Region

BAGHDAD — Sunni gunmen, including fighters linked to Al Qaeda, made gains in the contested Iraqi city of Ramadi Tuesday in a setback for pro-government forces, as attacks killed 10 in the capital.

The clashes came after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for Iraqi leaders to address the “root causes” of nationwide unrest, echoing calls from diplomats for Baghdad to focus more on political reconciliation.

But Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki has ruled out talks to resolve the standoff, as April 30 parliamentary elections loom and his government faces Iraq’s worst protracted period of bloodshed since it was emerging from a brutal Sunni-Shiite sectarian war in 2008.

Parts of Ramadi and all of Fallujah, which lies just 60 kilometres from Baghdad, fell out of government control more than two weeks ago, the first time militants have exercised such open control in major cities since the insurgency that followed the 2003 US-led invasion.

In recent days, Iraqi forces and allied tribes had been retaking areas of Ramadi, the Anbar provincial capital, from militants and anti-government tribesmen. The latest clashes represent a setback for Baghdad and threaten to further prolong the crisis. Gunmen, including those affiliated with the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), seized all or parts of a half-dozen neighbourhoods in the south and centre of the city in firefights that began late Monday evening and carried on into Tuesday, according to a police captain and an AFP journalist.

Two policemen were killed and five others wounded in the clashes, and three police vehicles set ablaze, according to Dr Ahmed Al Ani at the city’s main hospital.

Sporadic clashes continued in the affected neighbourhoods Tuesday, while shelling struck the Andalus neighbourhood of central Ramadi and damaged houses, a police officer said.

Civil servants had largely returned to work and most shops were reopened, an AFP journalist said, but schools remained closed.

Gunfights also erupted in the Albubali area between Ramadi and Fallujah where security forces have repeatedly clashed with militants.

In Fallujah, government employees returned to work, but the city remained in the control of gunmen, said an AFP journalist there.

A doctor in the city’s main hospital said at least 26 people were killed in Fallujah and surrounding areas in the past two weeks.

The army stayed on the city’s eastern frontier Tuesday. Shelling in the city wounded two people, witnesses said, while brief clashes could be heard in the city Monday evening.

Fighting erupted in the Ramadi area on December 30, when security forces cleared a year-old Sunni Arab anti-government protest camp.

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

ISIL has been active in the Anbar fighting, but so have anti-government tribesmen.

The army has largely stayed outside of Fallujah during the crisis, with analysts warning any assault on the city would likely cause significant civilian casualties.

In Baghdad, shootings and bombings killed 10 people, including a senior judge, a day after attacks in and around the capital, including four car bombs against civilian targets, killed 30.

CAIRO — Egyptians voted on Tuesday for the first time since the military deposed president Mohamed Morsi on a draft constitution that may set the stage for a presidential bid by army chief General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.

At least five people were killed in confrontations between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and police, official sources said, highlighting the tensions in the country. A small bomb went off in Cairo, injuring no one.

The Brotherhood, still backing Morsi who is now in jail, has called for a boycott and protests over the draft, which deletes Islamic language written into the basic law approved a year ago when he was still in office. It also strengthens state bodies that defied him: the army, the police and the judiciary.

While a state crackdown on dissent has erased many freedoms won by the 2011 uprising against president Hosni Mubarak, anticipation of more stable government sent the stock market on Tuesday to its highest level since his downfall. The main index exceeded its January 2011 peak.

The referendum is a milestone in the political transition plan the army-backed government has billed as a path back to democracy even as it presses a fierce crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s best organised party until last year.

A presidential election could follow as early as April.

Echoing a view widely held in Egypt, a senior European diplomat said Sisi would probably announce his candidacy in the next few days — a prospect that will delight supporters but could stir more conflict with his Islamist opponents.

With little or no sign of a campaign against the draft — one moderately Islamist party says its activists were arrested while campaigning for a no-vote — it is expected to pass easily, backed by many Egyptians who staged mass protests on June 30 against Morsi and the Brotherhood before his removal.

