Region

BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki urged Al Qaeda-linked fighters who have overrun two cities west of Baghdad to give up the battle, vowing Wednesday to press forward with a push to regain control of the mainly Sunni areas.

The United Nations, meanwhile, warned that the area in Anbar province is facing a “critical humanitarian situation” as food and water supplies are starting to run out.

Sectarian tensions have been rising in Iraq for months as minority Sunnis protested what they perceive as discrimination and random arrests by the Shiite-led government. But violence spiked after the December 28 arrest of a Sunni lawmaker sought on terrorism charges and the government’s dismantling of a months-old anti-government Sunni protest camp in the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi.

As clashes erupted, Al Qaeda-linked gunmen assaulted Ramadi and nearby Fallujah, cities that were among the bloodiest battlefields for US forces during the war. The militants overran police stations and military posts, freed prisoners and set up their own checkpoints.

The United States and Iran have offered materiel help for the Iraqi government but say they won’t send in troops.

Speaking in his weekly television address, Maliki hinted at a possible pardon for members of Al Qaeda’s local branch known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant who abandon the fight.

“The war that is being fought by the Iraqi security forces, tribes and all segments of Iraqi society against Al Qaeda and its affiliates is a sacred war,” he said. “I call on those who were lured to be part of the terrorism machine led by Al Qaeda to return to reason.”

In return, he promised that his government will “open a new page to settle their cases so that they won’t be fuel for the war that is led by Al Qaeda”.

The militant gains in the Sunni-dominated province of Anbar are posing the most serious challenge to the Shiite-led government since American forces withdrew in late 2011 after years of bitter warfare following the 2003 invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led regime and propelled the formerly repressed Shiite majority to power.

UN envoy to Iraq Nickolay Mladenov warned that the humanitarian situation in Anbar is likely to worsen as military operations continue.

Food and water supplies in Fallujah are beginning to run out, and more than 5,000 families have fled to neighbouring provinces to escape the fighting, he said.

“The UN agencies are working to identify the needs of the population and prepare medical supplies, food and non-food items for distribution if safe passage can be ensured,” he said in a statement.

Those residents who remain in Fallujah, 65 kilometres west of Baghdad, appeared Wednesday to be trying to restore some semblance of normalcy, though the situation remained tense.

A call went out over mosque loudspeakers late Tuesday calling on fleeing families to come back and militants to leave the city. Markets reopened and some families returned to their homes. Civilian cars and trucks were seen driving through the city and traffic policemen were on the streets.

Tensions have been simmering in Iraq since December 2012, when the Sunni community staged protests to denounce what they say is second-class treatments by Maliki’s Shiite-led government.

Al Qaeda militants, emboldened by the civil war in neighbouring Syria, have sought to position themselves as the Sunnis’ champions against the government, though major Sunni tribes in Anbar and elsewhere oppose the group’s extremist ideology and are fighting against it.

CAIRO — An Egyptian court on Wednesday adjourned the murder trial of deposed president Mohamed Morsi to February 1, citing “weather conditions” that prevented the Islamist’s transport to court from his prison.

It had been scheduled as the second hearing in Morsi’s trial, after an initial court appearance in November in which he denounced the tribunal and insisted he was still the country’s president.

Morsi, who was toppled by the military in July, is accused of inciting the killings of opposition protesters in December 2012 outside the presidential palace.

“Because of the weather conditions, Mohamed Morsi could not be brought, so the trial will be adjourned to February 1,” said presiding judge Ahmed Sabry Youssef.

Morsi is detained in prison some 60 kilometres from the Mediterranean city of Alexandria.

He is on trial with 14 co-defendants, but only several were brought Wednesday to the makeshift court house in a police academy on Cairo’s outskirts.

Elsewhere, police fired tear gas at Morsi’s supporters who had rallied in protest at the trial.

In Cairo’s Nasr City neighbourhood, tyres were burnt and some car windows were smashed during brief clashes. Police said they had made 14 arrests.

In the police academy, defendants were held in a room adjacent to the court room as they waited for the hearing to start.

“This is a political trial,” yelled Essam Al Erian, one of the defendants and a senior member of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood movement.

His lawyer Bahaa El Din Abdel Rahman told AFP his client and other defendants had embarked on a hunger strike.

“All the accused who are present today are on hunger strike and reaffirm that they reject this trial,” he said.

More than 1,000 people have been killed since Morsi’s overthrow and thousands of Islamists have been arrested.

Morsi will also face separate trials on charges of espionage and colluding with militants to carry out attacks in Egypt.

He was catapulted from the underground offices of the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood to become Egypt’s first freely elected president in June 2012 following Mubarak’s overthrow in an early 2011 uprising.

