Region

TRIPOLI — The UN mission in Libya is hoping to convene a political dialogue next week aimed at resolving months of crisis in the country where rival governments are vying for power.

Oil-rich Libya has been rocked by political instability since a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed veteran dictator Muammar Qadhafi in 2011.

Three years later, Prime Minister Abdullah Al Thani's government and the internationally recognised parliament elected in June are being challenged by rival, Islamist-backed, administrations.

The country is also being torn apart by fighting between Islamist and nationalist militias.

The UN mission,
UNSMIL, in a statement on Sunday, said it would call on the different parties to meet on September 29 for an "initial round" of talks aimed at ending the strife.

"This dialogue would be based on the legitimacy of the elected institutions, respect for the constitutional declaration, inclusiveness, respect for human rights and international law, and a clear rejection of terrorism," it said.

The Thani government and the parliament elected in June are in virtual domestic exile in the far eastern city of Tobruk.

They moved there in August for security reasons when Islamist-backed militias captured most of the capital, Tripoli, and second city Benghazi in the east.

Since then, the dissolved interim parliament, or General National Congress (GNC), has been reinstated in Tripoli and a rival government named under Omar Al Hassi.

The dialogue is aimed at reaching a “framework agreement on the rules of procedures of the house of representatives” and another on “the critical issues relating to the governance of the country”, UNSMIL said.

It also hoped the meeting would set a date and venue for a ceremony during which the outgoing parliament would hand over power to the internationally recognised legislature.

“Agreement on these points will allow for future discussions on the critical issues of governance and the political transition and full normalisation of institutions and the country,” it added.

In parallel, the United Nations would open “confidence building” talks with the various Libyan parties to help bolster security nationwide, it said.

UNSMIL did not say where the September 29 meeting would be held, but a mission source said it would take place in Libya.

SANAA — Shiite rebels guarded government offices and army bases in the Yemeni capital alongside troops on Monday after a UN-brokered peace agreement aimed at ending a week of deadly fighting.

Sunday's hard-won deal, signed by the president and all the main political parties, is intended to put the troubled transition back on track in impoverished Yemen which borders oil kingpin Saudi Arabia and is a key US ally in the fight against Al Qaeda.

Sanaa residents began to venture into the streets as the guns fell silent after a week of deadly clashes between the rebels and their Sunni Islamist opponents, AFP correspondents reported.

Rebel fighters were manning joint checkpoints with troops outside the public offices they entered in their lightning advance on Sunday, which include the government building, parliament, army headquarters and the central bank.

Commanders said they had orders to cooperate with the rebels, known as Ansarullah or Houthis, who had waged a decade-long insurgency in the mountains of the far north before launching a bid for power in the capital last month.

"We are working side by side with Ansarullah to protect public buildings and property," a military police commander told AFP at a checkpoint near the rebel-controlled state radio headquarters.

The interior ministry had called on the security forces on Sunday not to confront the rebels.

The speed of the advance reflected the fragility of the regime three years after a deadly uprising which forced veteran strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh from power.

The rebels brought reinforcements into the capital overnight from their strongholds further north, tribal sources said.

They carried out searches through the night and into Monday of the homes of their Sunni Islamist opponents, multiple sources said.

They included leading figures in the Islah Party as well as General Ali Mohsen Al Ahmar, a veteran army officer close to the Islamists.

Sanaa provincial governor, Abdulqader Hilal, resigned in protest late on Sunday after rebels seized his car at a checkpoint, sources close to him said.

The rebels hail from the Zaidi Shiite community that makes up 30 per cent of Yemen’s mostly Sunni population but is the majority community in the northern highlands, including Sanaa province.

New PM to be named 

They have taken advantage of shifting alliances among the region’s Zaidi tribes to advance from their mountain strongholds and lay claim to a stake in power in Sanaa.

Under Sunday’s deal, President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has three days to bring a rebel representative into government as an adviser and to name a neutral replacement for Prime Minister Mohamed Basindawa.

Basindawa tendered his resignation as the security forces surrendered state institutions without a fight on Sunday although it had yet to be accepted by the president on Monday.

