THE FIRST ENGLISH LANGUAGE DAILY IN FREE KUWAITEstablished in 1977 / www.arabtimesonline.com

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PM denies attack plan ... tensions riseKURDS OFFER IRAQ TALKS OVER AIRPORT, BANKS BAN

Panel preps nursing report Peshmerga note force deployment

MP defends grilling motion

‘Final’ accord, says Abbas

Lawmakers favor enforcement

Trump is unlikely tosoften on Iran deal

Ceasefire deal agreed for south Damascus

Drone kills British ‘White Widow’ extremist

Hamas, Fatah sign reconciliation deal

Canadian Joshua Boyle and American Caitlan Cole-man, who were kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2012, are shown in an image from 2016. The American woman, her Canadian husband and their three young children have been released after years of being held captive by a network with ties to the Taleban. The two were ab-ducted five years ago while travelling in Afghanistan and have been held by the Haqqani network. The couple had

three children while in captivity. (AP) — See Page 12

Syrian security forces gather near the site of an attack near the main police headquarters in Syr-ia’s capital Damascus on Oct 11. Three suicide bombers blew themselves up near the main police headquarters building in Syria’s capital Damascus on Wednesday, killing at least two

people, the interior ministry said. (AFP)

A person walks past trees across the Parc de la Tete d’Or in downtown Lyon early on Oct 12. (AFP)

FRIDAY-SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13-14, 2017 / MUHARRAM 23-24, 1439 AH

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By Abubakar A. IbrahimArab Times Staff

KUWAIT CITY, Oct 12: The parliamentary committee tasked to investigate irregularities in the Ministry of Health on Thursday met Head of the Nursing Depart-ment Latifa Al-Mansour to dis-cuss issues concerning several nurses hired from abroad.

Committee Chairman MP Saadoun Hammad Al-Otaibi dis-closed that Al-Mansour briefed them on the nurses’ employment contracts and the committees in charge of recruiting nurses.

He said the investigative panel

will meet again next week to seek further clarifications from some ministry officials to pave way for finalizing its report which will be submitted to the National Assem-bly for voting.

In another development, MP Riyadh Al-Adsani revealed some of his colleagues have ac-cused the proponents of the in-terpellation request against the state minister for cabinet affairs of conspiracy. He argued that they are not the conspirators but the one who covers up corrup-tion.

Speaking in a press conference

ERBIL, Iraq, Oct 12, (Agencies): Iraq’s prime minister on Thursday denied an attack on the Kurds was imminent, in a bid to defuse tensions that had prompted Kurdish peshmerga fighters to temporarily seal off road links with the rest of the country.

“We are not going to use our army to fight our people or to make war on our Kurdish citizens or others,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said.

“Our duty is to preserve the unity of our country, to implement the constitution, and to protect citizens and national forces,” he told a meeting of tribal leaders from the western province of Anbar.

The rise in tensions came two weeks after Kurdish voters over-whelmingly backed independence in a non-binding referendum that the central government condemned as illegal.

Iraqi Kurdish forces closed the two main roads connecting Erbil and Dohuk with the northern city of Mosul for several hours, a Kurdish military official said.

WASHINGTON, Oct 12, (RTRS): President Donald Trump finds himself under immense pressure as he consid-ers de-certifying the international nuclear deal with Iran, a move that would ignore warnings from inside and outside his administration that to do so would risk undermining US credibility.

Trump is expected to unveil a broad strategy on con-fronting Iran this week, likely on Friday. There was always the chance he could still have a last-minute change of heart and certify Iran’s compliance with the 2015 accord, which he has called an “embarrassment” and the “worst deal ever negotiated.”

Senior US officials, European allies and prominent US lawmakers have told Trump that refusing to certify the deal would leave the US isolated, concede the diplomatic high ground to Tehran, and ultimately risk the unraveling of the agreement.

Signed by the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, the European Union and Iran, the deal re-lieved sanctions on Tehran in exchange for curbing its dis-puted nuclear program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) con-cluded that Iran secretly researched a nuclear warhead until 2009, which Tehran denies. Iran has always insisted that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and denies it has aimed to build an atomic bomb.

After Trump made clear three months ago he would not certify Iran’s compliance with the deal, his advisers moved to give him options to consider, a senior administration of-ficial said.

Recertify“They came up with a plan that protects the things

they are concerned about but doesn’t recertify, which the president made clear he was not going to do. That ship has sailed,” according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official said Trump has been telling foreign leaders and US lawmakers that his refusal to certify the Iran deal would not blow it up.

“He’s not walking away from it. The chances of him walking away from it go down if they work with him on making it better,” the official said.

White House officials said Trump is expected to an-nounce a broad, more confrontational policy toward Iran directed at curbing its nuclear and ballistic missile pro-grams and financial and military support for Hezbollah and other extremist groups.

Trump has said he believes the nuclear deal is too gener-ous toward Iran and would not stop it from trying to de-velop a nuclear weapon.