“We are here for two reasons: to eradicate the Brotherhood and take our rights in the constitution,” said Gamal Zeinhom, a 54-year-old voter standing in line at a Cairo polling station.

Others cited a desire to bring stability to Egypt after three years of turmoil.

Failed experiment

Sisi ousted Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected head of state, last July. His Islamist opponents say he is the mastermind of a coup that kindled the worst internal strife in Egypt’s modern history and revived an oppressive police state.

But after a failed experiment with democracy, many are weary of the upheaval that has gripped this nation of 85 million and shattered its economy. They see Sisi, 59, as someone who can stabilise and protect Egypt from what local media depict as foreign and domestic conspiracies to divide the nation.

Sisi inspected a polling station after voting began, dressed in desert coloured fatigues and wearing his trademark dark sunglasses. The two-day vote ends on Wednesday.

A Sisi presidency would mark a return to the days when the post was controlled by army men — a pattern broken by Morsi’s one year in office.

Brotherhood supporters staged protests in at least four cities. Police arrested 65 Brotherhood supporters who were trying to obstruct voting, security officials said.

The bloodiest clashes were in Sohag, south of Cairo, where conflicting accounts of what happened emerged.

Local officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said four Brotherhood supporters were killed and more than 20 wounded, in addition to three policemen.

But the interior ministry said Brotherhood supporters had killed four people and wounded nine more, including a police officer, when they opened fire on passersby to stop them reaching polling stations, the state news agency reported.

The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a Geneva-based group that works to uphold the rule of law, described the draft constitution as highly flawed.

“The referendum campaign has taken place within a context of fear, intimidation and repression, calling into question the fairness of the entire process,” it said in a statement.

The government has recently escalated its crackdown on the Brotherhood, declaring it a “terrorist organisation” on December 25. Al Qaeda-inspired militants have stepped up attacks on security forces since Morsi’s ouster.

While the government has linked the attacks to the Brotherhood, the group has repeatedly said it is a non-violent movement committed to peaceful resistance to the state.

But the security clampdown — hundreds of Islamists have been killed and thousands arrested — has taken the steam out of protests while fuelling anger among young Islamists. Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders have been arrested and are on trial.

Underlining how the political picture has changed since Morsi’s downfall, Mubarak asked for permission to vote in this referendum, his lawyer Fareed El Deeb said. It was not immediately clear whether Mubarak — who faces retrial for his role in the killing of protesters in 2011 — would get to vote.

While Western states have criticised the crackdown and called for inclusive politics, they have put little pressure on Cairo. Egypt, which controls the Suez Canal, 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.

The government has been supported by Gulf Arab states hostile to the Brotherhood. They jumped to Egypt’s rescue after Morsi’s overthrow, offering billions of dollars in aid.

TUNIS — Tunisians marked the third anniversary Tuesday of the ending of years of dictatorship in the first Arab Spring uprising but political bickering prevented adoption of a new constitution by the symbolic target date.

Tunisia’s leaders held a low-key ceremony in the Kasbah district of the capital, where the government’s headquarters are located, to commemorate the January 14, 2011, overthrow of veteran strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

President Moncef Marzouki, outgoing prime minister Ali Larayedh and his designated successor, Mehdi Jomaa, attended the ceremony along with other top officials.

Amid tight security, thousands of flag-waving Tunisians rallied peacefully along Habib Bourguiba Avenue, epicentre of the mass protests that drove Ben Ali from power and inspired revolts across the Arab world.

The demonstrators included both supporters and critics of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that was voted to power after Ben Ali’s downfall, but which finally resigned last week under an agreement to end months of political turmoil.

The failure of Tunisia’s political factions to adopt the long-delayed new constitution has clouded the celebrations.

Lawmakers previously agreed to do so by Tuesday, but the national assembly, which was due to meet early in the afternoon to continue scrutinising the draft charter, had not convened by 1500 GMT, and no new deadline has been set for ratification.

