World
Search effort intensifies after Indonesia quake killed 268
More rescuers and volunteers were deployed Wednesday in devastated areas on Indonesia’s main island of Java to search for the dead and missing from an earthquake that killed at least 268 people.
With many missing, some remote areas still unreachable and more than 1,000 people injured in the 5.6 magnitude quake, the death toll was likely to rise. Hospitals near the epicenter on the densely populated island were already overwhelmed, and patients hooked up to IV drips lay on stretchers and cots in tents set up outside, awaiting further treatment.
More than 12,000 army personel were deployed Wednesday to increase the strength of search efforts that being carried out by more than 2,000 joint forces of police, the search and rescue agency and volunteers, said Suharyanto, the National Disaster Mitigation Agency chief.
Television reports showed police, soldiers and other rescue personnel using jackhammers, circular saws and sometimes their bare hands and farm tools, digging desperately in the worst-hit area of Cijendil village where tons of mud, rocks and trees were left from a landslide.
Suharyanto, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, said aid was reaching thousands of people left homeless who fled to temporary shelters where supplies can be distributed only by foot over the rough terrain.
In several hard-hit areas, water as well as food and medical supplies were being distributed from trucks, and authorities have deployed military personnel carrying food, medicine, blankets, field tents and water tankers.
Read: Magnitude 5.9 quake hits northwest Turkey, causing panic
Volunteers and rescue personnel erected more temporary shelters for those left homeless in several villages of Cianjur district.
Most were barely protected by makeshift shelters that were lashed by heavy monsoon downpours. Only a few were lucky to be protected by tarpaulin-covered tents. They said they were running low on food, blankets and other aid, as emergency supplies were rushed to the region.
He said more than 58,000 survivors were moved to shelters and more than 1,000 people were injured, with nearly 600 of them still receiving treatment for serious injuries.
He said rescuers had recovered 268 bodies from collapsed houses and landslides that triggered by the earthquake, and at least 151 still reported missing. But not all of the dead have been identified, so it’s possible some the bodies pulled from the rubble are of people on the missing list.
Rescue operations were focused on about a dozen villages in Cianjur, where people are still believed trapped, Suharyanto said.
Magnitude 5.9 quake hits northwest Turkey, causing panic
An earthquake with a magnitude 5.9 has hit a town in northwest Turkey on Wednesday, Turkey’s government-run Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency said.
The earthquake was centered in the town of Golkaya, in Duzce province, some 200 kilometers east of Istanbul. It was felt in Istanbul and in the capital Ankara.
The quake sent people rushing out of buildings and cut power in the area, Duzce’s mayor Faruk Ozlu told private NTV television.
Ozlu said there was no immediate report of casualty or damage but authorities were still assessing possible destruction.
Turkey sits on top of major fault lines and is frequently shaken by earthquakes.
Duzce was hit by a powerful earthquake in 1999, which killed some 800 people.
'Stock up on blankets': Ukrainians brace for horrific winter
Ukraine could face rolling blackouts across the country through March, an energy expert said, due to what another official described Tuesday as the “colossal” damage done to Ukraine's power grid by relentless Russian airstrikes. Ukrainians are being told to stock up on supplies, evacuate hard-hit areas — or even think about leaving the country altogether.
Sergey Kovalenko, the CEO of private energy provider DTEK Yasno, said the company was under instructions from Ukraine’s state grid operator to resume emergency blackouts in the areas it covers, including the capital Kyiv and the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region.
“Although there are fewer blackouts now, I want everyone to understand: Most likely, Ukrainians will have to live with blackouts until at least the end of March,” Kovalenko warned in a Facebook post.
“I think we need to be prepared for different options, even the worst ones. Stock up on warm clothes, blankets, think about what will help you wait out a long shutdown,” he said, addressing Ukrainian residents.
Russia has been pummeling Ukraine’s power grid and other infrastructure from the air for weeks, as the war approaches its nine-month milestone. That onslaught has caused widespread blackouts and deprived millions of Ukrainians of electricity, heat and water.
“This winter will be life-threatening for millions of people in Ukraine,” said Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge, the World Health Organization's regional director for Europe, due to the lack of power and Ukraine's damaged health facilities.
