Region

PARIS — France will not carry out military action against Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria, but will soon begin air strikes to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces in Iraq, President Francois Hollande said on Thursday.

“I have decided to respond positively to the Iraqi authorities to provide air support,” Hollande told a news conference. “We will not go beyond that. There will not be ground troops and we will only intervene in Iraq.”

France has previously signalled it would carry out air strikes in Iraq and send special forces to the country to help direct them and to train armed forces. It is already providing arms to the Kurdish forces in the north of the country.

French fighter jets and surveillance aircraft began reconnaissance missions in Iraq on Monday.

Asked when French air strikes would begin, Hollande said: “As soon as we have identified targets — that means in a short-time frame.” He added: “It will be air support to protect Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish peshmerga forces to reduce and weaken this terrorist group.”

Hollande said Paris had not been asked to take part in strikes in neighbouring Syria, where IS has its power base. He cited legal and military difficulties and said Paris feared strikes against IS targets there would benefit Syrian President Bashar Assad.

France’s has been a staunch opponent of Assad, was the first to back the Syrian opposition and has been the only Western nation to admit publicly to arming rebels on the ground.

It has said it will strengthen its support for “moderates” fighting Assad and IS.

“We cannot, despite the presence of this terrorist group Daesh [IS], carry out whatever action that would favour the regime of the dictator Bashar Assad,” Hollande said.

“We are also attentive to aspects of international law. In Iraq we were called for help by the Iraqi authorities, but in Syria we are not.”

French forces are also stretched, with more than 5,000 troops in West Africa. Its annual overseas defence budget for 2014 is already almost triple what was originally planned at a time when the government is under severe pressure to cut spending.

VIENNA — Western powers told Iran on Thursday it must step-up cooperation with a UN watchdog's investigation into suspected atomic bomb research by the country if it wants to get a broader nuclear deal that would ease sanctions.

The warning was issued at a board meeting of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, as chief negotiators from Iran and six world powers prepared to resume talks in New York after a two-month hiatus.

Iran's envoy, Reza Najafi, dismissed accusations about his country's atomic activities as "mere allegations ... without any substantiation" but also said a new meeting with the IAEA to discuss the matter was expected to be held soon.

A stalled IAEA inquiry could further complicate the powers' parallel efforts to reach a settlement with Iran on curbing its nuclear programme in exchange for a gradual phasing out of financial and other punitive measures hurting its economy.

The US and the EU said they were concerned about the slow headway so far in the IAEA's long-running probe into suspicions that Iran has worked on designing a nuclear weapon. Iran denies the charge and says it is Israel's assumed atomic arsenal that threatens Middle East peace.

An IAEA report in early September showed Iran had failed to answer questions about what the UN agency calls the possible military dimensions of the country's nuclear programme by an August 25 deadline.

In a statement to the IAEA meeting, the EU said it was disappointed with the "very limited progress" in that inquiry.

"The EU underlines that resolving all outstanding issues [between Iran and the IAEA] will be essential to achieve a comprehensive, negotiated long-term settlement," it said.

That was a reference to the push by the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany to negotiate a resolution to the wider, decade-old dispute with Tehran over its nuclear programme.

Iran has been promising to cooperate with the IAEA since Hassan Rouhani, seen as a pragmatist, was elected president last year on a platform of ending Tehran's international isolation. It says its nuclear work is for non-military purposes only. 

Nuclear deadlines 

But Iran did not address two key issues by late August as  agreed with the IAEA: alleged experiments on explosives that could be used for an atomic device, and studies related to calculating nuclear explosive yields.

They were part of a landmark report published by the IAEA in 2011 with intelligence indicating Iran had a nuclear weapons research programme but halted it in 2003 when it came under increased international pressure. 

The intelligence suggested some activities may have resumed later. The report identified about 12 specific areas that it said needed clarification.

Iran says the allegations are baseless, while pledging to address the concerns.