A third of around 150 articles in the text have yet to be examined after nearly two weeks of debate, and key provisions have been rejected by lawmakers during fractious sessions in parliament in recent days.

These include articles on the eligibility criteria for the head of state and the prerogatives of the prime minister.

Lawmakers also rejected an article on the government’s role in nominating judges, after an acrimonious debate.

“We must prepare the country for the constitution that it deserves,” Ennahda official Ajmi Lourimi told Islamist demonstrators.

“The time for military coups is past, because the people will defend their revolution,” he added, referring to the military overthrow last July of elected Islamist president Mohamed Morsi after a single year in power in fellow Arab Spring country Egypt.

In turn, opposition leaders took a swipe at Ennahda.

“Despite the difficulties, the obstacles and the deception of the people, this revolution was made to succeed,” said Issam Chebbi, a leader of the Republican Party.

Tunisians are awaiting the formation of a caretaker government of technocrats under Mehdi Jomaa, the non-partisan former industry ministry tasked on Friday with leading the country to fresh elections and getting the transition back on track.

His appointment followed the voluntary resignation of Ennahda, which had headed the coalition government since its election triumph in October 2011.

Its tenure was dogged by a sharp rise in Islamist violence, persistent social unrest and a political crisis triggered by the assassination of opposition MP Mohamed Brahmi last July by suspected jihadist militants.

Transition has taken ‘too long’

Ennahda’s veteran leader Rached Ghannouchi, in an interview with French newspaper Le Monde, said the delays in establishing functioning state institutions had been a mistake.

“This transition lasted too long. All the problems occurred in the second year [of Ennahda’s rule] because it took too long, even if, of course, this was not done on purpose,” Ghannouchi said.

“From the beginning, we made the mistake of thinking we could do everything in a year.”

Separately, the secular president admitted in a speech on Monday that the country’s leaders had not satisfied the hopes that accompanied the uprising three years ago.

“We are very far from realising the objectives of the revolution,” Marzouki said, while adding that Tunisia was on “the right track, [even if] the path is still difficult and dangerous”.

The country has suffered a wave of attacks blamed on jihadist militants in the past year, and a growing number of strikes and protests in recent months that have often turned violent.

The protests were concentrated in Tunisia’s deprived central region, where a young street vendor sparked the revolution by setting himself on fire in December 2010 to protest his impoverished circumstances.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel’s defence minister accused US Secretary of State John Kerry of an “incomprehensible obsession” with his push for Middle East peace, drawing an angry response from Israel’s chief ally Tuesday.

The US State Department described Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon’s comments as “offensive,” in a mark of the degree of outrage in Washington at the latest public spat between the two allies, which follows a major row over Iran policy.

Israel’s top-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot quoted Yaalon as expressing hope that Kerry, who has visited the region 10 times since taking office in February 2013, would end his peace push and focus his energies elsewhere.

“The American plan for security arrangements that was shown to us isn’t worth the paper it was written on,” Yaalon was quoted as saying in private conversations with Israeli officials, accusing Kerry of being naive and implying he is a nuisance.

The State Department said Yaalon’s reported remarks were “inappropriate” for a minister in the government of a close ally.

“The remarks of the defence minister, if accurate, are offensive and inappropriate especially given all that the United States is doing to support Israel’s security needs,” spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki told reporters.

Psaki said Kerry and his team “have been working day and night to try to promote a secure peace for Israel because of the secretary’s deep concern for Israel’s future”.

“To question his motives and distort his proposals is not something we would expect from the defence minister of a close ally,” she said.

Kerry coaxed Israelis and Palestinians back into direct negotiations last summer and has since shuttled tirelessly between the two leaderships in a bid to keep the talks alive.

His proposals include a security plan for the border between a future Palestinian state and neighbouring Jordan, involving high-tech equipment to enable Israel to reduce or end its troop presence on the ground, Israeli media say.

But Yaalon said the idea of technology replacing boots on the ground was naive.

