Region

GAZA CITY  — The sound of a blast cut through the air on Gaza’s beach, drawing people out of seafront buildings to see a crowd of terrified children sprinting along the sand.

They screamed as they ran, smoke rising behind them from an Israeli strike.

Panicked onlookers shouted at them to run away from the scene, and towards the safety of a hotel.

And then another blast hit the site, there was an orange glow and more smoke.

A hut used by Palestinian fishermen was set ablaze by the strike.

The children continued to run, but some of them were left behind. Four of them were killed.

Afterwards, emergency services spokesman Ashraf Al Qudra gave names of the four, all cousins: Ahed Atef Bakr, aged 10, Zakaria Ahed Bakr, also 10. Mohamed Ramez Bakr, nine and Ismail Mohamed Bakr, 11.

The other children, some crying and others bleeding, ran into a hotel, where staff and journalists scrambled to help them.

Thirteen-year-old Hamed Bakr had shrapnel in his chest and was crying, “It hurts, my chest hurts”.

Those present worked to clean and dress his wounds and those of two other injured children while ambulances were called.

It was unclear if Wednesday’s strikes were the result of naval shelling, which frequently hits part of the Gaza coastline, or from Israeli warplanes.

 ‘Tragic outcome’ 

Several hours after the strikes, the Israeli military in a statement described the deaths as “tragic” and said it was investigating the incident.

“Based on preliminary results the target of this strike was Hamas terrorist operatives,” the statement said.

“The reported civilian casualties from this strike are a tragic outcome.”

At least 220 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in the nine days since the start of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas running the coastal strip.

Fighters in Gaza have fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, killing one.

The four bodies of the children were later taken to Abu Hasira mosque, near where the boys had died.

The boys were laid out, wrapped in the yellow flags of the Fateh Party — the Palestinian rival to the Hamas movement — in front of mourners.

“We come from God and to God we shall return,” the imam overseeing the funeral prayers said.

Relative Khamis Bakr, 47, shook with anger as he spoke.

“They were playing on the beach, they’d gone there to get away from Beach Camp because there was a lot of shelling there,” he said.

“They walked right into their deaths.”

Zakaria’s grandfather pushed through the mourners to the four small bodies and kneeled down, apparently in shock.

“The children were just playing, they had told one of their mothers that they were going to the beach,” he said.

“We didn’t know anything had happened, and then we heard on the radio that there had been a strike and people from the Bakr family had been killed.

“And then I knew that the children were gone.”

TRIPOLI/BENGHAZI, Libya — Several shells hit the terminal of Libya’s main airport on Thursday as rival militias fought in Tripoli for a fifth day, and gunmen assassinated a female politician in the east.

In another sign of growing turmoil, air controllers halted work in Tripoli, shutting off much of the oil-producing country from international traffic.

Tripoli International Airport has been a battlefield since fighters attacked it with heavy guns on Sunday to wrest control from a rival militia which has been based there since the fall of Libya’s late ruler Muammar Qadhafi in 2011.

The conflict is fuelling worries that Libya is on the point of turning into a failed state where a weak central government is powerless to control the militias which helped oust Qadhafi.

The airport fighting pits brigades from Misrata, a western coastal town, against rival fighters from Zintan in the northwest. Their rivalry exemplifies the divisions between tribes and cities in a country where few efficient state institutions exist after over four decades of one-man rule.

On Thursday, several shells hit the airport terminal where the Zintanis are holding out, striking the main building for the first time, witnesses said.

A Reuters reporter at the airport saw holes in the roof and smashed windows at the terminal building and in airline offices, including one belonging to British Airways, with a shell lying on the floor.

Air controllers refused to go to work at the control tower in Tripoli, which regulates traffic for all of western Libya, a spokesman for the transport ministry said.

On Wednesday, Libya reopened the western Misrata airport, which had been closed with Tripoli after the weekend attack, but it will have to shut again because Tripoli air controllers are also responsible for Misrata.

