Region

BEIRUT — Syrian rebels and activists have launched a second “revolution” nearly three years into the uprising against President Bashar Assad, this time against a powerful Al Qaeda affiliate accused of brutal abuses.

Battles have raged for two days across northern Syria since the newly formed Army of Mujahedeen declared war on the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), with two massive rebel alliances joining the battle against the extremist group.

“The revolution has returned to its true path, and the rays of the sun have started to shine on Syria,” Ibrahim Al Idelbi, an activist from the war-torn country’s northwest with close ties to the rebels, wrote on his Facebook page.

“January 3, 2014: The revolution against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant begins,” wrote coastal Latakia’s Ammar, also on Facebook.

Activists and rebels have long accused ISIL of imposing a reign of terror on areas under its control, including public executions and the kidnapping, torture and assassination of rival rebels and civilians.

Some have gone so far as to accuse the group of colluding with the Assad regime to tarnish the image of the initially peaceful uprising and deter Western nations from intervening more forcefully on the rebels’ behalf.

The latest fighting appeared to have been ignited by the torture and murder this week of Dr Hussein Al Sleiman, known as Abu Rayyan, a popular medic.

‘People have had enough’

An activist in Idlib who goes by the name Abu Leyla said ISIL “only benefits the Assad regime”, which has long insisted that all its opponents — peaceful activists and rebels alike — are “terrorists”.

“They have taken over roads from local fighters and then withdrawn, opening the way to the army. They take over border crossings to control arms shipments for the rebels. People have had enough,” Abu Leyla said.

Aron Lund, an expert on Syria’s insurgency, said ISIL’s vision of itself, not as a mere rebel group but as a nascent Islamic state governed by a harsh interpretation of Sharia law, has alienated other rebel groups, including less radical Islamists.

“We see what the other groups say — that they’ve given ISIL one chance after another, but that they keep burning their bridges,” said Lund, editor of the Syria in Crisis website of the Carnegie Endowment.

The recently formed Islamic Front and the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, two broad alliances that bring together tens of thousands of opposition fighters, both condemned ISIL on Friday.

“We call on ISIL to withdraw immediately from Atareb [in northern Syria] ... and remind them that those who freed Atareb [from Assad’s regime] are those you are fighting today,” said the Islamic Front, Syria’s largest rebel alliance.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group that relies on a network of sources inside Syria, said at least 36 ISIL members and supporters have been killed and another 100 have been captured by rebels.

However, the group’s setbacks in Syria came as it advanced in neighbouring Iraq, seizing the city of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in the volatile Anbar province.

Syrian protesters took to the streets on Friday in demonstrations against ISIL that recalled the early days of protest against Assad. In Aleppo, they cried: “Free Syrian Army forever! Crush ISIL and Assad!”

The main opposition Syrian National Coalition on Saturday endorsed the fight against “the authoritarian repression” and “Al Qaeda extremism” of ISIL.

ISIL supporters, meanwhile, accused the other rebels of betraying the group, with one supporter calling the activists “mercenaries” on Twitter and another saying: “To those of you who stay silent in the face of injustices against ISIL, you’re next.”

‘Syria and extremism don’t mix’

Assad has insisted from the start of the Arab Spring-inspired uprising that he is fighting against foreign terrorists, but dissidents say his regime has largely ignored ISIL while going after peaceful activists and more moderate rebels.

They often point to ISIL’s main headquarters in the eastern city of Raqa, which has been spared by the regime’s air force despite heavy bombing campaigns in other areas.

Salman Sheikh, a scholar at the Brookings Doha Centre, said the recent fighting made it clear that “Syria and extremism don’t mix” but that rebels opposed to both ISIL and Assad will need more international support to prevail.

To date, the West has done little to arm the rebels for fear that weapons may end up in the hands of jihadists.

“Many Syrians have given up on the outside world, and have felt the need, despite the risks, to recover their own revolution, alone,” Sheikh said.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM –– Israeli officials Friday denied claims by a former envoy that Israel had killed most of those behind bombings at its embassy and Jewish charity offices in Argentina in the 1990s, media said.

News website Ynet quoted foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor describing as “complete nonsense”, the allegation by Itzhak Aviran, Israel’s ambassador to Argentina from 1993 to 2000.

The July 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Charities Federation (AMIA) building in Buenos Aires killed 85 people. Hundreds were hurt in a bombing Argentina had said was masterminded by Iran.

Two years earlier, in March 1992, a car bombing in front of the Israeli embassy in the capital killed 29 and wounded 200 others.

