ISTANBUL // Rebels fought off an attack by Syrian regime troops yesterday aimed at regaining control over a border crossing on the frontier with Turkey.
Two Turks were slightly injured as stray bullets were fired into Turkish territory.
All 13 border crossings between Turkey and Syria have been under the control of the rebels on the Syrian side for some time, a Turkish official said. "It looks like regime forces were trying to get the border post back, but the attempt was unsuccessful," he said.
Rebels have been trying to take control of border crossings to provide safe passage and havens near Turkey, which is sympathetic to the fighters trying to overthrow the regime of Bashar Al Assad.
Only Syria's border crossings with Lebanon remain under the control of the Damascus government, the Turkish official said.
Live footage from the CNN-Turk news channel from the Turkish border town of Akcakale showed armed fighters moving on a building on the Syrian side of the Tall Al Abyad border crossing as shots from automatic weapons rang out. A huge explosion later destroyed parts of the building.
Shortly afterwards, armed opposition fighters were seen on the roof of the building, apparently after driving government forces away. They fired shots into the air in celebration and took down the Syrian government flag.
The fighting had started on Tuesday and escalated yesterday morning, the Turkish official said. A woman and a child suffered minor injuries by stray bullets. Local officials put the number of injured at three. Authorities in Akcakale closed schools in the area yesterday as a precaution and warned people to stay indoors.
The fighting near Akcakale marked the second time that the conflict in Syria spilt over on to Turkish territory. In April, two fleeing Syrians were killed by shots fired over the border from Syrian government soldiers in Kilis, west of Akcakale.
The official said Ankara was watching events in Akcakale very closely, but early reports suggested that the fighting there was different from the incident in Kilis in April.
"At the last time, a group trying to flee into Turkey and Turkish officials on the Turkish side of the border were shot at," he said. By contrast, there appeared to have been "no specific targeting" of people on Turkish territory in the Akcakale incident.
The fighting flared as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, was preparing to drum up support for the creation of a no-fly zone over Syria, in talks at the UN General Assembly in New York in the coming days. Mr Erdogan also used a telephone conversation with the US president Barack Obama late Tuesday to address the Syrian issue.
Ankara, a former ally of Syria that has become one of the harshest critics of the Assad regime, says the unrest in Syria is starting to affect Turkish national security, with about 80,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey. Mr Erdogan's government has said the country can handle no more than 100,000 refugees, but Turkish calls for safe zones or a no-fly zone to protect people on Syrian soil have been met with silence internationally.
The Turkish official said yesterday Ankara would continue to press the international community to act in Syria and to create "a safe environment [inside Syria], so that civilians can stay there without fear of being killed". But the official conceded that Turkey was facing an uphill struggle. "Some countries are not that eager" for action in Syria, he said.
Representatives of an "Islamic quartet" of countries trying to bring an end to the conflict in Syria are expected to meet at the UN General Assembly, the official said. The first meeting of the group - Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Syria's ally Iran - in Cairo this week was marred by the absence of Saudi Arabia. Turkey would like to see "the Iranians to be more forthcoming" at the meeting in New York, the official said.
But a Turkish analyst said Mr Erdogan was unlikely to find many allies willing to take part in the establishment of a no-fly zone.
Veysel Ayhan, chairman of the International Peace Research Centre, a think tank in Ankara, said Turkey did not want act alone in Syria, and plans for any kind of international intervention probably would have to wait several months.
"No one is expecting anything before the US elections" in November, Mr Ayhan said.
Yesterday the Obama administration has identified 117 Iranian aircraft it says are ferrying weapons to the Assad regime. The Treasury Department says the planes operated by Iran Air, Mahan Air and Yas Air are delivering weapons and Iranian forces under the cover of "humanitarian" shipments. Yesterday Mr Al Assad told Iran's foreign minister that the war engulfing Syria is targeting not just it but the "resistance axis". The Assad regime, Iran and the Lebanese Shiite movement Hizbollah refer to themselves as a "resistance axis" in their common opposition to Israel. "The ongoing battle is targeting the whole of the resistance axis, not just Syria," Mr Al Assad told Ali Akbar Salehi. Two bombs also exploded in a Damascus suburb, causing civilian casualties, according to Syria's state news agency Sana. The first blast went off near a secondary school in the Damascus suburb of Qudsayya, followed by a second explosion about 200 metres away.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said there was shelling in several eastern districts of the city. The Observatory said 32 people were killed nationwide yesterday, including 27 civilians, after 173 died the previous day.
tseibert@thenational.ae
* With additional reporting by Agence France-Presse and Reuters
HOW DO SIM CARD SCAMS WORK?
Sim swap frauds are a form of identity theft.
They involve criminals conning mobile phone operators into issuing them with replacement Sim cards, often by claiming their phone has been lost or stolen
They use the victim's personal details - obtained through criminal methods - to convince such companies of their identity.
The criminal can then access any online service that requires security codes to be sent to a user's mobile phone, such as banking services.
How Tesla’s price correction has hit fund managers
Investing in disruptive technology can be a bumpy ride, as investors in Tesla were reminded on Friday, when its stock dropped 7.5 per cent in early trading to $575.
