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The Iranian flag waves in front of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters, before the beginning of a board of governors meeting, in Vienna, Austria, March 1, 2021. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner

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ERBIL,Iraq, March 12 (Reuters) - Iraq will host another round of talks between regional foes Iran and Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, the foreign ministry in Baghdad said on Saturday, without giving further details.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein revealed the development during remarks at a diplomatic forum in Antalya on Turkey's southern coast cited by local media. A foreign ministry spokesman confirmed the comments to Reuters.

The talks will be the fourth round hosted by Baghdad between officials from its two neighbours and mutual adversaries, according to local media.

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The Saudi foreign ministry did not respond to request for comment.

Diplomats hope the opening of direct channels between Iran and Saudi Arabia will signal an easing of tensions across the Middle East after years of hostilities that have brought the region close to a full-scale conflict.

Talks to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal on Friday faced the prospect of collapse after a last-minute Russian demand forced world powers to pause negotiations for an undetermined time despite having a largely completed text. read more

Negotiators have reached the final stages of 11 months of discussions to restore the deal, which lifted sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its nuclear programme, long seen by the West as a cover for developing atomic bombs.

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Reporting by Amina Ismail; Additional reporting by Aziz El Yaakoubi; Writing by Moataz Mohamed; Editing by Mike Harrison

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Iraq to host another round of Iran-Saudi Arabia talks - Reuters.com

A roll-on/roll-off vehicle carrier belonging to Dubai-based Salem Al Makrani Cargo Company capsized and later sank in the Persian Gulf about 30 miles from southern Iraq.

All but one the ships 30 crew members have been rescued, Irans official IRNA news agency said.

The ship is the UAE-flagged Al Salmy 6, which was underway from Dubai to Umm Qasr in southern Iraq.

A spokesperson for Salem Al Makrani Cargo Company told reporters that the ship experienced high winds and waves which caused the vessel to capasize.

Many of the crew members made it into life rafts and two were reported to be in the water, one of whom was rescued by a nearby tanker.

The last position received from the vessel was at 06:05 UTC, or 10:05 local time, with its status reported as Not Under Command.

Al Salmy 6 was built in 1983 and is 16,021 gross tonnes.

The incident is the latest in a series of car carrier mishaps, the latest being the fire and sinking of the Felicity Ace in the Atlantic Ocean. Other recent stability-related accidents have included the Golden Ray in St. Simons Sound, Georgia and Modern Express in the Bay of Biscay.

Excerpt from:
Ro-Ro 'Al Salmy 6' Capsizes and Sinks Off Iraq - gCaptain

A total of 81 mass graves of Yazidis have been found in Sinjar district in northern Iraq since 2014, according to a Kurdish official on Thursday, Anadolu News Agency reports.

Baravan Hamdi, Deputy Minister of the Martyrs in the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), said these graves were dug by the Daesh terrorist group.

"These graves are acts of ethnic cleansing," he told Anadolu Agency.

The KRG Deputy Minister said two mass graves were found two weeks ago in the Hardan village in Sinjar, and several bodies were exhumed and sent to Baghdad for DNA analysis and identification.

The Sinjar district was captured by the Daesh terrorist group in 2014 and, in 2015, the PKK terror organisation managed to establish a foothold in the area.

According to Iraqi figures, the Daesh group killed 1,293 Yazidis and kidnapped 6,417, of whom 3,530 had managed to flee from the group's grip.

READ: Daesh detention centres are ticking time bombs in Iraq

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81 mass graves of Yazidis found in Iraq's Sinjar since 2014: Official - Middle East Monitor

Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald said the same people who pushed the U.S. into war with Iraq and Afghanistan for Republicans are now back to do the same for the Democrats with a war against Russia. Greenwald told FOX News' Laura Ingraham on Thursday that people should be cautious when the two parties are in lockstep when it comes to war because that means there was very little debate and people were coerced.

Greenwald also said Russiagate and the hatred and distrust for Russia that was created is one of the reasons why the Russia-Ukraine conflict could not be solved diplomatically.

"This is journalism in 2022," Greenwald said. "There are no standards, there are no ethics. A lot of their readers who they write for want them to lie to them or about their enemies as long as it advances the cause."

"I think the more interesting question is the fact that you pointed out to, there is very little debate over something this cataclysmic potentially in the U.S. Congress," he said. "I haven't seen the two parties united in lockstep to this extent since the days after 9/11. I think that lockstep unity produced a lot of bad outcomes. It's generally a bad thing."

"We should be experiencing discomfort whenever the two parties are in complete unity because it signifies not rational thought that has led to a common consensus, but a kind of moral coercion that politicians sense and feel like they need to embrace a narrative about questioning it because as you know very well and I do too, any questioning of the current consensus in Washington immediately subjects you to claims you're a Russian agent, and obviously if you're an elected leader or anyone you don't want that said about you. It's working to prevent the questioning that we need, the debate we need to," Greenwald said.

