Region

Tokyo — Japan, reeling from the murder of two nationals by Daesh extremists, will offer an extra $15 million in aid to fight terrorism in Middle East and Africa, a report said Sunday.

Japan hopes to demonstrate its resolve not to cave in to terrorism with the fresh assistance, which will be announced at a global counter-terrorism conference starting on Wednesday in Washington, the Sankei Shimbun said.

It said the money would be distributed through international organisations to affected regions, including countries bordering Syria and Iraq. Large parts of those countries are controlled by militants from Daesh terror group.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has come in for criticism over the timing of an earlier $200 million Japanese pledge to help refugees fleeing Daesh-controlled areas, and the comments he made.

Abe announced the $200 million aid in Egypt on January 17, saying Japan would "help curb the threat" of Daesh and give the money "for those countries contending with" the militants.

The announcement was followed by the hostage drama, with the militants demanding the same sum in exchange for a captured Japanese contractor and a journalist.

The militants later changed their demand to the release of a death row inmate from a Jordanian prison.

The militants then eventually announced the killing of the pair as well as a Jordanian airman, along with photos and videos.

BEIRUT — Heavy fighting in southern Syria has killed scores of pro-government and insurgent fighters in the past week, a group monitoring Syria's war said on Sunday, forecasting even fiercer violence as the weather clears.

Syria's army and allied combatants from Lebanon's Hizbollah launched a large-scale offensive in the region last week against insurgent groups, including Al Qaeda's Syria wing Al Nusra Front and non-jihadist rebels.

Southern Syria is one of the last areas where mainstream rebels opposing President Bashar Assad have a foothold. They have lost ground to hardline Islamist militants in the four-year conflict.

More than 50 rebels have been killed in the fighting, the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Rami Abdulrahman said 43 members of the Syrian army and allied groups had also died, including 12 officers.

"Now the weather is better there will be Syrian air strikes. With the air strikes they will move forward," he said.

State news agency SANA said Syrian forces had inflicted "heavy losses" on "terrorist groups" in Deraa on Sunday after killing many enemy fighters and destroying their vehicles the previous day.

Syrian officials were not immediately available for comment on Sunday. State media and Hizbollah's Al Manar channel have carried regular reports on the fighting in the south.

Abdulrahman, who tracks the war using sources on the ground, said around 5,000 pro-government troops were taking part in the offensive, which aims to take a triangle of rebel-held land from rural areas, southwest of Damascus to Deraa city to Quneitra.

Sources on both sides of the battlefront have said the offensive aims to shield Damascus, the capital, which is a short drive to the north. The insurgents made significant gains in the south in recent months, taking several army bases.

"The situation remains hit-and-run between us and regime forces," said Abu Gaiath, a spokesman for the rebel Alwiyat Seif Al Sham group. Its fighters are part of the "Southern Front" rebel alliance that has had support from states opposed to Assad.

Speaking via the Internet from inside Syria, he said fighting had calmed in the past two days but the military was aiming to encircle a village northeast of Quneitra and had captured towns and villages south of Damascus.

The observatory's Abdulrahman said 10 fighters on the government side had been executed after being accused of passing information to the enemy. He also said Al Nusra Front fighters had been killed in battle but exact numbers were not known.

Winter weather had curtailed fighting in the past few days and prevented air strikes, one of the army's most potent weapons against insurgents. Abdulrahman said the army and allied groups planned to involve 10,000 fighters in the offensive.

BAGHDAD — An international rights group said Shiite militias allied with Iraqi security forces have escalated a campaign of abuse against Sunni residents in recent months, as gunmen assassinated a prominent Sunni tribal leader during an ambush in a Shiite district in Baghdad.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement that the militiamen, who are part of the fight against Daesh terror group, have begun driving Sunni families from their homes, kidnapping or summarily executing them in some cases.

The report said the abuses are taking place mainly in areas that were seized from Daesh — which holds about a third of Iraq and Syria.

The militias — mainly volunteers who answered the call-to-arms from Shiite clerics — are growing more brutal, stoked by a desire for revenge against the Sunni extremists who have frequently butchered and attacked Shiites.

"Iraqi civilians are being hammered by ISIS [the English acronym for Daesh] and then by pro-government militias in areas they seize from ISIS," said Joe Stork, the deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch. "With the government responding to those they deem terrorists with arbitrary arrests and executions, residents have nowhere to turn for protection."