But his single year in power was marred by political turmoil, deadly clashes and a crippling economic crisis.

In December 2012, members of the Muslim Brotherhood attacked opposition protesters camped outside the presidential palace in protest at a decree by Morsi to grant himself extra-judiciary powers.

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

The incident was a turning point in Morsi’s presidency, galvanising a disparate opposition that eventually organised mass protests in June 2012 that prompted the military to oust and detain the Islamist.

Morsi’s defence says there is no proof he had incited the clashes, and that most of those killed in the violence were Brotherhood members.

SANAA — Shiite rebels and gunmen from the powerful Hashid tribe in north Yemen clashed for a third straight day on Wednesday, with the fighting intensifying, tribal sources told AFP.

The fighting first broke out on Monday when Shiite Houthi rebels attempted to take over the towns of Wadi Khaywan and Usaimat, strongholds of the Hashid tribe in Amran province, they said.

The Shiites launched the attacks in retaliation for the Hashid tribe’s support for Sunni Salafist groups fighting Houthis in Dammaj, the Shiites’ stronghold in the northern province of Saada, the sources said.

According to witnesses, the fighting has left dozens dead and wounded. AFP could not confirm the toll due to the difficulty of accessing the area.

The tribal sources said the fighting had intensified on Wednesday, while the Shiite Houthi Ansarullah (Partisans of God) group said on their website that they had taken control of several Hashid strongholds.

During the battles, a Hashid chief, Hashim Al Ahmar, escaped an attack but his guard and four of his relatives were killed, tribal sources said.

Yemeni President Abd Rabbo Hadi on Tuesday sent a delegation to try to broker a truce but they have yet to make contact with leaders from the two sides.

Houthi rebels have been battling the Sanaa government for nearly a decade in the remote Saada province, but the outbreak of fighting with Sunni militants has deepened the sectarian dimension of the unrest.

Fighting that erupted in late October has centred for months on a Salafist mosque and Koranic school in Dammaj.

But the conflict has spread in the northern provinces, embroiling Sunni tribes wary of the power of the Houthis, who have repeatedly been accused of receiving support from Iran.

The Houthis, named after their late leader Abdel Malek Al Houthi, are part of the Zaidi Shiite community.

They rose up in 2004 against the government of ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, accusing it of marginalising them politically and economically.

They accuse radical Sunnis in Dammaj of turning the town centre into “a real barracks for thousands of armed foreigners”, a reference to the Dar Al Hadith Koranic School, where foreigners study.

On January 6, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it had evacuated 34 people wounded in the Dammaj clashes.

The ICRC said it has managed to enter Dammaj six times since the fighting resumed on October 24.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — More than 10,000 African asylum seekers rallied outside Israel’s parliament in Jerusalem on Wednesday, police said, in a fourth straight day of protests against immigration policy.

The demonstration was “calm”, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP, adding that police were deployed to keep order. He put the number of protesters at “more than 10,000”.

“We are refugees, we need protection,” the demonstrators chanted.

An organiser of the rally, who gave his name only as Baso, said that more than 100 busloads of protesters had headed in the morning from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

“We have a letter addressed to the government of Israel, but we will hand it to the Knesset [parliament],” he told AFP.

Parliament speaker Yuli Edelstein, however, banned four demonstration leaders, who were invited to a meeting with MPs, from entering the Knesset building.

Edelstein wanted to “avoid provocation that could degenerate into violence”, a statement from his office said.

Tens of thousands of migrants, mostly Eritrean and Sudanese, have demonstrated each day since Sunday in Tel Aviv, including outside offices of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and foreign embassies.

Israel’s commercial capital was the scene of race riots in 2012 and the rightwing government has vowed to step up the repatriation of illegal immigrants, saying they pose a threat to the state’s Jewish character.

Some 52,000 were already in Israel, after managing to slip across the desert border with Egypt, before Israel completed a high-tech barrier last year.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the protests will make no difference to his government’s tough stand on asylum seekers.

“Just as we’ve succeeded in blocking off illegal infiltrations thanks to the security fence, we’re determined to send back those who made it in before the border was closed,” he told members of his rightwing Likud Party on Monday.

Under legislation passed last month, authorities can detain illegal immigrants entering Israel for up to a year without trial.

The government has opened a sprawling detention facility in the Negev Desert to house both new entrants and immigrants already in the country deemed to have disturbed public order.

The UN refugees agency has condemned Israel for ignoring the reasons asylum seekers have fled their countries of origin and for failing to provide “those with protection needs” with “access to refugee status determination”.

MINNEAPOLIS — An American who’s been held in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for nine months in connection with a satirical online video about youth culture in Dubai was expected to be released soon, the US State Department said Tuesday.

