Region

ISTANBUL — Militants from Turkey's separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on Monday hijacked a truck, seizing 400 kilogrammes of the explosive substance ammonium nitrate, the Turkish army said.

The incident in Turkey's southeast comes amid an sudden upsurge in attacks blamed on the Kurdish militant group, including the killing in broad daylight of three off-duty Turkish soldiers at the weekend.

The army said that the latest incident took place at a private coal mine in the Silopi district of Sirnak province close to the border with Iraq.

Having seized the vehicle, the group loaded the explosives onto another truck and then released the driver of the first truck.

The army blamed the incident on the "separatist terror organisation", its customary term for the PKK which it never refers to by name.

The upsurge in tensions with the PKK, which until now has largely observed a fragile ceasefire since March 2013, highlight the controversy over the government's strategy against Islamist jihadists in Syria.

Kurdish militants accuse the Turkish government of failing to support Kurdish fighters seeking to prevent the Syrian border town of Kobane from being overrun by jihadists.

Turkey has arrested seven people suspected of involvement in Saturday's killing of three soldiers in the town of Yuksekova in Hakkari province — a crime that commentators warned risked derailing the peace process with the Kurds.

At least 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK in 1984 launched an insurgency aimed at winning self-rule and greater rights for Turkey's Kurdish minority.

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — The Lebanese army took the last position held by Islamist militants in the northern city of Tripoli on Monday, ending two days of battles that marked some of the worst fighting to spill over into Lebanon from the Syrian civil war next door.

Guns fell silent as the army issued a statement saying fighters who had fled should turn themselves in or be hunted down. A security official said the city had been secured and 162 militants arrested.

At least 11 soldiers, eight civilians and 22 militants have died in the fighting in the predominantly Sunni Muslim city where hostilities linked to Syria's civil war have erupted repeatedly in the last three years.

"The operation is over and the army is entering areas where the gunmen were entrenched in order to clear them," Samir Jisr, a Sunni politician from Tripoli, told Reuters.

The fighting marks the worst spillover of Syria-related violence into Lebanon since early August, when Islamist insurgents affiliated to the Nusra Front and Islamic State (IS) staged an incursion into the border town of Arsal and took around 20 soldiers captive.

Three have been executed and the Nusra Front has threatened to kill a fourth in response to the army operation in Tripoli.

The latest fighting erupted after an army raid on a militant hideout last Thursday. The detained leader of the cell has told investigators its plan was to set up a safe haven for Islamist militants in villages near Tripoli, security sources said.

Lebanese officials fear Islamist insurgents from the Syrian civil war are trying to expand their influence into Sunni areas of northern Lebanon. With the onset of winter, they see a rising threat from insurgents based in the mountainous border area who may try to open up new supply routes between Syria and Lebanon.

The Syrian war has triggered Lebanon's worst instability since its own 1975-90 civil war. There have been several bouts of fighting in Tripoli since the Syria war erupted in 2011.

Political conflict has left Lebanon without a president since February when Michel Suleiman's term expired.

The area taken by the army on Monday included a mosque being used as a base by the gunmen in the Bab Al Tabbaneh district. Hundreds of families left the neighbourhood under a humanitarian ceasefire requested by local Sunni leaders.

A brief gunfight ensued as soldiers entered and started to comb the area. Security sources said some of the gunmen may have left with the civilians and others could have gone into hiding.

The fighting, some of the worst Tripoli has seen since the Lebanese civil war, caused damage to parts of the historic Old City. Some shops in the ancient souk had been completely destroyed, said Tawfik Debousi, head of a local trade association. "The whole area is historic," he told Reuters.

The fighting also engulfed areas outside Tripoli near the towns of Al Minya and Bahneen, where at least two soldiers were killed in an ambush. The army used helicopter gunships to fire at militant positions for the first time in recent years.

Fighting in Syria has divided its smaller neighbour along sectarian lines, with Sunnis supporting Syrian rebels and Shiites backing President Bashar Al Assad. Hardline Islamists have also won a degree of support among Lebanese Sunnis, though Sunni leaders say such groups have no major backing in Lebanon.

Lebanese security officials say another concern is support for militants among the Syrian refugees who number 1.1 million in Lebanon according to UN figures.

Prime Minister Tammam Salam, the most senior Sunni in the Lebanese government, met ministers and security officials on Monday and said "it was necessary to continue the confrontation", his office said in a statement.

