Region

KOCHI, India — A group of 46 Indian nurses who were trapped in an area of Iraq seized by Islamic militants were greeted by tears and cheers from relatives Saturday as they arrived home in southern India.

The relatives, clutching flower bouquets and hoisting “Welcome Home” banners, thronged the nurses as they emerged into the airport in the Kerala city of Kochi, tearfully embracing them.

“We’re happy and relieved,” one unidentified nurse told local television stations.

The nurses found themselves stranded while working in a state-run hospital in Tikrit when jihadists launched their lightning offensive last month.

It was not immediately clear if the nurses had been abducted and held captive or if they had been trapped and were unable to leave.

They were moved from Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit to the militant-held city of Mosul on Thursday against their will, the Indian foreign ministry said.

The nurses told reporters at the Kochi airport they had no complaints about their treatment by the rebels.

“They took care of us,” another nurse told reporters.

The nurses had boarded early Saturday a specially chartered plane for India from the city of Erbil, the Kurdish regional capital, where they had been shifted the previous day.

“I thank God for keeping my daughter safe in her hours of peril. She had gone to Iraq... to make our lives better,” M.V. Retnamma, the mother of one nurse.

“I can see her alive. For the last 25 days, we were praying for her safe return,” Retnamma said as she joyfully welcomed her daughter Monisha.

Many Indian workers travel to the Gulf to seek better paid employment. Some of the nurses had earlier resisted returning to India as they had taken large loans to get work in Iraq.

Joint effort 

Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, who welcomed the nurses at the airport, attributed their safe return to the “joined efforts” of the foreign affairs ministry, embassies and his state.

“We worked together to get them back and we got a 100 per cent result,” Chandy told reporters, adding the nurses’ return had been complicated by the “complete disruption of law-and-order in Iraq”.

The Indian foreign ministry said the government was not immediately able to disclose details of how it arranged for the nurses to return home.

“The best antidote for them is to be with their near and dear,” Syed Akbaruddin, spokesman for the Indian foreign ministry, told reporters Friday.

“We hope the balm of being with their friends and family would be the best solution for their travails,” Akbaruddin added.

Nurse Marina Jose told NDTV news channel before leaving for India that the women had despaired of ever seeing their homeland again.

“We never thought we will come back, that we would come out,” she said.

But she added in apparent reference to the rebels, “They didn’t harm anyone. They didn’t touch even. They talked nicely,” Jose said, a view many of the other nurses echoed Saturday.

The nurses’ group was separate from another 39 Indian construction workers being held in Mosul, Iraq’s second-biggest city and the first to fall in a jihadist-led offensive that has overrun swathes of territory north and west of Baghdad.

More than 30 Turkish truck drivers were freed on Thursday after three weeks in captivity, but a separate group of almost 50 Turks seized in an attack on the Turkish consulate in Mosul last month remain in captivity.

The situation of the trapped workers in an area of Iraq overrun by Islamic militants in recent weeks had been the first foreign crisis for the new right-wing government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Militants led by the Islamic State jihadist group launched their offensive on June 9, and swiftly took control of large chunks of five provinces, sparking a crisis that has alarmed world leaders.

BEIRUT — Lebanon’s Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil warned Friday the Syrian refugee crisis may lead to “strife” in the tiny Mediterranean country between Syrians and Lebanese, should it remain unsolved.

“We believe the situation has reached breaking point and I am echoing the words of security officials,” he said.

“If the situation continues to develop in this direction, there will be strife between the Lebanese and the Syrians.”

To highlight the scale of the influx, Bassil compared it to transferring the entire population of Romania to Britain or France.

Hosting more than 1.1 million Syrians fleeing their country’s three-year war, Lebanon is home to the highest number of Syrian refugees in the region and also to the highest refugee population per capita in the world.

Bassil spoke at a news conference focusing on the refugee crisis a day after the United Nations warned that Syrian refugees will comprise more than a third of Lebanon’s population by the end of 2014.

