Region

WASHINGTON — Iran is secretly flying surveillance drones over Iraq and sending military equipment there to help Baghdad in its fight against Sunni insurgents, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

A “small fleet” of Ababil drones was deployed to the Al Rashid airfield near Baghdad, the newspaper said on its website, citing anonymous US officials.

Tehran has also installed an intelligence unit at the airfield to intercept electronic communications between ISIS fighters and commanders.

Ababil drones, less sophisticated than US unmanned aircraft, are designed in Iran and have a nearly three-metre wingspan. They are used for surveillance and are unarmed.

About a dozen officers of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, have also been sent to Iraq to advise Iraqi commanders and help mobilise Shiite militias in the south of the country, the paper said, adding that Iran’s General Qassem Suleimani recently made two trips to Iraq.

Iran is also sending two flights daily to Baghdad with 70 tonnes each of military equipment and supplies.

“It’s a substantial amount” of material, a US official told the newspaper. “It’s not necessarily heavy weaponry, but it’s not just light arms and ammunition.”

Tehran has massed 10 divisions of its army and its Quds Force troops along the border, ready to act if the Iraqi capital or Shiite shrines are threatened, The New York Times added.

Asked at a briefing, US State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said she “can’t confirm the specifics in those reports”.

But she said “anyone in the region shouldn’t do anything that might exacerbate sectarian divisions, that would fuel extremism inside Iraq”.

The United States has for two weeks said Iranian aid for the Iraq crisis should be done in a nonsectarian way — by pressuring the Iraqi government to adopt a national unity government and not fuel the Sunni and Shiite conflict.

We “believe Iran could play a constructive role if it’s helping to send the same message to the Iraqi government that we’re sending”, Harf said.

A lightning offensive by Sunni insurgents led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has overrun swathes of land north and west of Baghdad this month and threatens to tear the country apart.

The United Nations says at least 1,075 people have been killed, an estimated three quarters of them civilians, and 658 wounded in Iraq between June 5 and 22. Hundreds of thousands more have been displaced.

BAGHDAD/DUBAI — The militants dismantling Iraq’s borders and threatening regional war are far from united — theirs is a marriage of convenience between ultra-hardline religious zealots and more pragmatic Sunni armed groups.

For now, they share a common enemy in Shiite Islamist Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, whom Iraq’s Sunni minority accuse of marginalising and harassing them.

But each anticipates they will square off someday over the future shape of Iraq’s Sunni territories.

The question looms over who will triumph: the Al Qaeda splinter group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which aims to carve out a modern-day Caliphate, or myriad Iraqi Sunni armed factions, who fight based on a nexus of tribal, family, military and religious ties, and nostalgia for the past before the US invasion in 2003.

Many experts and Western officials believe ISIL, due to its internal cohesion, and access to high-powered weapons and stolen cash, will overpower its Sunni rivals.

They point to the lessons of Syria’s three-year-old civil war, where a unified ISIL leadership steam-rolled other groups and entrenched itself as the force to be reckoned with in western Syria. They warn that even the Sunni revolt against Al Qaeda last decade in Iraq would not have succeeded without the decisive punch of American firepower.

Cracks are already showing in the loose alliance of ISIL and fellow Sunni forces, suggesting the natural frictions that exist between the jihadists and other factions will inevitably grow.

In the Iraqi town of Hawija, ISIL and members of the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, which includes former Iraqi army officers and is rooted in Iraq’s ousted Baath Party, fought turf battles from Friday to Sunday when ISIL demanded their rival pledge loyalty to them, according to locals. At least 15 people died before the clashes ended in stalemate.

Friction may grow

Such confrontations could become the new Sunni reality if there is no swift political resolution to the crisis that began two weeks ago when ISIL stormed Mosul, seizing it in hours and then dashed across northern Iraq grabbing large swathes of land.

The charge, which saw the army abandon positions en masse, has defined the dynamics between ISIL and the other insurgents.

According to a high-level Iraqi security official, who specialises in Sunni militant groups, ISIL has about 2,300 fighters, including foreigners, who have led the speedy assault from Mosul through other northern towns, including Hawija, west of oil-rich Kirkuk, Baiji, home of Iraq’s biggest refinery, and Saddam Hussein’s birthplace Tikrit.

