Region

TUNIS — Tunisia’s first parliament since the 2011 revolution on Thursday elected veteran politician Mohamed Ennaceur, 80, of anti-Islamist party Nidaa Tounes as house speaker.

Ennaceur, the sole candidate, won 174 votes from the 214 MPs in attendance.

In a brief speech, he thanked lawmakers and vowed parliament would follow a consensual approach to guarantee “freedoms and human rights” and strive “to build a state of law”.

The vote had initially been expected on Tuesday during the newly elected parliament’s inaugural session but was delayed for consultations on a consensus candidate.

Ennaceur is deputy leader of Nidaa Tounes, which won a landmark legislative election in October — the first since the overthrow of long-time strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali nearly four years ago.

Nidaa Tounes head Beji Caid Essebsi, 88, is frontrunner in a presidential election run-off due to be contested by the end of this month.

Ennaceur served as social affairs minister under Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s “father of independence”, during the 1970s and 1980s.

Nidaa Tounes won 86 seats in the October parliamentary polls, beating moderate Islamist movement Ennahda into second place with 69 seats.

Parliament picked deputy speakers Thursday from Ennahda and the third-placed Free Patriotic Union.

Under the North African country’s electoral system, the party with the most votes has a mandate to form a coalition government.

Nidaa Tounes has said it will not form a government before the presidential runoff, in which Essebsi faces incumbent Moncef Marzouki after neither candidate secured an absolute majority in a November 23 first round.

BAGHDAD — Four bombs struck across Baghdad on Thursday, mainly in Shiite Muslim districts of the Iraqi capital, killing 20 people, medical and police sources said.

Sunni militants from Islamic State, who control much of northern and western Iraq as well as a belt of territory around Baghdad, regularly target Shiite neighbourhoods of the city.

The deadliest explosions were two car bombs in the densely populated Sadr City in eastern Baghdad, which killed 15 people and wounded 51 others, the police and medics said.

A roadside bomb near a small restaurant in the northern Shiite neighbourhood of Shaab killed three people and wounded nine, police said.

Earlier a bomb killed two people near the Green Zone district which houses most government buildings, security and medical sources said.

The bomb struck 200 metres from the edge of the zone, they said. In response, security forces closed two nearby bridges that span the Tigris River, linking eastern and western Baghdad.

Bombings are frequent in the Iraqi capital but mostly strike neighbourhoods some distance from the central district, which houses the Iraqi parliament and the US embassy and is a base for many Iraqi politicians.

WASHINGTON — Revelations about Iranian air strikes against Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq have illustrated how American and Iranian forces are operating in separate areas to avoid confrontation, part of a fragile alignment fraught with risk, US officials and analysts say.

Air raids by Iranian F-4 Phantom fighters over the weekend reflect a pattern in which Iranian or US military advisers have carved out separate spheres in Iraq as the two archrivals seek to defeat a common enemy — the IS group, defence officials said.

"It was in eastern Diyala province," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren said of the air strike. "We have not had any air activity there."

The bombing run in eastern Iraq marked the first time the Iranian air force had flown its F-4 fighters in a combat mission against the IS group, US officials said.

Defence officials said both Tehran and Washington want to avoid confrontations or accidents that could spin into an international crisis or feed sectarian violence, and take pains to steer clear of the other nation's troops.

For the moment, the US-led coalition is ready to tolerate Iranian military advisers and aircraft in eastern or southern provinces with large Shiite populations, defence officials said.

"There's a tacit understanding we're not going to operate in the same space. And they're not targeting American forces," a senior defence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

"We know they have interests there. Iraq is their next door neighbour."

But the arrangement could easily unravel between the two enemies, and Washington is concerned that Shiite-led Iran's role could trigger an explosion of sectarian violence.

"It's a delicate balance," the official said. "The main thing is that the Iranians are supporting Iraqis in a way that doesn't fuel sectarianism."

Troops on the ground 

Iran's military presence in Iraq is nothing new, as Tehran rushed military advisers to the country in June after IS fighters swept through western and northern towns.

Iran's elite Quds force has sent advisers to Samarra, Baghdad, Karbala and Al Sahra air base near Tikrit, seeking to safeguard Shiite areas and organise local Shiite militias, analyst Farzin Nadimi wrote in a report posted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Iran also has flown surveillance drones in Iraq, US officials said, and analysts say Iranian pilots have helped fly Russian-made Su-25 Frogfoot attack aircraft that Tehran supplied to the Baghdad government several months ago.

An Iranian pilot, possibly operating as a forward air controller, was reportedly killed in Samarra in July, Nadimi wrote.

"They've had troops and advisers on the ground for a long time. And they have been flying UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]," the defence official said.

