Region

ISTANBUL — A Turkish pro-Palestinian group plans to send aid ships to Gaza to challenge the Israeli blockade, it said on Monday, four years after Israeli commandos stormed its flotilla bound for the territory, killing 10 Turks.

The plan may hinder efforts to rebuild shattered diplomatic ties between Turkey and Israel, just as Ankara launched an “air corridor” carrying wounded Palestinians to Turkey and aid to Gaza.

The Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) announced that activists from 12 countries had decided to launch a convoy of boats to Gaza “in the shadow of the latest Israeli aggression.

“The Freedom Flotilla Coalition affirmed that, as most governments are complicit, the responsibility falls on civil society to challenge the Israeli blockade on Gaza,” it said in a statement after the group met in Istanbul at the weekend.

An IHH spokeswoman did not elaborate but said the group would hold a news conference on Tuesday. Turkish foreign ministry officials had no immediate comment.

Nine Turks were killed in May 2010 in international waters when Israeli soldiers raided their vessel, the Mavi Marmara, leading a flotilla to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. A 10th Turkish activist died in May from wounds suffered in the attack.

Turkey’s relationship with its former ally Israel had been tense since late 2008 over a previous Israeli military operation in Gaza.

Pro-Palestinian sentiment

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was elected president on Sunday, has been among the most vocal critics of Israel’s conflict with the Islamist Hamas movement that rules Gaza.

In his election campaigning, Erdogan likened Israel’s actions to those of Adolf Hitler and warned it would “drown in the blood it sheds”.

Hamas spokesman Ehab Al Ghsain said: “We hope that now with the presence of Mr Erdogan as the president, chosen by the majority of the Turkish people, the support of Turkey and their defence of our people will increase.”

Israel, which denounced Erdogan’s comments, says its offensive is intended to stop rocket fire from Gaza and to destroy tunnels used by gunmen to infiltrate Israel.

Pro-Palestinian sentiment runs high in mostly Muslim Turkey, and protesters have repeatedly taken to the streets in recent weeks to demonstrate against Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

Three Palestinian women and a male youth were flown from Tel Aviv to Ankara overnight for medical treatment after Turkey held talks on the matter with Israel, the first step of Ankara’s bid to evacuate possibly thousands from the Gaza Strip.

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu revealed details of the aid initiative last week after a month of bloodshed that has killed 1,910 Palestinians and 67 Israelis.

Osama Al Najar, spokesman of the health ministry in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, said 60 more wounded people would be flown to Turkey on Monday. He said the Palestinian Authority had helped organise their transfer from Gaza to Israel.

Davutoglu said Turkey planned to bring in some 200 wounded in the first stage. Health Minister Mehmet Muezzinoglu said Ankara was ready to send a 60-strong medical team to establish a field hospital in the region if permission is granted.

Turkey’s state disaster and emergency authority was to send an initial aid cargo of 3,500 food parcels by plane from Ankara to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport on Monday evening as part of the air corridor.

GAZA — Palestinian Ibrahim Mohammad Al Toum, 85, sleeps on the floor on a thin mattress in a Gaza schoolroom, displaced for the third time in six years.

A farmer of oranges and lemons, his house in northern Gaza City has been bombed in each of the three Israeli-Palestinian conflicts since 2008. He has no idea why he has been singled out in this way.

“Why did they do it? Why? It is unfair, unfair! I am a peaceful man!” he said, sitting on the mattress in the schoolroom, surrounded by members of his extended family.

At any rate, he will not blame the Palestinian authorities in the Gaza Strip, a coastal enclave of 1.8 million people dominated since 2007 by the Islamist Hamas faction.

Israel says Hamas is responsible because it uses residential areas as arms depots and launchpads for rockets, drawing Israeli strikes.

But Toum said it was up to powers outside Gaza to do something to end the conflict, not authorities inside.

“The Arab countries were asleep when Israel struck,” Toum said. “The solution is with the Arab countries, with America to put pressure on Israel. I don’t want more war, why was there a war?”

Egypt is mediating a new round of indirect peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis, but with the Middle East gripped by a series of crises from Libya to Iraq, attention paid by the Arab world to the Palestinian cause is less than it used to be.

This is despite a higher death toll — 1,938 Palestinians and 67 Israelis — than in past Gaza clashes.

