World

With the war in Ukraine still raging, Russian President Vladimir Putin travels Tuesday to Tehran for talks with his Iranian and Turkish counterparts on the Syria conflict.

Russia, Turkey and Iran have in recent years met to discuss Syria as part of the so-called “Astana peace process” to end more than 11 years of conflict in the Arab country.

All three are involved in Syria, with Russia and Iran supporting the Damascus regime against its opponents, and Turkey backing rebels.

Tuesday’s summit comes as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to launch a new offensive in northern Syria against Kurdish militants.

Iran, whose President Ebrahim Raisi is hosting the meeting, has already warned that any Turkish military action in Syria could “destabilise the region”.

The Tehran summit will also enable Erdogan to hold his first meeting with Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

The Turkish president has for months been offering to meet the Russian leader in a bid to help resolve heightened global tensions since the war began.

“The timing of this summit is not a coincidence,” Russian analyst Vladimir Sotnikov told AFP.

“Turkey wants to conduct a ‘special operation’ in Syria just as Russia is implementing a ‘special operation’ in Ukraine,” he said.

Turkey has launched waves of attacks on Syria since 2016, targeting Kurdish militias as well as Islamic State group jihadists and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

– Green light? –

Erdogan’s planned military offensive targets Kurdish fighters which Ankara regards as “terrorists”.

They include the US-backed Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which formed a crucial part of an international coalition against the Islamic State group in Syria.

Ankara fears a strong Kurdish presence along its border with Syria will embolden the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which for decades has been waging an insurgency against the Turkish state that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Syria’s government has repeatedly condemned Turkish threats to mount a new incursion.

Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe who specialises in Turkish foreign policy, said Ankara wants the blessing of Moscow and Iran before launching its operation. 

“It’s particularly important because the two potential target regions are under the control of Russia, and Turkey wants to be able to use the airspace… so as to minimise the risks,” he said.

Iran “also has an indirect presence in the region through Shiite militias that it controls”, said Ulgen.

Ultimately, Erdogan is hoping to get “the green light” from Putin and Raisi, he added.

Russia has already expressed the hope that Turkey would “refrain” from launching an attack on Syria.

Iran, whose foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian visited both Ankara and Damascus in recent weeks, has also urged caution.

– ‘Destabilising’ –

Late last month, Iran’s top diplomat said in Ankara that “we understand that… maybe a special operation might be needed”.

“Turkey’s security concerns must be tackled fully and permanently.”

Days later, Amir-Abdollahian said in Damascus that Turkish military action in Syria “would be a destabilising element in the region”.

Mazloum Abdi, chief commander of the YPG-linked Syrian Democratic Forces, has urged Russia and Iran to restrain Turkey.

“We hope (the attacks) will not take place and that the Kurds… will not be forsaken during the talks between the big powers,” he said.

The SDF has warned that an invasion by Ankara would undermine efforts to combat Islamic State group jihadists in Syria’s northeast.

Nicholas Heras of the Newlines Institute said Iran and Russia “want to prevent another Turkish military campaign in Syria”.

“Iran is building a presence in and around Aleppo that concerns Turkey, and Russia is for all intents and purposes ceding ground to Iran throughout Syria,” he added.

For Iranian political analyst Ahmad Zeidabadi, “new differences” have emerged between Russia, Iran and Turkey following the Ukraine war.

This and an “uncertain future”, he said, means the three leaders will try to “coordinate” their views on Syria to avoid further tensions.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday marked the 80th anniversary of the wartime round-up of Jews in France by calling for redoubled vigilance against the growing anti-Semitism in the country.

Macron delivered his speech at the former railway station in Pithiviers, 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of Paris, where 8,100 French Jews, including 4,400 children, were deported to Auschwitz.

Also attending the ceremony were some of the few survivors of those deported on the convoys sent to the Nazi camp.

“Eight decades ago, Vichy France betrayed these children by delivering thousands of them to their executioners,” said Macron, referring to the French wartime regime that collaborated with the Nazi occupiers.

“It is the duty of France, to be true to itself, to recognize this and to concede nothing to this contemporary fight against anti-Semitism.”