The high-level official told Reuters that as ISIL has raced on from Mosul, the north’s biggest city which they dominate, other Iraqi Sunni groups have seized much of the newly-gained rural territory because ISIL is short on manpower.

The different groups appear to be following ISIL’s lead in the bigger communities it has captured like Tikrit and Baiji.

But as the new order settles in Iraq’s Sunni north, the high-level security officer predicted: “They will soon be fighting each other.”

Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi security expert with good contacts in Gulf Arab governments, also expects friction to grow.

“How long can this honeymoon last?” he said. “ISIL is not acceptable among the people, either socially or politically.”

If the rebel alliance does fracture, battles could drag Sunni regions of Iraq into a state of permanent internecine war.

A Sunni politician sketched out the future.

“ISIL will take a stand in favour of [its] Islamic law and the people of the region will refuse because they will want to protect their rights,” said Dr. Muhannad Hussam, a politician with the nationalist Arabiya list.

‘No one will win’

“I am afraid for the Sunni areas. They will be burned. No one will win.”

He said that other insurgent groups, even if they could not defeat ISIL, would eventually adopt guerrilla tactics and still be able to hurt ISIL, regardless of the jihadists’ superior arms. “They can fight as gangs, not as a military,” he said.

“They are tied to the land and ISIL is not. ISIL can’t fight an enemy from all sides.”

British Defence Minister Philip Hammond, touring Gulf Arab states to discuss Iraq, told reporters in Qatar on Wednesday ISIL could lose control of Sunni areas if local people could be persuaded to withdraw the tacit support they were giving it.

Some Gulf Arab countries had been sending messages to moderate Sunni leaders in Iraq about a political solution, he said without elaborating.

For now, the front rests on two strong pillars: The groups’ common membership of the Sunni minority, and a conviction that Sunnis have been marginalised and persecuted by Maliki.

Both factors have helped ISIL win the cooperation if not the hearts of war-weary Sunni communities. Many of ISIL’s current partners initially collaborated with its parent organisation Al Qaeda before revolting between 2006 and 2008, disgusted by its ultra-hardline agenda.

Then, when they rebelled against Al Qaeda they were bolstered by US firepower, winning promises of reconciliation with Maliki and his Shiite-led government. But Maliki failed to deliver on those pledges and security forces continued to carry out mass arrests in the face of militant threats.

As violence has exploded in the last two years, ISIL has seized on such communal grievances.

Looting, smuggling

ISIL has multiple internal strengths — ruthlessness, self-funded wealth estimated in the tens of millions of dollars from sophisticated extortion rackets, kidnap ransoms, smuggling of oil and other goods, diplomats and counter-terrorism experts say, and eye-catching social media skills.

It and other groups have looted and dismantled captured Syrian factories and sold off the equipment, the diplomats said.

It also has open lines of communication to support bases in neighbouring Syria, where it is a powerful force in that country’s civil war. Its bastion in the town of Raqqa gives it proximity to Turkey — a conduit for foreign recruits — as well as access to Syrian oil reserves, which it sells. They have tapped similar markets in Iraq.

Its achievement in dismantling much of the border drawn by European colonialists nearly a century ago is a source of prestige in the trans-national community of Islamist sympathisers that provides a steady flow of foreign recruits.

And yet, self sufficient though it may be in material terms, in Iraq in recent months it has consciously teamed with other Iraqi factions. It has drawn strength by partnering with them, or by choosing not to hunt them down over past grudges and mainly resisted the urge to eliminate alternative voices.

Such militias include the Islamic Army, the 1920 Revolution Brigades, the Mujahadeen Army, the Rashadeen Army and Ansar Al Sunna. These formations bring together Islamists, military veterans, tribal figures and professionals, who were marginalised after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Another leading group is the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, a Baathist offshoot created by Ezzat Ibrahim Al Duri, a former lieutenant of Saddam’s.

ISIL co-existed with such factions first in the vast desert areas west of Baghdad, where tribes rose up in late December and then in the sudden advance this month in the north.

The Sunni revolt against Maliki in the desert cities of Fallujah and Ramadi since early this year allowed for ISIL to enter the urban areas and seize ground. Since then they have fought the Iraqi government in Anbar, sometimes on the same side and other times in competition with their Sunni cohorts.