Meanwhile, police said Sunday that Qassim Sweidan Al Janabi, as well as his son and six bodyguards, were killed when their motorcade was attacked by gunmen in Baghdad's northern Shiite district of Shaab. The attack, which took place late Friday, could fuel the ongoing sectarian tensions in the country.

A group of prominent Sunni politicians met to discuss the attack and urged the government to issue a law that would incriminate the Shiite militias, said Sunni Parliament Speaker Salim Al Joubori in a statement issued on Sunday.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar Al Abadi, a Shiite, said that the perpetrators are aiming to "distract the security forces in the confrontation against the real enemy... that is Daesh and to create a rift in the political process”. 

Meanwhile, Saad Maan, spokesman for Iraq's ministry of interior, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that Iraqi security forces have arrested two relatives of Daesh leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.

Maan said Baghdadi's uncle Saleh Ibrahim and his niece's husband, Diaa Nouri Saadoun, were taken into custody in the Iraqi city of Samarra late Friday. He said both were found to have connections to the Sunni militant group and had intended to fight in Samarra, a Shiite holy city.

GAZA CITY — Middle East Quartet envoy Tony Blair on Sunday warned during a visit to the Gaza Strip of "another eruption" in the Palestinian enclave devastated from last summer's conflict with Israel.

"I'm extremely concerned that if you leave Gaza in the state it's currently in, you'll have another eruption, and violence, and then we're back in a further catastrophe, so we've got to stop that," he said.

Blair was making his first trip to Gaza since the July-August war between Israel and the territory's Islamist rulers Hamas.

The conflict killed about 2,200 Palestinians and 73 on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers, and left 100,000 Gazans homeless.

The United Nations has been taking efforts to speed up the delivery of material to rebuild damaged homes, with officials saying the pace has picked up after a slow start.

Britain's former premier also called for a rethink on how peace could be reached, two decades after the historic accord which was to have paved the way for a final agreement.

"So 20 years after Oslo we need a new approach to Gaza and a new approach to peace," Blair said.

"The problem in my view, having spent almost eight years in this role, is not as often thought, locking negotiators in a room long enough to make an agreement," he said.

"You can lock negotiators in a room for eternity and they can't make an agreement."

Blair also said that "the place to start with peace is actually Gaza, because if we're able to change the situation in Gaza, politically and economically, then we're able to do a lot of changes in the whole of the politics of this conflict".

The Quartet envoy called on Israel to open its crossings into the territory, and on Gaza to "open up and reconnect with the world", stressing that Palestinian reconciliation could only happen if it is "based on peace".

A unity deal between the West Bank-based Fateh, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas has faltered since its signing last April.

The Quartet has demanded that Hamas renounce violence against Israel and recognise past agreements signed with Israel, whose existence it does not accept.

Set up in Madrid in 2002, the Quartet is composed of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia.

TRIPOLI — A bomb exploded at an oil pipeline from Libya's El Sarir field on Saturday, halting flows to Hariga Port as the country struggles to restore crude exports battered by factional fighting.

In a separate incident, gunmen stormed government buildings in the coastal city of Sirte, forcing officials out at gunpoint and taking over administrative offices, television and radio stations, the state news agency said.

No more details were immediately available. Several Islamist groups are active in Sirte.

Libya is riven by conflict, with two rival governments operating their own armed forces and separate parliaments, nearly four years after the civil war that led to the overthrow and killing of leader Muammar Qadhafi.

The fighting also involves Islamist groups, former rebels, ex-Qadhafi troops and tribal and federalist factions often pursuing local causes.

No group claimed responsibility for Saturday's pipeline bombing. Oil infrastructure, ports and pipelines in the North African OPEC member state are often targets of attack.

Hariga oil terminal supervisor Rajab Abdulrasoul told Reuters on Saturday the bomb went off at around 5:00am.

"A bomb exploded at a pipeline carrying crude between El Sarir oil field and Hariga port," he said. "The firefighters are still trying to put out the fire. What happened is sabotage."

A spokesman for the National Oil Corporation said a tanker had been loading up with crude at Hariga. He said it could take up to three days to restore the pipeline.

Hariga had just reopened after a strike by guards there. The country's two main oil ports and nearby fields are still closed after clashes between rival armed groups trying to gain control of them.

Libya's oil production has fallen to around 350,000 barrels a day, a fraction of the 1.6 million bpd Libya used to pump before the NATO-backed 2011 uprising that ended Qadhafi's rule.

Two gunmen attacked Tripoli's Corinthia hotel last month, killing nine people, including five foreigners, in an attack claimed by militants who said they were loyal to the Daesh terrorist group.