Read more: Ukraine to civilians: Leave liberated areas before winter
Temperatures commonly stay below freezing in Ukraine in the winter, and snow has already fallen in many areas, including Kyiv. Ukrainian authorities have started evacuating civilians from recently liberated sections of the southern Kherson and Mykolaiv regions out of fear that the winter will be too hard to survive.
Kovalenko said even if no more Russian airstrikes occur, scheduled outages will be needed across Ukraine to ensure that power is evenly distributed across the country's battered energy grid.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian missile strikes have damaged more than 50% of the country’s energy facilities.
“The scale of destruction is colossal” on the power grid from the Russian barrage last week, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the CEO of Ukrenergo, the state-owned power grid operator, told Ukrainian TV on Tuesday.
He said Ukraine has “practically no intact thermal (or) hydroelectric power plants” following the large-scale attack by Moscow on Nov. 15.
Also Tuesday, the Kyiv regional authorities said more than 150 settlements were enduring emergency blackouts due to the onset of winter weather, including snowfall and high winds. More than 70 repair teams have been deployed to restore power across the province.
The battle for terrain has continued unabated despite the deteriorating weather conditions, with Ukrainian forces pressing against Russian positions as part of a weeks-long counteroffensive and Moscow’s forces keeping up shelling and missile strikes.
In a key battlefield development, a Ukrainian official acknowledged that Kyiv’s forces are attacking Russian positions on the Kinburn Spit, which is a gateway to the Black Sea basin and parts of the southern Kherson region that are still under Russian control.
Natalia Humeniuk, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian army’s Operational Command South, said in televised remarks that Ukrainian forces are “continuing a military operation” in the area.
Read more: Shells hit near nuclear plant; blackouts roll across Ukraine
The Kinburn Spit is Russia’s last outpost in Ukraine’s southern Mykolayiv region, directly west of Kherson. Ukrainian forces recently liberated other parts of the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions. Moscow has used the Kinburn Spit as a staging ground for missile and artillery strikes on Ukrainian positions in the Mykolaiv province, and elsewhere along the Ukrainian-controlled Black Sea coast.
Ukraine recently recaptured the city of Kherson, on the western bank of the Dnieper River, and surrounding areas.
Recapturing the Kinburn Spit could help Ukrainian forces push into territory that Russia still holds in the Kherson region “under significantly less Russian artillery fire” than directly crossing the Dnieper, a Washington-based think tank said. The Institute for the Study of War added that control of the area would help Kyiv alleviate Russian strikes on Ukraine’s southern seaports and allow Ukraine to increase its naval activity in the Black Sea.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s presidential office said Tuesday that at least eight civilians were killed and 16 were injured over the previous 24 hours, as Moscow’s forces once again used drones, rockets and heavy artillery to pound eight Ukrainian regions.
In the eastern Donetsk region, fierce battles continued around the city of Bakhmut, where the Kremlin’s forces are keen to clinch a victory after weeks of embarrassing military setbacks. Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko also said Russia launched missiles at the city of Kramatorsk, a Ukrainian military hub, and on the strategic city of Avdiivka.
He added that power and communications were nonexistent in most of the Donetsk region.
According to Ukraine’s presidential office, one civilian was killed and three others wounded after Russia shelled the city of Kherson, which Ukrainian forces recaptured on Nov. 10.
Since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, the war has killed at least 16,784 civilians and injured 10,189, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates.
But U.S. Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated earlier this month that some 40,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed or wounded.
Strong quake rocks Solomon Islands, sends people fleeing
A powerful magnitude 7.0 earthquake jolted the Solomon Islands Tuesday afternoon, overturning tables and sending people racing for higher ground.
There were no immediate reports of widespread damage or injuries, although Australia's prime minister said a roof at its High Commission had collapsed. An initial tsunami warning was withdrawn after the threat passed.
Solomon Islands government spokesperson George Herming said he was in his office on the second floor of a building in the capital, Honiara, when the quake rocked the city. He said he crawled underneath his table.