Many Libyans who had been planning to come home for the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan have been trapped abroad. Expatriates trying to leave the country have been travelling by taxi to Tunisia, in scenes reminiscent of the 2011 NATO-backed uprising.

In the eastern Islamist hot spot of Derna, gunmen shot dead Fariha Al Barkawi, a former member of parliament, officials said. She is the second prominent woman to be assassinated, following the killing of Benghazi human rights activist Salwa Bugaighis last month.

Western powers fear chaos in Libya will allow arms and militants to flow across its borders. The south of the vast desert country has become a haven for Islamist militants kicked out of Mali by French forces earlier this year.

BEIRUT — Syria’s Kurds imposed compulsory military service for their men to ward off a push by Islamic extremists in the predominantly Kurdish areas in northern Syria, Kurdish officials said Thursday.

The move reflects fears among Syrian Kurds that the ongoing offensive by the Islamic State group in their region may potentially reverse gains made by their ethnic minority in the past three years.

The Kurds — a long ostracised community in Syria — have made unprecedented gains amid the three-year-old civil war, carving out a semi-autonomous territory in the north as overstretched government troops abandoned the region to focus on defending Damascus, President Bashar Assad’s seat of power.

In November, the Syrian Kurds declared their own civil administration in areas under their control, dividing it into the regions of Afrin, Kobani and Jazeera.

Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units successfully pushed out jihadis from a string of towns and captured stretches of territory along the borders with Turkey and Iraq.

But things changed this month, after militants from the Islamic State seized territories straddling the Iraq-Syria border where they declared a self-styled caliphate. Using advanced weapons seized from Iraqi forces, the Islamic fighters launched an offensive against the Syria’s northern Kurdish region of Kobani, also known as Ayn Arab, capturing several predominantly Kurdish villages.

The fighting between the Syrian Kurds and the jihadis, which broke out on July 2, left dozens dead on both sides, according to activists. Hundreds of Kurds have flocked from neighbouring Turkey to help their brethren, the activists said.

“The Islamic State is reinforcing its positions around us and there are clashes,” said Kobani-based Kurdish journalist Barzan Isso.

Juan Mohammed, a spokesman for the Kurdish city of Qamishli, said Jazeera — the largest of the three Syrian Kurdish territories in size and population — adopted the draft law this week.

It requires all adult males serve in “self-defence” duty for six months. The law was approved Sunday by the legislative council that acts as Jazeera’s local parliament. Isso and Kurdish activist Mustafa Osso said the law went into effect this week.

Isso told The Associated Press that according to the draft law, every family was required to have one of its male members between the ages of 18 and 30 do the service. After six months, the men can decide if they want to go to the front lines.

Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Syria, making up more than 10 per cent of the country’s 23 million people.

The Kurdish civil administration is dominated by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, or PYD, Syria’s most powerful Kurdish group.

The long-run battles between the Syrian Kurds and the Islamic militants have added another layer to the complex Syrian civil war, which has also seen bitter infighting among Sunni rebel factions and a bloody rivalry between the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and their former allies of the Islamic State.

Also Thursday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Islamic State fighters captured a gas field east of the central province of Homs after heavy battles that killed 23 soldiers and guards at the facility.

The observatory said more than 300 people, including guards, soldiers and employees at the field were also wounded or captured. The report could not be independently confirmed.

The Islamic State has captured much of Syria’s oil fields in the eastern province of Deir Al Zour over the past weeks.

The Syrian conflict has killed at least 170,000 people, a third of them civilians, and displaced some 9 million, a third of the country’s pre-war population.

TAMPA, Florida — A Florida teenager who was detained in Israel and apparently beaten by police returned home on Wednesday, eager to seek medical care and put behind him a summer trip that drew renewed world attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Tariq Khdeir, 15, was greeted by cheering relatives, friends and media at Tampa International Airport. He said he felt good, while bruises on his face that had spurred a probe into complaints that he was beaten while in Israeli custody, were significantly faded.