Shezanne Cassim, 29, was arrested in April, six months after he and others uploaded their spoof documentary to the Internet. The video is about would-be “gangsta” youth in the Gulf Arab city-state.

The UAE-owned daily, The National, has said Cassim and his co-defendants were accused of defaming the country’s image abroad. Cassim’s supporters said he was charged under a 2012 cyber crimes law that tightened penalties for challenging authorities.

In December, Cassim was sentenced to one year in prison, a fine and deportation.

Pooja Jhunjhunwala, a State Department spokeswoman, said Tuesday that Cassim has been moved to a deportation facility for processing.

“We understand processing will take a few days at which point he will be returning to the United States,” she said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

“The protection of US citizens overseas is one of the Department of State’s highest priorities,” Jhunjhunwala said. “We continue to work closely with the UAE authorities to ensure his quick release.”

Rori Donaghy, director of the London-based Emirates Centre for Human Rights, said Cassim’s pending release is not surprising. Although it is not codified in Emirati law, Donaghy said, it is customary for defendants who have demonstrated good behaviour to be released after serving three-fourths of their sentence.

Donaghy said Cassim and his friends never should have been imprisoned, and that authorities have continued to use the cyber crimes law to restrict free speech.

Cassim, a US citizen, was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Dubai for work after graduating from the University of Minnesota in 2006. He became the public face of the defendants after his family launched an effort to publicise his months-long incarceration.

Seven others were convicted with him in December.

The video, titled “Ultimate Combat System: The Deadly Satwa Gs,” is set in the Satwa district of Dubai. It is a documentary-style video that pokes fun at Dubai youth who styled themselves “gangstas” but are not particularly thuggish, and shows fictional “combat” training that includes throwing a sandal and using a mobile phone to call for help.

It opens with text saying the video is fictional and is not meant to offend.

US Senator Amy Klobuchar, who had been working on Cassim’s release and pushed to have his sentence include time served, said the decision to release him was the “right thing to do”.

“Jailing this young man for months for posting a harmless video made absolutely no sense, especially in a country that prides itself on being a tolerant and just nation,” she said.

AMSTERDAM — The world’s chemical weapons watchdog, which is overseeing the destruction of Syria’s toxic arsenal, called on the government of President Bashar Assad to pick up momentum in handing over the remaining chemicals.

Syria missed a deadline to transport the most toxic substances out of the country by December 31, loading a first batch of chemicals onto a Danish cargo vessel on Tuesday, a week late.

The Syrian government has until the end of March to hand over the so-called first priority chemicals, including around 20 tonnes of lethal mustard gas, and to the end of June to completely eliminate its chemical weapons programme.

“We are exhorting the Syrian government to intensify its efforts, so we can conclude the critical part of this mission absolutely as fast as the conditions allow,” Michael Luhan, spokesman for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), said on Wednesday.

“We are happy to see there is finally movement. We hope to see that that movement continues regularly now through the next few weeks, so we can get these chemicals out of the country as quickly as possible.”

Syria declared 1,300 tonnes of chemical weapons to the OPCW, which won the Nobel Peace prize last year, and is transporting them by road to the port of Latakia so they can be destroyed abroad.

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

The most serious attack was on August 21, when hundreds of people died in a sarin gas strike in the outskirts of the capital, Damascus.

That attack prompted the United States to threaten to use military force against Assad’s regime, which it said was likely responsible.

The bulk of the chemicals will be processed on the Cape Ray, a 200-metre US cargo ship, which is being fitted with a portable hydrolysis system to neutralise around 560 tonnes of the most deadly toxins.

The remainder will go to commercial toxic waste processing plants, including one in England.

KUWAIT CITY –– Several Kuwaiti MPs sharply criticised the Cabinet on Wednesday, two days after its formation, saying it will fail to resolve problems in the oil-rich emirate, and urged the premier to quit.

Since early 2006, Kuwait has been in almost continuous political crisis, with a dozen Cabinets quitting and parliament dissolved six times.

“This is a strange Cabinet. It is a cocktail that lacks harmony,” said MP Safa Al Hashem, a well-known critic of the prime minister, during a parliamentary debate.

Shiite MP Saleh Ashour said “the formation of the Cabinet takes place through consultations with people of influence and interests... No one is satisfied with this government which cannot be trusted to resolve our problems”.

Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber Mubarak Al Sabah, a senior member of the ruling family, on Monday carried out an expanded reshuffle that replaced seven ministers and affected six others in the 16-member Cabinet, formed just five months ago.

Before the reshuffle, MPs had questioned several ministers over alleged mismanagement and corruption.

During Wednesday’s debate, some MPs still accused the new government of promoting corruption.

