Region

VIENNA — Iran will convert more of its higher-grade enriched uranium into reactor fuel under an extended nuclear deal with world powers, making the material less suitable for building atomic bombs, a diplomatic source and a US think tank said on Monday.

Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China, and Russia failed to meet a November 24 deadline for resolving their dispute over Tehran's nuclear programme. They gave themselves until the end of June for further negotiations.

It was the second time this year they had missed a self-imposed target for a comprehensive agreement under which Iran would curb its nuclear programme in exchange for an end to sanctions hobbling Tehran's economy.

As a result, a preliminary accord reached in late 2013 will remain in force. Under its terms, Iran halted its most sensitive nuclear activity in return for limited easing of sanctions.

Accordingly, Iran earlier this year eliminated its stockpile of uranium gas enriched to a fissile concentration of 20 per cent, a relatively short technical step away from weapons-grade material. A large part of it was processed into oxide.

When the deal was first extended in July, Iran undertook to move further away from potential weapons material by converting 25kg of the uranium oxide — a quarter of the total — into nuclear fuel during the initial four-month extension.

The diplomatic source said that under the new extension Iran would continue this work and he suggested around 5kg would be converted per month.

In line with this, a US-based research and advocacy group, the Arms Control Association, said 35kg uranium oxide would be turned into fuel during the seven-month period. It said Iran had also made specific commitments limiting its development of advanced centrifuges to refine uranium.

In a letter seen by Reuters on Monday, Iran and the six powers asked the UN nuclear watchdog to continue checks that Tehran is honouring its undertakings, including "monitoring of fuel fabrication" for a Tehran research reactor.

In July, a US official said that once the oxide had been turned into fuel plates, Iran would "find it quite difficult and time-consuming" to use it in any effort to develop a bomb.

Iran denies seeking a nuclear weapons capability, saying its atomic energy programme is meant to generate electricity.

NEW DELHI — An Indian student who travelled to Iraq to join the Islamic State (IS) group has returned home disillusioned after jihadists made him clean toilets and do other menial jobs, according to media reports.

Areeb Majeed, 23, left for Iraq with three friends in late May amid fears by authorities that IS militants were attempting to recruit from India's large pool of young Muslim men.

The engineering student flew home Friday to Mumbai where he was arrested and charged by India's elite National Investigation Agency (NIA) with terror-related offences.

Majeed told NIA officers he was sidelined by the jihadists for whom he fetched water and performed other lowly tasks such as cleaning toilets, instead of taking part in the deadly offensive like he wanted, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

He phoned his family to say he wanted to come home after suffering an unexplained bullet wound for which he did not get proper medical attention, the agency said late Sunday.

"Only after I begged them, I was taken to a hospital," he was quoted as saying by NIA officers. "There was neither a holy war nor any of the preachings in the holy book were followed."

India's moderate population of 150 million Muslims have traditionally not been drawn into sectarian conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, but the case of the four raised concerns about online recruitment.

Al Qaeda announced in September a new chapter of its extremist movement charged with waging jihad in South Asia, prompting several Indian states to be placed on high alert.

Tanvir Sheikh, the father of one of Majeed's friends who was still missing in Iraq, said he felt betrayed by his son.

Sheikh said his son Fahad was offered a job in Kuwait but instead decided to travel to Iraq to join the extremists.

"He had got a job offer from Kuwait with a salary of 3 lakh rupees ($4,800) but he ignored that and instead took up arms. Now what happens to his future?" Sheikh told the Indian Express newspaper on Monday.

"I feel let down by my son. He had a bright career ahead of him but he took advantage of our love and betrayed us."

Radicalised foreigners have been drawn to the IS group, which has conducted a series of mass executions and other atrocities since launching its offensive in Iraq and Syria in June.

BAGHDAD — When Islamic State (IS) group fighters swept into northern Iraq's second city Mosul in a lightning June offensive, their propaganda trumpeted a better life for the people under jihadist rule.

