Region

CAIRO — Deposed Egyptian leader Mohamed Morsi was back in court Saturday as his trial over the killing of protesters resumed, with the defence insisting he is still the legitimate president.

His trial is seen as a test for Egypt’s military-installed authorities, who have come under fire for a heavy-handed crackdown on his Islamist supporters after he was forced out by the army last July.

An Islamist coalition backing Morsi called for nationwide protests on Saturday to “support the legitimate elected president”, but there were no reports of any demonstrations.

At Saturday’s hearing Morsi, dressed in a white prison uniform, was held in a glass cage separate from co-defendants, an AFP correspondent reported from the court.

Of the 14 co-defendants, seven were present, while the rest are being tried in absentia.

Some of the co-defendants turned their backs on the proceedings and gave a four-fingered “Rabaa” salute, after welcoming Morsi when he entered his cage.

The gesture refers to a massive pro-Morsi protest in Cairo’s Rabaa Al Adawiya Square that was violently dispersed in August, setting off clashes in which hundreds of people, mostly Islamists, were killed.

The third hearing of the trial — in which Morsi and his co-defendants are accused of inciting the killing of protesters in December 2012 outside the presidential palace — was being held at a heavily guarded police academy in Cairo.

“This court has no jurisdiction to look into the case because Morsi is still the president and no official decision was taken for his ouster,” said lawyer Salim Al Awa, a member of the defence team.

The judge declined a request by Morsi to speak at the proceedings.

Prosecutors showed video footage at Saturday’s hearing of what they said were “supporters of defendants” chanting pro-Morsi slogans, carrying sticks and dismantling protest tents outside the presidential palace in December 2012.

The footage also showed at least one alleged Muslim Brotherhood member firing a gun.

At that time, members of the Muslim Brotherhood to which Morsi belongs attacked opposition protesters camped outside the palace in protest at a decree by Morsi to grant himself extra-judicial powers.

At least seven people were killed in the clashes, and dozens of opposition protesters were detained and beaten by Morsi’s supporters.

The incident was a turning point in Morsi’s presidency, galvanising a disparate opposition that eventually organised the mass protests in June 2013 that led to his downfall.

Morsi’s defence says there is no proof he incited the clashes, and that most of those killed in the violence were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which moved in to protect the presidential palace after police withdrew.

The trial was adjourned to Tuesday.

The first hearing in trial of Muslim Brotherhood supreme guide Mohamed Badie and more than 50 others for inciting deadly violence in the Nile Delta city of Qaliub, shortly after Morsi’s ouster, was also briefly convened and adjourned to Monday. 

‘President of republic’ faces four trials 

Morsi is facing four separate trials, and at the first hearing of another trial on January 28 he defiantly insisted he was still the “president of the republic.”

In that trial, Morsi and 130 co-defendants face charges of breaking out of prison during the 2011 uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade rule.

Morsi also faces trials on charges of espionage in collaboration with the Palestinian Hamas movement, and insulting the judiciary. The espionage trial will start on February 16, while no date has yet been set for the other trial.

Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood won a series of polls after Mubarak’s ouster and who became Egypt’s first freely elected leader in June 2012, was ousted a year later by the army after massive protests against him.

Amnesty International says that since Morsi’s overthrow on July 3 at least 1,400 people have been killed in clashes with security forces and his opponents.

Months of bloodshed has dimmed hopes for reconciliation in the Arab world’s most populous nation as it prepares for a presidential vote to be held by mid-April.

Egypt’s army chief Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, whose popularity has skyrocketed since he ousted Morsi, is expected to seek the presidency.

The Muslim Brotherhood was designated a terrorist organisation late last year, with any public show of support punishable by lengthy jail terms.

MUNICH/OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday that he remains hopeful that the Obama administration’s effort to broker a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians can succeed, Reuters news agency reported.

The United States hopes to complete a “framework” accord in coming weeks and will then try to negotiate a final peace deal by the end of 2014, a US official said last week, according to a participant in a briefing with American Jewish leaders.

“I am hopeful and we will keep working on it,” Kerry, who despite widespread scepticism is leading the US effort to push the two sides towards a deal, said during remarks at the Munich security conference.

“I believe in the possibility or I wouldn’t pursue this,” he said. “I don’t think we’re being quixotic ... We’re working hard because the consequences of failure are unacceptable.”

