for months since the October 2021 general parliamentary elections where the Shiite parties failed to reach an agreement to for a government. After occupying the government buildings and the Republican Palace in Baghdad’s Green Zone, and Muqtada al-Sadr alleged resignation from politics, deadly protest and riot erupted in Baghdad with many causalities.
However, Muqada al-Sadr’s vocation from politics did not last much and returned to politics after he swiftly put an end to the riots when he called back on his supporters to evacuate the streets of Baghdad and return home.
Iran needs stronger guarantees from Washington for the revival of a 2015 nuclear deal, its foreign minister said in Moscow on Wednesday, adding that the U.N. atomic watchdog should drop its "politically motivated probes" of Tehran's nuclear work.
Earlier in the day, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Mohammad Eslami, said that if the International Atomic Energy Agency did not close the investigation into Tehran's undeclared activities, "there will be no implementation of the agreement."
And the website "Iran International" quoted Eslami as saying that Iran "does not possess undeclared nuclear sites... The IAEA's questions must be closed before all parties return to the JCPOA, otherwise there will be no day of re-implementation."
Islami considered that the IAEA's questions "come in continuation of those alleged military readings", expressing his rejection of the documents submitted against Iran about three sites. "Iran does not have an undeclared nuclear site in principle," he said.
He continued, "Negotiation is a give and take, not a construction article decision, where you can say nice things."
"The nuclear deal to happen the global nuclear watchdog must put an end to its probing of Iran nuclear sites, "Raisi asserted at a news conference in Tehran on Monday, marking a year as president.
Yesterday, the Iranian Tasnim Agency quoted a spokesman for the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization as saying that Tehran would not accept the "excessive" demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency of the United Nations.
"We consider the demands of the IAEA to be excessive because their implementation is impossible because of the sanctions. If they lift the sanctions, Iran will respond in kind," Tasnim news agency quoted Behrouz Kamalvandi as saying.
After months of indirect talks, Tehran and Washington are struggling to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. The main sticking point is Tehran's insistence that the Atomic Energy Agency close its investigations into uranium traces found at three undisclosed sites before the nuclear deal was revived.
On Monday, Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi announced that reviving the agreement on his country's nuclear program is linked to the International Atomic Energy Agency's closing of the file of Iranian sites suspected of witnessing unauthorized activities, with the negotiations between Tehran and major powers reaching critical stages.
The issue of previously finding traces of nuclear materials at three sites, which Tehran did not claim to have witnessed such activities, raises tension between Iran on the one hand, and Western powers and the United Nations agency. The amount of Uranium traces found at the sites prompted the head of the IAEA to warn that “only countries making bombs” are exhibiting this level of activity.
While Iran considers this file "political", Western countries, particularly the United States, are calling on it to cooperate with the agency to put an end to these suspicions.
Raisi's comments came while Tehran is studying the US response to Iran's proposals in response to a "final" draft presented by the European Union with the aim of completing indirect talks between the two parties that began last year with the aim of reviving the 2015 agreement, from which Washington withdrew in 2018.
If the US and Iran do not reach an agreement, Iran could become a nuclear state within days, experts warn.
The deal could also supply over 1 million daily barrels to the global market, offsetting high energy prices caused by the war in Ukraine. The European countries are pushing Washington to reach a deal soon, otherwise the US allies at the forefront of the Russian war in Ukraine could face disaster in the coming months.
In his message, Alawi congratulated the PUK "brothers" on the election of Bafel Jalal Talabani as the President of PUK, and hoped that the PUK would continue to strengthen the historical ties between the "sons" of Iraq.
President Bafel Jalal Talabani was elected as the president of the PUK by an overwhelming majority of the PUK leadership council, on Monday, August 29.
"The Kurdish revolutions against oppression and dictatorship were not only Kurdish revolutions but also Iraqi revolutions, and the unity of the Kurdish people is the key to the unity of all Iraqis," Allawi said in his message.
Allawi said he was confident that the PUK, led by Bafel Talabani, would continue to work with the national political forces to correct the political process.
The ministry also said that "the Ba'ath regime used chemical weapons against civilians in the Anfal process in Badinan." Although the Baathist regime did use chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians on many occasions, most notably starting with the Halabja Chemical Bombardment that killed 5000 thousand civilians, reports of the Baathist regime using chemical weapons in the Badinan region during the Anfal campaign is another crime revealed.
