Region

CAIRO — Egyptian authorities have arrested 13 members of the Muslim Brotherhood on suspicion of planting bombs around the Suez Canal to disrupt shipping, security sources said on Monday.

The waterway, the fastest shipping route between Europe and Asia, is a vital source of hard currency for Egypt, particularly since the 2011 uprising that toppled veteran autocrat Hosni Mubarak and scared off tourists and foreign investment.

Egypt's government has escalated rhetoric against the Brotherhood, which it regards as a terrorist group, since the assassination of the country's top prosecutor last week.

The security sources said the men formed a 13-member cell that included an employee at the Suez Canal Authority.

Prosecutors had ordered that they be detained for 15 days and said they had planted bombs in areas including sanitation and electricity facilities as well as on beaches, they said.

No one at the prosecutors' office was immediately available to comment.

The army toppled president Mohamed Morsi of the Brotherhood in 2013 following mass protests against his rule.

The Brotherhood says it is committed to peaceful activism designed to reverse what it calls a military coup, after former army chief, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi ousted Morsi, and then went on to become elected president.

Security forces cracked down hard on Morsi's supporters after he was ousted, killing hundreds in the streets at Cairo protest camps and arresting thousands of others in what human rights groups described as a return to repression.

KUWAIT — Kuwait has detained 26 people suspected of involvement in a suicide bombing on a Shiite Muslim mosque last month that killed 27 people, a local newspaper reported on Monday, quoting the public prosecutor.

The June 26 attack by Daesh militants jolted Kuwait, raising the spectre of sectarian strife in the Gulf Arab oil exporting state. The attack prompted the government to declare it was at war with Islamist militants and that it would strike at cells believed to be on its soil.

The prosecutor, Dherar Al Asousi, said four women were among the 26 suspects detained for possible links to the attack, the Kuwaiti Arabic-language Al Qabs newspaper said. Asousi said the suspects had been detained for 10 days.

He said other suspects, including fighters with Daesh abroad, have been identified and that some of their relatives inside Kuwait have been charged in connection with the blast. Asousi gave no numbers and provided no further details.

Al Rai newspaper, another Arabic-language Kuwaiti daily, said last week that 10 suspects, among them Saudis, Kuwaitis and stateless residents of Kuwait, had been referred to the public prosecution, a move that indicates a criminal case has been opened.

Among those 10 are five principal suspects accused of helping the suicide bomber, a Saudi, to carry out the attack, the newspaper said.

Kuwaiti officials have said the attack was aimed at stirring up sectarian conflict in the majority Sunni Muslim emirate, where the two sects have traditionally coexisted in peace.

As authorities tightened security, parliament last Wednesday approved a law put forward by the interior ministry to create a DNA registry of Kuwaiti nationals and residents living in the Gulf state. 

BRUSSELS — The European Union's top prosecutor said Monday she has been told that smugglers' boats bringing migrants across the Mediterranean to Europe are also carrying Daesh militants.

Michele Coninsx, the head of the EU's judicial cooperation agency Eurojust, told reporters she received the information as part of the organisation's efforts to help EU nations jointly respond to illegal immigration, terrorism and cybercrime.

Coninsx said the agency's coordination efforts are ongoing and she couldn't divulge what information EU nations had provided.

She told The Associated Press it isn't yet clear what problem the reported infiltration of Islamist militants may pose for European law enforcement. But she said groups like Daesh are also using proceeds from people trafficking to fund terrorism.

Eurojust, she said, is one of several EU agencies mobilised to shut down traffickers' operations.

"We're going after the criminals. We're going after the money," said Coninsx, a career prosecutor from Belgium who is also Eurojust's chief official for terrorism investigations.

"It is an alarming situation because we see obviously that these smugglings are meant to sometimes finance terrorism, that these smugglings are used sometimes to have and ensure exfiltrations and infiltrations of members of Daesh."

Paying thousands of dollars for a shot at reaching Europe, tens of thousands of people have left Libya in unseaworthy and overcrowded boats or dinghies over the past two years. An unknown number have drowned. This year, about 70,000 migrants have been rescued, many by an EU-led naval operation.