“The large majority of those responsible are no longer of this world, and we did it ourselves,” Aviran told the Buenos Aires-based AJN Jewish news agency on Thursday.

“He is completely detached from the reality in Israel,” public radio’s website wrote, citing an unnamed Israeli diplomatic source. “There is no truth in what he says.”

Two decades after the blasts, those who instigated them have not been brought to justice.

Neither Carlos Menem, who was Argentina’s president from 1989 to 1999, nor his successor Fernando de la Rua and those who followed “did anything to get to the bottom of this tragedy”, Aviran told AJN.

“We still need an answer [from the Argentine government] on what happened,” he added. “We know who the perpetrators of the embassy bombing were and they did it a second time.”

Courts in Argentina have charged eight Iranians over the AMIA bombing and authorities are demanding their extradition. They include former defence minister Ahmad Vahidi and ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Argentine authorities also suspect Iran of being behind the 1992 bombing.

Iran has repeatedly denied any involvement in the attacks.

Argentina’s 300,000-strong Jewish community is the largest in Latin America.

BEIRUT –– A Saudi man suspected of leading an Al Qaeda-linked group has died in detention in Lebanon from kidney failure, a judicial source told AFP Saturday.

“Majid Al Majid, who suffered from kidney disease and was in poor health, has died,” the source said on condition of anonymity.

Majid was the suspected head of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, which claimed responsibility for an attack in November on the Iranian embassy in Beirut that killed 25 people.

A Lebanese minister this week told AFP that Majid had been arrested by army intelligence.

Saudi Arabia had hailed Majid’s detention, and the Iranian embassy in Beirut had requested access to the investigation into the double suicide bombing.

The attack on the embassy came amid rising tensions in Lebanon over the role of the Tehran-backed Shiite movement Hizbollah in the war in neighbouring Syria.

Hizbollah and Iran are allied with the Syrian regime, and Hizbollah has sent fighters to help battle the Sunni-led insurgency, which is supported by its opponents in Lebanon.

In claiming the embassy bombing, brigades member Sirajeddin Zreikat warned of more attacks in Lebanon if Hizbollah keeps sending troops to support Syrian President Bashar Assad.

In 2009, Lebanon sentenced Majid in absentia to life in prison for belonging to a different extremist group, the Al Qaeda-inspired Fatah Al Islam.

DUBAI –– Bahrain has named a Bahraini citizen who lives in Iran as a main suspect in what it called planned “terrorist acts” and said he and his collaborators had received training and other help from Tehran.

Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet, said last Monday it had foiled an attempt to smuggle arms and explosives, some made in Iran and Syria, into the country by boat.

The Gulf Arab kingdom has been rattled by bouts of unrest since February 2011, when protests led by members of its Shiite majority population demanded that the Sunni ruling family give up ultimate power to an elected parliament.

Bahrain’s chief prosecutor Osama Al Oufi, cited by the state BNA news agency, said the suspect behind the smuggling operation, Ali Mafoudh Al Moussawi, was accused of “planning to commit terrorist acts and planting explosives targeting vital installations, and sovereign and security locations”.

Moussawi recruited a number of people to be trained in Iran to carry out attacks and formed a group to smuggle the weapons and explosives into Bahrain, BNA said.

Several members of the group were arrested and confessed to having been trained by Iranians at camps for the Islamic Republic’s elite Revolutionary Guard, BNA said late on Thursday.

“The accused confessed that they had joined the group to... commit terrorist acts with religious motivations from their points of view,” Oufi said, according to BNA.

Other members of the group are still at large in Iran and Iraq, he said, adding that two of those arrested while trying to smuggle the arms spoke an Iraqi dialect of Arabic.

The Manama government, dominated for generations by the Sunni Muslim Al Khalifa family, accuses Bahrain’s opposition of having a Shiite sectarian agenda, and links to Tehran and to Lebanese Shiite militant group Hizbollah.

The opposition denies this, saying such allegations are a pretext for avoiding democratic reforms. Tehran also denies any link, but champions the cause of the opposition while Hizbollah has criticised Manama’s crackdown on Shiite protesters.

In February, Bahrain accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guard of setting up a militant cell to assassinate public figures in the Gulf Arab kingdom and attack its airport and government buildings.

Bahrain’s Shiite opposition groups suspended their participation in reconciliation talks with the government after the arrest of a senior member of Al Wefaq, the main opposition group, in September.

BEIRUT –– A statement in the name of the Al Qaeda-linked militant group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed responsibility on Saturday for a suicide bombing in the Hizbollah stronghold of southern Beirut that killed at least five people two days ago.

