ABU DHABI: UAE’s National Centre of Meteorology (NCM) issued a statement on Saturday warning seafarers to exercise caution in the Arabian Gulf and drivers to take extra precautions due to poor visibility caused by sandstorms and high winds.
According to the NCM, winds with speeds reaching 55kph per hour will cause rough seas and wave heights could reach up eight feet by 10am on Sunday.
In the statement, the center expected visibility to drop to less than 2,000 meters, urging drivers to properly follow the traffic rules.

BEIRUT: A suicide car bomb targeting US forces in northern Syria wounded at least two allied fighters Saturday, a monitor said, with Daesh claiming the attack.
A terrorist “driving a car bomb” hit a convoy that included a US armored vehicle from the international anti-Daesh coalition and Kurdish fighters in the city of Manbij, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The two wounded fighters were from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Britain-based monitor said.
“No US soldiers were injured or killed today,” coalition spokesman Sean Ryan told AFP.
Daesh claimed the attack by an “explosive-laden vehicle” via its Amaq propaganda arm.
The attack is the third in the past two months targeting the US-led coalition and its allies in northern Syria.
On January 16, four Americans were among 19 people killed in a suicide attack in the city claimed by Daesh.
Manbij is a former Daesh stronghold that is now held by a military council affiliated to the SDF.
The city constitutes a major point of contention between Syria’s Kurdish minority, which maintains de facto autonomy in parts of northern and northeastern Syria, and neighboring Turkey.
The extremist attacks followed US President Donald Trump’s announcement in December that he would withdraw American troops from Syria, as he declared Daesh had been defeated.
The White House later said around 200 American “peacekeeping” soldiers would remain in northern Syria.
The SDF is currently battling to wipe out the final scrap of Daesh territory close to Syria’s border with Iraq.
After a lightning offensive that saw it seize large swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014, Daesh’s self-declared “caliphate” has crumbled under pressure from multiple offensives, but the terrorists remain able to launch deadly attacks.
Syria’s multi-fronted war has killed more than 360,000 people since it began in 2011 with President Bashar Assad’s regime bloodily suppressing protests.

ALGIERS: Algerian authorities on Saturday ordered an early start to the spring university holiday, an apparent attempt to weaken two weeks of student-led protests against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
The Higher Education Ministry’s decision came a day after tens of thousands of demonstrators packed central Algiers to challenge the veteran leader’s 20-year-old rule in the biggest protests in the capital in 28 years.
Without giving a reason for the move, the Ministry said in a decree that the spring break would be brought forward by 10 days, starting on Sunday instead of March 20.
Algerians desperate for jobs and angry at unemployment, corruption and an elderly elite seen as out of touch with the young have taken to the streets since Feb. 22 to protest the 82-year-old’s plans to seek a fifth term in an April 18 election.
Many of the demonstrations — the largest since 1991 when the army canceled elections Islamists were poised to win — started at university premises before spilling out onto the streets.
The ailing Bouteflika is in hospital in Geneva and has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013.
On Thursday he issued his first warning to protesters, saying the unrest, now entering its third week, could create chaos in the oil- and natural gas-producing North African country.
Bouteflika has offered to limit his term after the election and has vowed to change the “system” that runs the country, but the protest movement has galvanized discontent among different sectors, particularly students and young families.
Some long-time allies of Bouteflika, including members of the ruling party, have expressed support for the protesters, revealing cracks within a ruling elite long seen as invincible.
Friday’s protests were largely peaceful but some clashes between youths and police broke out in the evening and state media said 110 protesters and 112 policemen had been hurt in the unrest.

NEAR BAGHOUZ, Syria: Defeated but unrepentant, some militants limping out of their besieged final bastion in eastern Syria still praise Daesh and promise bloody vengeance against its enemies.

The skeletal and dishevelled figures shuffling out of the smoldering ashes of the proto-state may look like a procession of zombies, but their devotion seems intact.

At an outpost for US-backed forces outside the besieged village of Baghouz, 10 women stand in front of journalists, pointing their index fingers to the sky in a gesture used by Daesh supporters to proclaim the oneness of God.

Most refuse to disclose their names or nationalities.

Indistinguishable under their identical black robes, a group of women arriving at the screening point manned by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) swarm around reporters like hornets.

Some throw rocks at the cameras of those trying to film them, while one screams at a photographer and calls him a pig.

A woman snarks at the way the reporter is dressed: “God curses women who resemble men.”

The SDF are closing in on diehard militants and their relatives holed up in a makeshift encampment inside the village of Baghouz.

More than 7,000 people have fled the bombed-out bastion over the past three days, escaping shelling by the SDF and airstrikes by the US-led coalition against Daesh.

But for Umm Mohammed, a 47-year-old woman from Iraq’s Anbar province, the men who have fled are “the cowards and the meek.”

As for the women, “we left because we are a heavy burden on the men,” she says.

“We are waiting for the (next) conquest, God willing.”

Nearby, a little boy hums a militant anthem as he walks beside his mother, his jacket covered with dust.

The boys raised under Daesh rule and trained to fight from a young age — are the reason the group will survive, another Iraqi woman says.

