Region

DUBAI/VIENNA — Iran has conducted "mechanical" tests on a new, advanced machine to refine uranium, a senior official was quoted as saying on Wednesday, a disclosure that may annoy Western states pushing Tehran to scale back its nuclear programme.

Iran's development of new centrifuges to replace its current breakdown-prone model is watched closely by Western officials. It could allow the Islamic Republic to amass potential atomic bomb material much faster.

Tehran says its nuclear programme is peaceful and that it produces low-enriched uranium only to make fuel for a planned network of atomic energy plants. If processed to a high fissile concentration, uranium can be used for nuclear weapons.

"Manufacturing and production of new centrifuges is our right," Iranian atomic energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi said.

Iran's Fars news agency also quoted him as saying that Iran had tested its latest generation of centrifuge, the IR-8, but had not yet fed it with uranium gas.

UN nuclear agency reports this year showed Iran testing four other models under development at an above-ground Natanz nuclear site — IR-2m, IR-4, IR-6 and IR-6s — with such gas.

Iran had informed the UN International Atomic Energy Agency in December that it planned to install a single IR-8. The IAEA said in May that it had observed a new "casing" at the site, but that it was not yet connected.

An interim accord struck late last year in Geneva between Iran and six world powers — designed to buy time for talks on a final nuclear deal — stipulated that Iran could not go beyond the centrifuge research and development it has been conducting at the Natanz site, including testing of new models.

It was one of the thorniest issues to settle in technical talks on how to implement the preliminary deal.

In a comment that Western officials may dispute, Salehi said that "based on the Geneva agreement, research and development have no limit", Fars reported.

‘Very tough topic’

Salehi said Iran had "introduced" the IR-8 centrifuge to the IAEA. "Mechanical tests have been done but gas has yet to be injected," Salehi said. That would require President Hassan Rouhani's permission.

The comments reported by Fars did not make clear when the tests were carried out. The IAEA, which regularly inspects Iran's nuclear facilities, is expected to issue a quarterly report on the country's nuclear programme around September 3.

In a separate monthly update on August 20 about the implementation of the Geneva Accord, it did not suggest any new centrifuge development activities, only saying that Iran had "continued its safeguarded enrichment R&D practices".

The negotiations between Iran and the United States, France, Germany, China, Britain and Russia — aimed at ending a decade-old dispute over Iran's nuclear programme — were extended in July until November 24 in view of persistent wide differences.

A senior US official on July 18 said Iran's nuclear R&D was a "very tough topic" in the discussions, among others.

Faced with technical hurdles and difficulty in obtaining parts abroad, Iran has been trying for years to replace the erratic, 1970s vintage IR-1 centrifuge it now operates at its underground Natanz and Fordow uranium enrichment facilities.

Although Iran's progress so far appears limited, it is an issue that Western states will want to see addressed as part of any final settlement over Iran's nuclear programme.

They want Iran to roll back uranium enrichment to a point where it cannot produce enough highly enriched material for a bomb before the outside world can detect it.

GAZA/OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — An open-ended ceasefire in the Gaza war held on Wednesday as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced strong criticism in Israel over a costly conflict with Palestinian fighters in which no clear victor emerged.

On the streets of the battered, Hamas-run Palestinian enclave, people headed to shops and banks, trying to resume the normal pace of life after seven weeks of fighting. Thousands of others, who had fled the battles and sheltered with relatives or in schools, returned home, where some found only rubble.

In Israel, sirens warning of incoming rocket fire from the Gaza Strip fell silent. But media commentators, echoing attacks by members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, voiced deep disappointment over his leadership during the most prolonged bout of Israeli-Palestinian violence in a decade.

“After 50 days of warfare in which a terror organisation killed dozens of soldiers and civilians, destroyed the daily routine [and] placed the country in a state of economic distress ... we could have expected much more than an announcement of a ceasefire,” analyst Shimon Shiffer wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s biggest-selling newspaper.

“We could have expected the prime minister to go to the president’s residence and inform him of his decision to resign his post.”

