分类： world

BAGHDAD – In a move that underscores escalating regional instability across the Middle East, Iraqi officials ordered an immediate closure of the busy Shalamcheh border crossing with Iran on Saturday, April 4, 2026, after a deadly airstrike on the Iranian side of the checkpoint killed one Iraqi citizen and wounded five more.

Omar al-Waeli, chairman of Iraq’s official Border Ports Commission, confirmed to the Iraqi News Agency that the airstrike targeted the crossing’s passenger terminal in the early hours of Saturday. The fatal blast claimed the life of an Iraqi passenger traveling through the facility, while the five injured victims were all transferred to medical centers inside Iranian territory for treatment, al-Waeli added.

Local Iraqi media reports note the strike occurred at the same time that convoys carrying humanitarian donations and logistical support were entering Iran through the Shalamcheh crossing. Situated in Iraq’s southern Basra Province, the border post serves as one of the most critical commercial and travel arteries connecting the two neighboring countries, handling large volumes of bilateral trade and cross-border tourism on a regular basis.

The closure of the key southern crossing comes as a separate deadly attack rocked another Iraqi border checkpoint just hours later. Iraq’s paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) announced Saturday that one of its fighters was killed and four additional members were wounded in a joint US-Israeli airstrike at the al-Qaim border crossing, located in Iraq’s western Anbar Province near the Syrian border. The PMF statement added that an employee of Iraq’s Ministry of Defense was also injured in the strike on the group’s 45th Brigade operating at the post.

Both attacks unfolded against a backdrop of sharply heightened tensions across the Middle East, which began when joint US-Israeli airstrikes on targets inside Iran launched on February 28 triggered a wave of retaliatory strikes by Iran and its regional allied militias against US and Israeli interests across the region. The latest attacks on Iraqi border crossings have further stoked fears that the ongoing conflict spillover could disrupt critical trade routes and deepen instability in Iraq, which has long faced collateral damage from regional power clashes.

On the night of Friday, April 3, 2026, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake jolted multiple regions across Afghanistan, leaving a confirmed death toll of 12 and four additional people injured, Afghan deputy government spokesperson Hamdullah Fitrat announced in a public statement on Saturday.

The seismic event sent strong tremors rippling across a wide swathe of the country, impacting communities in the national capital Kabul as well as six eastern and northern provinces: Panjshir, Logar, Nangarhar, Laghman, Nuristan, and Badakhshan. Beyond the human cost of the disaster, Fitrat shared in a post to the social platform X that the quake also caused significant structural damage: 38 residential homes were damaged, and a total of 40 families have been displaced or otherwise affected by the disaster.

Initial geological surveys placed the earthquake’s epicenter roughly 35 kilometers south of Jurm district in Afghanistan’s northern Badakhshan Province, at coordinates 36.55 degrees north latitude and 70.85 degrees east longitude. The temblor originated at a depth of 186.4 kilometers below the Earth’s surface, a depth that allowed shaking to be felt across far-flung regions of the country, from the capital Kabul to all adjoining border provinces.

This latest seismic disaster is far from an isolated event for Afghanistan, a nation that sits atop geologically active fault lines and is frequently battered by destructive earthquakes, especially in and around the rugged Hindu Kush mountain range that stretches across the country’s northern and eastern regions. Just last November, a stronger 6.3-magnitude quake hit this same general region, killing more than two dozen people and injuring nearly 1,000 more across the northwestern provinces of Samangan and Balkh.

TEHRAN – In a recent public clarification posted to social media platform X, Iran’s top diplomat Seyed Abbas Araghchi has pushed back against misleading Western media reports, reaffirming that Tehran’s core priority in ongoing conflict negotiations is securing a “conclusive and lasting” end to the war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran.

Araghchi’s statement came in direct response to claims published Friday by *The Wall Street Journal*, which alleged that Iran had formally informed mediators it would refuse to meet with U.S. officials for ceasefire negotiations hosted in Islamabad, Pakistan, and that Tehran deemed Washington’s negotiating terms unacceptable. Compounding earlier reporting, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency cited an unnamed informed source early Friday confirming that Iran had already rejected a U.S. proposal for a 48-hour temporary ceasefire, which had been shared via a third-party neutral friendly state the day prior.