On July 16 and 17, French police rounded up 13,000 Jews in Paris and its suburbs on the orders of the Nazis.

The incident has become known as the Vel d’Hiv round-ups because many of those arrested, including the elderly and sick, were initially held at the Velodrome d’Hiver, a cycle racing track in Paris’s 15th arrondissement. 

From there, they were taken to camps at Pithiviers and other locations then onto the Nazi concentration camps. Only a few dozen ever returned.

– ‘Dark hours’ – 

“We are not done with antisemitism, and we must make a lucid assessment of it,” said Macron.

“This anti-Semitism is even more burning, rampant, than it was in 1995, in our country, in Europe, and in so many places in the world,” he stressed.

Macron was referring back to the words of one of his predecessors Jacques Chirac, who in 1995 acknowledged France’s responsibility for the Vel d’Hiv round ups.

“These dark hours stain our history forever,” said Chirac in a landmark speech. “On that day, France accomplished the irreparable”.

After Chirac, Francois Hollande went further during his presidency, speaking in a 2012 speech of a crime “committed in France, by France”.

Then in 2017 Macron, newly elected as president, reaffirmed France’s responsibility for the round-up in a speech marking its 75th anniversary and in the presence of then Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Macron was himself criticised for saying in 2018 that France’s Philippe Petain, who headed the Vichy regime, had been a “great soldier” during World War I, even if he had subsequently made “fatal choices”.

– ‘Persistent’ anti-Semitism –

On Sunday Macron warned that in the modern world anti-semitism “can take on other faces, drape itself in other words, other caricatures”.

“But the odious anti-Semitism is there, it prowls around, always alive, persistent, stubborn, coming back”, he continued, citing “terrorist barbarity”, “murders and crimes”, resurgences on “social networks” and the desecration of graves.

It is found, the French leader added, in debates on television, “It plays on the complacency of certain political forces. It also thrives on a new form of historical revisionism, even negationism,” he said.

He did not make any direct reference to far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, who had argued that Petain had “saved” French Jews.

That claim is contested by most historians, who point to the wartime leader’s well-documented anti-Semitism.

Pithiviers railway station, which has not served passengers since the end of the 1960s, has been converted into a memorial to the Holocaust which opened earlier this month.

“This station is the place where the French event becomes European genocide,” said Jacques Fredj, the director of the Shoah Memorial, which commemorates the French deportations.

“It is a place of memory unique in France.”

Texas state lawmakers on Sunday slammed law enforcement’s slow response to the shooting in Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, saying more decisive action could have saved lives.

A total of 376 officers — border guards, state police, city police, local sheriff departments and elite forces — responded to the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School, members of the southern US state’s House of Representatives said in a preliminary report.

But, the lawmakers charged, the situation was “chaotic” due to the officers’ “lackadaisical approach” to subduing the gunman.

Seventy-three minutes elapsed between the first officers’ arrival and the shooter’s death, an “unacceptably long period of time.”

“The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life,” the report said.

While the report acknowledged it was likely that most of the victims died immediately after the first shots were fired, some died while being transferred to the hospital. 

“It is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue,” the report said.

According to the text, which does not incriminate certain police teams over others, law enforcement officers “failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.”

Steve McCraw, Texas’s public safety chief, has previously described the police response to the attack as an “abject failure,” focusing most of his criticism on Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo.

Arredondo, who has been suspended pending the investigation result, “did not assume his preassigned responsibility of incident command” and made analytical errors because he did not have all the necessary information, the Texas lawmakers said.

But no other officers offered to help or replace him, the report said. “There was an overall lackadaisical approach by law enforcement at the scene.”

“The scene was chaotic, without any person obviously in charge or directing the law enforcement response.”

The lawmakers presented their findings to the victims’ relatives, who have for weeks denounced a lack of transparency from authorities regarding the shooting and accused them of seeking to cover up police failures in the case.

After the report was published, local media reported that Uvalde police lieutenant Mariano Pargas had been suspended while the city investigated his role in the shooting response.

Pargas was acting city police chief the day of the attack.

Public criticism of Texas authorities surged last week after the release of surveillance camera video obtained by local media.

