JEDDAH: Protesters in Iraq denounced both Iran and the US as “occupiers” on Sunday as the fallout continued from the death of Iranian warlord Qassem Soleimani.

The Iraqi parliament voted for all foreign troops to leave, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said all US forces in the Middle East would pay the price for Soleimani’s death, and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Iran was likely to “make a mistake and … go after some of our forces in Iraq or northeast Syria.”

Soleimani, the Quds Force chief who set up and controlled proxy militias for Iran throughout the Middle East, was killed by a US drone missile strike near Baghdad airport early on Friday.

Black-clad mourners packed the Iranian city of Mashhad on Sunday as a coffin carrying Soleimani’s remains was paraded through the streets.

“Iran is wearing black, revenge, revenge,” they chanted as darkness fell and they followed the truck carrying the coffin toward the floodlit Imam Reza shrine.

In Iraq, however, attempts to hail Soleimani as a hero were resisted. Many Iraqis blame him for propping up the government they have been trying to bring down since early October, and protesters in the southern city of Nasiriyah blocked a mourning procession for him.

In Diwaniyah, also in the south, hundreds of young Iraqis marched through the streets chanting: “No to Iran, no to America.” One protester said: “We’re taking a stance against the two occupiers.”

Meanwhile, Iraq’s parliament called on Sunday for all foreign military forces to leave.

“The Iraqi government must work to end the presence of any foreign troops on Iraqi soil and prohibit them from using its land, air space or water for any reason,” the resolution said.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Soleimani’s killing marked a new chapter in the history of the Middle East, and revenge attacks on the US military in the region would force them to withdraw “humiliated, defeated and in terror … as they left in the past.”

BEIRUT: There were mixed responses in Lebanon to a speech by Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah on Sunday about the assassination of Qassem Soleimani.

A media activist, who declined to be named, said Nasrallah’s speech amounted to “a declaration of war” on the US. “How can the leader of a Lebanese party declare such war?”

Former MP Fares Saeed said: “There is nothing new in Nasrallah’s speech except that it is a high tone, an attempt to call to arms and a statement that Iran’s prestige still exists despite the assassination of Soleimani.”

“The results will not change what is happening,” he said. “There is an American decision to blockade Iran.”

On the impact of the speech on internal matters in Lebanon, he said: “Before and after the assassination, Lebanon is governed by Hezbollah and it is unable to save Lebanon from the crises that it is suffering from, economically and financially.”

But Wafa Sharif, a retired employee, said that she listened to Nasrallah’s speech to find out what would happen and “he assured me that there is no war in Lebanon but (the war is) in Iraq. There are no American bases in Lebanon. And if this is the limit of revenge, then this is reassuring, but I do not know how far they will succeed and what are the repercussions of this step.”

Hania Kinao, a Twitter activist, said: “Go back to Iran; we know that you don’t care about Lebanon.”

In his speech, Nasrallah called the assassination of Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, “a landmark separating two stages in the region. (It is) A new phase not only in the history of Iran or Iraq but for the whole region.”

“Trump’s policy aims to bring Iran to the negotiating table, but his term will end before Iran goes to him, and he will not receive a phone call,” he said.

Nasrallah said that the deputy head of the Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, “was with me about two months ago in the southern suburbs of Beirut and asked me to pray for him to be a martyr.”

“The bombing of the convoy of Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis turned everyone into pieces that are difficult to distinguish,” he said.

“The Iraqis were united in the funeral of Soleimani and Al-Muhandis, and they will not let any American soldier stay in Iraq,” he said. “The resistance forces must cooperate because the region is going to a different stage. The resistance forces must decide how to deal with or act with this event. Iran will not ask for anything. It is not permissible to content ourselves with consolation and memorial, the process is not against Iran, but against all our axis, and we must all work for just retribution.”

“This means the American military presence in the region, the military bases, the American military battleships, every American officer and soldier on our lands. The American army is the one that killed, and it will pay the price.”

There is nothing new in Nasrallah’s speech except that it is a high tone, an attempt to call to arms and a statement that Iran’s prestige still exists despite the assassination of Soleimani.

Fares Saeed, Former Lebanese MP

He said: “By fair retribution, we do not mean the American people throughout our region. There are American citizens who should not be harmed. Harming them serves Trump’s policy.”

He added: “The martyrdom seekers who drove the Americans out of our area in the past are still there and much more than they were before. And when the American coffins return to the US, Trump and his administration will realize that they lost the region, they will lose the elections, and the response to the killing of Soleimani is to remove the American forces from all of our region and the goal will be achieved.”

Nasrallah’s speech was accompanied by the deployment of the Lebanese army in the southern suburbs of Beirut, on the roads from Baalbek to Dahr Al-Baydar, and from Sidon to Beirut.