Netanyahu, who has faced constant sniping in his Cabinet from right-wing ministers demanding military action to topple Hamas, scheduled a news conference for Wednesday evening, expected to be his first public remarks since the Egyptian-mediated truce deal took effect on Tuesday evening.

Palestinian health officials say 2,139 people, most of them civilians, including more than 490 children, have been killed in the enclave since July 8, when Israel launched an offensive with the declared aim of ending rocket salvoes.

Israel’s death toll stood at 64 soldiers and six civilians.

The ceasefire agreement called for an indefinite halt to hostilities, the immediate opening of Gaza’s blockaded crossings with Israel and Egypt, and a widening of the territory’s fishing zone in the Mediterranean.

A senior Hamas official voiced willingness for the security forces of Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the unity government he formed in June to control the passage points.

Both Israel and Egypt view Hamas as a security threat and are seeking guarantees that weapons will not enter Gaza, a narrow, densely populated territory of 1.8 million people.

Under a second stage of the truce that would begin a month later, Israel and the Palestinians would discuss the construction of a Gaza sea port and Israel’s release of Hamas prisoners in the occupied West Bank, possibly in a trade for the remains of two Israeli soldiers believed held by Hamas, the officials said.

Israel has in recent weeks said it wants the full demilitarisation of Gaza. The United States and European Union have supported the goal, but it remains unclear what it would mean in practice and Hamas has rejected it as unfeasible.

Competing victory claims

“On the land of proud Gaza, the united people achieved absolute victory against the Zionist enemy,” a Hamas statement said.

Israel said it dealt a strong blow to Hamas, killing several of its military leaders and destroying the Islamist group’s cross-border infiltration tunnels.

“Hamas’ military wing was badly hit, we know this clearly through unequivocal intelligence,” Yossi Cohen, Netanyahu’s national security adviser, said on Army Radio.

But Israel also faced persistent rocket fire for nearly two months that caused an exodus from a number of border communities and disrupted daily life in its commercial heartland.

“They are celebrating in Gaza,” Cabinet minister Uzi Landau, of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu Party in Netanyahu’s coalition, told Israel Radio. He said that for Israel, the outcome of the war was “very gloomy” because it had not created sufficient deterrence to dissuade Hamas from attacking in the future.

Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s most popular columnists, expressed concern “that instead of paving the way to removing the threat from Gaza, we are paving the road to the next round, in Lebanon or in Gaza”.

“The Israelis expected a leader, a statesman who knows what he wants to achieve, someone who makes decisions and engages in a sincere and real dialogue with his public,” he wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth. “They received a seasoned spokesperson, and very little beyond that.”

Ben Caspit, writing in the Maariv daily, said there was no victory for Israel in a conflict that resulted in “a collapsed tourism industry [and] an economy approaching recession”.

Israel’s central bank has estimated the conflict will knock half a point off economic growth this year.

But with future diplomatic moves on Gaza’s future still pending, there was no immediate talk publicly among Netanyahu’s coalition partners of any steps to break up the alliance.

In a further sign of the truce’s impact, Egypt eased restrictions at the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, allowing World Food Programme supplies containing a shipment of 25,000 food parcels into the coastal territory for the first time since 2007, a statement by the humanitarian group said.

Israel has regularly permitted food and other humanitarian goods to be shipped into Gaza across its border, during the latest fighting as well. A government website says 5,359 truckloads of goods have transited the Kerem Shalom crossing with Gaza since July 8, the day the seven-week conflict erupted.

Israel has said it would facilitate the flow of more civilian goods and humanitarian and reconstruction aid into the impoverished territory if the truce was honoured.

But, Cohen said: “[Hamas] will...not get a port unless it declares it will disarm. It will not get even one screw unless we can be sure it is not being used to strengthen Gaza’s military might.”

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said 540,000 people had been displaced in the Gaza Strip. Israel has said Hamas bears responsibility for civilian casualties because it operates among non-combatants and uses schools and mosques to store weapons and as launch sites for rockets.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is considering launching a humanitarian relief operation for Shiite Turkmen in northern Iraq who have been under siege for weeks by Islamic State militants, US defence officials said Wednesday.