Najafi said the two issues had not yet been completed because of "their complexity and the invalidity" of the IAEA's information. "The so-called 'missing the deadline' is totally inaccurate," Najafi told reporters.

US envoy Laura Kennedy urged Iran to "intensify its engagement" with the IAEA. "Concerns about the possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear programme must be addressed as part of any comprehensive solution," she said.

An interim accord was reached between Iran and the six powers in Geneva last November.

But they did not meet a self-imposed July target date for a long-term accord and now face a new deadline of November 24.

While the powers seek to limit the size of Iran's future nuclear programme — and thereby extend the time it would need for any bid to amass fissile material for a weapon — the IAEA is investigating alleged research and experiments in the past that could be used to make the bomb itself.

Western officials say that although there is no chance of the IAEA inquiry being completed before the scheduled end of the six-power talks, some of the sanctions relief Iran is seeking would probably depend on its cooperation with the UN agency.

BEIRUT — The Islamic State (IS) group on Thursday released a video showing a British journalist who says he is a prisoner of the extremists.

In a slick, three-minute video shot with three cameras, John Cantlie, a photojournalist, said he worked for publications including The Sunday Times, The Sun and The Sunday Telegraph, and came to Syria in November 2012 where he was subsequently captured by the IS group.

The group which now controls roughly a third of Syria and Iraq has beheaded two US journalists and a British aid worker, and has threatened to kill another British hostage.

The British government declined to comment on the video.

In Copenhagen, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said the IS group "is not just a threat to the stability of the Middle East region but to all of us in our homelands".

Asked about the video, he told reporters that he had heard about it but has not yet seen it.

"Obviously we'll look very closely at any material that's been released on the Internet," he said, declining further comment.

The just over three-minute long clip released Thursday by the IS group's media arm, Al Furqan, was different than previous videos.

Entitled "Lend me Your ears", it is previewed as the first in a series of lecture-like "programmes" in which Cantlie says he will reveal "the truth" about the IS group.

Wearing an orange T-shirt and sitting behind a desk, he criticised the war on the IS group and said he  and other British and US hostages have been abandoned by their governments. Cantlie's name has not been mentioned among foreign hostages held by the group.

He was briefly held up by Islamic extremists along with a Dutch photographer in Syria in July 2012.

No IS fighters appear in the video, which was posted online by users associated with the IS group and reported by the SITE Intelligence Group, a US terrorism watchdog.

In addition to beheaded US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines, the IS group has threatened to kill Alan Henning, a British former taxi driver who was taken captive in December shortly after joining an aid convoy and crossing the border from Turkey into Syria.

BEIRUT — Islamic State fighters backed by tanks have captured 21 Kurdish villages over the past 24 hours in northern Syria near the Turkish border, prompting civilians to flee their homes amid fears of retribution by the extremists sweeping through the area, activists said Thursday.

For more than a year, the Islamic State (IS) group and Kurdish militias have been locked in a fierce fight in several pockets of northern Syria where large Kurdish populations reside. 

The clashes are but one aspect of Syria's broader civil war — a multilayered conflict that the UN says has killed more than 190,000.

Since Wednesday, Islamic State militants appear to have gained the upper hand in Syria's northern Kurdish region of Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab, overrunning 21 Kurdish villages, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. 

It said there were casualties on both sides, but that Kurdish civilians were fleeing their villages for fear that IS group fighters "will commit massacres against civilians".

Nawaf Khalil, a spokesperson for Syria's Kurdish Democratic Union Party, the Kurdish fighters withdrew or lost up to 20 villages in the Kobani region and evacuated civilians with them.

"The battles that are taking place in Kobani are the most violent," Khalil said adding that IS group fighters were using tanks in their offensive. Khalil called on Kurds around the world to come to Syria to defend Kobani.

The fighting forced nearly 3,000 people to try to flee to Turkey and gathered near the border Turkish district of Suruc, according to the private Dogan News Agency. A video released by the agency showed Syrian refugees walking to the border with some Kurds asking to be allowed to cross to stay with relatives on the Turkish side of the frontier.