In his resignation letter, Basindawa accused Hadi of being “autocratic”, according to the text released by the council of ministers.

“The partnership between myself and the president in leading the country only lasted for a short period, before it was replaced by autocracy to the extent that the government and I no longer knew anything about the military and security situation,” he wrote.

A security protocol to Sunday’s agreement requires the rebels to hand over the institutions they have seized, and once a new prime minister has been named, to start dismantling the armed protest camps they established in and around the capital last month.

But rebel representatives refused to sign the protocol at Sunday’s ceremony.

Rebel spokesman Mohammed Abdessalam said they would only do so once the security forces had apologised for the deaths of rebel protesters during an attempt to storm government headquarters earlier this month.

The deal also requires the president to name an adviser from the separatist Southern Movement which has been campaigning for the secession of the formerly independent south.

The southerners’ boycott of Hadi’s UN-backed plans for the transition has been another major obstacle.

Southern grievances have allowed parts of the region to become strongholds for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula regarded by Washington as the jihadist network’s most dangerous arm.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon said Sunday’s agreement marked a “positive step towards political stability and peace”, according to a statement issued by his spokesman.

SURUC, Turkey — Some 130,000 Kurdish refugees fleeing Islamic militants have crossed the border from Syria into Turkey in the past four days, Turkey's deputy prime minister said Monday as fighting raged close to Turkey's southern border.

The minister, Numan Kurtulmus, warned that Turkey was facing "a refugee wave that can be expressed by hundreds of thousands".

"This is not a natural disaster... what we are faced with is a man-made disaster," Kurtulmus said of the surge of mostly women, children and the elderly that started late Thursday.

The situation has raised tensions between Turkish authorities and Kurds, who claim the government is hampering their efforts to help their brethren in Syria by refusing to let Turkish Kurds cross into Syria. New clashes Monday erupted along the border near the town of Suruc, with Turkish police firing tear gas and water cannons to disperse Kurds protesting the government or demanding to reach Syria.

The conflict in Syria had already pushed more than a million people over the border since it began in March 2011. Refugees on Sunday reported atrocities by Islamic fighters that included stonings, beheadings and the torching of homes.

"We don't know how many more villages may be raided, how many more people may be forced to seek refuge," Kurtulmus said. "An uncontrollable force at the other side of the border is attacking civilians."

Suruc itself was flooded with refugees and armoured military vehicles.

Al Qaeda breakaway group — which says it has established an Islamic state, or caliphate, ruled by a harsh version of Islamic law in territory it captured straddling the Syria-Iraq border — has recently advanced into the Kurdish regions of Syria that border Turkey.

Turkey had previously been reluctant to take part in international efforts against the group, citing the safety of 49 citizens taken hostage in June when the Islamic group overran the Iraqi city of Mosul. But on Saturday, Turkey secured the hostages’ release but would not say how. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denied paying a ransom but has been vague on whether there was a prisoner swap.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday the United States now expects Turkey to step up in the fight against the militants.

Fighting raged Monday between Kurdish fighters and the militants near the northern Syrian city of Kobani, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Parts of the city are within a kilometre of the Turkish border.

The observatory said the militants have lost at least 21 fighters since Sunday night, most of them on the southern outskirts of Kobani.

Nawaf Khalil, a spokesman for Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party, or PYD, told The Associated Press the situation on the ground “is better than before”. He said the main Kurdish force in Syria, the People’s Protection Units, had pushed Islamic State fighters 10 kilometres away from previous positions east of Kobani.

“We will fight until the last gunman in Kobani,” Khalil said.

RAMALLAH — Scores of Palestinians who were rearrested by Israel after being freed in a prisoner exchange are to stage a hunger strike Tuesday as truce talks resume in Cairo, officials said.

The Ramallah-based Prisoners' Club said Monday the strike will be observed by 63 prisoners who were among a group of 1,027 freed by Israel under the terms of a 2011 swap arrangement.

They have all since been rearrested.

Since mid-June, when three Israeli settlers were kidnapped and subsequently killed by Palestinian fighters, Israel has arrested more than 2,000 people across the occupied West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem, a club statement said.