“What are you talking about?” he reportedly asked Kerry during a meeting. “I ask you: how will technology respond when a Salafist or Islamic Jihad cell tries to commit a terror attack against Israeli targets? Who will engage them?”

Yaalon said after years of living the conflict, he understood a lot more about the Palestinians than the US top diplomat.

“Secretary of State John Kerry — who arrived here determined, and who operates from an incomprehensible obsession and a sense of messianism — can’t teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians,” he was quoted as saying.

“The only thing that might save us is if John Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us be.”

Yaalon’s public criticism of the US top diplomat earned him a rebuke from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as other government ministers.

“Even when we have disagreements with the United States, it is about the matter at hand and not about the person,” Netanyahu said at the opening of the winter session of parliament.

Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz told army radio that while he agreed with the “content” of Yaalon’s remarks, the defence minister should avoid “personal insults”.

Writing on Facebook, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians, said: “We can oppose negotiations in a responsible and measured way, without compromising relations with our best friend.”

Yaalon’s remarks came on the back of a US-Israeli spat over a landmark deal Washington and other world powers reached with Iran in November on its controversial nuclear programme.

Israel publicly opposed the plan, which will see limited relief for Tehran from Western sanctions in exchange for rolling back parts of its civil nuclear programme, describing it as a “disaster” and a “gift” to its biggest foe.

Israel has also been at loggerheads with its US ally over its drive to expand its settlements in the occupied West Bank, including annexed Arab East Jerusalem, even while the peace talks with the Palestinians that Kerry helped relaunch are under way.

Just last week, Israel unveiled plans to build another 1,800 new settler housing units, hot on the heels of Kerry’s latest visit.

A senior US official on Tuesday reiterated Washington’s opposition to settlement building, which it has called “illegitimate”.

BEIRUT — The Syrian government has retaken territory around the northern city of Aleppo, the military said on Tuesday, after two weeks of rebel infighting that has weakened the insurgency against President Bashar Assad.

The internecine conflict among various rebel groups will allow Assad to portray himself as the only secular alternative in Syria to a radical Islamist regime when peace talks begin in Switzerland on January 22.

His military advances will give the Syrian government delegation greater leverage at the negotiating table.

An army statement said government forces had pushed out from their base at Aleppo’s international airport, southeast of the city, and were moving towards an industrial complex used as a rebel base and Al Bab road, needed by insurgents to supply the half of Aleppo under their control.

It said that government forces, along with militia loyal to Assad, were in “complete control” of the Naqareen, Zarzour, Taaneh and Subeihieh areas along the eastern side of Aleppo, which was the major Arab country’s commercial hub and most populous city before the conflict erupted in 2011.

In the past year, the Syrian government has pushed back at rebels across the country, besieging restive suburbs around the capital and pushing opposition fighters from towns near the Lebanese border and along the road linking Damascus to the coast.

Assad’s forces took ground in central Homs province and his forces regrouped as rebel rivalries grew. While the embattled leader avoided US military strikes by agreeing to give up his chemical arsenal, his forces continue to bomb opposition territory from the air and using long-range artillery. But neither side appears to be able to break the overall deadlock.

While the army has been able to take some towns on the outskirts of Aleppo, rebels have held their ground in the districts of the city they entered in 2012 and the government has not made major advances in the urban areas where opposition fighters are dug in.

Foreign jihadists

Fighting between Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and rival Islamists and more moderate rebels have killed hundreds of people over two weeks and shaken ISIL, a militant faction led by foreign jihadists.

But ISIL regrouped and retook much of its stronghold in the eastern city of Raqqa on Sunday from remnants of the Nusra Front, another Al Qaeda affiliate although much more Syrian in makeup, and Islamist units called the Islamic Front.

ISIL took control of the town of Al Bab, east of Aleppo, from other rebels on Monday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

The observatory, which tracks Syria’s war using sources from both sides, said eight fighters from Ahrar Al Sham, a unit within the Islamic Front, were killed by an ISIL car bomb in the western province of Idlib just before midnight on Monday.