Like many fronts of Syria's civil war, momentum in the fight between the extremists and the Kurds has swung back and forth. Earlier this week, for example, Kurdish fighters captured 14 villages from the IS in other parts of Syria.

Still, the retreat in Kobani marked a setback for the battle-hardened Kurdish force known as the People's Protection Units. The militia, which also goes by the initials YPK, has been perhaps the most successful fighting force battling the IS group, which has routed Iraqi and Syrian government forces. 

Last month, the YPK crossed the border into Iraq and opened a safe passage for members of the ancient Yazidi minority who were attacked by IS fighters.

The fighting around Kobani is part of the IS's wider battle in Syria as the extremists look to seize control of the few areas in the northeast still outside of their hands.

The Syrian government, meanwhile, has begun targeting the group with greater frequency since the militants overran much of northern and western Iraq. Before that, Syrian President Bashar Assad has largely left the group alone, instead focusing his firepower on more moderate rebel brigades.

On Thursday, government helicopter gunships attacked the northern town of Al Bab, which is controlled by the IS group, killing more than two dozen people. The Local Coordination Committees activist group said 51 people were killed in the attack in which a helicopter dropped a barrel packed with explosives on a bakery.

The observatory also reported the airstrike, but said at least 26 were killed. It warned that the number could rise because some of the wounded are in critical conditions.

The discrepancy in death tolls could not be immediately reconciled, but casualty figures frequently differ in the chaotic aftermath of attacks in Syria.

The US has been conducting airstrikes against IS fighters in Iraq since early August. President Barack Obama last week authorised strikes against the group in Syria as well, and his administration is currently trying to cobble together an international coalition to go after the group. The US is already flying reconnaissance missions over Syria.

Observatory director, Rami Abdurrahman, said activists saw drones flying over areas held by the IS group, including the towns of Manbij and Maskaneh. He added that it is not clear whether the drones were American.

WASHINGTON — The US Senate steamed towards final congressional approval Thursday of President Barack Obama's request to train Syrian rebels for a war against Islamic State (IS) militants in the Middle East.

The legislation also provides funding for the government after the end of the budget year on September 30, eliminating any threat of a shutdown in the run-up to November elections for control of the Senate and a new House.

For a second straight day, the administration dispatched top-ranking officials to reassure lawmakers — and the public — that no US ground combat operation was in the offing.

Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel told one House committee that Obama "is not going to order American combat ground forces into that area".

Appearing before a different panel, Secretary of State John Kerry said the administration understands the danger of a "slippery slope". The term was widely used a half-century ago as the United States slid ever deeper into a Vietnam war that eventually left more than 50,000 US troops dead.

Obama's general plan is to have US troops train Syrian rebels at camps in Saudi Arabia, a process that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said could take a year.

Additionally, the president already has said he will use existing authority to have the Pentagon deploy air strikes against Islamic fighters in Syria as well as in Iraq. Hagel said the president received a detailed plan for operations in Syria during a visit Wednesday to US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, and was reviewing it.

In Washington, leaders in both political parties supported the Senate legislation.

Asked about approving Obama's plan in the wake of the war in Iraq, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said: "Iraq was a mistake. I was misled and I voted wrong. But this is not Iraq, this is a totally different thing."

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell also favoured the legislation.

But his fellow Kentuckian, Senator Rand Paul, opposed not only the president's policy but also the refusal of Senate leaders to permit a stand-alone vote on it.

He warned against creating a vacuum that radical Jihadists may quickly fill. "Intervention that destabilises the Middle East is a mistake. And yet, here we are again, wading into a civil war," he said.

Paul is a likely candidate for the White House in 2016, and his position set out a clear foreign policy maker in advance of Republican primaries still more than a year away.

This week's vote seemed likely to become an issue in contested Senate races before then.

Like some Republicans, Senate liberals split on the measure.

