Middle East & North Africa

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is to visit Sudan in the coming days, a Sudanese government official said on Sunday.

Sudan has been normalising relations with the United States since the overthrow of former leader Omar al-Bashir in April 2019 but is still seeking removal from a list of countries the U.S. considers as state sponsors of terrorism.

Pompeo is also due to visit Israel and the United Arab Emirates on Monday and Tuesday following an accord between the two countries this month to forge full relations.

DUBAI (Reuters) - Analysis from the black boxes of a downed Ukrainian passenger plane shows it was hit by two missiles 25 seconds apart and that passengers were still alive for some time after the impact of the first blast, Iran said on Sunday.

The announcement by the head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization marks the first official report on the contents of the cockpit voice and data recordings, which were sent to France for reading in July.

BEIRUT (AP) — The 10 firefighters who received the call shortly before 6 p.m. — about a big fire at the nearby port of Beirut — could not know what awaited them.

The brigade of nine men and one woman could not know about the stockpile of ammonium nitrate warehoused since 2013 along a busy motorway, in the heart of a densely populated residential area — a danger that had only grown with every passing year.

TEHRAN, Aug 22 (NNN-IRNA) – Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said, in a letter to the rotating chairman of the United Nations Security Council, that, the U.S. has “no right” to restore sanctions on Iran.

“The Dispute Resolution Mechanism is only open to the actual JCPOA participants,” Zarif said in the letter, which was written on Thursday and made public by the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, yesterday.

ADEN, Aug 22 (NNN-SABA) – Yemen’s pro-government forces, yesterday managed to dismantle a minefield laid previously by the Houthi rebels, in the country’s Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, a military official said.

“A team of explosives experts received calls from a local resident, about existence of mines on his agricultural farm in Durayhmi district of Hodeidah, and immediately rushed to the site,” the military source said.

“Around 65 mines were successfully dismantled by the experts, who managed to secure the residents in the area,” the source said.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The head of Israel’s coronavirus task force has asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to ban an annual pilgrimage in which Hasidic Jews visit the central Ukrainian town of Uman over concerns the site may become a virus hotspot.

Tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews descend on Uman every Jewish New Year to visit the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who revived the Hasidic movement and died in 1810. This year, Jewish New Year celebrations run from Sept. 18-20.

(Reuters) - Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi had just embarked on a state visit to Washington when gunmen shot dead the young protest leader Reham Yacoub in her car in Basra on Wednesday.

Yacoub, 29, was an outspoken critic of the Iran-backed militias whose power and influence Kadhimi has been trying to rein in since taking office in May.

The attack was the third on activists in the southern city in a week. Tahseen Oussama, 30, was gunned down on Aug. 14 and four others were shot at while together in a car Monday.

Tehran, Aug 22, IRNA – Presidential Office chief of staff Mahmoud Vaezi wrote in a tweet that US President Donald Trump resorts to threats as way-out for his steep decline of popularity.

The era of unilateralism is over and the international community does not stand US bulling and threats, Vaezi wrote on Friday evening.

22 Aug 2020; MEMO: Turkey criticized Greece on Friday because of a statement by Athens on the conversion of the Chora Museum to mosque.   

"Chora mosque, like Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque and other cultural assets on our lands, belongs to Turkey and it is our property," Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said in a statement. 

The comment came after Greek counterparts made a statement against the reopening of the sixth-century Chora Museum as a mosque in Istanbul.  

22 Aug 2020; MEMO: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Friday that the Fatih drilling vessel discovered the country’s largest energy source in its history -- 320 billion cubic meters of natural gas in the Black Sea.