Region

GAZA CITY — Cradling his baby daughter, Saeed Masri took flight Friday from renewed Israeli bombardment of Gaza with little faith that even a UN facility can protect his family.

Three hours after a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas ended, a missile hit the roof of a building opposite the apartment in Jabaliya where he was staying with relatives after his own neighbourhood was shelled.

“We were in Beit Hanoun and were there during the war and the shelling, so after that I came to stay here with my cousins,” Masri said as he trudged down the street with his family in tow.

It was only a small rocket fired by a drone, intended as a warning for civilians to leave, residents said.

It shattered the roof of the building and left no casualties, but an ambulance was parked around the corner in case it was followed by more attacks.

Masri heeded the message immediately, packing some food into plastic bags, gathering his wife and five children and setting off down the street to find safety.

His eyes darted as he spoke, looking back at the building just hit by the strike, his daughter silent in his arms and with the four other children milling around his legs.

He planned to take shelter in a UN-run school to keep his family safe, but he had little hope it would guarantee protection.

“The schools aren’t safe either, they hit the schools,” he said.

At least 153 schools in Gaza, including 90 run by the UN, have been damaged by Israeli air strikes or shelling during the conflict, the UN children’s fund UNICEF says.

Three deadly strikes on UN schools in the Gaza Strip since Israel launched its assault on the territory on July 8 stirred international fury.

“Why is the whole world sleeping, why?” asked Masri quietly. “Children and women are being targeted, and the world is sleeping.”

Still scared

As talks in Cairo aimed at reaching a lasting truce failed to achieve concrete results, Palestinian fighters fired two rockets at southern Israel before the 72-hour ceasefire ended at 0500 GMT.

Dozens more rocket attacks followed.

Israel retaliated, saying it was targeting terror sites in the coastal enclave where the Islamist group Hamas is the de facto ruler.

Palestinian emergency services said one of the strikes killed a 10-year-old boy.

The rocket fire prompted Gazans who had gone home during the ceasefire to return to the hospitals and schools to which some 200,000 people had fled to before the three-day reprieve.

In Beit Hanoun, a steady stream of families trudged along the road to a school.

Others riding donkey carts and cars packed with mattresses and clothes rattled past, just half an hour after the ceasefire ended.

Um Abdullah, 50, who did not give her real name, said she was reluctantly returning to the school she and her family had sheltered in.

“We were waiting for a second truce, but it did not come,” she sighed. “We waited until the last minute, until 8:00am, but it did not come.”

She had only been able to pack a small bag of clothes and another with some flat bread and tomatoes before fleeing again.

She would now stay in the school until a lasting truce was reached.

In the Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City, families trickled back to another UN-run school after receiving news of the failed truce.

Hundreds of refugees from some of the worst-damaged areas have sheltered in the classrooms overlooking a central courtyard.

Laundry was hanging from the rooms overlooking the courtyard, where there was a strong smell of sweat and waste.

In the courtyard, Abdullah Abdullah, 33, had just arrived back after spending the truce at home.

Like Masri, Abdullah was worried for his wife and children.

“I’m afraid because the schools were targeted, because young people died, women and children,” he said.

“We’re all scared, I’m scared, my children are scared, my wife is scared.”

BEIRUT — Lebanon’s leading Sunni politician Saad Hariri returned from self-imposed exile Friday on a trip to bolster the country’s army after clashes with jihadists in the latest spillover from Syria’s war.

Hariri’s visit, his first since 2011, comes after open conflict between the army and jihadists on the border with Syria that has killed 17 troops and left 19 kidnapped.

Hours after his arrival, a military source said troops had begun entering the restive town of Arsal for the first time since the fighting erupted a week ago.

Hariri’s trip follows his announcement that Saudi Arabia, one of his chief allies, would give $1 billion to shore up the army and security forces against jihadists.

His return to Lebanon also underscores the seriousness of the clashes in the Arsal region in eastern Lebanon on the Syrian border.

Fighting that began there on August 1 has eased, and a military source said Friday night that the army has “started to enter” Arsal, setting up a checkpoint and advancing slowly.

But earlier, residents who tried to return to their homes were fired on by snipers and it remained unclear whether gunmen had withdrawn from the town.

Sunni clerics have mediated a truce under which the militants agreed to return to Syria, and talks are continuing over the release of 17 policemen and 19 soldiers being held hostage.

The violence in Arsal is the worst in the border region since the Syrian war began in March 2011.