Calling his attack by masked police “the scariest thing that has happened to me”, Khdeir told reporters he believes his story drew outrage largely because he was a US citizen.

“You only know my story because I am an American,” he said. “I am only 15, but I will never think about freedom in the same way,” he added.

A high school student at a private Islamic school in Tampa, Khdeir was vacationing in Jerusalem with his parents and younger sisters on a summer trip to visit their Palestinian relatives.

He was arrested during protests after his cousin, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, was abducted and killed in early July, sparking calls from Palestinians for a new uprising against Israel.

The Maryland-born teenager’s homecoming follows his release from house arrest in Israel, where an investigation into his treatment by Israeli forces is continuing.

Khdeir has said he was not involved in clashes with police prior to his detention along with five other protesters.

Friends and relatives in Florida awaiting his return were anxious for him to be evaluated by US doctors. Khdeir’s father complained that Israeli officers denied his son proper medical treatment after they beat him.

Khdeir looks forward to returning to school and going fishing with his friends, he told reporters.

He and his mother asked supporters to remember all the children killed in recent weeks during the resurgent Israeli-Palestinian violence.

“They have names like mine,” Khdeir said. “No child, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli, deserves to die that way.”

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli prosecutors indicted three Jews on Thursday over the kidnapping and murder of a Palestinian teenager who was burned to death this month, the justice ministry said.

The identity of those charged was not disclosed by the ministry, which simply stated that one was a 29-year-old from the West Bank settlement of Adam.

The others were 16-year-olds, one from Jerusalem and the other Beit Shemesh, an Israeli town west of Jerusalem. All were from the same family.

Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, was kidnapped from East Jerusalem on July 2 and burned to death in a suspected revenge attack for the abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers.

The three Israeli youths face separate charges over the attempted kidnapping of another Palestinian, aged seven, from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Beit Hanina, as well as alleged arson attacks on Palestinian-owned cars.

Two of them are also accused of setting alight a Palestinian shop in the town of Izmeh, a West Bank village near Israel, the ministry said in a statement.

An Israeli government legal adviser quoted in the media denounced the attacks as “shocking acts of racism against innocent people”.

Khdeir’s murder followed the abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank last month.

It led to days of violent protests in East Jerusalem that quickly spread to Arab towns across Israel, with stone-throwers fighting pitched battles with Israeli forces.

That in turn sparked a new conflict between Israel and Hamas, with Israel launching an aerial bombing campaign on July 8 against the Gaza Strip that has killed at least 230 Palestinians.

One Israeli has been killed.

Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, this week disclosed confessions of three Jewish extremists who said they kidnapped and killed Khdeir in revenge for the murder of the three Israelis by alleged Palestinian fighters.

The trio had decided to kill an Arab, and equipped themselves with cable ties, petrol and other materials, and had randomly chosen Abu Khdeir as their victim, it said.

Shin Bet also said at the time that the suspects were all related.

On July 1, the suspects had tried to kidnap a child elsewhere in East Jerusalem, but were thwarted by the youth’s mother.

Security officials said the three had scoured east Jerusalem neighbourhoods in search of a victim before happening on Abu Khdeir.

After forcing him into the car, they struck him on the head and drove to a forest in West Jerusalem, where they poured flammable liquid on him and set him alight.

An initial forensic report showed smoke in his lungs, indicating he was alive when set alight. A lawyer for the family told AFP his body had been burnt beyond recognition.

TUNIS — At least 14 Tunisian soldiers were killed when dozens of gunmen with rocket-propelled grenades attacked two checkpoints in the remote Chaambi mountains, one of the deadliest militant strikes on the north African country’s armed forces.

Since April, thousands of Tunisian soldiers have been deployed the Chaambi region bordering Algeria in an operation to flush out Al Qaeda-linked militants. Some have been in the area since fleeing French intervention in Mali last year.