In Mosul, the north’s biggest city, ISIL has mostly tolerated the different factions. Its members brag they are converting their fellow fighters. “Other groups are pledging loyalty,” one pro-ISIL Sunni fighter claimed.

An Islamic Army member explained the equation was simple: “The people of Mosul are fed up with the oppression of Maliki’s forces.”

ISIL aims to provoke Iran

In Tikrit and Baiji, where militants are laying siege to Iraq’s biggest refinery, a similar dynamic is in play.

ISIL has the best arms, while tribal fighters, including members of the Islamic Army and Mujahadeen Army, are bolstering ISIL’s numbers in the offensive on Baiji’s refinery, a second Iraqi security official said.

Anna Boyd, an expert on Al Qaeda at IHS risk consultancy, said that the decision by ISIL to partner with other groups over the past year suggests that its leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi is conscious of the pitfalls of factionalism.

Aware of its fractious reputation, ISIL in Syria has attempted “soft power” initiatives to present a more acceptable face. It has run charity events, and provided food and medical aid, sometimes putting on tug-of-war contests in town squares.

But its brutality has also left a record of infighting. In Syria ISIL initially formed alliances of convenience with other rebels but by late 2013 felt strong enough to attack several rival factions including the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate.

Now, in Iraq, Baghdadi’s solution may be to keep raising the levels of violence against Shiites to goad Shiite power Iran to intervene and compel other Sunni factions to cling with him.

Such a development would attract more recruits from conservative Sunni Gulf Arab states, where ISIL’s gory video messages are believed to have an attentive audience on Twitter.

“The risk is that, despite its tendency to feud with other Sunni groups, its military gains... are such that they will inspire support for ISIL beyond Iraq and Syria,” said Boyd.

ISIL is careful to keep an upper hand with its Sunni peers.

Upon the capture Sunday of the town Al Alam, just outside Tikrit, an ISIL leader touring the area was asked why the group had bothered to seize the Sunni community.

The ISIL leader explained the town fell in a broader strategic region, where other armed factions also held sway, and ISIL needed to impose some cohesion. “We are working on coordinating our works and unifying these groups,” he said.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel told the United States on Thursday Kurdish independence in northern Iraq was a “foregone conclusion” and Israeli experts predicted Israel would be quick to recognise a Kurdish state, should it emerge.

Israel has maintained discreet military, intelligence and business ties with the Kurds since the 1960s, seeing in the minority ethnic group a buffer against shared Arab adversaries.

The Kurds have seized on recent sectarian chaos in Iraq to expand their autonomous northern territory to include Kirkuk, which sits on vast oil deposits that could make the independent state many dream of economically viable.

Washington wants Iraq’s crumbling unity restored. On Tuesday, US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Iraqi Kurdish leaders and urged them to seek political integration with Baghdad.

Kerry discussed the Iraqi crisis with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in Paris on Thursday.

“Iraq is breaking up before our eyes and it would appear that the creation of an independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion,” Lieberman’s spokesman quoted him as telling Kerry.

A day earlier, Israeli President Shimon Peres had a similar message for US President Barack Obama, who hosted the dovish elder statesman at the White House.

Briefing reporters, Peres said he had told Obama he did not see unifying Iraq as possible without “massive” foreign military intervention and that this underscored Kurdish separation from the Shiite Muslim majority and Sunni Arab minority.

“The Kurds have, de facto, created their own state, which is democratic. One of the signs of a democracy is the granting of equality to women,” Peres said.

He added that neighbouring Turkey appeared to accept the Kurds’ status as it was helping them pump out oil for sale.

A history of silence

Israel last Friday took its first delivery of the disputed crude from Iraqi Kurdistan’s new pipeline. The United States disapproves of such go-it-alone Kurdish exports.

There are some 30 million Kurds on a swathe of land running through eastern Turkey, northern Syria, northern Iraq and western Iran. They have hesitated to declare independence in Iraq, mindful of opposition from neighbouring states with Kurdish populations.

Israel’s foreign ministry said there were currently no formal diplomatic relations with the Kurds. Israeli officials declined to comment, however, on the more clandestine ties.

“Our silence — in public, at least — is best. Any unnecessary utterance on our part can only harm them [Kurds],” senior Israeli defence official Amos Gilad said on Tuesday.

