Region

BAGHDAD — Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott made an unannounced visit Sunday to Baghdad, meeting with top officials to discuss ways his country can aid Iraqi forces in their fight against the Islamic State (IS) group.

Abbott and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi discussed military cooperation between the two countries, including the training and equipping of Iraqi soldiers, state television reported. The Iraqi army collapsed last summer in the face of a blitz by extremists from IS, which now holds about a third of Iraq and neighbouring Syria in its self-declared caliphate.

During a joint news conference, Abbott said that his country is determined to provide all kinds of support to Iraq in its war against terrorism. He vowed to enhance cooperation between the two countries.

Australian fighter jets are bombing IS targets in northern Iraq as part of a US-led coalition and 200 Australian special forces troops soon will enter Iraq to advise and assist local security forces.

Meanwhile Sunday, police said mortar shells slammed into several houses in the Shiite village of Sabaa Al Bour, about 30 kilometres north of Baghdad, killing four people and wounding seven.

Elsewhere, police said a bomb blast on a commercial street killed two people and wounded six in western Baghdad.

Sunday night, two bombs exploded in downtown Baghdad, killing three people and wounding 10, police said.

Medical officials confirmed the casualties. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to journalists.

TRIPOLI — Forces loyal to Libya's internationally recognised government on Sunday launched air strikes on the country's biggest steel plant at Misrata, officials said, hitting the western city allied to a rival group for a second consecutive day.

Turkish Airlines, the only foreign airline still flying to Libya, cancelled a flight from Misrata to Istanbul, according to the website of Istanbul airport. The airline could not be immediately reached for comment.

The recognised prime minister Abdullah Al Thinni has been forced to run a rump state in the east since a group known as Libya Dawn linked to Misrata took control of Tripoli last August and set up a rival government.

Mohamed Abdelmalik Al Faqih, chairman of the Libyan Iron and Steel Company (Lisco), said war planes hit the plant's perimeter and a wall near a company training centre at around 1100 local time.

A state news agency loyal to the rival Tripoli government said a plane had also tried attacking an air force academy near the civilian airport but fired its rockets early after coming under anti-aircraft fire, missing its targets.

A spokesman for forces allied to Thinni confirmed air strikes on Misrata, without giving details.

Since Muammar Qadhafi was ousted in 2011, Libya has failed to attain stability. Former rebel brigades which once fought side by side have now turned on each other, aligning themselves with rival political factions in a scramble for control.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel was weighing its options Sunday for further punishing the Palestinians after freezing millions in tax revenues as a first response to their bid to join the International Criminal Court.

The Palestinian move to join the Hague-based court sets the scene for potential legal action against Israel for war crimes, in a bid to put pressure on it to pull out of the territories.

But the request to join the court, formally presented on Friday, infuriated Israel which quickly moved to freeze the transfer of half a billion shekels ($127 million/106 million euros) in tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority.

"The Palestinian Authority has chosen to take a path of confrontation with Israel, and we will not sit idly by," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Cabinet ministers on Sunday, vowing to put up a vigorous defence of Israel's soldiers.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat denounced the freezing of the transfer as “piracy”, and Hamas said it amounted to “the theft of Palestinian money”, urging the leadership to cut all security cooperation with Israel.

But Israeli officials warned it was only the first in a series of punitive measures.

“If the Palestinian Authority doesn’t take a step back, I think we have to take much more severe steps,” said Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, a close associate of Netanyahu, referring to a “gradual dissolution” of the PA.

“We should not aid the existence of this authority.”

Israel may also file countersuits against top Palestinian officials, a source close to the government said on Friday.

Israel in ‘attack mode’ 

But, in an unusual development, Israel was not planning to announce any new settlement construction, a senior foreign ministry official said on Sunday.

Speaking to Israeli diplomats serving in Europe, foreign ministry director general Nissim Ben Sheetrit said Israel’s response would be “harsher and more comprehensive” than just freezing the taxes, but would not include settlement announcements, ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon told AFP.

“Israel is about to switch from defence to attack mode,” Nahshon quoted him as saying, confirming comments first published by the Haaretz website.

After the Palestinians won the upgraded UN rank of observer state in November 2012, Israel froze the tax monies and also announced plans for 3,000 homes in a highly sensitive area of the West Bank, as well as in annexed East Jerusalem, triggering a furious response from the international community.

