Region

BEIRUT — More than 120,000 fighters supporting Syrian President Bashar Al Assad have been killed in the country’s civil war since it began in 2011, a group monitoring the war said on Wednesday.

Syria’s conflict began as a peaceful protest movement calling for reforms in 2011 but descended into civil war after a government crackdown. In total, more than 200,000 people have been killed and millions more have fled their homes.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said some 11,000 members of government forces and loyalist militias had been killed in the five months since Assad delivered an inauguration speech for a third presidential term.

In a breakdown of the casualties, the group said some 5,631 armed forces members have been killed in violence including shelling, gunfights, aircraft crashes, suicide attacks, snipers, executions and car bombs since the speech.

Another 4,492 fighters from loyalist militias had been killed, as well as 735 fighters of Arab, Asian and Iranian origin, and 91 from the Lebanese Shiite movement Hizbollah, the monitoring group said.

Shiite fighters including from neighbouring Iraq and Lebanon have joined Syria’s fight to aid Assad, a member of the Shiite-derived Alawite sect, against the Sunni rebels trying to overthrow him.

Assad was inaugurated for a third presidential term in July after winning an election the opposition denounced as a farce.

Exact death tolls in the conflict have been difficult to verify, but the figures calculated by the observatory are widely regarded as credible. The United Nations estimated in August more than 190,000 people had died in the conflict.

LONDON — London police stopped a plane on the runway at Heathrow Airport to remove a 15-year-old girl intent on joining Islamist fighters in Syria, a report said Wednesday.

Counter-terror officers rushed to Europe's busiest airport and stopped the plane, which was bound for Istanbul, the London Evening Standard newspaper reported.

They ordered the plane to turn around as it taxied down the runway.

The girl, from Tower Hamlets in east London, had secretly saved up to buy a ticket.

The incident happened earlier this month. The girl has returned to her family, the Standard reported.

"On December 6, police received reports of a 15-year-old girl from Tower Hamlets missing from home," a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

"Police were able to locate her and she has since returned home safely."

Heathrow Airport declined to comment when contacted by AFP.

The Standard said the incident would heighten concern about the number of girls and young women travelling to Syria and Iraq.

An estimated 500 Britons have travelled abroad to become jihadists, many with the Islamic State jihadist group.

In August, Britain's terror threat level was raised to severe, the second-highest of five levels, meaning that a terror attack is considered highly likely.

It came against a backdrop of increasing concerns over aspiring British jihadists travelling to Iraq and Syria to learn terror "tradecraft".

Several teenagers are among those who have gone abroad to join fighters with Islamic State and other extremist groups.

SANAA — Yemen's Houthi movement sacked top managers of the country's second largest port and the main oil company on Wednesday, staff said, in the latest move by the Shiite Muslim group to consolidate its hold on state institutions.

The Houthis, who became the de facto power in Yemen in September when they captured the capital Sanaa, portray their move as a revolution against corruption and embezzlement which they say was emptying state coffers.

Officials at Hodeida Port said Houthi fighters on Wednesday blocked the director of the facility, Yemen's main Red Sea harbour where most of the country's food imports arrive, with a view to replacing him.

"The staff were so angry that they walked out in a demonstration and closed off the port," a port official said by telephone.

Later on Wednesday, about 20 Houthi fighters broke into the state-run Safer oil company in Sanaa, kicked out the director and his deputy and locked their offices, company officials said.

Yemeni officials said the moves appear to be part of a systematic drive by the Houthis to tighten their grip on power, bypassing the government nominated by Prime Minister Khaled Bahah in November.

Western powers are worried about the volatile situation in Yemen, which shares a long border with oil giant Saudi Arabia and is fighting Al Qaeda militants and separatists in the south.

Officials say the Houthis are getting support from former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was sanctioned last month by the UN Security Council for threatening Yemen's peace and stability, a charge he has denied.

"It is clear that the Houthis, together with Ali Abdullah Saleh, are completing their (September) 21 coup," said Sultan Al Atwani, an adviser to President Abed-Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

Saleh loyalists held up a parliamentary meeting which was meant to confirm Bahah's government, demanding the reopening of offices belonging to their General People's Congress which they said had been shut by authorities in southern Yemen.