Despite Beirut’s effort to insulate itself from the war next door, the fighting has spilled over and stoked existing political and sectarian tensions in Lebanon.

Much of Lebanon’s Sunni community, including Hariri, supports the Sunni-dominated uprising against President Bashar Assad.

But many Lebanese Shiites support Assad, and the powerful Shiite Hizbollah movement has sent fighters to bolster his troops against the uprising.

Hariri, 44, has voiced unconditional support for Lebanon’s army, but some of his constituents accuse the army of allowing Hizbollah free rein to fight in Syria and failing to protect Sunnis.

“Our choice is to support the state and to help the army and the security forces, even if some mistakes have been made,” he said in a statement Friday evening, after meeting members of his Future movement.

“If Hizbollah acts in a way that harms Lebanon, it doesn’t mean similarly mistakes should be made in response, or that the backbone of the state and its prestige should be broken,” he added.

Hizbollah is Hariri’s chief political rival, with several of its members accused of assassinating his father, former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005.

The party’s representatives also brought down Saad Hariri’s government in 2011 by resigning, after which he went into exile.

His departure has left the Sunni community with little leadership on the ground, even as the Syrian conflict has stoked tensions.

Many in Lebanon, including Hariri and his supporters, accuse Hizbollah of embroiling the country in Syria’s war by fighting alongside Assad.

But Hizbollah says it is fighting next door to prevent the spread of extremist Islamists into Lebanon.

$1 billion in Saudi aid 

The fighting in Arsal erupted last Saturday afternoon, when gunmen attacked soldiers after the arrest of a Syrian man accused of belonging to Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Al Nusra Front.

It prompted army chief General Jean Kahwaji to urge France to speed up delivery of weapons being bought under a $3 billion deal financed by Saudi Arabia.

On Wednesday, Hariri announced the new $1 billion in Saudi aid, and he said Friday he was working with the government and military on how best to disperse the money.

Analysts said Hariri’s trip was intended to rally the Sunni community around the army and bolster his standing in Lebanon.

“Hariri’s return can be seen as an attempt at unifying the Sunni community both around Lebanese state institutions, particularly the army, as well as around Saudi Arabia, which is now championing itself as a major counterterrorism force in the region,” said Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre.

“Such a rallying of Sunnis would have a stabilising effect on the country and detach the Sunni community from being attracted to the extremism presented by groups” such as the Islamic State, she said.

Khatib added that Hariri was also “striving to regain a central political standing in Lebanon as the country looks forward to holding parliamentary and presidential elections”.

BEIRUT — Fighters identified as Islamists crossed into Lebanon from Syria on Saturday, triggering an exchange of fire with Lebanese villagers who forced them back across the border, Lebanese security sources and a villager said.

The gun battle near the village of Kfar Qouq followed a battle between gunmen and Syrian security forces on the other side of frontier, the sources said. It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties.

Kfar Qouq is near the Bekaa Valley town of Rashaya and some 100km south of the border town of Arsal that was seized last Saturday by Islamists who crossed from Syria. That incursion was the most serious spillover yet of Syria’s three-year-long civil war into Lebanon.

Dozens of people were killed in five days of fighting between the army and the militants who included Islamists affiliated to the Islamic State, which has seized territory in Syria and Iraq.

The militants pulled out of Arsal to the mountainous border zone on Thursday, taking with them 19 captive soldiers. Militant sources told Reuters on Friday they sought to exchange them for Islamists held in Lebanese jails.

CAIRO — An Egyptian court on Saturday dissolved the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political wing of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, dealing a crippling blow in the campaign to crush Egypt’s oldest Islamist movement.

A court banned the Muslim Brotherhood itself in September, but that ruling did not mention its political wing, leaving open the possibility it could be allowed to run in parliamentary elections, due late this year.

Saturday’s supreme administrative court ruling excludes the Brotherhood from formal participation in electoral politics, potentially forcing the movement underground, particularly as it has lost the sympathy of large swathes of the public.

The court’s ruling called for the FJP to be dissolved and its assets seized by the state. Its decision is final and cannot be appealed, a judicial source said.

The FJP’s lawyer called the ruling political and said it was unconstitutional to deprive the defence of the right to appeal.

“The legal reasons given do not justify this ruling but this is a political decision to get rid, not just of the Freedom and Justice Party, but of all the parties that were established after the revolution of January 25, 2011,” lawyer Mahmoud Abou Al Aynayn told Reuters.