Now, nearly six months later, residents there are suffering from a lack of clean water and also a shortage of medicine to treat illnesses caused by it.

The very name "Islamic State" is a clear pointer that the group seeks to rule as well as to conquer: IS has declared a cross-border Islamic "caliphate" spanning parts of Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

But despite spearheading the June offensive that also overran the surrounding Nineveh province and swathes of other territory, IS has been unable to provide basic services in these areas, ultimately undermining the state to which it aspires.

"The impression given in IS propaganda is a group offering a better quality of life than before that is also more just for locals," said Aymenn Al Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum who is an expert on jihadist organisations.

But "the hardships of the locals certainly undermine IS claims to be a state meeting the needs of the people and offering them real security", he said.

One resident of east Mosul whose wife became ill because of contaminated water told AFP by telephone that the "disruption of the water treatment stations" had led to sickness among many people.

Digging wells 

"The biggest and most dangerous problem now is because of our harsh circumstances and the absence of services," Abu Ali said.

Some people have even turned to digging their own wells to get water because of interruptions in the mains supply, which Abu Ali said could be cut for a day or even a week.

Problems with basic services already existed in much of Iraq before this year's crisis erupted, but these have been compounded in Mosul by skilled government employees fleeing jihadist rule.

"Treatment stations are old and the water distribution networks are damaged," a water treatment official in Mosul said, adding that there was now a shortage of workers as well.

At Mosul General Hospital, one doctor said the facility had admitted 15 people infected by contaminated water in just 24 hours — and there are nine other hospitals in the city.

A doctor at Republican Hospital said it too had received a large number of people, especially children, who had become sick, and that stomach and intestinal infections and hepatitis were on the rise.

As the number of ill people increases, there is a corresponding shortage of medicine available to treat them.

'A big prison' 

One official in the Nineveh provincial health department said stocks of drugs were running low and the Nineveh Pharmaceutical Company had stopped operating.

"Communication with government institutions has been cut and we have not received any budget to allow the provision of the medicines we need," the official said.

Umm Mohammed, a resident of west Mosul who brought her 10-year-old son to Republican Hospital for treatment, said: "There is a major shortage of medicine needed to treat these sick people.

"The roads are closed and Mosul has turned into a big prison that we can't leave," she said.

Expensive private pharmacies are now the only option, she said, asking: "How will the poor get medicine?"

A 29-year-old woman living in southern Mosul brought her daughter Shaima in to Mosul General for treatment.

"My daughter has not stopped crying and suffering from stomach pains" since the day before, she said.

For now, there would appear to be little immediate hope of the problem being resolved.

While Iraq's army and allied forces are engaged in an anti-IS offensive, the key cities of Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah remain in jihadist hands.

And while Kurdish forces and elite federal forces have battled IS in Nineveh province, they would have to make significant advances to pose a credible threat to the militants holding Mosul.

GAZA — Three months after the war in Gaza, Sadeeqa Naseer still lives in a bomb site. Air strikes turned the two upper floors of her three-storey apartment building in the Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun into a rubble-strewn ruin.

Thirty-five people shelter on the ground floor, where holes blasted in the wall by tank shells have been covered over only by plastic sheeting that does little to keep out the cold wind and driving rain of the fast-approaching winter.

Someone managed to extend an electric cable from a nearby building, providing just enough power to run a fridge and keep a single lamp on during the night. But there is no cement to rebuild, and no one can get a bulldozer to clear the rubble. Men were chipping futilely at concrete slabs with hammers.

"Who could live here?" asks Naseer, 60, who said she had received no aid from the United Nations or anyone else.

Since the July-August war between Israelis and Hamas Islamists that run Gaza, in which more than 2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis were killed, barely any progress has been made rebuilding the shattered territory, despite donors pledging $5 billion.

Israel tightly monitors the import of construction materials and equipment into Gaza, arguing that otherwise it could be used to rebuild tunnels used by Hamas fighters who control the strip to carry out attacks.