The mission, if it went forward, would be the second recent US military humanitarian intervention in Iraq. US cargo planes dropped tonnes of food and water to displaced Yazidis on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq earlier this month, supported by US air strikes on nearby Islamic State fighting positions.

The administration is now focused on the imperiled town of Amirli, which is situated about 169 kilometres north of Baghdad and just a few kilometres from Kurdish territory. An estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people are estimated to have no access to food or water.

The head of the United Nation's assistance mission in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, earlier this week called for urgent action in Amirli and described the situation as desperate.

Three US defence officials said a humanitarian mission is under consideration. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they could not discuss internal administration deliberations by name. The timetable for a decision on whether and how to go ahead with the mission was not immediately clear.

Separately, the top US commander in the Middle East, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, met Wednesday in Baghdad with Iraq's premier-designate, Haider Al Abadi, to discuss cooperation in the fight against the Islamic State group, according to a statement issued by Abadi's office. The statement said Austin expressed the US government's willingness to provide more counterterrorism training for Iraqi security forces.

The US has several hundred military personnel in Iraq providing security for American facilities, including the US embassy in Baghdad and the US consulate in Erbil, and coordinating with Iraqi security forces.

The US also has a military-run office of security cooperation as part of the US embassy, but the military personnel assigned to that office work on military sales rather than provide field training for Iraqi forces.

The siege of Amirli is part of the Islamic State's offensive, which seized large swaths of western and northern Iraq this summer and pushed further in neighbouring Syria.

Residents have put up fierce resistance since the siege began, preventing the Sunni militants from successfully taking over the town. But the militants have, in turn, cut off the town, leaving thousands without access to food, water and medicine, despite recent airdrops by the Iraqi military.

Like other minorities in Iraq such as the Christians and the Yazidis, the Shiite Turkmen community has also been targeted by the Islamic State, which views them as apostates. Tens of thousands of Turkmens, Iraq's third-largest ethnic group, have been uprooted from their homes since the Islamic State took Mosul, the northern city of Tikrit and a spate of towns and villages in the area.

Dr. Ali Al Bayati, head of an Iraq-based humanitarian group called the Turkmen Saving Foundation, said Wednesday that at least 15,000 civilians, including many women and children, remain trapped in Amirli without access to food or water.

He said the streets are blocked by Islamic State fighters and the only way out is by air. The nearest Iraqi ground force is in the town of Toz Khormatu, which has seen intense clashes in recent weeks. Electricity and water are completely cut off in Amirli, according to Bayati.

Bayati said airdrops from the Iraqi military have provided residents with desperately needed staples like rice, oil and cheese, as well as weapons to help them resist the Islamic State. However, the residents often go 10 days without any airdrops successfully reaching them.

David Pollock, a former State Department official and now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Tuesday the US military could assist in opening a land corridor into Kurdish territory for the besieged Turkmen.

"It's a very urgent situation," Pollock said.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass — A US writer freed this week after being held captive for two years by Syrian insurgents on Wednesday thanked those who had worked for his release and said he was emotionally overwhelmed by his welcome home.

Peter Theo Curtis, who was held by Nusra Front, Al Qaeda's official wing in Syria, said he had no idea while he was imprisoned that there had been hundreds of people around the world pushing for his release.

In a written statement released overnight, Curtis also thanked the government of Qatar and US officials for working to free him.

"I am just overwhelmed with emotion," Curtis, 45, told reporters outside his mother's home Wednesday morning.

Curtis, who was freed on Sunday, said numerous strangers had approached him to welcome him back to the United States.

"I suddenly remember how good the American people are and what kindness they have in their hearts. And to all those people I say a huge 'thank you' from my heart, from the bottom of my heart," he said.

He declined to answer questions. "I will respond, but I can't do it now," said Curtis, who along with his mother Nancy Curtis raised a US flag at the home before he spoke to reporters.

Curtis arrived in the United States late on Tuesday after a flight from Tel Aviv, meeting his mother at Boston's Logan Airport.

His release comes against the backdrop of other efforts to free other US hostages in Syria as the United States considers possible options, including air strikes, to target the Islamic State organisation.