He said it “is as though the whole of Romania’s population of 19 million moved to Britain or France, home to 63 million and 67 million people respectively”.

He also said that, out of Syria’s neighbours, Lebanon already had the highest density population at 370 people per square kilometre even before the Syrian war erupted in 2011.

“If we add 160 or 170 Syrians for each square kilometre, we now have 520 people per square kilometre in Lebanon,” Bassil said.

“The number of Syrians is already more than 35 per cent, because there are large numbers who have not registered” with the UN, he said.

“In Turkey, however, Syrians only comprise 1.2 per cent of the population, whereas in Iraq, the figure is 1.4 per cent and in Jordan it’s 18.5 per cent.”

Calling for the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon to be reduced, Bassil said they should not be helped financially because “that encourages them to stay”.

He also said the number of Syrian children in public sector primary and middle schools stands at 88,000 — 3,000 more than that of Lebanese and other foreigners combined.

Most Lebanese children attend private schools.

The medical sector has also been affected, Bassil said, noting that in one of Beirut’s biggest hospitals, “80 Syrian children were born in May, compared with 40 Lebanese children”.

He bemoaned the financial burden borne by Beirut because of the refugee crisis.

“Lebanon pays $100 million a month to provide free electricity to Syrian refugees,” said Bassil.

He also said an international fund set up to help Lebanon get through the crisis has only been given limited support, and that “even if funding reaches $100 million, that will barely be enough to pay for a month’s power”.

TEHRAN — An Iranian pilot has been killed while fighting in Iraq, state media reported Saturday, in what is thought to be Tehran’s first military casualty during battles against Islamic State jihadists.

Iran’s official IRNA news agency did not say whether the pilot died while flying sorties or fighting on the ground.

It said Colonel Shoja’at Alamdari Mourjani was killed while “defending” Shiite Muslim holy sites in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad.

His death comes after Iran’s declarations that it will provide its western neighbour with whatever it needs to counter the Sunni militants who are laying siege to the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki.

Samarra is a major flashpoint in the fighting and is home to the Shiite Al Askari shrine which was bombed by Al Qaeda in February 2006, sparking a bloody Sunni-Shiite sectarian war that killed tens of thousands.

The reports of the pilot’s death came as Iranian officials insist their assistance is not in the form of troops, but rather of weapons and equipment if Iraq asks for them.

President Hassan Rouhani vowed last month that Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, would protect Shiite holy sites in Iraq, including in Samarra.

The Fars news agency appeared to confirm the IRNA report, publishing photos of a funeral service for the pilot on Friday in his home province of Fars, in southern Iran.

Fars did not give any details, but hinted that Alamdari Mourjani was a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, whose elite Quds Force is believed to be on the ground and assisting Iraqi forces, despite Tehran’s denials.

SANAA — The Yemeni air force bombed Shiite Muslim fighters north of Sanaa on Saturday in fighting that caused “a large number of casualties”, local officials said, after a truce reached last month between the insurgents and government forces collapsed.

The fighting in northern Yemen, which has taken on a sectarian tone, is further destabilising a country struggling to overcome many problems, including a secessionist movement in its restive south and the nationwide spread of Al Qaeda insurgency.

Shiite Houthi fighters, officially known as Ansarullah, blamed army units linked to the rival Sunni Muslim Islah Party for breaking the June 23 ceasefire on Friday when government troops advanced on an area in Al Jouf province.

A Yemeni government official said the army’s advance on the town of Al Safra in the province northeast of Sanaa had been prompted by the failure of Houthi fighters to vacate positions in compliance with the ceasefire.

Tribal sources in Al Jouf province, which is partly controlled by the Houthi rebels, said at least 18 people — 10 Houthis, five tribesmen and three soldiers — had been killed in clashes on Friday.

The fighting later expanded to the adjacent Omran province, where the Yemeni air force flew sorties and bombed Houthi positions around the provincial capital early on Saturday.

Local officials said “a large number of casualties” had been killed in Saturday’s violence, including at least eight tribal fighters and four soldiers. The Houthis gave no figures for casualties on their side.