Civil war

Syria sank into civil war after a peaceful street uprising against four decades of Assad family rule began in March 2011. The revolt spiralled into an armed insurgency after the army responded with massive and deadly force to suppress the unrest.

As the fighting spread, better-armed hardline Islamists took the fore over more moderate Muslim and secular rebels, who are supported by Gulf Arab and Western nations.

Syria’s foreign ministry dismissed as “fantasy” statements by the pro-opposition Friends of Syria group — including Western and Gulf states — in Paris on Sunday that Assad was a war criminal and peace talks should end his “despotic regime”.

“The Syrian Arab Republic is not surprised by what happened in Paris during the meeting of Syrian people’s enemies and the statements, which are closer to fantasy than reality,” the ministry said in a statement on Monday.

The World Food Programme delivered rations to a record 3.8 million people in Syria in December, but civilians in eastern provinces and besieged towns near the capital Damascus remain out of reach, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

The UN agency voiced concern at reports of malnutrition in besieged areas, especially of children caught up in the civil war, and called for greater access.

The official Kuwaiti news agency said non-governmental organisations had promised to donate a combined $400 million for humanitarian aid for Syria ahead of an international donor conference that will start in Kuwait on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — US federal prosecutors have charged an Iranian-American with trying to ship sensitive documents on the F-35 fighter jet to Iran, according to court documents.

Mozaffar Khazaee, who was arrested last week, is accused of trying to smuggle thousands of pages of F-35 blueprints and technical documents, authorities said in a US government affidavit.

Agents inspected a shipment to the Iranian city of Hamadan that the 59-year-old suspect claimed contained household goods.

Instead, they found “boxes of documents consisting of sensitive technical manuals, specification sheets, and other proprietary material relating to the United States Air Force’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme and military jet engines”.

Khazaee was arrested on January 9 at Newark International Airport in New Jersey before he was able to board a connecting flight to Frankfurt, Germany, en route to Iran, the US attorney’s office for the district of Connecticut said.

Khazaee, who became a US citizen in 1991, was charged with “transporting, transmitting and transferring in interstate or foreign commerce goods obtained by theft, conversion, or fraud,” which carries a potential 10-year prison sentence.

The documents he tried to send included design outlines of the fighter’s jet engine that were labelled as subject to export restrictions, officials said.

The radar-evading F-35 warplane is the most expensive US weapons programme ever and is supposed to form the backbone of the future American fighter fleet.

DAMASCUS — A Palestinian minister on Tuesday accused “terrorists” fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad of blocking aid access to the Yarmouk refugee camp in southern Damascus.

Rebels control swathes of Yarmouk, but for months government forces have imposed a suffocating siege on the camp, where some 20,000 Palestinians live despite terrible shortages.

Palestinian Labour Minister Ahmad Majdalani, who was visiting Damascus to negotiate aid access to the camp, said its Palestinian residents must not be used as “hostages” in the conflict.

An aid convoy heading to Yarmouk was targeted on Monday “some 100 metres away from the agreed meeting point”, on the edges of the camp, Majdalani said at a press conference in Damascus.

He said “the source of fire was known... to be controlled by Al Nusra Front, Ahrar Al Sham and Suqur Al Golan,” directly accusing rebel groups battling Assad’s troops.

Majdalani added “all these groups are known for their terrorist links and methodology”.

The minister also said Palestinians “everywhere know... that those who have taken the camp hostage are these groups, not the Syrian authorities”.

Some 45 people have died in recent months because of food and medical shortages in Yarmouk, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group has said, with the most recent death on Tuesday.

Monday’s aid convoy was the sixth to have failed to enter the camp.

Palestinian sources have told AFP the convoys were blocked from entering by gunfire, but did not specify who was responsible.

But the opposition Yarmouk local coordination committee said Assad loyalists had blocked the convoy.

“The Syrian regime and the [pro-Damascus] Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command... kickstarted a clash targeting the Palestinians and everyone else there, to continue with their brazen policy of starvation,” the activist group said via Facebook.