Earlier on Tuesday, his parents said in various television interviews that they were relieved. Their son's return came just days after rivals of Al Nusra Front, the militant group Islamic State, last week said it killed journalist James Foley and threatened another still being held hostage, Steven Sotloff.

Curtis' ex-girlfriend, Jennifer Steil, said he spoke Arabic fluently and understood the Koran, rare attributes among Westerners who travelled to the region.

"He had a passionate interest in trying to understand what's going on in the Middle East and why people were turning to violence," said Steil, an author and journalist.

WASHINGTON — An American was killed last weekend in Syria, where he was fighting for the Islamic State, US media reported Tuesday, in an account only partially confirmed by US officials.

Douglas McCain had joined the violent extremist group as a fighter, leaving his family "devastated" and "just as surprised as the country", his uncle Ken McCain told CNN.

He had converted from Christianity to Islam several years ago, according to the uncle, who said the US State Department informed the family of his death on Monday.

"We are in contact with the family and are providing all possible consular assistance," agency spokeswoman Jen Spaki said.

"There's typically a process that needs to be gone through before any confirmation can be made."

She declined to comment further "out of respect for the family".

A number of Americans are believed to have joined militants in the region.

Former classmates recalled McCain as a "goofball" who liked to play basketball and aspired to become a rapper.

"Doug was a fun guy to be around. Played basketball, joked a lot, had a small sense of humour. Got along with most... Wasn't the best athlete, but liked to play," a former basketball friend told NBC News.

Friends said on Twitter that he converted to Islam around 2004.

The younger McCain was "a good person, loved his family, loved his mother, loved his faith", his uncle told CNN, referring to his nephew's Christian beliefs before his conversion.

McCain was killed in a battle against Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda-linked group blacklisted by the United States, the report said.

NBC News said McCain, of San Diego, California, was carrying about $800 in cash and his American passport in his pockets.

It cited a Free Syrian Army-linked activist as saying McCain was among three foreign fighters in the IS camp who died during the battle.

On Facebook, the 33-year-old called himself "Duale ThaslaveofAllah", and his Twitter bio read "It's Islam over everything", according to NBC.

The State Department says there are some 12,000 extremist fighters from countries around the world — hailing from as many as 50 countries — including some Americans.

US officials last week told AFP that more than 100 US nationals had left to fight in Syria or tried to do so.

GAZA/OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — A ceasefire agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians aimed at ending a seven-week Israeli aggression on Gaza went into effect on Tuesday and joyous Palestinians streamed into the streets of the battered enclave to celebrate.

Minutes before the Egyptian-brokered truce began at 1600 GMT, a rocket fired by Palestinian fighters killed one person in an Israeli kibbutz, or collective farm, near the Gaza border, Israel said.

Palestinian and Egyptian officials said the deal calls for an indefinite halt to hostilities, the immediate opening of Gaza's blockaded crossings with Israel and Egypt and a widening of the territory's fishing zone in the Mediterranean.

A senior official of the Islamist group Hamas, which runs Gaza, voiced willingness for the security forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the unity government he formed in June to control the passage points.

Both Israel and Egypt view Hamas as a security threat and are seeking guarantees that weapons will not enter the territory of 1.8 million people.

Under a second stage of the truce that would begin a month later, Israel and the Palestinians would discuss the construction of a Gaza sea port and Israel's release of Hamas prisoners in the occupied West Bank, the officials said.

After the ceasefire began, crowds and traffic filled the Gaza streets. Car horns blared and recorded chants praising God sounded from mosque loudspeakers.

"Today we declare the victory of the resistance, today we declare the victory of Gaza," Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri said.

Israel gave a low-key response to the truce.

A statement issued by a spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had accepted the Egyptian proposal for “an open-ended ceasefire” and would attend Cairo talks on Gaza’s future only if there was a “total end to terror attacks” from the enclave.

The conflict has taken a heavy toll in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian health officials say 2,139 people, most of them civilians, including more than 490 children, have been killed in the enclave since July 8, when Israel launched an offensive.

Sixty-four Israeli soldiers and five civilians in Israel have been killed.

Thousands of homes in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged in the most prolonged Israeli-Palestinian fighting since a 2000-2005 Palestinian Intifada, or uprising.