The air raid involving the F-4 fighters represented "an expansion in capabilities", he said.

But Iran's fighter flights were also a show of power and influence, said Ali Reza Nader, an analyst at the RAND Corporation think tank.

"Iran doesn't have to conduct air strikes," Nader said. Iran's leaders "want to demonstrate that Iran is a force to be reckoned with".

The silent partnership suits both Tehran and Washington, as the United States is mindful that if it embraced open military cooperation with Iran, Israel and Sunni Arab allies would be enraged, Nader said.

Any degree of collaboration in Iraq between the two countries will hinge on the outcome of Western nuclear diplomacy with Tehran, he said.

"We'll have to see what happens with the nuclear negotiations. If theyre' not succesful, then the case for cooperation is not very strong," he said.

 'Plenty of targets' 

US officials hope the Iranian air raids will pile pressure on the IS militants, who seized large parts of Syria and Iraq earlier this year as Iraqi army troops retreated in panic.

And they say there is little risk of competing over which IS units to hit.

"There are plenty of targets for everybody," said a second defence official.

After hundreds of US and coalition air strikes since August — and after weapons deliveries from both Tehran and Washington — the Iraqi army and Kurdish forces have made some modest advances but the IS group has yet to be driven out of from strongholds in the north and west.

US and allied aircraft renewed air raids in Iraq against IS over the past three days, the military's Central Command said. American and coalition warplanes conducted 11 strikes in Iraq since Monday in the north and west, including four raids against IS extremists near Mosul, it said in a statement.

Unlike Iran, Central Command releases regular updates on its strike sorties, describing the geographic areas where IS fighters were targeted. But there has been no mention of coalition strikes in eastern Iraq, near Iran's border.

BEIRUT — Lebanese authorities are holding a daughter and an ex-wife of the head of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the interior minister said.

It was initially reported that a wife and son of the self-proclaimed "caliph" had been arrested last month.

The woman, who has been named as Saja Al Dulaimi, was travelling with two sons and a daughter, Interior Minister Nouhad Mashnuq told the Lebanese MTV channel late Wednesday.

He said DNA tests showed that the girl was Baghdadi's child.

"Dulaimi is not Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi's wife currently. She has been married three times: first to a man from the former Iraqi regime, with whom she had two sons," he said.

"Six years ago she married Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi for three months, and she had a daughter with him. Now, she is married to a Palestinian and she is pregnant with his child," Mashnuq added.

"We conducted DNA tests on her and the daughter, which showed she was the mother of the girl, and that the girl is his [Baghdadi's] daughter, based on DNA from Baghdadi from Iraq," the minister said.

He gave no details on Dulaimi's nationality, but a security source said she was believed to be Iraqi.

Mashnuq offered no further information about her current husband, although he said investigations showed the woman had ties to extremists in Lebanon.

Dulaimi's children were at a children's care centre while she was being interrogated, he said.

Mashnuq also confirmed the arrest of the wife of Anas Sharkas, a leader in Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate Al Nusra Front.

Dulaimi was among a group of female prisoners released from Syrian jails in March, in exchange for 13 nuns from the ancient town of Maalula held by Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate Al Nusra Front.

The IS group has yet to comment publicly on Dulaimi's detention, but Al Nusra, despite a feud with Baghdadi's group, issued a statement of condemnation.

It described her as "sister Saja Al Dulaimi" and said the arrest of women and children was evidence of the "weakness" of the Lebanese state.

Sources said the detention of Dulaimi and Sharkas' wife could help the Lebanese as they struggle to negotiate the release of 27 members of the security forces held by jihadists from IS and Al Nusra.

The soldiers and police were abducted when militants from the two groups briefly overran the Lebanese border town of Arsal in August.

The fighters withdrew after a truce negotiated by clerics, but took 30 hostages, three of whom have been executed.

NAIROBI/MOGADISHU — A Kenyan warplane crashed in southern Somalia on Thursday, with the Kenyan military saying the crash was due to technical problems while Somali rebels said they had shot it down with a missile.

The aircraft, which had been on a combat mission, came down in the area of the southern port city of Kismayu, where Kenyan troops are deployed as part of an African Union peacekeeping force battling the Islamist rebel group Al Shabab.

A spokesman for the Kenya Defence Force (KDF) said the pilot reported a technical problem on returning from a combat mission at about 3pm (1200 GMT) before he was forced to eject.

Al Shabab said they had shot the plane down, however.

"We hit the Kenyan jet and downed it. It was bombing Bulaguduud town today," the rebels' spokesman for military operations, Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, told Reuters. He said the group used a missile and that the pilot was "burnt inside”.

Kenyan planes have often flown missions over Somalia since troops marched across the border in 2011, but Al Shabab has not previously shown it could target them with missiles.

