CAIRO, Egypt: Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas arrived in El Alamein in Egypt Saturday, the news agency Wafa said, ahead of unity talks between Palestinian factions boycotted by the militant group Islamic Jihad. The Palestinian news agency said that as well as chairing Sunday’s meeting of the heads of Palestinian factions Abbas "is scheduled to meet with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah El-Sisi”. Last week, Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad Al-Nakhalah made his group’s participation in the talks conditional on the release of its members and those of other factions detained by Palestinian security forces in the West Bank.
In a statement to AFP Saturday, Islamic Jihad official Mohammad Al-Hindi again denounced "continued political detention and prosecution of the resistance”. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is also boycotting the talks. Sunday’s meeting will include the heads of other political factions, including Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Both Abbas and Haniyeh met in Ankara on Wednesday in the run-up to Sunday’s crucial meeting. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has good relations with both, hosted the talks and said his government will do its best to push for intra-Palestinian reconciliation.
A Palestinian official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, said the talks aim to "end the divisions (between factions) in preparation for a unified Palestinian government and presidential and general elections”. Haniyeh’s spokesman Taher Al-Nunu told AFP that Hamas sought to "unify the Palestinian position” under a strategic plan to "confront the Israeli occupation in light of the aggression of its extremist government”. Since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, the Islamist movement has been at loggerheads with Abbas’s secular Fatah which administers Palestinian-run areas of the West Bank, which Israel has occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Attempts to end the more than 15-year Fatah-Hamas rift saw leading figures from both movements sign a reconciliation deal in Algiers last year, promising long-delayed Palestinian elections in 2023. Egypt’s meeting comes amid a resurgence of violence linked to increasing Zionist attacks on Palestinian positions, which this year has killed at least 203 Palestinians, one Ukrainian and one Italian, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources from both sides. Meanwhile, four "fighters” from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have been killed by a drone strike in northern Iraq, officials in the autonomous Kurdistan region said, blaming the Turkish military.
The strike on Friday near Iraqi Kurdistan’s second city Sulaimaniyah came as Kurdish authorities in neighboring Syria said a drone attack also by Turkey had killed four members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Ankara and its Western allies classify the PKK as a "terrorist” organization. Turkey also considers the main component of the SDF, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), to be a "terrorist” offshoot of the PKK. The Turkish army rarely comments on its strikes in Iraq, but routinely targets PKK rear bases in the mountains of the Kurdistan region. On Friday around 8 pm (1700 GMT), "four PKK fighters were killed and another wounded when a Turkish army drone targeted their vehicle near the village of Rangina” north of Sulaimaniyah, according to a statement from Iraqi Kurdistan’s anti-terrorism services.
Since 1984 the PKK has waged an insurgency in Turkey that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and Ankara has long maintained military positions inside northern Iraq where it regularly launches operations against them. Two raids a week apart in May in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Sinjar district killed six Yazidi fighters affiliated with the PKK, in strikes local security officials blamed on Ankara. In late February and early March, strikes which the anti-terrorism service attributed to Turkey, again killed fighters from the Sinjar Resistance Units. The movement took up arms against the Islamic State group in 2014 following the jihadists’ massacre of thousands of Yazidi men and their abduction of thousands of women for use as sex slaves.
Both the Iraqi federal authorities and the Kurdistan regional government have been accused of tolerating Turkey’s military activities to preserve their close economic ties. On Tuesday the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani referred to an "upcoming visit” by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but did not provide a specific date. The meeting would likely focus on economic activity as well as the sensitive issue of water. Baghdad says upstream dams built by Turkey on major rivers it shares with drought-hit Iraq have contributed to severe water shortages in recent years. – AFP