"The amazing thing is it's the same people, it's David Frum and Nicolle Wallace and Matthew Dowd and Bill Kristol and Max Boot," Greenwald said. "All these neocons back then who were doing this and made themselves the enemy of the country. They ended up in complete disrepute by the end of the second Bush-Cheney term, are now back in the saddle doing it on behalf of Democrats on their cable networks, on their newspapers' op-ed pages. And it's like people have no historical memory, they cheer for these people because they rehabilitated themselves by opposing Trump and that's all they know."

GLENN GREENWALD: It's not just the same tactics, the same rhetorical tactics. You know back then, the idea was if you question the War on Terror, if you question the neocons' invasion of Iraq, if you questioned anything the neocons wanted to do, it meant your patriotism was impugned. It meant you were on the other side, you were an ally of the terrorist, all that rhetoric. And that's the same rhetoric now.

The amazing thing is it's the same people -- it's David Frum and Nicolle Wallace and Matthew Dowd and Bill Kristol and Max Boot. All these neocons back then who were doing this and made themselves the enemy of the country. They ended up in complete disrepute by the end of the second Bush-Cheney term -- are now back in the saddle doing it on behalf of Democrats on their cable networks, on their newspapers' op-ed pages. And its' like people have no historical memory, they cheer for these people because they rehabilitated themselves by opposing Trump and that's all they know.

It's like the neocons have become the most influential force again in American foreign policy as though Iraq and the excesses of the War on Terror never happened.

LAURA INGRAHAM: Yeah, some of us evolved.

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Greenwald: The Same Neocons That Pushed Iraq War Are Now Doing It On Behalf Of Democrats And They Are Being Cheered - RealClearPolitics

BACKGROUND & CONTEXT

Thi-Qar, one of the southernmost governorates of Iraq along the Euphrates basin, shares an emerging environmental degradation problem with the rest of governorates in the south which has affected peoples immediate and long-term socio-economic prospects. As of recently, this has coupled with Iraq-wide governance and financial challenges. This has led to instability in the south of Iraq, especially Thi-Qar, making this area a particular hotspot for fragility as compared to the rest of the country, with structural issues ranging from high levels of poverty, low levels of human capital, and lack of infrastructure development. In the governorate capital, Nasiriyah, as in other neighbouring urban areas such as Basra or Al-Amarah, people have protested in large scale since 2015 against their deteriorating living conditions, in a period where the government and the international community were focused on the ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) conflict ravaging Iraqs north. The initial months of the protests in Nassiriya were particularly intense with clashes in the streets.

As of 2021, Thi-Qar remains the main stronghold of the protests in Iraq, concentrated in Nasiriyah. Despite the different attempts from security forces and other armed groups to break the protests, often with harsh actions leaving several casualties many residents continue protesting and asking for their demands to be implemented.In the past two years the protests in Nasiriyah have led to the change of multiple police chiefs and governors, but with no manifest improvement of the structural issues people suffer from. The most recent attempt to appease protests has been to appoint a new governor for Thi-Qar who was one of five candidates that was presented by the protestors to the Iraqi government.

To better understand social fragility and challenges to resilience in Thi-Qar, focus must be placed on what makes violence spiral up and become increasingly protracted. Rural areas in Thi-Qar, in particular, are narrowly connected to fragility present in general in the governorate, although it may manifest differently. Different drivers were found through interviewing community members and institutional actors alike, ranging from the inability to pursue traditional rural livelihoods, absence of institutional responsiveness, bleak outlooks and lack of agency of youth, as well as social norms that are increasingly unable to foster change and respond to challenges peacefully .

Resilience-building in Thi-Qar, thus, faces entrenched issues that have made the governorate a particularly fragile region in Iraq for years. This is seen in key indicators of fragility from 2012 in Table 1, obtained from the last nation-wide government held household survey available in Iraq. All districts in Thi-Qar systematically doubled the Iraq average in terms of poverty and male youth unemployment. It shows that almost half of families in the governorate were living below the poverty line and more than half of male youth were already struggling to find sustainable employment. Against this background it is not surprising to find that rural Thi-Qar has been a source of young recruits for the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs) since 2014, as they offered employment prospects to a much neglected group. These units supported Baghdads fight against ISIL as a response to a fatwa issued by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to defend Iraq and its citizens, and remain mobilised after the formal end of the conflict in what is a very politicised topic impacting the future of Iraq.

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Improving prospects for peace and stability in vulnerable communities in southern Iraq [EN/AR] - Iraq - ReliefWeb