Region

CAIRO — A jihadist group behind a wave of spectacular attacks is a grave threat to Egypt’s stability as political turmoil triggered by the Islamist president’s ouster rocks the country, analysts say.

In less than a fortnight, Ansar Beit Al Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem) has claimed responsibility for several high-profile attacks.

These include a car bombing at police headquarters in Cairo, shooting down a military helicopter with a missile and assassinating a police general in broad daylight in the capital.

“Vengeance is coming,” the Sinai-based group warned army chief Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who is expected to stand for the presidency after he ousted Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president.

The group’s attacks have “made Egyptian authorities look like they were chasing ghosts”, said David Barnett, research associate at US-based think tank the Foundation for Defence of Democracies.

“It is the main militant group that has the potential to escalate the destabilisation in the country.”

Analysts say Ansar Beit Al Maqdis is inspired by Al Qaeda.

But Egyptian security officials claim the “terrorist group is derived” from Morsi’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood which won all elections after the 2011 ouster of Hosni Mubarak.

Ansar Beit Al Maqdis is thought to have been founded primarily by Egyptians in 2011 after the anti-Mubarak revolt, with most of its fighters drawn from Sinai tribes.

In recent months the group has also seen support coming from the Nile Delta and some areas of Cairo, experts say.

Although its overall command structure and source of funding are major unknowns, two of its known leaders are Shadi Al Menei, who has eluded arrest so far and is from Sinai’s Sawarka tribe, and Abu Osama Al Masry, of whom little is known.

The group is also believed to be led or backed by militants who broke out of prison in 2011 during the anti-Mubarak revolt.

“Its links with Al Qaeda are tenuous at best,” said Barnett. The group’s videos often feature clips of Al Qaeda’s Egypt-born leader Ayman Al Zawahiri.

The group’s “early goal was to attack Israel and prevent co-operation between Egypt and Israel by sabotaging gas pipelines”, said France-based Matthieu Guidere, an expert on Islamist militants.

Interior minister targeted

On Friday its fighters fired a rocket at Israel’s Red Sea resort of Eilat, the group said in a statement.

“On July 3 [the day Morsi was removed] the group issued a fatwa declaring the Egyptian army as infidels. From there, it turned from an anti-Israeli jihadist group to one focusing against the Egyptian security forces,” Guidere said.

Ansar Beit Al Maqdis also claimed a September 5 car bomb attack in Cairo targeting interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim, who escaped unhurt.

Its deadliest assault was a December 24 suicide car bomb that ripped through a police building north of Cairo, killing 15 people.

On January 25, as Egyptians marked the third anniversary of the start of the anti-Mubarak revolt, the group claimed it downed a military helicopter in Sinai with a missile, killing five soldiers.

“The level of sophistication is beyond what observers thought they were capable of,” Barnett said of the group’s ability to stage assaults outside the Sinai.

“The attacks suggest there are well experienced fighters in the group. Some of them have significant experience in fighting.”

Sinai-based researcher Ismail Alexandrani said Ansar Beit Al Maqdis had procured weapons from Libya and Sudan after the fall of Mubarak.

“We can also say that some jihadists who previously fought in Afghanistan, Syria and Bosnia have joined the group,” he added.

Ansar Beit Al Maqdis believes in gaining power through violence, analysts believe.

“The overthrow of Morsi’s government is a prime indication for their argument that the way to success is through violence and not through democratic process,” said Barnett.

The Muslim Brotherhood says that it renounced violence decades ago.

Morsi’s overthrow has polarised Egypt, with Amnesty International saying that 1,400 people have been killed in political violence since last July.

Deputy Interior Minister Shafiq Saeed said the authorities “have arrested members from the group who have confessed that [Ansar Beit Al Maqdis] belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood”, and denied that jihadist attacks had risen.

“The government is so entrenched in the battle against the Brotherhood that they appear to be losing the sight of the actual battle around them,” said Barnett.

“The reality is that there is real danger from the jihadi group capable of carrying out attacks.”

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — In the 1920s, an urgent call went out to the literati across the Middle East from Arab leaders in Jerusalem: Send us your books so that we may protect them for generations to come. 

Jerusalem was soon flushed with writings of all kinds, to be stored and preserved at the newly minted Al Aqsa Mosque library.

But many of those centuries-old manuscripts are in a state of decay. Now, religious authorities are restoring and digitising the books, many of them written by hand. They hope to make them available online to scholars and researchers across the Arab world who are unable to travel to Jerusalem.