Houthi leader Abdel-Malek Al Houthi earlier lashed out at Hadi, saying he was sanctioning corruption, and demanded that he hand control of state bodies to the Houthis so that they could ensure that "funds are not wasted".

Apart from their move at Hodeida Port, the Houthis have sacked four provincial governors, the editor of the main state newspaper Al Thawra and the commander of the special forces.

Houthi fighters also broke into Yemen's largest publishing house, removed the editor of the official Al Thawra newspaper and forced staff to alter the editorial line, employees said.

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government has identified and stopped payment of tens of millions of dollars in salaries previously disbursed to nonexistent troops, known here as "ghost soldiers", as part of the prime minister's vow to tackle corruption in the military and regain a foothold in the battle against IS (IS) group, two senior government officials said.

The initiative is part of Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi's plan to rebuild the US-trained military which crumbled in the face of last summer's onslaught by IS militants.

Abadi recently purged the military and interior ministry from a number of senior officials who were appointees of his predecessor, Nouri Al Maliki. While it is unclear whether any of the sacked officials are among those accused of collecting misappropriated funds, Abadi vowed to pursue the sensitive matter "even if it costs me my life".

According to the two senior officials, authorities prevented the loss of over $47 million of improper military spending in November, mostly from salaries that were previously paid to soldiers who are dead, missing or did not exist and which were pocketed by senior commanders. The two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to speak to media, said the money was the first of several tranches of funding to be regained by Iraq's defence ministry.

Abadi announced last month that at least 50,000 ghost soldiers existed in four different divisions of the military and would be cut from its payroll. "We were paying salaries while we lack the money," he said in a televised address.

"We have started blowing some big fish out of the water and we'll go after them until the end," he added.

The Iraqi military has struggled to recover from its collapse in June when IS group captured the country's second largest city, Mosul, and swept over much of northern Iraq. In the face of the blitz, commanders disappeared. Pleas for more ammunition went unanswered. In some cases, soldiers stripped off their uniforms and ran.

The Iraqi army has since been reduced to 10 of the 14 divisions it had before IS offensive in June. The government officially says the country's total military and police forces stand at 1 million men. However, a senior Iraqi military official told The Associated Press that the military consisted of 238,000 fighters as of early December.

That figure is overstated, according to a senior US military official, who said Iraqi military strength stands, generously, at 125,000 — down from 205,000 in January 2014. He believes the number of ghost soldiers is far greater than the 50,000 cited by the prime minister, but did not give his own estimate. Both military officials also spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to media.

If all 50,000 soldiers cited by the prime minister received an entry-level salary (about $750 per month), it would add up to at least $450 million in bogus salaries per year.

"The numbers will be much higher if the investigation includes ghost policemen in the interior ministry," Iraqi lawmaker Liqaa Wardi told the AP. "I think that the efforts exerted by the current government will face resistance by some corrupt army and security officers who have made gains and fortunes due to the corruption system and the ghost soldiers."

Many have blamed the army's poor performance on Al Maliki, saying he replaced top officers with inexperienced or incompetent political allies in order to monopolise power. From 2010 until his resignation in August, Maliki had also held both the interior and defence portfolios, in part because lawmakers could not agree on nominees for them.

In the case of the fall of Mosul, poor training and a lack of loyalty to the central government have been widely cited as a principle cause for the military's collapse there.

Once Abadi was sworn in and his government approved, it took six weeks to fill the critical posts of interior and defence ministers following a deadlock among rival parliamentary blocs.

The US, which began air strikes on August 8 to reinforce Iraqi and Kurdish forces, is now looking to boost its efforts with additional weapons supplies to the embattled Iraqi military. The Pentagon has made a spending request to Congress of $1.6 billion, focusing on training and arming Iraqi and Kurdish forces. According to a Pentagon document prepared last month, the US is looking to provide an estimated $89.3 million worth of weapons and other equipment to each of the nine Iraqi army brigades.

Part of the drive to target the ghost soldier corruption is also financial necessity. Plunging oil prices and soaring costs from Iraq's war against IS group have taken a significant toll on Iraq's economy, prompting government spending cuts, including in defence, which so far constitutes 22 per cent of next year's proposed budget, according to Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

"Any senior military official involved in such obvious corrosive corruption should be court martialled and tossed in jail — especially in a perilous environment such as that which Iraq is facing," said Paul Sullivan, an expert on Middle East affairs at National Defence University in Washington. "The regular people and the lower ranks are hurt the most by the corruption of the leaders."