Asked on Israel’s Army Radio whether Kurdish independence was desirable, Gilad noted the strength of the Israeli-Kurdish partnership in the past and said: “One can look at history and draw conclusions about the future.”

Israeli intelligence veterans say that cooperation took the form of military training for Kurds in northern Iraq, in return for their help in smuggling out Jews as well as in spying on Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad and, more recently, on Iran.

Eliezer Tsafrir, a former Mossad station chief in Kurdish northern Iraq who is now retired from Israeli government service, said the secrecy around the ties had been maintained at the request of the Kurds.

“We’d love it to be out in the open, to have an embassy there, to have normal relations. But we keep it clandestine because that’s what they want,” he told Reuters.

Ofra Bengio, an Iraq expert at Tel Aviv University and the author of two books on the Kurds, said last week’s oil delivery and other commercial ties between Israel and Kurdistan were “obviously” part of wider statecraft.

“I certainly think that the moment [Kurdish President Masoud] Barzani declares independence, these ties would be upgraded into open relations,” she said. “It depends on the Kurds.”

The Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq has denied selling oil to Israel, whether directly or indirectly. The Israeli government declined to comment on Friday’s oil delivery.

GERMAWA CAMP, Iraq — Amsha’s family decided to leave the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar after shelling one night killed their neighbour as he used his outdoor toilet.

The 24-year-old now lives in a tent with the other eight members of her family at the Germawa camp in the Kurdish province of Dohuk.

She describes nights of terror as Sunni militants traded fire with Iraqi troops desperate to hold onto the town.

She curses her country’s politicians, both Shiites like Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki and Sunnis like herself, for courting her support ahead of April 30 elections, only to abandon the city.

“We walked for four hours to leave Tal Afar. We’re now living nine to a tent, trying to breathe in this heat,” she says.

“Where are the politicians from Tal Afar? The ones who came to ask for our vote during the elections?

“They are in Erbil,” she says, referring to the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.

It has been insulated from the insurgent offensive, led by jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, that has overrun parts of five provinces north and west of Baghdad.

They are “safe with their families, or even in the [United Arab] Emirates”.

Amsha, who declines to give her last name, has spent eight days in the camp, after fleeing with her family late one night.

“We were going mad with the shelling. The government planes were overhead and we didn’t know when they would fire or where,” she says.

“Our neighbour was killed in shelling one evening as he went to the toilet, and none of us could sleep because we didn’t know if we’d wake up.”

She said the army announced, as the battle for the town stepped up, that civilians who wanted to leave should do so.

“We set out at 9:00pm. We left the city on foot,” she says.

“The Iraqi army started to fire in the air as we left, and some of us threw ourselves to the ground, thinking they were shooting at us.”

We are trapped’

She and her family say they walked for hours before they were able to find someone with a car willing to pick them up.

They eventually arrived at Germawa, just as the camp was being set up.

A Kurdish official overseeing the camp says nearly 700 people are sheltering there — displaced from Tal Afar and nearby Mosul, a city of some two million that was the first to fall in the militant offensive.

Amsha, like many at the camp, says her family fled for fear of the government response to the militant assault as much as to escape the fighters.

“We are caught in the middle. We didn’t see the militants, only the army’s shelling and air strikes,” she says.

“We just want to be able to sleep and know we will wake up in the morning,” she adds, tears running through the makeup lining her eyes.

She dabs her face with the ends of the brown scarf loosely tied around her hair and regains her composure, and a measure of anger.

“We are trapped. We have no say in our future, everything is decided by those who are in power,” she says.

She makes no secret of her contempt for the Iraqi army, but also expresses no love for the Sunni militants.

“I don’t care who is in charge, Arab, Kurdish, Turkmen, Sunni, Shiite. We just want a future.

“I am a student at university. My brother and sister both have exams they still need to take; we don’t know what will happen to them.”

And she talks shyly about the indignities of life at the camp, especially for its women, including her and her three sisters.

“There’s no privacy for us. Imagine what it is like to live like this on your period,” she says quietly.

“All we want is a life, and a chance to decide what to do with it.”

