Helicopter carrying Iran's President Raisi crashes in mountains

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 19 May 2024

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TEHRAN - A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister crashed on Sunday as it was crossing mountain terrain in heavy fog, an Iranian official told Reuters, and rescuers were making their way to the site of the incident.

The official said the lives of Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian were "at risk following the helicopter crash", which happened on the way back from a visit to Iran's border with Azerbaijan.

"We are still hopeful but information coming from the crash site is very concerning," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The bad weather was complicating rescue efforts, the state news agency IRNA reported. The chief of staff of Iran's army ordered all the resources of the army and the elite Revolutionary Guard to be put to use in the search and rescue operations.

State TV stopped all its regular programming to show prayers being held for Raisi across the country and, in a corner of the screen, live coverage of rescue teams deployed on foot in the mountainous area in heavy fog.

The rescue teams were expected to reach the site of the crash later on Sunday evening, state TV reported.

Raisi, 63, was elected president in 2021, and since taking office has ordered a tightening of morality laws, overseen a bloody crackdown on anti-government protests and pushed hard in nuclear talks with world powers.

In Iran's dual political system, split between the clerical establishment and the government, it is the supreme leader rather than the president who has the final say on all major policies.

But many have seen Raisi as a strong contender to succeed his 85-year-old mentor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has strongly endorsed Raisi's main policies.

Raisi's victory in a closely managed election in 2021 brought all branches of power under the control of hardliners, after eight years when the presidency had been held by pragmatist Hassan Rouhani, who negotiated a nuclear deal with Washington.

However, Raisi's standing may have been dented by widespread protests against clerical rule and a failure to turn around Iran's economy, hamstrung by Western sanctions.

Raisi had been at the Azerbaijani border to inaugurate the Qiz-Qalaisi Dam, a joint project.

Interior Minister Ahmed Vahidi told state TV only that one of the helicopters in a group of three had come down in the incident, and that authorities were awaiting further details.

Foreign doctors trapped by Israeli Assault on Gaza

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 19 May 2024

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CAIRO — The 35 American and other international doctors came to Gaza in volunteer teams to help one of the territory’s few hospitals still functioning. They brought suitcases full of medical supplies and had trained for one of the worst war zones in the world. They knew the health care system was decimated and overwhelmed.

The reality is even worse than they imagined, they say.

Children with horrific amputations. Patients with burns and maggot-filled wounds. Rampant infections. Palestinian doctors and nurses who are beyond exhausted after seven months of treating never-ending waves of civilians wounded in Israel’s war with Hamas.

“I did not expect that (it) will be that bad,” said Dr. Ammar Ghanem, an ICU specialist from Detroit with the Syrian American Medical Society. “You hear the news, but you cannot really recognize ... how bad until you come and see it.”

Israel’s incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah has exacerbated the chaos. On May 6, Israeli troops seized the Rafah crossing into Egypt, closing the main entry and exit point for international humanitarian workers. The teams were trapped beyond the scheduled end of their two-week mission.

On Friday, days after the teams were supposed to leave, talks between U.S. and Israeli authorities yielded results and some of the doctors were able to get out of Gaza. However, at least 14, including three Americans, chose to stay, according to one of the organizations, the Palestinian American Medical Association. The U.S.-based non-profit medical group FAJR Scientific, which organized a second volunteer team, could not immediately be reached. The White House said 17 Americans left Gaza on Friday, and at least three chose to stay behind.

Those who left included Ghanem, who said the 15-mile trip from the hospital to the Kerem Shalom crossing took more than four hours as explosions went off around them. He described some tense moments, such as when an Israeli tank at the crossing took aim at the doctors’ convoy.

“The tank moved and blocked our way and they directed their weapons (at) us. So that was a scary moment,” Ghanem said.

The 14 doctors with the Palestinian American Medical Association who stayed behind include American Adam Hamawy. U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth credits Hamawy with saving her life when, as a military helicopter pilot in Iraq in 2004, she was hit by an RPG, causing injuries that cost her her legs.

“Three of the U.S. citizen doctors in our teams declined to leave without a formal replacement plan for them,” the association’s president, Mustafa Muslen, said.

The two international teams have been working since early May at the European General Hospital, just outside Rafah, the largest hospital still operating in southern Gaza. The volunteers are mostly American surgeons but include medical professionals from Britain, Australia, Egypt, Jordan, Oman and other nations.

