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Hussein Hamasaleh, a representative of the Summit Foundation for Refugee Affairs in Greece, told Kurdsat English that about 60 migrants were trapped on the island of Caesarea in Greece, trying to go to Italy, and are currently are in the custody of police.
He said the migrants were from the Kurdistan Region, Iran and Afghanistan, and two Russians were arrested that are suspected of being smugglers.
“The migrants have been interrogated and all communication devices have been confiscated. They are likely to be sent back to closed camps around Athens,” Hama Saleh added.
Recently, Greece and Turkey have increased their efforts to detain, and prevent migrants from reaching their shores in an attempt to prevent them from migrate to Europe.
Commenting on the escalating fears of a nuclear disaster or conflict, the ministry made it clear on Thursday that nuclear weapons can only be used in an emergency, Reuters reported.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Ivan Nechayev said that nuclear weapons would only be used to respond to a similar attack or to counter any threat to the country's existence.
Last Tuesday, the Russian Defense Minister confirmed that his country does not intend to use nuclear weapons during its military campaign on Ukrainian soil, describing media speculation about the possible deployment of nuclear or chemical weapons as "utter lies."
As for the possibility of a prisoner exchange between Moscow and Washington, Nechayev indicated that work is underway to implement a prisoner exchange deal between the two parties, pointing out that it is engaged in "quiet diplomacy" with the United States over that potential deal, which may include basketball star, Britney.
Grenier was sentenced on August 4 in Russia to nine years in prison on drug charges, a sentence that US President Joe Biden called "unacceptable." Her attorneys have filed an appeal over her conviction and nine-year Russian prison sentence for drug possession.
The US administration has also repeatedly asserted that Greiner was unjustly detained but at the same time offered to replace her with Victor Bout, a Russian arms dealer serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States.
It is noteworthy that since the start of the Russian military operation on the territory of the western neighbor, Washington has lined up firmly with Kyiv, supporting it with weapons, equipment, and humanitarian aid.
Thousands of sanctions were imposed on Russia, affecting all sectors, the wealthy and politicians, including senior ministers.
He also said that he discussed with Guterres the possible directions for the development of the Ukrainian grain export agreement, noting that during a meeting, they also dealt with what he described as Russian "nuclear blackmail" about the Zaporinha nuclear plant, which Moscow and Kyiv accuse each other of the bombing.
"The United Nations must ensure the security of this strategic objective, its demilitarization and its complete liberation from Russian forces," Zelensky said.
For its part, Anadolu Agency reported that Turkey and Ukraine signed an agreement on the sidelines of Erdogan's visit to rebuild infrastructure.
Earlier today, Erdogan met Zelensky in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv after he arrived in the town in preparation for the tripartite meeting that brings them together with Guterres, according to Anadolu Agency.
On Thursday, the Ukrainian president considered his Turkish counterpart's visit to Lviv, in western Ukraine, a "strong message of support" for his country.
Turkish Trade Minister Mehmet Mus and Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov signed a memorandum of understanding that would see Turkey involved in helping to rebuild Ukrainian infrastructure after the conflict.
"The visit of the President of Turkey to Ukraine is a strong message of support from such an important country," Zelensky wrote on Telegram, noting that he had discussed with his Turkish counterpart the issue of grain exports and the situation at the Zaporizhia nuclear plant.
Guterres, who arrived in Lviv on Wednesday afternoon, plans to visit the Black Sea port of Odesa on Friday, where grain exports have resumed under an UN-brokered deal to ease a worsening global food crisis.
Also, on Saturday, he will go to the Joint Coordination Center in Istanbul, which includes officials from Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and the United Nations who oversee the Black Sea exports of Ukrainian grain and fertilizer.
For its part, Erdogan's office said he would discuss ways to increase grain exports and steps that could be taken to end the war between Ukraine and Russia through diplomatic means.
The office also added that Erdogan would discuss "all aspects" of bilateral relations between Ankara and Kyiv during his meeting with Zelensky.
It is noteworthy that Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement on July 22, brokered by Ankara and the United Nations for four months to re-export grains and fertilizers after stopping the conflict to ease the global food crisis.
The United Nations said it could help facilitate IAEA inspectors' visit to Zaporizhia from Kyiv, but Russia said any visit by inspectors could not take place through the Ukrainian capital because it was too dangerous.
For weeks, Moscow and Kyiv have exchanged accusations about launching attacks on the nuclear plant under Russian control, raising the international community's fears of a catastrophe that may appear in its head if the bombing continues in the vicinity of this site.
The protesters say that their rallying is in support of state institutions and forming the government as soon as possible.