“I expect other parties to be dissolved too.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, once Egypt’s oldest, best organised and most successful political movement, has seen hundreds of its members killed and thousands detained since then-army chief Abdel Fattah Al Sisi overthrew elected president and Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi 13 months ago, following weeks of protest.

Morsi, who ruled for a year, and other Brotherhood officials were rounded up in the wake of his ousting and hundreds have been sentenced to death in mass court rulings that have drawn criticism from Western governments and human rights groups.

Sisi, who went on to win a presidential election in May, vowed during his campaign the Brotherhood would cease to exist under his rule.

Clampdown

The FJP was established in June 2011, in the aftermath of the uprising that removed Hosni Mubarak from power after 30 years and inspired hopes for more pluralistic politics in Egypt.

It went on to win parliamentary and presidential elections, but many Egyptians became disillusioned with Morsi after he gave himself sweeping powers and mismanaged the economy, taking to the streets in protest and prompting the army move against him.

But the leading lights of the 2011 uprising, many of them secular youth activists, have also found themselves on the wrong side of the new political leadership, many of them receiving long sentences for breaching a new anti-protest law by taking part in small and peaceful gatherings.

The government accuses the Brotherhood of inciting violence and terrorism. Egypt’s state and private media now portray the Brotherhood as a terrorist group and an enemy of the state.

GAZA CITY — Israeli warplanes pounded targets in Gaza Saturday, a day after killing at least five Palestinians, and fighters fired dozens of rockets into Israel after attempts to extend a three-day truce stalled.

The month-long conflict flared once again after mediators tried but failed to extend a ceasefire that expired at 0500 GMT Friday as Palestinian fighters shattered the quiet with pre-dawn rocket attacks.

But the United States said it still hoped that a new ceasefire could be in place soon.

“Our hope is that the parties will agree to an extension of the ceasefire in the coming hours,” State Department spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters.

Egypt, which is mediating between Israelis and Palestinians, insisted negotiations were making progress and urged a new truce but Israel recalled its delegation and warned it would not negotiate under fire.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military to retaliate “forcefully” and blamed the Islamist movement Hamas for breaching the ceasefire.

Palestinian fighters fired 40 rockets into Israel, injuring one civilian and a soldier, the army said.

“In response, we struck 51 terror sites and targeted three terrorists in Gaza,” a military statement said, without elaborating.

The violence ended the 72-hour lull in fighting. 

Israel’s aggression on Gaza has killed at least 1,898 Palestinians. The United Nations says at least 1,354 of the Palestinians killed since July 8 were civilians, including 447 children.

Israel says some 67 Israelis were killed, almost all soldiers.

In Gaza, fighting died down in the early hours of Saturday but Israel carried out a number of attacks, mainly on areas from which the population has fled, an AFP correspondent said.

Rocket fire on Israel stopped Friday at 1800 GMT, according to the Israeli army.

Five Palestinians were killed and at least 31 others wounded in Friday’s air strikes, said Ashraf Al Qudra, Gaza’s emergency services spokesperson. Among the dead was a 10-year-old boy.

Some Palestinian families who had returned home trickled back to shelter in UN-run schools when Israeli air strikes resumed.

In Al Tuffah district of Gaza City, hundreds of refugees were seen living in classrooms, laundry hanging off balconies and a scrum of people queuing for UN food handouts.

“Of course we’re all scared, I’m scared, my children are scared, my wife is scared,” Abdullah Abdullah, 33, told AFP at the school.

In southern Israel, the army banned gatherings larger than 500 people within 40 kilometres of Gaza and said kindergarten and summer camps could only operate if there was a bomb shelter nearby.

In Gaza, the interior ministry said Israeli warplanes struck targets in Jabaliya in the north, Gaza City and in the centre of the Palestinian enclave.

Israel said it was targeting “terror sites”.

It first launched an air campaign on July 8, followed nine days later by a ground offensive designed to destroy Hamas’ arsenal of rockets and its network of attack tunnels stretching into Israel.

“We will continue to strike Hamas, its infrastructure, its operatives and restore security for the state of Israel,” said army spokesperson Lt. Col. Peter Lerner.

Meanwhile, violent protests against Israel’s offensive erupted Friday across the occupied West Bank, where two Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in clashes with Israeli forces, Palestinian medical officials told AFP.