The World Health Organization said the U.N., which coordinates visits of volunteer teams, is in talks with Israel to resume moving humanitarian workers in and out of Gaza. The Israeli military said it had no comment.

The doctors’ mission gave them a first-hand look at a health system that has been shattered by Israel’s offensive in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. Nearly two dozen hospitals in Gaza are no longer operating, and the remaining dozen are only partially working. Israel’s campaign has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 79,000, according to Gaza health officials. Almost 500 health workers are among the dead.

The military’s nearly 2-week-old Rafah operation has sent more than 600,000 Palestinians fleeing the city and scattering across southern Gaza. Much of the European Hospital’s Palestinian staff left to help families find new shelter. As a result, the foreign volunteers are stretched between medical emergencies and other duties, such as trying to find patients inside the hospital. There is no staff to log where incoming wounded are placed. Medicines that the teams brought with them are running out.

Thousands of Palestinians are sheltering in the hospital. Outside, sewage overflows in the streets, and drinking water is brackish or polluted, spreading disease. The road to the hospital from Rafah is now unsafe: The United Nations says an Israeli tank fired on a marked U.N. vehicle on the road Monday, killing a U.N. security officer and wounding another.

When the Rafah assault began, FAJR Scientific’s 17 doctors were living in a guesthouse in the city. With no warning from the Israeli army to evacuate, the team was stunned by bombs landing a few hundred meters from the clearly-marked house, said Mosab Nasser, FAJR’s CEO.

They scrambled out, still wearing their scrubs, and moved to the European Hospital, where the other team was staying.

Dr. Mohamed Tahir, an orthopedic surgeon from London with FAJR, does multiple surgeries a day on little sleep. He’s often jolted awake by bombings shaking the hospital. Work is frantic. He recalled opening one man’s chest to stop bleeding, with no time to get him to the operating room. The man died.

Tahir said when the Rafah assault began, Palestinian colleagues at the hospital nervously asked if the volunteers would leave.

“It makes my heart feel really heavy,” Tahir said. The Palestinian staff knows that when the teams leave “they have no more protection; and that could mean that this hospital turns into Shifa, which is a very real possibility.” Israeli forces stormed Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, the territory’s largest, for a second time in March, leaving it in ruins. Israel alleges that Hamas uses hospitals as command centers and hideouts, an accusation Gaza health officials deny.

The patients Tahir has saved keep him going. Tahir and other surgeons operated for hours on a man with severe wounds to the skull and abdomen and shrapnel in his back. They did a second surgery on him Wednesday night.

“I looked at my colleagues and said, ‘You know what? If this patient survives -- just this patient -- everything we’ve done, or everything we’ve experienced, would all be worth it,’” Tahir said.

Dr. Ahlia Kattan, an anesthesiologist and ICU doctor from California with FAJR, said the hardest case for her was a 4-year-old boy, the same age as her son, who arrived with burns on more than 75% of his body, his lungs and spleen shattered. He didn’t survive.

“He reminded me so much of my son,” she said, holding back tears. “Everyone has different stories here that they’re taking home with them.”

Weighing heavily on all the volunteers, Kattan said, is “the guilt that we’re already feeling when we leave, that we get to escape to safety.”

Morocco’s automotive industry flourishing, embracing electric vehicle era

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 19 May 2024

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TANGIERS, Morocco — A train that travels from rural northern Morocco to a port on the Mediterranean Sea carries no passengers. Three times a day, it brings hundreds of cars stacked bumper to bumper from a Renault factory outside Tangiers to vessels that transport them to European dealerships.

Business incentives and investing in infrastructure like the freight railway line have allowed Morocco to grow its automotive industry from virtually non-existent to Africa’s largest in less than two decades. The North African kingdom supplies more cars to Europe than China, India or Japan, and has the capacity to produce 700,000 vehicles a year.

Moroccan officials are determined to maintain the country’s role as a car-making juggernaut by competing for electric vehicle projects. But whether one of Africa’s few industrialization success stories can stay competitive as worldwide auto production transitions to EVs and increasingly relies on automation remains to be seen.

More than 250 companies that manufacture cars or their components currently operate in Morocco, where the auto industry now accounts for 22% of gross domestic product and $14 billion in exports. French automaker Renault, the country’s largest private employer, calls Morocco “Sandero-land” because it produces nearly all of its subcompact Dacia Sanderos there.