Addressing the distorted narrative spread by U.S. media, Araghchi emphasized that Iran has never rejected the invitation to hold talks in the Pakistani capital, and expressed sincere gratitude to Pakistan for its diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the crisis. “What we care about are the terms of a conclusive and lasting end to the illegal war that is imposed on us,” the foreign minister stressed, underscoring that Tehran’s refusal to accept superficial, temporary ceasefire terms does not equate to a rejection of dialogue altogether.

The current open conflict traces back to late February, when the United States and Israel launched a coordinated joint airstrike campaign targeting Tehran and multiple other urban centers across Iran. That attack killed Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, alongside a number of senior Iranian military commanders and civilian bystanders. In the immediate aftermath of the strike, Iran retaliated with multiple waves of missile and drone attacks targeting both Israeli territory and U.S. military assets stationed across the Middle East, triggering a rapid escalation of regional tensions that has drawn international diplomatic intervention aimed at preventing a full-scale regional war.

In the months after Syria’s transitional government ousted former President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, a bombshell new investigation by *The New York Times* has confirmed that authorities in Damascus are drastically underreporting widespread kidnapping, violent assault, and sexual abuse targeting women and girls from Assad’s native Alawite community.

Since taking power, the administration led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa has publicly acknowledged only one confirmed case of an Alawite woman being abducted. But the Times’ on-the-ground investigation, which relied on anonymous victim testimony to protect survivors from further harm, has verified at least 13 separate kidnappings of Alawite women and girls. Of those confirmed cases, five survivors reported being gang-raped during their captivity, and two of those victims returned to their families after being released with unplanned pregnancies resulting from the abuse.

The Times’ findings reinforce earlier independent documentation of the crisis. Human rights watchdog Amnesty International warned in July 2025 that it had corroborated credible reports of at least 36 comparable kidnappings, while the Syrian Feminist Lobby has recorded 80 Alawite women and girls as missing since the start of 2025.

Survivors and observers have offered differing accounts of the motive behind the attacks. Multiple kidnapped women told investigators they experienced explicitly sectarian abuse, with their captors framing the attacks as revenge for the Alawite community’s historical alignment with the Assad regime. Other analysts have characterized many of the incidents as criminal enterprises driven by ransom demands. In one documented case, a family paid kidnappers $17,000 to secure their relative’s release, only for the abductors to keep the money and refuse to free her. Another 24-year-old survivor described being held for three weeks in a squalid, unkempt room, where she was repeatedly raped, beaten, had her head and eyebrows shaved as a humiliation, and cut multiple times with razor blades. She was ultimately freed only after her parents paid a large ransom.

Tensions between Syria’s new ruling leadership and the Alawite community have remained at a fever pitch ever since Assad’s ouster and subsequent exile to Moscow. Just last year, small-scale armed attacks on transitional government security forces by suspected Assad loyalists in the coastal Alawite stronghold of Latakia escalated into large-scale brutal sectarian violence. A separate investigation by Reuters later traced the bulk of the resulting civilian deaths back to Damascus-based security officials, with at least 1,500 Alawite civilians killed in the crackdown.

When contacted by *The New York Times* for comment on its latest findings, Interior Ministry spokesman Nour al-Din Baba claimed the government could not respond to the investigation unless the outlet turned over the full names of all interviewed victims. The newspaper declined this request, having granted formal anonymity to all survivors to protect them from retaliation. Baba reaffirmed the government’s stance, standing by an official November 2025 inquiry that examined 42 reported kidnappings and concluded only one of the cases was “authentic.”

The roots of Syria’s ongoing sectarian tension stretch back to the start of the country’s 13-year civil conflict, which began in 2011 when Assad regime forces opened fire on peaceful pro-democracy protestors. The war ultimately left hundreds of thousands of Syrians dead and millions more displaced internally across the country and as refugees abroad. While a portion of the Alawite community initially backed the pro-democracy movement, widespread government persecution of dissent and growing fears over sectarian extremist groups within the opposition pushed most Alawites to align with Assad over the course of the war.

Following Assad’s overthrow, Alawite community leaders have repeatedly called for international protection from targeted sectarian revenge attacks. The issue flared into public view this week during al-Sharaa’s official visit to London, where he was met by large protests organized by Alawite and Alevi (a related sect primarily found among Turkey’s Kurdish and Turkish communities) activists. Protesters accused al-Sharaa’s transitional government of enabling what they describe as systematic violence amounting to genocide against Alawite civilians.