"The government stands united behind the legitimate military security forces in the battle they are fighting to strike the terrorists and restore security to Tripoli and the north."

Politicians across Lebanon's political field condemned the violence in Tripoli, Lebanon's second largest city and a historic base for Sunni Islamist groups.

The precise affiliations of all the fighters taking part in the clashes were not immediately clear. Security sources say they include both Lebanese and Syrian supporters of the hardline Sunni Islamist groups IS and the Nusra Front.

The Nusra Front is the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda. IS is an Al Qaeda offshoot that controls swathes of both Syria and Iraq, targeted by a US-led campaign of air strikes in those two countries.

Lebanese Interior Minister Nohad Machnouk said in remarks published on Monday that the Tripoli gunmen numbered no more than 200 and were from both Lebanon and Syria.

Many Sunni Syrian rebels and hardline Lebanese Sunni Islamists accuse Lebanon's army of working with the Lebanese Shiite movement Hizbollah, which has sent fighters to aid Assad, a member of the Shiite-derived Alawite minority.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Palestinians will be effectively banned from riding the same buses as Israeli settlers in the West Bank, local media said Sunday, with a rights group slamming the plan as “racial segregation”.

Hundreds of Palestinians travel each day to work in Israel from the occupied West Bank, mainly in the construction business, using a single crossing point at Eyal where they present travel permits.

Currently they are allowed to return to the West Bank on the same buses as Israeli settlers.

But a new measure announced by Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon, due to go into effect next month, will require them to again check in at the Eyal crossing point, the Haaretz daily reported.

The workers would have to find separate transportation from that point on.

The directive in effect “bans Palestinian workers from traveling on Israeli-run public transportation in the West Bank”, said Haaretz.

The defence minister was not immediately available for comment.

Israeli settlers in the West Bank have called for years for Palestinians to be banned from public transport there, arguing their presence poses a security risk.

But Haaretz reported that the bus ban contradicted the view of the Israeli army, which does not see Palestinian commuters on Israeli transport as a threat, since the workers go through security vetting before receiving their travel permits.

Israeli rights group B’Tselem accused Yaalon of making a racially motivated decision.

“It is time to stop hiding behind technical arrangements... and admit this military procedure is thinly veiled pandering to the demand for racial segregation on buses,” a group statement said.

Last year, the group criticised the Israeli government for its decision to launch separate bus lines for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

BEIRUT — Syrian government air strikes on two besieged, rebel-held areas of the central province of Homs killed at least 31 people, 13 of them children, a monitoring group said on Sunday.

Sixteen members of the same family were among 24 people killed in raids late Saturday and Sunday on the town of Talbisseh, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, updating an earlier toll.

They included 12 children and three women, said the Britain-based monitoring group which has a wide network of sources inside Syria.

Talbisseh was one of Syria’s first areas to fall under rebel government control, after the 2011 outbreak of a revolt against President Bashar Assad.

It has been under total army siege for two years, and near-daily bombardment.

In the Waer district on the outskirts of Homs — the only area of Syria’s third city still in rebel hands — air strikes on Sunday killed seven people, including a child, the Observatory said.

Activists say army bombing of densely-populated Waer has escalated, marring hopes of a truce similar to those reached in other parts of the country.

The escalation came after 47 children were killed in an October 1 suicide attack at a school in a government-held area of Homs city.

“The head of the military security branch was changed” after the school attack, said Hassan Abul Zein, an activist in Waer who spoke to AFP via the Internet.

“The new head of the branch has launched a barbaric campaign against the neighbourhood... where the humanitarian situation is deplorable,” he said.

Homs was once dubbed “the capital of the revolution” against Assad.

But government forces retook control of the whole of the rest of the city in May when rebel fighters withdrew from central districts under a UN-brokered deal that ended a punishing two-year siege.

Elsewhere in the war-ravaged country, 12 civilians from the same family, including two women, were killed in government barrel bomb strikes on the rebel town of Busra Al Sham in southern Syria’s Daraa province.

Human Rights Watch has accused the government of defying a February UN Security Council resolution that ordered all sides in the war to stop the “indiscriminate use of barrel bombs and other weapons in populated areas”.

Also on Sunday, rebel fire on a school in the northern city of Aleppo killed a child and a man, and wounded 26 other people.