Hamed Abu Teir, the library’s manager, called the manuscripts a “treasure and trust”. ‘’We should preserve them”, he said.

Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, is located on a hilltop compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount. The holy site is ground zero in the territorial and religious conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

The library and its 130,000 books are housed in two separate rooms in the compound, where modern steel bookshelves are affixed to ancient stonewalls.Among the collection are some 4,000 manuscripts, mainly donations from the private collections of Jerusalem families. UNESCO, which is providing assistance for the restoration project, says the library contains “one of the world’s most important collections of Islamic manuscripts”.

The drive to restore the manuscripts and get them online is part of a greater global trend that has seen an array of historical documents digitised and uploaded to increase access to researchers worldwide.

Here, the gap to be bridged isn’t just physical distance. Residents of countries with no diplomatic relations with Israel, including much of the Arab world, are unable to visit Jerusalem and Palestinians living in the nearby West Bank or the Gaza Strip need to secure a permit from Israel to enter the city. Officials hope to circumvent those hindrances by putting the manuscripts online.

“A student in the Arab and Muslim world can’t access it. A student in Algeria or Saudi Arabia for example can’t come here and access [the manuscripts]. We want to grant him the knowledge in his own house,” said Abu Teir.

Most of the manuscripts were donated in response to a call in the early 1920s from the Supreme Muslim Council, a religious governing body, said Walid Ahmad, an education professor at Israel’s Al Qasemi Academic College who has researched the library. He said the council sought to prevent Arabs from selling old manuscripts to foreign and Jewish buyers and preserve the Islamic heritage in one of its holiest sites.

The oldest book dates back 900 years, with some of the newer titles from the 19th century. Most of the texts are religious, but other subjects include geography, astronomy and medicine. Some of the pages contain personal letters about travel in the Middle East of the 18th century. Radwan Amro, who is leading the restoration process, said the most well-known manuscript in the collection was written by Imam Mohammed Al Ghazali, an Islamic scholar from the 12th century.

The manuscripts were stored in a library for the first few years of the 1920s, but when riots erupted in 1929 over disputes surrounding Jewish and Arab access to the sacred compound, the manuscripts were stored in bags and closets in a separate building nearby, Ahmad said. They would remain there for nearly half a century, when a new space was created for them.

But upon unpacking the books, officials realised they had been pillaged, with many snatched or destroyed.

About a quarter of the 4,000 manuscripts are considered in poor condition. Half of the books are already undergoing restoration, but the other half lie exposed in a small room in the library.

Many are in tatters. Shards of paper crumble off their pages. Insects have dug deep trenches into the unprotected leafs. Thousands of loose, fraying pages lie on a long table where an expert is attempting to match them to their original book.

The restoration and digitisation project, funded by the Waqf, Jordan’s Islamic authority which manages the holy site, aims to preserve what remains.

In the six years since the project began, Amro said the 10-person team has restored 200 manuscripts as well as old maps, Ottoman population and trade registers and hand-written documents from the Mamluk period of the 13th to 16th centuries. But the painstakingly slow process of treating every individual page to protect the intricate text and the paper’s delicate fibres means restorers have a long road ahead of them.

Amro would not give an estimate as to when the restoration would be complete, joking that it could take “hundreds of years”. But he said nearly all of the manuscript pages have been digitised and hopes that by the end of the year they will be put online.

Ahmad of Al Qasemi College said that in order to stay relevant in the Arab world from which it is physically disconnected, the library must put its collection online.

“Presenting materials to the greater public is the essence of an important library like Al Aqsa’s,” said Ahmad. “That’s how you stay on the map as a library.”

CAIRO — Deposed Egyptian leader Mohamed Morsi was back in court Saturday as his trial over the killing of protesters resumed, with the defence insisting he is still the legitimate president.

His trial is seen as a test for Egypt’s military-installed authorities, who have come under fire for a heavy-handed crackdown on his Islamist supporters after he was forced out by the army last July.

An Islamist coalition backing Morsi called for nationwide protests on Saturday to “support the legitimate elected president”, but there were no reports of any demonstrations.

At Saturday’s hearing Morsi, dressed in a white prison uniform, was held in a glass cage separate from co-defendants, an AFP correspondent reported from the court.

Of the 14 co-defendants, seven were present, while the rest are being tried in absentia.

