Day: September 19, 2023

Azerbaijan said on Tuesday that six of its citizens had been killed by land mines in two separate incidents in the Nagorno-Karabakh region and blamed “illegal Armenian armed groups” for laying the deadly mines.

Karabakh, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, has an overwhelmingly ethnic Armenian population and broke from Baku’s control in the early 1990s after a war. Azerbaijan recaptured swathes of land in and around it in a 2020 war.

Baku said four interior ministry staff had been killed when their truck was blown up by a mine near a tunnel construction site. Another mine had killed two civilians, also in a truck, it said.

There was no immediate response from the ethnic Armenian authorities in Karabakh whom Azerbaijan wants to disband to allow it to re-integrate the territory. Armenia said on Monday that accusations that its own armed forces had placed mines on Azerbaijani territory were false.

The incidents undermine efforts to reduce tensions

The landmine incidents occurred a day after badly needed food and medicine was delivered to Karabakh along two roads simultaneously, a step that looked like it could help ease mounting tension between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

A land mine in Afghanistan. (credit: FLICKR)

Ties remain severely strained, however.

Azerbaijan’s defense ministry on Tuesday accused “illegal Armenian armed groups” of jamming the GPS navigation of a passenger jet flying from Tbilisi in Georgia to Baku.

Ethnic Armenians in Karabakh called the allegation “an absolute lie” designed to distract attention from what they called “the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the illegal blockade” of Karabakh by Baku.

That was a reference to months of Azerbaijani restrictions on the Lachin corridor – the only road linking Armenia with Karabakh – which had until the last few days not allowed in aid on the grounds that the route was purportedly being used for arms smuggling.

Armenia’s foreign ministry said on Monday that Azerbaijan’s diplomatic stance looked like it was preparing the ground for a military escalation.

Both sides say they remain committed to settling their differences via a peace deal.

(Reuters) – U.S. stock index futures inched higher on Tuesday ahead of a two-day Federal Reserve monetary policy meeting and as investors awaited grocery delivery app Instacart’s Nasdaq debut to assess a potential recovery in the IPO market.

Maplebear Inc, parent of Instacart, secured a fully diluted valuation of $9.9 billion after its IPO was priced at $30 per share, the top of its indicated price range.

Arm Holdings last week had a stellar market debut, raising hopes of a bounce back in the initial public offering (IPO) market.

Investors are also focused on the Fed meeting later in the day, where it is widely expected the central bank will hold benchmark interest rate at the current 5.25%-5.50% range.

Recent economic data has signaled that core inflation is crawling toward the Fed’s 2% target, though a steady climb in oil prices remains a concern. Crude prices have gained for three consecutive weeks, and the benchmarks are around 10-month highs.

“The market narrative has again shifted from optimism that inflation has been dealt with to fears of an inflation re-acceleration driven by robust consumer data and recovering oil prices,” said Matthew Morgan, head of fixed income, Jupiter Asset Management.

“Central banks should pause here and wait and see the impact of what they have already done rather than risk serious damage to the economy.”

Investors will also monitor the Fed’s quarterly report on economic projections to gauge participating members’ longer-term policy outlook.

Traders have fully priced in a pause by the Fed on Wednesday when it concludes its meeting, with a 59% likelihood of interest rates remaining unchanged in November and December, according to CME’s FedWatch tool.

While most of the key data releases on inflation are out of the way, investors will keep an eye on U.S. housing data for August.

At 5:32 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were up 49 points, or 0.14%, S&P 500 e-minis were up 7.25 points, or 0.16%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were up 24.5 points, or 0.16%.

Fintech firm Block Inc fell 1.1% in premarket trading as CEO Alyssa Henry of its unit, Square, will exit the company after more than nine years.

Five Americans freed from Iran made an emotional return to the United States on Tuesday ending their imprisonment “nightmare”, a day after they were swapped for five Iranians held in the U.S. and the unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian funds.

Coming off the plane, the returning Americans were embraced by family and friends with smiles, laughs, and visible emotion, video footage from the airport showed. One of the returnees briefly waved a small Stars and Stripes handed to him.

“The nightmare is finally over,” said Babak Namazi, speaking with his arm around his returning brother Siamak at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

The welcome ceremony followed a carefully choreographed exchange, agreed after months of Qatar-mediated talks, that was triggered on Monday when the funds that had been blocked in South Korea were wired, via Switzerland, to banks in Doha.

After the transfer was confirmed, the five U.S. prisoners plus two relatives took off on a Qatari plane from Tehran, at the same time as two of the five Iranian detainees landed in Doha on their way home. Three Iranians chose not to go to Iran.