Earlier this month, south of Sirte, gunmen killed 12 people, among them two Filipino and two Ghanaian nationals, after storming a remote oil field. Officials said most of the victims were beheaded or shot.

French and Libyan officials said Daesh militants were behind the attack on the oil field, in which France's Total has a stake, but which is operated by a Libyan company.

BAGHDAD — A Sunni tribal leader, his son and seven bodyguards were killed in Baghdad, a cousin told AFP Saturday, in an attack that could inflame sectarian tension in Iraq.

Sheikh Qassem Sweidan Al Janabi and most of his bodyguards were shot in the head, while son was killed by a bullet to the chest, said Abu Qusay, speaking from the cemetery where they were buried.

They were killed late Friday when unidentified gunmen attacked a three-vehicle convoy carrying Janabi and his nephew, lawmaker Zeid Al Janabi, late Friday, officials and security sources said earlier.

Janabi was later released but the tribal leader, seen as a moderate Sunni, as well as his son and at least six other people, mostly bodyguards, were killed, they had said.

"Gunmen manning a fake checkpoint stopped the convoy carrying MP Janabi and kidnapped all who were on board," a senior member of the lawmaker's staff said.

"They moved them to Sadr City, where they released the MP, then took the others and killed them. Their bodies were found next to Al Nida'a Mosque in northern Baghdad," he told AFP.

Sadr City is a vast Shiite neighbourhood in the north of the capital from which Iraq's powerful Shiite militias draw many of their recruits.

Abu Qusay told AFP by telephone that the convoy was ambushed as it made its way to Baghdad from Latifiyah, an area south of the capital.

‘Message to Sunnis’ 

Sheikh Janabi was found sitting in the back seat of one of the cars, his hands tied behind his back with his own belt and shot in the head, he said.

His son was shot in the chest and his body was found near the vehicle while most of the bodyguards had been shot in the head, he added.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the killings.

But Abu Qusay accused unnamed “armed militias backed by some sides of the government”, in an apparent reference to Shiite militias who have been helping Iraqi forces battle the Daesh group.

“People who carry state-issued weapons... and wear state-issued uniforms are behind the assassination,” he added.

The murders are a “message to any Sunni who speaks out in the defence of Sunnis or asks for the return” of people displaced by fighting to their homes.

Sheikh Janabi had recently called for Sunni residents to return to Jurf Al Sakhr, an area south of Baghdad which government forces backed by Shiite militias recaptured from jihadists in late October, he said.

The capture of Jurf Al Sakhr by Daesh fighters had posed a threat to both Baghdad and the Shiite shrine city of Karbala, which millions of pilgrims visit each year.

Sheikh Janabi, who was born in 1952, was arrested by US troops in 2004, a year after the US-led invasion of Iraq, and served more than two years in prison, said Abu Qusay.

Interior, defence ministers summoned 

Adnan Al Janabi, another MP from the same tribe, said the assassinated tribal leader was a key player in efforts to combat sectarianism.

He said Sheikh Janabi, who was a particularly prominent figure in the religiously mixed areas south of Baghdad, had “a known history of confronting terrorism, sectarianism, and supporting national reconciliation”.

The lawmaker also said Janabi’s only son, Mohamed, who was killed in the attack, had just returned after completing a PhD in law at the University of Glasgow.

Parliament Speaker Selim Al Juburi, also a Sunni, condemned the assassination and urged a full investigation into the attack.

He said the interior and defence ministers were summoned to parliament on Monday to provide explanations.

“Parliament will not remain silent in the face of acts that might undermine the authority of the state,” said Janabi, at the start of a televised parliament session.

He said the assassination was evidence that some people in Iraq were “working to sabotage the achievements of the state”.

The top UN envoy in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, also called for the killers to be brought to justice.

The US-led coalition carrying out air strikes against Daesh meanwhile carried out nine bombing raids in Iraq, including near the jihadists’ self-proclaimed capital, the second city of Mosul, United States Central command Said Saturday.

SANAA — Shiite militiamen behind a power grab fired live rounds to disperse thousands of protesters in central Yemen Saturday, as security fears prompted more foreign governments to close their embassies in Sanaa.

In the Saudi capital Riyadh, foreign ministers of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries were holding an extraordinary meeting, with Gulf sources saying they would discuss developments in their impoverished neighbour.

Home to Al Qaeda's deadliest branch and a key US ally in the fight against the group, Yemen has descended into chaos since the militia, known as Houthis, seized Sanaa in September.

