The Washington Post reported Iran’s top leader Thursday welcomed comments by President Barack Obama advocating diplomacy and not war as a solution to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, a rare positive signal in long-standing hostile transactions between Tehran and Washington. The report on Iran’s state television quoted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as praising a recent statement by the U.S. president saying he saw a “window of opportunity” to use diplomacy to resolve the nuclear dispute. Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters in Iran, told a group of clerics: “This expression is a good word. This is a wise remark indicating taking distance from illusion.” It is one of the rare cases in which Iran’s top leader praised an American leader.
The same agency reported yesterday that political expression in this seaside strip is firmly regulated by the ruling Islamist militant group Hamas, and the authorities recently approved a robust street rally against an unlikely target: the government in Syria, long Hamas’s benefactor and host. The demonstration, as well as Hamas leaders’ statements in support of Syrian protesters and the abandonment of their Damascus offices, was an indicator of the Gaza-based movement’s stark break with Syria — and of the rapidly shifting partnerships of a changing Middle East. Although Hamas could once comfortably ally itself with fellow Sunni powers while at the same time receiving aid and hospitality from Shiite forces in Syria and Iran, the region’s growing sectarian divide means the group is likely to have to pick sides.
The New York Times reported that each night, across the Orontes River and all along the border, new secrets of the bloodshed in Syria arrive. Rickety wooden boats ferry a stream of people, some walking and some wounded, to the safety of Turkey, on a flight from cities and villages racked by fighting. As the pace of the government assault has quickened in recent days, so has the traffic on the river. The number of exiles keeps growing, filling refugee camps and towns on the border, with their fearful tales of home. A Turkish official said about 1,500 Syrians crossed the border last month, pushing the numbers of refugees in the region’s camps past 11,000, just short of a high reached in June after heavy clashes between defectors and the Syrian Army.
The Turkish information agency Hurriyet reported that Turkey will find a solution to the Kurdish conflict regardless of the cost, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said yesterday as Deputy Prime Minister Beşir Atalay promised fresh democratization steps. “Whatever the price, we will resolve this issue with the blessing of God and the support of the people – we will continue to struggle for that until our last breath,” Erdoğan said. “This is a human matter before everything else. No one can harm our fraternity. We are brothers in faith.” Erdoğan made the remarks at a meeting of his party’s provincial chairmen yesterday on the eve of a visit to the southeastern province of Mardin and a day after his wife, Emine Erdoğan, and Atalay visited the families of 34 civilians who were killed in a botched air raid in the southeastern province of Şırnak’s Uludere district in December 2011.