Kurdsat News reporter said that after Sadr Movement leader Muqtada al-Sadr postponed Saturday's million-strong demonstration, the number of striking supporters of the coordination framework has increased. Hundreds of others have joined the rally, and more tents have been erected.
KurdSat News correspondent in Baghdad said, "After Muqtada al-Sadr postponed its planned million-strong protest scheduled for Saturday, more people joined Coordination Framework supporters, and have set up tents in Baghdad."
After nine months, the Iraqi parties have not agreed to form a government. As talks between the parties broke in early June, Muqtada al-Sadr withdrew his MPs from the parliament and instructed his supporters to storm the Iraqi Council of Representatives.
Al-Sadr's rivals have responded by instructing their supporters to go on strike in Baghdad to counter al-Sadr's claim that he is the one who commands the streets.
Despite health problems, 1,517 sick inmates remain in prison due to medical reports that state their conditions to be fit to serve in prison. In the first eight months of this year, 43 political inmates have passed away in Turkish prisons due to various diseases.
Cases of human rights violations in Turkey in March included 148 deaths and 281 incidents of torture or maltreatment, with 51 of them taking place in prisons, where five inmates also died, according to the monthly Rights Violations Report prepared by human rights defender and opposition deputy Sezgin Tanrıkulu, Turkish media reported.
“Turkey’s prisons continue to be centres of ill-treatment and torture. According to the statement made by the Turkish Human Rights Association (İHD) on 29 April 2022, as of April 2022, there are 1517 ill prisoners, 651 of whom are seriously ill,” People’s Democratic Party official website reported.
After the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, the Turkish government has imprisoned thousands of activists, journalists, and politicians on various charges.
Sheikh Hussein Hama Salih, the representative of the Sulaimani-based Summit Foundation, dedicated to migrant and refugee affairs Agency for Refugee Affairs in Greece, told Kurdsat News that "there is no new information about the fate of the migrants whose yacht sank in the Aegean Sea."
"No one from the Kurdistan region has contacted them to say that they are relatives of the migrants," a Summit Foundation representative in Greece noted.
"He said the search for the migrants has been suspended because the Greek government would usually stop the search after 48 to 72 hours of an incident," Hama Salih explained.
He said, "the exact number of missing migrants is unknown and the search requires special divers because the depth of the water at the scene is unknown."
Asked whether any Kurdish citizens were among the missing, the foundation's representative said that there is no information, but no one from the Kurdistan Region has contacted to say that the relatives of the migrants, but among the 29 migrants rescued, there are no Kurds or Iraqis.
Ari Jalal, director of Summit Foundation, said that "they had contacted relevant embassies and authorities regarding the identity of the missing migrants, and they are positive that there are no Kurd or Iraqi nationals among the missing."
A migrant yacht with over 80 passengers on board capsized near the Aegean Island of Karpathos on November 9. Twenty-nine migrants were rescued from drowning, and over 50 others are still missing.
The Mediterranean has become the main route to Europe, and almost all migrants from Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia pass through the Mediterranean to get to Europe. The war in Ukraine has made the other routes from Ukraine and Belarus risky for immigrants.
A US State Department spokesman said that the United States is exchanging its views on Iran's response with the European Union, Middle Eastern allies, and Israel after receiving Iran's comments on the nuclear deal proposal to save the 2015 agreement.
The spokeswoman added that removing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from the terrorist list is outside the Vienna negotiations.
"At the moment, we are studying the 'final proposal' for the deal, and we are consulting with other JCPOA participants and the United States on the way forward," an EU spokeswoman told reporters Tuesday in Brussels.
She refused to give a time frame for any reaction from the European Union, coordinating the negotiations in Vienna.
After 16 months of intermittent and indirect talks between the United States and Iran, during which the European Union shuttled the two sides, a senior EU official said on August 8 that the bloc had made a "final" offer and expected a response within "a few weeks."
Iran responded to the proposal late on Monday, but neither Tehran nor the European Union provided any details on the response's content. Although Iran's foreign ministry hinted at a possible breakthrough.
The Iranian foreign minister called on the United States to show flexibility in resolving the three remaining issues, indicating that Tehran's response would not be final acceptance or rejection.
Washington has said it is ready to agree immediately to restore the one concluded in 2015 based on European Union proposals.
Diplomats and officials told Reuters news agency that whether Tehran and Washington accept the "final" offer from the European Union, it is unlikely that either will declare the agreement a failure because reviving it serves the interests of both parties.
There are significant risks, as failure in the nuclear negotiations risks the outbreak of a new regional war. Iran has warned of a "crushing" response to any Israeli attack if the nuclear deal fails.
Israel and Gulf states have proposed a new deal that curtails Iran's foreign activities in the Middle East and deprives it of its regional hegemony.