The strike is timed to coincide with the resumption of indirect truce talks in Cairo aimed at cementing the terms of a ceasefire deal which ended 50 days of fighting in and around Gaza, and which went into effect on August 26.

The two sides agreed to resume talks within a month of that date to discuss several tough issues, including the possibility of a new swap arrangement.

Such a trade would involve the Islamist Hamas group releasing the remains of two soldiers killed in the Gaza war in exchange for Israel freeing an unspecified number of prisoners.

The hunger strikers’ aim was to “demand that the Palestinian negotiators find a solution to the situation and ensure their release as quickly as possible”, the statement said.

The talks are not expected to last more than one day as the Jewish New Year holiday begins at sundown on Wednesday, and it was not clear how long the planned hunger strike would last.

Bassem Al Salhi, a member of the Palestinian negotiating team, told AFP Tuesday’s meeting would “allow a timetable to be put in place for [talks which would take place] after Eid Al Adha”, the Muslim feast of sacrifice which this year falls on the first weekend of October.

“Since the start, the Palestinians have asked that the prisoners question be discussed, but the Israelis have categorically refused to deal with this matter,” he said, referring to talks in the run-up to the August ceasefire deal.

In Cairo, the two teams are expected to discuss Gaza’s reconstruction, a Palestinian demand for a port and an airport and Israel’s insistence on militant groups disarming.

Figures quoted by the Prisoners’ Club indicate that more than 7,000 Palestinians are currently in Israeli jails.

BEIRUT — Kurds, who are fleeing Syria in their tens of thousands from a jihadist onslaught, are a people of Indo-European origin. Spread across four states, they number between 25 and 35 million.

Based in four countries 

The Kurds are currently spread across nearly half a million square kilometres of mountainous territory, stretching from southeastern Turkey to central Iran, via northern Iraq and Syria.

The biggest number, between 12 and 15 million, live in Turkey, where they make up one fifth of the population. Iran has around five million, less than 10 per cent of the population, while Iraq has 4.6 million (15 to 20 per cent) and Syria around two million (9 per cent).

With no access to the sea and no state to represent them, the Kurds have maintained their language, traditions and clan-based form of social organisation.

Tensions with central authorities 

The Kurds have been demanding the creation of a unified Kurdish state, and are thus seen as a threat to the territorial integrity of the countries where they live.

In Turkey, a rebellion led by the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which is considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, has left 45,000 dead in the past 30 years.

The Ankara government in late 2012 launched difficult peace negotiations with the PKK, which declared a ceasefire in March 2013. The PKK, which initially sought an independent Kurdish state, is now calling for greater autonomy.

In Iran, the army dismantled a Kurdish republic in 1946 set up a year earlier. The authorities then harshly cracked down on a Kurdish uprising which followed the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Tehran accuses Washington of supporting armed groups based in Iraq, like the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, which has close links with the Turkish PKK.

In Iraq, the Kurds, persecuted under the regime of Saddam Hussein, rose up in 1991 after Baghdad's defeat in Kuwait during the first Gulf War.

The uprising was repressed, leading to an exodus of two million Kurds to Iran and Turkey. The West imposed a no-fly zone, creating Iraqi Kurdistan as a semi-autonomous region. Oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan comprises Erbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniyah provinces.

The peshmerga, or Iraqi Kurdish fighters, seized the city of Kirkuk on June 12 after the rout of the Iraqi military by jihadist group the Islamic State (IS). On July 3, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massud Barzani, launched plans for a referendum on independence, drawing criticism from his American allies.

In Syria, the Kurds, who are repressed by the regime, reacted cautiously to the insurrection which broke out in March 2011.

They have been running their zones in the north of the country since the withdrawal of government forces in mid-2012.

The powerful Democratic Union Party on November 12, 2013, announced the formation of a transitional autonomous administration after making key territorial gains against jihadists.

In firing line 

Kurds are mainly Sunni Muslims, with minorities of non-Muslims, including Christians and Yazidis, and have mostly secular political movements, making them a target for the jihadists.

In Iraq, they have been in the firing line of the IS offensive launched on June 9 after the Iraqi army collapsed.

Kurds from Syria and Turkey came to their aid in August, when the jihadists were 40 kilometres from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Iraqi Kurds have received Western aid, with deliveries of weapons, with their forces also supported by US and French air strikes.