Some of the co-defendants turned their backs on the proceedings and gave a four-fingered “Rabaa” salute, after welcoming Morsi when he entered his cage.

The gesture refers to a massive pro-Morsi protest in Cairo’s Rabaa Al Adawiya Square that was violently dispersed in August, setting off clashes in which hundreds of people, mostly Islamists, were killed.

The third hearing of the trial — in which Morsi and his co-defendants are accused of inciting the killing of protesters in December 2012 outside the presidential palace — was being held at a heavily guarded police academy in Cairo.

“This court has no jurisdiction to look into the case because Morsi is still the president and no official decision was taken for his ouster,” said lawyer Salim Al Awa, a member of the defence team.

The judge declined a request by Morsi to speak at the proceedings.

Prosecutors showed video footage at Saturday’s hearing of what they said were “supporters of defendants” chanting pro-Morsi slogans, carrying sticks and dismantling protest tents outside the presidential palace in December 2012.

The footage also showed at least one alleged Muslim Brotherhood member firing a gun.

At that time, members of the Muslim Brotherhood to which Morsi belongs attacked opposition protesters camped outside the palace in protest at a decree by Morsi to grant himself extra-judicial 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 the mass protests in June 2013 that led to his downfall.

Morsi’s defence says there is no proof he incited the clashes, and that most of those killed in the violence were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which moved in to protect the presidential palace after police withdrew.

The trial was adjourned to Tuesday.

The first hearing in trial of Muslim Brotherhood supreme guide Mohamed Badie and more than 50 others for inciting deadly violence in the Nile Delta city of Qaliub, shortly after Morsi’s ouster, was also briefly convened and adjourned to Monday. 

‘President of republic’ faces four trials 

Morsi is facing four separate trials, and at the first hearing of another trial on January 28 he defiantly insisted he was still the “president of the republic.”

In that trial, Morsi and 130 co-defendants face charges of breaking out of prison during the 2011 uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade rule.

Morsi also faces trials on charges of espionage in collaboration with the Palestinian Hamas movement, and insulting the judiciary. The espionage trial will start on February 16, while no date has yet been set for the other trial.

Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood won a series of polls after Mubarak’s ouster and who became Egypt’s first freely elected leader in June 2012, was ousted a year later by the army after massive protests against him.

Amnesty International says that since Morsi’s overthrow on July 3 at least 1,400 people have been killed in clashes with security forces and his opponents.

Months of bloodshed has dimmed hopes for reconciliation in the Arab world’s most populous nation as it prepares for a presidential vote to be held by mid-April.

Egypt’s army chief Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, whose popularity has skyrocketed since he ousted Morsi, is expected to seek the presidency.

The Muslim Brotherhood was designated a terrorist organisation late last year, with any public show of support punishable by lengthy jail terms.

MUNICH/OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday that he remains hopeful that the Obama administration’s effort to broker a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians can succeed, Reuters news agency reported.

The United States hopes to complete a “framework” accord in coming weeks and will then try to negotiate a final peace deal by the end of 2014, a US official said last week, according to a participant in a briefing with American Jewish leaders.

“I am hopeful and we will keep working on it,” Kerry, who despite widespread scepticism is leading the US effort to push the two sides towards a deal, said during remarks at the Munich security conference.

“I believe in the possibility or I wouldn’t pursue this,” he said. “I don’t think we’re being quixotic ... We’re working hard because the consequences of failure are unacceptable.”

US envoy Martin Indyk said the framework would address core issues in the conflict, including borders, security, refugees and Jewish settlements, a participant in the briefing said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, which includes pro-settler parties, has already shown signs of strain over talks on Palestinian statehood.

Jordan Valley  

The UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories Friday criticised Israel’s demolition of 36 homes in the Jordan Valley and urged a halt to such actions in the West Bank, according to Agence France-Presse.

Hundreds of activists, meanwhile, staged an overnight demonstration in the Jordan Valley region.

The moves came as fresh opinion poll evidence showed that faith in the Middle East peace process has largely evaporated among both Israelis and Palestinians.

The demolitions in the Jordan Valley community of Ain Al Hilweh on Thursday displaced 66 people, including 36 children, James Rawley said in a statement.

“I am deeply concerned about the ongoing displacement and dispossession of Palestinians... along the Jordan Valley where the number of structures demolished more than doubled in the last year,” he said.