Local rights activists say the monthlong conflict has displaced around 520,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and at least half of them, like Toum and his family, have been staying in United Nations refugee camps in schools.

New ceasefire

With a new ceasefire agreed late on Sunday, some families started to return to their homes from the camps on Monday, carrying bags and mattresses on their backs or loading up donkey carts.

Toum is not sure how he will repair his house again. When the Israeli army warned it would bomb his district last month, the father of 10 fled Gaza’s northern Tawam neighbourhood.

Tawam used to be covered in farms but over Toum’s lifetime it has given way to concrete houses that have squeezed the rural land. Toum is worried that his citrus trees have not received enough water during the war and he expects they are dead.

The neighbourhood has suffered relatively light damage in battles between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters this time. Several homes have been destroyed and one of the mosques is wrecked, its dome lying amid rubble.

When the fighting began, Toum travelled to the UN camp in the school on a donkey cart with members of his family, taking only two mattresses and a coarse grey blanket, which four of them would later share.

His simple concrete house was hit shortly afterwards, causing parts of two of its four floors to collapse together. Toum tried to return with his 75-year-old wife Amena several days later but the area was too dangerous.

“When I and my wife went back to try to take belongings, they bombed it again, during Ramadan. We did not have the Eid feast this year because of the war,” he said.

It is an experience he has gone through twice before during his old age. Each time the journey to the camp could take up to one hour “depending on the health of the donkey”, he said.

“In 2008, the planes came and bombed the home. I came to a refugee school in Gaza. We lived on bread and cans of fish for 23 days. Then back to Tawam, and they had destroyed my home,” he said, starting to cry quietly.

He was given 4,000 euros from the United Nations to rebuild the house but four years later it was bombed for a second time.

In 2012, Toum was in the bedroom when the shelling started. When he returned after several days in a refugee camp, the bedroom walls were pitted with bullets and there was a gaping hole near the window.

This time he says he will stay in the school until water and electricity are restored to his home and he feels that the area is safe again. “But nowhere is better than home,” he said.

BAGHDAD –– Iraq moved closer to turning the page on Nouri Maliki's reign when an alternative prime minister was named Monday to steer the country out of a raging war and save it from breakup.

"The country is in your hands," President Fuad Masum told Haidar Al Abadi after accepting his nomination by parliament's Shiite bloc, in a move immediately welcomed by the United States.

Washington had warned Maliki against stirring trouble after the two-term premier gave a defiant midnight television address suggesting he was ready to fight for his job to the very end.

Haidar Al Abadi was somewhat of a dark horse in the months-long political wrangling over who should be nominated for prime minister after April elections.

The coalition headed by Maliki, who has been prime minister since 2006, won the vote comfortably but his increasingly sectarian policies were seen as partly responsible for the violence that has gripped Iraq recently.

People in a Sunni neighbourhood of the city of Baquba gathered in the street and fired shots in the air to celebrate Maliki's defeat.

"The United States stands ready to fully support a new and inclusive Iraqi government," Brett McGurk, the US deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern, said.

A Shiite politician considered close to Maliki, Abadi was born in Baghdad in 1952 and returned from British exile in 2003 when US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein.

US President Barack Obama, who on Thursday sent warplanes back into the skies over Iraq to halt a devastating jihadist advance in the north, had repeatedly stressed that any viable solution to Iraq's woes would have to start with the formation of a new government.


It had become clear in recent weeks that Maliki had lost support from Washington. Gradually, all his other erstwhile allies followed: Iran, the Shiite clergy and even his own Dawa party.

Moments before Maliki spoke on television, special forces, soldiers and police deployed across Baghdad, especially around the Green Zone district housing the country's key institutions.

Several of the capital's main thoroughfares and bridges were closed to traffic and on Monday morning unusual numbers of security personnel, uniformed and plain-clothed, remained deployed across the city.

His television address, in which he vowed to sue Masum for failing to choose him as prime minister, had dispelled any hope he would step down gracefully.

On Monday afternoon, even as the president shook hands with Abadi, Maliki sent his supporters to protest on Baghdad's main square.

GAZA CITY — The Israelis and the Palestinians agreed to a fresh 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza Sunday, accepting an Egyptian invitation to resume talks to end fighting that has killed more than 2,000 people.