In 2018, US President Donald Trump backed away from the nuclear deal he had concluded before he took office, calling it a loss, and re-imposed harsh US sanctions, prompting Iran to start violating restrictions on uranium enrichment.
The recent comments from EU officials regarding a possible agreement between the US and Iran led to decreased oil prices. The EU hopes to bring Iran closer to the West to reduce its dependence on Russian energy, which has caused significant economic prices on the continent.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Kazemi has invited the leaders of the political parties to discuss the political stalemate and solutions to overcome the political crisis at the Council of Ministers building.
Meanwhile, leaders of the Coordination Framework, Sunni and Kurdish parties, and the head of the Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council Fayeq Zeidan are attending the meeting, but Muqtada al-Sadr has boycotted the meeting.
The roundtable meeting is to end the stalemate between the Iraqi political parties that have foiled government formation talks.
According to the Directorate for Combating Organized Crime figures, during 2019, 2020, and 2021, 33 crimes of human organ trafficking, nine crimes of sex trafficking, and 11 cases of trafficking of minors under 18 has been recorded.
One case involving child trafficking and 17 cases of forced labor were recorded by the directorate, along with seven cases of human trafficking and 10 cases involving using people as beggars in the Kurdistan Region.
The Directorate for Combating Human Trafficking was inaugurated in 2018. It has six branches divided over the major administrative divisions of the Kurdistan region.
Recent numbers suggest an increase in the number of human trafficking cases in the past decades. However, according to the KRG’s official website, the number of Human trafficking and organized crime is going down.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said the Israeli strike targeted a Syrian army air defense base in Abu Afsa. It added that Iran-backed fighters are usually in the base.
The regime's media said that Israel carried out an "air attack" with rockets targeting sites in Damascus countryside, pointing out that this bombing coincided with another from the west, targeting some sites south of the coastal governorate of Tartus.
Earlier, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps tested rockets and drones in Syria's Almayadin desert, near the Iraq border.
The regime's air defenses confronted Israeli missiles in the sky of Tartus and the Qalamoun Mountains near the Lebanese border after hearing explosions, the Syrian government-affiliated media reported.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed in a statement, "three members of the regime forces were killed and others were wounded as a result of the Israeli targeting of an air defense base and a radar in the village of Abu Afsa," which is located 5 km south of Tartus city.
The observatory had stated that Israeli strikes targeted "military sites of the regime forces where Iranian militias are present in the southern countryside of Tartous," noting that "violent explosions were heard in the sites."
Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside the regime-controlled areas of Syria over the past years, but it rarely acknowledges or discusses such operations.
However, Tel Aviv has admitted that it targets the bases of pro-Iranian militias, such as the Lebanese Hezbollah.
Tartus is located in western Syria on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, south of Latakia, 250 km north of the capital, Damascus, and 30 km from the Lebanese border.
"They then resorted to burning hospitals, power plants and blowing up towers, just to impose themselves and prevent the formation of a national majority government," al-Iraqi added.
The Fatah coalition, a key party within the Coordination Framework said that "delaying negotiations will lead to chaos in the streets and Iraq’s complete demolition."
"The Sadr movement has now chosen this path [no talks] and no longer believes in dialogue, and is only working to expand the crisis and complicate the situation to impose will, and take over Iraq," the coalition said.
Erbil is a Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) strong hold, and has been hit by rockets several times since the last two years. Most of the attacks were carried out using Katyusha rockets that usually targeted American bases in Erbil. Although, on March 13, multiple ballistic missiles were fired from Iran and shook Erbil. The attack was condemned by the US, and other regional and European powers.
Talks between the Iraqi political parties came to a halt when the supporters of the Sadrist movement stormed the Iraqi parliament when the assembly was about to meet to vote on the candidate for the prime minister and the president.
The parliament has been occupied ever since and al-Sadr has called for fresh elections, a call largely rejected by Coordination Framework parties.
Iranian Foreign Ministry stated, "Only three issues remain between the US and Iran before reaching an agreement, and the US has accommodated two of them, and only guarantees remain.
These developments came as Russia's representative in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, on Sunday hinted at the possibility of reviving the nuclear agreement with Iran.
The Russian official pointed to the possibility of positive developments soon, noting that a consensus on the Iranian nuclear deal is scheduled to be reached early next week.
He also indicated that the European Union coordinators made several amendments to the text presented to Iran and the US, according to the Russian "TASS" agency.
Ulyanov stressed that the final agreement on restoring the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iranian nuclear program might be reached as early as next week in the event of positive events.
After a months-long stalemate, talks resumed last Thursday in the Austrian capital between Iran and the parties to the agreement (Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany).
The talks are being coordinated by the European Union, with the United States indirectly participating.