Turkey said Monday that some 130,000 people had flooded across its border from Syria as Kurdish fighters battled IS jihadists trying to capture the strategic town of Ain Al Arab.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — It is already common for intelligence agencies to recruit their officers online, but Israel’s Mossad has gone one further by touting for local agents and informants too.

Israel, which has full diplomatic ties with only two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan, lacks embassies elsewhere in the Middle East that would-be informants could turn to, leaving it in need of other local recruitment channels.

“All are welcome, regardless of religion, nationality or occupation, to contact our organisation — Mossad — to work for us or to be involved in activities which could bring great personal benefit,” reads the new “Contact us” section of the Mossad website ( https://www.mossad.gov.il/eng/Pages/encontactus.aspx ), also available in Arabic, Farsi, French or Russian.

“Rest assured that total discretion and confidentiality is of the utmost priority, and is the basis of our connection.”

Even in Egypt and Jordan, Israel’s embassies are under heavy scrutiny and, apparently heeding the risk that online offers of information or help may also be far from secure, Mossad adds:

“We suggest you consider whether the computer you are using and your location is secure enough. It would be safer to fill in the form using means that are not directly connected to you.”

The glossy Mossad website went up a decade ago to boost recruitment for officers and analysts amid increasingly fierce competition from Israel’s booming private hi-tech sector. In one promotional video, a couple are shown racing from shadowy spy missions to family time at home.

Gad Shimron, a former Mossad field officer who now writes on intelligence and military affairs, said the new approach “seems to be an effort by the Mossad to attract the maximum number of interested parties”.

“If some of them prove to be valuable sources of information or help, even if 90 per cent get written off as useless, that could still be worthwhile.”

BEIRUT — Lebanon's army on Monday distanced itself from a video showing troops abusing Syrian detainees in an area where soldiers have battled jihadists, saying the incident was "isolated".

The video, which appeared online over the weekend and quickly provoked widespread outrage on social media, shows around 30 Syrian men lying on the ground, some with their hands bound.

A soldier walks over to one man, who is missing the lower part of his right leg, and treads with his boot on the man's thigh.

He asks sarcastically "Am I hurting you?" while prodding the man's neck with his gun.

Other soldiers kick another prone man in the back and face.

A military spokesman confirmed that the army was "aware" of the video but described it as an "isolated incident".

"The army command is opposed to this kind of behaviour and endeavours to treat all detainees well," he said.

"Every soldier who carries out acts of this kind will be held responsible," he added.

The video was supposedly filmed in the Arsal region of eastern Lebanon on the border with Syria and appears to have been taken by a soldier because it is shot at close range.

Last month, Lebanese troops battled jihadists who entered from Syria in the Arsal area, and around 30 Lebanese soldiers and policemen are still being held hostage after the end of the clashes.

Three of them have been killed, two beheaded by the Islamic State group and a third shot dead by Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate.

Since the third execution, the army has stepped up shelling of jihadist positions in the Arsal region.

It has also carried out multiple raids targeting Syrian refugees, particularly at informal camps in the region and arrested several Lebanese citizens as well.

Syrian activists have reported increasing tensions with Lebanese residents in the wake of the violence in Arsal, and the kidnappings and executions.

There are more than 1.1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, which has a population of just four million citizens and has kept the border open to those fleeing the conflict in its neighbour.

SANAA — Yemen's Shiite Houthi rebels, who signed a UN-brokered peace deal Sunday after seizing key institutions, only recently began extending their influence beyond their northern highland stronghold.

The rebels belong to the Zaidi sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam which makes up approximately a third of the Sunni-majority country's population.

Zaidis are the majority in the northern provinces bordering Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia, and the Houthis are widely accused of receiving support from Shiite-dominated Iran.

The north was a Zaidi imamate until a 1962 coup turned Yemen into a republic ruled by a government long considered illegitimate by the rebels.

Badreddin Al Houthi, who formed the "Faithful Youth" movement in 1992 as a political group to fight discrimination, is considered the spiritual leader of the Houthi movement, which is named after him.