US envoy Martin Indyk said the framework would address core issues in the conflict, including borders, security, refugees and Jewish settlements, a participant in the briefing said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, which includes pro-settler parties, has already shown signs of strain over talks on Palestinian statehood.

Jordan Valley  

The UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories Friday criticised Israel’s demolition of 36 homes in the Jordan Valley and urged a halt to such actions in the West Bank, according to Agence France-Presse.

Hundreds of activists, meanwhile, staged an overnight demonstration in the Jordan Valley region.

The moves came as fresh opinion poll evidence showed that faith in the Middle East peace process has largely evaporated among both Israelis and Palestinians.

The demolitions in the Jordan Valley community of Ain Al Hilweh on Thursday displaced 66 people, including 36 children, James Rawley said in a statement.

“I am deeply concerned about the ongoing displacement and dispossession of Palestinians... along the Jordan Valley where the number of structures demolished more than doubled in the last year,” he said.

“This activity not only deprives Palestinians of access to shelter and basic services, it also runs counter to international law.”

His office said more than 1,000 people had been displaced last year in the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem by demolitions on the grounds that homes had been built without Israeli permits, “which are virtually impossible to obtain”.

On Friday, around 300 Palestinians together with Israeli and foreign activists set up camp in abandoned houses near Jericho in the West Bank to protest against Israel’s refusal to pull out of the Jordan Valley in case of a peace deal, an AFP photographer said.

The demonstrators in Ain Hijleh village were equipped with generators and said they planned to spend the night in around a dozen of the houses, as Israeli troops and police kept watch from a distance.

They held a banner reading: “No peace with settlements.”

Their action — dubbed “Melh Al Ard” (salt of the earth) — aimed “to revive an old Palestinian Canaanite village in the Jordan Valley”, to counter any Israeli annexation plans, the activists said in a statement.

They condemned Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process brokered by Kerry.

His efforts would “establish a disfigured Palestinian state and recognises the Israeli entity as a Jewish state”, they said.

Such a state would put Arab Israelis at risk of deportation at any time, the activists said.

Faith in the Middle East peace process has largely evaporated among Israelis and Palestinians in the two decades since the Oslo accords and a famous White House lawn handshake, a new poll found Friday.

According to the Zogby Research Services poll, neither side has much confidence in the new push for peace being led by Kerry, which the pollsters believe is proving a hard sell.

Although two decades have elapsed since then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands watched by then US leader Bill Clinton, “it is clear several deep differences exist” plaguing the atmosphere between the two sides.

“Twenty years later only 18 per cent of Palestinians and 19 per cent of Israelis view Oslo as a positive development in the history of their relationship,” the poll said.

Both sides believe the other is not committed to peace.

And only around a third of people in each community sees a two-state solution as feasible, even though 74 per cent of Israelis and 47 per cent of Palestinians agree it is the desired outcome.

“From the results of this poll, it is clear that the past 20 years have taken a toll on the confidence both Palestinians and Israelis have in the peace process that began with the 1993 signing of the Oslo accords,” the poll said.

Kerry is trying to draw up a framework agreement which would set out the end game in the resumed negotiations and guide the talks going forward over the next few months.

Twenty years ago both Palestinians, some 61 per cent, and Israelis, some 54 per cent, said they “were hopeful” when the Oslo accords were signed, setting out a roadmap for the peace process.

The poll was carried out in the Middle East in August 2013 among 1,000 Israelis and Palestinians, just as Kerry persuaded the two sides to resume talks after a three-year hiatus.

BEIRUT — Syrian government and opposition delegations leave 10 days of peace talks with few results and a follow-up meeting uncertain, but analysts and negotiators say the discussions are an important beginning.

The immediate post-mortem on the talks from Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem was blunt.

“I regret to tell you that we have not reached tangible results during this week,” he said as the talks wrapped up in Geneva on Friday.

Despite persistent pressure from UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, and co-sponsors Russia and the United States, the two delegations failed to agree on a single point.

No ceasefire was signed, talks on a transitional government never began, and a mooted deal to allow aid into the besieged Old City of Homs went nowhere.

Opposition National Coalition chief Ahmad Jarba said the regime had failed to show “serious commitment” during negotiations.

