Region

Rabat — Hundreds of lawyers have registered to defend two women who went on trial in Morocco on Monday accused of "gross indecency" for wearing dresses considered provocative, an activist said.

The women were arrested in the southern city of Agadir in mid-June after walking through a marketplace in the dresses, sparking anger among passers-by in the conservative Muslim kingdom.

The verdict is to be delivered on July 13, said Fouzia Assouli, head of women's rights organisation LDDF.

The two women, hairdressers aged 23 and 29, were charged with "indecent exposure" for which they could face up to two years in prison.

They have been backed by hundreds of lawyers, many of whom appeared in court on Monday, said Assouli.

"Five hundred lawyers registered to defend the two women, but because of restricted space in the courtroom, only 200 were able to attend" the hearing, she told AFP.

The lawyers took turns to put forward arguments in the case, she said.

One of them, Sibai Bakar, said the trial was a "chance for our country to amend its laws to conform with its commitments to human rights and especially individual freedoms".

Rights organisations have denounced the trial and protests are to be held later this week in Agadir and in Morocco's commercial capital Casablanca in support of the two women.

In the police report, the women were said to have been wearing clothes that were "too tight".

Article 483 of Morocco's penal code states that anyone found guilty of committing an act of "public obscenity" such as "gross indecency" can be jailed for between a month and two years.

The case comes amid growing calls for "morality" to be respected in Morocco, which has been frequently criticised by international groups for rights abuses.

MADRID — Spanish police on Tuesday arrested a woman in the Canary Islands on suspicion of recruiting adolescent girls to join the Daesh terror group in Syria, the interior ministry said.

The Spanish woman, a convert to Islam, radicalised the young women and aided their travel, the ministry said in a statement. Once the girls reached Syria they were sexually exploited and made to do domestic and hospital work, it said.

The woman, who was arrested on the holiday resort island of Lanzarote, had direct contact with a member of Daesh in Syria, who gave her information on how to recruit and send women to that country, the ministry said.

The arrest comes amid a crackdown on Islamist activities by Spanish authorities.

Also on Tuesday, police arrested a suspected Algerian militant at Barcelona airport as he made a connection flight, the ministry said. The man, who had fought in Syria, was wanted by Belgian police for terrorist crimes and was in transit from Algeria to an unnamed European country.

Spain has arrested 48 people this year in relation to Islamist militant activities, including Tuesday's arrests, and is working to prevent radicalised young Muslims joining armed groups in Iraq or Syria or attacking targets at home. 

SANAA — Two deadly car bombs hit the capital and a southern city in Yemen on Tuesday, state news agency Saba reported, a day after air strike and clashes killed almost 200 people nationwide.

One of the explosives-laden cars detonated near a hospital in downtown Sanaa, which the news agency controlled by Yemen's dominant Houthi group said killed and injured "numerous" people, while another killed around 10 people in Al Bayda, capital of a province in the country's battle-weary south.

Daesh in Yemen has claimed responsibility for a string of recent deadly attacks against the Shiite Muslim group which runs the capital, calling them apostates deserving death.

Saudi-led coalition air strikes and clashes killed at least 176 fighters and civilians in Yemen on Monday, residents and media run by the Houthi movement said, the highest daily toll since the Arab air offensive began more than three months ago.

The United Nations has been pushing for a halt to air raids and intensified fighting that began on March 26. More than 3,000 people have been killed since then as the Arab coalition tries stop the Houthis spreading across the country from the north.

The Iran-allied Shiite Houthis say they are rebelling against a corrupt government, while local fighters say they are defending their homes from Houthi incursions. Sunni Saudi Arabia says it is bombing the Houthis to protect the Yemeni state.

As fighting has raged across Yemen's south, the conflict has taken on a sectarian tinge, pitting the Shiite Houthis against local Sunni fighters who in many places fight alongside hardline Al Qaeda militants, who also revile the Houthis.

‘Collapsing’

On Monday, about 63 people were killed in air strikes on Amran province in the north, among them 30 people at a market, Houthi-controlled state media agency Saba said.

In the same province, about 20 fighters and civilians were killed at a Houthi checkpoint outside the main city, also named Amran, about 50km northwest of the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, local residents said.

Arab alliance warplanes also killed about 60 people at a livestock market in the town of Al Foyoush in the south.