Despite appearing to falter after it took effect, the ceasefire had largely held with few reports of violations.

US-allied Yemen, an impoverished country of 25 million that shares a long border with the world’s top oil exporter Saudi Arabia, has been in turmoil since 2011 when mass protests forced veteran President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down.

At least 200 people have been killed this year in battles pitting the Houthis — named after the tribe of their leader — against the government and Sunni tribal allies.

Officials say the Houthis, who have fought short but devastating wars with government forces since 2004, are getting weapons from Iran.

The Houthis deny this, saying they seek autonomy and less US interference in Yemen’s affairs.

DUBAI — Two suspected Al Qaeda militants blew themselves up early on Saturday after being surrounded inside a government building in southern Saudi Arabia, following an attack on a border post with Yemen, Saudi-owned Al Arabia television reported.

The satellite channel, in a report on its website, quoted unnamed sources as saying the militants blew themselves up in the Sharurah area near the Wadia border post with Yemen.

The militants had put up “stiff resistance” to security forces surrounding them, firing automatic weapons and hurling grenades at security forces. There were no reports of casualties among Saudi security forces.

Saudi security forces had been searching buildings for militants who had fled after the attack, in which six people, including one suicide bomber and two security personnel, were killed.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has long viewed its 1,800km border with impoverished, conflict-ridden Yemen as a major security challenge and has been building a fence to deter militants and criminals.

Gunmen on Friday killed the commander of a border patrol on the Saudi side of the Wadia border post, where three of the attackers also died in an ensuing firefight, Saudi state news agency SPA said.

The agency said security forces had arrested one of the gunmen and were searching for one or two others believed to be hiding in the area.

Yemen’s state agency Saba earlier reported that a suicide bomber drove a car laden with explosives into the Yemeni side of the Wadia border crossing, killing himself and one soldier and wounding another.

After the attack, Yemeni security forces chased militants who fled from the scene in two cars into the desert, Saba said, citing a military source.

But a Yemeni official, apparently referring to the same incident, earlier told Reuters the gunmen had escaped into Saudi Arabia after attacking the Yemeni border post.

The official said the attackers were Al Qaeda militants.

The Wadia crossing links Saudi Arabia with Yemen’s southeastern Hadramout province, which stretches through arid valleys and empty desert — a landscape that Al Qaeda militants use to their advantage across the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia’s construction of the security fence along its border with Yemen has often been interrupted by protesting tribesmen who say it prevents them accessing pastures for their livestock.

The kingdom overcame its own Al Qaeda insurgency almost a decade ago, but said in May it had detained 62 suspected Al Qaeda militants with links to radicals in Syria and Yemen who it said it believed were plotting attacks on government and foreign targets in the kingdom.

RAMALLAH — Violent protests sparked by the abduction and killing of a Palestinian teenager spread to Arab villages in Israel on Saturday, presenting a new challenge to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel has stayed silent on the investigation into the death of an East Jerusalem youth who Palestinians believe was kidnapped and killed by far-right Jews, but the Palestinian attorney-general was reported as saying he had been burned alive.

“The direct cause of death was burns as a result of fire and its complications,” Mohammed Al A’wewy was quoted as saying by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA late on Friday.

Israeli-Palestinian tensions have risen sharply since three Israeli teens were kidnapped on June 12 and later found dead in the occupied West Bank.

This was followed on Wednesday by the kidnapping of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, in his neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. His charred body was found hours later in a forest on the edge of the city.

Saber Al Aloul, the director of the Palestinian forensic institute, attended the autopsy, which was carried out by Israeli doctors. Al A’wewy said Al Aloul had reported soot had been found in Khdeir’s respiratory canal, which meant that “the boy had inhaled this material while he was burnt alive”.

Burns covered 90 per cent of the body and there was a cut to the head. Samples such as fluids and tissue were taken for more lab examinations to complete the legal medical report.