Matters worsened last week when they ousted the government.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that Yemen is falling apart and called for Western-backed President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who resigned last month in protest at growing unrest sparked by the Houthis, to be restored to power.

In the city of Ibb, which the militia have held since last year, protesters chanted: "Houthi, Iran: Yemen is not Lebanon!", in reference to predominantly Shiite Iran's alleged support for the militia.

They also shouted slogans against Russia, which is thought to be reluctant to take a hard line against the Houthis at the UN Security Council.

Witnesses said the Houthis fired warning shots to disperse the protest, wounding at least six people.

Similar demonstrations took place in the Shiite-populated city of Dhammar which is also under Houthi control, and the southern city of Daleh, where protesters demanded political parties end their UN-brokered talks with the militia in Sanaa.

In the capital, hundreds protested describing the militia as "gangs that could not build a state".

Protesters 'tortured' 

Meanwhile, the family of demonstrator Saleh Awadh Al Bashiri, detained by the Houthis Wednesday at a protest against their takeover said he had died from torture wounds suffered in captivity.

Another two protesters who were held with him have also been hospitalised after they were found wounded and left on a street.

The families posted pictures on social media they said were of their sons showing parts of their bodies bruised and swollen from beatings.

On Sunday, the Houthis announced a ban on all demonstrations against them unless they are authorised by the interior ministry, which itself is now under their control.

The militiamen have been accused of attacking and detaining protesters as well as reporters covering demonstrations against their seizure of power.

Diplomatically, more countries shut their embassies, with Spain and the United Arab Emirates becoming the latest to announce Saturday they had suspended operations at their missions in Sanaa.

The UAE foreign ministry said it has also evacuated all staff, following a similar move by Sunni-dominated GCC leader Saudi Arabia.

“This decision comes in light of the increasingly deteriorating political and security situation” and the “unfortunate events with the Houthis undermining legitimate authority in the country”, the UAE said in a statement carried by the official WAM news agency.

The United States, France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the Netherlands have also closed their embassies and withdrawn staff because of security fears.

And Spain said it was temporarily suspending embassy activity in Yemen “in light of the current situation of insecurity and instability in Sanaa”.

The embassy had advised all Spanish citizens to “temporarily” leave Yemen, the foreign ministry said.

And the Turkish foreign ministry “strongly” advised Turks in Yemen to leave.

The Houthis had said Western powers had no reason to shut their embassies, insisting that security was solid in the capital.

Tehran had also criticised the “hasty action” of closing the embassies, insisting the Houthis were fighting “corruption and terrorism”.

Following consultations in New York Thursday, Britain said it would work with Jordan on a resolution to outline the Security Council’s stance on Yemen.

CAIRO — Egypt's decision to buy 24 Rafale jet fighters from France underscores its determination to diversify its sources of weapons and reduce its dependence on the United States, experts said.

The 5.2-billion-euro ($5.9 billion) deal is a historic first foreign sale of the Rafale for France, which is set to sign the contract in the Egyptian capital on Monday.

Rights group Amnesty International has criticised the sale of the jets and a frigate to a nation that it has accused of "alarming" human rights abuses.

The United States — a long-time strategic partner of Egypt, to which it gives about $1.5 billion in aid each year including roughly $1.3 billion in military assistance — has played down the impact of the sale.

"Egypt is a sovereign country," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Friday. "We have our own security relationship, so I wouldn't say there's a concern from this end."

US-Egyptian relations have been strained since the military deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013 and launched a brutal crackdown on his supporters.

Morsi, the country's first freely elected head of state, was toppled by then army chief and now President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi following massive protests against his controversial one-year rule.

Sisi was elected president in May 2014 with 96.91 per cent of the vote.

More than 1,400 people have died in the crackdown on Morsi supporters.

Thousands have been imprisoned and hundreds sentenced to death, while Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood has been branded a "terrorist" organisation and banned.

The brutal repression of Morsi supporters prompted Washington to freeze part of its aid to Cairo in October 2013 and demand that Egypt implement democratic reforms.

"The contract [with France] is an implicit message to the United States signifying that Egypt will no longer count exclusively on US weapon supplies," said retired Egyptian army general Mohammed Mujahid Al Zayyat.

Egypt no longer wants to be "blackmailed" in its relations with the United States, said Zayyat, an expert with the Cairo-based National Centre for Middle East Studies.

US officials "have their own views as to how the Egyptian army should be rebuilt and reject the army's belief that Israel is its key enemy," he added.

Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 but relations between the two neighbours have never been fully developed and remain frosty over Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.