Palestinian officials and critics of Israeli policy say that has made it impossible to rebuild, leaving 40,000 of the strip's 1.8 million residents in temporary shelter and thousands more facing winter in barely habitable ruins.

"The cement and gravel are being regulated as if they were a nuclear weapon," said Sari Bashi, co-founder of Gisha, an Israeli organisation which monitors access to Gaza and says only a tiny fraction of cement needed to satisfy demand is reaching the strip.

An Israeli government official said Israel was willing to help in any way to ensure reconstruction in Gaza moved forward rapidly, but it also wanted to be sure that Hamas was not rebuilding its militant infrastructure.

Unluckiest minister

"I am the unluckiest housing minister in the world," said Mufeed Al Hasayna, a businessman who spent most of his career in New Jersey before joining a technocratic Palestinian government formed this year to unite Hamas-run Gaza with the West Bank.

According to Hasayna, Gaza needs 8,000 tonnes of cement a day to meet demand. A new system set up with the United Nations to comply with Israeli requirements lets through at most 2,000, he said.

At that rate, reconstruction would take more than 30 years, said Hasayna, one of four members of the unity government based in Gaza rather than the West Bank.

"We have 18,000 fully destroyed buildings and about 50,000 partially destroyed ones," he said. "Gaza before the war needed about 70,000 apartments a year to keep pace with population growth. Now after the war, Gaza needs 150,000 new apartments."

Since the war, electricity has been partially restored so that power is now cut for only eight hours a day. Sewage and water treatment plants are mostly working again, although there is still almost no drinking water.

But in terms of clearing the vast mountains of rubble and mangled steel, rebuilding homes and patching up smashed roads, bridges and other infrastructure, next to nothing has happened.

The biggest difficulty is moving reconstruction materials and other equipment into Gaza. Egypt has largely kept its border with Gaza closed, so any goods must be transferred from Israel, which has two crossings open: one for goods, one for people.

To satisfy Israeli demands for precise tracking of all cement, the United Nations came up with a strict mechanism that involves video and GPS monitoring of materials, which can only be transferred to vetted suppliers.

For ordinary Palestinians who do not have access to the official supplies, if they can find any cement at all, they can buy it only from the black market at more than $50 a bag, more than seven times the normal price.

Clearing away rubble is all but impossible, with little access to diggers and bulldozers.

Hasayna, the housing minister, signed an agreement with the UN Development Programme and the Swedish government last week to equip and hire local contractors to clear and recycle rubble from northern Gaza. It has yet to start on a big scale.

The men chipping away at the concrete slabs outside Sadeeqa Naseer's ruined apartment sell any steel and aggregate they can extract. But they have made little progress with hand tools.

"Thirty-five people are living in conditions that are not tolerable with the help of anyone but God," says Naseer. "We want our house to be rebuilt before cold and sickness kill us."

BAGHDAD — US air support and pledges of weapons and training for Iraq's army have raised expectations of a counter-offensive soon against Islamic State (IS), but sectarian rifts will hamper efforts to forge a military strategy and may delay a full-scale assault.

The Sunni Islamists stormed through northern Iraq in a 48-hour offensive in June, charging virtually unopposed towards the outskirts of Baghdad, humiliating a US-trained Iraqi army which surrendered both land and weapons as it retreated.

By contrast, even a successful effort by the Shiite-led government to dislodge IS, also known as ISIS, from Sunni territory where it rules over millions of Iraqis would be fiercely fought and could stretch well beyond next year.

The Baghdad government relies on Shiite militias and Kurdish peshmerga to contain IS — a dependence which underlines and may even exacerbate the sectarian rivalry which opened the door for the summer offensive.

US newspapers have cited officials in Washington saying the Americans' training mission aims to prepare Iraqi troops for a spring offensive to retake territory, including Mosul, northern Iraq's largest city and IS' powerbase.

Hemin Hawrami, an official close to Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani, told Reuters that Iraqi forces would not be ready to take the fight to Mosul, in Iraq, until late 2015.