It recovered slightly but still ended the week 15 per cent lower and is down a third from its all-time high of $883 on January 26. The electric car maker’s market cap fell from $834 billion to about $567bn in that time, a drop of an astonishing $267bn, and a blow for those who bought Tesla stock late.
The collapse also hit fund managers that have gone big on Tesla, notably the UK-based Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust and Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF.
Tesla is the top holding in both funds, making up a hefty 10 per cent of total assets under management. Both funds have fallen by a quarter in the past month.
Matt Weller, global head of market research at GAIN Capital, recently warned that Tesla founder Elon Musk had “flown a bit too close to the sun”, after getting carried away by investing $1.5bn of the company’s money in Bitcoin.
He also predicted Tesla’s sales could struggle as traditional auto manufacturers ramp up electric car production, destroying its first mover advantage.
AJ Bell’s Russ Mould warns that many investors buy tech stocks when earnings forecasts are rising, almost regardless of valuation. “When it works, it really works. But when it goes wrong, elevated valuations leave little or no downside protection.”
A Tesla correction was probably baked in after last year’s astonishing share price surge, and many investors will see this as an opportunity to load up at a reduced price.
Dramatic swings are to be expected when investing in disruptive technology, as Ms Wood at ARK makes clear.
Every week, she sends subscribers a commentary listing “stocks in our strategies that have appreciated or dropped more than 15 per cent in a day” during the week.
Her latest commentary, issued on Friday, showed seven stocks displaying extreme volatility, led by ExOne, a leader in binder jetting 3D printing technology. It jumped 24 per cent, boosted by news that fellow 3D printing specialist Stratasys had beaten fourth-quarter revenues and earnings expectations, seen as good news for the sector.
By contrast, computational drug and material discovery company Schrödinger fell 27 per cent after quarterly and full-year results showed its core software sales and drug development pipeline slowing.
Despite that setback, Ms Wood remains positive, arguing that its “medicinal chemistry platform offers a powerful and unique view into chemical space”.
In her weekly video view, she remains bullish, stating that: “We are on the right side of change, and disruptive innovation is going to deliver exponential growth trajectories for many of our companies, in fact, most of them.”
Ms Wood remains committed to Tesla as she expects global electric car sales to compound at an average annual rate of 82 per cent for the next five years.
She said these are so “enormous that some people find them unbelievable”, and argues that this scepticism, especially among institutional investors, “festers” and creates a great opportunity for ARK.
Only you can decide whether you are a believer or a festering sceptic. If it’s the former, then buckle up.
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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What is blockchain?
Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology, a digital system in which data is recorded across multiple places at the same time. Unlike traditional databases, DLTs have no central administrator or centralised data storage. They are transparent because the data is visible and, because they are automatically replicated and impossible to be tampered with, they are secure.
The main difference between blockchain and other forms of DLT is the way data is stored as ‘blocks’ – new transactions are added to the existing ‘chain’ of past transactions, hence the name ‘blockchain’. It is impossible to delete or modify information on the chain due to the replication of blocks across various locations.
Blockchain is mostly associated with cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Due to the inability to tamper with transactions, advocates say this makes the currency more secure and safer than traditional systems. It is maintained by a network of people referred to as ‘miners’, who receive rewards for solving complex mathematical equations that enable transactions to go through.
However, one of the major problems that has come to light has been the presence of illicit material buried in the Bitcoin blockchain, linking it to the dark web.
Other blockchain platforms can offer things like smart contracts, which are automatically implemented when specific conditions from all interested parties are reached, cutting the time involved and the risk of mistakes. Another use could be storing medical records, as patients can be confident their information cannot be changed. The technology can also be used in supply chains, voting and has the potential to used for storing property records.
Brief scores:
Barcelona 3
Pique 38', Messi 51 (pen), Suarez 82'
Rayo Vallecano 1
De Tomas Gomez 24'
Other acts on the Jazz Garden bill
Sharrie Williams
The American singer is hugely respected in blues circles due to her passionate vocals and songwriting. Born and raised in Michigan, Williams began recording and touring as a teenage gospel singer. Her career took off with the blues band The Wiseguys. Such was the acclaim of their live shows that they toured throughout Europe and in Africa. As a solo artist, Williams has also collaborated with the likes of the late Dizzy Gillespie, Van Morrison and Mavis Staples.
Lin Rountree
An accomplished smooth jazz artist who blends his chilled approach with R‘n’B. Trained at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC, Rountree formed his own band in 2004. He has also recorded with the likes of Kem, Dwele and Conya Doss. He comes to Dubai on the back of his new single Pass The Groove, from his forthcoming 2018 album Stronger Still, which may follow his five previous solo albums in cracking the top 10 of the US jazz charts.
Anita Williams
Dubai-based singer Anita Williams will open the night with a set of covers and swing, jazz and blues standards that made her an in-demand singer across the emirate. The Irish singer has been performing in Dubai since 2008 at venues such as MusicHall and Voda Bar. Her Jazz Garden appearance is career highlight as she will use the event to perform the original song Big Blue Eyes, the single from her debut solo album, due for release soon.