SANAA — Fifteen children on a school bus were among at least 25 people killed in a suicide car bomb attack in central Yemen targeting a Shiite militia leader on Tuesday, security sources said.

The children were killed when their school bus was caught up in the attack targeting the home of a leader of the Shiite militia, known as Houthis, in the town of Rada, a security source told AFP, blaming the attack on Al Qaeda militants.

A medical source confirmed that at least 25 people had died in the attack.

The defence ministry, on its website 26sep.net, condemned "this cowardly terrorist attack on the home of a citizen and a school bus", and also held Al Qaeda responsible.

Yemen has been rocked by instability since the Shiite fighters seized control of the capital Sanaa in September.

The Houthis have since been expanding their presence throughout the country but are facing fierce resistance from Sunni tribes and Al Qaeda's powerful Yemeni branch.

Tuesday's bomb attack was the second to target Houthis in Rada in little more than a month.

On November 12, a suicide bomber killed dozens of people gathered at the residence of a tribal chief in Rada.

The mixed Sunni-Shiite town has seen heavy fighting since the Houthis took over parts of it in October, while Al Qaeda has set its sights on taking over Rada.

State authority has weakened in the face of the rivalries on the ground.

Armed Houthis on Tuesday surrounded the defence ministry in Sanaa after having been denied access, a military source said.

Another group of Shiite militiamen broke into the offices of Ath-Thawra newspaper demanding the dismissal of the chairman of the board, Faisal Makram, a source at the official daily told AFP.

The militiaman said they were following orders from their leader, Abdelmalek Al Houthi, "to end corruption in all state institutions".

BEIRUT — Nearly 200 combatants on both sides were killed in 24 hours when the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda took two regime bases in Idlib province, a monitoring group said on Tuesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain but gleans its information from a wide network of activists and medics on the ground, said Al Nusra Front attackers also captured more than 100 regime soldiers.

"There were at least 100 dead on the regime side and 80 among the attackers, killed in clashes, bombardments and by mines," observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

Then on Monday, the air force kept up its raids against the Maaret Al Numan area near the two bases, killing at least 10 civilians, said the observatory.

The jihadists and their allies took at least 120 soldiers prisoner, while another 100 fled south towards the town of Morek in the neighbouring province of Hama.

A video distributed by the observatory shows five of the captured soldiers kneeling on the floor of a room, stripped down to their underwear and with their hands tied behind their backs.

The captors kick the men in the face and on their heads, slap them, and then one man whips them mercilessly with a hose as one of the soldiers cries out in pain.

Seizing the key Wadi Al Deif and Hamidiyeh military posts on Monday gave the jihadists control of most of the northwestern province, in a major blow to President Bashar Assad's regime.

The jihadists advanced on the bases in coordination with Islamist rebel groups Ahrar Al Sham and Jund Al Aqsa, the observatory said, adding that a string of villages in the area also fell.

It was also another defeat for Western-backed rebels who were driven out of most of Idlib last month by Al Nusra Front fighters.

Idlib was among the first provinces to fall, soon after the March 2011 outbreak of the armed revolt against Assad's rule.

Elsewhere in the war-torn country, regime warplanes hit the besieged district of Waer in the central city of Homs, killing at least 13 civilians, said the observatory.

Among the casualties was a member of a delegation that had been in talks for a ceasefire with the government, as well as his wife.

RAMALLAH — The Palestinians are to submit a draft resolution to the UN Security Council on Wednesday as planned although US Secretary of State John Kerry warned of a veto, Palestinian officials said.

"We will submit our project to the UN Security Council tomorrow [Wednesday]," Nimr Hammad, adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, told AFP.

Another official said Kerry was told at a meeting in London on Tuesday that the Palestinians would go ahead as planned with their text calling for a withdrawal of Israeli troops from occupied Palestinian territory within two years.

Kerry told the Palestinian delegation that Washington would use its veto within the Security Council, he said of the meeting between the secretary of state and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat.

The official, who asked not to be named, said the London talks had been “long and difficult but achieved results”.

If the United States uses it veto, Erekat told Kerry, the Palestinians would apply to join all international organisations and conventions, including the International Criminal Court, a move firmly opposed by Washington.