“The talks were obviously not a success,” said Salman Sheikh, director of the Brookings Doha Centre think tank.

“The other disappointing thing was that there was hope that the momentum would come from some sort of a deal on humanitarian access. That hasn’t happened,” he added.

The failure to secure humanitarian access ranks among the larger disappointments of the talks, dashing hopes the government might ease its blockade of besieged rebel-held enclaves as a goodwill gesture.

In the end, the regime offered to allow women and children to leave the Old City of Homs, but aid convoys on standby to enter were left waiting.

Desperately needed food did reach the besieged Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk on Thursday and Friday, but the plight of civilians trapped in the south Damascus camp had not even been on the Geneva agenda.

The talks have also done nothing to slow the pace of killing in Syria, where more than 136,000 people have died since the conflict erupted in March 2011, an NGO said Saturday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said nearly 1,900 people were killed between the start of the talks on
January 22 and their penultimate day on Thursday.

‘A modest beginning’ 

A second round of talks is proposed for
February 10, but Mouallem said he could not confirm the regime’s participation without first consulting President Bashar Assad.

Mouallem also said on Saturday the US had asked to “negotiate directly” with his delegation, but that they had “refused to do so before [US] Secretary of State John Kerry apologised for what he said at the conference”.

Kerry said Assad “will not be part” of any transitional government.

The tone in Syria’s state media on Saturday was also far from conciliatory.

“In Geneva, the Syrian delegation spoke as the voice of Syrian rights. They spoke from the heart,” said government daily Al Thawra.

It said the opposition, by contrast, had said “nothing but what was dictated to them on a piece of paper by their master”.

“They were a subservient humiliated slave, and an obedient client,” it charged, alluding to the opposition’s Gulf Arab and Western backers.

But despite the deadlock, Jarba confirmed the opposition would attend the next round of talks, and Brahimi said there had been glimpses of common ground.

“This is a very modest beginning, but it is a beginning on which we can build,” he said on Friday, while admitting disappointment at the failure to achieve humanitarian access.

He was due to hold talks in Munich on Saturday with both Russia, which backs the Assad regime, and the US, which supports the opposition.

Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said the talks were a “first step towards possible success”.

“At least, the two parties recognised the respective other side as someone they have to negotiate with,” he said.

Both sides defied the expectations of many not by only showing up to the talks, but also by not walking out, despite tense moments and mutual recriminations.

“This isn’t much, but more could not have been expected,” Perthes said.

And reports the US Congress has secretly approved resuming weapons deliveries to “moderate” Syrian rebel factions suggest the opposition gained something by attending the talks.

Massoud Akko, a member of the technical team in the opposition delegation, acknowledged little progress had been made, but said the opposition won symbolic victories.

“This is the first time that the Syrian regime has accepted to discuss the future of Syria with Syrians, so I think this is something that we have won,” he told AFP.

RAMADI, Iraq — Security forces and allied tribal fighters mounted major offensives on Saturday against militants in the conflict-hit cities of Ramadi and Fallujah as attacks elsewhere in Iraq killed eight people.

The massive assaults, involving soldiers, police and pro-government armed tribesmen, are part of efforts to wrest back control of areas that have been in the hands of militants, including the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) for weeks, sparking fears the ongoing stand-off could impact elections scheduled for April 30.

They come after Iraq’s deadliest month in nearly six years, with more than 1,000 people killed in January, as it grapples with a surge in bloodshed that has sparked fears of a return to the all-out conflict that left tens of thousands dead in 2006 and 2007.

Security forces and their allies assaulted the militant-held neighbourhoods of Malaab, Dhubat, and Street 60 in Ramadi, killing 35 anti-government fighters and seizing large amounts of weaponry, according to a police officer and tribal militia commander Mohammed Khamis Abu Risha.

The clashes were among the heaviest in several weeks, an AFP journalist in Ramadi said, adding that all mobile phone and Internet connections had been cut.

Abu Risha, the nephew of a powerful tribal sheikh, has backed anti-government protesters and was implicated in the killing of five soldiers near Ramadi last year, but in ISIL he shares a common enemy with the government in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, aerial bombardment and artillery fire on a neighbourhood in northern Fallujah, a rare major operation in the city itself, has killed 15 militants, the defence ministry announced Saturday, without saying when it happened.