The footage shows the shooter arriving at Robb Elementary school with a semi-automatic rifle and the officers’ long wait in the hallway before finally breaching the classroom where the gunman was holed up.

On a hot Sunday afternoon in New York, the epicenter of the US monkeypox outbreak, a long line of men aged 20 to 40 wait for a vaccine to protect themselves and their loved ones against the virus.

With its rows of tables and chairs and stacks of medical equipment, the vaccination center — a high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn — is reminiscent of a vaccine spot for Covid-19, a virus for which New York was also the US epicenter.

Everyone who spoke to AFP while waiting in line said they felt lucky to have gotten an appointment, as New York lacks doses. On Friday, 9,200 time slots became available on the city’s dedicated website at 6:00 pm.

They were all gone in seven minutes.

Three days earlier, site traffic was so high that the page crashed.

“It was frustrating, largely because especially with Covid, you’d think that we would have more of a structured process or vaccine rollout,” Aidan Baglivo, 23, told AFP. “There just wasn’t really anything.”

– ‘Shouldn’t be an issue’ –

The city of more than eight million people saw monkeypox infections climb last week, with 461 cases recorded Friday since the US outbreak began in May.

That number is up from 223 cases on Monday.

Baglivo, a data analyst, noted that people who are the most connected on social media have the highest chances of getting a vaccine appointment.

Robert, who declined to give his last name, told AFP he sat at his computer refreshing the website “like a crazy person” until he got a slot.

“This shouldn’t be an issue because there’s already a vaccine, and it (the rollout) should be… more efficient to prevent it from becoming more of an issue,” said the 28-year-old. Neither his partner nor his best friend have been able to get a vaccine.

“Every additional day where there’s not more people being vaccinated is a bummer.”

Anyone can catch monkeypox, which spreads through close physical contact, but the Jynneos vaccine is currently reserved for men who have sex with men, who make up the vast majority of cases.

Many LGBTQ people, of which there is a large population in New York, worry their community will be further stigmatized because of the virus.

– ‘Important to be proactive’ –

Nathan Tylutki, a 42-year-old actor, wonders if “there would be a quicker response to developing more vaccines if it wasn’t affecting queer people.”

In his opinion, there isn’t a lot of anti-vaccine sentiment in the LGBTQ community “because we’ve seen disease, we know what the AIDS epidemic” was like.

“We know that it’s important to be proactive about these kinds of things,” he told AFP.

Monkeypox is characterized by lesions on the skin — which can appear on the genitals or the mouth  — and is often accompanied by fever, sore throat and pain in the lymph nodes. It usually clears up on its own but can be extremely painful.

New York, on the US East Coast, has already either administered or scheduled 21,500 vaccines and hopes to speed up the process, promising more than 30,000 jabs for the whole state.

But due to a lack of doses, the Bushwick site is not expected to reopen Monday.

City health commissioner Ashwin Vasan said Sunday that New York needs tens of thousands more vaccines.

In line at the Bushwick site, fitness instructor Leroy Jackson has another concern.

“I am one of maybe two or three Black people on this line” out of more than 100, said the 27-year-old.

Access to appointments for minorities and underprivileged groups is even more limited, he pointed out.

Russian police on Sunday detained journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, who in March interrupted a live TV broadcast to denounce the military action in Ukraine, her lawyer said.

No official statement has been made, but her detention comes a few days after 44-year-old Ovsyannikova demonstrated alone near the Kremlin holding a placard criticising Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin.

“Marina has been detained,” her entourage said in a message posted on the journalist’s Telegram account. “There is no information on where she is.”

The message included three photos of her being led by two police officers to a white van, after apparently having been stopped while cycling.

Her lawyer, Dmitri Zakhvatov, confirmed her arrest to the Ria-Novosti news agency, saying he did not know where Ovsyannikova had been taken.

“I assume that it is linked one way or another to her act of protest,” he added.

In March Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One television, barged onto the set of its flagship Vremya (Time) evening news programme, holding a poster reading “No War” in English.

On Friday, Ovsyannikova posted photos of herself on Telegram showing her near the Kremlin and carrying a protest placard raising the deaths of children and denouncing Putin as a “killer”.