The ceasefire deal, which was to come into effect at one minute past midnight (2101 GMT on Sunday), clinched days of frantic mediation to stem an aggression that resumed after an earlier truce collapsed on Friday.

"Israel has accepted the Egyptian proposal for a ceasefire," an official told AFP shortly after a Palestinian source confirmed accepting the initiative.

The Egyptian foreign ministry called for the ceasefire to begin at 00:01 local time (21:01 GMT Sunday) "given the necessity to protect innocent blood".

It called on both sides to use the lull to "reach a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire”.

Israel had bolted truce talks in Cairo on Friday when Hamas refused to extend an earlier ceasefire.

More than a month of Israeli aggression on Gaza has killed at least 1,939 Palestinians and 67 people on the Israeli side, most of them soldiers.

The UN says just under three quarters of those killed in Gaza were civilians, and around a third of the civilian victims were children.

On the ground, eight Palestinians were killed, including a woman and two 17 year olds, in a barrage of Israeli air strikes on Sunday and 10 bodies were pulled from the rubble east of Gaza City, local medics said.

Throughout the day, Israeli warplanes hit 41 targets, including a factory in Gaza City used to make cleaning products close to the main hotel where foreign journalists are based.

Fighters launched 35 rockets over the border, 23 of which struck southern Israel, and eight that were shot down, with the rest falling short inside Palestinian territory, the army said.

In Deir Al Balah, an angry crowd of young men bellowed slogans as they carried the bloodied body of one of the teenagers to its burial side.

“God loves martyrs! We will march on Jerusalem in our millions,” chanted mourners.

At the graveside, neighbours passed around pieces of shrapnel as he was laid to rest in a plot of land where several other freshly-dug graves laid open, as if prepared for further deaths.

Gaza plunged back into an abyss of violence after a 72-hour truce ended on Friday, with the Israeli military hitting more than 160 targets and killing at least 19 people, and Palestinian fighters launching 110 rockets of which 85 smashed into Israel.

Israel said it had been forced to close its Kerem Shalom crossing used to truck supplies into the southern Gaza Strip after it was struck twice by rocket fire.

“After continuous and intentional rocket fire at the Kerem Shalom crossing this morning and this afternoon, during which trucks carrying flammable materials to the Gaza Strip were almost hit, we took the exceptional decision to close the crossing in order to protect the lives of workers and traders,” a defence ministry statement said.

For days, Egyptian efforts to broker an end to more than a month of fighting led nowhere.

“Israel will not engage in negotiations under fire,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Cabinet on Sunday, warning the operation would not stop until there was a prolonged quiet.

In the West Bank, an 11-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by Israeli troops as he played outside his home in Al Fawwar Refugee Camp near the southern city of Hebron, relatives and medics said.

The Israeli army claimed troops had opened fire during a “violent riot” but said it had opened an investigation into the circumstances of the shooting.

Israel’s war on Gaza has triggered a series of almost daily protests across the West Bank, during which 16 Palestinians have been killed, the Ramallah-based health ministry said.

The resumption of fighting has put Netanyahu under increased pressure from hardliners to send ground troops back in to Gaza to topple Hamas, the de facto power in the battered Palestinian enclave.

“There is no doubt that the only thing left to do now is to overpower Hamas, clean out the territory and get out as quickly as possible,” said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said that if talks to secure a permanent ceasefire led nowhere, going back in to Gaza would be the only option.

“The moment the door closes and negotiations do not bear any fruit and we are faced with continued fire... there will apparently be no choice, and then we will go in,” he told public radio.

TRIPOLI — Heavy shelling resumed in the Libyan capital Tripoli on Sunday after three days of relative calm following more than a month of street fighting between rival armed factions battling for control of the city’s airport.

The North African OPEC oil producer is facing the worst violence since the 2011 war that toppled Muammar Qadhafi, with more than 200 people killed. Many Western embassies and international companies have evacuated staff members.

Southern Tripoli was covered by black plumes of smoke, with artillery and rockets hitting areas around the international airport, where two rival brigades of ex-rebels have established front lines.

There were no immediate reports of casualties from the new exchanges. But the health ministry said it cannot reach hospitals because of power failures and gasoline shortages in Tripoli.

“We have been trying to gather information and details, but it is really hard to reach doctors,” health ministry spokesman Ammar Mohammed said.

