Region

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — Seven people, including a three-year-old boy, have been killed since Saturday in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, medical and security sources said.

The victims are the latest casualties of violence fuelled by sectarian tensions over neighbouring Syria’s civil war.

Tripoli, 30km from the Syrian border, has been sharply divided between the Sunni Muslim majority and small Alawite community for decades.

The Lebanese army used “rockets” for the first time to quell the fighting between rival neighbourhoods, one security source said, without specifying which weapons were used. Normally, soldiers use assault rifles to target snipers.

The sources said three people killed by snipers were from the Sunni Muslim Bab Al Tabbaneh district, whose residents overwhelmingly support the Sunni Muslim rebels battling Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Three others killed were from the Alawite neighbourhood of Jebel Mohsen, which supports fellow Alawite Assad. Two of them were killed by snipers and a third was shot during a street clash.

A boy aged three from the nearby neighbourhood of Qoubbe died from wounds he sustained as a result of the fighting.

Sniper attacks are common along Syria Street, which divides the rival neighbourhoods and adjacent roads.

Sources said 53 people had also been wounded in the past 48 hours in related clashes, including four soldiers. The army has been deployed across the city for months in an effort to quell the violence.

Sectarian clashes in Tripoli killed more than 100 people in 2013. Dozens of people died in gun battles, and twin car bombs at Sunni Muslim mosques killed 42 people in August.

REYHANLI, Turkey — Omar Sheikhhamdu hoists himself up on prosthetic limbs and takes his first halting steps since a Syrian air strike tore off his legs nearly a year ago.

Clinching waist-high bars on either side of him, the 19-year-old former university student will pace back and forth for five minutes before stopping to rest.

That he is able to walk at all is down to the National Syrian Project for Prosthetic Limbs, which provides free treatment and prosthetics to any Syrians who make their way to the clinic in Reyhanli, just across the border in Turkey.

The clinic does not ask whether patients are fighters or civilians, but Raid Al Masri, the director of the centre, says around 40 per cent of the 370 patients it has treated in the last year are women and children.

“We have a patient who is a year-and-a-half old. He was wounded when he was eight months old,” he said.

“He hadn’t even learned to walk and he lost his leg. The first time he walks he’ll walk on a prosthetic limb.”

An estimated 130,000 people have been killed in Syria’s war, and if there were a reliable tally for the number of wounded it would likely far exceed that number.

The Reyhanli clinic is registered in Britain and funded by Syria Relief, a non-governmental organisation based there, as well as the Syrian Expatriates Medical Association, a group of doctors from abroad who treat war victims.

On a recent day several young men arrived, some hobbling on crutches while others, like Sheikhhamdu, had to be carried in by relatives.

One man, just 22 years old, lost both legs and an arm in a rocket attack in Aleppo six months ago.

It takes at least four months after the last surgery before a patient can even be fitted with prosthetic limbs, followed by months of physical therapy.

“For those who have lost both legs, it’s a little harder to rehabilitate them after they get the prosthetic limbs,” Masri says.

“It’s hard for them to get used to it.”

Sheikhhamdu, who lost one leg below the groin and the other above the knee, seems to take to the new limbs, at least as long as he holds onto the bars.

“He’ll go back and forth for five minutes and then rest. Next week we will try for 10 minutes,” says Samir Al Masri, a volunteer physical therapist.

Earlier, Sheikhhamdu had quietly recalled the day everything in his life changed.

The family was preparing to go to Friday prayers when a bomb dropped by a regime warplane struck their home, killing his sister and wounding him and two others.

“Sometimes I feel like I lost everything,” he says. “I can’t move.”

The little things

Therapists encourage the patients as they help them to stretch their legs and exercise the muscles before fitting them with prosthetics.

Abdelmawla, an 18-year-old volunteer, shares a special bond with those who come in.

He was riding in a car with his family on a highway north of Damascus when a government patrol fired a burst of heavy machine-gun fire at the car, shredding his left leg from above the knee.

“Everything seemed normal. And right that moment there was very heavy gunfire, very heavy,” he says.

“It was really frightening.”

Months later he found the clinic by chance during a trip to Turkey and was later fitted with a prosthetic leg.

Today he walks with only a slight limp, but he still struggles with the little things.

“There are things little kids can do that I can’t, like play football,” he says.