After 60 hearings and within the framework of international agreements, the Iraqi High Criminal Court recognized that the Anfal process was a genocide of the Kurdish people. However, the Anfal Campaign remains to be recognized by prominent states.
The Ministry of Martyrs stressed that they would continue their efforts to recognize the crime of Anfal as genocide internationally.
The Anfal Campaign was a genocidal plan against Iraqi Kurds carried out in eight different phases, each targeting a specific region of the Kurdistan region. the purpose was to eliminate the Kurdish revolutionaries fighting against Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime. The Kurdish revolutionaries, generally known as the Peshmerga, depended on the villages of the Kurdistan region for their subsistence. The Baathist regime eradicated most of the hamlets, weakened the Peshmerga, and Arabized the Kurdistan region's strategic, oil-rich regions.
The seventh and last phases of Anfal were committed in the Badinan region, where hundreds of villages, communities and settlements were destroyed, and their populations moved to relocation camps in Sulaimani and Erbil. In the Anfal Genocide an estimated 182 civilains, including children, women, the elderly were buried alive, shot or went missing.
According to Kurdistan Genocide Writers Union, "not a single Anfal remain of the Badinan region Anfal genocide is repatriated." The Union asked the Kurdistan region government to ramp up its efforts to bring their remains and create monuments in Duhok, the location of the Anfal Campaign of Badinan.
Commenting on the occasion, the Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani said, "we send our regards to the victim's relatives, and we bow to the innocent lives of the Anfal victims. Barzani also asked the Iraqi federal government to compensate the victims' acquaintances because Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal has recognized the atrocity as genocide.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry announced that it had received the American response to the comments it made on the final text of the nuclear agreement. An official familiar with the matter said that the US response sent to Iran falls short of Iran's expectations, Politico reported.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said that Tehran has begun to study the US response carefully, and its opinion will be communicated to the European coordinator. The nuclear talks in Vienna are conducted through the European powers that relay messages between Washington and Tehran.
On Wednesday, the US State Department confirmed that Washington is sticking to the diplomatic path for a joint return to the nuclear agreement with Iran.
State Department spokesman Ned Price told Al Arabiya that the joint return of the nuclear agreement with Iran is in the interest of the United States. He also stressed that diplomacy is the best option to constrain Iran's nuclear program.
Most of the obstacles prevented from reaching an agreement last March are now gone since both Washington and Tehran have accommodated each other's demands.
Both the US and Iran need an agreement. The US needs to distance Iran from Russia and alleviate high energy prices by flooding the market with Iranian oil after a possible deal, while Iran could get a respite from "Maximum Pressure" sanctions that have crippled the country's economy.
Yet it is Perincek, a man with a world of contacts in Russia, China, Iran, and Syria whose conspiratorial worldview identifies the United States as the core of all evil, that Erdogan at times turns to help resolve delicate geopolitical issues.
Seven years ago, Perincek mediated a reconciliation between Russia and Turkey after relations soured following the Turkish air force’s downing of a Russian fighter.
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Now, Perincek is headed for Damascus to engineer a Russian-backed rapprochement with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose overthrow Erdogan had encouraged for the past 11 years since the eruption of mass Arab Spring-era anti-government demonstrations that morphed into a bloody civil war.
Chances are that Perincek’s effort will be more successful than when he last tried in 2016 to patch up differences between Erdogan and Al-Assad but ultimately stumbled over the Turkish leader’s refusal to drop his insistence that the Syrian president must go.
Erdogan has suggested as much in recent days, insisting that Turkey needed to maintain a dialogue with the government of Al-Assad.
“We don’t have such an issue whether to defeat Assad or not… You have to accept that you cannot cut the political dialogue and diplomacy between the states. There should always be such dialogues,” Erdogan said.
He went on to say that “we do not eye Syrian territory… The integrity of their territory is important to us. The regime must be aware of this.” Erdogan’s willingness to bury the war hatchet follows his failure to garner Russian and Iranian acquiescence in a renewed Turkish military operation in northern Syria. The operation was intended to ensure that US-backed Syrian Kurds, whom Turkey views as terrorists, do not create a self-ruling Kurdish region on Turkey’s border like the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq.