Read more: 252 dead as Indonesia earthquake topples homes, buildings, roads
“It's a huge one that just shocked everybody,” Herming said.
“We have tables and desks, books and everything scattered all over the place as a result of the earthquake, but there's no major damage to structure or buildings,” he said.
Herming said the Solomon Islands, which is home to about 700,000 people, doesn't have any big high-rises that might be vulnerable to a quake. He said there was some panic around the town and traffic jams as everybody tried to drive to higher ground.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said all the staff of Australia's High Commission were safe.
“There are no known injuries but the roof of the High Commission annex has collapsed, which would point to likely damage throughout the city,” Albanese told Parliament.
“Staff have been moved to higher ground because there was a tsunami warning that was issued. Our High Commission is seeking to confirm the safety of all Australians in the Solomons. There are difficulties because phone lines have gone down. So there are communication difficulties there,” Albanese added.
Read more: Earthquake rocks Nepal, six dead while in sleep
Freelance journalist Charley Piringi said he was standing outside near schools on the outskirts of Honiara when the quake sent the children running.
“The earthquake rocked the place,” he said. “It was a huge one. We were all shocked, and everyone is running everywhere.”
The quake's epicenter was in the ocean about 56 kilometers (35 miles) southwest of Honiara at a depth of 13 kilometers (8 miles), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center initially warned of possible hazardous waves for the region but later downgraded a tsunami warning as the threat passed.
The Solomon Islands sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a arc along the Pacific Ocean rim where many volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur.
38 killed in factory fire in China
A blazing fire has killed 38 people at a company dealing in chemicals and other industrial goods in central China’s Henan province.
Two other people were injured, the local government in part of Anyang city said in a statement Tuesday.
Read: Palestinian officials say house fire in Gaza Strip kills 21
The fire was reported about 4:30 p.m. Monday and took firefighters about 3 1/2 hours to bring under control, the Wenfang district government said.
Ukraine to civilians: Leave liberated areas before winter
Ukrainian authorities have begun evacuating civilians from recently liberated sections of the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, fearing that a lack of heat, power and water due to Russian shelling will make living conditions too difficult this winter. The World Health Organization concurred, warning that millions face a “life-threatening” winter in Ukraine.
Authorities urged residents of the two southern regions, which Russian forces have been shelling for months, to move to safer areas in the central and and western parts of the country. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Monday that the government will provide transportation, accommodations and medical care for them, with priority for women with children, the sick and elderly.
Vereshchuk last month asked citizens now living abroad not to return to Ukraine for the winter to conserve power. Other officials have suggested that residents in Kyiv or elsewhere who have the resources to leave Ukraine for a few months should do so, to save power for hospitals and other key facilities.
The WHO delivered a chilling warning Monday about the energy crisis' human impact on Ukraine.
“This winter will be life-threatening for millions of people in Ukraine,” said the WHO’s regional director for Europe, Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge. “Attacks on health and energy infrastructure mean hundreds of hospitals and healthcare facilities are no longer fully operational, lacking fuel, water and electricity.”
Read more: Shells hit near nuclear plant; blackouts roll across Ukraine
He warned of health risks such as respiratory and cardiovascular problems from people trying to warm themselves by burning charcoal or wood and using diesel generators and electric heaters.
The evacuations are taking place more than a week after Ukraine recaptured the city of Kherson, on the western bank of the Dnieper River, and surrounding areas in a major battlefield gain. Since then, heading into the winter, residents and authorities alike are realizing how much power and other infrastructure the Russians damaged or destroyed before retreating.
Ukraine is known for its brutal winter weather, and snow has already covered Kyiv, the capital, and other parts of the country.
Russian forces are fortifying their defense lines along Dnieper River's eastern bank, fearing that Ukrainian forces will push deeper into the region. In the weeks before Ukraine's successful counteroffensive, Russian-installed authorities relocated tens of thousands of Kherson city residents to Russian-held areas.
On Monday, Russian-installed authorities urged other residents to evacuate an area on the river's eastern bank that Moscow now controls, citing intense fighting in Kherson's Kakhovskiy district.
