Region

TUNIS — Tunisia’s outgoing government said on Thursday it had suspended planned energy price hikes, its second policy reversal in two weeks after popular protests forced it to scrap a tax increase envisaged under its 2014 budget.

Three years after toppling their autocratic leader Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali in an uprising that inspired other “Arab Spring” revolts, Tunisians are chafing under high living costs and a lack of economic opportunities.

But international lenders are pressing Tunisia to trim public subidies to cut a budget deficit the government expects to have reached 6.8 per cent of national output last year.

Tunisia had initially budgeted 4.3 billion Tunisian dinars ($2.59 billion) for food and energy subsidies in 2014, down from 5 billion dinars in 2013.

“We have decided to suspend the increase in energy prices planned for the 2014 budget,” Tunisian Finance Minister Ilyas Fakhfakh told the state news agency TAP.

He said revenues from the planned increase had been expected to total 220 million dinars in 2014.

Fakhfakh, who with other ministers steps down shortly under an accord that transfers power to a caretaker government, did not comment on how the budget shortfall might be covered.

Last week, protests and strikes prompted the outgoing Islamist-led government to suspend a hike in vehicle tax.

The economic discontent threatens Tunisia’s largely peaceful transition to democracy, which has been seen as a model for other Arab nations struggling with instability.

Fakhfakh told Reuters last week the government had taken the necessary measures to keep the budget deficit under control, one of the main conditions for the International Monetary Fund to release a loan tranche worth $500 million.

Tunisia’s new transitional prime minister, Mehdi Jomaa, took office last Friday and is due to form a caretaker Cabinet in the next few days which will govern the small North African country until new elections.

RAMALLAH — A top Palestinian leader Thursday accused Israel of imposing its own agenda onto Washington’s Middle East peace push, pressing issues that overshadowed Palestinian demands.

The remarks by senior Fateh Party member Nabil Shaath came after US Secretary of State John Kerry’s 10th visit to the region to try to push a framework for final status talks as an April deadline for the negotiations loomed.

“Israel has succeeded in really persuading Mr Kerry to change the agenda of the discussions,” Shaath told reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

“Today, you will see Mr Kerry going back and forth, discussing nothing but two issues. The two issues have never been in our agenda: The Jewishness of the state and [security in] the Jordan [Valley],” he said.

Palestinian leaders refuse to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, fearing this could preclude the right of return for Palestinian refugees who left or were driven into exile when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Another sticking point in talks is security arrangements in the Jordan Valley, where the West Bank borders Jordan, under any future peace agreement.

Israel insists on maintaining a long-term military presence in the Jordan Valley as a buffer against attacks on Israel, but the Palestinians want an international security force deployed there for their own security.

Shaath said Kerry was being forced to hammer out the two issues as other crucial points — such as the borders of a future Palestinian state — were being overlooked.

“They [Israelis] force the agenda on [Kerry]; they will not talk about anything else.”

“It is a narrative problem that is taking most of the time of Mr Kerry,” he said.

“You think any Palestinian leader in his right mind can ever accept this?” Shaath said of recognising Israel as a Jewish state.

“Or is this simply instated to make it impossible for any Palestinian leader to sign a peace agreement with Israel?”

The peace talks have in recent months focused specifically on security, with Kerry and his team proposing a detailed plan for the Jordan Valley.

A peace treaty would deal with all the divisive core issues, including the contours of a future Palestinian state, refugees, the fate of Jerusalem claimed by both as a capital, security and mutual recognition.

ROME — The removal and destruction of the most dangerous agents in Syria’s chemical arsenal will likely be delayed until the end of June because of logistical and security problems, the head of the world’s chemical weapons watchdog said on Thursday.

Mustard gas and the components for making Sarin and VX — known as “priority” agents — were originally to have been destroyed by the end of March.

Syria has already missed a December 31 goal to transport the most toxic substances to a port and so far has loaded only a relatively small amount of chemicals onto the Danish cargo ship Ark Futura.

