Director of General Board for Kurdistani Areas Outside the Region, Fahmi Burhan welcomes the decision of the High Committee for the Implementation of Article 140, which requires restoring land to the Kurds and Turkmens in the disputed territories.

The director hoped that the Arabization contracts will be canceled, in an interview with KurdSat. The contracts have denied the rights of Kurdish farmers to farm their lands in the area.

He added that they support any efforts and decisions that lead to the return of land to Kurds, Turkmens and all indigenous communities of Kirkuk.

They had been confiscated by the fall of the Ba'ath regime for whatever reason and given to others, the director noted.

He said the directive of the High Committee for the Implementation of Article 140 is a good step and hope that the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture to work seriously on it and go into effect.

General Board for Kurdistani Areas Outside the Region is a KRG department responsible for monitoring the situation of the disputed territories between the Kurdistan region and the federal government.

Shaqlawa district in Erbil is considered one of the oldest Christian-inhabited places in the Kurdistan region. The cities have old and new churches for Christians. 

The Betirma neighborhood is a predominantly Christian Street in the city, as they have lived there for over 18 centuries. Shaqlawa Muslims and Christians enjoy friendly relations and would participate in each other’s festivities and funerals. Every year the Christians in Shaqlawa celebrate Christmas with many activities. 

The Betirma Neighborhood in Shaqlawa were most Christians live

"We are from Shaqlawa and were born here, and there is no difference between us and our Muslim brothers and sisters, we attend each other’s funerals and celebrations, and we are all like siblings," a Christian woman in Shaqlawa told KurdSat English.

There are no differences between us, we are all siblings, and we, as Kurds of Shaqlawa, have no problem at all, but the public services in the city do not meet our needs, a Shaqlawa Muslim said. 

Following the ISIS onslaught on parts of Iraq, many Iraqi Christians left the country for Europe or elsewhere, but most of those who live in the Kurdistan region chose to stay in their native homes as it offers them security and prosperity, commentators say. 

News of the Islamic Republic disbanding its morality police went viral yesterday as it quickly put the pieces together for the situation in the protest-hit country.  The morality police are usually cited as the main drive behind the months-long unrest; however, news of its abolition was a wrong interpretation of a statement from Iran prosecutor general Mohammad Jafar Montazeri.

Montazeri said that the Guidance Patrol wasn't Judiciary's business, but the police's, the police launched it and ended it themselves. The police patrol to monitor the hijab code is a program launched by the reports to the interior ministry's police department. Iran's top prosecutor seemed to distance himself from the Guidance Patrol, the eschewed police program that has sent tens of thousands of Iranians to the streets.

New York-based Iranian historian, and Iran affairs expert Arash Azizi tweeted, "There is some evidence that some inside the regime are debating whether to relax, change, re-package or do something to the Hijab laws although Khamenei is very unlikely to concede anything on this front."

"Montazeri did say they launched it and they shut it themselves so this is why the world media has been quick to report that the GP has been shut," the Azazi added.

 

Azizi also notes the state media worked to backtrack on the issue. "Although the Berlin Wall did also come down based on an official uttering something in the middle of a presser!"

Parliament Member of the Domestic Affairs Committee Jalal Rashidi Koochi said, "I have heard that the Guidance Patrol will have no place in the new plan being prepared by the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution," Azizi reported.

The dissolution, if were true, could have encouraged protestors to persist in protesting, creating the belief that demonstrations would force the regime to further concessions, but that is precisely what Tehran works to avoid. Protests would lead nowhere; the Islamic Republic wants to remind people. 

 

Nihad was a 21-year-old university student who initially escaped the blast but returned to the burning building to save his cat; he managed to keep the cat but lost his life in the flame. 

Nihad’s cat survived with a bit of burn on her fur. On November 22, a gas tank exploded in Duhok’s Grebasy neighborhood at a building that housed a bakery and a dormitory that killed two students and four police officers.

His family went to the destroyed dorm in tears to bring Nihad’s cat back home and wished that Nihad had stayed alive. His roommates talked of Nihad as a kind person who loved to help others.

Petting cats in the Kurdistan region is a new phenomenon, and cats were previously looked at as doomed, filthy creatures. 

One of Nihad's roommates sorrowfully hugging Nihad's cat after the gas leak blast. 

 

Arab leaders will meet today, Tuesday, in a summit hosted by Algeria, the first in 3 years, with the continuing divisions over the conflicts in the region, especially in Syria and Libya, as well as the normalization of some countries' relations with Israel. Algeria joined the pack of countries that normalized their relations with Israel.  The Arab League does not recognize Israel and boycotts the country and instructs its members to do so. 