Also in the south, residents reported a further 30 killed in a raid they said apparently targeted a Houthi checkpoint on the main road between Aden and Lahj. They said 10 of the dead were Houthi fighters.

Tribal sources in the central desert province of Marib said about 20 Houthi fighters and soldiers fighting alongside them were killed in air raids and gunbattles with tribal fighters, who support Yemen's president in exile Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

On Tuesday, UN envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed continues meetings with Houthi officials in Sanaa to try to broker a ceasefire to allow aid deliveries. One Houthi official said Monday's attacks had dealt a blow to peace efforts.

LONDON — The majority of children living in areas of Gaza hardest-hit during last year's conflict are showing signs of severe emotional distress and trauma, including frequent bed wetting and nightmares, a global children's charity said on Monday.

A ceasefire last August ended 50 days of fighting between Gaza fighters and Israel, in which health officials said more than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed. Israel put the number of its dead at 67 soldiers and six civilians.

Israeli air strikes and shelling hammered the densely populated Gaza Strip, dominated by the Islamist Hamas movement, causing widespread destruction of homes, schools and other buildings.

Hamas and other groups launched thousands of rockets and mortar bombs from the Palestinian enclave into Israel. 

Some 551 children were killed in Gaza and 3,436 were injured during the conflict, while an estimated 1,500 lost their parents, according to a report by Save the Children.

More than 70 per cent of children in the worst-affected areas of Gaza suffer from regular nightmares and bed wetting and live in fear of further fighting, while half do not want to attend school because they are afraid to leave home, the charity said.

"We saw our home being destroyed. I was crying because we have memories and dreams there, from the day of our birth. My memories, pictures, clothes, toys ... everything is gone. I can't live, I only feel pain," a 12-year-old girl told the charity.

Mental trauma

Homelessness and repeated exposure to violence, coupled with soaring unemployment for parents and limited mental health support, have prevented children from recovering from the mental trauma of war, according to Save the Children.

Around 100,000 people in Gaza are still homeless a year on from the conflict, while major reconstruction of health facilities, water networks and schools has yet to begin, the charity said.

Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip after the Islamist movement Hamas won power there in elections in 2006, and the flow of reconstruction materials into the territory has been greatly restricted since the end of the 2014 conflict.

So slow has the influx of goods been that the United Nations last month said it could take 30 years to repair the damage.

The continued blockade and threat of renewed conflict has made it difficult for children in Gaza to live normal lives, according to Save the Children.

"Many children in Gaza have now lived through three wars in the past seven years, the last one notable for its brutality. They are emotionally and, in some cases, physically shattered," Save the Children CEO Justin Forsyth said in a statement.

Of the 1.8 million people living in Gaza — a population growing by 50,000 a year — nearly two-thirds are dependent on aid in some form or another. It is the United Nation's longest-running relief operation, set up in 1949. 

BAGHDAD — A bomb fell from an Iraqi Sukhoi warplane and exploded in eastern Baghdad on Monday because of a "technical problem", killing at least eight people and wounding 17, officials said.

"One of the bombs became stuck because of a technical problem, and during its [the aircraft's] return to base it fell on... houses in Baghdad Jadida," security spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan said.

The pilot tried six times to drop the bomb, which became stuck while he was carrying out strikes against the Daesh terror group, but was unable to dislodge it "mechanically or manually," the defence ministry said in a statement.

But the bomb came loose as the plane overflew Baghdad to land at its base, the ministry said.

The governor of Baghdad province, Ali Al Tamimi, called for the Rasheed air base, where the plane was bound, to be moved to a non-residential area.

Tamimi said he contacted the air force and was told the plane was returning from the Haditha area in Anbar province, which is surrounded by Daesh.

The explosion ripped through small houses in Baghdad Jadida, tearing down walls, smashing roofs and leaving bricks and other rubble piled in the street.

"Our house was destroyed," said Ali Jassem, a 27-year-old interior ministry employee.

Jassem said that if an accidental bombing can happen in an area where there is no fighting, "God knows the extent of the events happening" in combat zones.

Iraq received Sukhoi Su-25 jets from Russia and Iran last year as it sought to bolster its fledgling air force to combat Daesh, which overran large parts of the country.