At Khdeir funeral on Friday, furious Palestinians chanted “Intifada! Intifada”, calling for a new uprising against Israel. 

Stones thrown at Israeli police were met by tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets in one of the most highly charged displays of enmity in Jerusalem in years.

At least one Palestinian was hurt in confrontations in the city of Nablus overnight, medical staff said.

Stone and firebomb attacks

The protests spread on Saturday to normally calm Arab Israeli areas, mainly along roads in the centre and north of the country where protesters threw stones and firebombs at passing cars. Dozens were arrested in these clashes, a police spokeswoman said.

A Jewish driver was forced from his vehicle and told to flee before his car was burned at one location while at another, a woman suffered light injuries from rocks thrown at her car.

Palestinian officials trying to calm tensions have said they would prevent any Intifada, or uprising, and seek a solution to the crisis that began when the three Israeli teens were kidnapped.

The discovery of the bodies of the three Jewish seminary students on Monday prompted an outpouring of national grief in Israel.

Many Palestinians, including President Mahmoud Abbas, assert that Khdeir was the victim of far-right Jews incensed at the Israeli deaths.

Netanyahu has called Abu Khdeir’s killing “loathsome” and ordered a swift police investigation.

Israeli authorities said they did not yet know whether Abu Khdeir was indeed the victim of a hate crime.

Tensions also persisted on Saturday along the frontier with the Gaza Strip, where Israeli warplanes bombed three Hamas targets in response to mortar and rocket fire at Israel.

There were no reported casualties in the air raids or from the 14 rockets fired at Israel.

Israel mobilised ground forces on Thursday along the Gaza frontier in a threat to invade if rocket fire from the enclave did not stop. Egypt, a bordering country, has tried to mediate a truce to prevent an escalation of these hostilities.

BAGHDAD — A video posted online Saturday purports to show the leader of the Islamic State extremist group that has overrun much of Syria and Iraq delivering a sermon at a mosque in Iraq, in what would be a rare — if not the first — public appearance by the shadowy militant.

The video was released on at least two websites known to be used by the group, but it was not possible to independently verify whether the person shown was indeed the group’s leader, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. 

It bore the logo of Al Furqan, the group’s media arm.

Through brute force and guile, the Islamic State group has seized control of a vast swath of land straddling Syria and Iraq, and has declared the establishment of an Islamic state, or caliphate, in those territories. It proclaimed Baghdadi the leader of its state and demanded that all Muslims pledge allegiance to him.

“The mujahedeen have been rewarded victory by God after years of jihad, and they were able to achieve their aim and hurried to announce the caliphate and choose the imam,” he says in the video, referring to the leader.

“It is a burden to accept this responsibility to be in charge of you,” he adds. “I am not better than you or more virtuous than you. If you see me on the right path, help me. If you see me on the wrong path, advise me and halt me. And obey me as far as I obey God.”

He is dressed in black robes and a black turban, has dark eyes, thick eyebrows and a full black beard. He speaks eloquent classical Arabic, but with little emotion.

The mosque has several dozen men and boys standing for prayer, and a flag of the black Islamic State group is hoisted in the mosque. One man stands guard, with a gun holster under his arm.

At the beginning of the video, the man purported to be Al Baghdadi slowly climbs the pulpit in the great mosque in Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, which Al Baghdadi’s group captured last month. Then the call to prayer is made as he cleans his teeth with a miswak, a special type of stick that devout Muslims use to clean their teeth and freshen their breath.

A senior Iraqi intelligence official said that after an initial analysis the man in the video is believed to indeed be Al Baghdadi. The official said the arrival of a large convoy in Mosul around midday Friday coincided with the blocking of cellular networks in the area. He says the cellular signal returned after the convoy departed.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief the media.

A Mosul resident confirmed that mobile networks were down around the time of Friday prayers, and then returned a few hours later. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears for his safety.

Another aspect of the rule Al Baghdadi envisions was made clear in a series of images that emerged online late Saturday showing the destruction of at least 10 ancient shrines and Shiite mosques in territory his group controls.