The Russian connection 

Washington has tried to balance its defence relationship with criticism of alleged human rights violations by the Egyptian government.

It recently delivered to Cairo a shipment of Apache helicopter gunships, supposedly for use in counterterrorism operations, while also denouncing mass convictions of Sisi's opponents.

Military expert and retired army officer Ahmed Abdel Halim said Egypt was being held "hostage" by Washington because of its human rights record, and needed to diversify its sources of weaponry.

"The diversification of the supply of weapons and technology is aimed at dissuading any country from exercising a monopoly over Egypt or of trying to blackmail it," he said.

Abdel Halim, a former president of the national security commission at the Egyptian senate, said Egypt would continue to import weapons from the United States, as well as France and “maybe even China”.

Russia, he said, could be another key supplier.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, a key non-Arab backer of Sisi, paid a landmark visit to Cairo this week.

The two leaders agreed a deal for Moscow to build Egypt’s first ever nuclear power plant to produce electricity.

They also agreed on “further military cooperation between our two countries given the current circumstances” in Egypt, said Sisi, who visited Russia twice last year to discuss Russian weapon supplies.

Egypt is fighting an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula and also fears that the chaos in neighbouring Libya, where powerful militias are battling for territory, could spread across the border.

“Egypt will continue to buy weapons from the Americans but it will also buy them from Russia, and this was clear during Putin’s visit to Cairo,” said Arab affairs expert Mathieu Guidere.

That “will put Egypt in a better position vis-a-vis the Americans”, he said.

Kurdish forces backed by US-led air strikes have regained control of at least 163 villages around the Syrian town of Kobani after driving back militants from Daesh terror group in the past three weeks, a monitor of the conflict said on Saturday, Reuters reported.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that although the Kurds had recaptured many villages since winning back Kobani in late January, their progress had been slowed by renewed clashes to the west and southwest of the town, where Daesh had redirected its fighters.

The battle for the predominately Kurdish town, known as Ayn Al Arab in Arabic, became a focal point for the US-led air campaign against Al Qaeda offshoot in Syria.

Daesh controls large areas of northern and eastern Syria, including a strip of territory across the northern Aleppo countryside and a corridor stretching southeast from Raqqa province to the frontier with Iraq.

The Syrian Kurds, who also received military support from Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces, said they drove Daesh from the town near the Turkish border on January 26. US-led forces have carried out almost daily air strikes on Daesh targets around the area since late last year.

The Kurds were joined by several hundred rebel fighters in the battles for areas surrounding the town, the Observatory’s founder Rami Abdulrahman said. The rebel groups included the Shams Al Shamal brigade and the Raqqa Revolutionaries Brigade, anti-Daesh fighters from northern Syria who had battled alongside the Kurds to win back territory.

Daesh’s advance on Kobani last year with heavy weapons drove tens of thousands of residents over the border into Turkey. The Kurds, armed with mainly light weapons, called for international help and the town now lies in ruins.

Assad ‘part of solution’ 

Meanwhile, any resolution to the fighting in Syria must involve President Bashar Assad, the United Nations envoy to Syria has said in the first such acknowledgement by the UN, Agence France-Presse reported.

“President Assad is part of the solution,” Staffan De Mistura told a joint press conference with Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz in Vienna on Friday.

“I will continue to have very important discussions with him,” de Mistura added, noting: “The only solution is a political solution.”

This was the first time a UN envoy on Syria has explicitly named Assad as part of a peaceful solution after nearly four years of fighting between government forces and rebels seeking his overthrow.

De Mistura’s remarks drew condemnation from the key opposition National Coalition as well as from activists on the ground in Syria.

“I think De Mistura is fooling himself if he thinks that Assad is part of the solution,” coalition member Samir Nashar told AFP by telephone from Istanbul.

“Assad is the problem, not part of the solution.”

Najib Ghadbian, the National Coalition’s UN envoy, described the “brutality” of Assad’s regime as the root cause of the conflict.

He also warned the US-led alliance fighting the Daesh group — which has seized swathes of territory in both Syria and Iraq — that its efforts would fail unless world powers get serious about a peace plan for Syria.

“We welcome the coalition but we need to have a comprehensive strategy to address the underlying cause: Assad and Assad’s brutality,” said Ghadbian.

De Mistura, who was in Damascus this week to meet Assad, is due to deliver a report on his mission to the UN Security Council on February 17.

If no solution to the conflict is found, “the only one who takes advantage of it is ISIS”, de Mistura said, using another name for Daesh.