Aleppo city has been divided into government and rebel areas ever since a major offensive by insurgents in July 2012.

Syria’s war began as a peaceful protest movement demanding political change, but morphed into a civil war after Assad’s regime unleashed a brutal crackdown against dissent.

KHARTOUM — Sudan's ruling party has given final approval to President Omar Hassan Al Bashir as its candidate in next year's presidential vote, sealing his bid to extend his rule after 25 years in power.

Wanted on charges of genocide and war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Bashir has reason to fear his future should he leave office as he would have to entrust his fate to a successor. He can now cast those fears aside.

National Congress Party leaders endorsed Bashir by a 94 per cent margin at a party conference late on Saturday. Senior leaders had already eliminated four rival party candidates in an earlier vote last week.

The formal endorsement confirmed what many in Sudan had expected: Bashir would break his promise to step down and not run for another term in April 2015 polls.

Though the 70-year-old Bashir pledged in January to redraw the constitution, bring opposition parties into government, and launch a national dialogue, no visible progress has been made.

The few active opposition movements in Sudan are already losing hope of any change in the political climate and some have recently announced their plan to boycott the presidential vote.

Dire economic conditions since the secession of the oil-rich southern half of the country in 2011 — including inflation that currently hovers around 40 per cent — anger struggling citizens.

However, some Sudanese feel they cannot trust alternatives to Bashir, who has proven himself a political survivor, fighting off coup attempts, civil wars, and international isolation.

Sudan was placed on a US sanctions list in 1993 for harbouring "international terrorists" and is under international sanctions for actions during the conflict in the Darfur region that has killed hundreds of thousands of people since 2003.

In 2009, that isolation deepened when the ICC issued arrests warrants against Bashir. Nations like Kenya were criticised by the United States — itself not party to the ICC's Rome Statue — for hosting him.

US President Barack Obama notified US Congress on Friday he was extending sanctions on Sudan that began with an emergency declaration in 1997. In a statement issued by the White House, Obama said that Sudan's policies and actions pose an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States".

But there were no complaints after Bashir's visit to Cairo this month. Egypt, concerned over militants capitalising on chaos in post-Muammar Qadhafi Libya next door, has said it will coordinate efforts with Sudan in order to stabilise Libya. Sudan and Egypt share a border with Libya.

Perhaps sensing a changing dynamic, Bashir struck a confident tone in remarks at the conference, telling party members that he believed his country's isolation was ending.

"Many bodies were counting on Sudan being isolated, but we are seeing an opening in our external relations," he said.

He cited his recent visits to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, saying that they "removed the doubts" and "returned things to normal". 

CAIRO — An Egyptian court sentenced 23 pro-democracy activists on Sunday to three years in prison each for holding an unlicenced and violent protest, after international calls to free the defendants.

The rights activists include Yara Sallam and Sanaa Seif, described by Amnesty International as “prisoners of conscience”. Seif has been on hunger strike for about two months, her mother Laila Soueif said.

The Cairo court also ordered each of the 23 defendants to pay a fine of 10,000 Egyptian pounds (about $1,390).

Some of the activists had supported the military’s overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July last year which unleashed a deadly crackdown on his Islamist supporters.

They had since turned on the new authorities as it extended a crackdown on all protests.

The verdict, one of several against secular-leaning activists in recent months, may be appealed.

The defendants were accused of holding an illegal protest on June 21 calling for the release of detainees and the annulment of a law that bans all but police-sanctioned demonstrations.

They were also accused of vandalism during the demonstration near the presidential palace in Cairo.

“The ruling is political, it has no legal grounding,” alleged Ahmed Ezzat, one of the defence lawyers, after judge Abdelrahman Al Zawary pronounced his verdict.

The defendants were present inside a caged and soundproofed dock when the judge read out the verdict to a stunned courtroom.

The crackdown on secular and left leaning protesters has sparked accusations that President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the former general who toppled Morsi, is unwilling to tolerate any dissent.

Sisi and his supporters say the troubled country needs a firm hand to get back on its feet after almost four years of turmoil following the 2011 overthrow of veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak.

Some of the youths leaders who spearheaded the anti-Mubarak uprising and were once hailed as national heroes have been jailed under the law restricting protests, enacted in November last year following Morsi’s overthrow.

“The general trend is to target the youths,” said Leila Soueif after the verdict. Her son Alaa, a prominent leftist activist, is also facing a separate trial on similar charges.