Ahmet Uzumcu, head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), said he was “confident” that all the chemicals could be destroyed by the end of June — the original deadline for the complete elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons programme and associated agents.

“As we were not able to meet the timeline for the 31st of December, from my point of view what is important is really the end of June 2014, so we will do our best to meet it,” he said.

The OPCW is overseeing the destruction of the Syrian arsenal as part of an international accord brokered by Russia and the United States after poison gas attacks on the outskirts of Damascus killed hundreds, including children, last August.

Chemical weapons were likely used in five out of seven attacks investigated by UN experts in Syria, where a near three-year civil war has killed more than 100,000 people.

The Syrian government and the opposition have accused each other of using chemical weapons, and both have denied it. 

Transport challenge

Uzumcu said only about 16 tonnes of the total of 560 tonnes of the “primary” chemicals had so far been shifted to the Danish vessel.

Once the Danish ship has loaded all the primary agents, it will take them to the port of Gioia Tauro in southern Italy, where they will be transferred to a US ship and later destroyed at sea.

Transporting the chemicals through a civil war is “quite challenging”, Uzumcu said, renewing an appeal to groups that oppose Syrian President Bashar Assad’s rule to cooperate.

“The biggest area of concern is clearly the safe transportation of those weapons, chemical substances, from the sites in Syria to the port of Latakia,” he said.

Syrian authorities say opposition groups attacked two chemical storage sites more than a week ago, Uzumcu said, adding this had not been independently verified and there was “no evidence” that chemical agents had fallen into the hands of rebel groups.

Uzumcu said he met a Syrian delegation on Wednesday at The Hague to try to address security concerns.

“Some additional measures are being taken right now to reduce risks. We hope that we can move relatively quickly in the coming weeks,” he said.

Uzumcu is in Italy to address parliament about the transfer of the primary agents.

The US ship MV Cape Ray, which has been specially equipped to destroy the nerve agents, is likely to be in the Mediterranean Sea by the end of January, Uzumcu said. The chemical transfer should take no more than 48 hours, he added.

As the international coordination to rid Syria of its arsenal continues, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday that Britain would award a contract to destroy around 150 tonnes of chemicals to French firm Veolia Environement.

The chemicals will be processed at the firm’s incineration plant at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire, England, the sources said.

BAALBEK, Lebanon — A car bomb Thursday ripped through the main square of Hermel, a Hizbollah bastion in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, killing three people in the latest attack linked to Syria’s war, officials said.

A group calling itself Al Nusra Front in Lebanon, after a Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate, said it was responsible for the blast and said it was a suicide attack, in a statement on social media.

A security official told AFP the bomb exploded in front of Hermel’s main government building, which houses administrative offices as well as police and security posts.

Health Minister Ali Hassan Khalil said three people were killed and 31 wounded in the town located only about 10 kilometres from the Syrian border.

“Two of the bodies were unidentified. We don’t know whether one of them was a suicide attacker,” Khalil told Hizbollah’s Al Manar television channel.

It was the first bombing to hit Hermel since the Syrian conflict erupted in March 2011, and the fifth major assault on a Hizbollah stronghold in Lebanon since the Iranian-backed Shiite movement admitted it was fighting alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria.

“By the grace of God, an earthquake has shaken the bastion of Iran’s party in Hermel, in a martyrdom [suicide] attack by one of the lions of Al Nusra Front in Lebanon,” said the statement posted on Twitter.

The attack was staged “in response to the party’s crimes against children, women and Sunnis in Syria,” it added.

It was not immediately clear if the group is linked to Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria and one of the main groups fighting to topple Assad.

The bombing came as the trial in absentia of four Hizbollah members accused of murdering Lebanese former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005 began at a UN-backed court in the Netherlands.

Interior Minister Marwan Charbel said that “given the human remains in the car and next to it, it seems like a suicide attack, but we will not rush to judgement”.

The army cordoned off buildings damaged in the attack as investigations were launched.

“The explosion was huge. People are really scared and upset. It took place just as people were on their way to work and to go about their daily business in the middle of town,” said Ali Shamas, the headmaster of a Hermel college.