The army has largely stayed out of Fallujah, just a short drive from Baghdad, fearing any major incursion could lead to a bloody and protracted conflict with massive civilian casualties and property damage.

American battles in the city, a bastion of militants following the 2003 US-led invasion, were among their bloodiest since the Vietnam war.

But an official in the provincial security command centre told AFP that security forces were preparing a major assault on Fallujah in a bid to retake the city.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not elaborate.

Fallujah is in Anbar province, a mostly Sunni desert region west of Baghdad that shares a border with Syria.

BEIRUT — Syrian government and opposition delegations leave 10 days of peace talks with few results and a follow-up meeting uncertain, but analysts and negotiators say the discussions are an important beginning.

The immediate post-mortem on the talks from Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem was blunt.

“I regret to tell you that we have not reached tangible results during this week,” he said as the talks wrapped up in Geneva on Friday.

Despite persistent pressure from UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, and cosponsors Russia and the United States, the two delegations failed to agree on a single point.

No ceasefire was inked, talks on a transitional government never began, and a mooted deal to allow aid into the besieged Old City of Homs went nowhere.

Opposition National Coalition chief Ahmad Jarba said the regime had failed to show “serious commitment” during the negotiations.

“The talks were obviously not a success,” said Salman Sheikh, director of the Brookings Doha Centre think tank.

“The other disappointing thing was that there was hope that the momentum would come from some sort of a deal on humanitarian access. That hasn’t happened,” he added.

The failure to secure humanitarian access ranks among the larger disappointments of the talks, dashing hopes that the government might ease its blockade of besieged rebel-held enclaves as a show of good will.

In the end, the regime offered to allow women and children to leave the Old City of Homs, but aid convoys on standby to enter were left waiting.

Desperately needed food did get into the besieged Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk on Thursday and Friday, but the plight of civilians trapped in the south Damascus camp had not even been on the agenda of the Geneva discussions.

The talks have also done nothing to slow the pace of killing in Syria, where more than 130,000 people have died since the conflict erupted in March 2011.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said nearly 1,900 people were killed between the start of the talks on January 22 and their penultimate day on Thursday. 

‘A modest beginning’

A second round of talks is proposed for Feburary 10, but Mouallem said he could not confirm the regime’s participation without first consulting President Bashar al-Assad.

And the tone in Syria’s state media on Saturday was far from conciliatory.

“In Geneva, the Syrian [government] delegation spoke as the voice of Syrian rights. They spoke from the heart,” said government daily Al Thawra.

It said the opposition, by contrast, had said “nothing but what was dictated to them on a piece of paper by their master”.

“They were a subservient humiliated slave, and an obedient client,” it charged, alluding to the opposition’s Gulf Arab and Western backers.

But despite the deadlock, Jarba confirmed that the opposition would attend the next round of talks, and Brahimi said there had been glimpses of common ground.

“This is a very modest beginning, but it is a beginning on which we can build,” he said on Friday, while admitting disappointment at the failure to achieve humanitarian access.

He was due to hold talks in Munich on Saturday with both Russia, which backs the Assad regime, and the United States, which supports the opposition.

Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said the talks were a “first step towards possible success.”

“At least, the two parties recognised the respective other side as someone they have to negotiate with,” he said.

Both sides defied the expectations of many not by only showing up to the talks, but also by not walking out, despite tense moments and mutual recriminations.

“This isn’t much, but more could not have been expected,” Perthes said.

And reports that the US Congress has secretly approved resuming weapons deliveries to “moderate” Syrian rebel factions suggest the opposition gained something by attending the talks.

Massoud Akko, a member of the technical team in the opposition delegation, acknowledged that little progress had been made, but said the opposition won symbolic victories.

“We pushed the regime to discuss, to negotiate with the Syrian people,” he told AFP.

“This is the first time that the Syrian regime has accepted to discuss the future of Syria with Syrians, so I think this is something that we have won.”

President Barack Obama plans to travel to Saudi Arabia in March on a mission to smooth tensions with Washington’s main Arab ally over US policy on Iran’s nuclear programme and the civil war in Syria, a newspaper reported.

Obama is preparing to meet with King Abdullah for a summit, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing unnamed Arab officials briefed on the meetings.

“This is about a deteriorating relationship” and declining trust, said a senior Arab official in discussing the need for the summit, which was pulled together in recent days, the newspaper reported.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment.