The Su-25s are robust aircraft designed for ground attack missions, but Iraq's Sukhoi fleet is made up of ageing planes that have seen heavy use as Baghdad's forces battle to push the jihadists back.

The US agreed to sell Baghdad 36 F-16 warplanes, but none have been delivered to Iraq so far.

The first batch of the jets has instead been sent to Arizona, where Iraqi F-16 pilots are training.

One of the pilots, Brigadier Rasid Mohammed Sadiq, was killed in a crash during an aerial refuelling exercise at the end of June.

BEIRUT — Daesh militants stormed a Syrian town held by Kurdish-led forces near Raqqa city on Monday, part of a wider offensive by the militants two days after their de facto capital was hit by some of the heaviest US-led air strikes in the conflict.

The Kurdish YPG militia said it was fighting to expel Daesh militants who had attacked the town of Ain Issa, which was only captured from them two weeks ago with aerial support from the US-led military alliance.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which reports on the war, said Daesh forces had taken the town and areas around it some 50km north of Raqqa city. Air strikes at the weekend destroyed seven bridges over waterways in Raqqa, which is bordered to the south by the Euphrates River, it said.

Monday’s attack on Ain Issa was part of a coordinated Daesh offensive on YPG positions that also targeted the northeastern province of Hasakeh, bordering Turkey to the north and Iraq to the south, YPG spokesman Redur Xelil said.

The YPG has been the only notable partner to date on the ground in Syria for the US-led alliance battling to eliminate Daesh in Syria and northern Iraq, where the group has declared a “caliphate” to rule over all Muslims.

Ain Issa, one of the YPG-held areas targeted on Monday, sits on a major east-west highway that runs all the way from Aleppo in the west to the Iraqi city of Mosul.

YPG-led forces said they had captured Ain Issa on June 23 in part of an offensive that drove deep into Daesh’s stronghold of Raqqa province. They also said they had captured the northern town of Tel Abyad at the Turkish border.

The World Food Programme and local partners delivered 2,000 food rations to Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen families in Tel Abyad last Thursday, enough to last 10,000 people for a month, the UN agency said. Daesh’s retreat allowed access to the area for the first time in more than eight months, it said.

In the last two days, Daesh militants have attacked YPG-held positions near the northeastern city of Hasaka, which is divided between government and YPG control and in the Jabal Abdul Aziz mountain range southwest of the city, Nasir Haj Mansour, a Kurdish official in Hasaka province, said.

Hasaka is important in the battle against Daesh for reasons including its location at the border with territory controlled by the group in Iraq.

The observatory said Daesh fighters had seized villages from YPG control in the Jabal Abdul Aziz area. It said the Daesh offensive stretched all the way from Hasaka province in the north east to the town of Sarin in the north western Aleppo province.

DUBAI/ADEN — Yemen's exiled government said on Monday it expects a deal shortly on a humanitarian ceasefire that would run through the Eid Al Fitr holiday later this month, as air strikes by Saudi-led warplanes killed more than 40 people.

The United Nations has been pushing for a halt to fighting and air raids that have killed nearly 3,000 people in Yemen since March when a Saudi-led coalition intervened against Houthi forces in a bid to restore President Abed Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The government, exiled in Riyadh, said talks were focused on implementing an April UN resolution calling for the Iranian-allied Houthis to quit cities seized since September and for aid supplies to be sent to stricken Yemeni civilians.

"We are now in consultations for guarantees to ensure the success of the truce," Hadi spokesman Rajeh Badi told Reuters.

"The mechanism we presented to implement [the UN resolution] demanded real guarantees to ensure aid is delivered to those who need it," he said, noting that talks were under way to "lift the deliberate siege on Aden, Taiz, Lahj and Dhalea".

Major cities in central and southern Yemen have been racked by heavy fighting between the Houthis and a patchwork of military, regional and tribal forces allied with Hadi.

Badi said a sought-after "humanitarian pause" would last through the end of the three-day Eid, due to start on July 17.

The Houthis have also signalled readiness to honour a truce.

Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam said last week in a Facebook post he had discussed the matter with UN Yemen envoy Ould Cheikh Ahmed in Muscat, Oman. Cheikh Ahmed flew to Sanaa on Sunday for talks with the Houthis.