His son Hussein led a nearly three-month uprising in the northwestern province of Saada that left 400 people dead before the army killed him in September 2004.

The rebels are now led by Hussein's brother, Abdulmalik Al Huthi.

They fought six wars with the central government between 2004 and February 2010, when they signed a truce.

Thousands of people were killed in the rebellion.

Role in 2011 uprising

As an Arab Spring-inspired uprising against then president Ali Abdullah Saleh swept through Yemen in 2011, the Houthis reached out to the opposition in Sanaa and joined protest camps there.

It was their first major show of influence outside their strongholds in Saada and Amran provinces.

However, the rebels rejected a Gulf deal brokered by Saudi Arabia, which fought them between 2009 and 2010 after a border incursion.

Under the deal, Saleh, himself a Zaidi who ruled Yemen since 1978, was replaced as president by Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi in 2012 and a consensus government was formed.

The rebels rejected the new government and repeatedly accused it of corruption. They chose a fuel price rise in late July as an opportunity to revolt.

The rebels had already been advancing out of the mountains and closer to Sanaa, widening their zone of control in a bid to win a bigger share of a future federal government.

Earlier this year, the rebels drove the influential Al Ahmar tribe out of its bastions in Amran.

The federation was agreed following difficult national talks that ended in February. Despite taking part in the dialogue, the Houthis rejected plans for a six-region federation.

On August 18, they established camps inside Sanaa and on Sunday swooped on key institutions, including the government headquarters and military sites, after an apparent surrender by security forces.

Iran's influence 

Yemeni authorities have repeatedly accused Tehran of backing the Huthi rebellion, and during protests the rebels chant Iran's famous Islamic revolutionary slogan "Death to America! Death to Israel!"

Their public discourse also appears heavily influenced by Hezbollah, Lebanon's powerful Shiite militia that is backed by Tehran.

At protest camps, they have displayed pictures of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah alongside others of Syria's embattled Tehran-backed president, Bashar Assad.

"For years, the Houthis have moved closer to Iran in terms of organisation, ideology, politics and media," said Samy Dorlian, a Yemen specialist at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques at Aix-en-Provence in France.

The Houthi rebels, who last year rebranded themselves as Ansarullah (Supporters of God), claim direct descent from the family of the Prophet Mohammed.

DUBAI — For decades the opposing poles of Middle East power politics, Saudi Arabia and Iran may be driven to set aside at least some of their differences by the rise of a mutual enemy: Islamic State.

The Sunni militant group is as hateful to Tehran for its threat to the rule of Iran's Shiite allies in neighbouring Iraq and Syria as it is to Saudi Arabia for its pursuit of fundamentalist theocratic rule in an Islamic caliphate.

"We are aware of the importance and sensitivity of this crisis, and the opportunity we have ahead of us," Saudi Foreign Minister said after meeting his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif in New York on Sunday, according to the Iranian state news agency IRNA.

"We believe that by using this precious opportunity and avoid the mistakes of the past, we can deal with this crisis successfully."

It was the highest-level meeting between the two countries since the election of the pragmatic Hassan Rouhani as Iranian president last year.

Zarif also sounded upbeat, saying: "Both my Saudi counterpart and I believe that this meeting will be the first page of a new chapter in our two countries' relations," according to IRNA.

"We hope that this new chapter will be effective in establishing regional and global peace and security, and will safeguard the interests of Muslim nations across the world."

There were first hints of detente last month when both countries welcomed the appointment of Haidar Al Abadi as Iraq's prime minister after Islamic State's lightning advance across northern Iraq forced his predecessor Nouri Al Maliki from power.

Maliki was close to Iran, where he had spent years in exile while Saddam Hussein maintained Sunni rule in Iraq, but was accused by his opponents of ruling for the Shiites only — breeding resentment and rebellion among the Sunni minority, and paving the way for IS to threaten the survival of the state.

Once Iran came to see Maliki as too divisive and withdrew its backing, it removed a thorn in relations with Riyadh.

Soon after, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian met Prince Saud in Jeddah for what he called "constructive" talks about Islamic State and Israel's attack on Gaza, and spoke of "opening a new page" in relations. And a week ago, Riyadh said it planned to reopen its embassy in Baghdad after two decades.