A senior official quoted by Haaretz said the government had learned a lesson from that incident and would not be taking any steps making Israel the focus of criticism rather than the Palestinians.

“We will not let Israel Defence Forces soldiers and officers be dragged to the International Criminal Court in The Hague,” Netanyahu told ministers, vowing to defend them with “determination”.

The ICC can prosecute individuals accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed since July 1, 2002, when the court’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, came into force.

‘Israeli crimes in Gaza’ 

Speaking to AFP, a Palestinian legal expert said the first case that would be referred to the ICC would be the “crimes” committed by Israel during summer 2014, including the Gaza war.

Shawan Jabarin, director of the Ramallah-based rights group Al Haq, said the Palestinians had decided to file suit over Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip starting from June 13, 2013.

That was the date when Israel began a massive West Bank crackdown after the kidnapping and subsequent murder of three Israeli teenagers, triggering a series of events which led to the seven-week Gaza war.

A high-ranking legal official quoted by the top-selling Yediot Aharonot said Israel was ready to counter with its own lawsuits against senior Palestinian officials.

“These lawsuits, which are backed up with evidence, documents and affidavits, can be filed as early as tomorrow morning,” he told the paper.

The basis of the complaints would be that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ partnership in a consensus government with Hamas makes him complicit in the militant group’s rocket attacks from Gaza on civilians in Israel.

Under an economic agreement between the sides signed in 1994, Israel transfers to the PA tens of millions of dollars each month in customs duties levied on goods destined for Palestinian markets that transit through Israeli ports.

The tax revenues make up around two-thirds of the PA’s annual budget, excluding foreign aid.

ADEN, Yemen — A senior army officer was shot dead in southeastern Yemen and four fighters from a Houthi-led militia that controls much of Yemen died in a bomb attack on a guesthouse south of the capital Sanaa on Sunday, state media reported.

Yemen has been in turmoil since 2011 when an uprising toppled long-time president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The new government has been struggling against violence from Al Qaeda and the rise of Shiite Muslim Houthi fighters, who seized Sanaa in September.

State news agency Saba said 25 others from the Popular Committees, a force comprising mainly Houthis tribesmen, were wounded in the explosion in the city of Dhamar, some 100km south of Sanaa.

"Terrorist elements are likely to have planted the bomb at the entrance of the guesthouse," the agency said, employing a term often used by the authorities to denote Islamists such as Al Qaeda in Yemen.

The Yemeni defence ministry said on its website that the latest victim, Colonel Hamoud Hussein Al Dharhani, was shot dead on Sunday when he left his house in the city of Ataq in the southeastern Shabwa province. 

Yemeni authorities also blame Al Qaeda for a campaign of targeted killings in which between up to 350 senior army officers have died in the past three years.

Last week, an intelligence officer identified as Colonel Nasser Ahmed was shot dead while driving in the southern city of Al Bayda, and a general escaped a bomb attack on a road his convoy was traveling on near the City of Al Qatan in eastern Hadramout province.

Also on Sunday, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry in Sofia denied that a Bulgarian man had been arrested in Sanaa along with other foreigners.

The Yemeni interior ministry had said on Saturday that police had arrested three foreigners, one of them a Bulgarian national, in Sanaa after one of them was found to have Al Qaeda material in his possession.

BRUSSELS — The European Union plans to set up a cell of advisers in Belgium that member governments can tap to fight jihadist propaganda, a top EU official told a newspaper Saturday.

"The idea is for Belgium to welcome a cell of experts who can offer European countries immediate responses to a very serious communications problem," EU counterterrorism chief Gilles de Kerchove told Le Soir newspaper.

Social media has become a powerful recruiting tool for jihadists, with the Islamic State group posting several videos online showing grisly beheadings of Western hostages.

The experts taking part in the pilot project will offer "counter-narratives" and other messages to fight the propaganda used by Islamic State and other jihadist groups, de Kerchove said.

For example, he said, the experts might be able to distribute interviews of jihadists who return from Syria disillusioned with the cause, either because they are shocked by "sick people who take pleasure in the violence" or because the battle is no longer about removing Syrian President Bashar Assad but rather a power struggle between insurgent groups.

De Kerchove said the project is not yet finalised but the European Commission, the EU executive arm, aims to set aside one million euros over 18 months to hire five or six experts who work inside the Belgian interior ministry, according to the daily.