The convoy of six trucks carried 1,700 30-kilogramme food parcels, each of which could feed a family for 20 days.

In a reflection of the desperation in the camp, footage distributed by activists on Tuesday showed a young man from Yarmouk crying for assistance.

“We don’t have the money to pay for a kilo of rice, we don’t have money to pay for a kilo of bulgur... We don’t have anything to do with this conflict. We just want to eat and drink, we want to be safe,” he wept.

BEIRUT — A Lebanese group loyal to Al Qaeda vowed Tuesday to keep up its attacks against Iran, Hizbollah and Israel, less than a fortnight after the death of its leader, Majid Al Majid.

The Saudi-born Majid, whose group claimed responsibility for a November attack on the Iranian embassy in Beirut, died in the custody of Lebanese authorities, who said he was ill before his arrest.

“His project will continue, God willing, in striking Iran, its party [Lebanese Shiite group Hizbollah] and the aggressor Jews [Israel], and in defending oppressed Sunnis everywhere,” the Abdallah Azzam Brigades said in an online statement.

The group also lashed out against Lebanon for “arbitrarily detaining” Islamists, and said Lebanese miliary intelligence was under the control of “Iran’s party”, another reference to Hizbollah, which is closely allied with Shiite Iran.

It criticised “attacks against Sunnis orchestrated by Iran’s party, which controls Lebanon’s military intelligence and manipulates it at will”.

It said Iran “manipulates all Lebanese state institutions to protect both its interests and those of its Baathist ally in Syria”, a reference to President Bashar Assad’s regime.

According to a judicial source, Majid died from poor health on January 4, days after he was arrested.

His body was later sent back to his native Saudi Arabia, after the Saudi embassy had expressed relief over his arrest.

The brigades’ statement said Majid was detained while he was “unconscious” and in intensive care.

“The medical devices that were allowing [Majid] to breathe were pulled out, and God had mercy on him and received him as a martyr,” it charged.

The statement was issued to express condolences over the death of Majid, whom it termed the “prince of the Levant, who has gone to meet his God”, and whose passing “has filled [our] hearts with sadness”.

The November attack on the Iranian embassy in Hizbollah’s south Beirut stronghold killed 25 people.

Majid had “directly supervised the preparation of” the twin suicide bombing, the statement said.

The attack came as tensions rose in Lebanon over the role of Hizbollah in the conflict in neighbouring Syria.

Hizbollah publicly confirmed last April that its fighters were supporting Assad’s regime against the Sunni-dominated rebels, who are backed by most Lebanese Sunnis.

BAGHDAD — Iraq is struggling to tighten control of its border with Syria, alarmed by a resurgent Al Qaeda force that seeks to build an Islamic state across a frontier drawn in colonial times.

The Baghdad government has deployed troops and new US- and Russian-made weaponry to try and cut the militants’ cross-border supply lines, hoping that can kill off the threat. But as US forces found before them, it is a near-impossible task.

The Syrian civil war that has inflamed sectarian tensions across the region, and a desolate geography favouring smugglers and guerrillas are just two of Baghdad’s difficulties in getting a firm grip on the 600-km desert boundary.

Another is tribal ties that span the border, with Iraqis regularly sending food, supplies and weapons to Syrian relatives enduring that country’s war. Iraq says Sunni Islamists have gone back and forth from Syria during the conflict.

Some local people, like desert tribesmen elsewhere, are reluctant even to recognise international borders.

Crucially, political and sectarian animosities felt by the Sunni population of the western province of Anbar towards the Shiite-led central government weaken its authority there.

“It’s not winnable, to control this part of Iraq’s borders,” said Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi analyst at the Gulf Research Centre think tank, referring to Anbar and its neighbour to the north, Nineveh.

“Even the Americans couldn’t do it,” he said, referring to the US occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011.

Al Qaeda-linked militants, feeding off widespread Sunni resentment at perceived mistreatment by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government, swept into the Anbar cities of Fallujah and Ramadi on January 1. Ramadi is now back under government control.