The United States and Saudi Arabia have been allies since the kingdom was formed in 1932, giving Riyadh a powerful military protector and Washington secure oil supplies.

Washington’s relationship with the Saudis was crucial as the region faced changes and challenges from the transition in Egypt to civil war in Syria.

But relations have been tested on a number of fronts.

Members of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family threatened a rift with the United States to protest perceived American inaction over Syria’s civil war, which has killed more than 100,000 people, as well as the recent US outreach with Iran.

The Sunni Muslim kingdom’s regional rivalry with Shiite Iran, an ally of Syria, has amplified sectarian tensions across the Middle East.

King Abdullah is also to use the meeting to question Obama on why he decided against air strikes in Syria, which Saudi and other Arab officials believe strengthened Assad, the newspaper reported.

“The meeting in many ways will get back to basics,” said a Saudi official briefed on the meetings, according the Wall Street Journal. “Why did Obama do it the way he did it?”

US and other security officials said earlier last week that “moderate” Syrian rebel factions were receiving light arms supplied by the United States. 

The Arab Spring as well as a November agreement between Iran and other world powers that curbs parts of Tehran’s nuclear programme, has angered Saudi Arabia, along with other Arab states and Israel.

The relationship was also badly shaken by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, since most of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, and by the subsequent American invasion of Iraq.

Obama’s visit comes after a mission to Riyadh by US Secretary of State John Kerry.

BEIRUT — A suicide car bomber killed three people at a petrol station in a stronghold of the Shiite Hizbollah movement on Lebanon’s northern border on Saturday, the latest sign that Syria’s civil war is spilling over into its small neighbour.

The blast occurred in the town of Hermel at the northern end of the Bekaa Valley, an area populated mainly by Shiite Muslims among whom Hizbollah draws its support.

Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) cited witnesses who said the perpetrator entered the gas station and asked to buy fuel before detonating the bomb, leaving a metre-deep hole in the ground and setting the station and nearby cars on fire.

Images broadcast on Hizbollah’s Al Manar television showed fire raging beside a severely damaged petrol station as well as emergency vehicles and security forces at the scene.

A security source told Reuters that, besides the three dead bystanders and the dead bomber, 28 other people had been wounded in the blast.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Saturday’s blast fitted a pattern of attacks by rival sectarian groups on each other’s strongholds that has been amplified by Syria’s civil war. Another suicide car bomb killed three people in Hermel last month.

Lebanon’s caretaker interior minister, Marwan Charbel, told Reuters by phone that the situation in Lebanon was “unstable and getting worse every day”.

“This matter is very, very dangerous,” he said. “It is bigger than the security apparatus.”

Suicide bombers often use stolen vehicles, and Charbel said up to 400 cars had been stolen in Lebanon in the last six months.

“This is a strange path for Lebanese, because most of the explosions we see are carried out by Lebanese,” he said.

Saturday’s blast happened near a building that houses a charity connected to the late Shiite Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. Fadlallah, who died in 2010, was not a member of Hizbollah.

Shortly after the explosion in Hermel, a bomb went off near an Al Manar office in the Beirut neighbourhood of Ouzai, a security source said. It was not clear whether the Hizbollah-run television station had been targeted or whether anyone was hurt.

Hizbollah-run areas are frequently hit by bomb and rocket attacks claimed by Sunni militants. Four car bombs have exploded in Hizbollah’s stronghold of south Beirut since July. A pair of suicide bombings at the Iranian embassy in November killed at least 25 people including an Iranian diplomat.

Hizbollah has sent fighters and advisers to aid President Bashar Assad, a member of Syria’s Alawite minority, which is an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Both Hizbollah and Assad are supported by Shiite-ruled Iran.

Hizbollah’s intervention in Syria and the steady flow of Lebanese Sunnis joining the anti-Assad rebels have both fuelled sectarian strife in Lebanon, which has taken in more than 900,000 refugees from the Syrian civil war.

TEHRAN — Iran has received the first instalment of $4.2 billion in frozen assets as part of a nuclear deal with world powers, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told ISNA news agency Saturday.

Unblocking the funds under the landmark deal in which Iran agreed to roll back parts of its nuclear programme and halt further advances is expected to breathe new life into its crippled economy.