As many as 60 Tunisian and Algerian militants ambushed the checkpoints on Wednesday night, killing the soldiers as they were breaking their daily fast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, officials said. More than 20 soldiers were wounded.

“It was two simultaneous terrorist attacks when they were breaking their fast. The bodies of nine of them were burned after they were hit with an RPG. Five more were shot.” Colonel Major Souhail Chmangi, chief of army land forces, said.

“This is open warfare,” he said.

Another soldier is missing after the attack, and authorities could not confirm if he had been kidnapped. But Defence Minister Ghazi Jribi said the fighters had fled to Algeria.

Tunisia has struggled with the rise of radical Islamist militants since the 2011 popular revolt ended the rule of autocrat Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali and began its fragile steps towards democracy.

Militants calling themselves Okba Ibn Nafaa Brigade claimed responsibility on a social media site they often use. That claim could not be verified, but Tunisia says the group is operating in Chaambi and is tied to Al Qaeda’s North Africa wing.

Tough terrain

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the North Africa branch, has also claimed attacks in Tunisia in the past, but another militant group, Ansar Al Sharia, listed as a terrorist organisation by Washington, is also active.

The mountain range is tough terrain, allowing small groups of fighters plenty of cover. Tunisian forces have conducted several raids there and bombarded caves after eight soldiers were captured and executed last year.

Algeria’s military, experienced in battling its own Islamist insurgency, has been coordinating with Tunisia, especially with intelligence-sharing. But despite their large presence, Tunisian troops have been harried by improvised landmines and the porousness of the border complicates the tracking of militants, who use the area as a training ground.

One of the Arab world’s most secular states, Tunisia has adopted a new constitution and allowed a caretaker government to take over until elections this year as a way to ease tensions between a leading Islamist party and secular opponents.

But hardline, ultra-conservative Islamists are still influential, and Tunisia is one of the main sources of fighters travelling from North Africa to fight with Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq.

Last year a Tunisian man who had travelled to fight in Syria returned to carry out a suicide attack on a beach resort near the capital, killing only himself, but shocking a country that relies heavily on foreign tourism for revenue.

Tunisian officials also worry about arms and fighters spilling over from neighbouring Libya, where the weak government is unable to impose order on brigades of former rebels and militias still fighting since the 2011 fall of Muammar Qadhafi.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM/GAZA — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday instructed the military to begin a ground offensive in Gaza, an official statement from his office said.

Reuters witnesses and Gaza residents reported heavy artillery and naval shelling and helicopter fire along the Gaza border.

“The prime minister and defence minister have instructed the IDF [Israel Defence Force] to begin a ground operation tonight in order to hit the terror tunnels from Gaza into Israel,” the statement said.

Israel and Palestinian fighters in the densely populated enclave have been fighting a cross border war for 10 days.

The Israeli military says Gaza fighters have fired more than 1,300 rockets into Israel. Palestinian health officials say 233 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air and naval strikes. 

One Israeli civilian has been killed by fire from Gaza.

A statement from the Israeli military said the operation will include “infantry, armoured corps, engineer corps, artillery and intelligence combined with aerial and naval support”.

Before dawn on Thursday, about a dozen Palestinian fighters tunnelled under the border, emerging near an Israeli community. At least one was killed when Israeli aircraft bombed the group, the military said.

On Thursday night, loud thuds and flashes of orange light lit the sky in the eastern Gaza strip as Israeli gunboats fired shells and tracer fire, while artillery and helicopters fired over the border, Reuters witnesses on both sides of the border said.

Gaza residents and medical officials reported heavy shelling along the eastern borders from the southern town of Rafah up to the north of the enclave.

Shells landed by Al Wafa rehabilitation hospital east of Shejaia, an eastern suburb of Gaza. “We were not able to evacuate all the patients, the staff can barely evacuate themselves at this point. It’s a desperate situation,” Basman Alashi, head of the hospital, told Reuters.