“This activity not only deprives Palestinians of access to shelter and basic services, it also runs counter to international law.”

His office said more than 1,000 people had been displaced last year in the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem by demolitions on the grounds that homes had been built without Israeli permits, “which are virtually impossible to obtain”.

On Friday, around 300 Palestinians together with Israeli and foreign activists set up camp in abandoned houses near Jericho in the West Bank to protest against Israel’s refusal to pull out of the Jordan Valley in case of a peace deal, an AFP photographer said.

The demonstrators in Ain Hijleh village were equipped with generators and said they planned to spend the night in around a dozen of the houses, as Israeli troops and police kept watch from a distance.

They held a banner reading: “No peace with settlements.”

Their action — dubbed “Melh Al Ard” (salt of the earth) — aimed “to revive an old Palestinian Canaanite village in the Jordan Valley”, to counter any Israeli annexation plans, the activists said in a statement.

They condemned Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process brokered by Kerry.

His efforts would “establish a disfigured Palestinian state and recognises the Israeli entity as a Jewish state”, they said.

Such a state would put Arab Israelis at risk of deportation at any time, the activists said.

Faith in the Middle East peace process has largely evaporated among Israelis and Palestinians in the two decades since the Oslo accords and a famous White House lawn handshake, a new poll found Friday.

According to the Zogby Research Services poll, neither side has much confidence in the new push for peace being led by Kerry, which the pollsters believe is proving a hard sell.

Although two decades have elapsed since then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands watched by then US leader Bill Clinton, “it is clear several deep differences exist” plaguing the atmosphere between the two sides.

“Twenty years later only 18 per cent of Palestinians and 19 per cent of Israelis view Oslo as a positive development in the history of their relationship,” the poll said.

Both sides believe the other is not committed to peace.

And only around a third of people in each community sees a two-state solution as feasible, even though 74 per cent of Israelis and 47 per cent of Palestinians agree it is the desired outcome.

“From the results of this poll, it is clear that the past 20 years have taken a toll on the confidence both Palestinians and Israelis have in the peace process that began with the 1993 signing of the Oslo accords,” the poll said.

Kerry is trying to draw up a framework agreement which would set out the end game in the resumed negotiations and guide the talks going forward over the next few months.

Twenty years ago both Palestinians, some 61 per cent, and Israelis, some 54 per cent, said they “were hopeful” when the Oslo accords were signed, setting out a roadmap for the peace process.

The poll was carried out in the Middle East in August 2013 among 1,000 Israelis and Palestinians, just as Kerry persuaded the two sides to resume talks after a three-year hiatus.

BEIRUT — Syrian government and opposition delegations leave 10 days of peace talks with few results and a follow-up meeting uncertain, but analysts and negotiators say the discussions are an important beginning.

The immediate post-mortem on the talks from Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem was blunt.

“I regret to tell you that we have not reached tangible results during this week,” he said as the talks wrapped up in Geneva on Friday.

Despite persistent pressure from UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, and co-sponsors Russia and the United States, the two delegations failed to agree on a single point.

No ceasefire was signed, talks on a transitional government never began, and a mooted deal to allow aid into the besieged Old City of Homs went nowhere.

Opposition National Coalition chief Ahmad Jarba said the regime had failed to show “serious commitment” during negotiations.

“The talks were obviously not a success,” said Salman Sheikh, director of the Brookings Doha Centre think tank.

“The other disappointing thing was that there was hope that the momentum would come from some sort of a deal on humanitarian access. That hasn’t happened,” he added.

The failure to secure humanitarian access ranks among the larger disappointments of the talks, dashing hopes the government might ease its blockade of besieged rebel-held enclaves as a goodwill gesture.

In the end, the regime offered to allow women and children to leave the Old City of Homs, but aid convoys on standby to enter were left waiting.

Desperately needed food did reach the besieged Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk on Thursday and Friday, but the plight of civilians trapped in the south Damascus camp had not even been on the Geneva agenda.

The talks have also done nothing to slow the pace of killing in Syria, where more than 136,000 people have died since the conflict erupted in March 2011, an NGO said Saturday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said nearly 1,900 people were killed between the start of the talks on
January 22 and their penultimate day on Thursday.

‘A modest beginning’ 

A second round of talks is proposed for
February 10, but Mouallem said he could not confirm the regime’s participation without first consulting President Bashar Assad.