Turkey hoped the operation would allow it to create a 30-kilometer buffer zone controlled by its forces and its Syrian proxies on the border of the two countries.
Russia and Iran’s refusal to back the scheme, which would have undermined the authority of their ally, Al-Assad, has forced Turkey to limit its operation to shelling Kurdish and Syrian military positions.
The United States seeming unwillingness to offer the Kurds anything more than verbal support, and only that sparsely, has driven the Kurds closer to Damascus and, by extension, Russia and Iran as Syria quietly expand its military presence in the region. The US has long relied on the Kurds to counter the Islamic State in northern Syria.
The rejiggering of relationships and alliances in Syria occurs on the diplomatic and military battlefield.
The Turkish attacks and responses by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) at its core appear to be as much a military as a political drawing of battle lines in anticipation of changing Turkish and Kurdish relations with the Al-Assad government.
By targeting Syrian military forces, Turkey is signalling that it will not stand idly by if Syria supports the Kurds or provides them cover, while unprecedented Kurdish targeting of Turkish forces suggests that the Kurds have adopted new rules of engagement. Turkey is further messaging that it retains the right to target Kurdish forces at will, much like it does in northern Iraq.
Both Erdogan and the Kurds are placing risky bets
The Kurds hope against all odds that Al-Assad will repay the favor of allowing the president to advance his goal of gaining control of parts of Syria held by rebel forces and forcing a withdrawal of US forces from the area by granting the Kurds a measure of autonomy.
With elections in Turkey next year, Erdogan hopes that Al-Assad will help him cater to nationalist anti-Kurdish and anti-migrant sentiment by taking control of Kurdish areas.
Turkey wants to start repatriating some of the four million predominantly Syrian refugees it hosts. In early August, Turkey’s interior ministry announced that it had completed the construction of more than 60,000 homes for returning refugees to northeastern Syria.
Concern about a potential deal with Al-Assad and a call by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusloglu for reconciliation between opposition groups and Damascus sparked anti-Turkish protests in Turkish-controlled areas of northern Syria as well as rebel-held Idlib.
Turkey also expects Al-Assad, keen to regain territorial control and maintain centralized power, to ultimately crack down on armed Kurdish groups and efforts to sustain autonomously governed Kurdish areas.
As a result, Perincek, alongside Turkish-Syrian intelligence contacts, has his work cut out for him. The gap between Turkish and Syrian aspirations is wide.
Al-Assad wants a complete withdrawal of Turkish forces and the return of Syrian control of Kurdish and rebel-held areas. He is unlikely willing or able to provide the kind of security guarantees that Turkey would demand.
Both the Kurds and Erdogan are caught in Catch-22s of their own that do not bode well for either. The Kurds may be left with no options if a Turkish-Syrian rapprochement succeeds or face a Turkish onslaught if it fails. Similarly, reconciliation on terms acceptable to Erdogan may amount to pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
Whether he agrees with Al-Assad or violence in northern Syria escalates, Erdogan risks sparking a new wave of refugees making its way to Turkey at a time that he can economically and politically least afford it.
In the words of analyst Kamal Alam, Erdogan’s problem is that the Turkish president “is running out of time before the next election to solve Syria's Gordian knot. For his part, Assad can wait this out – because after Turkey again fails to bomb its way out of the northeastern problem, Erdogan will need Assad far more than the reverse.”
All hotels, motels, cafes, restaurants, and tourist places that provide tourism services are obliged to make Kurdish the primary language for the menu and signs of their places, and the directive will be effective after fifteen days from issuing the decree.
According to the decree, written in seven points, all places with tourist licenses must use Kurdish as the primary language, followed by any other foreign language.
The decree instructed all general directorates and special committees to follow up on the implementation of the decision. The penalties for violators will be recorded starting with the closure of the place for three days, in case of repetition or more place for seven days.
Due to many foreign and Iraqi tourists to the Kurdistan Region, most tourist areas write signs and menus in other languages and are usually not followed by Kurdish.
Today, Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said in a press conference that the current text of the nuclear agreement is bad and cannot be accepted. He added the deal would not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bomb.