 

KurdSat's reporter in Algeria, Bestun Salam, said, "Iraqi President Dr. Latif Rashid would work to bring Algeria and other Arab states together, following discontent between Arab Nations." 

 

"Iraq has many unsettled issues with its neighboring Arabi countries, to which President Rashid seeks to address," Salam said. 

Traditionally, Iraq has played a mediating role between the region's countries for its position at the heart of the Middle East and a leadership that views unity as an answer to violence. 

Algeria prepared to host the Arab Summit by tightening security measures, raising the flags of countries and displaying the historical monuments of the participating countries.

According to Algerian media, 17 Arab leaders are expected to participate in the Summit that will be held in Algeria on the first and second of November, which will be held under the slogan "Reunion".

Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman would not attend the Summit for health reasons. The Algerian presidency has said that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will not participate in an upcoming Arab summit in Algeria on doctors' recommendations to avoid travel.

 

The Palestinian presidency said, on Monday, that the Arab Summit in Algeria on Tuesday and Wednesday is the Summit of Palestine and Arab unity.

Presidential spokesperson Nabil Rudeineh added, in a statement, that the Summit will send a clear message to the world that Palestine and its cause is the central issue of the Arab nation, which always stands by the Palestinian right and supports it by all means, according to the official Palestinian News Agency.  "The Summit represents a strong message of support for the Palestinian people in defending their rights and sanctities, the spokesperson said. 

Nabil's remarks cast a shadow on Israeli diplomatic victories with some Arab countries, including Algeria, which now hosts the first Arab Summit after two years. It sends the message that Arab leaders consider the normalization of ties with Israel normal.

In 2022, Iraq passed a law that criminalized all relations with Israel; the law strongly rejected the normalization of ties with Israel, and some Iraqi leaders asked other Arab states to follow suit.

The League of Arab States, which includes 22 countries, held its last Summit in March 2019 in Tunisia before the outbreak of the "Covid-19" epidemic. Since then, several member states of the Arab League, which historically have backed the Palestinians and condemned Israel, have. Its top priority is the remarkable normalization with Israel.

 

The UAE normalized its relations with Israel in 2020 within the framework of a series of agreements negotiated by Washington, followed by Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan followed suit.

Arab Food Security Strategy

The Algerian News Agency said that the Arab foreign ministers' meeting was concluded with a discussion of a draft resolution on Arab national food security and a draft resolution on the work emanating from the meeting of the Economic and Social Council.

The Assistant Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, Hossam Zaki, confirmed that during their preparatory meeting, the Arab foreign ministers reached "agreements" on the issues on the Summit's agenda, which he considered "indicators that herald a successful summit in Algeria." According to the Algerian News Agency.

Earlier, the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, hoped that "the summit will witness the inauguration of the Arab food security strategy... at a time when there is an urgent need for integrated and collective action to confront the dangerous food gap that the Arab world suffers from," he said.

Egyptian Jordanian Iraqi meeting

 

Egypt, Jordan and Iraq affirmed continued cooperation and coordination within the tripartite cooperation framework to serve the three countries' common interests.

 

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Ayman Safadi, and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Fouad Hussein, met on Monday, on the sidelines of the preparatory meetings for the Arab Summit in Algeria, Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

 

Today, Monday, the semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted the Tehran judiciary head as saying about 1,000 people have been charged with "acts of sabotage in the recent events, including assaulting or killing security guards, and setting fire to public property," and will be tried publicly this week, as the authorities intensify their efforts to crackdown on weeks-long protests.

The mass indictments are the governments answer to international reports on the Islamic Republics human rights violations amid the country-wide unrest. International female figures, including former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Canada's Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and media tycoon Oprah Winfrey as well as Nobel laureates Kurdish Nadia Murad, and Malala Yousafzai called for expulsion of Islamic Republic from the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

Video published online shows Tehran University students stoning security guards inside Tehran University, and chanting “death to the dictator,” a reference to Iranian Supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

On Saturday, the Revolutionary Guards explicitly called on the protesters to stay away from the streets. Iranian leaders have described the protests as a plot by the Islamic Republic's enemies, the United States and Israel.

The Iranian authorities are waging a bloody crackdown to quell the unrest. On Sunday, Hengaw Human Rights Organization reported a 16-year-old boy who was shot at point-blank range in Oraz Square in Western Kurdish city of Piranshahr, later giving in to his wounds.