Russia has been pounding Ukraine’s power grid and other infrastructure from the air for weeks, causing widespread blackouts and leaving millions of Ukrainians without electricity, heat and water.
Read more: Deadly missile strike adds to Ukraine war fears in Poland Deadly missile strike adds to Ukraine war fears in Poland
To cope, four-hour or longer power outages were scheduled Monday in 15 of Ukraine's 27 regions, according to Volodymyr Kudrytsky, head of Ukraine’s state grid operator Ukrenergo. Ukrenergo plans more outages Tuesday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian missile strikes have damaged more than 50% of the country’s energy facilities.
Zelenskyy on Monday repeated his calls for NATO nations and other allies to recognize Russia as a terrorist state, saying its shelling of energy facilities was tantamount “to the use of a weapon of mass destruction.” Zelenskyy also again urged stricter sanctions against Russia and appealed for more air defense aid.
“The terrorist state needs to see that they do not stand a chance,” he told NATO’s 68th Parliamentary Assembly meeting in Madrid in a video address, after which he said the body approved the terrorist designation.
Also Monday, Zelenskyy and his wife made a rare joint public appearance to observe a moment of silence and place candles at a Kyiv memorial for those killed in Ukraine's pro-European Union mass protests in 2014. As bells rang in a memorial tribute, Ukraine's first couple walked under a gray sky on streets dusted with snow and ice up to a wall of stone plaques bearing the names of fallen protesters.
Their visit coincided with fresh reminders Monday of more death and destruction on Ukrainian soil.
At least four civilians were killed and eight more wounded in Ukraine over the past 24 hours, the deputy head of the country’s presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said Monday.
A Russian missile strike in the northeast Kharkiv region on Sunday night killed one person and wounded two as it hit a residential building in the village of Shevchenkove, according to the region's governor.
One person was wounded in the Dnipropetrovsk region, where Russian forces shelled the city of Nikopol and surrounding areas, Gov. Valentyn Reznichenko said. Nikopol lies across the river from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
In the eastern Donetsk region, which Moscow partially controls, Russian forces shelled 14 towns and villages, the region’s Ukrainian governor said.
Heavy fighting was taking place near the Ukrainian-held city of Bakhmut, where a school was damaged. In Makiivka, which is under Russian control, an oil depot was hit and caught fire.
Russian-installed authorities said more than 105,000 people in the province’s capital, Donetsk, were left without electricity on Monday after Ukrainian shelling damaged power lines. One person was killed, officials said, and 59 miners were trapped underground after power was cut to four coal mines.
In the neighboring Luhansk region, most of which is under Russian control, the Ukrainian army is advancing towards the key cities of Kreminna and Svatove, where the Russians have set up a defense line, according to Luhansk’s Ukrainian Gov. Serhiy Haidai.
“There are successes and the Ukrainian army is moving very slowly, but it will be much more difficult for Russians to defend themselves after Svatove and Kreminna (are retaken)," Haidai told Ukrainian television.
Britain's Defense Ministry said retaining control of Svatove should be a political priority for Russia but that “both Russian defensive and offensive capability continues to be hampered by severe shortages of munitions and skilled personnel.”
In another development, the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency said its inspectors on Monday reported that weekend shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, had not damaged key equipment and they had identified no nuclear safety concerns.
The six reactors, which are all shut down, are stable, and the integrity of spent and fresh fuel, along with stored radioactive waste, was confirmed, the IAEA said, adding that staff are repairing damage to other equipment.
As they have for months, Kyiv and Moscow blamed each other for the shelling of the Russian-occupied power station, and again the IAEA didn't comment on who was responsible.
Women's protests overshadow Iran's World Cup loss
Iran’s players didn’t sing their national anthem and didn’t celebrate their goals. In the stands, many Iranian fans showed solidarity with the protest movement that has roiled the country for months.
Iran’s World Cup opener Monday against England was not just about soccer, but the political struggles gripping the Islamic Republic. And for some Iranian women, barred from attending men’s soccer matches at home, it was a precious first chance to see the national team live.