They said troops shot dead Mohammed Qatri, 19, near the Israeli settlement of Psagot, between occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Nader Edriss, 22, died Saturday morning in a hospital from wounds sustained during a protest in Hebron which also left dozens of others wounded, one seriously, by rubber bullets and live fire.

The army claimed that Qatri was one of a group that hurled rocks at soldiers and approached the settlement fence, ignoring orders to halt.

Elsewhere, Egypt called for an immediate return of the ceasefire and said progress had been made in the negotiations.

The head of a Palestinian delegation in Cairo said they were committed to achieving a truce.

“We told the Egyptians [mediators] we are sitting here to achieve a final agreement that restores the rights” of Palestinians, Azzam Al Ahmed told reporters.

Hamas and the Islamic Jihad group had rejected another 72-hour truce, accusing Israel of stalling.

“There had been an agreement on the vast majority of matters that are important to the Palestinian people, but some limited points remained undecided, a matter that should have led to an acceptance to renew the ceasefire,” the Egyptian foreign ministry said.

Hamas and Palestine Liberation Organisation officials laid out a number of demands, including the lifting of Israel’s eight-year blockade and the building of a sea port.

They also want Israel to free 125 key prisoners.

Despite withdrawing all its troops from Gaza by the time the truce began on Tuesday, Israel has retained forces along the border.

BAGHDAD — President Barack Obama said on Saturday US air strikes had destroyed arms that Islamic State militants could have used against Iraqi Kurds, but warned there was no quick fix to a crisis that threatens to tear Iraq apart.

Speaking the day after US warplanes hit militants in Iraq, Obama said it would take more than bombs to restore stability, and criticised Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s Shiite-led government for failing to empower Sunnis.

“I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks. This is going to take some time,” Obama told a news conference in Washington.

Islamic State has captured wide swathes of northern Iraq since June, executing non-Sunni Muslim captives, displacing tens of thousands of people and drawing the first US air strikes in the region since Washington withdrew troops in 2011.

After routing Kurdish forces this week, the militants are just 30 minutes’ drive from Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital, which up to now has been spared the sectarian bloodshed that has scarred other parts of Iraq for a decade.

The US president said Washington would continue to provide military assistance and advice to Baghdad and Kurdish forces, but stressed repeatedly the importance of Iraq, which is a major oil exporter, forming its own inclusive government.

Maliki has been widely criticised for authoritarian and sectarian policies that have alienated Sunnis and prompted some to support the insurgency.

“I think this a wake-up call for a lot of Iraqis inside of Baghdad recognising that we’re going to have to rethink how we do business if we’re going to hold our country together,” Obama said, before departing on a two-week vacation.

Employees of foreign oil firms in Erbil have been leaving, and Kurds have snapped up AK-47 assault rifles in arms markets for fear of imminent attack, although these had been ineffective against the superior firepower of the Islamic State fighters.

Given the Islamic State threat, a source in the Kurdistan Regional Government said it had received extra supplies of heavy weaponry from the Baghdad federal government “and other governments” in the past few days, but declined to elaborate.

In their latest advance through northern Iraq, the Islamic State seized a fifth oil field, several towns and Iraq’s biggest dam, sending tens of thousands fleeing for their lives.

An engineer at the Mosul dam told Reuters that Islamic State fighters had brought in engineers to repair an emergency power line to the city, Iraq’s biggest in the north, that had been cut off four days ago, causing power outages and water shortages.

“They are gathering people to work at the dam,” he said.

A dam administrator said militants were putting up the trademark Islamic State black flags and patrolling with flatbed trucks mounted with machine guns to protect the facility they seized from Kurdish forces earlier this week.

Relief supplies

The Islamic State, comprised mainly of Arabs and foreign fighters who want to reshape the map of the Middle East, pose the biggest threat to Iraq since Saddam Hussein was toppled by a US-led invasion in 2003.

The Sunni militants, who have beheaded and crucified captives in their drive to eradicate unbelievers, first arrived in northern Iraq in June from Syria where they have captured wide tracts of territory in that country’s civil war.

Almost unopposed by US-trained Iraqi government forces who fled by the thousands, the insurgents swept through the region and have threatened to march on Baghdad with Iraqi military tanks, armoured personnel carriers and machine guns they seized.

The US Defence Department said two F/A-18 warplanes from an aircraft carrier in the Gulf had dropped laser-guided 500-pound bombs on Islamic State artillery batteries. Other air strikes targeted mortar positions and an Islamic State convoy.