A United Nations delegation has been in Tripoli since Friday to try to broker a ceasefire between armed factions loyal to Islamist-allied Misrata brigades and their rivals allied to the western town of Zintan.

An official from the delegation, who declined to be identified, said on Saturday that UN envoys were optimistic.

“The mission has already met several key actors and is still fairly optimistic that a ceasefire can be obtained,” the official said.

Libya’s newly elected parliament has also called for an immediate ceasefire, but the main Islamist political party and its allies have opposed the fact that parliament has been meeting in the eastern town of Tobruk, which they described as unconstitutional.

“We recognise the parliament, but we don’t recognise its sessions in the town of Tobruk and all the decisions that come from there,” Ahmed Hadil, a spokesman of the Central Shield brigades, one of the militias fighting to control the airport, told reporters on Saturday.

Since the fall of Qadhafi, Libya’s government has been unable to control rival militias of heavily armed former rebels, who once fought against Qadhafi but now refuse to disarm and count on semi-official support from ministries or politicians.

Fighting since last month over the Tripoli airport involves two loose factions.

On one side are Zintanis, including some former Qadhafi forces, who present themselves as a bastion against Islamist fundamentalists and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Against them are brigades from the western port of Misrata, allied with Islamist political forces and other militias, who say they are fighting to clear out remnants of Qadhafi’s army.

RIYADH — Saudi Arabia’s specialised criminal court has sentenced four men to prison for travelling abroad to fight in Syria’s civil war, local and state media reported on Sunday.

King Abdullah decreed in February that citizens involved in fighting overseas faced up to 20 years in prison in a bid to prevent the radicalisation of young people who might then turn against their own government.

While the conservative Sunni Muslim kingdom has backed opposition groups battling President Bashar Assad, an ally of Riyadh’s main regional rival Shiite Iran, it also regards militant groups there as a threat to its own security.

“The accused were proven to have ... quit their obedience to the ruler by travelling abroad to fight,” the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

The men were sentenced to terms ranging between four months and two years and 10 months, it said, adding that their crimes included forgery of travel documents and money laundering.

The website of the daily Al Riyadh newspaper said two of the men had fought in Syria before becoming disillusioned with the conflict and surrendering to Saudi authorities.

The other two had travelled to Yemen with the intention of then going to Syria, it said. The sentences were lenient as the defendants had shown remorse and cooperated with authorities.

The kingdom has called on citizens fighting in Syria, Iraq and Yemen to return home, often describing them as “misled” in official statements. Saudi state media usually reserves its harshest criticism for militant groups or clerics who recruit young Saudis as fighters.

BEIRUT — Syrian regime air raids killed 12 people on Sunday and wounded 23, including a mother and a baby boy removed from her womb, according to a monitoring group and amateur video.

The video, broadcast by militants in the city of Raqa in northeastern Syria and whose authenticity could not be verified, shows a frail infant being resuscitated with a respiratory mask on his face and blood-soaked cotton by his side.

His little chest is seen responding to treatment as his bloodstained head is wrapped in gauze.

“This baby’s mother was wounded in the belly, and we had to remove him. He was hit in the head by shrapnel, and the doctors are trying to save him,” said a commentary on the video footage.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group also reported that the infant had been removed from his mother’s womb, and said both mother and child survived the ordeal.

It said 12 people — including five children, a woman and a teacher — were killed when regime warplanes bombarded parts of Raqa city which is held by Islamic State jihadist fighters.

Since the IS launched a lightning offensive in neighbouring Iraq two months ago, regime forces have been pounding positions of the jihadists who also control territory in eastern and northern Syria.

The group, which declared a “caliphate” straddling the two countries at the end of June, is seeking to extend the territory it controls.

IS fighters have spread terror in its strongholds such as Raqa, where it imposes its own extreme interpretation of Islam, and arrests people, beheading some and stoning others.

In the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, most of which it controls, the IS has seized three villages from the influential local Shuwaitat tribe.

Two weeks of fighting between the jihadists and tribesmen is reported to have killed dozens of people and led to an exodus of more than 5,000 civilians.

The more than three-year conflict in Syria, which the observatory says has killed more than 170,000 people, has become even more complex with the rise of jihadist groups battling both government forces and mainstream rebels.