More than eleven Iranian cities witnessed noisy night-time protests on Sunday evening. These nighttime protests, are underway mostly in Iranian Kurdish cities. Unrest of Sanandaj, Saqqez, and Mahabad among other cities, erupted despite warnings from the Revolutionary Guards, and firing by riot police and Basij elements, the voluntary paramilitary popular force.

Weeks of protests in Iran have entered their seventh week, defying warnings from the Revolutionary Guards, as students faced tear gas, beatings and gunfire from riot police and Basij forces.

According to the Iranian Human Rights Organization, elements of the Iranian security and Basij stormed the campuses of several universities in the country to suppress the protesters and arrested a number of them.

The death of Zhina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish girl from Saqqez at the custody of morality police led to nationwide protests, the longest since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Sources close to Twitter revealed that Elon Musk plans to start laying off employees at Twitter beginning Saturday, according to four people familiar with the matter who told the New York Times, and explained that he asked some managers to prepare a layoff list.

The Guardian reported that Twitter's new owner plans to cut 75 percent of the company's staff. According to the Washington Post, job cuts are expected across the company, no matter who is in charge.

Three sources said Musk, who closed a $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter on Thursday, ordered cuts across the company, with some departments shrinking more than others, but the size of the layoffs was not specified, as Twitter has about 7,500 employees.

Reports of layoffs have surfaced since Musk agreed to buy the company in April. The billionaire, who also directs the electric car giant Tesla and rocket maker SpaceX, told investors he would take Twitter, reduce its workforce, review content rules, and look for new revenue streams. Twitter won't be "Free-for-All Hellscape,' Addressing Advertisers' Concerns, Musk said earlier.

Twitter employees will be laid off before November 1st when employees are scheduled to receive stock grants as part of their compensation. These grants usually represent a significant portion of employees' salaries.

By laying off workers before that date, Musk could avoid paying these grants even though he is supposed to pay employees in cash instead of their stock under the terms of the agreement.

Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management CEO Ross Gerber said Musk family office chief Jared Birchall told him layoffs were coming on Twitter. "I was told to expect somewhere that about 50 percent of the people will be laid off," he added.

Gerber added that his company invested less than $1 million to help fund Musk's acquisition of Twitter.

Musk, 51, has moved quickly since taking ownership of Twitter on Thursday. He arrived at the company's San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday and began meeting employees. Late Thursday, he fired the company's chief executive officer, chief financial officer, and other executives. He also made a plea to advertisers, who provide the bulk of Twitter's revenue, to tell them that the platform would be a respected advertising destination.

But Musk may take time to evaluate other sections of Twitter, such as deciding which posts to follow and remove on the site.

While he initially said he wanted Twitter to be a place free of all kinds of comments and would bring back banned users, including former President Donald Trump, Musk made clear on Friday that such changes would not happen immediately.

Instead, he announced that he plans to set up a board to deal with content questions and will not immediately reinstate banned users.

It is unlikely that Musk would pay the gold sums to be received by the top Twitter executives who were dismissed.

Under the merger agreement, those executives, including Paraj Agrawal, the chief executive, were set to receive compensation ranging from $20 million to $60 million if fired.

But Musk fired the executives for a "cause," meaning he did so with justification, which could invalidate that agreement, two people familiar with the matter said.

One person said those executives, including former chief financial officer Ned Segal, former general counsel Sean Edgett, and former top policy and law executive Vijaya Jade, are considering their next steps.

Musk is also testing Twitter engineers. Three people familiar with the matter said he and his team had been tasked with completing some projects. One of the projects, they said, included changes to the Twitter login screen. They added that some engineers worked late Friday night to complete the tasks.

Watch a video version of this analysis here

Rising anti-Semitism among Christian nationalists, together with Evangelicals, the mainstay of US grassroots support for Israel, threatens to drive a wedge between the community and Israel.

The threat of a fracture in relations is magnified by an assertion by Focus on Western Islamism that Republicans and Evangelicals are teaming up with alleged Islamists in America’s culture wars.

Focus on Western Islamism is a far-right website published by Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum, a think tank that supports the Israeli hard right.

Describing a recent protest by conservative Muslims and Christians in Dearborn, Michigan, an Arab American heartland, against the presence of books with sexually explicit content in public schools, Matthew Deperno, the Republican candidate for the state’s attorney general in next month’s midterm elections, said, “you’re probably seeing a shift in the Republican Party.”

Muslim and Christian leaders hailed the protest as conservatives in both groups uniting against liberals and leftists in what amounted to abandoning what was long alleged to be a 'Red-Green' alliance between Islamists and the left, a reference to Democrats.