He said the cell would have a limited capacity to advise simultaneously a handful of European governments seeking to tackle a communications problem.

"We will see if it leads to something," the counterterrorism expert was quoted as saying.

"If it works well, without doubt some states will develop a certain capacity and would like to continue it with their own means. The idea is to advise; the state then does what it wants," he said.

There was no immediate comment from the European Commission.

De Kerchove told AFP in September that around 3,000 citizens of the European Union had flocked to the cause of jihadists in Syria and Iraq as EU member states worry that some of them could pose a "terrorist" threat when they return to their home countries trained and battle hardened.

KHARTOUM — Sudan's parliament on Sunday passed constitutional amendments allowing President Omar Bashir to appoint state governors directly and expanding the mandate of its powerful security agency.

"The amendments were approved unanimously," national assembly speaker, Al Fatih Ezzedine Mansour, said after parliament agreed to 18 changes.

Elections for state governors had also been due to take place in April along with presidential and parliamentary polls.

The proposed amendments pushed the date of the elections back by 11 days, and polling is now scheduled for April 13.

Bashir, 71, is standing again in the election which is widely expected to extend his reign but that opposition parties have said they will boycott.

Another amendment expanded the responsibilities of the powerful National Intelligence and Security Service.

The amendment means the NISS is now a "regular force whose mission is to oversee internal and external national security", Badria Suleiman, head of the committee that examined the amendments, said on Sunday.

The NISS will also "work to combat all political, military, economic and social threats, as well as terrorism".

Previously, Sudan's constitution said the NISS was a body for gathering and analysing intelligence, although it already ran military units in addition to having plainclothes officers.

It has authority for the Rapid Support Forces or RSF, a counterinsurgency unit deployed in the western Darfur region and in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, in a report last April, accused the RSF of carrying out attacks against civilians, an allegation Sudan has denied.

MPs from the opposition Popular Congress Party pulled out of a session in parliament on Saturday night over the amendments.

"What is happening is a violation of the constitution," said the head of the PCP's parliamentary bloc, Ismail Hussein.

Sudan has an interim constitution signed under a 2005 peace agreement that ended 22 years of bloody civil war between the north and south.

Bashir seized power in a 1989 coup and won a 2010 presidential election marred by an opposition boycott, with observers saying the vote failed to meet international standards.

TEHRAN — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Sunday that ongoing nuclear negotiations with world powers are a matter of "heart", not just centrifuges ahead of talks next week in Geneva.

Speaking to an economic conference in Tehran, Rouhani both countered hard-line critics worried Iran will give up too much while also attempting to signal his administration remains open to negotiation with the six-nation group leading the talks.

If "we are ready to stop some types of enrichment which we do not need at this time, does it mean we have compromised our principles and cause?" Rouhani asked.

He responded: "Our cause is not linked to a centrifuge. It is connected to our heart and to our willpower."

On January 15, Iranian negotiators will meet in Geneva with officials from the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany, hoping to hammer details out of a final deal. Iran reached an interim, one-year deal with world powers in November 2013 to freeze its nuclear programme in exchange for the easing of some sanctions. Negotiators later agreed to extend talks until June 30, with hopes of reaching a rough deal in March.

The West fears Iran's nuclear programme could allow it to build nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear programme is only for peaceful purposes, like power generation and medical research.

The main conflict is over uranium enrichment, which can create both reactor fuel and the fissile core of nuclear arms. In seeking to reduce Iran's bomb-making ability, the US has proposed that Tehran export much of its stockpile of enriched uranium — something the Islamic Republic has long said it would not do. Two other unresolved issues are Iran's Fordo underground enrichment site and the nearly built Arak nuclear reactor.

Two diplomats in recent days told The Associated Press that Iran and the US tentatively agreed on a formula about shipping its stockpile to Russia, as well as drew up a catalog outlining areas of potential accord and differing approaches to remaining disputes. On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham denied any tentative formula or catalog had been made.

MOGADISHU — A huge suicide car bomb blast shook Somalia's capital Mogadishu on Sunday near the heavily fortified international airport, killing four people, officials said.

A police official said the bomber rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into another car, setting off a huge blast that was heard across the coastal city.

A military spokesman for Somalia's Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Shabab, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Abu Musab, confirmed that the militants had carried out the attack.