Senator Bernard Sanders, an independent, readily conceded the threat posed by forces seeking creation of an IS. But he said countries in the Middle East most threatened had not yet joined the international coalition that Obama is trying to assemble.

But Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California), said Obama's proposal marked a moderate, middle course between doing nothing in response to a terrorist threat and refighting the Iraq war. 

"Every civilised person has to stand up against this," she said.       

While Democrats expressed fears that the legislation could lead the nation back into a war, some Republicans were sceptical that Obama's strategy was strong enough to prevail.

As a result, the legislation provided only a narrow grant of authority that will expire on December 11. It specifically stops short of approving the deployment of US forces "into hostilities or into situations where hostilities are clearly indicated by the circumstances”.

The expiration date means Congress will have to return to the issue in a postelection session scheduled to begin in mid-November.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM/RAMALLAH — Most Palestinians have known only two leaders: Yasser Arafat, the stubble-chinned firebrand fond of chequered scarves and olive fatigues, and Mahmoud Abbas, a smooth-shaven father figure who favours Western suits and ties.

Arafat died in Paris in 2004, having led the Palestine Liberation Organisation since 1969, and Abbas has been in the driving seat since, trying to forge a still-elusive peace deal with Israel.

Abbas, 79, shows no signs of ill health and continues to travel widely, visiting France this week before heading to New York for the UN General Assembly next week, the annual jamboree that provides Palestine with a global stage.

But he says he will not stand in future elections, so it is only a matter of time before he passes the baton to a new leader, one whom the vast majority of Palestinians — 4.4 million in the West Bank and Gaza and nearly 7 million elsewhere around the world — hope will lead to the foundation of an independent Palestinian state.

The problem is that Abbas has not named a successor and shows no inclination to do so and no one has emerged as a natural heir. Even those closest to him are left guessing who is best placed to take on the leadership.

It is a strategy that may serve a short-term purpose but it raises longer-term questions about democratic accountability, political vision and the sort of personality that will eventually take the helm in statehood negotiations with Israel, if and when they ever resume.

"He doesn't have a protégé, he hasn't facilitated a system in which people feel they can rise to the top," said Grant Rumley, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies in Washington, D.C.

What's more, political analysts say, he has moved to sideline several potential rivals over the years, most recently Salam Fayyad, his former prime minister, who perhaps spoke too freely when he mentioned to a US newspaper in 2012 that he might try his hand at the presidency some day.

"It's becoming an urgent matter," Rumley said of the absence of a single leader-in-waiting.

Others are blunter about what they see as the failure of the political class to plot a clear course.

"There's really no strategy," said Rami Khouri, a researcher at the American University of Beirut. "Abbas is acting like a typical Arab leader who is comfortable in his position and doesn't quite know what to do about what may come next."

Closer to home, one Palestinian diplomat who works in Ramallah, where Abbas is based, describes him as becoming "a bit like Samson in the temple, ready to bring the whole structure down" around him with little heed to the consequences.

Troubled throne 

Since Abbas formally took office as Palestinian Authority president in January 2005, the ground has shifted beneath him, complicating almost every political calculation he and his once-dominant party, Fateh, has had to make.

The Islamist movement Hamas, founded in Gaza in the 1980s, has risen to prominence, winning Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and shaking the foundations of Abbas' power by opening people's minds to an alternative to Fateh.

Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas served as prime minister under Abbas for a year before being dismissed in June 2007, when tensions between the two parties boiled over in Gaza, resulting in the Islamists seizing full control of the territory.

As a result of those internal splits, the Palestinian parliament has not properly met since 2007 and legislative elections scheduled for January 2010 never took place.

Abbas' mandate as Palestinian Authority president theoretically expired in January 2009 but officials say the constitution gives him the right to remain in office until new elections are held — combining the parliamentary and presidential cycle — for which no date has yet been set.

In April, Fateh and Hamas sought to bridge their differences and agreed to form a "unity government". When that deal was finalised in June, Abbas said elections would be held "within six months", which appears ambitious.