Obama has said the action was needed to halt the Islamist advance, protect Americans in the region as well as hundreds of thousands of Christians and members of other religious minorities at risk.

US military aircraft dropped relief supplies to members of the ancient Yazidi sect, tens of thousands of whom have collected on a desert mountaintop seeking shelter from insurgents who had ordered them to convert to Islam or die.

Islamic State militants have threatened to kill more than 300 Yazidi families in the villages of Koja, Hatimiya and Qaboshi unless they change religion, witnesses and a Yazidi lawmaker told Reuters on Saturday.

British aircraft would also drop humanitarian supplies “imminently” to help the Yazidi, said Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond. “We expect that to go on for the foreseeable future, dropping supplies to people, in particular to the people who are trapped on the mountain Sinjar,” he told the BBC in London.

“We are more widely looking at how to support this group of people and get them off that mountain.”

The Islamic State’s campaign has returned Iraq to levels of violence not seen since a civil war peaked in 2006-2007 during the US occupation.

The territorial gains of Islamic State, who also control a third of Syria and have fought this past week inside Lebanon, has unnerved the Middle East and threatens to shatter Iraq, a country split between mostly Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

Attention has focused on the plight of Yazidis, Christians and other minority groups in northern Iraq, one of the most demographically diverse parts of the Middle East for centuries.

The semi-autonomous Kurdish region has until now been the only part of Iraq to survive the past decade of civil war without a serious security threat.

Its vaunted “peshmerga” fighters — those who “confront death” — also controlled wide stretches of territory outside the autonomous zone, which served as sanctuary for fleeing Christians and other minorities when Islamic State fighters stormed into the region last month.

But the past week saw the peshmerga crumble in the face of Islamic State fighters, who have heavy weapons seized from fleeing Iraqi troops and are flush with cash looted from banks.

GAZA (Reuters) - Israel launched air strikes across the Gaza Strip on Friday in response to Palestinian rockets fired after Egyptian-mediated talks failed to extend a 72-hour truce in the month-long war.

As rocket-warning sirens sounded in southern Israel, the military said Hamas had fired at least 18 rockets from Gaza and Israel's "Iron Dome" interceptor system brought down two. Gaza fighters said they had fired 10 rockets on Friday.

In the first casualties since hostilities resumed on Friday, Palestinian medical officials said a 10-year-old boy was killed in an Israeli strike near a mosque in Gaza City. In Israel, police said two people were injured by mortar fire from Gaza.

After a huge explosion in Gaza City, apparently from an air raid, a military spokesman said Israel had responded to Hamas rocket fire by launching air strikes at "terror sites" across the Gaza Strip.

"We will continue to strike Hamas, its infrastructure, its operatives, and restore security for the State of Israel," Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner said in a statement.

An Israeli government official said Israel would not negotiate with Palestinians about renewing the truce in Gaza as long as fighters continued to launch rockets.

Heavy civilian casualties and destruction during Israel's campaign against fighters in packed residential areas of the Gaza Strip have raised international alarm over the past month, but efforts to extend a ceasefire at talks in Cairo failed.

Israel had earlier said it was ready to agree to an extension as Egyptian go-betweens pursued negotiations with Israeli and Palestinian delegates.

Hamas said Palestinian factions had not agreed to extend the truce, but would continue negotiations in Cairo.

An Islamic Jihad official added: "Discussions in Cairo have not finished and we will pursue our efforts to stop the aggression and achieve the just demands of our people."

The Palestinians had wanted Israel to agree in principle to demands which include a lifting of the blockade on the Gaza Strip, the release of prisoners and the opening of a sea port.

The armed wing of Hamas released a statement late on Thursday warning Palestinian negotiators not to agree to an extension unless Israel offered concessions.

Naval blockade

Israel has shown little interest in easing its naval blockade of Gaza and controls on overland traffic and airspace, suspecting Hamas could restock with weapons from abroad.

Israel's Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, speaking on Army Radio, raised the prospect of Israel relaunching a ground operation it halted on Tuesday and "taking control of the Gaza Strip in order to topple the Hamas regime".

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown little inclination to do so.

In Gaza, some families who had returned to their homes in the northern town of Beit Hanoun during the ceasefire gathered their belongings and headed back to the United Nations shelters where they had sought refuge over the past few weeks.