The sprawling airport area is a major base for members of Somalia's armed forces and houses several foreign embassies and African Union troops battling the Islamists.

It has been a frequent target of attacks by Al Shabab, most recently in late December when the group launched a major assault against an African Union command centre.

"We had information about this car laden with explosives and we have been following it... but it detonated and four civilians were killed, and the bomber," interior ministry spokesman Mohamed Yusuf told reporters.

Witnesses said they saw clouds of smoke after the explosion, and that security forces opened fire to disperse approaching onlookers — prompting fears that another coordinated attack was under way.

Several witnesses also said they saw up to five destroyed vehicles in the vicinity of the explosion.

"There was a terrible explosion. The security forces have cordoned off the area. They opened fire to disperse people nearby," said Ali Suleyman, a witness.

The latest attack came at the end of a week which saw the United States conduct another air strike against Al Shabab, who are Al Qaeda's main African affiliate and are battling to topple the country's fragile internationally-backed government.

The Somali government said the Shabab's intelligence chief, Abdishakur Tahlil, was killed in Monday night's raid.

Al Shabab's former leader Ahmed Abdi Godane was also killed by a US air strike in September.

The organisation emerged from the Islamic Courts Union that controlled Mogadishu in 2006 before being pushed out by Ethiopian forces.

The militants were finally driven from their fixed positions in Mogadishu in 2011, and have lost several strongholds in the south and centre of the country in a recent offensive by the AU's 22,000-strong AMISOM force.

The group, however, still controls vast rural areas from where militants launch regular attacks against the AU's AMISOM troops and the country's government.

KIRKUK, Iraq — The Islamic State (IS) jihadist group on Saturday freed dozens of men it had seized while searching for people who burned its flag in north Iraq, officials and residents said.

An intelligence officer and a local official said that 162 out of 170 men were released after being taken by IS from the villages of Al Shajara and Gharib in Kirkuk province, where two of the jihadist group's flags were torched.

A 39-year-old from Al Shajara who was among those detained said that they were taken by pickup truck to an open area where they were bound and questioned about who burned the flag.

He and other detainees were kept overnight in houses with five to 10 people per room, after which all but eight were released, the man said.

A resident of Al Shajara confirmed that dozens of people had returned to their homes in the area.

IS has previously turned to mass detentions as it seeks to quell resistance in the swathes of territory in Iraq that it has overrun since June.

It seized 50 people in Kirkuk province after residents burned one of their positions and flag in September, and 20 more the following week for allegedly forming a resistance group.

Some of those seized were subsequently released.

But the group has also executed thousands of people in areas it controls in Iraq and Syria, sometimes in grisly beheadings it videotapes and posts online.

CAIRO — Egypt disputed Sunday a claim by British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney that she had been warned she risked arrest last year if she released a report in Cairo critical of the judiciary.

Clooney, a rights lawyer who married Hollywood star George Clooney in a lavish Venice ceremony last year, told Britain's Guardian newspaper that the warning had stopped her going ahead with a Cairo launch for the February 2014 report for the International Bar Association.

But interior ministry spokesman Hani Abdel Latif questioned the source of the alleged warning.

"She should say exactly who said that," Abdel Latif told AFP. "Why not specify from the start who told her that?"

"We have nothing against her," he said.

In the comments published by The Guardian on Saturday, Clooney did not detail the source of the alleged warning.

"When I went to launch the report, first of all they stopped us from doing it in Cairo," she said.

"They said: 'Does the report criticise the army, the judiciary, or the government?' We said: 'Well, yes.' They said: 'Well then, you're risking arrest.'"

The report, based on a fact-finding mission made in mid-2013, warned about the wide powers that ministers had over judges and highlighted a record of selective prosecutions, flaws that Clooney said later contributed to the convictions of three Al Jazeera journalists.

Clooney, who is now on the defence team for one of the three — Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy — said the same flaws in the judicial system meant she had little confidence in the retrial ordered on Thursday by Egypt's top court.

She said she was focusing instead on lobbying for Fahmy to be deported under new powers decreed by President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in November.

Lawyers for Fahmy's Australian colleague Peter Greste are pushing for the same outcome, while the wife of Egyptian Baher Mohamed has said she is looking at ways to get her husband out of Egypt.

The three men remain in custody pending the retrial.