Sam Westrop, the director of the Forum’s Islamist Watch, lamented in a lengthy Forum article that the Muslim-Christian protest in Dearborn was not an isolated incident.

“Increasingly, the Right’s approach to Islam and Islamism is changing,” Mr. Westrop said.

The rising anti-Semitism and the teaming up of Muslim and Christian conservatives could also put daylight between Israel and segments of the American Jewish community if Israel continuously gives onerous Christian nationalist attitudes a pass or, even worse, supports the community despite its anti-Semitic facets.

In a twist of irony, United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed expressed concern that former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu may include a far-right, racist political party in a coalition government if he wins next week’s elections and succeeds in putting an alliance together.

Bin Zayed has not shied away from emboldening attitudes akin to the thinking of Focus on Western Islamism and the Middle East Forum in the UAE’s effort to suppress any expression of political Islam or an interpretation of the faith that does not command absolute obedience to the ruler.

Islamic scholar Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, a faculty member of Zaytuna College, argued in a lengthy paper that former President Donald J. Trump was the lesser of evils as far as Muslims are concerned.

The California-based college’s president, Hamza Yusuf, is a prominent American Muslim leader and scholar, a member of the UAE’s Supreme Fatwa Council, and one of the main propagators of the Emirates' autocratic form of moderate Islam.

Controversially, Mr. Yusuf was a member of the Trump administration’s Commission on Unalienable Rights.

Westrop points not only to UAE-backed Muslim conservatives without mentioning their Emirati connections but also to Qatar, which he describes as “an Islamist government” that funds the American right.

There is a precedent for Israel, particularly Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister and the most dominant and polarizing political figure of his generation, either joining the Christian nationalist and Republican fray or looking the other way when anti-Semitism is in play.

The former prime minister had no compunction about acting hand in hand with the American right and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban campaigning with anti-Semitic overtones against Hungarian-born American Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, because of his liberal or leftist leanings.

Netanyahu also had no qualms about Orban’s rewriting of Hungary’s World War Two history, which included rehabilitating anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi wartime figures as anti-communist icons.

To be fair, Netanyahu vocally opposed when he was in office a Polish law that made it illegal to accuse the Polish nation or state of complicity in Nazi German crimes.

Netanyahu’s Likud is poised to emerge as Israel’s largest political party in next week’s election, the country’s fifth in four years. Still, he may find it challenging to build a governing coalition as he battles corruption charges and confronts mounting criticism of his willingness to work with Otzma Yehudit or Jewish Power, a rapidly growing far-right racist party.

Netanyahu's willingness to opportunistically back a tainted attack on someone of Jewish descent because of a political disagreement raises tantalizing questions about how, if he makes a successful comeback, he will deal with, for example, Sweden's new government that a party with roots in neo-Nazism supports.

The Sweden Democrats, who helped the new conservative government secure a majority in parliament without being rewarded with Cabinet representation, have insisted that the party has put its past behind it.

But earlier this month, Rebecka Fallenkvist, the 26-year-old head of the party’s television programming, called Anne Frank "immoral" and "horniness itself" in an Instagram post that was later deleted.

Ms. Frank was an acclaimed Dutch Jewess, who documented in a diary life in hiding under Nazi persecution, until the Germans killed her in 1944,

Days later, Ms. Fallenkvist celebrated her party’s electoral success in Swedish with the words “Helg Seger’ which means weekend victory but sounds like ‘Sieg Heil,’ the Nazi greeting.

The party quickly moved Fallenkvist from her publicly visible job to its administrative office in parliament, likely to play a role in the mechanics of the Sweden Democrats’ parliamentary support for the new conservative government.

Israel’s reluctance to firmly confront Christian nationalism for the anti-Semitic attitudes of some of its most prominent proponents casts a shadow over its battle against the racist anti-Jewish attitude, a foreign policy priority.

To be sure, Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, Ziv Nevo Kulman, condemned Fallenkvist’s remarks. He warned that “unfortunately, there are many more bad weeds that must be uprooted." It was unclear if he was referring to the Sweden Democrats or anti-Semitism in general.

Nevertheless, the Israeli reluctance takes on added significance given that Christian nationalism is no longer a fringe movement within the Republican Party. On the contrary, a recent poll suggested that a majority of Republicans believe that the United States should break with its constitutionally mandated secularism to declare itself a Christian nation.

The Republican’s Christian nationalist sentiment contrasts starkly with other results of the poll that showed that more than 60 percent of Americans favor religious pluralism and oppose the United States identifying itself as a Christian nation.