Mouallem also said on Saturday the US had asked to “negotiate directly” with his delegation, but that they had “refused to do so before [US] Secretary of State John Kerry apologised for what he said at the conference”.

Kerry said Assad “will not be part” of any transitional government.

The tone in Syria’s state media on Saturday was also far from conciliatory.

“In Geneva, the Syrian delegation spoke as the voice of Syrian rights. They spoke from the heart,” said government daily Al Thawra.

It said the opposition, by contrast, had said “nothing but what was dictated to them on a piece of paper by their master”.

“They were a subservient humiliated slave, and an obedient client,” it charged, alluding to the opposition’s Gulf Arab and Western backers.

But despite the deadlock, Jarba confirmed the opposition would attend the next round of talks, and Brahimi said there had been glimpses of common ground.

“This is a very modest beginning, but it is a beginning on which we can build,” he said on Friday, while admitting disappointment at the failure to achieve humanitarian access.

He was due to hold talks in Munich on Saturday with both Russia, which backs the Assad regime, and the US, which supports the opposition.

Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said the talks were a “first step towards possible success”.

“At least, the two parties recognised the respective other side as someone they have to negotiate with,” he said.

Both sides defied the expectations of many not by only showing up to the talks, but also by not walking out, despite tense moments and mutual recriminations.

“This isn’t much, but more could not have been expected,” Perthes said.

And reports the US Congress has secretly approved resuming weapons deliveries to “moderate” Syrian rebel factions suggest the opposition gained something by attending the talks.

Massoud Akko, a member of the technical team in the opposition delegation, acknowledged little progress had been made, but said the opposition won symbolic victories.

“This is the first time that the Syrian regime has accepted to discuss the future of Syria with Syrians, so I think this is something that we have won,” he told AFP.

RAMADI, Iraq — Security forces and allied tribal fighters mounted major offensives on Saturday against militants in the conflict-hit cities of Ramadi and Fallujah as attacks elsewhere in Iraq killed eight people.

The massive assaults, involving soldiers, police and pro-government armed tribesmen, are part of efforts to wrest back control of areas that have been in the hands of militants, including the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) for weeks, sparking fears the ongoing stand-off could impact elections scheduled for April 30.

They come after Iraq’s deadliest month in nearly six years, with more than 1,000 people killed in January, as it grapples with a surge in bloodshed that has sparked fears of a return to the all-out conflict that left tens of thousands dead in 2006 and 2007.

Security forces and their allies assaulted the militant-held neighbourhoods of Malaab, Dhubat, and Street 60 in Ramadi, killing 35 anti-government fighters and seizing large amounts of weaponry, according to a police officer and tribal militia commander Mohammed Khamis Abu Risha.

The clashes were among the heaviest in several weeks, an AFP journalist in Ramadi said, adding that all mobile phone and Internet connections had been cut.

Abu Risha, the nephew of a powerful tribal sheikh, has backed anti-government protesters and was implicated in the killing of five soldiers near Ramadi last year, but in ISIL he shares a common enemy with the government in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, aerial bombardment and artillery fire on a neighbourhood in northern Fallujah, a rare major operation in the city itself, has killed 15 militants, the defence ministry announced Saturday, without saying when it happened.

The army has largely stayed out of Fallujah, just a short drive from Baghdad, fearing any major incursion could lead to a bloody and protracted conflict with massive civilian casualties and property damage.

American battles in the city, a bastion of militants following the 2003 US-led invasion, were among their bloodiest since the Vietnam war.

But an official in the provincial security command centre told AFP that security forces were preparing a major assault on Fallujah in a bid to retake the city.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not elaborate.

Fallujah is in Anbar province, a mostly Sunni desert region west of Baghdad that shares a border with Syria.

BEIRUT — Syrian government and opposition delegations leave 10 days of peace talks with few results and a follow-up meeting uncertain, but analysts and negotiators say the discussions are an important beginning.

The immediate post-mortem on the talks from Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem was blunt.

“I regret to tell you that we have not reached tangible results during this week,” he said as the talks wrapped up in Geneva on Friday.

Despite persistent pressure from UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, and cosponsors Russia and the United States, the two delegations failed to agree on a single point.

No ceasefire was inked, talks on a transitional government never began, and a mooted deal to allow aid into the besieged Old City of Homs went nowhere.

Opposition National Coalition chief Ahmad Jarba said the regime had failed to show “serious commitment” during the negotiations.