TEHRAN — An Iranian passenger plane crashed Sunday moments after takeoff from Tehran, killing 39 people on board and narrowly avoiding many more deaths when it plummeted near a busy market.

The plane was headed to the eastern city of Tabas, the IRNA and Fars news agencies said, when it crashed at 9:18am (0448 GMT), after leaving Mehrabad Airport.

It triggered a fireball when it smashed into the capital’s Azadi neighbourhood, close to where hundreds of military families live, and only a few hundred metres from a row of shops.

Iran’s deputy transport minister, Ahmad Majidi, said the Antonov An-140 turboprop plane had 40 passengers, including six children, and eight crew on board.

The accident killed 39 people and injured nine, according to the latest official toll. A fire official initially said all on board had been killed.

The aircraft was operated by Sepahan Airlines, and a tail section bearing the company’s dolphin logo could be seen sticking out of the road as security forces cordoned off the crash site where firefighters had doused the flames.

Black smoke billowed from the mass of burnt out and twisted metal, with officials saying the plane hit a wall and trees.

“The scene was terrible, with the back of the plane in the middle of the street,” one witness said.

“But we were lucky because there was a market 500 metres away and a lot of people were there.”

Another witness told state television: “I was on my motorbike and I heard something behind me. I turned round and it was a plane, so I got on to the ground because it was so close.

“With other people, we ran to try to save the passengers but there were two or three loud explosions and a huge fire.”

Mehrabad airport, near central Tehran, is by far the country’s busiest domestic hub, serving routes to all major Iranian cities.

Most international passenger flights take off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, which is farther west of the capital.

Alireza Jahangirian, the head of Iran’s civil aviation authority, said: “The plane crashed in trees. There were no casualties on the ground.”

An investigation is under way, he added.

The Ukrainian-designed An-140 is intended for regional use, has a range of around 2,400 kilometres and can carry up to 52 people. Iranian airlines are one of the plane’s biggest users.

The Isna news agency reported that the plane in Sunday’s crash had been assembled under licence by an Iranian company in Isfahan, 450 kilometres south of Tehran.

Later Sunday, President Hassan Rouhani ordered the grounding of all domestically produced An-140s.

“The president has asked for a complete report from the transport ministry, and in the meantime has ordered a halt to all flights by this type of aircraft,” IRNA reported.

Iran had nine locally built Antonov An-140s before Sunday’s crash.

Iran has suffered several air crashes in recent years, blamed on ageing planes, poor maintenance and a shortage of new parts because of international sanctions.

Iranian airlines, including state-run operators, are short of finance and have seen business suffer because of banking restrictions imposed on the Islamic republic by the United States and Europe.

Iran’s last major air crash was in January 2011, when an Iran Air Boeing 727 shattered on impact while attempting an emergency landing in a snowstorm in the northwest, killing 77 people.

And in July 2009, a Russian-made jetliner crashed shortly after taking off from the capital, killing all 168 people on board.

ADEN — An Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Yemen said it killed 14 soldiers in an eastern province as revenge for an army offensive against its members, while a US drone attack killed three suspected militants in central Yemen on Saturday, an official said.

The Yemeni army has sent extra troops to the Wadi Hadramout region in northeastern Yemen to counter attempts by militant group Ansar Al Sharia to declare an Islamic emirate in the city of Seiyoun.

In the past week, Yemeni security forces have killed at least 25 suspected militants in clashes in Wadi Hadramout, including seven who were killed on Thursday when they tried to attack an army facility.

Residents and officials said people in the area found the bodies of the 14 soldiers riddled with bullets on a road near Seiyoun, three hours after they were abducted from a public bus.

The soldiers were on their way to Sanaa, on leave after serving in the area.

Ansar Al Sharia, in an Internet posting late on Friday, confirmed its militants had ambushed and killed the soldiers for taking part in military operations against the group.

“...The captive soldiers participated in the latest campaign against Sunni Muslims in Wadi Hadramout, and thus the mujahedeen decided to kill them as a punishment for their crimes,” the statement said.

The group posted pictures of the soldiers in civilian clothes surrounded by militants concealing their faces with traditional head dresses.

On Saturday, three suspected Al Qaeda militants in the central province of Maareb were killed in a US drone, a local official told Reuters.