Coninsx said an Italian official told Eurojust three weeks ago the flow of migrants has risen fivefold.

Often the smugglers mingle with the migrants in hopes they won't be caught — although dozens have been arrested in Sicily and other parts of southern Italy. 

CAIRO — Egypt's military launched air strikes and ground operations that killed 63 militants in North Sinai on Sunday, security sources said, as the country grapples with an increasingly ambitious insurgency based in the region.

The Sinai has recently witnessed some of the heaviest fighting between security forces and militants since the army toppled president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013.

Security sources said on Sunday troops killed the 63 in villages between the towns of Sheikh Zuweid and Rafah.

The army found four militant hideouts and attacked them with Apache helicopters and ground troops. It also attacked vehicles belonging to the militants, the security sources added.

Daesh’s Egypt affiliate, recently renamed Sinai Province, has killed hundreds of soldiers and police since Morsi's removal.

Though the vast peninsula has long been a security headache for Egypt and its neighbours, the removal of Morsi brought new violence that has grown into an Islamist insurgency that has spread out of the region.

On Monday, a car bomb in Cairo killed Egypt’s top prosecutor, the highest-profile official to die since the insurgency began.

Egyptian government officials have accused Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood of links to Sinai attacks. The Brotherhood says it is a peaceful movement that wants to reverse what it calls a military coup through street protests.

Egypt’s interior ministry said on Sunday it had arrested 12 Brotherhood members who had formed three cells with the intention of carrying out attacks on policemen, soldiers and military and police bases.

Also on Sunday, the prosecutors referred to trial 22 people charged with planting bombs near targets including the high court and Cabinet buildings, state news agency MENA reported.

President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi has also expressed concern about militants based in neighbouring Libya, where Egypt has launched air strikes on Daesh targets.

Gaza City — In the ruins of what used to be his home, Gaza Strip resident Rabah Abu Shanab reflects on what used to be — and what little hope remains.

"We were doing better a year ago," the 57-year-old said while sitting on a plastic chair in his living room, now just concrete slabs and twisted iron bars.

"The whole world was paying attention to Gaza, but today nobody cares."

This week marks one year since Israel's devastating war with Palestinian fighters in Gaza, and despite a tacit ceasefire that has largely held, there has been little reason for residents caught up in the conflict to believe their suffering will soon end.

Thousands of homes destroyed by Israeli strikes are yet to be rebuilt, a strict Israeli blockade and tightly controlled borders have added to Gazans' misery and the risk of yet another conflict remains a threat.

On top of that, internal tensions have seen Salafist extremists in Gaza challenge Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the territory, angry over its ceasefire with Israel and what they see as its lack of zeal in enforcing Islamic law.

Jihadists — and not Hamas — have claimed credit for recent rocket fire into Israel.

They have claimed links to the Daesh terror group, and whether or not there is any truth to such statements, their emergence has further complicated the task of setting Gaza on a path to recovery. 

'Another conflict becomes inevitable' 

Residents find themselves trapped in the besieged coastal enclave, which has seen three wars in six years and where 39 per cent of the 1.8-million population lives below the poverty line.

Last year's 50-day war was the longest and deadliest of the three, with 2,251 Palestinians killed, including 551 children, compared with 73 people on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers.

“I think what is different after this last conflict than even after the previous two was a much higher sense of hopelessness, that there really was not a feeling that the conditions were going to improve,” said Robert Turner, the director of operations in Gaza for UN relief agency UNRWA.

“We have not addressed any of the underlying causes, so I think conventional wisdom would be that another conflict becomes inevitable at some point.”

Indirect talks between Hamas and Israel’s right-wing government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the aim of shoring up the ceasefire — and potentially easing the blockade that has been in part blamed for the slow progress in rebuilding — have not convinced war-weary residents.

For Yahya Zaza, 20, “war has become normal for us”.

‘Don’t have any future’

“We know that we don’t have any future,” he said of the crowded territory where a population of graduates remains frustratingly unemployed amid the nine-year blockade.