Unencumbered by many of democracy’s checks and balances, the government tells companies looking to outsource production to cheaper locales they can get approval for new factories and complete construction in as little as five months.

“We didn’t export one car 15 years ago. Now it’s the first exporting sector in the country,” Minister of Industry and Trade Ryad Mezzour said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Mezzour said Morocco has distinguished itself from other outsourcing destinations by expanding its ports, free trade zones and highways. The government offered subsidies of up to 35% for manufacturers to put factories in the rural hinterlands outside of Tangiers, where Renault now produces Clios as well as Dacia Sanderos, Europe’s most popular passenger vehicle, and soon plans to start manufacturing hybrid Dacia Joggers.

Chinese, Japanese, American and Korean factories make seats, engines, shock absorbers and wheels at the Tangiers Automotive City, a large campus of car parts manufacturers. Stellantis produces Peugeots, Opels and Fiats at its plant in Kenitra.

Devoting immense resources to developing and maintaining an automotive sector that could employ a young and growing workforce was part of a 2014 industrialization plan. To create jobs, Mezzour said that he and his predecessors have focused on offering more than cheap labor to foreign automakers looking for new places to build cars and produce parts.

Major automakers pay unionized factory workers less in Morocco than they do in Europe. But even with salaries one-fourth the size of France’s 1,766.92-euro ($1911.97) monthly minimum wage, the jobs pay more than the median income in Morocco. The industry employs 220,000 — a small but sizable chunk of the more than 200,000 agricultural jobs the country is losing annually amid a six-year drought.

Like in many African countries, Morocco’s domestic market for new cars is small. Less than 162,000 vehicles were sold there last year. The government’s success in building an automotive industry nevertheless has made cars the tip of the spear as Morocco works to transform its largely agrarian economy.

“I have one simple priority — not exports or being competitive. My job is to create jobs,” Mezzour said.

Abdelmonim Amachraa, a Moroccan supply chain expert, said the spending on infrastructure and training skilled workers puts the industry in a good position to lure investment from automakers looking to build out their electric vehicle supply chains.

Moroccan officials have sought investment from both East and West, trying to lure industry players from China, Europe and the United States as they now race to produce affordable electric vehicles at scale. China’s BYD — the world’s largest electric vehicle maker — has at least twice announced plans to build factories in the country that have stalled before starting.

“The important question is what can a small country do in this world,” Amachraa said, noting how rapidly global car manufacturing was changing. “We have this ability to coexist with Europe, Africa and the United States when a link can’t be found between China and the United States.”

As Europe works to phase out combustion engines over the next decade, automakers like Renault are preparing to adapt in Morocco. Mohamed Bachiri, the director of the Renault Group’s operations in the country, said the company’s record of success in Morocco makes it an attractive destination for others to invest, particularly in EVs.

He said the industry is likely to continue growing because Morocco’s “integration rate” — the percentage of parts that carmakers can source domestically — has steadily risen to more than 65%. The country also has a competitive advantage by having the experienced and skilled autoworkers that some other outsourcing destinations lack, Bachiri said.

“We’re predisposed to manufacturing cars for customers in our sphere. And the day they decide they need electric vehicles, we will,” he said.

The government has bankrolled public-private partnerships like a Renault-managed academy to train technicians and managers. Compared to comparable markets, Morocco’s political climate and proximity to Europe made it a safe investment, Bachiri said.

“It’s like being on an island next door,” he said, noting instability in neighboring countries throughout North and West Africa.

However, as the United States and European countries encourage their automakers to “onshore” electric vehicle production, it’s unclear how Morocco will fare. The country has long prided itself on being a free market that eschews tariffs and trade barriers but finds itself squeezed as countries vying for EV production advantages enact policies to protect their domestic automotive industries.

Western governments that have long pushed developing countries to embrace free trade are now enacting policies to boost their own EV production. France and the United States both passed tax credits and incentives last year for consumers who buy electric vehicles manufactured in Europe or North America, respectively.

Though the U.S. incentives can extend to Morocco because the countries share a free trade agreement, Mezzour said they complicated the global supply chain and sometimes made his job more complicated.

“We’re living in some kind of new age of protectionism,” Mezzour said. “We’re living in instability in terms of trade rules that makes it more difficult for countries like Morocco that invested heavily in open, free and fair trade.”