The purported ISIL claim, which also warned of further attacks, came in a statement responding to an offensive against the group by rival forces in northern Syria over the last two days in which dozens of people have been killed.

The statement said the fighting in Syria had been launched at a time when the Islamic State had “breached the borders and penetrated the security system of the Party of Satan in Lebanon” — an ironic reference to Hizbollah, whose name means Party of God in Arabic.

ISIL said it had “struck its stronghold in the so-called security zone in southern suburbs of Beirut on Thursday... in the first small installment of a heavy account that awaits these shameless criminals”.

If confirmed, it would be the first time that ISIL had claimed responsibility for an attack in Beirut, which has suffered a wave of bombings since last summer, mostly targeting Hizbollah and its allies.

Two suicide bombers struck the Iranian embassy in southern Beirut in November in an attack claimed by the Al Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam Brigades, whose leader died in a Lebanese military hospital on Saturday.

The army said Thursday’s attack had been carried out by a suicide bomber identified through DNA tests as Qutaiba Mohamad Al Satem. Lebanese media said Satem was a 19-year-old from Wadi Khaled, in north Lebanon close to the Syrian border.

FALLUJAH, Iraq — Iraq has lost Fallujah to Al Qaeda-linked fighters, a senior security official said on Saturday, putting militants who repeatedly battled American forces for the city back in control.

Parts of the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, west of Baghdad, have been held by militants for days, harkening back to the years after the 2003 US-led invasion when both were insurgent strongholds.

Fighting erupted in the Ramadi area Monday, when security forces removed the main anti-government protest camp set up after demonstrations broke out in late 2012 against what Sunni Arabs say is the marginalisation and targeting of their community.

Anger at the Shiite-led government among the Sunni minority is seen as one of the main drivers of the worst violence to hit Iraq in five years.

“Fallujah is under the control of ISIL,” a senior security official in Anbar province told AFP, referring to Al Qaeda-linked group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

However, the city’s outskirts were in the hands of local police, the official added.

An AFP journalist in Fallujah also said that ISIL seemed to be in control, with no security forces or Sahwa anti-Al-Qaeda militiamen visible on the streets.

In Ramadi, a witness said Iraqi special forces had deployed on Street 60, where ISIL militants were positioned the day before.

More than 100 people were killed on Friday in Ramadi and Fallujah, in the country’s deadliest single day in years.

Fourteen died in and near Ramadi on Monday and Tuesday, while later tolls were not immediately clear.

Hundreds of gunmen, some bearing the black flags often flown by jihadists, gathered at outdoor weekly Muslim prayers in central Fallujah on Friday, a witness said.

One went to where the prayer leader had stood, and said: “We announce that Fallujah is an Islamic state and call you to stand by our side.”

Fallujah was the target of two major assaults after the 2003 invasion, in which American forces saw some of their heaviest fighting since the Vietnam war.

American troops fought for years, aided by Sunni tribesmen in the Sahwa militia forces from late 2006, to wrest control of Anbar from militants.

Militant power rising

US forces suffered almost one-third of their total Iraq fatalities in Anbar, according to independent website icasualties.org.

But two years after US forces withdrew from the country, the power of militants in the province is again rising.

Clashes erupted in the Ramadi area on Monday as security forces tore down the sprawling anti-government protest camp.

The violence then spread to Fallujah, and a subsequent withdrawal of security forces from areas of both cities cleared the way for ISIL to move in.

ISIL is the latest incarnation of an Al Qaeda affiliate that lost ground from 2006, as Sunni tribesmen and former insurgents allied with US troops against jihadists in a process that began in Anbar and came to be known as the “Awakening”.

But the extremist group has made a striking comeback following the US withdrawal and the outbreak of Syria’s civil war in 2011.

Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Centre, said its “strength and territorial control and influence have been expanding in Anbar for some time”, although mainly in rural desert areas.

The Ramadi protest camp operation pushed Sunni tribes into conflict with the government, and ISIL “has ridden this wave of popular Sunni anger”, Lister said.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki had long sought the closure of the protest camp, dubbing it a “headquarters for the leadership of Al Qaeda”.

But its removal has caused a sharp decline in the security situation.

And while the closure has removed a physical sign of Sunni Arab grievances, the perceived injustices that underpinned the protest have not been addressed.

Violence in Iraq last year reached a level not seen since 2008, when it was just emerging from a brutal period of sectarian killings.

Sunni anger helped fuel the surge in unrest, boosting recruitment for militant groups and decreasing cooperation with security forces, while the civil war in Syria also played a role, experts say.