Washington, which helps bankroll Egypt’s army and has come to terms with the overthrow of democratically-elected Morsi, had demanded Egypt release the “secular” activists during a visit by US Secretary of State John Kerry in September.

The United States and other countries have also called on Egypt to free three journalists with the English language Al Jazeera broadcaster who have been sentenced to up to 10 years for allegedly defaming Egypt.

CAIRO/GAZA — Egypt announced on Sunday it was postponing talks in Cairo on cementing the Gaza war ceasefire after closing its border with the Palestinian enclave in response to deadly attacks in the Sinai Peninsula.

Two attacks on Friday in Sinai, which borders the Gaza Strip and Israel, killed at least 33 Egyptian security personnel in some of the worst anti-state violence since former army chief Abdel Fattah Al Sisi ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood last year.

Citing “the state of emergency in the border area between Egypt and Gaza” and the closure on Friday of the Rafah crossing, a senior Egyptian diplomat said indirect talks between Israel and Palestinian factions would not resume in the coming week.

No new date for the negotiations was announced.

The talks, focussed on preserving the Auguest 26 truce that ended the 50-day Gaza war and on opening the borders of the Egyptian and Israeli-blockaded territory, adjourned in late September for Jewish and Muslim holidays.

The ceasefire has been holding. An easing of frontier restrictions is crucial for reconstructing tens of thousands of homes in the Gaza Strip that were damaged or destroyed in the fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian fighters.

Israel wants security arrangements that will ensure such material is not used by Hamas to rebuild cross-border tunnels or to manufacture rockets, whose firing at southern Israel triggered the Israeli offensive.

No group has claimed responsibility for Friday’s attacks in Sinai. Similar operations have been claimed by Ansar Bayt Al Maqdis, Egypt’s most active Sinai-based jihadi group.

Egypt has accused Hamas in the past of aiding Islamist armed groups in Sinai — an allegation denied by the Gaza movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“We are against the shedding of a drop of Egyptian blood. We wish Egypt security and stability,” said Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza.

He said Egypt had informed the group that negotiations would not be held as planned on Monday. An Israeli official said Israel had yet to receive word from Cairo on a postponement.

MURSITPINAR, Turkey — Kurdish forces in the Syrian town of Kobani thwarted a new attempt by fighters from the Islamic State group Sunday to cut off the border with Turkey before Iraqi Kurdish reinforcements can deploy.

The predawn assault marked the fourth straight day that the jihadists had attacked the Syrian side of the border crossing as the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters prepare to head for Kobani, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Kurdish forces, backed by US-led air strikes, have been holding out for weeks against an IS offensive around Kobani, which has become a high-profile symbol of efforts to stop the advance of the jihadists.

More than 800 people have been killed in ground fighting for Kobani since the IS offensive on the Syrian Kurdish enclave began on September 16, the observatory said.

The jihadists have lost 481 dead, while 313 Kurds have been killed fighting to defend the area, said the Britain-based group, which has a wide network of sources inside Syria.

The figures do not include IS losses to US-led air strikes, which the Pentagon has said run to “several hundred”.

Civilians accounted for 21 of the dead. The jihadist assault prompted nearly all of the enclave’s population to flee, with some 200,000 refugees streaming over the border into neighbouring Turkey.

Last week, under heavy US pressure, Turkey unexpectedly announced that it would allow the peshmerga fighters to cross its territory to join the fight for Kobani.

The main Syrian Kurdish fighting force in the town has close links with the outlawed rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought a three-decade insurgency in southeastern Turkey and Ankara had previously resisted calls to allow in reinforcements.

The peshmerga forces are “ready to go”, but they are not expected to deploy to Kobani before Monday at the earliest, Kurdish news agency Rudaw reported.

“Technical issues” concerning their transit through Turkey still had to be resolved, Rudaw said without elaborating.

The names of all of the fighters in the force have been submitted to both Ankara and Washington, it added.

The Democratic Union Party (PYD) which dominates Kobani agreed to the offer of the peshmerga troops.

Turkish suspicions 

But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan charged in comments published on Sunday that the “terror” group did not really want the peshmerga forces to deploy to Kobani for fear of seeing its influence diminished.

“The PYD does not want the peshmerga to come,” Erdogan said.