The 21 photographs posted on a website that frequently carries official statements from the Islamic State extremist group document the destruction in Mosul and the town of Tal Afar. Some of the photos show bulldozers plowing through walls, while others show explosives demolishing the buildings in a cloud of smoke and rubble.

Residents from both Mosul and Tal Afar confirmed the destruction of the sites.

Sunni extremists consider Shiites Muslims heretics, and the veneration of saints apostasy.

The Islamic State group seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June in the opening act of its lightning offensive that sent much of the Iraqi army scattering. Shiite militiamen and volunteers have had to fill the void as the regular army struggles to regroup.

On Saturday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki removed the chief of the army’s ground forces and the head of the federal police from their posts as part of his promised shake-up in the security forces following their near collapse.

Military spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim Al Moussawi says Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki signed the papers to retire Lt. Gen. Ali Ghaidan, commander of the army’s ground forces, and Lt. Gen. Mohsen Al Kaabi, the chief of the federal police. Moussawi says both men leave their jobs with their pensions. No replacements have been named.

Last month, Maliki retired three generals who had been deployed in Mosul and ordered legal proceedings against them. He also dismissed a brigadier general and ordered his court martial in absentia. He said he planned to retire off or court martial more senior officers, but gave no details.

Maliki has also vowed to bring the full weight of military law, including the execution of deserters, on anyone who is found out to have fled the battle.

NEW DELHI — Nearly 50 Indian nurses from the southern state of Kerala have been taken against their will from a hospital in the militant-controlled city of Tikrit in Iraq, India’s foreign ministry said on Thursday.

At a briefing with reporters, foreign ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin declined to say who had ordered the nurses to leave the hospital or where they were taken.

“They are not going of their own free will,” he said, when asked whether the nurses had been abducted by a militia. “This is a situation where lives are at stake.”

A senior aide to Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, who spoke to the nurses on Thursday, told Reuters that militants had forced the nurses to vacate the hospital and board two buses. Most of the nurses are from the south Indian state of Kerala.

Tikrit, the birthplace of former president Saddam Hussein, has been the site of fierce fighting this week as Iraqi troops battle to regain control of the city from the Al Qaeda splinter group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Islamic State insurgents and other Sunni Muslim militant groups seized towns and cities across Syria and Iraq in a lightning advance last month.

Indian nurses can earn higher wages in the Middle East than at home. Some of the nurses in Iraq resisted returning to India because they had taken out large loans to get overseas work.

Some critics say the Indian government should have sought to evacuate the group of 46 nurses in Tikrit earlier, despite the difficult security situation.

“The Iraqi army is not in control of Tikrit,” Akbaruddin said, adding that the nurses were still in phone contact with Indian officials. “We have been in touch with humanitarian organisations and they had, in this instance, indicated their inability to reach the nurses given the difficulties in road transport.”

Two weeks ago, 40 Indian construction workers were kidnapped in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, and all but one of them are still in captivity. The workers have been press ganged into building defensive fortifications for the insurgents, Indian newspaper The Hindu reported, citing a senior Kurdish security official.

About 10,000 Indians work in Iraq, mostly in areas unaffected by the fighting, but scores of them have returned to India since ISIL began its offensive.

LONDON — Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region has hit back at Baghdad over independent oil exports, a letter from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) showed, threatening to counter sue the central government for trying to block its sales.

The strongly worded letter shows growing confidence from the Kurdish capital Erbil in the long-running oil sales dispute, as Baghdad struggles to regain control of swathes of territory lost to a Sunni Islamic militant insurgency.

The letter, addressed to Iraqi Oil Minister Abdul Karim Luaibi from KRG Natural Resource Minister Ashti Hawrami, said the Kurds would pursue legal action by the middle of this month if Baghdad does not stop its “interference”.

“[The] KRG will bring civil, and where necessary, criminal proceedings against your ministry and any person, foreign adviser, or any entity conspiring with your ministry in any form,” Hawrami wrote, in the letter dated June 29 and carried on a KRG website. He did not specify a court for the action.