“We have mixed feelings. We are in pain for the losses but we are also proud we fought this war alone and we were not broken,” said Gaza teacher Ahmed Awf, 55, as he held his two-year-old son in his arms and joined in the street festivities.

Despite Israeli bombardments from sea and air and an offensive that included a ground invasion, Hamas was able to keep up cross-border rocket salvoes that reached Israel’s heartland, in Tel Aviv. Many of the rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said 540,000 people had been displaced in the territory. Israel has said Hamas bears responsibility for civilian casualties because it operates among non-combatants. Israel claims that the group uses schools and mosques to store weapons and as launch sites for rockets.

In the run-up to the ceasefire, Israel bombed more of Gaza’s tallest structures in attacks that toppled a 13-storey apartment and office tower and destroyed most of a 16-floor residential building.

Israel claimed it was targeting Hamas control and command centres. 

DUBAI — Air strikes by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on Libyan Islamists — as alleged by Washington despite denials from Cairo and the Gulf state — would mark an escalation of a regional struggle over the future of the Arab world.

If true, Arab responsibility for the attacks would also add to a picture of the West's regional allies acting increasingly independently in the absence of decisive US involvement, seeking security goals with which Washington may not agree.

US officials said on Monday that Egypt and the UAE, which has one of the most powerful air forces in the Middle East, had carried out a series of strikes on Islamist fighters in Tripoli.

European allies joined Washington in urging outsiders not to interfere in Libya, which is suffering its worst violence since the overthrow of Muammar Qadhafi in 2011.

Tripoli residents said last weekend that unidentified jets had attacked targets in the capital. There were also strikes on Islamist-held positions last Monday.

Egypt denied conducting air raids in the North African country, while UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash suggested on Twitter that the allegations had been promoted by anti-UAE Islamists.

Whoever carried out the raids, they were in tune with wider efforts by Egypt and conservative Sunni Muslim allies to roll back the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood — a regional Islamist movement — and its sponsor, Qatar.

Analysts noted that President Barack Obama, who last year called off air strikes on Syria at the last minute, has himself said US allies in the region should play a greater role in tackling local crises.

“In the light of US inaction in Syria, the message is clear, that you have to take care of your own concerns,” said Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, stressing that he did not know for sure if the UAE was involved or not. If the raids were indeed carried out by Egypt and the UAE, it would open a new chapter in inter-Arab relations, said Theodore Karasik, research director at Dubai think tank INEGMA.

“The feeling is that America hasn’t stood up for its values and policies in the region,” he said, referring to a common Arab view that the US administration has been hesitant in supporting rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“So these states will now take it upon themselves to act. Ironically this is, in broad terms, what Washington has been asking them to do — solve their own problems.”

The alleged use of outside military muscle touched a nerve in the West, acutely aware that its own intervention in Libya in the run-up to the fall of Qadhafi contributed to the country’s descent into chaos.

In an indication of the sensitivity of the issue, the publication of their assertions was followed within hours by a joint statement by the United States and European allies cautioning against foreign interference.

Outside involvement would worsen divisions in Libya and slow progress in its political transition, it said.

And yet the West may have to get used to a more activist stance by participants in a tussle for influence pitting Egypt and most conservative Arab Gulf states against Islamist-friendly Qatar, Sudan and non-Arab Turkey and Iran.

A number of Arab powers have used a variety of tools in the past four years including armed force, aid, finance and diplomacy to shape events in Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Libya to their advantage.

“The important point here is that regional forces are taking their own path to supporting proxies,” said Karasik. “This is the result of the region wanting to police itself without waiting for extra-regional decisions.”

Abdullah said that if the UAE had taken part in the raid, it must have had “very compelling reasons to do so”. If Libya became a failed state and an exporter of extremists then the stability of neighbouring Egypt would be at risk, he added.

The world was busy with many other crises, and so action may have been needed to prevent extremists taking over, he said. 

While policy differences between Washington and its Arab allies are nothing new, the propensity of some to go it alone in pursuing their aims is novel.