“The first tranche of $500 million was deposited in a Swiss bank account, and everything was done in accordance with the agreement,” Araqchi said.

Iran clinched the interim deal in November with the P5+1 group — Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany — and began implementing the agreement on January 20.

Under the agreement, which is to last six months, Iran committed to limit its uranium enrichment to 5 per cent, halting production of 20 per cent-enriched uranium.

In return, the European Union and the United States have eased crippling economic sanctions on Iran.

A senior US administration official told AFP last month that the first $550-million (400-million-euro) instalment of $4.2 billion in frozen assets would be released from February.

“The instalment schedule starts on February 1 and the payments are evenly distributed” across 180 days, the US official said.

Iran and the P5+1 will also hold a new round of talks in Vienna on February 18 in a bid to discuss a comprehensive solution to Tehran’s contested nuclear programme.

Major world powers and Israel fear that Iran is trying to develop an atomic bomb, but Tehran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful.

Also on Saturday, the official IRNA news agency quoted the head of the civil aviation authority, Alireza Jahanguirian, as saying that Iran will soon receive spare parts for its ailing civilian fleet.

Jahanguirian said the parts would arrive within two weeks as part of the sanctions relief agreed in Geneva in November.

But the November deal foresees an easing on sanctions imposed on several sectors, including Iran’s car industry and petrochemical exports, as well as allowing civil aviation access to long-denied spares.

SANAA — Fierce clashes between Huthi Shiite rebels and gunmen from the powerful Hashid tribe killed at least 60 people on Friday in northern Yemen, tribal sources told AFP.

The clashes in Omran province killed 40 Huthi rebels and their allies and left 20 dead in the ranks of the Hashid tribe, the sources said.

The violence in Omran dates back to January 5 when Huthis tried to seize Hashid strongholds.

“The fighting, the heaviest since the clashes broke out in Omran, erupted at dawn on Friday in Wadi Khiwan and Wadi Danan and in other areas of the Huth and Isha districts,” a tribal elder said.

Gunmen on both sides fired machine-guns and mortar rounds, he added.

Another source close to the powerful Al Ahmar tribal grouping to which the Hashid belong said the tribes had “mobilised thousands of gunmen over the past few days” to confront the Huthis.

The source blamed the Huthis for launching an offensive on Tuesday, pounding the region with rockets and mortar rounds “in a bid to advance on the Huth district and Al Khomri”, Al Ahmar bastions.

“Tribesmen launched a counteroffensive and were able to push back the Huthis and today’s fighting was the fiercest,” the source said.

Hashid tribesmen recaptured ground lost to the Huthis earlier in the week, he said, adding, however, that the fighting was still under way late Friday.

The rebels have been pushing out from their stronghold in the mountains of the far north to other areas nearer the capital to lay a stake to their own autonomous unit in a promised federal Yemen, political sources say.

But their fighters, know as Huthis from the name of the rebels’ leading family, have faced stiff resistance from pro-government Zaidi tribes, as well as from Sunni hardliners who have established religious schools in parts of the north.

President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has pledged that Yemen will adopt a federal constitution to tackle the grievances of its disparate regions.

But at a ceremony last Saturday to mark the conclusion of a troubled 10-month national dialogue, he put off any decision on the thorny issue of how many component units it will have, promising that a special commission will decide.

The prospects of a federal Yemen, originally mooted as a solution to the grievances of the formerly independent south where secessionist violence has been on the rise, has spawned demands for autonomy from other discontented regions, including the rebel-held far north.

CAIRO — Prime Minister Hazem Al Beblawi has said a Cabinet reshuffle will include the defence ministry, an Egyptian newspaper said on Saturday, in the clearest sign yet that Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi plans to stand for president.

Army chief Sisi, now defence minister in Egypt’s interim government, deposed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July after mass protests against his rule and is widely expected to announce his candidacy within days and win an election easily.

Before he can run for president he must step down from his government post.

The reshuffle will not be announced before a visit by Beblawi to Saudi Arabia, a major financial supporter of Egypt’s interim government, on Tuesday and Wednesday, the privately-owned Al Masry Al Youm newspaper quoted him as saying.

The reshuffle is to include the defence ministry and the ministry for international cooperation, whose head, Ziad Bahaa Al Din, tendered his resignation last Monday, according to the report.

Cabinet officials were not immediately available for comment.