An AFP photographer saw body parts strewn on the ground, as well as damaged vehicles and ambulances transporting casualties away. 

‘Solidarity needed to immunise Lebanon’

President Michel Sleiman described the attack as “the latest in a criminal series that target Lebanon’s stability.”

“Immunising [Lebanon] from such terrorist groups will require solidarity between leaders and the people, and the rapid establishment of a government that is able to meet the challenges.”

For nine months, Lebanon’s rival political camps have failed to form a government.

Tensions and deadly fighting linked to the Syria war have also gripped Lebanon, which is sharply divided into pro- and anti-Damascus camps.

Hizbollah has since last May been openly involved in Syria’s war, sending in thousands of fighters to support regime forces.

But Hizbollah MP Nawar Sahili said: “What happens in Syria stays in Syria... There must be no links made between our presence in Syria and these terrorist, criminal, cowardly explosions.”

Five major attacks have struck Hizbollah bastions in southern Beirut and in eastern Lebanon since it admitted it is fighting on Assad’s side.

Prior to Thursday’s attack, the two most recent were claimed by the Abdallah Azzam Brigades, which is loyal to Al Qaeda.

Until 2005, Lebanon had been dominated politically and militarily by Syria for 30 years.

While Lebanon has suffered a spike in violence since the war in Syria broke out, the frequency of attacks has risen in recent weeks.

In November, 25 people were killed in a twin suicide attack targeting the Iranian embassy in southern Beirut, also a Hizbollah bastion.

Then in late December, eight people were killed in a car bomb attack targeting a former minister opposed to Assad while five other died in a suicide blast that tore through southern Beirut on January 2.

KILIS, Turkey — Al Masri family, now reunited in exile this week by the horrors of Syria’s war, have watched their country unravel with breathtaking brutality.

Abu Ali fled with his wife and four children in March 2012 after receiving word that regime loyalists had stabbed to death dozens of women and children in his neighbourhood in the central city of Homs.

The newest arrival is Abu Ammar, a rebel who fled the northern town of Al Bab this week after his brigade was routed in a battle with jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

The Al Masris are among the estimated nine million people — more than a third of Syria’s population — displaced by a war that has only grown more brutal and complicated, with internecine fighting having erupted in recent weeks among rebels seeking to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

As diplomats gather in Switzerland next week to seek peace, the Masris will struggle to make ends meet in their spare, crowded apartment in Kilis, a Turkish town near the border.

“We must return, but we won’t as long as the regime exists,” says Umm Ali, Abu Ali’s wife, who like the rest of the family asked that her real name not be used because they still have relatives in Syria.

“After what we’ve seen, it’s impossible.”

A grisly massacre 

Abu Ali remembers watching the protesters march down the main street of his neighbourhood in Homs, past the grocery store he owned with his brother.

He says he never took part in the peaceful demonstrations against the Assad family’s 40-year rule, Arab Spring-inspired protests that began in March 2011 and were met with a brutal crackdown.

“They were killing people in hospitals,” Abu Ali recalls.

“A protester would be shot in the leg and then taken to the hospital... When the family went to claim the body it would have another bullet wound in the head.”

The worst was yet to come.

In March 2012, the feared pro-regime shabiha militia allegedly slaughtered two families in an attempt to cleanse Abu Ali’s mostly Sunni Muslim neighbourhood.

The Assads are Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, while the rebels mainly hail from the Sunni Muslim majority.

An activist told AFP at the time that 47 women and children had been stabbed to death or had their throats slit, and that some of the women had been raped. It was not possible to independently confirm the reports.

Abu Ali’s family fled that night with hastily packed suitcases and went to another area near Homs.

He said the few Sunnis who stayed behind were killed and dumped in the streets, where their remains rotted for months, no one daring to bury them.

As the civil war gathered steam the fighting around his new home became so severe he crossed the border into Lebanon. He soon had to leave again, for Turkey, because the rents were too high.

Now Abu Ali, who once owned his own business, shares a four-bedroom apartment with 16 people and makes around $10 (7.35 euros) a day working at a coffee shop.

The difference between his former life and the one he knows now, he says, “is the difference between heaven and earth”.

A retreat under fire

As reports of regime massacres spread, Syrians who had hoped to bring down the government peacefully instead took up arms. As the war grew more bitterly sectarian, radical Islamist groups assumed a prominent role in the insurgency.

Abu Ammar, 29, fled Homs at the same time Abu Ali left, eventually making his way to the strategic northern town of Al Bab, where he joined a moderate Islamist rebel group.

Two weeks ago his group joined with other powerful secular and Islamist rebels in battling Al Qaeda-linked ISIL, accused of kidnapping, torturing and killing scores of activists and rival rebels.

In the first few days ISIL was driven back, but it has since regrouped and is now advancing in many parts of the north.

Earlier this week ISIL laid siege to Al Bab and shelled it with artillery.

As Abu Ammar and his fellow fighters tried to repel the attack, Assad’s warplanes dropped explosives-filled barrels on the town.

“You can’t imagine how many people were wounded. So many people died,” he said, his voice choking up.

“There was a fighter with me who died in my arms.”

As his brigade retreated he, his wife and mother sped north, terrified they would run into a flying ISIL checkpoint.

“If they find someone they think is in the Free Syrian Army they kill him right away,” he said.

Now he has moved into the house in Kilis, reunited with his relatives nearly two years after they all fled Homs.

The family hopes to return, but with rebels locked in a two-front war with Assad and ISIL, and diplomatic efforts largely stalled, no one knows if or when that day will come.

Abu Ali can only wonder at the modest beginnings of the uprising, less than three years ago.

“The first protests in Homs were against bribery and corruption,” Abu Ali says.

“All they wanted was a new governor.”

BAGHDAD — Iraqi forces attacked a militant stronghold in crisis-hit Anbar province Thursday, while authorities found 14 bullet-riddled bodies in scenes harkening back to the worst of Iraq’s sectarian war.

The latest unrest, a day after nationwide attacks killed 73 people and gunmen made key territorial gains in Anbar, comes amid fears the country is sliding back into the worst of the brutal Sunni-Shiite conflict which left tens of thousands dead in 2006 and 2007.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon and other diplomats have urged Baghdad to pursue political reconciliation with the disaffected Sunni minority to end the weeks-long standoff in Anbar and the months-long surge in violence, Iraq’s worst since 2008.

But with parliamentary elections looming in April, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has ruled out dialogue with fighters who control parts of Anbar provincial capital Ramadi and all of Fallujah, which lies on Baghdad’s doorstep.

Early Thursday, around 3,000 security personnel, comprised of units from the elite Golden Brigade linked to Maliki’s office, and the interior ministry’s Rapid Intervention Force, attacked an alleged militant camp in Albubali, an area comprising villages and rural farmland between Ramadi and Fallujah.

They were backed by tanks and aircraft, according to a senior police officer and a policeman.

“The main target is to take control of this area [Albubali],” the officer said.

They also aimed to recover the bodies of eight members of the security forces — four of whom have been missing for several days and have since been confirmed dead, and four others who were killed when a booby-trapped house collapsed on them.

Fighting in Fallujah

Clashes were also reported just west of Fallujah overnight, while mortar rounds in the city killed two people. It was unclear who took part in the clashes, or who was responsible for the shelling.

Fighting initially broke out in the Ramadi area on December 30, when security forces cleared a year-old Sunni Arab protest camp.

It spread to Fallujah, and militants moved in and seized the city and parts of Ramadi after security forces withdrew.

Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has been involved in the fighting along with anti-government tribal fighters. The government, meanwhile, has recruited its own tribal allies.

The crisis marks the first time militants have exercised such open control in major cities since the height of the insurgency that followed the US-led invasion of 2003.

But while Iraqi officials have trumpeted security operations, which they say have led to the killing or capture of several militants and the dismantling of training camps and bomb-making sites, the bloodshed has shown no sign of abating.

In the latest instance, the bodies of 14 men, all kidnapped earlier Thursday by men wearing army uniforms, were found shot dead in an orchard north of Baghdad, two security officials said.

The victims, taken from their homes in the predominantly Sunni Arab town of Mishahda, had all suffered gunshots to the head and chest, the officials said.

Among them were at least five members of one family.

At the peak of sectarian fighting in the wake of the 2003 US-led invasion, Sunni and Shiite militias regularly carried out tit-for-tat kidnappings and assassinations and left scores of corpses littering the streets.

At the time, many of the bodies were blindfolded and showed signs of torture.

The authorities have made some concessions aimed at placating the protesters and Sunnis in general, including freeing prisoners and raising the salaries of anti-Al Qaeda Sahwa fighters.

But daily violence has continued, with nearly 600 people killed already this month, according to an AFP tally, including 73 who died on Wednesday.

Diplomats, analysts and rights groups say the government is not doing enough to address Sunni disquiet over what they see as mistreatment at the hands of the Shiite-led authorities.

BEIRUT — Two weeks of battles between Syrian rebels and jihadists have killed at least 1,069 people, mostly fighters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Thursday.

Among the dead, not all of whom were identified, were 608 Islamist and moderate rebels, 312 jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and 130 civilians, the Britain-based group said.

The battles broke out when rebels launched an offensive mainly in northern Syria against their erstwhile jihadist allies, whose quest for hegemony and systematic abuses have raised the wrath of those fighting to oust President Bashar Assad.

Among the 130 civilians dead were 21 summarily executed by ISIL in a children’s hospital in Aleppo that the jihadists had turned into a base, the observatory said.

Others died after being caught in the crossfire or in ISIL car bomb attacks.

Among the rebels killed were 99 summarily executed by ISIL.

The rebels also executed 56 ISIL prisoners, said the observatory, which relies on a broad network of activists and doctors in Syria for its reporting.

Another 19 people were reported killed in the fighting that has stretched from Aleppo to Idlib, Raqa, Deir Ezzor and Hama provinces in the past fortnight, though the observatory could not confirm their identities.

Clashes continued to rage Thursday, especially in Saraqeb, the jihadists’ last bastion in the northwestern province of Idlib, said the observatory.

In Aleppo province, meanwhile, a new ISIL car bomb hit a rebel checkpoint, it added.

The jihadists warned early in January that if the offensive against them continued, they would respond with suicide and car bomb attacks.

Meanwhile, the air force dropped powerful barrel bombs on rebel positions in and around Damascus, including Yarmouk refugee camp, Zabadani and Daraya, the observatory said.

In besieged Yarmouk, four people were killed by the bombing. Another two died as a result of malnutrition, bringing the total deaths related to food and medicine shortages to more than 50 in recent months.

“A kilo of rice costs $100 (74 euros) here. No one has rice. A single cigarette costs $40. Some people are eating the weeds that even animals won’t eat. Others are slaughtering cats and dogs,” said Ibaa Al Arabi, a camp resident who spoke to AFP via Skype.

A seventh person from Yarmouk died while demonstrating on the edges of the camp, when troops at a checkpoint opened fire, said the observatory.

Nearby Daraya — also under siege — was also pounded, though rebels shot down a helicopter, the group said.

In the central city of Homs, the number of people killed in shelling on Tuesday of the Ghouta neighbourhood rose to 19, including three children, the observatory said.

The Syrian conflict, which erupted after Assad unleashed a brutal crackdown on democracy protests in March 2011, has killed more than 130,000 people and forced millions to flee their homes.

BAGHDAD — The day after one of Iraq’s bloodiest days for months, shoppers and drivers packed the streets of Baghdad on Thursday, grimly aware that death can strike anywhere, any time.

At least eight bombs hit the capital, mostly in Shiite districts, on Wednesday, killing 40 people and wounding 88, while attacks elsewhere pushed the national death toll to 78.

“We are afraid even when we are in our houses, because we do not know the enemy,” said Raed Mohammed, as he and his assistant put spare machine parts back on the shelves of his shop, which had been damaged by one of the blasts in the Karrada neighbourhood.

“We don’t know who is targeting us. We aren’t in a war where we know who we’re fighting,” said the shopkeeper, shaven-headed apart from a neat goatee beard.

“We’ve lost our sense of security. Sometimes we have days when security is good, followed by days of relentless attacks.”

Mangled corrugated iron sheeting hung down from the storefront, which was open to the street. Pedestrians strode by without a second look at the pool of blood staining the asphalt.

“We walk in the streets with death certificates in our pockets,” Mohammed said. “We always have the feeling we won’t be going home. The problem is every one of us has a family, a wife and children to feed, so how would they live without us?”

Despite the almost daily carnage, Baghdad’s seven million people have no choice but to go about their lives.

Sometimes Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claims responsibility for the blasts, especially those involving suicide bomb attacks on ministries or other high-profile targets. Many explosions are never claimed.

“Every day, when I leave the house, I tell my wife what to do if I die,” said a middle-aged passer-by in a green jacket who gave his name only as Adel.

“I’m afraid to take my wife and children out. I’m thinking of stopping my child from going to school out of fear that schools will be bombed,” he said.

‘Business as usual’ 

Two years after US troops left Iraq, violence has climbed back to its highest levels since the Sunni-Shiite bloodletting of 2006-2007, when tens of thousands of people were killed.

The United Nations says nearly 9,000 people died violently in Iraq last year, all but 1,050 of them civilians.

The bombers have been just as diligent this year, with tension high since ISIL gunmen and their Sunni tribal allies seized the city of Fallujah west of Baghdad on January 1, exploiting widespread Sunni resentment at the Shiite-led government.

The bombing campaign, whose targets include the army and police, Shiite civilians and pro-government Sunni tribal fighters, appears aimed at provoking Shiite militias to retaliate and plunge Iraq back into open sectarian warfare.

Such calculations are lost on Baghdad’s residents, who, like people everywhere, just want to work, relax and send their kids to school knowing they will come home safely.

Men smiled and joked in the winter sunshine as they waited to pay for their fruit and vegetables at a market stall. A woman dressed in black wheeled a toddler past toys laid out on the pavement. Honking vehicles snarled the roads as normal.

“It is true the security situation is unstable, but you can see people out and about,” said Fadhil Al Nidawi, a man in his 40s.

“After each attack, people clean up, remove the rubble and go on with their business as usual. People have got used to it...

“Those who want to harm Iraq should think it over — they will achieve nothing.”

CAIRO — Egyptians overwhelmingly approved a new constitution by referendum, state media reported on Thursday, a widely expected outcome that nudges army chief General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi ever closer to a bid for the presidency.

The vote advances a transition plan the military-backed government unveiled after deposing Islamist president Mohamed Morsi last July following mass anti-government unrest.

The constitution won wide support among the many Egyptians who favoured Morsi’s removal. The Muslim Brotherhood had called for a boycott, saying the vote was part of a coup that deposed an elected leader and revived a brutal police state.

But the vote was also a sign of widespread yearning for a return to stability after almost three years of violent disorder that has crippled the economy, impoverishing many.

The next step is expected to be a presidential election for which Sisi — wildly popular among his supporters — appears the only serious candidate. He has yet to declare he will run.

Around 90 per cent of the people who voted approved the constitution, state-run media reported. Al Ahram, the state’s flagship newspaper, said the constitution was approved by an “unprecedented majority”, citing early results.

The authorities, who have billed the transition plan as a path to democracy, have also jailed leading Islamists and, in recent weeks, secular-minded activists, including prominent figures in the 2011 uprising against president Hosni Mubarak.

Morsi and other top Brotherhood politicians are standing trial on charges including inciting violence and conspiring with foreign militant groups against Egypt. Several members of the secular protest movement have also been jailed for breaking a new law that tightly restricts the right to demonstrate.

While Western states have criticised the crackdown and called for inclusive politics, they have put little pressure on Cairo for certain strategic reasons.

Egypt controls the Suez Canal, the fastest sea shipping route between Asia and Europe, and has been a cornerstone of US policy in the Middle East since the 1970s, when it became the first Arab state to make peace with Israel.

55 per cent turnout 

An interior ministry official said turnout appeared to be more than 55 per cent in what was the first vote since Morsi’s overthrow. A pro-Morsi alliance, which had called for a boycott, alleged fraud but offered no proof.

“Early indications point to the fact that Egyptians made history this week with a high level of participation in the vote on the draft constitution,” Ehab Badawy, Egypt’s spokesman for the presidency, said in a statement.

“This vote represents a resounding rejection of terrorism and a clear endorsement of the roadmap to democracy, as well as economic development and stability.”

A decree is expected within days setting the date for presidential and parliamentary elections, Al Ahram reported. The official result is expected to be announced on Saturday.

The constitution was drafted by a 50-member committee appointed by decree. It deletes controversial Islamist-inspired provisions written into the basic law approved when Morsi was still in office, and strengthens the state bodies that defied him: the army, the police and the judiciary.

Some of the Islamists’ opponents pointed to the result as proof of a popular mandate for Morsi’s ouster. “The Egyptians write the Brotherhood’s death certificate,” Al Youm Al Sabea, a privately owned newspaper, declared on its front page.

Rights groups criticised the detention of seven activists from a moderately Islamist party campaigning for a “no” vote.

In a statement, the foreign ministry said they were arrested on suspicion of law-breaking and all but one of them, held in relation to a past conviction, had been released. It added that there was no ban on campaigning for a “no” vote.

The Brotherhood had called for protests during the voting. Nine people were killed on the first day of voting in clashes between its supporters and security forces. The interior ministry said 444 people were arrested during the two-day vote.

A student was killed and four others injured in clashes between opponents and supporters of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood at Cairo University on Thursday, security sources said.

Stock market rally 

The referendum appeared to be a public vote of confidence in Sisi, 59, widely viewed as the most powerful figure in Egypt and by his supporters as the man needed to restore stability.

“I believe this is the most convenient time for Sisi to make an announcement if he has the intention to run,” said Mohamed Qadri Said, a retired army general who works at the state’s Al Ahram Centre for Strategic and Political Studies.

“I do not see anyone else running against him. He has done great things to the country and the people like him.”

The stock market has rallied to three-year highs this week, driven partly by hopes for more stable government.

But the country has also seen the bloodiest internal strife in its modern history since Morsi’s ouster. Bombings, attacks on security forces and bloody street violence occur regularly.

The government declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organisation on December 25. The group, outlawed for most of its 85-year life, says it remains committed to peaceful protest.

LONDON — More than two years after the death of Osama Bin Laden, the turbulent aftermath of the “Arab Spring” has helped his group — or more accurately, its offshoots and successors — gain ground.

Two weeks ago, fighters from Al Qaeda affiliate the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) took over much of the central Iraqi city of Fallujah, reversing their defeat at the hands of US forces and local tribal allies almost a decade ago.

Western officials fear associated groups will carve out havens in Libya, Syria, West Africa and perhaps Afghanistan once NATO troops withdraw.

But the new generation is very different to the tight-knit group that planned the September 11, 2001 attacks, security experts and officials say.

Groups such as ISIL, Somalia’s Al Shabaab or Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) have primarily local aims and are much less concerned with the Western “far enemy”.

In a video posted on YouTube on December 17 which Western intelligence agencies have been studying, a man in a balaclava snaps rounds into a Glock handgun magazine and, in a pronounced English Midlands accent, calls on British Muslims to join him in Syria, “the land of jihad”.

But the unidentified man does not mention attacking the West once. Instead, his ire is directed at the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad and the western-backed Free Syrian Army.

Heightened strains over the Syria war between Shiite Muslim Iran and Sunni power Saudi Arabia, who back opposite sides in the conflict, are contributing to sectarian tensions around the region and encouraging Gulf Arab sympathisers to increase funding of aggressively Sunni Al Qaeda affiliates.

But there is little sign of common purpose.

“There are probably more people fighting now under the Al Qaeda banner than ever before,” says Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations Al Qaeda and Taliban monitoring team until last year and now at the Soufan Group Consultancy. “But that doesn’t mean they are necessarily fighting for the same thing or even on the same side.”

Even as it raised its flag in Fallujah this month, ISIL was being evicted from its headquarters in Syria’s second city of Aleppo by Islamist groups including the Al Nusra Front, a rival Al Qaeda affiliate.

Letters captured from Bin Laden’s compound in 2011 show him struggling to control Al Qaeda’s affiliates and worrying that Al Qaeda in Iraq — now ISIL — was killing too many civilians and alienating Muslim opinion.

His successor, Ayman Al Zawahiri, opened Al Qaeda further to include groups such as Al Shabaab and now faces similar problems. In a letter last year, he called for ISIL to leave Syria to Al Nusra, a request it ignored.

“Most of those now claiming to be Al Qaeda would never have even been allowed into the (pre-September 11) movement,” said Nelly Lahoud, a senior researcher at the US Military Academy Combating Terrorism Centre who examined Bin Laden’s documents.

Still, Western spy chiefs have worries. Officials say hundreds of British and other European Muslims — as well as a smaller number of Americans — are fighting in Syria alone and will have to be monitored on their return.

“We are having to deal with Al Qaeda emerging and multiplying in a whole new range of countries,” John Sawers, head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), told a parliamentary panel in November. “There is no doubt at all that the threat is rising.”

The greatest Islamist militant risk to targets in the West, most officials and experts say, now comes from small-scale attacks with guns, bombs or knives along the lines of last year’s April 15 Boston bombing and May 22 killing of a British soldier in Woolwich, London.

Britain’s MI5 says well over half of the 34 plots it foiled between the July 7, 2005, London bombings and the Woolwich attack involved those already in the country. In most cases, however, there was also some tangential link to a foreign jihadi group.

Michael Adebolajo, one of two British Nigerian men who killed soldier Lee Rigby, had been arrested in Kenya in 2010 on suspicion of travelling to train with Al Shabaab in Somalia.

In its links to “AQ Central” and enthusiasm for attacking the West, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is seen as perhaps the closest to the old Al Qaeda model — although much of its focus remains on its local fights in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

AQAP in particular has put considerable energy into reaching out through websites and forums.

Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators he learnt to build the pressure cooker devices that killed three and injured 264 from an AQAP online magazine.

Overstating or understating?

Even within intelligence circles, there is growing disagreement over the nature of the threat.

“Everyone is asking themselves the same question: is it still meaningful to talk about Al Qaeda as a single organisation and if not, what are we dealing with?” says Nigel Inkster, former MI6 deputy chief and now head of transnational threats at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

US logistic support and intelligence — sometimes including drone strikes — has proved relatively effective in pushing back AQAP in Yemen and Al Shabaab in Somalia. In Mali, Washington worked with French and regional forces to force AQIM out of swathes of the country.

Denying such groups territory, however, only goes so far. US officials believe AQIM’s numbers remain largely undiminished.

There is also increasing opposition to such US-led action. Syria’s Assad seems unlikely to allow drones to operate in his country, while both Pakistan and Libya appear increasingly opposed to unilateral US action.

Nor are Washington and Baghdad likely to dramatically step up military cooperation, although drones have been sent.

Some suggest the Al Qaeda label may be distracting foreign powers from the reality of what are often local conflicts. What happened in Fallujah, they say, was as much about frustration amongst local Sunni tribes with the majority Shiite government.

Others, however, fear complacency.

“Many want to trumpet the demise of core Al Qaeda and take solace in the belief... that what we are seeing in Africa and the Levant is not part of some grand strategy,” says Georgetown professor and sometime US official Bruce Hoffman, one of Washington’s leading experts on the group. “Wishful thinking.”