The problem for Israel is that its identity as a Jewish state means it is not fundamentally opposed to a state defining itself in religious terms.

Israel's problem is the anti-Semitism of many proponents of Christian nationalism, even if the trend’s discriminatory attitude is akin to Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.

In addition, Christian nationalists are likely to be prominent in the next US Congress, irrespective of whether Republicans win a majority in next month’s mid-term elections.

One Israeli litmus test may be what happens if Christian nationalists are flagged in a proposed joint Israeli-European project that would monitor anti-Semitism on social networks as part of a global coalition against anti-Semitism.

“We are not necessarily speaking about a structured coalition with defined criteria and a legal framework… We would rather unite all interested partners in a looser coalition committed to the same values of battling anti-Semitism in all its forms,” said Shuli Davidovich, the head of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Bureau for World Jewish Affairs and World Religions.

Even so, Israel may find it increasingly difficult to reconcile the Jewish state’s raison d’etre as the protector of Jews and a safe haven with giving a pass to a Republican Party that tolerates anti-Semitic expression.

During drought, a Kurdish rain ritual called Bûke Baranê, "Rain Bride," is performed in Kurdistan. Young girls and boys originally performed the custom.

Children in the past fifty have largely performed Bride of the Rain. In the ritual, young girls or children carry a wooden doll dressed in a Kurdish woman's costume and sing songs asking her to make rain.

They usually take the wooden doll door to door, and people would respond by splashing water on it and giving the children treats and gifts.

There are different versions of the song; the most common one includes the following in Central Kurdish;

"Bûke baranê, awî bin dexlanê," O the rain-bride! O, the water that runs underneath crops!

"Bûke barane awî dewê," Rain-bride needs water.

"Awî naw dexlanî dewê," she wants the water for crops.

"Heyaran û meyaran," O beloved ones, our beloved ones.

"Xwaye bîkayte baran," O God make rain. "Bo feqir û hejaran," for the poor and the needy.

This song may vary from region to region and from dialect to dialect.

French orientalist Thomas Bois, who travelled across Kurdistan and wrote extensively about Kurds, notes that "children make a sort of doll of two pieces of wood in the shape of a Latin cross," which "they dress up and put a turban on its head," in his description of the "Bride of the Rain" ritual.

Then they go from house to house singing: pomegranate and jam, God let the rain fall, for the sick and the poor, God allow the rainfall, bald head of the spring, O Bride of the Rain, spray water the crops, give us meals of past days, Bois explains.

Kurdish Jews also performed the custom, but instead of an effigy, a real human woman would play the role of Bûke Baranê; sometimes, a boy would replace the girl. Those who accompanied Bûke Baranê would clap and sing; our bride is beautiful, beautiful! Our bride seeks rain, O, God, she wants food. And where is the remedy for the bridegroom?

As they went from house to house, each house owner poured water on the rainbride and offered food as a gift to their company. Bûke-Baranê custom among Kurds has its roots in Mithraic rituals associated with Anahita, the Indo-Iranian goddess of water.

The doll is an effigy of Anahita, the guardian angel of springs and water, and a symbol of fertility, friendship and love. According to Manya Saadi-Nejad, "the earliest material evidence specifically relating to Anahita date from the Median Period. Their Achaemenid successors inherited many of their royal rituals.

Diakonov attributes the rock tomb to the Median ruler Uvaxshtra I, "Cyaxares I" at Qizqapan, near Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, which has divine symbols carved upon the entryway; these may represent the triad of Ahura Mazda, Anahita, and Mithra attested later during the Achaemenid period."

The tradition of women soaking themselves in water to bring rain existed in Kurdistan in various forms in the event of a drought.

Bois writes, "women go to the well where they help washing each other." Or clothed in their finest dresses, they assemble in the shade of an old venerable tree where they pour water over one another's clothes and go back to their homes completely soaked.

Bois writes, "the women in the streets of Kirkuk collect rain-water in a spout, and after serving a meal to the poor, they poor are drenched with water from the spout."

The ritual helps explain the Kurdish people's deep roots in Kurdistan and the Middle East, as one of the earliest people that inhabited the landmass thousands of years ago. As they dwelled in geography for a long time, they developed customs and traditions that reflect their geography. The geography of the Kurdistan region has distinctive dry and wet seasons, as for months, little or no precipitation is seen during late spring, summer and early fall, evidencing that the "Buke Baranê" ritual is native to the Kurds and Kurdistan.