Beit Hanoun resident Yamen Mahmoud, a 35-year-old father of four, said: "Today I am fleeing again, back to displacement. I am not against resistance but we need to know what to do. Is it war or peace?"

Gaza officials say the war has killed 1,876 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Hamas said on Thursday it had executed an unspecified number of Palestinians as Israeli spies.

Israel says 64 of its soldiers and three civilians have died in the fighting that began on July 8, after a surge in Palestinian rocket salvoes into Israel.

It expanded its air and naval bombardment of the Gaza Strip into a ground offensive on July 17, and pulled its infantry and armor out of the enclave on Tuesday after saying it had destroyed more than 30 infiltration tunnels dug by fighters.

Hamas's refusal to extend the ceasefire could further alienate Egypt, whose government has been hostile to the group and which ultimately controls Gaza's main gateway to the world, the Rafah border crossing.

The announcement that the truce would not be extended came a few minutes after it expired at 0500 GMT (1 a.m. EDT) after lengthy talks that continued in Cairo through the night.

MANAMA — Bahrain has accused wealthier neighbour Qatar of harming its national security by “luring” some nationals to take Qatari citizenship, state news agency BNA said, a charge that could widen a rift among Gulf Arab countries.

Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recalled their ambassadors from Doha in March, accusing Qatar of failing to honour an accord not to interfere in each others’ internal affairs. The countries are all members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), along with Kuwait and Oman.

Efforts to patch up the rift, largely centred around Qatar’s backing for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement which the other countries deeply oppose, have so far failed.

BNA quoted the interior ministry’s undersecretary for nationality, passports and residence affairs, Sheikh Rashid Bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, as saying Qatar had “targeted specific families and singled out a particular category of people” with no consideration to Bahraini laws.

“The naturalisation of Bahrainis would affect Bahrain’s national security and vital interests negatively,” the agency said on its English website late on Wednesday, quoting the official.

Sheikh Rashid gave no details on who was being targeted for naturalisation or how many had been granted Qatari citizenship.

Bahrain is acutely sensitive to changes in its demographic balance between Shiite Muslims and Sunnis.

The Sunni-ruled kingdom has a Shiite majority and an ongoing conflict between the government and predominantly Shiite protesters calling for more democracy has strong sectarian elements.

There was no immediate comment from Qatar on the accusation, but a Gulf source said Bahrain’s complaint was linked to requests for naturalisation by some Bahraini families with tribal links to Qatar.

These requests are still under consideration, the source said, and the applicants had not yet met the requirement that include residing in the country for five years before being granted citizenship.

The source speculated that Bahrain may be concerned because such moves could affect its demographic balance.

“The problem with Bahrain is keeping a Sunni-Shiite balance and that’s why this issue is very sensitive for them,” the source told Reuters.

Bahraini Shiites have long accused their government of naturalising Sunnis from abroad so that they would eventually outnumber Shiites in the small Gulf kingdom.

Bahrain, home of the US Fifth Fleet, still sees regular violence more than three years after security forces quelled pro-democracy protests that erupted on the island during the Arab Spring.

Bahrain’s opposition has been largely decimated by arrests and prosecutions, and some young men have increasingly turned violent, targeting police and security forces with homemade bombs. Many are in jail and some are on trial on charges related to attacking security forces.

KUWAIT CITY — Kuwait said Thursday it was committed to fighting terrorism and its funding after the United States sanctioned three Kuwaitis accused of providing money, fighters and weapons to extremist groups.

“Kuwait is committed to fighting terrorism and its funding,” its ambassador to Washington Sheikh Salem Abdullah Al Jaber Al Sabah said.

“Kuwait has passed legislation to fight terror and its financing and has established the executive tools to implement it,” the ambassador told the official KUNA news agency.

“The state of Kuwait continues to cooperate with the United States and the international community in combatting this dangerous phenomenon,” he said.

The United States on Wednesday imposed sanctions on Shafi Al Ajmi and Hajjaj Al Ajmi, accusing them of raising money for Al Nusra front, a jihadist group fighting in Syria.

Both men are said to be Kuwaiti.

A third man, Abdulrahman Al Anizi, whose nationality was not disclosed, is accused of supporting the so-called Islamic State jihadist group, which launched a devastating offensive in northwestern Iraq on June 9.

KUNA said that all three men are Kuwaitis.

The ambassador said he will follow up on Washington’s decision with the US State Department.

The two Ajmis are very popular figures in Kuwait for championing campaigns to raise funds for the “Syrian and Palestinian peoples”, according to advertisements on social networks, especially Twitter.