Iran and the powers affiliated with the agreement began talks to revive it in April 2021, which were suspended for the first time in June. However, after its resumption in November, it was suspended again in mid-March, with points of disagreement remaining between Washington and Tehran, despite significant progress towards achieving the understanding, to return and resume in August.
The European Union has stepped up its efforts to bring Iran and the US closer together to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement as Russia continues to punish the Union by reducing energy flow to the continent. The EU sees Iran as a possible energy alternative for Russia as the war in Ukraine prolongs.
The head of the lawyer’s team of the Badinan prisoners said, "the strikers are in poor health, and the process of moving their cases forward is slow."
Bashdar Hassan, the head of the group of lawyers on behalf of the detainees in Badinan, told Kurdsat News that the prosecutor general had postponed his opinion on the fate of the detainees in Shiladze until Wednesday.
"Psychologist’s report on the detainees causes the delay is not sent to the prosecutor general, and their fingerprints have not been sent to the Criminal Evidence Directorate to determine whether the detainees are wanted elsewhere," Hassan added.
The prosecutor general was scheduled to give his opinion on the release or detention of the detainees, who have been on hunger strike for two weeks and are in poor health.
The Iraqi Army and the PMF forces launched a large-scale operation in Miqdadiya district from four axes to eradicate ISIS sleeper cells and ensure security in the area, the commander of Diyala operations said.
"The operation is based on intelligence received from our agents," Mousavi said, adding that the aim is to drive out ISIL fighters in the Diyala River areas north of Miqdadiya.
A long strip of land between the Peshmerga and Iraqi forces has become a safe haven for remaining ISIS militants. The area is a bare desert land stretching from the middle of Iraq until the Syria border to the northwest. The site is relatively less populated and far from local authorities. ISIS has used the are to recruit and reorganize itself.
Although, a recent agreement between the Iraqi forces and Peshmerga has seen joint commitment to end ISIS presence in the area.
The Chinese Army's Eastern Combat District Command continues its exercises around Taiwan on Tuesday, although it was supposed to end on Sunday, the main focus is now on carrying out "joint siege" and "joint defense" operations, according to a statement.
"The Eastern Combat Command of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) continued to organize joint military exercises in the sea and airspace around Taiwan Island on August 9, focusing on organizing joint blockade and joint defense operations," Beijing said in a statement.
On the other hand, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu confirmed Tuesday that Beijing is using air and sea maneuvers around the island to prepare for its invasion and change the status quo in the Indo-Atlantic region.
"China used maneuvers and military plans to prepare for the invasion of Taiwan," Wu said at a press conference in Taipei, adding that "China's real intention is to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and the entire region."
"It is conducting large-scale military exercises and missile launches, as well as cyberattacks, a disinformation campaign, and economic pressure to demoralize Taiwan," he added.
The Chinese army had organized large-scale exercises using missiles, aircraft, and warships in response to the visit of the US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island.
The exercises began on August 4 in 6 areas in the waters around the island and were supposed to end at noon on August 7, but they continued.
Beijing did not say when the exercises around the island would end, while the Chinese government's Global Times quoted analysts on Monday that the Chinese military drills near Taiwan will become routine and will not stop until the island and mainland China are reunited.
He said, "Excavations in Turkish waters will continue, and we do not need anyone's permission," TRT reported.
He added that the ship would operate 55 kilometers off the Turkish coast in an area outside the waters that Cyprus also claims.
Erdogan also said that "many conspiracies were hatched against our energy exploration projects," stressing Ankara's intention to reduce energy dependence abroad.
He stressed that the new ship, which bears the name "Abdul Hamid Khan," symbolizes Turkey's unique vision in the energy field.
He also indicated that "in the field of energy search, we are present with four exploration ships and two geological survey ships," noting that "the exploration work in Turkish waters will continue, and we do not need anyone's permission."
He announced that "Abdul Hamid Khan's ship will head to the Urukler-1 well, 55 kilometers off the coast of Gazipasa, Antalya," adding that "Uroklar 1 well is the first step in our comprehensive business plan in the Eastern Mediterranean."
The mission of the new ship "Abdul Hamid Khan" may ignite Greece's dispute over gas rights again.
"Athens is monitoring the situation carefully," Reuters reported. "We need to be vigilant ...We've always been doing what we have to do to have stability in our region and to defend international law and our sovereign rights fully," a Greek government spokesperson told Reuters.
As NATO partners Turkey and Greece have long been at odds over gas deposits in the eastern Mediterranean.
Athens accuses Ankara of illegally drilling for gas deposits off the Greek islands. The Turkish government rejects these accusations and considers gas exploration legal as it is disputed with Cyprus.
The War in Ukraine has once again encouraged Turkey to explore energy reserves in the Mediterranean.