“The talks were obviously not a success,” said Salman Sheikh, director of the Brookings Doha Centre think tank.

“The other disappointing thing was that there was hope that the momentum would come from some sort of a deal on humanitarian access. That hasn’t happened,” he added.

The failure to secure humanitarian access ranks among the larger disappointments of the talks, dashing hopes that the government might ease its blockade of besieged rebel-held enclaves as a show of good will.

In the end, the regime offered to allow women and children to leave the Old City of Homs, but aid convoys on standby to enter were left waiting.

Desperately needed food did get into the besieged Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk on Thursday and Friday, but the plight of civilians trapped in the south Damascus camp had not even been on the agenda of the Geneva discussions.

The talks have also done nothing to slow the pace of killing in Syria, where more than 130,000 people have died since the conflict erupted in March 2011.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said nearly 1,900 people were killed between the start of the talks on January 22 and their penultimate day on Thursday. 

‘A modest beginning’

A second round of talks is proposed for Feburary 10, but Mouallem said he could not confirm the regime’s participation without first consulting President Bashar al-Assad.

And the tone in Syria’s state media on Saturday was far from conciliatory.

“In Geneva, the Syrian [government] delegation spoke as the voice of Syrian rights. They spoke from the heart,” said government daily Al Thawra.

It said the opposition, by contrast, had said “nothing but what was dictated to them on a piece of paper by their master”.

“They were a subservient humiliated slave, and an obedient client,” it charged, alluding to the opposition’s Gulf Arab and Western backers.

But despite the deadlock, Jarba confirmed that the opposition would attend the next round of talks, and Brahimi said there had been glimpses of common ground.

“This is a very modest beginning, but it is a beginning on which we can build,” he said on Friday, while admitting disappointment at the failure to achieve humanitarian access.

He was due to hold talks in Munich on Saturday with both Russia, which backs the Assad regime, and the United States, which supports the opposition.

Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said the talks were a “first step towards possible success.”

“At least, the two parties recognised the respective other side as someone they have to negotiate with,” he said.

Both sides defied the expectations of many not by only showing up to the talks, but also by not walking out, despite tense moments and mutual recriminations.

“This isn’t much, but more could not have been expected,” Perthes said.

And reports that the US Congress has secretly approved resuming weapons deliveries to “moderate” Syrian rebel factions suggest the opposition gained something by attending the talks.

Massoud Akko, a member of the technical team in the opposition delegation, acknowledged that little progress had been made, but said the opposition won symbolic victories.

“We pushed the regime to discuss, to negotiate with the Syrian people,” he told AFP.

“This is the first time that the Syrian regime has accepted to discuss the future of Syria with Syrians, so I think this is something that we have won.”

President Barack Obama plans to travel to Saudi Arabia in March on a mission to smooth tensions with Washington’s main Arab ally over US policy on Iran’s nuclear programme and the civil war in Syria, a newspaper reported.

Obama is preparing to meet with King Abdullah for a summit, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing unnamed Arab officials briefed on the meetings.

“This is about a deteriorating relationship” and declining trust, said a senior Arab official in discussing the need for the summit, which was pulled together in recent days, the newspaper reported.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment.

The United States and Saudi Arabia have been allies since the kingdom was formed in 1932, giving Riyadh a powerful military protector and Washington secure oil supplies.

Washington’s relationship with the Saudis was crucial as the region faced changes and challenges from the transition in Egypt to civil war in Syria.

But relations have been tested on a number of fronts.

Members of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family threatened a rift with the United States to protest perceived American inaction over Syria’s civil war, which has killed more than 100,000 people, as well as the recent US outreach with Iran.

The Sunni Muslim kingdom’s regional rivalry with Shiite Iran, an ally of Syria, has amplified sectarian tensions across the Middle East.

King Abdullah is also to use the meeting to question Obama on why he decided against air strikes in Syria, which Saudi and other Arab officials believe strengthened Assad, the newspaper reported.

“The meeting in many ways will get back to basics,” said a Saudi official briefed on the meetings, according the Wall Street Journal. “Why did Obama do it the way he did it?”

US and other security officials said earlier last week that “moderate” Syrian rebel factions were receiving light arms supplied by the United States. 

The Arab Spring as well as a November agreement between Iran and other world powers that curbs parts of Tehran’s nuclear programme, has angered Saudi Arabia, along with other Arab states and Israel.