“There will be no spring or summer [offensive],” he said, adding that progress depended on government willingness “to reorganise the army, how quickly they can solve political issues with us and the Sunnis, [and] how quick the coalition will be in providing heavy arms to peshmerga and the Iraqi army”.

‘Certain victory’

The army, Shiite militias and Kurdish fighters have made some gains against Islamic State, pushing back an advance towards Kurdish territory in August and last week recapturing towns in Diyala province, on the road from Baghdad to Iran.

The leader of the pro-Iranian Shiite Badr Organisation, whose fighters battled alongside peshmerga and soldiers in Diyala, said they would turn next to the Sunni provinces of Salahuddin and Anbar — north and west of Baghdad — before moving further north to Nineveh province, where Mosul lies.

“We are counting on the support of the Sunni tribal fighters. With them joining the fight, our victory is certain,” Hadi Al Amiri told Reuters by telephone from Diyala province.

Amiri said he expected to get weapons not just from the Iraqi government, which may allocate a quarter of next year’s $100 billion budget to the military, but also from the $1.6 billion of arms and training which Washington plans to deliver.

Both Amiri’s assumptions look optimistic, as Washington and the Sunni tribes are deeply wary of Shiite militia forces.

Iraqi authorities aim to overcome the deep rifts between Shiites, Sunni Arabs, Kurds and other groups by absorbing local fighters into a state-funded National Guard, but the role of that force remains undecided.

Long war

Government adviser Zuhair Al Chalabi told Reuters the army was in no shape to surge north and Mosul’s mainly Sunni residents would resist a campaign by Shiite militias alone.

Instead, a combined force of army soldiers, Sunni tribes, Kurdish peshmerga and Shiite fighters must be assembled — and the open border with IS territory in Syria sealed.

“There is a plan, but it can’t be implemented that quickly,” said Chalabi, who is from Mosul.

Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari said IS was still a formidable force but was losing the ability to conduct major ground combat because that exposed it to air strikes.

Zebari, a Kurd, declined to give details of the military strategies of either the Baghdad government or the semi-autonomous Kurdish authorities, but said “planning and coordination are already under way” for the battle for Mosul.

“I am really not aware of spring offensives. The offensive is on — spring, summer, winter. We countered them in autumn. This is an ongoing battle with them.”

The United States is setting up four training camps for Iraq’s 80,000-strong armed forces — two around Baghdad, one in the Kurdish city of Erbil and the fourth in Anbar.

Washington has also set out plans to provide body armour and guns to 45,000 soldiers, 15,000 Kurdish peshmerga and 5,000 Sunni tribal forces.

A senior Western diplomat in Baghdad said the training might take six months, with the first round complete in late spring.

While he argued that the tide had turned against IS in northern Iraq and was moving against it elsewhere, fighting was likely to stretch into 2016.

And without control over the border, IS fighters could slip away and regroup in Syria. “It’s the balloon theory. You squeeze one part and it pops up elsewhere,” he said.

Hawrami, the Kurdish official, foresaw a protracted and potentially inconclusive battle.

“In order to guarantee their defeat in Mosul we have to defeat them in Syria as well,” he said. “ISIS cannot be vanquished. ISIS can be degraded and weakened, but this process of degrading and weakening needs years.”

BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi on Sunday announced that an investigation had uncovered the existence of 50,000 "ghost soldiers", and promised a widening crackdown on corruption.

"The prime minister revealed the existence of 50,000 fictitious names" in the military, said a statement from Abadi's office issued after a session of parliament.

A parliament statement said the premier scrapped the 50,000 jobs, equivalent to almost four full army divisions.

"Over the past few weeks, the PM has been cracking down to expose the ghost soldiers and get to the root of the problem," Abadi's spokesman Rafid Jaboori said.

He said that the investigation started with a thorough headcount during the latest salary payment process.

Soldiers confirmed to AFP that salaries were paid only recently after a two-month delay about which they were given no explanation.