"There are enough people who are qualified for the presidency and enough people who have the ambition," said Ghassan Khatib, a professor of politics at Birzeit University in the West Bank and a former government minister, who believes Fateh, despite its image problems and the nagging allegations of high-level corruption, would emerge victorious over Hamas.

Five or six names are consistently mentioned by Palestinian officials, European and American diplomats and others.    

Future leaders 

Perhaps the most prominent is Majid Faraj, the head of Palestinian intelligence, who has won plaudits from the Americans, including the CIA, for assistance that led to the capture of Abu Anas Al Libi, wanted for the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Libya.

Faraj, who is in his early 50s, has been brought in to take part in negotiations with the Israelis and Americans, earning respect from both. A fluent Hebrew speaker who has spent six years in Israeli jails, Faraj is regarded as a sharp pragmatist with the “get-it-done” mindset of a major general.

On the downside, while he grew up in a refugee camp outside Bethlehem, which gives him credibility on the Palestinian street, he has no real political base and does not speak English well, limiting his international reach.

"The Americans love him and the Israelis love him," said Rumley of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies. "He's about stability and security — basically US policy — keeping things calm and keeping the status quo."

A more radical possibility often talked about is Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the two uprisings or Intifadas against Israeli occupation, who was convicted by Israel of five counts of murder in 2004 and handed five life sentences.

There is often hope among Palestinians that Barghouti will be freed in a prisoner release negotiated with Israel but the prospects of that, most commentators agree, are slim.

It is, however, possible that he could be elected while in prison, allowing supporters to cast him as something of a Nelson Mandela figure.

Asked by Reuters what his prospects were as a leader, Barghouti replied in writing from prison: "The Palestinian leadership has so far failed to achieve freedom, the right of return and independence. It's the people's right to choose whom they deem appropriate to achieve their will according to free, fair and democratic elections."

A third possibility is that Fayyad, 62, the former prime minister, manages to build a support base and make a challenge. But he has always been regarded as more of a technocrat — he is a former IMF official — than a political animal and his style does not easily resonate with the man in the street.

Another oft-mentioned name is Jibril Rajoub, a former head of internal Palestinian security and a senior figure in Fateh who now runs the Palestinian Football Association and the Olympic Committee. While not afraid to mix politics and sport, those around him say his political days are behind him.

That leaves two people with very different backgrounds and styles who may well yet emerge as the strongest candidates — Mohammed Dahlan and Mohammed Shtayyeh.

Shtayyeh, 56, is a sharp and polished economist with a PhD from the University of Sussex who has risen through the ranks of Fateh and taken part in negotiations with Israel. He now heads a Palestinian investment and development fund that has made him a critical driver of the economy.

"Shtayyeh may well be the top candidate," said Rumley. "If there's a long, drawn-out process to decide who is the next leader of the Palestinians, Shtayyeh is the guy."

Dahlan, 52, is a former head of Fateh in Gaza who was close to the British and Americans.

His star looked to have fallen when his US-funded militia was routed by Hamas in 2007 but he has resurfaced in the United Arab Emirates, where he has raised vast funds for Palestinian causes and become a thorn in Abbas' side with critical comments about his leadership.

Dahlan's money and charisma, his upbringing in Gaza and his straddling of politics and militancy make him a powerful force but he has also been accused by rivals of being too close to the Israelis and the Americans and is perceived as juggling too many competing interests.

And the presidency might not be in his sights, according to a European diplomat who has had dealings with him.

"He's a puppet master," the diplomat said. "He would rather pull the strings above the head of whoever does end up being the next president."

GAZA CITY — The 48-year-old Palestinian woman's husband was shot to death in 2012 by fighters in the Gaza Strip for spying for Israel. A mother of seven, she herself was jailed by Gaza's Hamas rulers for aiding and abetting a spy — her husband.

The widow's account to The Associated Press gave a rare look into the secret espionage side of the war between Israel and the Hamas Islamist group.