But there is much mutual suspicion — and competing interests — to overcome.

Iranian leaders see Riyadh as a stooge for their American foes, and remain angry at Saudi Arabia's backing for Iraq during its eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s.

Saudi Arabia's ruling princes for their part fear that Iran's clerical elite remains determined to export the message of its 1979 Islamic Revolution to Shiites across the Middle East, not least to Lebanon or the wealthy Sunni-ruled monarchies of the Gulf.

Riyadh sees the sudden advance of Shiite Houthi rebels in Saudi Arabia's impoverished neighbour Yemen over the past week as evidence of such efforts.

Saudi Arabia has also backed mostly Sunni Syrian rebels fighting Iran's ally, President Bashar Assad, whose establishment belong to an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and both Riyadh and Tehran have accused each other of fuelling the bloodshed.

Nonetheless, Rouhani, seen as on the pragmatic wing of Tehran's clerical leadership, pledged after his election to improve ties with Iran's Gulf Arab neighbours as well as the West.

Iran's tone has been far less confrontational than under his predecessor, but overcoming decades of suspicion will take more than a meeting of foreign ministers.

CAIRO — A bomb blast beside Egypt's foreign ministry killed three policemen on Sunday, including a key witness in a trial of deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

The blast, the worst attack in Cairo for months, killed two police lieutenant colonels and a recruit, according to the foreign ministry.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the operation resembled those carried out by Islamist insurgents seeking to topple the US-backed government, underlining security challenges facing President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.

Sisi, who has just completed 100 days in office, has pushed through some badly-needed economic reforms such as a rise in fuel prices. But tackling Islamist militants, an issue that has dogged one Egyptian leader after another, is far from easy.

Egypt has faced rising Islamist militant violence since Sisi ousted Morsi last year after mass protests against his rule and cracked down on Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, which the government has declared a terrorist group.

One of the police officers killed in Sunday's blast, Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Mahmoud Abu Sareeaa, was a critical witness in a trial of Morsi related to a 2011 mass prison break, court and security sources told Reuters.

It was not clear if he was targeted or just happened to be at the site of the explosion.

The challenge of containing militancy has become more complex since Islamic State militants expanded their control over northern Iraq and eastern Syria in June and declared a caliphate, inspiring other militant groups including some based along Egypt's border with chaotic Libya.

Islamic State established ties with Sinai-based Ansar Bayt Al Maqdis and has been coaching Egypt’s most lethal militant organisation, security officials and an Ansar commander told Reuters.

Militant network

Smoke rose and people ran after Sunday’s blast along a sidewalk in the neighbourhood of Boulaq bu Eila, just behind the foreign ministry, located in a high rise building beside the Nile.

There was no damage to the foreign ministry building and work was proceeding normally, though security had been tightened, a source in the ministry told Reuters. Airport authorities said they were also taking greater precautions.

The last significant attack in Cairo was on June 30, when two policemen died trying to defuse bombs planted by militants near the presidential palace.

Sunday’s blast caused a tree to fall on a car. Bloodstained a busy intersection beside a crowded market.

While the death toll was low, any attack in the capital is bound to cast doubt over the effectiveness of security forces, who have vowed to end Islamist militant bloodshed that has hammered the tourism industry, a pillar of the economy.

Sisi has repeatedly expressed concerns about militancy in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East.

Security forces have killed hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters, arrested thousands and put top leaders on trial, severely weakening what was once Egypt’s most organised political group.

The Brotherhood says it is committed to peaceful activism, but authorities make no distinction between the Brotherhood and groups such as Ansar, which has in recent weeks beheaded several people it has identified as spies for Israeli intelligence, suggesting it has become more radical.

Despite several army operations Egypt’s military has struggled to tackle Ansar and other militant groups which have posed a challenge to authorities for decades.

The Egyptian state has crushed militant groups in the past but they often recover. In the 1990s, militants staged attacks against government officials and foreign tourists. It took then President Hosni Mubarak years to defeat them.

Egypt suffered other losses on Sunday. Six soldiers were killed after a military aircraft crashed due to a technical failure, the army spokesman said.