He has criticized the agreement’s “sunset clauses,” under which some restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program would expire over time. He also wants to toughen language on ballistic missiles and inspections. The International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran is complying with the agreement.

European officials have categorically ruled out renegoti-ating the deal, but have said they share Trump’s concerns over Iran’s destabilizing influence in the Middle East.

Several diplomats have said Europe would be ready to discuss sanctioning Iran’s ballistic missile tests and form-ing a strategy to curb Iran’s influence in the region.

CAIRO, Oct 12, (AFP): Rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah signed an agree-ment Thursday on ending a decade-long split following talks mediated by Egypt in Cairo, with president Mahmud Abbas call-ing it a “final” accord.

Under the agreement, the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority is to resume full control of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip by Dec 1, according to a statement from Egypt’s government.

Abbas welcomed the deal in comments to AFP and said he considered it a “final agreement to end the division” — though many details remain to be resolved and pre-vious reconciliation attempts have repeat-edly failed.

It was signed in Cairo by new Hamas deputy leader Salah al-Aruri and Azzam al-Ahmad, the head of the Fatah delegation for the talks, at the headquarters of Egypt’s intelligence service, which oversaw the ne-gotiations.

Celebrations broke out in the Gaza Strip after the announcement of the deal, with

residents waving flags of Egypt, Palestine, Fatah and Hamas.

Negotiations are now expected to be held on forming a unity government, with the various Palestinian political movements in-vited to another meeting in Cairo on Nov 21.

An official from Abbas’s Fatah move-ment said the Palestinian president was planning to soon travel to the Gaza Strip as part of the unity bid in what would be his first visit in at least a decade.

Sanctions taken by Abbas against Hamas-controlled Gaza will also soon be lifted, the Fatah official said.

The deal includes 3,000 members of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority’s police force redeploying to Gaza, a mem-ber of the negotiating team told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The figure is however a fraction of the more than 20,000 police officers employed separately by Hamas.

Another party to the negotiations, speak-ing on condition of anonymity, said the

LONDON, Oct 12, (Agencies): Sally Jones, a British jihadi who recruited online for the Islamic State group, has been killed in Syria by a US drone along with her 12-year-old son, The Sun newspaper reported on Thurs-day.

A convert to Islam from southern England, Jones was nicknamed the “White Widow” by the British press after her jihadi husband Junaid Hussain, also an IS militant, was killed by a drone in 2015.

Quoting a British intelligence source who had been briefed by US counterparts, The Sun reported that Jones and her son had been killed in June close to Syria’s bor-der with Iraq, as she was attempting to flee the IS strong-

hold of Raqqa.US intelligence chiefs were quoted as saying they

could not be 100 percent certain that Jones had been killed as there was no way of recovering any DNA from the ground, but they were “confident” she was dead.

Her son JoJo was presumed to be dead too, although his presence with her was not known at the time of the drone strike and he was not an intended target, according to The Sun.

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s spokesman de-clined to comment directly on the report, as did Defence Secretary Michael Fallon.

“If you are a British national in Iraq or Syria, and if

you have chosen to fight for DAESH, an illegal organisa-tion that is preparing and inspiring terror attacks on our streets, then you’ve made yourself a legitimate target,” Fallon told reporters in London.

“And you run the risk every hour of every day of being on the wrong end of an RAF or a United States missile,” he said.

One Western security source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Jones had not been heard of since earlier this year so the assumption was that she was dead, although the source refused to confirm the details of the Sun report.

Newswatch

DUBAI: The United Arab Emirates said on Thursday it was ending the mission of North Korea’s non-resident ambassador and terminating its own envoy’s services in Pyongyang, according to the offi cial Twitter account of state news agency WAM.

The UAE would also stop issuing new visas or com-pany licences to North Korean citizens, WAM added. (RTRS)

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LONDON: The husband of a British-Iranian woman de-tained in Iran on Wednesday led a protest in London de-manding the release of his wife and another British citizen held in the Middle Eastern state.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a 38-year-old mother, had already been sentenced to fi ve years in prison for par-ticipating in anti-regime demonstrations in 2009, and last week was hit with further charges, carrying a possible 16-year prison term.

“We were very surprised,” husband Richard Ratcliffe said of the new charges. (AFP)

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ADEN: Four soldiers and nine rebels were killed in south-ern Yemen on Wednesday, army sources said, as clashes fl ared in the last rebel pocket in mainly government-held Shabwa province.

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US to pull outof UNESCOPARIS, Oct 12, (AFP): The United States said Thursday that it was pulling out of the UN’s culture and education body, accusing it of “an-ti-Israel bias” in a move that underlines Wash-ington’s drift away from international institutions.

Following years of ten-sion at UNESCO, which is in the process of electing a new director-general, US State Department spokes-woman Heather Nauert announced that Washing-ton planned to withdraw.

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