“Do you know how painful it is to be the biggest football fan and never go to a match in 34 years?” said Afsani, a 34-year-old beekeeper from Tehran, who traveled to Qatar to watch the men's team for the first time. She said she wept when she entered the Khalifa International Stadium.
Like other Iran fans, Afsani declined to give her last name for fear of government reprisals.
Iran lost 6-2 to a superior England team, but the result wasn't the most important to Mayram, a 35-year-old Tehran resident who also watched her first soccer match live. She was disappointed that the players didn’t show more overt solidarity with the protests at home.
“You have girls being killed in the street,” she said. “It’s hard to say but this is not a happy occasion. It is really sad.”
Iran is competing in the World Cup amid a violent crackdown on a major women’s protest movement that has resulted in the deaths of at least 419 people, according Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that has been monitoring the protests.
Read more: England crush Iran to raise hope again: "It might just come home".
The unrest was spurred by the Sept. 16 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the country’s morality police. It first focused on the state-mandated hijab, or headscarf, for women, but has since morphed into one of the most serious threats to the Islamic Republic since the chaotic years following its founding.
Many Iran fans in Doha wore T-shirts and waved signs with the mantra of the uprising — “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Others wore jerseys bearing the names of female protesters killed by Iranian security forces in recent weeks.
In the 22nd minute of the match — a reference to Amini's age when she died — some fans chanted her name, though the refrain quickly faded out and was replaced by “Iran."
Other fans dressed in conservative black chadors and hijabs in the color of the Iranian flag cheered loudly for their national team. Many of them declined to speak about the political situation, saying it was not relevant to them.
Before international matches, Iran's players usually sing the national anthem with the right hands on their heart. On Monday they stood silently, their arms draped around each other's shoulders, prompting Iran’s state TV to cut from a close-up of the players’ faces to a wide shot of the pitch. During the match, the players didn't celebrate their two goals, something that has become common in Iranian league matches since the protests began.
The question of whether to root for the national team has divided Iranians. Many now view support for the Iranian team as a betrayal of the young women and men who have risked their lives in the streets.
“The protest movement has overshadowed the football,” said Kamran, a linguistics professor who lives in the verdant northern province of Mazandaran. “I want Iran to lose these three games.”
Others insist the national team, which includes players who have spoken out on social media in solidarity with the protests, is representative of the country’s people and not its ruling Shiite clerics. The team’s star forward, Sardar Azmoun, has been vocal about the protests online. He was on the bench during the match, to the dismay of fans who said they were looking to him to make a gesture of protest on the pitch. Two former soccer stars have even been arrested for backing the movement.
Read more: Iran sentences anti-government protester to death: Report
Ali Jassim, a 14-year-old Iranian fan, said he was sure the political crisis was affecting the team’s performance, as England went up 3-0 at half-time.
“I don’t know how they can focus in a stadium full of so many people who want them to fail, ” he said.
The Iranian government has tried to encourage citizens to support their team against Iran’s traditional enemies. Iran plays the United States on Nov. 29 — a contentious showdown that last occurred at the 1998 World Cup in France.
Observers note that the players are likely facing government pressure not to side with the protests. Already, Iranian athletes have drawn enormous scrutiny. When Iranian climber Elnaz Rekabi competed in South Korea without wearing her country’s mandatory headscarf, she became a lighting rod of the protest movement.
“At the end of the day, I want the players to achieve their dreams,” said Mariam, a 27-year-old sports fan and international relations student who traveled to Doha from Tehran to watch her first men's soccer match live. “It’s not their fault our society is so polarized.”
Mariam said a big achievement for the women protesting at home would be the right to choose whether to wear the hijab.
“But after that, women will go for their right to be in stadiums,” she said.
Activists: Iranian forces unleash heavy fire on protesters
Iranian security forces used heavy gunfire against protesters in a Kurdish town in the country's west on Monday, killing at least five during an anti-government protest that erupted at the funeral of two people killed the day before, activists said.
Videos circulating online show dozens of protesters taking shelter in alleyways as heavy gunfire echoes through the streets. Some show individuals lying motionless and bloodied in the streets, while others show residents gathering at a local hospital to donate blood.