According to her, Israeli security agents took advantage of her late husband's financial troubles a decade ago, luring him into collaborating by offering him a permit to work in Israel. She was later recruited when she was allowed to take one of their children to Israel for medical treatment.

"Our life was hell. We were scared," she said of their years feeding Israel information. "I used to look over my shoulder when I am out in the market, get scared when I see a police car." The woman, who was released in December, spoke on condition of anonymity because Hamas does not allow freed collaborators to talk to the press.

Israel has historically relied on collaborators against Palestinian fighters and activists, recruiting them with methods ranging from entrapment and blackmail to cash and perks. Hamas, in turn, has done whatever it can to stop collaborators — particularly by killing them in public as a deterrent to others — since it holds them responsible for helping Israel assassinate dozens of its top figures.

The issue emerged again with the latest round of fighting in Gaza, which ended late last month. During the war, fighters gunned down 22 suspected spies, almost all of them on a single day after three senior Hamas military operatives were killed in an Israeli airstrike apparently guided by collaborators.

Palestinians human rights groups sharply criticised Hamas for carrying out extra-judicial killings.

"It was a terrifying message to society and a deterrent to other collaborators," Salah Abdel-Atti of Gaza's Independent Commission for Human Rights said.

But rights concerns win little sympathy among Palestinians, who widely see informing for Israel as unforgivable treason — even among Gazans opposed to Hamas' iron fisted control of the territory since 2007.

Ramiz Abu Jazar, a Gazan whose brother was killed by Hamas in intra-Palestinian fighting in 2007, said he's all for killing collaborators. They are "like cancer in society", he told the AP. "They sold their souls to the devil."

There have been instances of Palestinians collaborating out of political conviction. Most embarrassing to Hamas, the son of the group's co-founder Sheik Hassan Youssef spied for Israel between 1997 and 2007, dubbed "the Green Prince". Now in the US, Mosab Yousef later wrote that he did so in part out of revulsion at Hamas' actions.

But the large majority of collaborators are believed to do so because of blackmail or financial gain.

"Everything starts and ends with money," said an operative from Israel's domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, which runs Palestinian informants. Many are recruited at Erez, Israel's border crossing with Gaza, when they seek an entry permit, said the operative, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to discuss the issue with the media.

On the Gaza side of Erez, a large sign put up by Hamas warns travelers against being recruited by Israelis.

An AP reporter this week witnessed firsthand how the Israeli military uses access to Israel through Erez to get information from Palestinians.

On the Israel side outside the crossing terminal, a Palestinian businessman who had just entered from Gaza sat waiting for his brother, who was crossing with him but was held up by border officials inside the terminal.

A uniformed army lieutenant speaking Arabic approached the man and promised to help his brother, but first asked him dozens of questions about life in Gaza, from the number of factories damaged in the latest war, to the mood on the streets and power supply. The questioning — casual in tone — lasted about 15 minutes and the man answered with little hesitation.

In the end, the officer insisted on taking the man's mobile phone number. The brother emerged soon after.

Hamas' Interior Ministry, which is in charge of security, says it has executed 12 collaborators since 2007 after closed-door trials.

Rights groups say another 53 alleged collaborators were gunned down by Hamas fighters in that same period. Often, they were dragged out of prisons where they had been detained on suspicion of spying and were shot.

The husband of the widow who spoke to the AP was recruited around a decade ago, when Israel still directly controlled Gaza before its withdrawal from the tiny Mediterranean coastal territory in 2005.

The man once worked in Israel as a garbage collector, at a time when thousands of Gazans were allowed to enter Israel daily for work. But his permit was revoked because of his involvement in a car theft, his wife said.

His wife began making frequent trips to neighboring Egypt to buy goods to sell in Gaza. When he tried to do the same, Israeli security agents stopped him on the Gaza side of the border. They offered him his Israel work permit back in exchange for collaboration, the wife told the AP.