“Some people can go to the bathroom and it’s perfectly normal. I can’t go to the bathroom in a normal way.”

He tells new patients they have a long road ahead, urging them to take it one daring step at a time.

“Some people have lost all hope in their lives, but then they see me, and I have a prosthetic limb,” he says.

“They see me and they realise they can live the life they did before, maybe even better.”

BEIRUT — A double suicide car bombing at the Bab Al Hawa border post between Syria and Turkey on Monday killed at least 16 people, including six rebels, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, updating an earlier toll, said 20 people were wounded as one car detonated at a checkpoint just outside the crossing and another inside the post.

The border crossing in Idlib province of northwest Syria is held by Islamist and moderate rebels who have been locked in fierce fighting with jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in recent weeks.

ISIL fighters on Monday took control of the Jarrah military airport in the northern province of Aleppo that had been in rebel hands since February 2013.

Islamist and moderate rebels angered by ISIL’s alleged abuses have forced them from Aleppo city but the group has managed to strengthen its grip on the town of Raqa, also in northern Syria.

On Monday, ISIL imposed a Taliban-style ban on music and smoking in Raqa, declaring them un-Islamic.

In a statement it said it would “ban the sale of music CDs, music players, and playing songs in cars and buses and in shops and all places.”

The group added it had taken the step because musical instruments and singing are “proscribed in Islam because they distract from remembering God and the Koran”.

In a second statement, ISIL said as part of efforts to “apply sharia (Islamic) law... it is completely forbidden to sell cigarettes or water pipes in any place”.

Such bans are reminiscent of those the Taliban imposed on television, cinema and music in Afghanistan when in power up until 2001.

ISIL has alienated activists and other opposition fighters in Syria, who accuse it of imposing a reign of terror on areas where it operates.

Its actions provoked a backlash from powerful rebel groups in early January, and the group is now fighting opposition forces in several parts of northern Syria.

The Observatory said Monday that ISIL fighters “withdrew after midnight yesterday (Sunday) from the western Aleppo countryside and evacuated their positions”.

The Britain-based Observatory also reported heavy clashes between jihadists and rebels on the outskirts of the town of Azaz in Aleppo province, near the border with Turkey.

Rebel groups in the town shelled areas where ISIL fighters were with mortar rounds, the Observatory said.

Meanwhile regime troops pressed operations across Syria.

The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists and doctors on the ground for its reports, said government air raids on Sunday had killed at least 44 people, including 16 children, across Aleppo province and in the southern province of Daraa.

Further air raids on Monday killed another five people in Daraa, the Observatory said. 

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told US Secretary of State John Kerry that he wants to annex a fourth bloc of West Bank settlements, army radio reported on Sunday.

Until now, Israel has always spoken of its intention to annex three blocs of settlements in any future agreement with the Palestinians: the Etzion bloc in the south, Maaleh Adumim to the east of Jerusalem, and the Ariel bloc in the north.

The report said Netanyahu was proposing that Israel also keep hold of a group of settlements deep in the West Bank — Beit El, Ofra and Psagot — which lie to the north and east of Ramallah, the radio said.

A settlement bloc is an area where clusters of settlements have been established in relatively close proximity to one another, in which the majority of the West Bank’s 367,000 settlers currently live.

If Israel was to keep hold of the “Beit El bloc” as well as the others, it would mean annexing a total of 13 per cent of the occupied West Bank, the radio said, describing it as a “very large per centage” of the territory.

“In the negotiating room, Netanyahu is talking about 13 per cent of territory,” the radio’s diplomatic correspondent Ilil Shahar said, quoting sources close to Netanyahu.

“Netanyahu is proposing to a [land] swap of three to four per cent then paying for the rest,” she said.

In previous rounds of negotiations, former prime minister Ehud Barak in 2001 spoke of Israel annexing six to eight per cent, and in 2008, then premier Ehud Olmert spoke about seven per cent.

The Palestinians want to keep Israel’s annexation of land they want for a future state to an absolute minimum, and have spoken of a maximum land swap of about two per cent.

Netanyahu’s office refused to comment on the report.

Shaul Arieli, an expert on mapping and the future Israeli-Palestinian borders described the proposal as infeasible.

“If we’re really talking about 13 per cent, we’re talking about an idea that’s a non-starter from the Palestinian point of view,” he told the radio.