"There are two kinds of 'fadhaiyin'," one experienced officer in the security forces said, using a word which, literally translated, means "space men", and refers to the fictitious soldiers crowding the payroll.

"The first kind: each officer is allowed, for example, five guards. He'll keep two, send three home and pocket their salary or an agreed percentage," he told AFP.

"Then the second and bigger group is at the brigade level. A brigade commander usually has 30, 40 or more soldiers who stay at home or don't exist," the officer said.

"The problem is that he too, to keep his job as a brigade commander, has to bribe his own hierarchical superiors with huge amounts of money," he said.

The officer explained that, for those reasons, the thousands of soldiers who defected or were killed this year across Iraq were rarely declared as such.

The United States, which occupied the country for eight years, has spent billions of dollars training and equipping Iraq's military.

Yet the army collapsed when fighters from the Islamic State jihadist group launched a sweeping offensive in June.

Since taking office in September, Abadi has sacked or retired several top military commanders, and Sunday's announcement suggests he wants to tackle the graft and patronage that prevailed under his predecessor Nouri Al Maliki.

"Haider Al Abadi is setting integrity, efficiency and courage as the criteria to appoint a new military leadership," Jaboori said.

"This weeding out process will extend beyond the military to all state institutions," he said.

BENGHAZI, Libya — About 400 people have been killed in six weeks of heavy fighting between Libyan pro-government forces and Islamist groups in Libya’s second-largest city Benghazi, medical staff said on Saturday.

Backed by forces led by a former general, the newly formed government army launched in mid-October an offensive against Islamists in Benghazi, expelling them from the airport area and from several camps the army had lost during the summer.

In the past three weeks the fighting has centred around Benghazi’s commercial port where pro-government forces say Islamists are holed up. The port has had to close, disrupting food supplies in the eastern city.

“The death toll has risen to 400,” a source at a Benghazi hospital said, declining to be identified for security reasons. Medics at other hospitals in the city confirmed the estimated death toll.

The fighting in Benghazi is part of wider turmoil in the North African country. Two governments, each with their own parliament and army chief of staff are vying for legitimacy, three years after the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi.

In August, Prime Minister Abdullah Al Thinni and his Cabinet were forced to leave Tripoli for the east of Libya when group called Libya Dawn seized the capital.

The new rulers set up their own government and parliament, but these have not been recognised by the United Nations and world powers.

DUBAI — Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Sunday the armed forces should increase their combat capability regardless of political considerations, in an apparent allusion to continuing nuclear talks with the West aimed at easing tension in the Middle East.

"Given our vast maritime borders and the enemy's huge investments in this area, our armed forces should continuously improve their [combat] readiness, irrespective of political calculations," Khamenei told a gathering of senior navy officials during a ceremony to mark the "Navy Week" in Iran.

Khamenei, who commands all branches of the armed forces in addition to other key centres of power in the Islamic republic, did not mention any countries by name but he normally uses "enemy" to refer mainly to the United States and Britain — both of which have intervened in Iran over the past century.

"Peacetime offers great opportunities for our armed forces to... build up on pre-emptive capacities," said Khamenei, with state television playing excerpts of his speech.

The United States and its key regional ally Israel have both hinted they might bomb Iran to prevent it developing nuclear weapons. Iran denies any such ambition and insists its atomic programme is designed for civilian projects.

With Khamenei's blessing, Iran's moderate President Hassan Rouhani launched a diplomatic initiative to resolve a 12-year nuclear dispute, hoping to save his country from punishing global sanctions. Tehran and six world powers missed a self-imposed deadline on November 24 for a deal, but gave themselves seven more months to overcome their many differences.

Despite his reserved support for the negotiations, Khamenei, perceived by many as a hardliner, remains distrustful of Western intentions in the region and insists that Iran's defence capability, including its controversial missile programme, must not be part of any broad diplomatic deal.