Egypt provides a clear example. Saudi Arabia was furious when veteran ruler Hosni Mubarak was toppled in 2011 and the Muslim Brotherhood, long mistrusted by Riyadh, later won power. Qatar helped to fund the elected Brotherhood government of President Mohamed Morsi, who was ousted by the army last year.

Riyadh and the UAE have since provided money to support Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who as a general led the takeover and has since been elected president after suppressing the Brotherhood.

US officials have looked askance at the heavy-handed political and security tactics of Sisi’s authorities, which they believe have helped to polarise Egyptian society.

Sisi’s men now fear that Islamists, if left to flourish in Libya’s disorder, could lay the foundations for the return of the Brotherhood in Egypt one day.

For most Gulf Arabs, the Brotherhood is anathema because its ideology challenges the principle of conservative dynastic rule long followed in the Gulf.

Gulf Arab states take Egypt’s stability seriously, regarding the Arab world’s most populous nation as their chief regional ally in their confrontation with Shiite Muslim Iran.

Riyadh sees the Iranian administration as an expansionist power bent on exporting revolution to the Arab world and interfering in the affairs of neighbouring Gulf states. Tehran denies any such interference.

DUBAI — Iran's deputy foreign minister said he held "positive and constructive" talks with Saudi Arabia's foreign minister on Tuesday where Islamist militancy in Iraq — that both see as a threat — was one of the topics discussed.

Hossein Amir Abdollahian was in Jeddah for the first high-level bilateral talks between the two countries since Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran a year ago, pledging to thaw Tehran's frosty relations with its Arab neighbours.

"Both sides emphasised the need to open a new page of political relations between the two countries," Abdollahian told Reuters by telephone after meeting Prince Saud Al Faisal.

The two men discussed issues of regional security such as the rise of the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Israeli attacks on Gaza, Abdollahian said, adding: "The meeting took place in a very positive and constructive atmosphere."

Official Saudi media did not intially report on Abdollahian's arrival, a sign of the sensitivity of relations between two of the Middle East's big powers which are separated by the Gulf and a religious divide, with Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia often at odds with Shiite Iran.

But state news agency SPA later did report the talks, saying the men "reviewed bilateral relations between the two countries and discussed a number of regional and international issues of common interest".

Saudi Arabia and Iran back opposing sides in wars and political struggles in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Bahrain, usually along sectarian lines, and vie for influence across the Middle East.

However, both Tehran and Riyadh were aghast at the rapid advances made by Islamic State in June and July and welcomed the departure of Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al Maliki this month.

Maliki was a close political ally of Iran but Tehran came to see him as a liability after many Sunni Iraqis, who felt sidelined or persecuted by the Shiite prime minister, sided with Islamic State.

Maliki was seen in Riyadh as being too close to Iran, and King Abdullah believed he had failed to fulfil promises to rein in the power of Shiite militias that targeted Sunnis.

Saudi Arabia remains wary of the incoming Iraqi prime minister, Haider Al Abadi, who is from the same political bloc as Maliki, analysts in the kingdom say, and continues to oppose what it sees as Iranian interference in Arab countries.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif continued his own visit to Iraq on Tuesday, meeting Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani, to whose forces Tehran has supplied weapons in response to Islamic State advances.

DJIBOUTI — Djibouti's president was unhurt when a member of the Republican Guard shot and wounded his doctor and at least one other person at the airport of the Red Sea nation after the presidential party had flown in, officials said on Tuesday.

President Ismail Omar Guelleh, who was returning from a meeting in Ethiopia, had left the airport shortly before the shooting took place on Monday afternoon, they said.

The Republic Guard said in a statement that one of its soldiers had "suddenly opened fire" injuring two people, including a Republican Guard doctor. It gave no motive for the attack but said an investigation had been launched.

There was no immediate suggestion of a political motive for the shooting.

A spokesman for the guard said three people had been injured in the incident. He said the doctor was the president's physician and had accompanied Guelleh on his trip to Addis Ababa.

A former French colony, Djibouti hosts a French military base and the only US military base in Africa. Its port is used by foreign navies policing the Gulf of Aden's shipping lanes, some of the busiest in the world, against pirates from Somalia, which borders the country to the south.