Iran has been convulsed by anti-government protests since the Sept. 16 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman who died in the custody of the country's morality police in the capital, Tehran. The protests, which were initially concentrated in the western, Kurdish region of Iran where Amini was from, have spread across the country and escalated into calls for the overthrow of Iran's ruling clerics.
Hengaw, a Kurdish human rights group, said Iranian security forces unleashed heavy gunfire on protesters in the town of Javanrud, where a funeral was held for two protesters killed the day before. It cited witnesses as saying that Iranian forces used heavy machine guns.
Read more: Iran sentences anti-government protester to death: Report
Hengaw said seven people were killed on Monday, while another group, the Kurdistan Human Rights Network, put the toll at five. The latter group said many of the wounded were being treated in homes because of fears they could be arrested from hospitals, making it difficult to confirm the toll. It said several were shot in the head or chest.
Iranian authorities heavily restrict media coverage of the protests and have periodically shut off internet access, making it difficult to confirm details of the unrest.
The semiofficial Fars news agency reported protests in Javanrud on Sunday night, saying security forces were fired upon with live ammunition. It said two people were killed and four wounded.
Later on Monday, state TV interviewed a local security official, Mohammad Pourhashemi, who blamed the shooting in Javanrud on local gunmen who he said had exchanged fire with security forces. The report did not provide further details.
Read more: Iran’s elite technical university emerges as hub of protests
Funerals have often been the scene of renewed protests in recent weeks, as they were during the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought the clerics to power. The latest demonstrations mark the biggest challenge to the theocracy in over a decade.
At least 426 people have been killed and more than 17,400 arrested, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group monitoring the unrest. It says at least 55 members of the security forces have been killed.
Jalal Mahmoudzadeh, a lawmaker representing the Kurdish city of Mahabad, told the Etemad daily that 11 people have been killed during protests in the city since late October, many of them in recent days. He said some members of the security forces fired upon homes and businesses on Saturday, and he called on authorities to adopt a softer touch.
The unrest cast a shadow over the World Cup on Monday, where the Iranian national team faced off against England. Iran's players did not sing along to their national anthem, and some fans chanted Amini's name at the 22nd minute of the match.
The violence has also spilled across the border into neighboring Iraq's northern Kurdish region. Iran has blamed the unrest at home in part on Kurdish groups based in Iraq, and has targeted them with missile and drone attacks.
Iran said Monday that its latest strikes were necessary to protect the country's borders, while Kurdish officials condemned the attacks as unprovoked aggression. Iraq's central government, which is dominated by parties close to Iran, also condemned the strikes.
A strike late Sunday killed a member of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, said Mohammed Nazif Qaderi, a senior official in the Kurdish Iranian group living in exile in Iraq.
The group said Iranian surface-to-surface missiles and drones hit its bases and adjacent refugee camps in Koya and Jejnikan. The group also asserted that the strikes had hit a hospital in Koya.
The Iranian strikes come in the wake of a visit to Baghdad last week by Esmail Ghaani, the commander of Iran's elite Quds Force. During the visit, Ghaani threatened Iraq with a ground military operation in the country’s north if the Iraqi army does not fortify the border.
Some Kurdish groups have been engaged in a low-intensity conflict with Tehran since the 1979 revolution. Iran accuses them of inciting protests in Iran and smuggling weapons into the country, allegations the Kurdish groups have denied. Iran has not provided evidence to back up the claims.
On Monday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani told reporters that Iran had acted to “protect its borders and security of its citizens based on its legal rights.” He alleged that the government in Baghdad and the Irbil-based administration of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region had failed to implement purported commitments to prevent threats against Iran from Iraqi areas.
The government of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq condemned the strikes as a “gross infringement of international law and neighborly relations.”
Qaderi told The Associated Press the Kurdish opposition groups in Iraq support the protests in Iran, which he described as a reaction to “the policies of this regime” he said oppresses its people. He denied that his group has sent fighters or weapons to Iran.
He said that his group had moved fighters away from the border to avoid giving Iran an “excuse” for further attacks. He called on the international community to prevent further aggression by Iran.