“Israel does not have the ability to compensate the Palestinians at that level, our potential for compensation is not more than 3 to 4 per cent, and of course the idea of paying is unacceptable.”

Israel and the Palestinians embarked upon a nine-month track of direct negotiations at the urging of US Secretary of State John Kerry, at the end of July, which appear to have made little progress.

Currently, Kerry’s main focus is trying to get the sides to agree on a framework to guide the negotiations forward in the coming months.

Although the term “settlement block” has been used by Israeli leaders for years, the parameters of such areas have never been clearly defined, with the best indicator of their location being the looping route of the sprawling West Bank barrier.

The phrase is a euphemism for those settlements that are supposedly within the Israeli national “consensus” as being the areas that should and likely will remain part of Israel under any future peace agreement, according to settlement watchdog Peace Now.

RAMADI, Iraq — Iraqi forces launched a major assault Sunday on a Sunni Arab city partially in the control of anti-government fighters in a bid to end a weeks-long crisis ahead of elections.

The operation, which involved police, pro-government militiamen and SWAT forces, sought to wrest back key neighbourhoods of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province and one of two cities where the authorities lost vast swathes of territory about three weeks ago.

Diplomats including UN chief Ban Ki-moon have urged Baghdad to pursue political reconciliation to undercut support for militancy.

But with an election looming in April, Iraqi Pemier Nouri Al Maliki has blamed “diabolical” Arab countries for the unrest and focused on security operations.

Iraqi forces backed by tribesmen moved into five Ramadi neighbourhoods Sunday, with helicopters providing cover and firing on the sprawling district of Malaab at the centre of fighting between anti-government fighters and security forces and their tribal allies.

“The Iraqi army launched a large operation with helicopter cover against Daaesh, Al Qaeda and terrorists in Ramadi,” defence ministry spokesman Staff Lieutenant General Mohammed Al Askari said, according to state television, employing terms frequently used by the Iraqi security forces to describe militants.

Security forces barred movement in the city as part of the operation, which targeted neighbourhoods in the south and centre of Ramadi.

The operation will seek to take back momentum from anti-government fighters, who have expanded their hold on Ramadi in the past week after police and allied tribesmen trumpeted gains there this month.

It follows an operation mounted by elite forces in the largely rural area of Albubali that security officials have described as a militant stronghold.

Troops there have been held back, however, by the threat of snipers and anti-aircraft weapons, as well as poor weather that has limited movement.

PM blames ‘treacherous’ Arab states

A large section of Ramadi and all of Fallujah, both former insurgent bastions close to Baghdad, fell from government control late last month.

It was the first time anti-government fighters have exercised such open control in major cities since the height of the insurgency that followed the US-led invasion of 2003.

Fighting originally erupted 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.

Maliki on Sunday blamed “diabolical” and “treacherous” Arab countries for supporting the unrest, and insisted he was “confident that the Iraqi people will defeat terrorism”.

“The world has united with us,” he said in a speech in the southern city of Nasiriyah. “The (UN) Security Council, the European Union, and most Arab countries, except some diabolical treacherous countries.”

He did not single out specific countries, but Iraqi officials have alleged Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular have supported disaffected Sunni Arabs in western Iraq as they have staged anti-government protests in the past year.

Maliki told The Washington Post in an interview published on Thursday that Baghdad specifically needed US “counter-terrorism” training.

The US defence official said Washington was also preparing to ship “several thousand” M-16 and M-4 assault rifles as well as ammunition to Iraq, after having already provided missiles to Maliki’s government.

Violence also struck elsewhere in Iraq on Sunday, with nine people killed in restive cities north of Baghdad, a day after a wave of bombings in the capital killed 25.

Among the dead were six pro-government Sunni militiamen gunned down in an early morning attack on their checkpoint near the confessionally mixed city of Baqouba. Attacks in the predominantly Sunni cities of Mosul and Tikrit left three others dead.

More than 650 people have been killed already this month, according to an AFP tally, part of a protracted surge in unrest nationwide.

TEHRAN — Ahead of the start of a nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, an official in the Islamic republic called limiting uranium enrichment and diluting its stockpile the country’s “most important commitments”, state radio reported Sunday.