“They don’t want the peshmerga to come to Kobani and dominate it.

“The PYD thinks its game will be spoilt if the peshmerga come. Their setup will be ruined.”

The PKK and its allies have long had difficult relations with the parties that control the Kurdish regional government and its peshmerga forces in northern Iraq.

By contrast Ankara has developed a good working relationship with the Iraqi Kurdish authorities.

A new US-led air strike hit IS fighters in Kobani as the coalition kept up its air support for the town’s defenders, an AFP correspondent on the Turkish side of the border reported.

But the lion’s share of coalition strikes in recent days have been in neighbouring Iraq as Washington has voiced mounting confidence that Kobani’s fall to the jihadists can be prevented following US arms drops earlier this month.

The US-led military coalition fighting IS launched 22 air strikes in Iraq and one in Syria on Friday and Saturday, the Pentagon said.

Eleven of the bombings in the heavy barrage targeted IS units, buildings, positions and vehicles near Iraq’s largest dam, north of IS-held second city Mosul.

The strikes helped Kurdish forces to retake the town of Zumar, on the shores of Mosul Dam’s huge reservoir, on Saturday after weeks of fighting with IS, a senior officer said.

SANAA — Yemeni troops and a US drone struck positions held by Al Qaeda suspects and Sunni tribes on Sunday killing over a dozen insurgents who have been battling Shiite rebels, tribal sources said.

The rebels, known as Houthis, have been facing fierce resistance from Al Qaeda fighters and tribesmen as they seek to expand their areas of control after seizing the capital Sanaa and the Red Sea port city of Hudeida.

Clashes broke out on Friday evening when Houthi fighters trying to wrest control of the mountains around the central town of Rada, in Baida province, met resistance from Sunni militias, tribal sources said.

On Sunday, the rebels took over several of these areas after a suspected US drone and army jets raided the positions held by Al Qaeda and the Sunni tribesmen, tribal sources said.

One source said that "20 Al Qaeda militants" were killed in the strikes, although the toll could not be confirmed from independent sources.

The rebels took control of Sanaa on September 21 after orchestrating weeks of protests that paralysed the government.

They then pushed south earlier this month, meeting little or no resistance from security forces.

But as their advance has taken them out of the mainly Shiite northern highlands into predominantly Sunni areas, they have met increasingly fierce resistance from local tribes as well as Al Qaeda.

Tribal sources said Saturday that two vehicles carrying suspected Al Qaeda militants near Rada were struck by a missile fired from an unmanned drone, leaving 10 dead.

Fighting between Shiite rebels and Sunni tribesmen allied to Al Qaeda has already left dozens dead in central Yemen.

Yemen is a key US ally in the fight against Al Qaeda, allowing Washington to conduct a longstanding drone war against the group on its territory.

The Houthis have seized on chronic instability in Yemen since the 2012 ouster of long-serving autocratic president Ali Abdullah Saleh to take control of large parts of the country.

The latest fighting has raised fears of Yemen — located next to oil kingpin Saudi Arabia and important shipping routes in the Gulf of Aden — collapsing into a failed state.

MURSITPINAR, Turkey — Fighters from the Islamic State group launched Saturday a new offensive on the northern Syrian town of Kobani after shelling the area from their positions nearby, activists and a Kurdish official said.

Heavy fighting took place in Kobani Saturday afternoon and many mortar shells were fired into the town. Machinegun fire could be clearly heard from inside the town where black smoke was billowing.

The US Central Command said an air strike destroyed an IS artillery piece near Kobani. In the afternoon, warplanes of the US-led coalition could be heard flying over Kobani.

Idriss Nassan, a senior official in Kobani, said the fighting concentrated on the southern and eastern edges of the town, also known as Ain Al Arab.

"They think they can enter the city and these are just dreams," Nassan told The Associated Press by telephone adding that IS fighters have not been able to take Kobani despite more than a month of attacks.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting concentrated on the eastern side of the town, surrounded on three sides by IS fighters. It added that IS fighters were spreading news in areas under their control that they will take Kobani on Saturday.

IS launched its offensive on Kobani in mid-September and captured dozens of villages before entering parts of the town. The fighting has forced 200,000 people to flee to neighbouring Turkey from the fighting.

Earlier last week, the US Central Command said its forces conducted more than 135 air strikes against the militants in and around Kobani, killing hundreds of IS fighters.