 

A Buke Baranê

Children celebrating rainfall in Kurdistan

Kurdish man splashes water on "Buke Baranê," Bride rain as a gesture of goodwill and celebration of rainfall

 

The Initiative: Sulaimani-based IQ internet service provider has announced "The Silk Route Transit (SRT)." The transit is "a strategic fiber optic project in Iraq and the region," per the company’s website. IQ explained that the company works "to make Iraq a transit hub, linking Iraq’s neighboring countries to the worldwide global fiber optic network."

"[to] act as the path of least resistance between Europe and Asia, fulfilling a long dream of ours to cement Iraq as a major network hub in the region," read the company statement. In an op-ed to Telecom Review, "The Silk Road Reborn," IQ CEO Asoz Rashid argues their project could serve as an alternative transit route to Egypt’s Telecom Egypt-run transit network. The idea is to restore Iraq’s ancient silk road role, as it played as a chokepoint between Asia, Africa, and Europe.

"This will enable users to have high-quality and low latency-based experiences for all streaming and gaming applications, it will enable users to have high-quality and low latency-based experiences for all streaming and gaming applications as well as other heavy-loaded tasks where fast and reliable connectivity is necessary," reads a statement on the IQ website.

Why Does It Matter? IQ is implementing a strategic fiber optic project in Iraq, connecting Iraq and all neighboring countries, Europe and Asia with fiber optics. According to an IQ statement, "the Silk Road will affect the speed and elimination of internet delays and interruptions in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the region will also help reduce the complexity and congestion of data traffic and internet lines to about 70 milliseconds."

An IQ source told KurdSat, "the project helps reduce internet traffic between the continents, and customers will be offered to choose between ours and Egypt’s transit routes."

The SRT infrastructure is divided into six territories, the major countries of the Middle East, and, through them, the rest of the world.

The venture will connect Iraq to the digital world, bringing it to the level of countries with advanced Internet systems.

People connected to the internet in the Kurdistan region complain about their internet services. Internet users usually have to subscribe to multiple service providers as different providers only work on different devices and locations, as most rely on mobile carriers for outdoor connection.

UK voters would favor Sunak and Mordaunt over Johnson as the next PM. When asked to choose between Sunak or Johnson, 44% chose Sunak, and 31% chose his former boss, per Opinium poll.

The former PM Boris Johnson, who went to office in a landslide victory but resigned after many scandals, is considering running again to be UK prime minister after Liz Truss's resignation, with rightwing Conservative MPs and party donors already backing his nascent campaign. The PM flew back to London from the Caribbean, where he was on vacation with his family.  

Sunak was leading narrowly ahead of Johnson among Tory MP nominations on Thursday night in a bid to claim the leadership victory he missed last month. Boris Johnson is privately urging Conservative MPs to support him for a return to Downing Street with a pledge that only he can win the Tories in the next election, British papers reported. Jonson has also offered Sunak an olive branch to reunite.

Only three Tory MPs will be able to run, as the party has set a threshold of 100 MPs for candidates to get on the ballot paper, and there are a total of 357 MPs in the party.

Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood tweeted his delight at becoming the 100th MP, supporting Rishi Sunak.
The 49-year-old Penny Mordaunt, the minister for parliamentary relations, has officially run for prime minister, becoming the first to do so since the resignation of Liz Trace.

"The support of my friends, who want a new beginning and a united party for the sake of the country, encouraged me to run," Mordant tweeted.

Kurdish British politician Nadhim Zahawi has not publicly expressed his willingness to run for office and apologized for economic turmoil after the mini-budget on TV. Zahawi also lacks roots within the conservative party and has no visible tory support.

The Kingdom is going through turmoil as it lost its Queen amid a shaky government that has failed to elect a leader, with the Sterling Pound plummeting against the dollar.

What Has Change: Human Rights groups reported 233 people killed since the unrest sparked at the death of 22-year-old Kurdish Zhina Amini, known as Mahsa Amini in Persian and Arabic media, in the custody of Iran's religious police.

What Happened: Her death initially sparked protests in her home town of Saqqez following his funeral and later spread to the rest of Kurdish cities and major Iranian population centers. Discontent spreads in the Capital and major cities while protests continue. Authority's crackdown only increases with many minors killed, detained or beaten.

What Is Happening? Demonstrations continue in Saqqez, and government forces have attacked citizens' homes and neighborhoods to intimidate people. Tensions and clashes have become a norm between security forces and demonstrators in Rojhelat. According to local media, protesters clashed with the security forces in the Kurdish city of Marivan in Iran's west.

Who Is Targeted? Hengaw Human Rights Organization released a video showing security forces arresting a child during demonstrations in Kermanshah. A source told KurdSat that the security forces reached out to detainee families in Mahabad and demanded money in return for their release.