“The caliphate will not end, because it has been ingrained in the hearts and brains of the newborns and the little ones,” says the 60-year-old, refusing to give her name.

Many women tell AFP that they want to raise their children on the ideology of the caliphate, even as its territorial presence fizzles out.

Abdul Monhem Najiyya is more ambivalent about the group.

“There was an implementation of God’s law, but there was injustice,” he says, claiming he worked as an accountant for Daesh.

“The leaders stole money… and fled,” he says. “We stayed until the bullets flew over our heads.”

But he says many senior Daesh figures have fled to the northwestern province of Idlib or crossed into Turkey and Iraq.

Najiyya’s harshest words are for the group’s elusive leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, whom he says he never saw once.

“He left us in the hands of people who let us down and left,” he says. “He bears responsibility, because, in our view, he is our guide.”

When asked why it took him so long to quit the redoubt, Najiyya said he was afraid of being detained by the SDF because his cousins are Daesh militants.

He also says that rumors the militants would be granted safe passage to Idlib, largely controlled by a rival militant group, encouraged some to stay.

Nearby, a bearded man with a leg wound cursed the coalition, whose warplanes have pummeled the last militant redoubt.

“I only surrendered because of my injury,” he says, adding that he had been with Daesh “since the beginning.”

One woman, who says she is from Damascus, tells AFP: “We have left, but there will be new conquests in the future.”

Speaking from behind a veil that covers her face, she says: “We will seek vengeance, there will be blood up your knees.”

KASSERINE/TUNISIA: Souad Gharsalli lives in a rented flat in the center of Kasserine, in western Tunisia, baking and selling artisanal bread to make money. But she should be growing olive trees for a living, she says.

Gharsalli, 47, grew up with three brothers and six sisters on her family’s 7 hectares (17 acres) of land in the region of Kasserine, on which they grew olive trees and grains.

When their father died in 1997, Gharsalli and her sisters inherited half as much land as their brothers, in accordance with Tunisian law.

Then one of the brothers asked his sisters to sign a document. The women, who are only partially literate, later found out they had given up any claim to their father’s land.

“We thought we were just giving them the right to work on our land,” Gharsalli told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “But after that, we had no right to any of it.”

Despite laws protecting their right to inherit, many women in Tunisia struggle to get their allocated share. According to government figures from 2014 — the latest available — in 85 percent of cases women got no land at all when their fathers died.

Now, a proposed new law could give women and men an equal share of inheritance.

The proposal, due to be debated by Parliament, has divided opinion across Tunisia, as well as other parts of North Africa and the Middle East.

Supporters say the law, which was presented to the country’s legislature in February, could give Tunisian women greater financial autonomy. Government figures show that less than five percent of women in Tunisia are registered land owners.

National polls show almost 60 percent of women in Tunisia are against the proposal, however, as it seeks to replace legislation that is based on Islamic law.

After opposition from conservatives, the original draft law was amended to allow individuals to “opt out” and continue to allocate inheritance according to the current rules.

“This will be the first Arab country that will have legislated on this question, which is sensitive and taboo because it is said to be written in the religious texts,” said Khadija Cherif, coordinator of the commission on inheritance at the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD).

“But (for me) this is not a question of religion. It is a question of economic power, which gives men power in the family and over the women.”

‘You will get land from your husbands’

Advocates of the proposal know that even if the text is passed into law, social pressure and informal family arrangements could still block women’s access to land.

Before Hayet Nasri’s father died, he told his family he would leave his 14 hectares of land to only one of his four sons.

After their father’s death, the brothers instead agreed to share the land between them. Now they have 200 olive trees each, and Nasri and her five sisters have none.

“The sharing of the land is not legal, it is not official. It’s done within the family, not the court,” said Nasri, who rents a house in Kasserine with her husband and five children.

To justify their actions, her brothers told her and her sisters: “You are married. You will get land from your husbands, not from us.”

But if all the land a woman has is from her husband, a divorce can leave her with nothing, said Ahmed Mbarki, a lawyer in Kasserine.

Tunisian divorce law provides for an equal split of property acquired during the marriage, but that applies only to residences, not land. Even so, “the husband will try to get around it,” said Mbarki.

“The land is always in the hands of the man, the husband, the father. If there is a divorce — and there are many — the husband gives nothing to his wife.”

Mbarki has also seen many inheritance cases where women willingly give up their rights to a portion of their fathers’ land.

“The sisters say, ‘I love my brother, I want to give them my part, I don’t want to cause any problems,’” he said.

First steps

Cherif of the ATFD — which has been leading the campaign for the new law — sees the proposed law, and the debate surrounding it, as promising “first steps” toward change.

“There is a lot of silence around injustice against women,” she said.

“It (the law) will allow those who think in silence that their situation is unjust to defend themselves, and it will allow others to become conscious of the fact that they have and can use this right. That will take time.”

She added that the ATFD is seeing more women fighting for their inheritance rights in court today compared to 20 years ago.

Gharsalli is still waiting. After divorcing her husband in 1998, she did not re-marry and now lives with her son.

Last year, her brothers promised to give her a plot of land but later changed their minds.

“My wish is to get the chance to own some part of this land to plant even just 20 olive trees to live off of,” she said.