Declarations of this kind expose her to criminal prosecution for publishing “false information” about and “denigrating” the army, offences that can carry heavy prison sentences.

Ovsyannikova became internationally famous overnight in March when she staged her live TV protest. Pictures of her interrupting the broadcast went around the world.

She was briefly detained and then released with a fine, but while a number of international observers praised her protest, it was not universally acclaimed by Russia’s opposition.

Some critics said that she had spent years working for a channel, Pervy Kanal, which they said was effectively a mouthpiece for the Kremlin.

In the months following her March protest, Ovsyannikova spent some time abroad, including a brief period working for the German newspaper Die Welt.

In early July, she announced that she was returning to Russia to settle a dispute over the custody of her children.

Barbs flew and derisive laughter rang out as the Conservative contenders battling to succeed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson clashed in a live TV debate Sunday, heading into a pivotal week for the acrimonious race.

Rising global temperatures were among the policy areas under contention after Britain’s climate minister, COP26 president Alok Sharma, threatened to resign if the winner retreats from the government’s “net zero” target.

With Britain facing a record-breaking heatwave this week and dire warnings of loss of life, only frontrunner Rishi Sunak pledged to maintain green taxes to help pay for the legally enshrined aim of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Former finance minister Sunak was repeatedly assailed by the four other contenders in the ITV debate, the second of three before the two finalists are submitted to Tory rank-and-file members who will decide their new leader by September 5. 

But he shot back with some of the debate’s most wounding lines, attacking Foreign Secretary Liz Truss for her promises of a borrowing binge to fund tax cuts and help ease a cost-of-living crisis.

“This something-for-nothing economics isn’t conservatism, it’s socialism,” he said.

– Sunak blamed for inflation –

Sunak also attacked Truss for her political U-turns down the years, from being a Liberal Democrat to becoming a Tory, and from campaigning for UK membership of the European Union in 2016 to enthusiastically backing Brexit today.

“I was just wondering which one you regretted most?” he queried.

An hour before the debate, Sunak posted a new campaign video shot in vintage black-and-white style to remind Tories about how he went against the party leadership early on to support Brexit — drawing a pointed contrast to Truss.

But the wealthy Sunak faced tough questioning about his tax affairs, his earlier possession of a Green Card for US residency, and his wife’s prior status as a “non-domiciled” resident of Britain who was shielded from UK taxes.

Truss sought to blame Sunak for Britain’s surging inflation and insisted on her own personal integrity. “I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” she said.

The leadership race was triggered after Johnson was forced to announce his resignation in the face of a cabinet revolt sparked in large part by Sunak, following months of scandal. 

The debate came after a survey of Tory members gave a surprise double-digit lead to outsider Kemi Badenoch.

Truss was second, narrowly ahead of former grassroots favourite Penny Mordaunt and Sunak, according to the unscientific poll by the ConservativeHome website.

– ‘Nonsense’ –

Badenoch and Mordaunt angrily clashed at the ITV debate about transgender rights. 

Mordaunt, who was briefly Britain’s first woman defence secretary before she was fired by Johnson, pushed back against claims that she was lying over her position about rights for transgender women — a hot-button issue on the Tory right.

Mordaunt said the attacks were “unedifying”, adding: “All attempts to paint me as an out-of-touch individual will fail.” 

Badenoch, a former junior minister with no cabinet experience, is running on an “anti-woke”, right-wing platform and has said the net zero goal amounts to “unilateral economic disarmament” by Britain. 

Mordaunt claimed that polling showed she was the only one of the contenders who could beat opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer in a general election — which in fact is not borne out by every survey.

The other candidates hooted in derision. Sunak said “that’s simply not true” and backbencher Tom Tugendhat shouted “nonsense”. 

On Monday, Conservative MPs will hold another round of balloting to eliminate the bottom-placed candidate — likely to be Tugendhat — before arriving at the final two by Wednesday.

Then the last two standing will appear before grassroots members across the country at a series of hustings, explaining why they are best positioned to confront challenges including the economic crisis and the war in Ukraine.

They must also heal Tory wounds inflicted by the numerous controversies of Johnson’s premiership.

All five contenders were asked to raise their hands if they would agree to have Johnson in their cabinet. None did.