“The hospital has been hit many times,” he said.

Sirens had sounded in southern Israel earlier in the day at the end of the ceasefire requested by the United Nations, giving way to renewed Palestinian rocket salvoes and Israeli bombing.

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s hawkish economy minister and a member of the decision-making Security Cabinet, said earlier in the day that time was running out for Hamas, the Islamist group dominant in Gaza.

“We are moving from Iron Dome to an iron fist,” Bennett said, referring to an anti-missile system that has intercepted many of the rockets in 10 days of warfare.

The military said rockets headed towards Tel Aviv, the southern city of Beersheba and Ashkelon. There were no reports of casualties or damage.

Israeli aircraft bombed a house in Gaza City, killing three children, another three youngsters and three other people died in separate attacks, the Gaza health ministry said.

The Israeli Security Cabinet was due to meet on Friday, an Israeli official said.

Ceasefire efforts

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius will visit Egypt, Jordan and Israel from Friday to Sunday in a bid to help defuse the situation, and will discuss putting a European mission on the Gaza-Israel border, a diplomatic source said on Thursday.

The French diplomat said the mission could be similar to an EU mission launched in 2005 providing border help at the crossing in Rafah between Gaza and Egypt. That mission was suspended when Hamas was elected in 2007.

Fabius will meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and US Secretary of State John Kerry separately in Cairo, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and then the Jordanian foreign minister, Nasser Judeh, and Royal Court Chief Fayez Tarawneh. He will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Sunday, the source said.

US President Barack Obama said on Wednesday he supported Egyptian efforts to agree a ceasefire that would end the worst flare-up of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities in two years. US officials would use their diplomatic resources over the next 24 hours to pursue closing a deal, he said.

Egypt had proposed a permanent ceasefire plan on Tuesday, which Israel accepted. But Hamas, saying its terms had been ignored, rejected it.

Hamas wants Israel and Egypt, whose military-backed government is at odds with the Islamist group, to lift border restrictions that have deepened economic hardship among Gaza’s 1.8 million populace and caused a cash crunch in the movement, which has been unable to pay its employees for months.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said it had discovered on Wednesday some 20 rockets hidden in an empty Gaza school.

Israel has long accused Palestinian fighters of storing weapons in civilian facilities and using Gaza residents as human shields by launching rockets from residential areas.

DUBAI — Having scaled the heights of Earth with the world’s tallest tower, the United Arab Emirates is now aiming for the stars, or just a little bit closer, with an ambitions trip to Mars. The energy-rich country on the eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula announced plans Wednesday to send the first unmanned Arab spaceship to Mars in 2021.

The ruler of the UAE’s emirate of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, said the mission will prove the Arab world is still capable of delivering scientific contributions to humanity, despite the many conflicts across the Middle East.

“Our region is a region of civilisation. Our destiny is, once again, to explore, to create, to build and to civilise,” said Al Maktoum, who is also UAE’s vice president, in a statement.

For years, the UAE has been pushing Arab League nations to create a pan-Arab space agency similar to the European Space Agency.

The government did not say how much the programme is expected to cost, but said the space agency would report to the Cabinet and be financially and administratively independent otherwise.

The UAE said that its unmanned probe will take nine months and travel more than 60 million kilometres to Mars, making the emirates one of only nine countries with space programmes to try and explore the red planet.

A UAE Cabinet statement said the project aims to advance human knowledge and develop Emirati human capital and economy, but did not list specific scientific goals for the probe.

The journey is complicated and many missions to Mars have failed. Countries first trying to launch into space usually fail more often than they succeed and that’s just getting into Earth’s orbit. Getting to Mars is the hardest job for even veteran space countries. Russia — the first country to go to space — failed frequently with landers, got one ship to land but only got 20 seconds of data.

The world’s overall success rate in Mars missions since the 1960s is less than 50-50. NASA has the best success rate at around 70 per cent. It has sent 21 missions to Mars since the 1960s, and all but six have succeeded. The US is the only nation so far to land and operate long-term an unmanned ship on Mars.