The United States condemned the latest Iranian strikes. “Such indiscriminate and illegal attacks place civilians at risk, violate Iraqi sovereignty, and jeopardize the hard-fought security and stability of Iraq and the Middle East," Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, who heads U.S. Central Command, said in a statement.
Sunday's Iranian strikes in northern Iraq come a day after Turkey launched deadly airstrikes over northern regions of Syria and Iraq, targeting Kurdish groups that Ankara holds responsible for last week’s bomb attack in Istanbul.
On Monday, Turkish officials said suspected Kurdish militants in Syria fired rockets into the border town of Karkamis in Turkey, killing two people, including a teacher and a 5-year-old boy.
252 dead as Indonesia earthquake topples homes, buildings, roads
The death toll from the earthquake that shook the Indonesian island of Java leapt to 252 on Tuesday as more bodies were found beneath collapsed buildings.
The Cianjur regional disaster mitigation agency said on its Instagram site that the number of dead increased from 162 reported the night before. Another 31 people remain missing and hundreds were injured.
The city of Cianjur, south of Jakarta, was near the epicenter of the 5.6 magnitude earthquake that hit Monday afternoon. The temblor sent terrified residents fleeing into the streets, some covered in blood and debris, and caused buildings around the rural area to collapse.
One woman told The Associated Press that when the earthquake hit, her home in Cianjur started “shaking like it was dancing.”
“I was crying and immediately grabbed my husband and children,” said the woman, who gave her name only as Partinem. The house collapsed shortly after she escaped with her family.
“If I didn't pull them out we might have also been victims,” she said, gazing over the pile of concrete and timber rubble.
In addition to those killed, authorities reported more than 300 people were seriously hurt and at least 600 more suffered minor injuries.
162 dead as strong quake topples houses in Indonesia’s Java
A powerful earthquake killed at least 162 people and injured hundreds on Indonesia’s main island on Monday. Terrified residents fled into the street, some covered in blood and debris.
Many of the dead were public-school students who had finished their classes for the day and were taking extra lessons at several Islamic schools when they collapsed, West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil said as he announced the new death toll in the remote, rural area.
The toll is expected to rise further, but no estimates were immediately available because of the area’s far-flung, rural population. Roughly 175,000 people live in the town of Cianjur, part of a mountainous district of the same name with more than 2.5 million people. Known for their piety, the people of Cianjur live mostly in towns of one- and two-story buildings and in smaller homes in the surrounding countryside.
Kamil said that more than 13,000 people whose homes were heavily damaged were taken to evacuation centers.
Emergency workers treated the injured on stretchers and blankets outside hospitals, on terraces and in parking lots in the Cianjur region, about three hours drive from the capital, Java. The injured, including children, were given oxygen masks and IV lines. Some were resuscitated.
“I fainted. It was very strong,” said Hasan, a construction worker who, like many Indonesians, uses one name. “I saw my friends running to escape from the building. But it was too late to get out and I was hit by the wall.”
Residents, some crying and holding their children, fled damaged homes after the magnitude 5.6 quake shook the region in West Java province in the late afternoon, at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). It also caused panic in the greater Jakarta area, where high-rises swayed and some people evacuated.
Read: Violence, tear gas, crush: What's behind the Indonesia football stampede?
In many homes in Cianjur, chunks of concrete and roof tiles fell inside bedrooms.
Shopkeeper Dewi Risma was working with customers when the quake hit, and she ran for the exit.
“The vehicles on the road stopped because the quake was very strong,” she said. “I felt it shook three times, but the first one was the strongest one for around 10 seconds. The roof of the shop next to the store I work in had collapsed, and people said two had been hit.”
Twenty-five people were still stuck buried in the debris in Cijedil village, National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Abdul Muhari said earlier in the day.
Several landslides closed roads around the Cianjur district. Among the dozens of buildings that were damaged was a hospital, the agency said. Power outages were reported.
Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysical Agency recorded at least 25 aftershocks.
“The quake felt so strong. My colleagues and I decided to get out of our office on the ninth floor using the emergency stairs,” said Vidi Primadhania, a worked in the capital, where many residents ran into the streets and others hid under desks.