Mohamed Sendawi, 18, spends his days collecting rubble from the war to sell to recyclers, filling his cart to earn 10 shekels (two euros, $3). He said he does it “to feed his brothers and sisters”.

A recent poll showed that one in two Gazans wants to leave the territory, a sentiment that has also led to tragedy, with many residents seeking to emigrate illegally drowning in the Mediterranean. Israel and Egypt allow few people through the land borders they control.

When the conflict finally ended last year, Hamas proclaimed “victory” despite the destruction, while Israel said it had fulfilled its objectives of destroying tunnels dug by militants and halting rocket fire.

Gazans today sneer at such claims of victory in a war that wiped out entire families, while rocket fire has continued to occur and Islamist militants have shown off their tunnels to the news media.

Political scientist Mukhaimer Abu Saada said it is difficult to name any significant gains for either side, apart from the fact that “now the parties are aware that there is no military solution and that they will have to sit down and talk”.

But even recent indirect contacts between Hamas and Israel have led to fallout.

The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas chafed at being excluded from the talks, and Abbas has sought to remake the Palestinian unity government put in place last year in an attempt to end a years-long split with Hamas.

‘Treated like guinea pigs’ 

Hamas official Ahmed Yousef said: “All the ingredients are there for an explosion: reconstruction has not begun and the war showed that it was not a solution since the situation is worse than before.”
It has created a vacuum that the jihadists have sought to fill, and signs of danger are apparent. Daesh fighters are battling Egyptian soldiers just over the border in Sinai, and some Gazans have left to fight in Syria.

Before last year’s war, two-thirds of the Gaza population depended on food aid and more than 40 per cent was unemployed, said the UN’s Turner.

“None of that has improved,” he said. “For the reconstruction of homes, we have money for 200 homes... but we need to rebuild about 7,000.”

Rights activist Essam Younes said: “Gazans are being treated like guinea pigs: we are mixing humiliation with confinement and waiting to see the result.”

“The only thing that is sure is that it will be dangerous because people are increasingly edgy,” he said.

ADEN — Fighting gripped Yemen's second city Aden on Sunday as the UN envoy arrived in the rebel-held capital Sanaa to press efforts to broker a ceasefire.

Saudi-led warplanes bombed rebel positions, killing eight people, while rebel rocket fire killed six, including a child, officials said.

The dead from the Katyusha fire were Somali refugees who had sought shelter in a kindergarten, medics said.

Aden was the last refuge of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi before he fled to Saudi Arabia in March and has been a key battleground ever since.

In neighbouring Lahj province, Hadi loyalists attacked a rebel gathering, killing 11, military sources said.

They also attacked the rebel-held Al Anad air base, Yemen's largest. Eight rebels and two Hadi loyalists were killed, the sources said.

UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed arrived in Sanaa for talks with the rebels and their allies on his ceasefire plans.

He told reporters at the airport that he was hoping "rapidly to secure a humanitarian truce" which could pave the way for a "peaceful settlement of the crisis which has turned into a catastrophe".

On Wednesday, the United Nations declared Yemen a level three emergency, the highest on its scale.

BEIRUT — Syrian government forces backed by fighters from Lebanon's Hizbollah entered the town of Zabadani on Sunday in a bid to take the last rebel-held bastion along the Lebanese border.

Elsewhere, at least 30 people, including six civilians, were killed in some of the heaviest US-led air strikes yet on the Daesh terror group in Syria.

And the jihadist group carried out a double car bomb attack that killed 11 people in northwestern Hasakeh city, where regime forces have been fighting to fend off a Daesh assault.

Syrian state television and Hizbollah's Al Manar station announced the advance into Zabadani on Sunday, a day after a major operation against it began.

“Heroic army forces in cooperation with the Lebanese resistance took control of Al Jamaiyat neighbourhood in western Zabadani and Al Sultana neighbourhood in the east of the city,” state television said.

“Operations are continuing with dozens of terrorists killed and wounded.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said regime forces and Hizbollah had entered Zabadani and intense clashes were under way in its east and west.
Army helicopters dropped at least 22 barrel bombs on the town and were also shelling it heavily, said the Britain-based monitoring group.