Humanitarian crisis

The United Nations last week designated the war in Yemen as a Level 3 humanitarian crisis, its most severe category, and the United States and the European Union have endorsed calls for a humanitarian suspension of hostilities.

On Friday, the United Nations alerted aid groups that a truce could start soon and advised them to be ready to start shipping aid. The United Nations engineered a five-day humanitarian ceasefire in May but aid groups said it did not last long enough to cover all of Yemen's needs.

In southern Yemen, a bombing run by Saudi-led warplanes killed more than 40 people at a livestock market in the town of Al Foyoush, on the road between the major port of Aden and the province of Lahj, the Houthi-run Saba news agency reported.

Local residents said the strike, apparently targeting a nearby Houthi checkpoint, killed 30 people, including 10 members of the group, while the rest were civilians.

The Houthi-run agency said 42 people in all had died in Saudi-led strikes across the country on Monday.

Overnight on Sunday, Saudi-led military planes destroyed the main headquarters of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh's General People's Congress party in Sanaa, a senior Party official and residents said.

Saleh is an ally of the Houthi group and still enjoys the loyalty of much of the armed forces more than four years after being forced to step down by mass “Arab Spring” protests.

On Sunday, at least five civilians were killed when shells fired by Houthi forces stationed north of Aden landed on a kindergarten in Mansoura district used to house displaced Yemenis from the port city, residents said.

Local fighters also said they killed up to 30 Houthi combatants in an area known as Al Basateen, north of Aden, on Sunday. It was not immediately possible to confirm the report.

BAGHDAD — A Daesh militant blew up an explosive-laden bulldozer near Haditha, killing seven Iraqi soldiers in one of a wave of bomb attacks on the northwestern town on Monday, a police source said.

Haditha and its nearby dam lie in one of the few parts of the huge western province of Anbar still under the control of Iraq's Shiite-led government forces, which were driven out of the provincial capital Ramadi in May.

Security services said they fired on and destroyed four other vehicles believed to be rigged with explosives near the town, before they could reach their targets. The coordinated assault reflected an escalation of Daesh operations in the final days of the holy month of Ramadan.

In a statement two weeks ago, Daesh spokesman Abu Mohammad Adnani called for increased attacks during Ramadan, and specifically mentioned Haditha.

A car bomb also exploded on Monday in the town of Jubba, about 30km southeast of Haditha, close to the Ain Al Asad Air Base where US forces have been training Sunni Muslim fighters from Anbar to take on Daesh.

A police source said seven soldiers were killed.

The Sunni Muslim province of Anbar is a stronghold of Daesh militants who control swathes of Iraq and Syria, including the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and the Syrian city of Raqqa, capital of their self-declared caliphate.

In Iraq, the Islamist militants have been driven out of the city of Tikrit and eastern province of Diyala, but have launched repeated strikes to retake lost ground in the refinery town of Baiji, north of Tikrit.

Army troops and fighters from the mainly Shiite Muslim Hashd Shaabi militias — backed by a US-led air campaign — have stepped up their counteroffensive in Anbar, cutting off a northern supply route to Daesh-held Fallujah as they tighten an attempted siege of the city, just 40km west of Baghdad.

A security source in Anbar said security forces recaptured a bridge north of Ramadi on Monday in an attack which killed 14 Daesh fighters.

In northeast Iraq, Daesh fighters launched an attack early on Monday against Kurdish peshmerga forces in the village of Murah, near the city of Kirkuk. A Kurdish police officer said peshmerga fighters, backed by air strikes, repelled the attack at around dawn after five hours of fighting.

A statement issued in the name Daesh said the Islamists had taken one peshmerga fighter prisoner, showing a photograph of a man with blood spattered on his shirt and face.

Kurdish forces later drove around with the bodies of dead militants splayed on the bonnets of their armoured vehicles. 

VIENNA — A dispute over UN sanctions on Iran's ballistic missile programme and a broader arms embargo were among issues holding up a nuclear deal between Tehran and six world powers on Monday, the day before their latest self-imposed deadline.

"The Iranians want the ballistic missile sanctions lifted. They say there is no reason to connect it with the nuclear issue, a view that is difficult to accept," one Western official told Reuters. "There's no appetite for that on our part."