In tandem with Rouhani's diplomatic overture, generals appointed by Khamenei are maintaining a relentless war rhetoric and unveil on an almost daily basis what they say are new innovations in weaponry.

"The range of [our] missiles covers all of Israel today," the chief of the Revolutionary Guards, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, said last week. "That means the fall of the Zionist regime, which will certainly come soon."

However, Admiral Ali Shamakhani, an ally of President Rouhani who serves as a top security official, sought to temper the bellicose language on Sunday.

"Our missile capability, like our nuclear, is inherently peaceful and geared for self-defence," the official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying.

ISTANBUL — Turkey's main pro-Kurdish party on Sunday pressed Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu over whether a probe had been launched into claims that an attack by jihadists on a border post had been launched from Turkish soil.

The Turkish army on Saturday confirmed Islamic State (IS) jihadists had staged an attack at the Mursitpinar border post close to the Syrian town of Kobani but strenuously denied that the car involved in the strike had come from its territory.

"Has any investigation been launched yet into the allegations that an explosive-laden car, said to be coming from Turkey, exploded as it crossed into Kobani from the Mursitpinar border post?" People's Democratic Party (HDP) lawmaker Faysal Sariyildiz said in a written parliamentary question to Davutoglu.

Some pro-Kurdish media said earlier that a suicide attack had been staged by a vehicle that had arrived from Turkish territory, raising new questions about Turkey's commitment to fight IS.

According to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, one suicide attacker blew up an explosive-packed car and another detonated a suicide-bomb belt.

The HDP lawmaker also demanded answers on claims that border villages evacuated by the state ostensibly for security reasons were "actually evacuated to facilitate the transition" of IS militants.

He also asked whether it was a coincidence that the attack came on the same day a delegation of HDP lawmakers held a rare meeting with jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan on his prison island on the Sea of Marmara.

Turkey has long been accused of encouraging the rise of IS and even collaborating with the group, as well as not doing enough to stop jihadists passing through its borders.

Turkish officials point to the fact that Ankara has listed IS as a terror group and insist everything is being done to stop the flow of jihadists across borders.

ISTANBUL — A settlement to end a three-decade insurgency by Kurdish militants in Turkey could be reached within months if the government puts in place legal guarantees for Kurdish rights, a jailed militant leader was quoted as saying on Sunday.

The siege by Islamic State (IS) militants of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani on the Turkish border has risked derailing Turkey's fragile peace process with its own Kurds, who have accused Ankara of failing to protect their ethnic kin.

Around 40 people were killed when thousands of Kurds took to the streets in October, mostly in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast, to demonstrate against what they saw as Ankara's refusal to intervene in Kobani.

Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group, nonetheless said agreement could be found within four to five months if Turkey showed it was serious, according to the pro-Kurdish People’s Democtratic Party (HDP), which visited him on his island prison.

"If all sides execute the process correctly, seriously and decisively, in maximum four to five months a major democratic solution can be achieved," the HDP quoted Ocalan as saying in a statement, but warned that failure would deepen regional chaos.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan initiated the peace process with Ocalan in 2012 with the aim of ending a 30-year-old insurgency by militants pushing for greater Kurdish rights. The conflict has killed 40,000 people, most of them Kurds.

Kurdish forces allied to the PKK, the People's Defence Units (YPG), are meanwhile fighting against IS insurgents attacking Kobani. The PKK is designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and European Union.

The violence spilled over the border on Saturday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war. It said IS fighters had clashed with Syrian Kurds just inside Turkish territory.

A Turkish official said IS insurgents had chased a group of Kurdish fighters over the border on Saturday, but denied there had been clashes in Turkey, saying a Turkish armoured vehicle had pushed the insurgents back into Syria.

IS militants have detonated four suicide car bombs in Kobani since Saturday, one of them at the Mursitpinar border crossing. US-led air strikes continued to hit the insurgents' positions around Kobani on Sunday.

The observatory said at least 62 fighters had been killed since early on Saturday, 50 of them from IS.