The autonomous Kurdish region has been trying to establish greater financial independence from Baghdad by selling its own oil production directly on international markets. It has largely been spared the violence affecting much of Iraq.

Baghdad has cut the KRG’s budget since January over the dispute, arguing the sales are illegal, and has repeatedly threatened to sue any firm that buys oil from the autonomous region.

But since the KRG took control of the northern oil hub of Kirkuk amid the retreat of the Iraqi military from the Islamic State-led insurgency, the autonomous region has been emboldened.

On Thursday, the president of Iraq’s Kurdish north asked the region’s parliament to prepare the way for a referendum on its long-saught goal of independence.

In the letter, Hawrami said Baghdad has treated the 2005 Iraqi constitution with “contempt”, arguing it was designed to allow the autonomous Kurdish region to export its own oil.

“These actions of your ministry are clearly politically motivated, hostile, illegitimate, and without constitutional basis, and contrary to the fundamental interests of the people of Iraq,” the letter said.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi insurgents are preparing for an assault on Baghdad, with sleeper cells planted inside the capital to rise up at “Zero Hour” and aid fighters pushing in from the outskirts, according to senior Iraqi and US security officials.

Sunni fighters have seized wide swathes of the north and west of the country in a three week lightning advance and say they are bearing down on the capital, a city of 7 million people still scarred by the intense street fighting between its Sunni and Shiite neighbourhoods during US occupation.

The government says it is rounding up members of sleeper cells to help safeguard the capital, and Shiite paramilitary groups say they are helping the authorities. Some Sunni residents say the crackdown is being used to intimidate them.

Iraqis speak of a “Zero Hour” as the moment a previously prepared attack plan would start to unfold.

A high-level Iraqi security official estimated there were 1,500 sleeper cell members hibernating in western Baghdad and a further 1,000 in areas on the outskirts of the capital.

He said their goal was to penetrate the US-made “Green Zone” — a fortified enclave of government buildings on the west bank of the Tigris — as a propaganda victory and then carve out enclaves in west Baghdad and in outlying areas.

“There are so many sleeper cells in Baghdad,” the official said. “They will seize an area and won’t let anyone take it back... In western Baghdad, they are ready and prepared.”

A man who describes himself as a member of one such cell, originally from Anbar province, the mainly Sunni Western area that has been a heartland of the insurgency, said he has been working in Baghdad as a labourer while secretly coordinating intelligence for his group of Sunni fighters.

The attack on the capital will come soon, said the man, who asked to be called Abu Ahmed.

“We are ready. It can come any minute,” he told Reuters during a meeting in a public place, glancing nervously around to see if anyone was watching.

“We will have some surprises,” he said. He pulled his baseball cap down tight on his face and stopped speaking anytime a stranger approached.

A portly man in his mid-30s wearing a striped sports shirt, the man said he fought as part of an insurgent group called the 1920 Revolution Brigades during the US occupation and was jailed by the Iraqi government from 2007-2009.

He gave up fighting in 2010, tired from war and relatively optimistic about the future. But last year, he took up arms again out of anger at a crackdown against Sunni protesters by the Shiite-led government, joining the military council, a loose federation of Sunni armed groups and tribal fighters that has since emerged as a full-fledged insurgent umbrella group.

While it was not possible to verify all details of his story, Reuters reporters are confident of his identity.

Like many Sunni fighters, Abu Ahmed is not a member of the Al Qaeda offshoot once known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and is ambivalent about the group which launched the latest uprising by seizing the main northern city Mosul on June 10 and shortened its name this week to the Islamic State.

Many Sunni armed groups turned against Al Qaeda during the US occupation but are now rallying to ISIL’s rebellion against the Shiite led government, though some say they deplore ISIL’s tactics of killing civilians and branding Shiites heretics.