Pictures of Soleimani were hung on billboards on the Beirut airport road and in the southern suburbs. Supporters of Hezbollah also raised a picture of Soleimani at the Barakat Al-Naqqar Gate on the border with the occupied Lebanese Shebaa Farms and wrote on it: “With your blood, we will cross it.”

The pictures on the Beirut airport road were criticized by social media activists. Rania Al-Khatib published a picture of the scene and commented: “These pictures are not in Iran but in Lebanon on the airport road.”

Another activist said: “Hanging the pictures on the airport road is totally and completely rejected. Those who love him should hang his picture in their homes; the airport and the airport road are only for the Lebanese. We respect your sorrow, respect our Lebanese identity.”

LONDON: With the elimination on Jan. 3 of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general who oversaw the Islamic Republic’s web of regional proxy armies, attention is bound to turn sooner or later to Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group whose cloak-and-dagger operations have been detected in places as far apart as South America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Entrenched deeply over the years in South America, Hezbollah is arguably the only Shiite militia belonging to the Soleimani network that has the twin advantages of ability and proximity to consider retaliating against the Trump administration for the targeted killing of the Quds Force commander with a direct attack on the US.

As recently as September, authorities in New York apprehended Alexei Saab, aka Ali Hassan Saab, an alleged Hezbollah operative who “conducted surveillance of possible target locations in order to help the foreign terrorist organization prepare for potential future attacks against the United States.”

Unlike China and Russia, the US is an avowed enemy of Hezbollah, having long designated the entire group, including its political wing, as a foreign terrorist organization.

In recent months, the State Department and Washington’s intelligence community have concluded that there is enough evidence to support claims linking Hezbollah to criminal activities, including drug trafficking, in South America and Europe.

Much has been written about Hezbollah’s presence in the “triple frontier” area along the Paraguay-Argentina-Brazil border in South America. Since the Al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have warned of potential terrorist cells forming in this under-policed corner of the continent.

Hezbollah has been able to find a footing in the tri-border area by piggybacking on the Lebanese diaspora presence. The ancestors of South Americans of Lebanese descent began arriving in the area before 1930 and were mostly Christian.

The fact that, today, more than 5 million Lebanese migrants and their descendants live in just two countries (Brazil and Argentina) has proved a distinct advantage for Hezbollah, which tries to cultivate intelligence assets from across the religious spectrum.

Hezbollah has developed local contacts to facilitate as well as conceal its drug-trafficking, money-laundering and terrorist-financing operations. Since 2009, a number of Lebanese nationals have been sanctioned by the US Treasury for their connection to organized crime, involving drug trafficking and money laundering in particular.

Just last month, the US Department of Justice sentenced Lebanon-born Ali Kourani, a naturalized US citizen, to 40 years in prison for his “illicit work” as an operative for ”the Islamic Jihad Organization,” the “external attack-planning component” of Hezbollah.

Maximilian Brenner, of the Berlin-based Security Institute, sees a mixed picture emerging from recent developments. “In the US, significant progress has been made in terms of harnessing crime-fighting ops to curb Hezbollah,” Brenner said.

“However, the international community is divided on the issue, with diverging interests preventing organized action to tackle Hezbollah also in the criminal — not solely in the international terrorism — context.”

Jonathan Cardozo, of the Paris-based Media Research Inc., says there is obvious overlap between terrorism and illicit drug trade, but the motives are not necessarily the same.

“Americans will find it very difficult, if not impossible, to combine the war against terrorism with the war against the drug trade, especially considering the differences in agency infrastructure, personnel and local assets,” he said.

“Slow-moving bureaucracies are not equipped to fight guerrilla-style tactics of lawless — and ruthless — criminal and terrorist outfits. While terrorists and criminals certainly collaborate in many instances, it is incredibly difficult to pinpoint any grand strategy at play in Latin America between the two elements.”

What is for certain, though, is that the rationale behind Hezbollah’s “South America strategy” is closely linked to its origin as revolutionary Iran’s most successful export.

Even as Hezbollah’s domestic position was fortified by election successes and sectarian polarization, its aggressive anti-Western rhetoric and targeting of US and Israeli interests placed it firmly in the crosshairs of the two countries. On the other hand, distant South America, with its leftist political parties and regimes, was a study in friendliness.

Sympathetic South American governments granted Hezbollah a high degree of operational freedom. For instance, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the socialist politician who served as Brazil’s president between 2003 and 2010, invested a lot of diplomatic capital in trying to forge a rapprochement with Hamas and Hezbollah as well as the two groups’ main backer, Iran.