Later, his wife grew suspicious because he was frequently going up on the roof of their house to make phone calls. When she confronted him, he confessed and told her, "I am not hurting anyone. I just give them a phone number, a name or information on a tunnel".

She did not join her husband in collaborating until 2008, when she was allowed to accompany one of their children being treated at an Israeli hospital. She was asked to go to the hospital's security office, and there an Israeli gave her money to buy presents for herself and her children.

A few days later, he gave her $14,000 along with instructions to leave the cash in various drop points around Gaza to pay other informants. "We left money under rocks, in garbage bins and by walls," she said.

Shortly before their arrest in 2011, she said, the husband received a call from the Israelis, who described a car to him and asked him to head immediately to the main road outside his home and wait for it. When he saw the car, he called the Israelis and reported that two people were in it.

More than an hour later, she said, the Israelis bombed the car, killing its occupants — apparently fighters.

During the last round of Israel-Hamas fighting in 2012, several senior Hamas figures were killed in an air strike, and the husband and five other alleged collaborators were pulled from prison by masked men, and shot to death at a Gaza intersection. The body of at least one of the six was also dragged in the street by a motorcycle, though it's not known if it was that of the husband.

The widow was convicted in a Hamas court and sentenced to seven years in prison. She was pardoned in December to look after her children.

Now she struggles to raise her children with little money. She did not speak of being harassed because of her conviction, but said: "The neighbors give me insincere smiles, but I know what they are thinking of us."

She reflected little about the rights or wrongs of working with Israel — showing a mix of denial, a desire to defend her husband's reputation and a relief that the fear of those years was over.

"My husband was a kind man," she insisted. "He would never hurt anyone."

UNITED NATIONS — A diplomatic breakthrough is unlikely on a nuclear deal to end sanctions against Iran when talks resume in New York this week between Tehran and six world powers deadlocked after a year of negotiations.

The talks between Iran and the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China are re-starting after a two-month hiatus and amid Washington and Tehran ruling out cooperation on fighting Islamic State militants who have taken over swaths of Iraq and Syria.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton will discuss the negotiations on a long-term nuclear deal over lunch on Thursday, diplomats said. The EU has been a kind of interlocutor for the six powers.

Diplomats from the six countries will begin meeting among themselves on Thursday before they all sit down with the Iranian delegation on Friday. The negotiations are expected to run until at least September 26 on the sidelines of next week's annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly.

US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, who heads the US delegation, said in a speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday that more movement from Iran will be needed to secure a long-term agreement.

"We can say on the positive side that our talks have been serious and that we have identified potential answers to some key questions," Sherman said. She also said "we remain far apart on other core issues, including the size and scope of Iran's uranium enrichment capacity".

Iran denies Western allegations that it is refining uranium to develop the capability to assemble nuclear weapons, saying it is doing it to help generate electricity.

The United States and its allies have in recent years imposed ever tighter financial and others sanctions on Iran, a major oil producer, to make it scale back its nuclear programme.

Western governments want Iran to have a centrifuge capacity in the low, single-digit thousands so that it would take Tehran a long time to use the machines to purify enough uranium to fuel an atomic weapon. Tehran has rejected demands to significantly reduce the number below the more than 19,000 it has now installed, of which roughly half are operating.

Last week, Zarif's deputy Abbas Araqchi criticised what he called the "illogical demands" of the Western powers. Araqchi also said: "We are always optimistic...but we have a difficult road to go."

Iran, diplomats close to the talks said, appears unwilling to reduce the number of its centrifuges to below 10,000.

But that would be an unacceptable for the six powers, who diplomats say are aiming to have a deal in place that leaves Iran in a position where it would need at least one year to produce enough high enriched uranium for a single bomb.

“On the question of enrichment we have practically made no progress,” a senior Western diplomat said. “The six want that in case the agreement is broken and the nuclear activities restart towards a military objective, that we have a breakout capacity of a year.”

Diplomats said a breakthrough in the New York negotiations was unlikely.