The deal removes a point of friction between the United States, which brands Tehran a sponsor of terrorism, and Iran, which calls Washington the “Great Satan”.

But it is unclear whether it will bring the two adversaries, which have been at odds for 40 years, closer on any other issues, such as Iran’s nuclear program and its backing for regional militias or the U.S. military presence in the Gulf and U.S. sanctions.

The freed Americans include U.S.-Iranian dual citizens Siamak Namazi, 51, and Emad Sharqi, 59, both businessmen, and Morad Tahbaz, 67, an environmentalist who also holds British nationality. Two of them have not been publicly identified.

U.S. President Joe Biden welcomed the return of the prisoners home in a statement on Monday but his administration also announced fresh U.S. sanctions.

“We will continue to impose costs on Iran for their provocative actions in the region,” he said.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who was in New York for the annual U.N. General Assembly, called the swap a humanitarian action. “It can certainly be a step based upon which in the future other humanitarian actions can be taken,” he added.

Biden, a Democrat, has faced criticism from Republicans over the deal. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, a prominent Republican, said the transfer of the $6 billion could encourage Iran to detain more U.S. citizens.

Biden aides say the money belongs to Iran and is being transferred from restricted South Korean accounts to restricted accounts in Qatar, which will monitor the cash to ensure it is spent on humanitarian goods not items under U.S. sanctions.

Relations between the United States and Iran have been especially bitter since 2018 when then-President Donald Trump pulled out of a deal aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and toughened U.S. sanctions.

Washington suspects Iran’s nuclear program may be aimed at developing nuclear arms, a charge Iran denies.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken left the door open to nuclear diplomacy, but suggested nothing was imminent.

U.S. analysts were sceptical about prospects for progress, particularly with a U.S. election looming in 2024.

“The prisoner swap does likely pave the way for additional diplomacy around the nuclear program this fall, although the prospect for actually reaching a deal is very remote,” said Henry Rome of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

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Journalists were ordered out of the devastated eastern Libyan city of Derna on Tuesday, the morning after demonstrators staged a rally and torched the home of the ousted mayor in fury over the authorities’ failure to protect the city from floods.

Arab broadcaster Al Hurra reported that the authorities had asked all journalists to depart as soon as possible. An Al Jazeera correspondent reporting from the city said he had been told to leave.

Hichem Abu Chkiouat, minister of civil aviation in the administration that runs eastern Libya, told Reuters by phone the decision to move journalists was unrelated to the protests there overnight.

“It is an attempt to create better conditions for the rescue teams to carry out the work more smoothly and effectively,” he said. “The large number of journalists has become an impediment to the work of rescue teams.”

He later said that reporters were not being told to leave Derna altogether, only to leave areas where their presence might hinder rescue operations.

Monday’s mass demonstration was the first reported in the city since it was hit by the worst natural disaster in Libya’s history a week earlier. Communications links to the city, which had functioned despite the flood, were shut down on Tuesday morning.

Thousands of people were confirmed killed and thousands more are still missing from the Sept. 10 flood, when dams burst above Derna in a storm, unleashing a torrent of water that swept away the centre of the city.

On Monday demonstrators crowded into the square in front of Derna’s landmark gold-domed Sahaba mosque chanting slogans. Some waved flags from atop the mosque’s roof. Later in the evening, they torched the house of Mayor Abdulmenam al-Ghaithi, his office manager told Reuters.

The government administering eastern Libya said Ghaithi had been suspended as mayor and all members of the Derna city council had been dismissed from their posts and referred to investigators.

A week after the disaster, swathes of Derna remain a muddy ruin, roamed by stray dogs, with families still searching for missing bodies in the rubble.

Angry residents say the disaster could have been prevented. Officials acknowledge that a contract to repair the dams after 2007 was never completed, blaming insecurity in the area.

Libya has been a failed state for more than a decade, with no government exercising nationwide authority since Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in 2011. Derna has been controlled since 2019 by the Libyan National Army which holds sway in the east. For several years before that it was in the hands of militant groups, including local branches of Islamic State and al Qaeda.

The demonstrators denounced the eastern-based parliament speaker Aguila Saleh, who has called the flood a natural catastrophe that could not be avoided.

“Aguila we don’t want you! All Libyans are brothers!” protesters chanted.

Mansour, a student taking part in the protest, said he wanted an urgent investigation into the collapse of the dams, which “made us lose thousands of our beloved people”.

Taha Miftah, 39, said the protest was a message that “the governments have failed to manage the crisis”, and that the parliament was especially to blame.