“The air raid was conducted by a US drone plane which targeted a house in the Maareb province, killing three people inside who are suspected to be members of Al Qaeda,” he said.

The United States considers Al Qaeda in Yemen one of the most dangerous wings of the militant network founded by Osama Bin Laden. In recent years it has made several attempts to carry out international attacks.

To counter the group, Washington lends financial and logistical support to the Yemen’s government and military, including regular drone strikes.

Stability in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Arab world, is of international concern because it borders major international shipping lanes and lies next to Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter.

Taking advantage of a power vacuum that arose during a 2011 uprising against the then- president Ali Abdullah Saleh, militants took over several southern towns and districts but were later repelled by a US backed military offensive.

In recent months, militants have been trying to consolidate their control over remote and volatile parts of eastern Yemen such as Wadi Hadramout.

In Seiyoun, the group had been distributing leaflets suggesting they wanted to establish an Islamic emirate and ordered women not to go out without a male guardian.

WASHINGTON — International airlines steered clear of Iraq on Friday after Washington banned American air carriers from Iraqi skies in the immediate wake of US air strikes on Islamist fighters.

Flights to and from the Gulf and beyond, which typically would have taken airways through Iraq, favoured parallel routes via Iran instead, according to real-time flight tracking websites.

Flightradar24.com indicated a long stream of airliners Friday evening Middle East time, flying single file through western Iranian — and virtually none over Iraq, in a complete reversal from a month ago.

“We’re still seeing some non-US carriers that are overflying Iraq,” notably regional and domestic ones, added Daniel Baker of US-based FlightAware.com.

“By and large, though, we are seeing a lot of people going further to the north” and over the Turkish-Iran border, avoiding Iraq as well as war-torn Syria, he told AFP.

The Federal Aviation Administration in Washington (FAA) banned all US civilian flights over Iraq just hours after American warplanes bombed positions held by Islamic State insurgents, who have occupied swathes of northern Iraq.

British Airways declared it would no longer overfly Iraq, as did Lufthansa and its subsidiaries Austrian Airlines and Swiss — joining Air France, Emirates, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, which had quietly opted to do so over the past two weeks.

In a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM), the FAA cited the “potentially hazardous situation created by the armed conflict” between Islamic State militants and Iraqi security forces “and their allies” as the reason for the indefinite ban.

The ban extends to “all US air carriers and commercial operators”, as well as US-licensed pilots unless they are flying aircraft registered in the United States for a foreign operator.

Chiefly affected by the FAA’s NOTAM are Delta and United Airlines, which both serve Gulf destinations from the United States — although flight tracking websites indicated Delta was already flying detours around Iraq.

“Very, very few flights from the United States fly over Iraq in the first place,” FlightAware’s Baker said.

‘Exercise caution’ 

However, the air lanes over northern and eastern Iraq have typically been favoured by international carriers for long-haul flights between Europe, the Middle East and Asia, despite many years of turmoil on the ground.

In a NOTAM dated July 22, the Iraq Civil Aviation Authority urged all pilots to “exercise caution... due to an increase of military operations from the ground to 23,500 feet [7,162 metres].”

And last week the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) told EU carriers to “exercise caution” over Iraq, saying “a potentially hazardous situation may exist” due to armed conflict.

Eurocontrol, the EU air traffic control service, reposted the FAA’s NOTAM on its website Friday, without announcing any restrictions of its own.

Jitters about flights over war zones escalated after the July 17 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur above an area of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists.

All 298 passengers and crew were killed after the Boeing 777 was knocked out of the sky by a ground-to-air missile, allegedly by rebels targeting a Ukrainian military aircraft.

On the heels of Friday’s FAA announcement, British Airways said it was “temporarily suspending our flights over Iraq” and using alternative routes to serve such Gulf points as Doha and Dubai.

Turkish Airlines, one of the key foreign carriers flying to Iraq, meanwhile said it had halted flights to Erbil “for security reasons until further notice”, following a similar announcement Thursday by Etihad Airways.

Last month, the FAA prohibited US airlines from overflying eastern Ukraine in the wake of the Malaysian Airlines tragedy, expanding a ban it had previously limited to Crimea.

It also briefly barred US air carriers from Tel Aviv after a Hamas rocket fell near the Israeli city’s Ben Gurion International Airport in the midst of the Gaza crisis.