The comments by Behrouz Kamalvandi, a spokesman of Iran’s atomic department, show how the government of moderate President Hassan Rouhani welcomes the deal, which begins Monday. International inspectors also already have arrived in Tehran, preparing for the government opening its facilities to them.

“Implementation of mutual commitments in the framework of the Geneva deal will begin from tomorrow,” Kamalvandi said. “Under the agreement, suspension of 20 per cent enrichment of uranium — and the diluting of the current stockpile of enriched uranium — are the most important commitments of our country.”

Iran struck the deal in November with the so-called P5+1 countries — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. Negotiators agreed to final terms of the deal January 13.

Under the agreement, Iran will limit its uranium enrichment to 5 per cent — the grade commonly used to power reactors. The deal also commits Iran to stop producing 20 per cent enriched uranium — which is only a technical step away from weapons-grade material — and to neutralise its 20 per cent stockpile over the six months.

In exchange, economic sanctions Iran faces would be eased for six months. Senior officials in US President Barack Obama’s administration have put the total relief figure at some $7 billion.

During the six months, negotiations between Iran and the world powers would continue in hopes of reaching a permanent deal.

The West fears Iran’s nuclear programme could allow it to build an atomic weapon. Iran insists its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, like power generation and medical research.

On Saturday a team of international inspectors arrived in Tehran in preparation of beginning their inspections. They will visit Fordo, where Iran enriches its 20 per cent uranium, as well as its Natanz facility, which produces 5 per cent enriched uranium, to ensure the country complies with the deal.

Kamalvandi said Sunday that Iran will use centrifuges now producing 20 per cent enriched uranium to instead produce 5 per cent enriched uranium to comply with the agreement.

But suspicions remain high in both Tehran and Washington after decades of hostility dating back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran that ousted the US-backed shah dynasty. Rouhani, Iran’s new reformist president, has reached out to the West, but must depend on support from Iran’s top decision-maker, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for his initiatives amid criticism from hardline factions.

Hardliners in Iran have already called the deal a “poison chalice” and are threatening legislation to increase uranium enrichment. Meanwhile, US lawmakers have threatened to pass new sanctions legislation against Iran that would take effect if Tehran violates the interim nuclear deal or lets it expire without a follow-up accord.

Writing a post on his Facebook page Sunday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif reassured the world that the deal will begin on time.

“I am hopeful that implementation of the first phase will have positive results for the country and peace and stability in the region and the world while preparing the ground for essential talks on a final solution,” Zarif wrote.

CASSINO, Italy — Libyan recruits are being put through their paces starting this month at a boot camp in Italy as part of an international programme to restore stability amid unrest since the fall of dictator Muammar Qadhafi.

Some of them are former rebels who fought to oust Qadhafi as part of ragtag opposition forces and the training is taking place at an Italian army base in Cassino, 100 kilometres south of Rome.

In one part of the base a soldier could be seen applying camouflage face paint, while in another soldiers trained on monkey bars and obstacle courses.

An imam in army fatigues calls the soldiers to prayer in a special room fitted out for the purpose and the menus at the canteen have been changed to halal.

The new soldiers “support a free Libya”, Lieutenant General Claudio Graziano, chief of staff of the Italian army, said Saturday during a visit to the base — near the site of the famous World War II battle of Monte Cassino.

“A strong army will become a reference point for democracy and security,” Graziano told a small group of reporters, as the 341 mostly young infantrymen around him got trained on weapons handling and camouflage.

Britain, Turkey and the United States are all taking part in the initiative to train up a total of 15,000 troops but Graziano said that Italy — Libya’s former colonial master — was “taking the lead”.

Two thousand Libyan soldiers — most of them from Benghazi, Misrata and Tripoli — will be trained in Italy and the first group arrived on January 10.

“We are learning to train together, to be one entity. It’s very important for us to learn how to stay united,” said one soldier from Libya, where there have been deep tensions between different cities and regions.

One of the Italian trainers is Captain Francesca Giardulli, who went on an intensive six-month language course, and shouted out her orders in Arabic.

“These are young civilians with no experience in the military and so we really have to train them as if they were newbies,” Giardulli told AFP.

Graziano said some of the soldiers fought in the rebellion but others had no experience of combat.

“None of them were in Colonel Qadhafi’s army,” he said.