At least 14 pro-government and Hizbollah fighters had been killed in the past 24 hours, along with at least 12 rebels and a civilian, it added.

The official SANA news agency said it had killed “dozens of terrorists”, a term the regime uses to describe its armed opponents.

Last rebel border bastion

Zabadani was one of the first towns to fall into rebel hands, in early 2012, and is now the opposition’s only remaining stronghold along the Lebanese border.

The town is strategically important for the regime in part because of its proximity to the capital and the highway that runs from Damascus to Beirut.

Zabadani has been under siege for more than a year, and most of the civilians have already fled, according to activists.

Alwan, an activist from Zabadani who now lives outside Syria, said there were still thousands of civilians in the east of the town and many wounded people.

“I don’t know what their fate will be,” he told AFP.

The town is in the Qalamun region, once an opposition stronghold but mostly recaptured by the regime and Hizbollah in a campaign between late 2013 and April 2014.

Elsewhere in Syria, the US-led coalition said it carried out 18 air strikes against Daesh’s de facto Syrian capital of Raqqa, destroying vehicles and bridges.

The observatory said the raids killed at least 30 people, among them six civilians including a child.

The US-led coalition said the strikes were some of its heaviest since it began bombing Daesh in Syria in September last year.

“The coalition conducted multiple air strikes in northern Syria to deny Daesh’s freedom to manoeuvre,” coalition chief-of-staff Brigadier General Kevin Killea said in a statement.

“These strikes provide the forces on the ground the opportunity to act decisively against Daesh.”

Daesh bombs kill 11

The raids came after Daesh released a video Saturday showing boys and teenagers killing 25 Syrian soldiers in the ancient amphitheatre in the city of Palmyra.

The execution-style murders had been reported earlier, in the days after Daesh seized the city from government forces on May 21, but the video was the first evidence of the killings.

Palmyra’s ancient ruins are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and there has been concern Daesh might seek to destroy its heritage, as it has done elsewhere in Syria and Iraq.

In northwestern Syria, the observatory said at least 11 regime forces were killed in a double car bomb attack on a checkpoint in the city of Hasakeh.

State television had reported the attack, saying it was near a power station but giving no toll.

Daesh launched a new assault against Hasakeh last month, seizing control of two districts from government forces, which share security responsibility in the city with Kurdish fighters.

The jihadists have been forced back in some areas, but fighting has continued.

More than 230,000 people have been killed in Syria since anti-government protests erupted in March 2011, precipitating a civil war pitting pro-regime forces, rebels and jihadist groups against each other.

GAZA CITY — Hamas authorities on Sunday reopened the offices of the Gaza Strip's only mobile telephone company, five days after closing them on accusations of tax-dodging.

A statement from Attorney General Ismail Jaber's office said that he had "ordered the reopening" of telecom provider Jawwal in Gaza City, but it did not give reasons.

"All Jawwal offices and stores have reopened," a company executive told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Jawwal provides a lifeline to the outside world for Gazans hemmed in on all sides by an Israeli blockade and Egyptian border crossing restrictions.

Its telecom services were not interrupted during the closure of its premises.

Police in the coastal territory, which Hamas controls, shut Jawwal's Gaza City office on Tuesday and posted notices saying the closure for "tax evasion" was on Jaber's orders.

Jawwal, one of the largest players in the Palestinian private sector, has its head office in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority — Hamas' rival — is also headquartered.

Jawwal director Ammar Al Eker said in a statement on Sunday that his company "always met its fiscal and financial obligations".

Some observers have said that Jawwal is probably paying taxes to the Palestinian Authority and not the Hamas authorities in Gaza.

A years-long split between Hamas and the PA, which is dominated by President Mahmoud Abbas' Fateh Party, has caused previous financial crises. 

Last year, Hamas closed banks for several days after a dispute with the PA over wages.

CAIRO — Egypt may take legal action against journalists who report "false" military death tolls in jihadist attacks that contradict official statements, if a new anti-terrorism law is approved, officials told AFP Sunday.