The relationship was also badly shaken by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, since most of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, and by the subsequent American invasion of Iraq.

Obama’s visit comes after a mission to Riyadh by US Secretary of State John Kerry.

BEIRUT — A suicide car bomber killed three people at a petrol station in a stronghold of the Shiite Hizbollah movement on Lebanon’s northern border on Saturday, the latest sign that Syria’s civil war is spilling over into its small neighbour.

The blast occurred in the town of Hermel at the northern end of the Bekaa Valley, an area populated mainly by Shiite Muslims among whom Hizbollah draws its support.

Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) cited witnesses who said the perpetrator entered the gas station and asked to buy fuel before detonating the bomb, leaving a metre-deep hole in the ground and setting the station and nearby cars on fire.

Images broadcast on Hizbollah’s Al Manar television showed fire raging beside a severely damaged petrol station as well as emergency vehicles and security forces at the scene.

A security source told Reuters that, besides the three dead bystanders and the dead bomber, 28 other people had been wounded in the blast.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Saturday’s blast fitted a pattern of attacks by rival sectarian groups on each other’s strongholds that has been amplified by Syria’s civil war. Another suicide car bomb killed three people in Hermel last month.

Lebanon’s caretaker interior minister, Marwan Charbel, told Reuters by phone that the situation in Lebanon was “unstable and getting worse every day”.

“This matter is very, very dangerous,” he said. “It is bigger than the security apparatus.”

Suicide bombers often use stolen vehicles, and Charbel said up to 400 cars had been stolen in Lebanon in the last six months.

“This is a strange path for Lebanese, because most of the explosions we see are carried out by Lebanese,” he said.

Saturday’s blast happened near a building that houses a charity connected to the late Shiite Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. Fadlallah, who died in 2010, was not a member of Hizbollah.

Shortly after the explosion in Hermel, a bomb went off near an Al Manar office in the Beirut neighbourhood of Ouzai, a security source said. It was not clear whether the Hizbollah-run television station had been targeted or whether anyone was hurt.

Hizbollah-run areas are frequently hit by bomb and rocket attacks claimed by Sunni militants. Four car bombs have exploded in Hizbollah’s stronghold of south Beirut since July. A pair of suicide bombings at the Iranian embassy in November killed at least 25 people including an Iranian diplomat.

Hizbollah has sent fighters and advisers to aid President Bashar Assad, a member of Syria’s Alawite minority, which is an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Both Hizbollah and Assad are supported by Shiite-ruled Iran.

Hizbollah’s intervention in Syria and the steady flow of Lebanese Sunnis joining the anti-Assad rebels have both fuelled sectarian strife in Lebanon, which has taken in more than 900,000 refugees from the Syrian civil war.

TEHRAN — Iran has received the first instalment of $4.2 billion in frozen assets as part of a nuclear deal with world powers, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told ISNA news agency Saturday.

Unblocking the funds under the landmark deal in which Iran agreed to roll back parts of its nuclear programme and halt further advances is expected to breathe new life into its crippled economy.

“The first tranche of $500 million was deposited in a Swiss bank account, and everything was done in accordance with the agreement,” Araqchi said.

Iran clinched the interim deal in November with the P5+1 group — Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany — and began implementing the agreement on January 20.

Under the agreement, which is to last six months, Iran committed to limit its uranium enrichment to 5 per cent, halting production of 20 per cent-enriched uranium.

In return, the European Union and the United States have eased crippling economic sanctions on Iran.

A senior US administration official told AFP last month that the first $550-million (400-million-euro) instalment of $4.2 billion in frozen assets would be released from February.

“The instalment schedule starts on February 1 and the payments are evenly distributed” across 180 days, the US official said.

Iran and the P5+1 will also hold a new round of talks in Vienna on February 18 in a bid to discuss a comprehensive solution to Tehran’s contested nuclear programme.

Major world powers and Israel fear that Iran is trying to develop an atomic bomb, but Tehran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful.

Also on Saturday, the official IRNA news agency quoted the head of the civil aviation authority, Alireza Jahanguirian, as saying that Iran will soon receive spare parts for its ailing civilian fleet.

Jahanguirian said the parts would arrive within two weeks as part of the sanctions relief agreed in Geneva in November.

But the November deal foresees an easing on sanctions imposed on several sectors, including Iran’s car industry and petrochemical exports, as well as allowing civil aviation access to long-denied spares.