France is putting together a more nuanced version of a draft to the Security Council setting a two-year timetable for concluding a peace treaty, without mentioning an Israeli withdrawal.

Mohammed Shtayyeh, a member of Abbas’ inner circle, said France had “accommodated” the Palestinians.

“We have merged. We don’t have two texts now. There is one single text. We have happily accepted the French text when the modifications have been added,” he said, without elaborating.

Shtayyeh said the United States wanted any draft resolution to be put off until after an Israeli general election in March but the Palestinians were “sick” of two-way negotiations with Israel that had made no progress.

RAMALLAH — A Palestinian was killed overnight during an Israeli military operation in the Qalandiya refugee camp near Ramallah in the West Bank, medical and security sources said Tuesday.

The 22-year-old man was killed when occupation troops entered the camp to make an arrest, triggering clashes with residents, the sources said.

The Israeli occupation army confirmed that its special forces had launched a raid on the camp and said that its troops responded when they came under fire.

It added in a statement that one of the "terrorists" had been hit while a spokeswoman said she did not know whether or not he had been killed.

The incident came with tensions running high in the occupied territories after months of unrest, and follows the death of a senior Palestinian official last week in a confrontation with Israeli troops.

According to an AFP tally, around 20 Palestinians have been killed since June in Israeli army operations in the West Bank.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel's upgraded Arrow ballistic missile shield failed its first live interception test on Tuesday, security sources said, a fresh setback for the US-supported system billed as a bulwark against Iran.

Operators of the Arrow 3 battery at Palmahim Airbase on the Mediterranean coast cancelled the launch of its interceptor missile after it failed to lock on to a target missile fired over the Mediterranean, the sources said.

"There was a countdown to the launch, and then nothing happened," one source told Reuters on condition of anonymity. "A decision was made not to waste the interceptor missile."

Arrow is among several elements of an integrated Israeli aerial shield built up to withstand potential future missile and rocket attacks by Iran, Syria or their guerrilla allies in Lebanon and Gaza.

In a statement, Israel's defence ministry said that "within the framework of preparations for a future interception test, a target missile was launched and carried out its trajectory successfully".

Asked whether Tuesday's trial had been intended as a full interception that had failed, a defence ministry spokesman had no immediate comment.

Arrow 3 interceptors are designed to fly above the earth's atmosphere, where their warheads detach to become kamikaze satellites, or "kill vehicles", that track and slam into the targets. Such high-altitude shoot-downs are meant to safely destroy incoming nuclear, biological or chemical missiles.

Arrow is jointly developed by state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries and US firm Boeing Co. Its earlier version, Arrow 2, was deployed more than a decade ago and officials put its success rate in trials at around 90 per cent.

But an Arrow 2 interception test on September 9 ended inconclusively, according to the defence ministry. The US journal Defence News later reported that the Arrow 2 interceptor missile missed its target.

RABAT, Morocco — Spanish and Moroccan police said Tuesday they had arrested seven suspected members of a terror network spread across their two countries aimed at recruiting women for the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria and Iraq.

The Moroccan interior ministry said two heads of the group were based in Fnideq, just outside the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, where women were brought from Spain and indoctrinated with jihadi thought.

European authorities have noticed a sharp increase in the recruitment of women from Europe for IS group in the past year, with at least 100 coming just from France.

The women were to be used as suicide bombers or married off to jihadi fighters, said the Moroccan statement.

Accounts from the areas under IS control in Syria describe large numbers of foreign women working as cooks, cleaners and in child care.

European officials say these networks, many operating online, target young people in search of their identity with the aim of planting multi-generational roots for an Islamic caliphate.

The Spanish statement said four women, including one minor, were among the five arrested in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla as well as the mainland city of Barcelona. One of the women holds Chilean citizenship, Chilean Interior and Security Minister Rodrigo Penailillo told reporters.

Both Spain and Morocco have arrested dozens of suspect jihadi militants and recruiters in recent years, with networks often centred on northern Morocco and the Spanish enclaves.

There are more than 1,200 Moroccans reportedly fighting in Syria, with more than 100 arrested upon their return.

In July, Morocco sounded the alarm over the threat of terrorist attacks from those returning from Syria and Iraq and boosted security in public places.

The cell was in contact with Moroccan commanders fighting with IS feared to be planning attacks in the kingdom as well, the Moroccan statement said.