The full scale of the death toll has yet to emerge, with thousands of people still missing. Officials have given widely varying death tolls. The World Health Organization has confirmed 3,922 deaths.

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Azerbaijan launched “anti-terrorist activities” in the Nagorno-Karabakh region to restore constitutional order and drive out what it called Armenian military formations there, a move that could foreshadow a new war in the region.

Loud shelling was audible from unverified social media footage filmed in Stepanakert, the capital of Karabakh, called Khankendi by Azerbaijan, on Tuesday.

Azerbaijan’s defence ministry spoke in a statement of its intention to “disarm and secure the withdrawal of formations of Armenia’s armed forces from our territories, (and) neutralise their military infrastructure.”

It said it was only targeting legitimate military targets using “high-precision weapons” and not civilians as part of what it called a drive to “restore the constitutional order of the Republic of Azerbaijan.”

Civilians were free to leave by what it called humanitarian corridors, it added, including one to Armenia.

Armenia, which says its armed forces are not present in Karabakh, said in a statement via its defence ministry that the situation on its own border with Azerbaijan was stable.

Internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, Karabakh has an overwhelmingly ethnic Armenian population and broke from Baku’s control in the early 1990s after a war.

Azerbaijan recaptured swathes of land in and around it in a 2020 war, but ethnic Armenian authorities who see the area as their ancestral homeland, remained in control of part of Karabakh, including its capital.

A ceasefire deal brokered by Russia and enforced by Russian peacekeepers has remained fragile ever since though with frequent shelling and mutual accusations.

Armenia has accused Moscow, which is embroiled in its own war in Ukraine, of being too distracted to be able to guarantee its security.

Russia’s foreign ministry said it was in contact with Azerbaijan and would make a statement soon.

Ruben Vardanyan, a billionaire banker who was a top official in Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian administration until February, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter:

“Azerbaijan has initiated a massive artillery attack against Nagorno Karabakh, targeting cities and civilians on a large scale.”

Reuters could not immediately verify assertions from either side.

Baku said it had informed Russia’s peacekeeping force along with a Turkish-Russian monitoring centre which is meant to help ensure the 2020 ceasefire is upheld.

Baku announced its operation after complaining that six of its citizens had been killed by land mines in two separate incidents, something it blamed on “illegal Armenian armed groups.”

The escalation occurred a day after badly needed food and medicine was delivered to Karabakh along two roads simultaneously, a step that looked like it could help ease mounting tension between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Until the last few days, Baku had imposed sweeping restrictions on the Lachin corridor – the only road linking Armenia with Karabakh – and had not allowed in aid on the grounds that the route was purportedly being used for arms smuggling.

Armenia had said that Baku’s actions, which is said had caused a humanitarian catastrophe, something Azerbaijan denied, were illegal.

Armenia’s foreign ministry had said on Monday that Azerbaijan’s diplomatic stance looked like it was preparing the ground for some kind of military action.

Russia struck three industrial warehouses in a drone strike on the western Ukrainian city of Lviv early on Tuesday, causing a huge fire and killing at least one person, local officials said.

Russian forces also shelled the southern city of Kherson, killing a policeman and wounding two civilians on a trolleybus, the head of the city’s military administration said.

“In the morning, a 49-year-old police sergeant was killed by Russian artillery fire in Kherson,” Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.

In Lviv, fire fighters tackled a blaze after three industrial warehouses were hit in an attack at around 5 a.m. (0200 GMT), emergency services said.

Photos released by the State Emergency Service of Ukraine showed huge flames lighting up the sky above the burning warehouses.

Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi said the body of a man who worked at one of the warehouses had been found under the rubble.

Sadovyi said the warehouses stored windows, household chemicals, and humanitarian aid.

“I want to emphasise that these are ordinary industrial warehouses. Nothing military was stored there,” regional govenor Maxim Kozitsky said on the Telegram messaging app.

He said Russian forces had launched 18 drones in the attack and that 15 had been shot down, including seven that were directly over the Lviv region.

Ukraine’s air force said Russia had launched a total of 30 drones and one Iskander ballistic missile in attacks on Ukraine overnight, and that 27 of the drones had been shot down.

Reuters could not independently verify the reports. There was no immediate comment from Moscow, which has carried out frequent air strikes on Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Russia has repeatedly attacked infrastructure critical to Ukraine’s defence, energy system and agriculture but many civilians have also been killed. At least seven people were killed in July when a Russian missile slammed into a residential building in Lviv, which is far from front lines.

Moscow has denied deliberately targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure.

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