Security forces called Kermanshah-based famous Kurdish singer Aziz Waisi for questioning following the singer's release of a song that supports the protesters. His son filmed himself exposing his fathers arrest and called for his release. Many Kermanshahi figures posted their pictures with the singer, calling for his immediate release. His detainment grabbed regional and international media attention, and Waisi was released soon. 

Update: Iranian security forces have killed at least 176 people, including 31 children, since the turmoil began in Saqqez and spread to 105 other cities across the country, and have arrested over 500 people in Sanandaj alone, according to a Hengaw Weekly report.

Who Burnt the Evin Prison? The latest media attention-grabbing incident was blazes and fires caught on camera and seen globally in Iran's notorious Evin prison, home to many "high profile" political arrests. The State media has suggested the events in Evin prison are not linked to the ongoing protests, quoting an official who blamed "criminal elements" for the fire.

Speaking from inside the prison, Tehran's governor told state TV that there was a riot in a wing of the prison housing petty criminals. Meanwhile, Iran's Mizan News has said the injured developed breathing difficulties during a fire at the prison's sewing workshop. Four of the wounded are in critical condition, it reported. Journalists accused the authorities of being behind the Evin prison riots as they sent a high-profile political prisoner home before it broke out. Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani - son of Iran's late former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - was given "early temporary release", according to his brother.

“Central Asia now resembles the 1990s when there was a huge competition between global and regional powers for influence over the resource-rich region. The shadow of Russia on the region, coupled with the desire of the Central Asian states to counterbalance Russia and China, has helped further foster relations between Turkey and the Central Asian states on politics and defense,” said Eurasia scholar Isik Kuscu Bonnenfant.

Opportunity for Turkey may be beckoning, but geopolitical minefields pockmark it.

For starters, Turkey's successful development of a battle-proven killer drone makes it a party to conflicts in Central Asia and a de facto participant in wars in the Caucasus, where Turkey is interested in good relations with Azerbaijan but also its arch-enemy Armenia.

Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine’s use of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 combat drones in the Central Asian state’s border clashes with Tajikistan, and Ukraine’s war against Russia has sparked controversy.

Even before the latest clashes, Kyrgyzstan unsuccessfully sought to delay, if not block, the sale of Turkish drones to Tajikistan.

In April, Kyrgyz foreign minister Jeenbek Kulubaev told parliament that Turkey had responded to the Kyrgyz request by saying "that it was business.” Even so, Turkey and Tajikistan have yet to ink a deal.

Remarkably, Erdogan, like his Chinese and Russian counterparts, made no concerted effort to end the border clashes even though he was mere 320 kilometers away from the battlefield when he attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in September.

The clashes were the most serious Central Asian military conflict since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine is an even larger minefield for Turkey not only because of the sale of drones but also given plans to build a Turkish drone manufacturing facility in the war-torn country and Turkish links to ethnic Turks in Crimea.

In August, Erdogan called on Russia to "return" Crimea to its "rightful owners." Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014.

Referring to the Crimean Tatars, Erdogan told Russian President Vladimir Putin: "These are our descendants at the same time, the people who are living there. If you were to take this step forward, if you could leave us, you would also be relieving the Crimean Tatars and Ukraine as well."

Complicating affairs, a coalition of tens of Caucasian civil society groups in Turkey is helping Russians fleeing to Turkey to avoid military service after Putin announced a mobilization. Turkey is home to 4 million Turkish nationals whose roots are in the Caucasus.

In past times, the Caucasian community supported refugees from Russian interventions in the Georgian regions of South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and in Chechnya, as well as Circassians fleeing the war in Syria after the eruption of civil strife in 2011.

The support for Russians refusing to fight in Ukraine came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appealed to Russia’s ethnic peoples to resist the Kremlin’s military call-up.

The support, against the backdrop of anti-war protests in the predominantly Muslim Russian republic of Dagestan in the northern Caucasus, has not gone unnoticed by supporters of Putin.

Bini Sultan Khamzayev, a member of the Russian parliament, charged that those protesting Putin’s mobilization were ethnic Turkish Kumyuks whom he accused of waging a Turkish-directed jihad against Russia since the time of Tsar Peter the Great. Kumyuks are the largest ethnic Turkish group in the northern Caucasus.

Blaming Turkey for anti-mobilization and anti-Putin sentiment in the Caucasus is more than convenient scapegoating. Unrest in the region goes to Putin's perception of the Caucasus as Russia's soft underbelly.