Maher Hamadouch, director of the UK-based Alawite advocacy group Syrian Coastal Society, argued that hosting al-Sharaa in the United Kingdom sends a dangerous message to the international community that accountability for human rights abuses can be ignored. “At a time when Syrians continue to endure displacement, insecurity, and marginalisation, allowing such a figure to enter the UK risks sending the wrong message: that accountability can be overlooked, and that those associated with violence can be normalised on the international stage,” Hamadouch said. His organization has called on the UK government to refuse to grant any public platform or political legitimacy to individuals linked to extremist activity or human rights violations. Hamadouch, who has previously defended Assad’s decades-long rule over Syria, added that al-Sharaa’s public record is “inseparable from violence, sectarianism and the repression of civilian populations in Syria.”

Deep in the village of Ittefaq, on the eastern outskirts of Afghanistan’s capital Kabul, the mud-caked rubble of a collapsed wall still holds the traces of a recently shattered life. Piles of salvaged blankets, dented cooking utensils and scattered personal belongings sit alongside broken bricks, a quiet marker of the tragedy that unfolded late Friday, when a 5.8 magnitude earthquake ripped through northern Afghanistan.

For Mohibullah Niazi, the neighbor who led early rescue efforts, the sounds of that disaster will linger. For three full minutes after the wall collapsed onto the refugee family camped next to his property, Niazi told reporters Saturday, he could hear the trapped family screaming for help. By the time a larger group of rescuers could clear the heavy mud and rock, the screams fell silent.

Eight members of the family, all Afghan refugees who had just returned to their home country 15 days earlier after being pushed out of neighboring Iran, were killed. The only survivor is 3-year-old Aarash, who was pulled from the rubble with a severe head injury and airlifted to a hospital in central Kabul for emergency care.

This small, already vulnerable family was among millions of Afghans forced to return to their unstable homeland in 2023, after neighboring Iran and Pakistan launched harsh crackdowns on undocumented foreign residents, most of whom are Afghan refugees who fled years of conflict and economic collapse. Najibullah, the 50-year-old head of the killed family, had nowhere else to go after crossing back into Afghanistan: the family set up a makeshift tent on empty low-lying land adjacent to Niazi’s home, because he could not afford permanent shelter. Just 30 minutes before the earthquake struck, Niazi said he offered the family space in his guest room to escape cold, heavy rains that had soaked the region for days. They declined his invitation.

Days of heavy rainfall had already softened the sodden earth holding the adjacent retaining wall in place, local residents explained. When the earthquake hit, the wall crumbled directly onto the family’s tent, trapping everyone inside before they could escape. Niazi and a handful of nearby neighbors immediately began digging by hand and with small spades, but the weight of the rock and mud was too much for their small group. “We tried our best,” Niazi recounted Saturday, standing at the disaster site. “But for two or three people, this was impossible work.”

Local authorities were alerted quickly, and Taliban-led rescue teams and ambulances arrived within an hour to continue recovery efforts. By Saturday morning, all eight bodies had been recovered, and the injured toddler had been transported for care. On Saturday, Health Ministry spokesperson Sharafat Zaman confirmed the boy remained hospitalized for his head injury, saying medical teams were monitoring his condition closely.

In the wake of the quake, official death toll numbers have seen a small discrepancy: Afghanistan’s deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat released an updated count Saturday putting the total national death toll at 12, with four additional people injured across the affected regions. Fitrat added that five full homes had been completely destroyed, and another 33 suffered major damage, impacting 40 families across six provinces: Kabul, Panjshir, Logar, Nangarhar, Laghman, and Nuristan. The Afghanistan Disaster Management Authority has meanwhile put the total death toll at nine, and officials have not yet explained the gap between the two counts.

Friday’s earthquake originated in the seismically active Hindu Kush mountain range, roughly 150 kilometers east of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, and 290 kilometers northeast of Kabul, according to data from both the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center and the U.S. Geological Survey. Afghanistan sits on one of the world’s most active tectonic fault zones, and major earthquakes have killed thousands of Afghans in just the last two years, as poorly constructed, informal housing across much of the country leaves communities extremely vulnerable to seismic activity.

Just last August 2023, a 6.0 magnitude quake struck a remote mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan, killing more than 2,200 people. In October that same year, a 6.3 magnitude quake and subsequent powerful aftershocks hit western Afghanistan, leaving thousands dead. Two months later, a 6.3 magnitude quake hit Samangan province in the north, killing 27 people, injuring more than 950, and damaging iconic cultural sites including the historic Blue Mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif.