Region

UNITED NATIONS, United States — The UN envoy for Libya warned Tuesday the battle for Tripoli was "just the start of a long and bloody war" and called for immediate steps to cut off arms flows fuelling the fighting.

Addressing the Security Council, Ghassan Salame said "many countries" were supplying weapons to the UN-recognised government in Tripoli and forces led by Khalifa Haftar.

Haftar, who is backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, launched an offensive on April 4 to seize the capital but his forces have been bogged down in the southern outskirts of Tripoli.

"I am no Cassandra, but the violence on the outskirts of Tripoli is just the start of a long and bloody war on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, imperiling the security of Libya's immediate neighbours and the wider Mediterranean region," Salame said.

Without immediate action to stop the flow of arms, “Libya will descend into civil war which could potentially lead to a Hobbesian all-against-all state of chaos or partition of the country,” he said.

His appeal came after the Tripoli-based government of national accord posted photographs at the weekend of dozens of Turkish-made armoured vehicles that it said on its Facebook page were fresh deliveries for its fighters.

UN experts earlier this month said in a confidential report to the council that missiles fired at pro-Tripoli forces in April pointed to a likely drone attack that could involve a “third party”. 

More than 75,000 people have been driven from their homes in the latest fighting and 510 have been killed, according to the World Health Organisation.

The envoy urged the council to set up a commission of inquiry to “determine who has taken up arms” and look into war crimes allegations.

With Haftar’s forces mobilised near Tripoli, Libyan militias linked to Daesh and Al Qaeda have stepped up attacks, in particular in the south, Salame said.

The Security Council failed last month to agree on a draft resolution demanding a ceasefire in Libya and a return to political talks to end the conflict.

Russia refused to include any mention of Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli while the United States said it needed more time to consider the situation, diplomats said.

“Attempts to place the responsibility at the foot of only one of the players would only lead to deepening confrontation,” Russian Deputy Ambassador Vladimir Safronkov told the council. 

France called for an immediate ceasefire and a return to talks, arguing that neither side could win an outright military victory in Tripoli.

Haftar is due to hold talks with President Emmanuel Macron in Paris this week.

The United States urged the warring sides to return to UN mediation.

ATMEH, Syria — Ali Al Ahmed and his family fled on foot through the fields when the bombs began raining down on their house in north-western Syria, escaping a major offensive by the Syrian army and its Russian allies.

"In the early hours of the morning, the artillery stopped. Then the warplanes and helicopters came out," Ahmed, a 25-year-old farmer, said, recalling his last hours in the village of Habeet which he fled with his family of five dozen.

Scattered during their frantic escape from the village, the family are now reunited in a makeshift shelter in an olive grove near the border with Turkey. They are among some of the 180,000 people uprooted by the military escalation.

It marks the biggest upsurge in violence since last summer between President Bashar Assad and his insurgent enemies in Idlib province and a belt of territory around it.

The night before Ahmed's family left the village, they hid indoors or in basements. They feared moving around the village even to check whether other inhabitants were still alive. 

Shelling hit his small truck, which they had planned to escape in. "The warplane was flying overhead," he said. "So we stood there watching the truck burn."

Then they set off through the fields: Some of the relatives ran on foot. Others hopped into cars with their neighbours. A few stayed behind.

"For three days, we didn't know anything about each other," Ahmed said. 

One of his neighbours managed to run away only to be hit when he reached the main highway, where his wife and children were killed. 

The territory is largely controlled by Tahrir Al Sham, an extremist group representing the latest incarnation of Al Nusra Front, formerly Al Qaeda's Syrian wing. The Syrian government says it is responding to attacks by Al Qaeda-linked terrorists. 

A few days after fleeing, Ahmed reunited with his four sisters and brothers, as well as some of their children who were lost. With help from neighbours and strangers, they gathered at a friend's house in north Idlib. 

The family ended up in an olive grove in the border town of Atmeh two weeks ago. 

"Our entire lives today are under these two trees," said Ahmed, who comes from the Hama countryside and had already been uprooted twice before during the eight-year war. 

They go out every day in search of farming work to make ends meet. At night, they try sending the children or women to sleep in other people's tents, said Ahmed’s sister, Um Mohammad. 

The rest sleep out in the open. 

Neighbours told them Al Habeet was now almost deserted, houses had collapsed and rubble had blocked the roads.

"We didn't expect to come out alive," she said.

TRIPOLI — Gunmen have cut off the main water pipeline to Libya's besieged capital, Tripoli, spelling more misery for residents already reeling from weeks of fighting.

The United Nations said the water blockage was a possible war crime as Libya's internationally recognised government accused forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar, which have been trying to capture Tripoli, of being behind the blockage.

The group on Sunday raided a station of the Great Man-Made River Project, a pipe network supplying ground water from the Sahara, the company said. The gunmen forced employees to turn off the pipes at the installation 400km south of Tripoli.

The eastern forces of Haftar's Libya National Army (LNA) launched an assault on Tripoli in early April and are bogged down in southern suburbs by fighters loyal to the UN-backed government of Prime Minister Fayez Al Serraj.

In past attacks on the pipeline, which was one of former president Muammar Qadhafi’s few development projects, it has taken up to two days for households to notice water shortages in the coastal city of 2.5 million people.

The Tripoli government blamed a group that also cut the water supplies in 2017, saying its commander, Khalifa Ehnaish, belonged to Haftar's forces.

The LNA denied that. Ehnaish could not be reached.

"Considering this was a closure of the valves in an LNA-controlled area, the complicity of Ehnaish with the LNA in orchestrating this cannot be discounted," said Emad Badi, a non-resident scholar with the Middle East Institute.

Fighting in the battle for Tripoli has killed at least 510 people, forced 75,000 out of their homes, trapped thousands of migrants in detention centres and flattened some southern suburbs.

It has also forced the closure of schools, split families on different sides of the front line and brought power-cuts.

The conflict is one of the most serious flare-ups in years of chaos since the 2011 toppling of Qadhafi.

WASHINGTON — The United States strongly suspects Shiite militias with ties to, and possibly encouragement from, Iran fired a rocket into Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, two US government sources said on Monday.

The sources, who are familiar with US national security assessments and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the United States was still trying to establish which militia fired the Katyusha rocket on Sunday and the extent, if any, of Iranian involvement.

The rocket fell in the Green Zone which houses government buildings and embassies and caused no casualties, the latest in a series of regional attacks the United States believes may have been inspired by Iran. Iran has rejected allegations of its possible involvement in attacks last week and Iran's Iraqi allies rushed to condemn Sunday's rocket blast.

The attacks include what Saudi Arabia described as armed drone attacks on two pump stations within the kingdom on May 14 and the sabotage of four vessels, including two Saudi oil tankers, off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on May 12.

Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi group claimed responsibility for attacking the two oil pumping stations. Saudi Arabia accused Tehran of ordering the attack. Tensions between Washington and its Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab allies on one side and Tehran and its Shiite Muslim proxies on the other have been flaring for weeks.

European and US government sources believe Shiite militias based in Yemen or Iraq carried out the attacks in Saudi Arabia and near the UAE, likely with Iran's encouragement.

The two US sources said they are still trying to establish whether the rocket attack, if inspired or directed by Iran, was designed to send a specific signal to the United States.

The incidents all took place after US President Donald Trump decided to try to cut off Iran's oil exports, moving roughly a year after he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six major powers. Trump's decision to abandon the deal that restricted Iran's potential pathway to developing a nuclear bomb, in return for relief from economic sanctions, angered Tehran, which accuses Washington of breaking its word. Iran denies ever having a nuclear weapons programme.

Low-grade uranium enichment

In what may be a sign of Iranian displeasure, an Iranian news service reported on a fourfold increase in Iran's rate of production of low-grade uranium enrichment. 

Quoting an official at the Natanz enrichment plant, the semi-official Tasnim news service said Iran was accelerating the rate of production at which it refines uranium to 3.67 per cent fissile purity, suitable for civilian nuclear power generation.

Two weeks ago Iran, after Trump sought to block all Iranian oil exports, said it would relax some of its commitments under the accord it struck with Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.

Under the deal, negotiated by the administration of Trump's predecessor Barrack Obama, Iran was allowed to stockpile up to 300kg of low-enriched uranium (LEU), and ship any excess out of the country for storage or sale.

Iran said this month that cap no longer applied in response to the US withdrawal from the deal.

It was not clear how far Iran's LEU stock was from the 300kg limit. Under the deal Iran can enrich uranium at 3.67 per cent, well below the 90 per cent purity required to make bombs and the 20 per cent level to which Iran enriched before the deal.

Former US director of national intelligence James Clapper, speaking to BBC World News television, played down the uranium announcement, saying: "I don't know that it's necessary to go into the panic mode yet."

However, as have some other analysts and diplomats, Clapper stressed the danger of an accidental escalation, particularly when opposing forces are close to one another. Both US and Iranian vessels patrol in the Strait of Hormuz.

"The thing I would be concerned about is some inadvertent incident that could go incendiary," he said.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had warned Iraqi leaders during a surprise visit two weeks ago to Baghdad that if they failed to rein in Iran-backed militias, which are expanding their power in Iraq and form part of its security apparatus, the United States would respond with force.

A US State Department official noted on Sunday that there had been no claim of responsibility for the rocket attack, and that no US-inhabited facility was affected, but said "we will hold Iran responsible" if such attacks were carried out by proxy militia forces.

On Sunday, Trump threatened Iran in a Tweet, raising concerns about a potential US -Iran conflict.

Critics accused Trump of sending mixed signals. Last week three US officials told Reuters Trump had told his top advisers he does not want war with Iran.

Democratic Senator Chris Coons, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Trump "bluffs about going after Iran" and said the consequences of being drawn into a war would be "tragic".

Iran's UN Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi warned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a letter made public on Monday that "if unchecked, the current situation might — sooner or later — go beyond the perimeter of control and thereby lead to another unnecessary regional crisis".

TEHRAN — Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Monday the “genocidal taunts” of US President Donald Trump will not “end Iran”, as tensions spike between the two countries.

“Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone. Economic terrorism and genocidal taunts won’t ‘end Iran’,” Zarif wrote on Twitter.

“Never threaten an Iranian. Try respect — it works!” he added.

In another Tweet, Zarif accused Trump of allowing his team to “trash diplomacy” and “abet war crimes — by milking despotic butchers via massive arms sales”.

The riposte by Iran’s top diplomat follows an ominous warning by Trump, who on Sunday suggested the Islamic republic would be destroyed if it attacked US interests.

“If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again,” Trump Tweeted.

Relations between Washington and Tehran plummeted a year ago when Trump pulled out of a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and imposed tough sanctions.

Iranian officials have repeatedly slammed the unilateral US sanctions as “economic terrorism”, saying that they have impeded the flow of essential goods.

Tensions have risen further this month with Washington announcing more economic measures against Tehran, before deploying a carrier group and B-52 bombers to the Gulf over unspecified alleged Iranian “threats”.

The Trump administration last week ordered non-essential diplomatic staff out of Iraq, citing the danger posed by Iranian-backed Iraqi armed groups.

On Sunday a rocket was fired into the Green Zone of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, which houses government offices and embassies including the US mission. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack.

While the US claim of Iranian “threats” has been met with widespread scepticism outside the United States, the mounting tensions have sparked growing international concern.

“I would say to the Iranians, do not underestimate the resolve on the US side in the situation,” British Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt told reporters on Monday in Geneva.

“They don’t want a war with Iran, but if American interests are attacked they will retaliate,” he added.

Hunt said that Britain wanted “the situation to de-escalate” and urged Iran “to pull back from the destabilising activities it does throughout the region”.

‘Goaded’ into war 

US media reports say Trump’s hawkish National Security Adviser John Bolton is pushing for war with Iran, but others in the administration are resisting.

Before Trump’s Twitter threat, Zarif had downplayed the prospect of a new war in the region, saying Tehran opposed it and nobody was under the “illusion” the Islamic republic could be confronted.

Iran is exercising “maximum restraint” in the face of an “unacceptable” escalation by the United States, Zarif said on Thursday.

Tehran has threatened to gradually withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal if partners still in the agreement — Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia — do not help it to circumvent US sanctions.

Saudi Arabia on Saturday called for emergency regional talks to discuss the mounting Gulf tensions.

It came days after mysterious sabotage attacks on several tankers in highly sensitive Gulf waters and drone strikes on a Saudi crude pipeline by Yemen rebels, who Riyadh claimed were acting on Iranian orders.

Saudi Arabia’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Adel Al Jubeir, said on Sunday his country does not want to go to war with Iran but would defend itself.

Saudi Arabia “does not want a war, is not looking for it and will do everything to prevent it”, he said.

“But at the same time, if the other side chooses war, the kingdom will respond with strength and determination to defend itself and its interests.”

CAIRO — Just a month before the African Cup of Nations, Egypt was hit by a bomb blast that undermined efforts to burnish its image as a bulwark of stability after years of turmoil.

The attack on Sunday near the famed pyramids of Giza is another setback to the North African country’s efforts to revive its key tourism industry after years of turmoil.

What happened? 

A roadside bomb explosion hit a tourist bus driving on a road close to a lavish new museum under construction overlooking the Giza plateau.

The blast shattered many of the bus’s windows, injuring several of its passengers as well as those of a nearby car. 

At least 17 people were wounded in the explosion including foreigners. 

South Africa’s foreign ministry said three of its nationals were hospitalised. 

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack yet.

Possible scenarios? 

A day later, Egypt announced that its security forces had killed 12 suspected militants in police raids near Cairo.

The interior ministry said the militants belonged to the Hasm movement which is believed to be a splinter faction of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group.

Hasm has previously claimed responsibility for attacks targeting security personnel and high-profile figures in Egypt including judges.

“The pyramids area is known to be a bastion for the Muslim Brotherhood. Groups like Hasm and Lewaa Al Thawra [believed to be affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood] have previously claimed responsibility for attacks in this area,” said Political Science Professor Mostafa Kamel Al Sayed.

Hassan Nafaa, another political science professor at Cairo University, said the authorities’ announcement about the killing of militants was meant to give a semblance of order.

“The security establishment wants to prove it’s effective and successful... by announcing it killed 12 members of the Hasm movement to give the impression it is behind the attack,” he said.

The ministry’s statement did not directly link the raids to the bus attack.

Precedents? 

Egypt’s tourism sector has been hit by a string of previous attacks, most recently in December when three Vietnamese nationals and an Egyptian tour guide were killed in an explosion.

Back then, a home-made explosive device struck their bus which was also driving near the site of the pyramids.

It followed a lull in attacks since the 2017 stabbing of two women on a beach in the seaside resort of Hurghada.

The heaviest blow to Egypt’s tourism sector was in October 2015 when a bomb attack claimed by the Daesh group downed a Russian airliner shortly after take off from the resort city of Sharm El Sheikh, killing 224 people on board.

Impact on tourism? 

Sunday’s attack follows signs of a recovery in the long-suffering tourism industry. 

Egypt is set to host the African Cup of Nations from June 21 to July 19 which it sees as an opportunity to show that the country is safe and able to handle an influx of tourists.

Tourism has been reeling from turmoil since the 2011 overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in a popular uprising.

In 2010, Egypt welcomed a record 14.7 million tourists, but by 2016 that figure had plunged by nearly two-thirds, to 5.3 million.

The following year witnessed a rebound with arrivals reaching 8.3 million, according to the official statistics agency.

Earlier this month, Tourism Minister Rania Al Mashat said the key industry accounts for about a fifth of the country’s gross domestic product. 

Despite the high stakes, some believe Sunday’s attack is unlikely to have a significant impact on tourism. 

“It is a minor incident and it has become common that similar occurrences take place in other areas around the world,” said Sayed.

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinians will not attend a US-led conference in Bahrain next month that the Trump administration has cast as a preliminary roll-out of its plan for them to make peace with Israel, a Palestinian Cabinet minister said on Monday.

Washington announced the conference on Sunday, describing it as an opportunity to drum up international investment for the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas. 

The Palestinians, who have boycotted the Trump administration since it recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital in late 2017, have shown little interest in discussing a plan that they anticipate will fall far short of their core demands.

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said on Monday that his government had not been consulted on the June 25-26 gathering in Manama. 

After the Cabinet met, Ahmed Majdalani, the social development minister and a member of the executive committee of the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organisation, said: "There will be no Palestinian participation in the Manama workshop."

He added: "Any Palestinian who would take part would be nothing but a collaborator for the Americans and Israelis."

US officials have predicted that the event will include representatives and business executives from Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as well as some finance ministers. The economic component discussed will constitute an unveiling of the first part of the Trump peace plan, US officials have said.

Israeli leaders have not commented on the conference. Israel’s finance minister, Moshe Kahlon, said through a spokesman on Sunday that he had yet to receive any invitation.

Shtayyeh reiterated Palestinians’ demands for a two-state peace deal with Israel entailing control of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as East Jerusalem as their future capital. Israel calls Jerusalem its indivisible capital and has said it might declare sovereignty in its West Bank settlements.

The Trump administration has said its still-secret peace plan would require compromise by both sides. Since being shunned by the Palestinians, it has cut back on US aid for them, contributing to economic hardship in the West Bank and Gaza.

“The financial crisis the Palestinian Authority is living through today is a result of the financial war that is being launched against us in order to win political concessions,” Shtayyeh told his Cabinet. “We do not submit to blackmail and we don’t trade our political rights for money.”

Hamas, locked in a more than decade-old power struggle with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ secular Fateh Party, also condemned the Bahrain conference.

“We reject any economic and political steps that aim to implement the deal of the century or to normalise ties with the Israeli enemy,” Hamas official Fawzi Barhoum told Reuters.