Their campaigns have been sponsored by leading Kuwaiti clerics.

But the two have expressed clear views against the Islamic State, accusing it of having links with the Syrian government, Iran and even the United States.

Following the US decision, the Twitter accounts of the two Ajmis, who together had around 800,000 followers, were suspended. They could not be reached for comment.

Anizi did not have an account on Twitter.

Under the order issued by the US Treasury, any assets the men hold in the United States are to be frozen and American citizens and residents are “generally prohibited” from doing business with them.

The latest US terrorism report on the country noted “increased reports of Kuwait-based private individuals funnelling charitable donations and other funds to violent extremist groups outside the country”.

On Tuesday, Social Affairs and Labour Minister Hind Al Sabeeh, announced tighter transparency rules to “correct the course” of charities gathering and distributing private donations.

The Islamic affairs ministry announced on the same day it had suspended all types of cash fundraising inside Kuwait’s mosques, including collections “for the Syrian people”.

TRIPOLI — Clashes in Libya spread from Tripoli to the western town of Zawiya near Tunisia’s border, where a large oil port is located, killing four people over the last two days, local town council officials said on Thursday.

Foreign governments have mostly closed their embassies and evacuated staff after three weeks of clashes turned Libya’s two main cities — Tripoli and Benghazi — into warzones in the worst fighting since the NATO-backed war against Muammar Qadhafi.

Three years after Qadhafi’s fall, Libya’s government has been unable to tame rival brigades of former rebel fighters who have allied themselves with competing political factions in a struggle over post-war spoils.

The fighting in Zawiya is part of a broader struggle between two loose confederations of former rebels and their political allies whose rivalries have exploded into street battles that have killed more than 200 people in the past three weeks.

Brigades allied to the town of Zintan — based in the city some 130km southwest of Tripoli — and their anti-Islamist Qaaqaa and Al-Sawaiq units are battling Islamist-leaning Libya Shield brigades loyal to the central, coastal town of Misrata who say they are fighting former Qadhafi allies.

“Four people were killed and nine others were wounded when Warshafana militias [from Zintan] allied with Qaaqaa and Al-Sawaiq brigades attacked Libyan Western Shields,” Zawiya council’s president Abdelkarim Salem Al Beh said.

“Libyan Shields have been protecting the main coastal road to the Tunisian borders,” he said.

Another local security official confirmed clashes between fighters loyal to Warshafana against the Libya Shield brigades.

But Zawiya’s port, a major terminal that is fed by the El Sharara oilfield, was safe, its managing director said.

“The clashes are around 20 kilometres from the port. The port is operating normally, and at least one tanker leaves everyday exporting oil,” Youssef Hamza, managing director of Zawiya port told Reuters.

Zawiya port is connected to El Sharara in the southern desert and its pipelines started operating a few months ago after months of blockades by armed protesters.

“All fuel depots for domestic consumption and for exports are full, and all tankers load once they arrive,” Hamza said.

Libya’s oil output dropped to about 450,000 barrels per day (bpd) from 500,000 bpd last week, but a spokesman for the state-run National Oil Corporation said oilfields were still secure despite clashes in the capital Tripoli.

Libya’s oil infrastructure has been targeted repeatedly since 2011 by armed groups, tribes and protesters who have taken over fields, blockaded ports or switched off pipelines.

On Thursday Tripoli was quieter for days after weeks of clashes as Misrata brigades try to oust Zintan fighters from Tripoli Airport, which they have held since Gaddafi’s overthrow.

Sporadic gunfire persists in the eastern city of Benghazi, where the self-declared Revolutionaries Shura Council, an alliance including former rebels and militants from the Al Qaeda-linked Ansar Al Sharia, has been fighting regular forces.

The fighting is also shifting to the political arena.

The new House of Representatives, elected in June, on Wednesday called for an immediate ceasefire under United Nations supervision. But Libya’s Islamist Justice and Construction Party, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, has rejected the House of Representatives sessions held in the eastern town of Tobruk, away from the fighting.

Already some Islamist-leaning lawmakers and former parliamentary deputies allied with the Misrata brigades involved in Tripoli clashes have rejected the new parliament as unconstitutional because it held sessions in Tobruk.

“We urge lawmakers to reconvene again to salvage the country’s transition to democracy and hold their first meeting in the city of Benghazi,” a party statement said on Thursday.