“How can we trust a government that promotes corruption ... We are very disgusted at the new Cabinet line-up,” independent MP Yacoub Al Sane said.

“Today, the prime minister proves that he cannot run the country ... I call on the premier to rescue the country by quitting,” said MP Ali Al Rashed, until recently a well-known government supporter.

The reshuffle included a new oil minister, Ali Al Omair, a lawmaker who is a senior member of the Islamist Salaf Alliance. Commerce and Industry Minister Anas Al Saleh was also moved to the finance portfolio.

The number of Islamist ministers rose from two to four in the current Cabinet. Besides the oil portfolio, Islamists head the ministries of Islamic affairs and justice, communications and health.

The reshuffle came after the constitutional court last month rejected two petitions to nullify July parliamentary polls and dissolve the five-month-old assembly.

The ruling, which cannot be challenged, means that the current parliament may become the first since 2003 to complete a full four-year term.

TRIPOLI –– Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan warned oil tankers to stay away from eastern terminals seized by armed protesters or they could be sunk, as a confrontation over control of Libya’s crude escalated.

The warning came on Wednesday after Libya’s navy fired warning shots at the weekend to ward off a tanker that the state-run National Oil Corp. (NOC) said had attempted to load crude at one port that has been out of government control for six months.

Negotiations to end the protests have failed as eastern federalists, seeking more autonomy from Zeidan’s government in Tripoli, have threatened to ship oil independently to world markets.

Protesters on Tuesday said they would guarantee security for vessels docking at the three eastern ports that they have held since summer, inviting foreign tankers to load crude and bypass government control.

“Any country or company or gang trying to send tankers to take oil from the seized ports without coordinating with the NOC, we will deal with them, even if we are forced to destroy or sink them,” Zeidan said. “We warn all countries there will be no leniency.”

The confrontation is a major challenge facing the OPEC member’s fragile government two years after the fall of Muammar Qadhafi. Former rebels, militias and tribesman have all resorted to force to make demands on a state that is still mapping out its new democracy.

In the east, the self-proclaimed Cyrenaica regional government and its armed protesters have taken over three ports: Ras Lanuf, Es Sider and Zueitina, which previously accounted for 600,000 bpd in crude exports.

Zeidan also said he could reshuffle his Cabinet this week or next in a bid to counter critics, who are pursuing a parliamentary vote of no-confidence against him amid Libya’s mounting disorder.

ADDIS ABABA –– South Sudanese rebels and a government delegation started peace talks on Tuesday to try to end fighting that has left the world’s newest state on the brink of civil war.

The talks in neighbouring Ethiopia will focus on brokering a ceasefire to halt three weeks of violence that has killed at least 1,000 people and driven 200,000 from their homes.

“We have begun our meeting on the cessation of hostilities,” a member of the government delegation told Reuters. After opening, the talks quickly took a break to allow consultations in Juba about the release of detained rebels.

The fighting, often along ethnic fault lines, has pitted President Salva Kiir’s SPLA government forces against rebels loyal to former vice president Riek Machar.

Tuesday was the first face-to-face session, after a formal opening ceremony on Saturday, due to delays caused by haggling over the fate of 11 detainees held by the government in Juba. The rebels initially insisted on securing their release before negotiations started.

A diplomat said the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional grouping of east African nations that initiated the talks, had sent its envoys to Juba to press Kiir to free the detainees.

The trio of envoys is led by Seyoum Mesfin, a former Ethiopian foreign minister, the diplomat said. “They will push for the detainees’ release,” said the diplomat, close to the talks.

“The talks are going on but we are here for consultations,” Kenyan Lieutenant-General Lazarus Sumbeiywo, one of the three IGAD envoys, told Reuters on arrival in Juba.

The talks in Addis paused to await the return of the IGAD envoys, expected later on Tuesday, officials said.

China, the biggest investor in South Sudan’s oil industry through state-owned Chinese oil giants National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) and Sinopec, called on Monday for an immediate ceasefire. Beijing is concerned by the unrest that had forced the government to cut oil production by about a fifth.

Sudan, which also has an economic interest in its southern neighbour’s oil output, said the Juba government discussed the deployment of a joint force to secure its oilfields during a visit by Sudanese President Omar Bashir on Monday.

The prospect of security cooperation between the two countries would represent an improvement in ties, after the civil war foes came close to conflict again in disputes over oil fees and the border in the early part of 2012.

All of landlocked South Sudan’s oil is piped through its northern neighbour, providing vital hard currency in transit fees for Khartoum.

South Sudan’s oil production fell by 45,000 barrels per day to 200,000bpd after oilfields in its northern unity state were shut down due to fighting. Upper Nile state is still pumping about 200,000bpd, the government said.

Oil major BP estimates that South Sudan holds sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest reserves.