President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who called for tougher laws following the assassination of his top prosecutor last week, is expected to approve the law within days. The Cabinet has already approved the draft law.
The country's press syndicate has denounced the law, saying it amounted to censorship.

Article 33 of the draft law, published in several Egyptian newspapers, stipulates a minimum two-year sentence for "reporting false information on terrorist attacks that contradicts official statements".

The law also opens up the possibility of deportation and house arrest.

Two officials, including Justice Minister Ahmed Al Zind, confirmed the wording of the law.

Zind said the law was prompted in part by coverage of Daesh group attacks on Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula on July 1.

The military spokesman said 21 soldiers and more than 100 militants were killed in the attacks and ensuing clashes, after security officials said dozens more soldiers had been killed.

The government has accused foreign media who reported the higher death toll of exaggerating troop casualties.

"The day of the attack in Sinai some sites published 17, then 25, then 40, then 100 dead," Zind said.

Zind said such reports affected the "morale" of the country.

"There was no choice but to impose some standards," he said. "The government has the duty to defend citizens from wrong information."
"I hope no one interprets this as a restriction on media freedoms. It's just about numbers [in death tolls]," he said.

"If the army says 10 died, don't report 20."
The country has been fighting a jihadist insurgency in Sinai since the army, then led by Sisi, overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

The attacks have killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers, while more than 1,400 people, mostly Morsi supporters, have been killed in a crackdown on protests.

Much of the media in Egypt has been supportive of the government, but the country's Journalists Syndicate condemned what it called "new restrictions on press freedoms" in the draft law.

"This is a dangerous article that violates the constitution," the union said in a statement.
"It violates the reporter's right to seek information from various sources... it allows the executive authorities to act as censors, and the judges of truth," it said.

The government has been accused of stifling press freedoms over the past two years.

In a report last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists said reporters faced "unprecedented threats" in Egypt, with a record number behind bars, mostly for links to Morsi's blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood.

BAGHDAD — Daesh suicide bombers and fighters attacked the centre of Iraq's northern oil refinery town of Baiji overnight, forcing the army and Shiite fighters to pull back, military sources and the local mayor said on Sunday.

The town of Baiji and its refinery — Iraq's largest — have been a battlefront for more than a year. The hardline Islamists seized the town in June 2014 as they swept through much of northern Iraq towards the capital Baghdad.

Control of Baiji neighbourhoods has changed hands many times during the conflict. The latest Daesh offensive comes after authorities said they controlled nearly the whole town and expected to drive insurgents from the refinery within days.

The militants attacked around 8pm (1700 GMT) on Saturday with two suicide car bombings. The blasts were followed by fierce clashes that lasted until midnight and drove the army and mainly Shiite Hashd Shaabi forces from the centre of town, two army colonels said.

Baiji mayor Mahmoud l Jabouri said there had been a pattern of withdrawals by Daesh fighters in the town followed by counter-offensives. "Their lethal weapons are suicide attacks and snipers, and this is why we have fighting back and forth."

Army officers said the army and Hashd groups were preparing a response. "Islamic State [Daesh] fighters are still holding positions in three neighbourhoods in Baiji and they are still receiving reinforcements," said one of the army colonels.

In Anbar province west of Baghdad, witnesses said two rockets hit a crowd in the Daesh-controlled provincial capital Ramadi on Saturday evening, killing at least 18 people.

They said a group of people had gathered after the daily Ramadan fast to play Muhaibis, a game where players have to identify a member of the opposing team who is hiding a ring.

"I heard a blast and saw fire coming from Dolphin Square. I ran to the place and saw vehicles carrying bodies and wounded covered with blood. They were innocent people playing a ring game; they were not making bombs," said Haj Thamir Ahmed, a Ramadi resident who lives nearby.

In northwest Baghdad, at least three people were killed and 11 wounded when a bomb went off near a restaurant in the mainly Shiite district of Shulaa on Sunday morning, police and medical sources said. Another two people were killed by a bomb in Hussainiya on the city's northern outskirts.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for those attacks, but statements in the name of Daesh said the group carried car bombings on Saturday evening in Baghdad and Balad Roz which killed 10 people.