"You can't rule out that they might have acquired a few, but it is not a capability that they have demonstrated in a clear manner," said Mark Schroeder, Africa analyst for consultancy Stratfor.

KDF spokesman Colonel David Obonyo denied the claim. "They don't have the capability or the means to do that," he said. "This was a purely mechanical failure, a technical problem."

Obonyo, who declined to give details about the type of aircraft except to say it was a combat jet, said a search and rescue operation had been launched for the pilot.

Kenyan troops recaptured Kismayu, a strategic port in the south of the war-torn country, from Al Shabab rebels in 2012.

The report follows two attacks in two weeks by Al Shabab militants inside Kenya's northern border region in which more than 60 non-Muslim Kenyan civilians were killed.

ABU DHABI — An Emirati woman has been arrested over the fatal stabbing of an American teacher and a foiled plot to bomb the home of another US citizen, UAE authorities said Thursday.

Interior Minister Sheikh Saif Bin Zayed said the woman, believed to be the veiled suspect who killed the American woman Monday in a shopping centre toilet, had also attempted to plant a makeshift bomb in front of the home of an American doctor in Abu Dhabi.

The suspect "is in the hands of the police", the minister said.

Police said the suspect was a 38-year-old Emirati, who they have dubbed "The Reem Island Ghost" after the location of the shopping centre where Monday's attack took place.

"We are witnessing an unprecedented, heinous crime in the UAE," Saif said, threatening "deterrent punishment against whoever attempts to tamper with UAE security."

The United Arab Emirates hosts millions of foreigners and has remained largely unscathed as unrest swept other Arab countries.

In CCTV footage released on Wednesday, the assailant is seen entering the shopping mall shortly after 1:00pm and then rushing from the restroom about 90 minutes later, as panicked shoppers scrambled.

The footage was accompanied by pictures of a bloodied kitchen knife and trails of blood on the floor of the restroom.

Complete footage released by the ministry on Thursday showed the fully covered woman entering a building in Abu Dhabi, pulling a wheeled luggage case, where she was allegedly hiding a bomb.

The bomb was planted at the door of one of the apartments in the building.

The footage then shows a raid on a house where the woman, dressed in pyjamas, was with a man, whom the police handcuffed.

The ministry did not give details on the fate of the man or say if he had a role in the attacks.

It showed several knives and bombmaking materials, as well as traces of blood on the steering wheel of the suspect's car.

Police said Wednesday that the divorced American woman, who worked at an Abu Dhabi kindergarten, was stabbed by a person wearing a black robe, black gloves and a niqab — a Muslim veil that conceals the face except for the eyes.

They initially said the woman was 37 years old but on Thursday said she was 47.

The victim's 11-year-old twins were taken into police care until their father arrived from abroad.

The stabbing took place on the same day as a recording was released attributed to Abu Mohammed Al Adnani, the spokesman of the extremist Islamic State group, that urged Muslims to attack Westerners by any means, even if only to "spit on their faces".

The UAE in September joined the US-led coalition carrying out air strikes against IS in Iraq and Syria.

SANAA  — A car bomb killed three people at the Iranian ambassador’s residence in Yemen on Wednesday, an attack claimed by Al Qaeda militants who oppose Iran and the Yemeni Shiite rebels who control the capital Sanaa.

Wednesday’s bombing, the second in Sanaa claimed by Al Qaeda in as many months, blew a large hole in the Iranian residence and sent rubble flying across the street of the well-guarded diplomatic quarter of the city, a Reuters witness said.
A Yemeni civilian and two soldiers were killed, a medical official said. Seventeen people, mostly employees at a nearby oil ministry building, were wounded. The ambassador was unhurt, having left his residence for the embassy 10 minutes earlier, security officials said.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed responsibility on its Twitter account. It said its fighters parked the car and left the scene, killing several Iranian employees and local guards. Security officials said it was a suicide attack and no Iranian staff were harmed.
Iran, the Middle East’s major Shiite power, backs the Houthi rebel movement that seized control of Sanaa in September and has since taken swathes of the country’s north and centre.
AQAP, which claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Sanaa on October 9 that killed 47 people at a Houthi checkpoint, opposes the political ascendancy of the Houthis, who took over Sanaa after weeks of anti-government demonstrations.
The hardline Sunni militants see Shiites as heretics and decry Iranian influence in politically volatile Yemen.
The United States, which is at odds with Iran on a number of issues from its nuclear programme to its support for militant groups in the Middle East, quickly condemned the bombing.
“Attacks on diplomatic facilities and against diplomats contravene all international norms and can never be justified or excused,” the State Department said in a statement.