Colonel Mohammed Badi leads the Libyan contingent and one of 34 officers and sub-officers in the first group.

“Our mission is the same as it is for all the armies in the world, to guard our borders and to ensure protection and security for our population, as well as collaborating with other countries,” he said.

Graziano, a former head of the United Nations monitoring force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, and a commander in Afghanistan, said this type of co-operation was “a cultural challenge, but it’s nothing new for us”.

“At the end of the training, the Libyans will speak a bit more Italian... and as for us, we will speak a bit more Arabic,” the general said with a smile.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel’s premier on Sunday condemned a decision by the UN cultural agency to postpone an exhibit tracing 3,500 years of ties between the Jewish people and Israel, following pressure from Arab countries.

UNESCO had said on Friday it was postponing the exhibit after receiving a letter from the 22-member Arab Group which expressed concern it “could impact negatively on the peace process and current negotiations under way in the Middle East”.

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied the exhibit would damage talks with the Palestinians, which began in July but have shown little sign of progress.

“It would not harm the negotiations. Negotiations are based on facts, on the truth, which is never harmful,” Netanyahu told ministers at the beginning of the weekly Cabinet meeting.

Netanyahu countered that what had harmed the talks were European moves to summon Israeli ambassadors over recent settlement announcements, referring to the construction tenders as “matters of no substance”, while ignoring “significant violations” by the Palestinians.

On Thursday, Israeli ambassadors in London, Rome, Paris and Madrid were called in for explanations in a move Netanyahu slammed as “hypocritical”.

“The one-sided approach towards Israel does not advance peace — it pushes peace further away,” he said.

The exhibition, “The 3,500 Year Relationship of the Jewish People to the Holy Land”, was due to open Tuesday at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris.

Israel’s relations with UNESCO have been at a major low since October 2011 when the Palestinians were admitted to the organisation as a full member.

In response, Israel and Washington cut funding to UNESCO, sparking a major financial crisis at the agency and putting hundreds of jobs at risk.

KHARTOUM — Sudan has started admitting some of the thousands of South Sudanese refugees who have been waiting at a border post after escaping fighting in their country, state-linked media said Sunday.

Officials in White Nile state “confirmed that 1,500 refugees from South Sudan were taken to Sudanese land through the border at Joda,” reported the Sudanese Media Centre, which is close to the security apparatus.

AFP found hundreds of South Sudanese waiting to cross at Joda on Friday and Saturday. They had not yet received permission to pass through the border gate, despite Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir’s statement earlier this month that southerners were free to enter.

One refugee told AFP he had been waiting to cross for four days and had not received any aid after fleeing the fighting in Malakal, the capital of South Sudan’s Upper Nile state.

But Al Tayeb Mohammed Abdullah, chairman of White Nile’s refugee coordination committee, told the SMC all procedures to move the southerners have now been completed and “the committee received the refugees north of Joda”.

The new arrivals have been given blankets, food, cooking utensils and other aid, he said, adding that another 4,000 South Sudanese are gathered on the frontier and just south of it.

They are part of an exodus that the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) says has seen more than 80,000 people seek safety in neighbouring countries from fighting between government and rebel forces in South Sudan over the past month.

BEITUNIYA, Palestinian Territories — Israel released a prominent leader from Islamist movement Hamas on Sunday after he spent more than two years in prison, Palestinian officials said.

Hassan Yousef, who is also a member of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Legislative Council, told reporters after his release he would work with Hamas rivals “Fateh and other Palestinian factions to achieve reconciliation”.

Dozens of Hamas supporters received Yousef at Beituniya, near Ofer prison. Yousef had been arrested in November 2011 for belonging to an illegal organisation.

Longtime tensions between Hamas and Fateh boiled over in a week of fighting in 2007 that left the Islamist movement in control of Gaza and effectively divided the Palestinian territories in two.

The two sides have made repeated attempts to heal the rift, including an Egyptian-brokered deal in 2011 in which they agreed to make way for an interim government of independents to organise fresh elections throughout the territories.

The agreement has never been implemented.

Yousef, one of the founders of the Islamist movement, made headlines after his son Mossab said he had spied for Israel between 1997 and 2007.

Mossab relocated to the US, changed his name to Joseph and converted to Christianity.

Yousef disowned his son in a letter sent during a previous term in an Israeli prison.