Da Silva’s initiative was part of a larger strategy of increasing Brazil’s outreach to, and strengthening bilateral relations with, Russia and Iran and their Middle Eastern allies, while effectively ignoring Washington’s concerns regarding the presence of Hezbollah cells in his country.

According to Ghanem Nuseibeh, founder of strategy and management consultancy company Cornerstone Global Associates, Hezbollah has been active in Latin America for decades now.

“The organization has been operating at the grass-roots level as well as attempting to infiltrate senior levels of government,” he said, pointing to the 2015 arrest of Dino Bouterse, the son of Suriname’s president, for inviting Hezbollah agents to establish a base in his home country in exchange for $2 million that was ultimately not paid.

Under the current conservative government of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has made a U-turn with regard to its Iran policy. As an inevitable corollary, the country now has little tolerance for Hezbollah’s activities in the region. Argentinian foreign policy too has swung in the same direction as Brazil.

An upshot of the rightward shift in the region’s political mood was the arrest in September 2018 by Brazilian authorities of Assad Ahmad Barakat, a man the Americans have long considered a key financier for Hezbollah.

In contrast with the hardening stances of Brazil and Argentina, the government of Venezuelan socialist President Nicolas Maduro views Hezbollah as a natural ally as part of a policy first adopted by his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who deepened ties with Iran when he came to power in 1999.

Against this mixed background, security analysts say subterfuge and criminality remain the key elements of Hezbollah’s South America strategy. They say it will not be easy to cut Hezbollah down to size and deny it the ability to influence governments — or to carry out terror attacks if it wants to avenge the killing of Soleimani.

There are possibly drug traffickers active in South America who are sympathetic to Hezbollah’s cause, the analysts say, adding that the fact that a group in control of 12 seats in the Beirut parliament is involved in drug trafficking and fundraising halfway across the world is deeply worrisome, even without their terrorist connotations.

Nuseibeh asserts that “it is likely Latin America will be an even more important frontier for Hezbollah in the coming days as it is a region in which the group has invested so many resources.”

Clearly, in the absence of a firm and coherent response to Hezbollah’s activities in South America, the organization, fired with a zeal to avenge the death of Soleimani, could pose a serious security threat to the region and beyond in the days to come.

CAIRO: An Egyptian court has ruled that Coptic citizens should be governed by Christian inheritance norms, including gender equality, a lawyer told AFP on Sunday.
“Until now, Islamic law (which provides that men should inherit twice as much as women) was applied to Coptic citizens, even though Orthodox rules guarantee equality between men and women,” said lawyer Hoda Nasrallah, who brought a test case.
Nasrallah said she was forced to go to court to ensure her father’s estate was “fairly shared” between her and her two brothers.
The court decision was based on article three of Egypt’s 2014 constitution, which said Christian inheritance rules govern Christian citizens.
Previous rulings by the Coptic Orthodox church guarantee gender equality in inheritance matters.
Coptic Christians, the largest non-Muslim religious minority in the Middle East, make up about 10-15 percent of Egypt’s predominantly Sunni Muslim population of 100 million.
Up until now, a law dating from the 1940s has continued to apply Islamic inheritance law to Coptic citizens.

ANKARA: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday said Turkish soldiers had begun deploying to Libya after parliament approved such a move last week.
“Our soldiers’ duty there is coordination. They will develop the operation center there. Our soldiers are gradually going right now,” he told CNN Turk broadcaster during an interview.
The Turkish parliament passed a bill allowing the government to send troops to Libya aimed at shoring up the UN-recognized government in Tripoli.
The Tripoli government has come under sustained attack since military strongman general Khalifa Haftar launched his offensive in April.
Haftar is backed by Turkey’s regional rivals, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, while the UN-backed government has the support of Ankara and its ally Qatar.
Erdogan said Turkey’s objective was “not to fight,” but “to support the legitimate government and avoid a humanitarian tragedy.”
Turkey’s move comes after the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord made a formal request for military support.
Meanwhile, the US Embassy in Libya on Sunday strongly condemned the military escalation in Tripoli in recent days, which reportedly killed and injured many people.
“This deterioration in security underscores the dangers of toxic foreign interference in Libya, such as the arrival of Syrian fighters supported by Turkey as well as the deployment of Russian mercenaries,” the embassy said in a statement via Twitter.
It all said that all Libyan parties have a “responsibility to end this dangerous involvement of foreign forces, which is contributing to civilian casualties and damaging civilian infrastructure to the detriment of all Libyans.”
The embassy also said it “stands ready to support all Libyan efforts to end the violence, curtail the interference of foreign forces, and reestablish a UN-facilitated political dialogue, which is the only path to lasting peace and prosperity.”
Libya and Turkey signed security and maritime agreements in November last year, angering Mediterranean countries including Greece and Cyprus who also seek to exploit energy resources in the region.