He also asked, "How can an agreement be signed with the Iranians that gives them a hundred billion dollars annually as a reward for violating all their obligations?"
He also noted that the current text does not fit the criteria set by US President Joe Biden himself and pledged to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear state.
He pointed out that "the Israeli government is conducting an open dialogue with the US administration on all disputed issues, especially since Washington was and still is the closest ally," as he put it.
Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz confirmed yesterday, Tuesday, that his country will do everything in its power to influence the nuclear agreement, warning the Biden administration that this agreement will allow the transfer of 250 billion dollars to the militias.
Over the past few days, Israel has intensified its meetings with US officials, with the nuclear negotiations approaching a final stage, and it has reiterated its position on refusing to agree with Tehran.
It is noteworthy that the nuclear agreement reached its final stages, after marathon rounds of talks that started last April in Vienna. A final draft was submitted to Washington and Tehran by the Europeans, early this month.
Currently, the remaining parties to the agreement that Washington withdrew from in 2015, (France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia), are waiting for the American response, in order to conclude long months of talks, and announce a new nuclear agreement or perhaps another round of negotiations.
So far Israel has been the only state that is opposed to the nuclear agreement. Many Gulf states embrace the deal. Kuwait and United Arab Emirates are in the process of reopening their embassies in Tehran.
The audit committee's report has been sent to Erbil Investigation Directorate to register the fraud as a criminal case under Article 19 of the Corruption Commission Law and submitted to the investigative judge of the Erbil Corruption Commission for investigation and resolution of the issue.
A source in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Corruption Commission told KurdSat English that "After noticing significant increases in the official's wealth, his file has been submitted to a court to investigate his financial records, and no further comments would be made until all investigations are over."
After al-Sadr announced future moves, his supporters headed today, Tuesday, to the headquarters of the Council and the Federal Court for a sit-in indefinitely in protest against the judiciary's position on dissolving Parliament, a demand that they have been demanding since the political crisis in the country erupted months ago. Especially with the coordination framework.
Hundreds of supporters of the prominent Shiite cleric in the country carried out an open sit-in in front of the Council and the Federation building, in an escalating step to expand the area of demonstrations and sit-ins inside the Green Zone.
The Iraqi security forces rushed to prevent them from breaking the supreme courts' quarters, although the Sadrists began camping and dancing in front of the federal institution that had earlier decided to terminate its functions indefinitely.
They also called on the demonstrators to join them and advocate for them to demand the dissolution of Parliament, the holding of early elections, and the accountability of the corrupt.
Al-Sadr had promised a few days ago future steps without specifying what they were, reiterating his rejection of dialogue with the corrupt and calling for a public dialogue between the political parties to solve the crisis in which the country has plunged after the Parliament failed to convene to elect a new president, despite the passage of several months since the end of Parliamentary elections that took place on the tenth of last October (2021).
A severe political crisis amid the inability of the political forces to agree on the president's election and the formation of a government is about to destabilize Iraq further.
This stalemate and stumbling have increased the tension between al-Sadr and the coordination framework, especially since late July, with the two sides exchanging pressure in the street and statements, without matters so far developing into violence or fighting.
While al-Sadr insists on dissolving Parliament and holding early legislative elections, the Coordination Framework wants to form a government before early elections.
While the Judicial Council previously announced that it is not within its powers to dissolve the Parliament and that the Iraqi laws and constitution sponsor this issue.
Nazim Abdullah, director of the poultry farmers association, told Kurdsat News that the owners of poultry farms are constantly losing money due to the increase in fodder prices.
"Since last Eid al-Adha, if chickens have been sold in 500 poultry houses and each house has lost 30 million dinars, a total of 15 billion dinars have been lost to poultry farms," Abdullah noted.
He explained that "they have been able to create large number of jobs in poultry farms, so the government and the Ministry of Agriculture should pay more attention to poultry farms to produce domestic poultry, because we scientifically prepare domestic chickens for the markets."
He added that "there are 38 fodder factories in the region, but these factories have not reduced the price of fodder and currently a ton of fodder is $700 in the market, while most of the supplies and food prices in the region have fallen."
When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, grain prices increased globally as it did in the Kurdistan region, however after a while price of most commodities have jumped back to normal.