Abu Ahmed said his own group, which includes former officers in Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein’s disbanded army, supports some aims of ISIL. “There are some good members of ISIL and some bad,” he said. Of the good ones: “We have the same cause.”

Security plans

The government says it can protect the capital and has spies who are tracking sleeper agents like Abu Ahmed to round them up.

“We have ample security plans. The sleeper cells are not only in Baghdad but in all other provinces and they are waiting for any chance to carry out attacks,” said Lieutenant-General Qassim Atta, the prime minister’s military spokesman.

“We keep those cells under careful and daily scrutiny, and follow up. We have arrested some of them. We have dispatched intelligence members to follow up those cells closely and we have special plans to counter their activities.”

An attempt to take Baghdad, a majority Shiite city with heavily fortified areas, would be a huge task for a rebellion that has so far concentrated on controlling Sunni areas. Many Baghdadis, Sunnis as well as Shiites, say they would fight an insurgency led by militants who want to establish a caliphate.

The Iraqi capital was the principle battlefield in Iraq’s worst sectarian bloodletting from 2006-2007, with tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, killed in fighting between Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias and US troops.

Then, millions of people fled the capital and millions more fled homes within it, turning previously mixed neighbourhoods into fortresses dominated by one sect or the other.

Although it has been at least six years since warring Sunni insurgents and Shiite militia last held open sway over whole sections of Baghdad, the capital has remained vulnerable to infiltration by ISIL suicide bombers, who strike Shiite and government targets almost daily.

A senior US intelligence official said Washington had evidence that ISIL was in the process of configuring its forces for a Baghdad assault using a plan that would include coordinated ISIL suicide strikes.

However, other US officials believe ISIL could overextend itself were it to try to take all of Baghdad. They say the more likely scenario would be for fighters to seize a Sunni district and cause disruption with bomb attacks.

ISIL fighters insist that their plan is to take the capital and topple Baghdad’s political elite.

“We will receive orders about Zero Hour,” said Abu Sa’da, an ISIL fighter reached by telephone in Mosul. He said the group had cells in Baghdad and communicated with them by e-mail despite the government’s sporadic blocking of Internet in an effort to disrupt the militants.

Cat and mouse 

For now, it is a cat and mouse game in the city. Abu Ahmed said the insurgency had agents in the Iraqi security forces, government ministries and inside the Green Zone. Men like him try to dodge an intensified campaign by the security forces and Shiite militias to round up conspirators.

There are “more detentions right now especially of ex-military officers and those who had been in American jails,” he said. “Their houses are raided by special police and militias, then we never hear about them again. We check the jails, they are not there.”

So far, they’ve managed to free 12 of them, at least one with the help of a 20,000 US dollar bribe. He blames harsh treatment by the Iraqi government for forcing them to war, opening his shirt to reveal two dark scars on his chest he says came from interrogations in custody. There was no way to verify his allegations of abuse by the security forces.

The prospect of an assault on Baghdad has led Shiite paramilitaries, mainly underground since 2008, to mobilise this year to help the authorities fight ISIL. Asaib Ahl Al Haq, a Shiite group Washington believes is funded and armed by Iran, says it has helped round up insurgent agents in Baghdad.

The movement says it is taking orders from the government and responding to a fatwa by Shiite clergy three weeks ago calling on citizens to help the armed forces.

The insurgents’ “goal is to control Baghdad and also to forestall the political process in Baghdad. They will try to execute this plot with their sleeper cells,” said Asaib Ahl Al Haq spokesman Ahmed Al Kinani. “We arrest them and hand them over to security forces.”

Many Sunnis in Baghdad say such activity has brought back memories of the last decade’s civil war, when Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents prowled the streets, capturing and killing the innocent under the excuse of rooting out terrorist foes. Now people are disappearing again.

A Sunni woman who spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared retribution from Asaib Ahl Al Haq, said her brother was first held by police for 13 days in April. Eight hours after he was released, masked Asaib fighters stormed into their house and took him.

“Their faces were covered. They had no number plates on their cars,” she said. That was the last time she saw him.