The group is a “monster waiting for this conflict to take place in order to be able to take advantage”, he said.

But Nashar disagreed, saying: “If Assad was really interested in fighting Daesh, he would have sent his troops to Raqqa rather than to Douma.”

Raqqa is the self-proclaimed capital of the jihadists in northern Syria, while Douma is a rebel bastion in the Eastern Ghouta area east of Damascus under a suffocating regime siege for more than a year.

More than 183 people have been killed in near daily bombardment of Douma over the past few weeks, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which said 29 children were among the dead.

‘Mass killing in Douma’ 

“It appears De Mistura hasn’t heard about the mass killing in Douma,” said Nashar.

An activist from Douma, who identified himself as Mohammed Salaheddin, also dismissed the UN envoy’s assessment.

“Assad can only contribute to a political solution by ordering his army to stop its arbitrary shelling of civilians and by... lifting the siege on Eastern Ghouta,” he told AFP via Skype.

The activist said Assad should then “give up the position in whose name he destroyed Syria”.

In Vienna, Kurz agreed that “in the fight against Daesh it can be necessary to fight on the same side” but insisted that “Assad will never be a friend or even a partner”.

Rights groups have accused Syrian government troops of indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in rebel-held areas, including with so-called barrel bombs.

In an interview broadcast this week by the BBC, Assad denied his forces were using the crude, unguided munitions that have been blamed for the deaths of thousands of civilians.

He also complained that in the fight against Daesh, “there is no dialogue” with the US-led coalition, which began air strikes against Daesh in September.

“There’s, let’s say, information, but not dialogue,” the embattled leader said.

In a poll on Thursday, 53 per cent of residents in opposition-held areas of Syria’s second city of Aleppo — which has seen some of the country’s worst violence since July 2012 — said they favoured De Mistura’s October proposal of a “freeze” in fighting.

But a great majority also said they were sceptical that a truce would hold.

Syria’s war began in March 2011 as a peaceful movement demanding democratic change. It later morphed into a brutal civil war after Assad’s regime unleashed a crackdown on dissent.

More than 210,000 people have killed in the conflict and around half of the country’s population has been displaced.

Several rounds of talks have ended without concrete results.

DUBAI — Bahraini police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of Shiite protesters who took to the streets for Saturday's fourth anniversary of an uprising that deeply divided the key US ally.

Amnesty International urged Bahrain to "rein in" its security forces and "seize the opportunity of the fourth anniversary of the uprising to announce genuine and long overdue reforms".

Police deployed heavily as men and women carrying Bahrain's red and white flag alongside portraits of detained activists chanted "Down Hamad", referring to the Sunni king.

Protesters burned tyres and blocked roads.

The police fired tear gas and sound bombs after boosting security around several villages and along major roads to prevent protesters advancing towards central Manama, witnesses said.

The opposition said on Twitter that the police also fired buckshot, and posted pictures of wounded protesters, saying several activists were arrested.

The main opposition bloc Al Wefaq in a statement issued in English urged protesters "to stick to the non-violent movement and... refrain from putting lives and private and public properties under threat".

"The calls for violence acts do not relate to the Bahraini people's peaceful movement for democracy," it said, condemning "the excessive use of force by security forces and which has resulted in serious casualties among the peaceful citizens".

It gave a toll of 13 people wounded.

Bahrain's Saudi-backed Sunni authorities crushed protests led by its majority Shiites shortly after they erupted on February 14, 2011, taking their cue from Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.

The radical February 14 Coalition, a cyber youth group, had called for demonstrations and strikes across the kingdom to mark the anniversary.

But the public security chief, Major-General Tariq Al Hassan, issued a stern warning against any protests.

"Action will be taken against those who spread terror among citizens or residents, put the safety of others at risk or try to disrupt the nation's security and stability," he said.

Amnesty said in a statement that "fundamental freedoms have increasingly been curtailed" in Bahrain.

The London-based rights watchdog urged the kingdom to release detained activists, allow demonstrations and "hold to account all those responsible for human rights abuses".

Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet, sits across the Gulf from Shiite-dominated Iran.

It is also one of several Arab states that back US-led air strikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, making it a vital Western ally.

The sectarian divide is deepening in Bahrain with a growing gap between the Sunni minority government and its mainly Shiite opponents.

The opposition is demanding a "real" constitutional monarchy with an elected prime minister independent of the ruling royal family, but the Al-Khalifa dynasty has refused to yield.

Al-Wefaq leader Sheikh Ali Salman has been behind bars since December 28 for allegedly trying to overthrow the regime.