Iranian and other Western officials confirmed this view. The foreign ministers of the six powers — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — met on Monday with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif — and were expected to meet again soon — to try to strike a deal by Tuesday night.

"The Western side insists that not only should it [Iran's ballistic missile programme] remain under sanctions, but that Iran should suspend its programme as well," an Iranian official said.

"But Iran is insisting on its rights and says all the sanctions, including on the ballistic missiles, should be lifted when the UN sanctions are lifted."

Separately, a senior Iranian official told reporters in Vienna on condition of anonymity that Tehran wanted a United Nations arms embargo terminated as well. A senior Western diplomat said a removal was "out of the question".

The deal under discussion is aimed at curbing Tehran's most sensitive nuclear work for a decade or more, in exchange for relief from sanctions that have slashed Iran's oil exports and crippled its economy.

The United States and its allies fear Iran is using its civilian nuclear programme as a cover to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Iran says its programme is peaceful.

An agreement would be the most important milestone in decades towards easing hostility between the United States and Iran, enemies since Iranian revolutionaries captured 52 hostages in the US embassy in Tehran in 1979.

An Iranian official told the semi-official Tasnim news agency that the talks could continue until July 9, echoing some Western diplomats. A White House spokesman in Washington said it was "certainly possible" the deadline could slip.

A deal could reduce the chance of any military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, something Washington has refused to rule out, and the possibility of a wider war in the Middle East, where conflicts already rage in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Iranian leaders have warned that Iran would respond to any attack by targeting US interests and Israel.

"Israel is a fake temporary state. It's a foreign object in the body of a nation and it will be erased soon," the state news agency IRNA quoted former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as saying.

Iran refuses to recognise Israel, which is widely believed to be the Middle East's only nuclear power and has repeatedly described Iran's nuclear programme as a threat to its existence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the deal would "pave Iran's path to a nuclear arsenal".

"It will give them a jackpot of hundreds of billions of dollars with which to continue to fund their aggression and terror — aggression in the region, terror throughout the world," he told reporters in Jerusalem.

If there is a nuclear deal, it will include a draft UN Security Council resolution that, once adopted, would terminate all UN nuclear-related sanctions while simultaneously re-imposing other existing restrictions on Iran.

The six powers argue that removing those measures could further destabilise the region.

"Intense work is going on to try and conclude by the deadline," a senior Western diplomat said, referring to Tuesday.

A German diplomat, however, said "failure is not ruled out". Iranian state news agency IRNA quoted an Iranian official saying that "serious differences" remained after the ministerial meeting.

US President Barack Obama must submit the deal to Congress by July 9 in order to get an accelerated 30-day review. If it is submitted later, the Republican-led Congress would have 60 days to review it, providing more time for the deal to unravel.

In parallel with the powers' talks, delegates from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were due to hold talks with Iranian officials in Tehran on Monday, following a visit from IAEA chief Yukiya Amano last week.

CAIRO — Egypt's military killed 241 militants in the Sinai from July 1-5, the army said Monday, including militants from the Daesh group who launched spectacular attacks last week.

The military has poured troops and armour into the peninsula, where security forces have been fighting an Islamist insurgency since then army chief and now President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi ousted president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

On July 1, jihadists from Daesh launched blistering attacks in the North Sinai town of Sheikh Zuweid — the scene of regular militant attacks — in which dozens were killed.

The military said 21 soldiers were killed in those attacks, after several media outlets reported higher tolls from security officials.

In figures released on Monday by the army spokesman on his Facebook page, the military said its forces killed 241 militants between July 1 and 5.

Four wanted militants and 29 suspected militants were also arrested.

Sixteen crude bombs were detonated, while 26 cars and 28 motorbikes belonging to militants were destroyed over the same period, the army said.

On Facebook, the army also posted photographs of dead militants, some even displayed on military tanks.

On Saturday, Sisi made a surprise visit to North Sinai, where in an address to troops at a camp whose location was not disclosed he said the region was now "totally stable".

The jihadists say their attacks are in response to the bloody repression launched by the authorities after Morsi's ouster, which has seen at least 1,400 people killed and thousands more jailed.

Most of the attacks on the security forces are claimed by a group calling itself "Sinai Province".

Formerly known as Ansar Beit Al Maqdis, it changed its name when it pledged allegiance to Daesh last November.