Preventing the Islamist sentiment that flourished in the Syrian civil war from spreading to Muslim regions of Russia was one reason why Putin intervened militarily in Syria to ensure the survival of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“Were the Kremlin’s regime to wobble because of factors stemming from the Ukraine war, Russia…could become a low-calorie version of the former Yugoslavia, unable to control its historic territories in the Caucasus, Siberia, and East Asia,” said geopolitical strategist Robert D. Kaplan.

Beyond the plight of Crimean Tartars and ethnic Caucasian support for anti-Ukraine war sentiment, Uighur exiles are another Turkic group that complicates Turkey’s vision of a Turkic world.

The exiles have become increasingly vocal in their outcry against China’s brutal repression of the Turkic minority in Xinjiang.

Uighur activity is a particularly sensitive issue for Turkey and China because of long-standing Turkish support for their ethnic cousins and the fact that Turkey is home to the world's largest Uighur exile community. China does not take kindly to any foreign criticism.

More recently, Turkey has sought to silence Uighur protests amid reports of a relaxation of the crackdown in Xinjiang.

Turkey scored diplomatic brownie points this week by arranging an informal tripartite meeting between Erdogan, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on the sidelines of a European summit in Prague.

It was the first-ever meeting between Erdogan and Pashinyan. Turkey, which supported Azerbaijan in the 2020 Caucasus war against Armenia and renewed clashes in September, has not had diplomatic or commercial ties with Armenia since the 1990s.

The two countries, despite differences over the deaths of 1.5 million people Armenia says were killed in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey, have been seeking to reestablish ties since early this year.

Even so, Turkey has to tread carefully in its rapprochement with Armenia to ensure that its diplomacy remains synced with Azerbaijan, its foremost ally in the Caucasus.

Turkey’s positioning of itself as the protector of Turkic and Muslim interests may not be enough to match Chinese progress on the ground in Central Asia, even if it stands to benefit from the scramble to operationalize an alternative trans-Eurasian transport corridor from China to Europe that would circumvent Russia by traversing independent former Soviet republics.

“Turkey has not had the kind of economic firepower to push into the region in the same way as China,” said scholar Raffaelo Pantucci in a recent webinar, despite conducting brisk trade with Central Asian nations.

Turkey hopes its emphasis on cultural links will compensate for its economic weakness.

Last week, Turkey became the first non-Central Asian country to host the World Nomadic Games, a competition dedicated to Turkic ethnic sports. The games were opened by Erdogan, whose son, Bilal, heads the World Ethnosports Confederation.

“Hosting sports organizations of this scale is a crucial aspect of soft power… It focuses on intangible heritage worth saving,” said sports economist Sabahattin Devecioglu.

Videos published in Persian and Kurdish social media show closed shops and commercial centers across Iran. Streets of Javanrud, Saqez, and Sanandaj cities are seen emptied following the strike.  

The Prime Minister of Canada announced "significantly" expanding sanctions against Iran, and in a statement, the PM of Canada said, "we intend to list more than 10,000 officers and senior members as inadmissible to Canada for their engagement in terrorism and systemic and gross human rights violations."

 

According to an Iranian lawmaker, the children of 5400 Iranian officials live abroad and says if the US and Canada are enemies, why do your children live there. 

In a video, Iran security forces are seen fleeing as protesters march towards them in Sanandaj. Many security officials and commanders were killed in the protests, especially in the Sistan and Baluchistan province.

Tehran's Intelligence Department summoned Hussein Safamanesh, a well-known artist from Kermanshah, following Safamanesh's protest against the death of Zhina Amini, and his fate remains unknown,  according to Hengaw.

In a joint letter titled "fulfill your promise to confront Authoritarianism," 21 human rights organizations called on US President Joe Biden to support Iranian protesters and called on the United States to invite the UN Commission on Human Rights to investigate the violence in Iran.

 

Zhina Amini's death in the custody of Iranian morality police sparked the protests that initially covered only Kurdish cities in Iran. Now it has entered its fourth week and continues to spread across the country, with violent clashes between the protesters and security forces common.

An Iranian medical examiner's report denied Mahsa Amini had died due to blows to her body while in the custody of Iran's morality police and linked her death to multiple organ failure caused by cerebral hypoxia. According to the report, she had brain surgery at Milad Hospital in Tehran at age eight.

The recent unrest is unlike any other that Iran has experienced in the past. Although the 2009 protests have stories to tell about the women's rights-related protests, the current protesters are from a new generation that spends most of their lives online and consumes a large portion of their daily information dosage from abroad rather than Iran.