Maliki is trying to enlist tribal support to stamp out Al Qaeda’s latest incarnation in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), whose rise has helped drive violence back to the worst level in at least five years.

His task is unusually complicated, for ISIL, which announced its formation in 2013 out of pre-existing groups, operates on both sides of the border, fighting the governments of both Maliki and Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Maliki said Iraqi border forces had reduced the passage of Al Qaeda fighters, weapons and smugglers. “But we have not been able so far to close all the crossing points they can infiltrate due to the difficult environmental and geographic conditions,” he told Reuters in an interview this week.

“There are also border cities which are half-Iraqi, half Syrian and their tribes have family connections, they are cousins.”

The size of Anbar — comprising a third of Iraq’s territory and bordering Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan — means that tenuous control of its borders is an important vulnerability.

“ISIL’s expansion in Syria ... has offered a tremendous platform to recruit, train and fundraise in ways that positioned the group to both stoke and exploit sectarian tensions in Iraq,” Brian Fishman wrote for the Combating Terrorism Centre, a research unit at the US Military Academy at West Point.

The Syrian-Iraqi border was drawn in the 1920s, when colonial powers France and Britain carved the two countries out of the remnants of the Ottoman empire after World War I.

Almost a century on, much of it remains just a line on a map.

There are two major border crossings between Iraq and Syria, one in Anbar and one in Nineveh, northwest of the city of Mosul. They are manned by Iraqi forces and fortified with blast walls, barbed wire and watchtowers.

But many minor Iraqi posts in between consist only of small, single-storey buildings with a watchtower and staffed by half a dozen security personnel.

These posts can be as much as 10km apart and their defenders have only light weapons and a single military vehicle, security officials said. Border guards there lack the equipment needed to monitor the frontier properly, they said.

Desert and shrub

The border in Anbar, usually patrolled by just a few thousand guards, is mostly open expanses of desert and scrub that allow ISIL fighters easy access to rear bases in Syria.

Hillsides, hidden caves and tracks have made the region a haven for smugglers for generations — and more recently for militants.

After the US invasion in 2003, the border became a source of tension as an anti-American, Sunni insurgency mounted.

Iraq and the United States often accused Syria of allowing insurgents to cross the border, a charge denied by Damascus.

No one doubts that Sunni fighters flow both ways today. Some Iraqi Shiites are also in Syria fighting for Assad’s forces.

Maliki said his government had banned the involvement of Iraqis in Syria. “We absolutely refuse to be involved in the crisis in any way,” he said. “No weapons, no supplies and no fighters.”

The border area features large cave systems and valleys, several of which extend for dozens of miles across the border and are used by ISIL to set up training camps, living quarters and arms depots, Iraqi security sources say.

Alarmed by the contagion spreading from Syria’s war, the government launched Operation Iron Hammer on December 23 to try to break the link between ISIL in Iraq and Syria.

“We want to separate the two frontiers, as each is feeding off the other,” said a senior security official in Baghdad.

Iraqi forces used Russian Mi-35 attack helicopters for the first time, as well as warplanes and US Hellfire missiles supplied after Maliki visited Washington in November.

“When we cut off its funds and support by blocking the route from Iraq to Syria, Al Qaeda will be finished in Syria, as it will be in Iraq,” the security official said.

Iraqi military officers say the new weaponry, as well as satellite imagery and other US-supplied intelligence, has given them new capabilities to hit a previously elusive enemy.

“There was some hesitation among the Americans with regard to providing us with light and heavy weapons,” Maliki said.

“But after the wisdom shown by Iraq in dealing with the recent crisis ... everyone rushed, Congress and the US administration, and asked us to provide a list of weapons we need to fight the terrorist gangs and Al Qaeda organisations.”

But the extent to which Iraq’s military campaign in Anbar border regions has damaged ISIL remains uncertain.

JUBA — A boat carrying civilians desperately fleeing heavy violence in South Sudan sank while crossing the Nile River, killing some 200 people, a military official said Tuesday, as fighting between rebels and government forces moved closer to the capital.