The UAE, which is comprised of seven emirates, says that its investments in space technologies already exceed 20 billion dirham, or roughly $5.4 billion. That includes investments in satellite data, mobile satellite communications and earth mapping and observation.

The Cabinet statement said the space technologies industry is estimated to be worth around $300 billion globally, and is increasingly important to the security of nations.

For hundreds of years up until the mid-13th century, Islamic advancements in science and technology experienced a golden age, but later fell behind. The ruler of the emirate of Abu Dhabi and UAE President Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nayhan said the Mars probe “represents the Islamic world’s entry into the era of space exploration”.

Several Muslim-majority nations such as Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey Indonesia, Pakistan and Iran already have space agencies or programmes.

Iran sent a monkey into space for the second time last year, returning it safely to Earth, and says it aims to send an astronaut into space.

There have also been several Muslim astronauts from around the world. Saudi-born Prince Sultan Bin Salman Al Saud became the first Muslim and Arab to travel to space in 1985.

Meanwhile, Egypt became the first Arab country to launch its own communications satellite in 1998, dramatically transforming the broadcasting landscape in the region.

The Dubai ruler said his country chose the epic challenge of reaching Mars because it inspires and motivates.

“The moment we stop taking on such challenges is the moment we stop moving forward,” he said.

BENGHAZI, Libya — Twenty aircraft were damaged by shelling at Libya’s main airport in the worst fighting in the capital Tripoli in months as rival militia battled for control, officials said on Wednesday.

Tripoli International Airport became a battlefield at the weekend when a militia launched an attack to try to take control from a rival armed group, part of the turmoil in Libya three years after Muammar Gaddafi was toppled.

The fighting, the worst in Tripoli since November, has halted flights, stranding abroad many Libyans who were planning to return home for the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and trapping expatriates. The heavy fighting in Tripoli and clashes in the eastern city of Benghazi prompted the United Nations to pull its staff out of the North African country.

Libyan carrier Afriqiyah had 13 planes damaged along with seven from rival Libyan Airlines, company officials told a televised news conference. Both airlines operate Airbus planes.

“The damage ranges from serious to superficial and we need time to see how grave the damage is,” said Abdulhakim Al Fares, chairman of Afriqiyah Airlines. He gave no figures for the estimated cost of repairs or replacement aircraft or loss of business.

A Reuters reporter at the airport on Tuesday saw six damaged planes, one of them totally burned out. At least 31 planes were parked at the airport at the time of the shelling.

“We tried to remove the planes from the airport but the attacking force from the east did not stop shelling which made it impossible to relocate the aircraft,” said government spokesman Ahmed Lamine.

He was referring to the city of Misrata from which some of the attackers come, pitting themselves against a rival militia from Zintan in the northwest which has been protecting the airport in the absence of state forces since helping to take Tripoli in August 2011 when Gaddafi’s government fell.

Gunfire could be heard on Wednesday at the airport, where the Zintan militia was still in control of the main perimeter.

The Libyan government has no control over former rebel fighters who helped topple Gaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising but now defy state authority and often battle for political or economic power.

Ministry of Transport spokesman Tarek Arwa said Libyan carriers had started operating flights to Dubai and Istanbul to bring back citizens stranded abroad, operating out of Misrata and a smaller airport in Tripoli.

Smaller airports in Zuwara and Ghadames in the west would be upgraded to serve international destinations to offset the closure of Tripoli’s main airport, he said, without giving a timeframe.

ARAR, Saudi Arabia — The group now calling itself the Islamic State rampaged across the border between Syria and Iraq a month ago and has since declared a caliphate across a swathe of the Middle East from Aleppo to the outskirts of Baghdad.

But if its leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, who has proclaimed himself ruler of all the world’s Muslims, has his eyes on extending his caliphate south, he will face a far more formidable frontier at the border with Saudi Arabia.