MOGADISHU — "The president has arrived, the president has arrived," chant youths in Mogadishu's Beerta Khaatka market, as armed men in trucks mounted with machine guns escort lorries with horns blaring through the throng.

The joking salutation is not for Somalia's president, but hails a national institution nonetheless: white sacks brimming with leafy sprouts of khat, the narcotic shrub chewed across the Horn of Africa and Yemen in a tradition dating back centuries.

The ubiquitous sight of young men with rifles slung over their shoulders and green stalks of khat dangling from their mouths is emblematic of the Somalia of recent decades, where marauding Islamist rebels and warlords bent on carving out personal fiefdoms have fomented a culture of guns and violence.

Grown on plantations in the highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia, tonnes of khat, or qat, dubbed "the flower of paradise" by its users, are flown daily into Mogadishu airport, to be distributed from there in convoys of lorries to markets across Somalia.

Britain, whose large ethnic Somali community sustained a lucrative demand for the leaves, banned khat from July as an illegal drug. This prohibition jolted the khat market, creating a supply glut in Somalia and pushing down prices, to the delight of the many connoisseurs of its amphetamine-like high.

"Those who exported to London have now made Mogadishu their khat hub," said Dahir Kassim, an accountant for a wholesale khat trader in Somalia's rubble-strewn capital where women under umbrella stands sell khat bundles wrapped in banana leaves.

The price of the cheap Laari khat popular in the impoverished country has halved to about $10 per kilogramme since Britain outlawed the stimulant. A kilogramme of "Special" or "London" khat has also gone down to about $18 from $30.

Before the UK ban, 27-year-old mason's assistant Mohamed Khalif could only afford to chew once a week. "Now I chew daily and my problems are over," said Khalif, blissfully.

The daily arrival of the khat trucks galvanises markets, sending female traders scrambling for the sacks of stems and leaves, whose potency wanes within a few days of plucking.

Other street vendors take advantage of the hubub to try to sell soft drinks and cigarettes.

Time-old tradition or 

a harmful vice?

"I bought my own houses from khat sales," said 55-year-old wholesale seller Seinab Ali in Mogadishu, distributing bundles of wrapped leaves to local traders.

But khat exporters in Kenya, a former British colony where the cash crop bolsters the local economy, say the UK ban has slashed their profits from sales to Somalia.

"Britain has made our khat business useless," said Nur Elmi, a khat trader in Kenyan capital Nairobi from where shipments to Somalia have almost doubled after Britain's ban.

"They cannot afford to buy it all [in Somalia], so we sell it at throwaway prices," he said.

The British decision to classify khat an illegal class-C drug was surrounded by heated debate, with critics saying it would create a lucrative clandestine market and even alienate immigrant youths, driving them into crime or Islamist extremism.

Home Secretary Theresa May had argued in backing the ban that it would help prevent Britain from becoming a hub for the trade, which was already banned in the United States and several European countries. She also cited evidence that khat had been linked to "low attainment and family breakdowns".

While defenders of khat-chewing hail it as a time-honoured social tradition comparable to drinking coffee, detractors say it shares part of the blame for the violent and destructive chaos suffered by Somalia for the last 20 years.

Somalia's cash-strapped government seldom collects health statistics. The spike in use is a concern but officials are too busy battling Islamist Al Shabaab rebels and rebuilding Somalia's state institutions to dedicate much attention to it, said the Mogadishu mayor's spokesman Ali Mohamud.

"Somali people are wasting money, time and energy on khat," he said. "Khat has only advantaged those who grow it."

A 2006 World Health Organisation report on khat said it can increase blood pressure, insomnia, anorexia, constipation, irritability, migraines and also impair sexual potency in men.

Even many of those who make a living from the khat trade recognise that its consumption can be harmful.

"Khat is good for mothers who sell it but for those who consume it is a disaster. Day and night I pray to God so that my children do not chew khat," said wholesaler Ali.

Many Somali women point to wrecked marriages and abandoned children as testimony to the dangers of excessive use of khat.

"Men who chew are not good," said Maryan Mohamed, who said she had been married 13 times. "They chew alongside their hungry children."