Warfare in the world’s newest state has displaced more than 400,000 people since mid-December, with the front lines constantly shifting as loyalist troops and renegade forces gain and lose territory in battles often waged along ethnic lines.

Lt. Col. Philip Aguer, the South Sudanese military spokesman, said there was fighting about 70 kilometres north of the South Sudanese capital of Juba. Heavy fighting also erupted Tuesday in Malakal, the capital of oil-producing Upper Nile state, which renegade forces briefly held before government troops retook it, he said.

As control of certain regions has changed, tens of thousands of residents have fled their homes to escape fighting that often pits the Dinka ethnic group of President Salva Kiir against the Nuer group of Riek Machar, the former vice president who now commands renegade forces. A boat on the Nile — fleeing the violence in Upper Nile State and carrying mostly women and children— sank on Saturday, killing at least 200 people, according to Aguer.

The violence has displaced 413,000 people, including more than 73,000 who sought refuge in neighbouring countries, according to the United Nations. Some of the fiercest battles have been fought in Jonglei, South Sudan’s largest state, where for months government troops had been trying to put down a local rebellion. South Sudan’s government now says it has made peace with the leader of that rebellion, David Yau Yau, a renegade colonel from the Murle tribe who appears to have cut a deal with the Dinka-led government against Machar’s mostly Nuer forces.

South Sudan has a history of ethnic rivalry, and its many tribes have long battled each other in recurring cycles of violence.

Nearly 10,000 people have been killed in the latest fighting, according to one estimate by an International Crisis Group analyst.

The Associated Press has seen video showing a representative of Kiir’s government meeting with Yau Yau in Jonglei’s Pibor county earlier this week after the militia leader agreed to integrate his fighters into the national army. In the video bodies of men in combat fatigues litter the bushes, but it is impossible to tell if the dead are rebels or government troops.

Troops from neighbouring Uganda appear to be actively fighting on behalf of Kiir, who is reportedly seeking the long-term commitment of Ugandan troops in the fight against renegade forces.

In Ethiopia, where peace talks are taking place, a spokesman for the rebels, former South Sudan Brig. Gen. Lul Ruai Kong, said Ugandan helicopters and fighter jets are bombing rebel positions.

Another pro-rebel official, Gideon Gatpan Thaor, said fighters described being hit with a smoky weapon that burns, possibly white phosphorous.

A Ugandan military official denied Ugandan forces are already involved in active combat but admitted that is where they are headed following the rebels’ threat to take Juba, where fighting erupted on December 15 before it spread across the oil-producing East African country.

Lt. Col. Paddy Ankunda, the Ugandan military spokesman, said Tuesday that Ugandan and South Sudanese army officials are drafting a “status of forces agreement” that will soon be signed by both countries after Kiir requested the Ugandans extend their deployment.

When that pact is signed, he said, “there could be things under the agreement which the forces might engage in.” He said a Ugandan army colonel previously with the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia has been appointed as head of Ugandan forces in South Sudan, part of wider efforts by Uganda to formalise a mission that is increasingly controversial at home and abroad.

On a recent trip to Juba, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni warned Machar that East African countries would unite to “defeat” him if he did not start talks with the government.

It now appears Museveni is going it alone, sending to South Sudan thousands of men and hardware that may have given government forces an edge against rebels who threatened Juba. Kiir has refused to release the political detainees who are Machar’s allies, one of the conditions set by the rebels before they can sign any ceasefire deal with the government.

Ugandan officials initially said troops were deployed to South Sudan to protect key installations such as the airport as well as to facilitate civilian evacuations.

Amid rumours some Ugandan forces have been killed or wounded in South Sudan, Ugandan lawmakers on Tuesday met for a special session to discuss the legality of the deployment.

Museveni is highly influential in Juba, where his prestige is based in part on his decades long support for the armed secessionist movement that eventually led to the creation in 2011 of the new state of South Sudan.