“Things remain blocked,” the senior Western diplomat said. “New York will be vital to see if we can break the impasse.”

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE , United States — President Barack Obama insisted Wednesday that US troops have no combat mission in Iraq, after his top general suggested some US advisors could join Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State group.

"The American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission," Obama told American troops at the headquarters of US Central Command in Florida.

Obama has repeatedly stressed that, despite ordering air strikes against IS in Syria and Iraq, he will not send US troops back to fight another land war in the region.

Indeed, he has based much of the rationale of his presidency on getting American forces out of foreign entanglements.

But his remarks here on Wednesday were lent added relevance by comments by General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Tuesday.

Dempsey said that it may at some point prove necessary to send US advisors into action with the Iraqi troops battling IS, in what he called "close-combat advising".

But the White House insisted the idea of US troops in battle was a "purely hypothetical scenario."

It was not immediately clear whether Obama's comments in Florida precluded such an approach, but there appeared to be plenty of rhetorical space for Dempsey's scenario to play out while allowing the president to insist that American troops have no dedicated combat mission.

The president did not repeat the frequent US characterisation of the evolving mission in Iraq and Syria that there will be no US “boots on the ground” — a term usually seen to refer to combat troops.

Obama’s short remarks at the rain drenched MacDill air force base also included a defence of his own foreign policy — which Republicans argue is collapsing around him.

He noted that he had brought US combat troops home from Iraq, refocused the US war in Afghanistan and would “responsibly” end combat operations in the country before the end of the year.

He also recalled the US operation to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and his policy of taking out the “core” leadership of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But in a nod to the new conflict and to critics who argue Obama has turned his back on a chaotic world too soon, he said: “We have always known the end of the war in Afghanistan did not mean the end to challenges of threats to America.”

The president, however, stressed that in the new conflict to “degrade” and “destroy” America would not go it alone and talked up the international coalition he is building.

Obama said France and Britain were already flying with the United States over Iraq, added that Australia and Canada would send military advisers to the country.

He noted Saudi Arabia’s willingness to base a US mission to train moderate Syrian rebels on its soil and said German paratroopers were also going to take part in a training mission which he did not specify.

Obama made his speech after meeting General Lloyd Austin, who runs US Central Command, which stretches across the troubled belt of South and Central Asia and the Middle East.

He also sat down in closed-door talks with military representatives of 40 nations which are expected to take part in the anti-IS mission.

MADRID — Libya's struggling elected government and representatives of 15 neighbouring nations on Wednesday unanimously rejected the idea of military intervention as a way to restore stability in the oil-rich nation, which some say is on the brink of civil war.

Meeting in Madrid, officials from countries surrounding Libya and to its north across the Mediterranean concluded "there is no military solution to the current crisis."

But Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo warned that the status quo puts Libya in a position where it could slide into a Syria-style civil war.

Libya currently has two rival parliaments and governments. One is recently elected but based in Tobruk, where it moved after Islamist militias took control of both Tripoli and Libya's second-largest city, Benghazi. The previous Islamist-led parliament remains in Tripoli and is backed by the militias.

Libya Foreign Minister Mohamed Abdulaziz offered no specifics on how his government could regain control of Tripoli but said he did not believe a recent series of mysterious airstrikes in Libya or future airstrikes would shift the balance of power.

"We are convinced that is impossible for us to overcome terrorism only through air strikes," Abdulaziz told reporters.

US officials have said some airstrikes were carried out by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, reinforcing the perception that Libya has become a proxy battleground for larger regional struggles — with Turkey and Qatar backing the Islamist militias and Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE supporting their opponents.

The specter of regional intervention has cast a pall over the increasingly fractured country, which was plunged into turmoil following the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that toppled longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi but gave rise to a patchwork of heavily armed and increasingly unruly militias.

Abdulaziz said his government is "not inviting any country to do any kind of military intervention in Libya. What we have seen is foreign intervention has always lead to disaster."