Since the group then known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched its lightning offensive last month in Iraq, Riyadh has sent thousands of troops to the border area.

They are beefing up a frontier already protected by a series of earth berms and fences, forming an exclusion zone stretching 10 kilometres deep into Saudi territory. Its entire 850km length is scanned by radar and infrared video cameras, monitored around-the-clock at a control room.

Last month King Abdullah pledged to take “all measures” to protect Saudi Arabia, both from Sunni ISIL, which Saudi Arabia has labelled a terrorist organisation, and also from Shiite militia in Iraq who have mobilised to fight the insurgents.

At least 1,000 army soldiers, 1,000 national guardsmen and three helicopter units have arrived to reinforce the border area near the town of Arar since ISIL’s advance in June, General Faleh Al Subai’i, commander of Saudi border guards in the area, told visiting reporters this week.

Saudi officials have not made public the total number of extra troops they have sent to the frontier, so far declining to comment on the accuracy of a report by Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television which put the number of reinforcements at 30,000.

Although alarmed by ISIL’s advance, border officials describe the Shiite militia — allied to the government in Baghdad and to Saudi Arabia’s enemy Iran — as the bigger threat.

“ISIL is not important. It’s a basic terrorist group without any military capability or suchlike. The most important one is the Shiite militia, which is organised with planning behind it,” Subai’i said.

Such views infuriate Baghdad, which accuses Riyadh of doing too little to stop ISIL fighters who pride themselves in killing Shiite civilians.

Riyadh strongly denies it has helped ISIL, and its state media and clerics preach against the group, but it has openly supported other Sunni militant groups fighting in Syria, and hundreds of Saudi nationals are believed to have joined ISIL. 

Hard to breach 

Unlike the heavily trafficked Syria-Iraqi border, which includes some of the most important commercial routes in the Middle East, the Saudi-Iraqi frontier is no hub for international trade. The post near Arar was last opened in October, when 65,000 Iraqi pilgrims crossed for the Hajj.

With the crossing closed, weeds grow high in the middle of the road to Iraq and a customs shed is carpeted in dust.

The fences and berms are hard to breach. No more than 12 people have been caught trying to cross the border illegally since the defences were build two years ago, officials said.

Since June, patrols have been increased. Border guards, in grey stone-pattern camouflage uniforms, say they have also noticed increased activity among their counterparts on the other side of the frontier.

Five guards, armed with assault rifles and stationed behind sandbags, gazed across a few hundred metres of desert to a small Iraqi frontier post on the other side of a dry wadi where a tiny-armed figure slowly paced the road.

Three rockets were fired from Iraq at a Saudi border guards’ housing complex last week. Subai’i said he did not know who had fired them but believed they were intended to provoke a violent response. His men were under strict orders not to shoot back.

“Some people suggest we look for who did it and retaliate. But the government said no; we will have higher vigilance and more police but nothing else,” he said.

A small crater in the stony ground shows where a rocket landed after flying over the Judaidat Arar housing compound, missing a small power plant and its fuel tanks by 100 metres before its shrapnel ripped ragged holes in the perimeter fence.

Iraqi border guards informed Saudi officers that they had discovered three deserted vehicles from which three Grad rockets had been fired and which held another five of the same type, Subai’i said.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the rocket fire. In November, a Shiite militia quickly said it was behind the launching of six Grad rockets — the same kind used last week — into Saudi territory near the border with Kuwait.

The nearest Iraqi town in this expanse of desert is Al Nukhayb, 80 kilometres away. It is still in government hands, but to its northwest is territory where ISIL holds sway, and to its east is Najaf province, home to strong Shiite militias.

“We’re not sure who was responsible. It could be ISIL or the [Shiite] militia, or another group,” said Captain Sultan Al Mutairi of the border guards’ intelligence wing. “In Iraq there are many terrorist groups. It’s a mess up there.”