Bloodstained

“Glass shattered on me from the force of the explosion,” Bashir Al Ossaimy, who works at a drug company opposite the residence, told Reuters. He had two bandages on his face, a swollen eye and a bloodstained jacket and shirt.
Inside the embassy compound, an Iranian flag was draped over the rubble. Part of the perimeter wall had caved in and several Houthi militia officials were on the scene, as well as regular Yemeni security officials.
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian urged Yemen to “quickly identify and punish the culprits behind the terrorist act”, according to the IRNA news agency.
Western and Gulf Arab countries, which have supported Yemen’s UN-backed political transition to democracy since 2012 after decades of autocracy, are worried that instability in Yemen could allow Al Qaeda to establish a stronghold.
Sunni Saudi Arabia, traditionally the dominant outside influence in Yemen, is also concerned about the Houthis’ friendship with Shiite Iran. Riyadh fears the Houthis may seek to emulate the king-making role played in Lebanon by the Shiite militia Hezbollah there.
Iranian diplomats have been targeted in Yemen before. One diplomat is being held hostage by suspected Sunni militants and another was killed this year when he resisted a kidnapping attempt.

MISHOR ADUMIN, Palestinian Territories — A Palestinian teen stabbed two Israelis in a West Bank settlement in “an apparent terror attack” on Wednesday before an off-duty security guard shot him in the leg, Israeli forces said.

None of the three were reported to have been seriously wounded.
Security spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement that the alleged attacker was a 16-year-old from the village of Al Azariya, East of Jerusalem.
She said he was moderately wounded in the shooting. Israeli forces had earlier described his condition as serious.
The stabbing victims, described as middle-aged, were also moderately wounded in the incident at a supermarket in the Mishor Adumim settlement, about 10 kilometres from Al Azariya.
Many Palestinians work in the settlement’s industrial zone and the supermarket is frequented by Palestinians and Israelis.
The armed Israeli was an off-duty security officer from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, the premier said.
Alleged Palestinian attackers have carried out a series of similar “lone wolf” attacks on Israelis in recent weeks amid increasing tensions in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

CAIRO — Another Egyptian has died of H5N1 bird flu, bringing the total number of deaths in Egypt from the virus to seven this year out of 14 identified cases, the health ministry said on Wednesday.

The 26-year-old man, who worked with birds and came to hospital suffering from a fever, cough and a shortage of breath, died in the province of Minya, south of Cairo, where several other cases have occurred, the ministry said in a statement.
On Monday, the ministry said three people had died in the last week.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), from 2003 through until October 2, 2014, there have been 668 laboratory-confirmed human cases of H5N1 infection officially reported from 16 countries. Of these cases, 393 have died.
The WHO warns that whenever bird flu viruses are circulating in poultry, there is a risk of sporadic infections or small clusters of human cases — especially in people exposed to infected birds or contaminated environments.
Human cases of H5N1 are rare, however, and the virus does not currently appear to transmit easily from person to person.
Egypt's H5N1 cases have largely been found in poor rural areas in the south, where villagers, particularly women, tend to keep and slaughter poultry in the home.

CAIRO — The head of Al Azhar, one of the most prestigious centres of Sunni Islam learning, condemned Wednesday "barbaric crimes" committed by the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq and Syria.

Militants are acting "under the guise of this holy religion and have given themselves the name 'Islamic State' in an attempt to export their false Islam," Sheikh Ahmed Al Tayeb told the opening session of a two-day international conference in Cairo on fighting extremism.
"I wonder and ask why this blind division exists that has tainted Arab blood," Sheikh Tayeb said, adding that religious, political and economic factors were behind the emergence of groups such as IS.
But "some feel that our suffering is also a plot by Israel so it remains the most powerful country in the region, and that possibility cannot be excluded", he said.
Sheikh Tayeb called on the US-led coalition that is fighting IS "to confront those countries who support terrorism financially and militarily".
"But we should not ignore our own responsibility for the emergence of extremism that has led to the formation of organisations such as Al Qaeda and other armed groups."
The United States launched its first air strikes against IS in Iraq in August. In late September, it extended the campaign to IS targets in Syria, joined by several Arab allies.
On Wednesday, the Pentagon said Iranian warplanes had also carried out air strikes against IS in Iraq, a claim Tehran refused to confirm or deny.
The Cairo conference, organised by Al Azhar, is being attended by delegates from several countries including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Morocco.
Later Wednesday, Saudi spy chief Prince Khaled Bin Bandar Bin Abdul Aziz met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, and the two "emphasised the pivotal role of Al Azhar in correcting the mistaken understandings about Islam, and in fighting terrorism," Sisi's office said.
"The two discussed regional issues concerning Iraq, Syria and Yemen... and agreed that Arab and Islamic countries must share responsibilities in fighting terrorism through coordination and joint efforts".