BAGHDAD/ERBIL — Iraqi forces launched an airborne assault on rebel-held Tikrit on Thursday with commandos flown into a stadium in helicopters, at least one of which crashed after taking fire from insurgents who have seized northern cities.

Eyewitnesses said battles were raging in the city, hometown of former leader Saddam Hussein, which fell to Sunni Islamist fighters two weeks ago on the third day of a lightning offensive that has given them control of most majority Sunni regions.

The helicopters were shot at as they flew low over the city and landed in a stadium at the city’s university, a security source at the scene said. Government spokesmen did not respond to requests for comment and by evening the assault was still not being reported on state media.

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said fierce clashes ensued, centred around the university compound.

Ahmed Al Jubbour, professor at the university’s college of agriculture, described fighting in the colleges of agriculture and sports education after three helicopters arrived.

“I saw one of the helicopters land opposite the university with my own eyes, and I saw clashes between dozens of militants and government forces,” he said.

Jubbour said one helicopter crash landed in the stadium. Another left after dropping off troops and a third remained on the ground. Army snipers were positioning themselves on tall buildings in the university complex.

Iraq’s million-strong army, trained and equipped by the United States, largely evaporated in the north after Sunni fighters led by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant launched their assault with the capture of the north’s biggest city Mosul on June 10.

But in recent days, government forces have been fighting back, relying on elite commandos flown in by helicopter to defend the country’s biggest oil refinery at Baiji.

A successful operation to recapture territory inside Tikrit would deliver the most serious blow yet against an insurgency which for most of the past two weeks has seemed all but unstoppable in the Sunni heartland north and west of Baghdad.

Maliki under pressure

In the capital, the president’s office confirmed that a new parliament elected two months ago would meet on Tuesday, the deadline demanded by the constitution, to begin the process of forming a government.

Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, whose Shiite-led State of Law coalition won the most seats in the April election but needs allies to form a Cabinet, is under strong pressure from the United States and other countries to swiftly build a more inclusive government to undermine support for the insurgency.

Maliki confirmed this week that he would support the constitutional deadlines to set up a new government, after pressure from US Secretary of State John Kerry, who flew to Baghdad for emergency crisis talks to urge him to act.

The 64-year-old Shiite Islamist Maliki is fighting for his political life in the face of an assault that threatens to dismember his country. Sunni, Kurdish and rival Shiite groups have demanded he leave office, and some ruling party members have suggested he could be replaced with a less polarising figure, although close allies say he has no plan to step aside.

Fighters from ISIL — an Al Qaeda offshoot which says all Shiites are heretics who should be killed — have been assisted in their advance by other, more moderate Sunni armed groups who share their view that Sunnis have been persecuted under Maliki.

Washington hopes that armed Sunni tribal groups, which turned against Al Qaeda during the US “surge” offensive of 2006-2007, can again be persuaded to switch sides and back the government, provided that a new Cabinet is more inclusive.

The United States, which withdrew its ground forces in 2011, has ruled out sending them back but is sending up to 300 military advisers, mostly special forces troops, to help organise Baghdad’s military response.

The fighters have been halted about an hour’s drive north of Baghdad and on its western outskirts, but have pressed on with their advances in areas like religiously mixed Diyala province north of the capital, long one of Iraq’s most violent areas.

On Thursday morning, ISIL fighters staged an assault on the town of Mansouriyat Al Jabal, home to inactive gas fields where foreign firms operate, in northeastern Diyala province. An Iraqi oil ministry official denied fighters had taken the field.

A roadside bomb in Baghdad’s Shiite northern district of Kadhimiya killed eight people on Thursday, police and hospital sources said.

Syria strikes

The ISIL-led advance has put the United States on the same side as its enemy of 35 years Iran, the Middle East’s main Shiite power, as well as Iran’s ally president Bashar Assad of Syria, who is fighting ISIL in his country.

Locals in the Iraqi border town of Al Qaim, captured by ISIL several days ago, say Syrian jets carried out strikes against militants on the Iraqi side of the frontier this week, marking the first time Assad’s air forces have come to Baghdad’s aid.

Publicly, Baghdad, which operates helicopters but no jets, said its own forces carried out the air strike. But a senior Iraqi government official confirmed on condition of anonymity that the strike was mounted by Assad’s air force.

Iran, which armed and trained some of Iraq’s Shiite militias, has pledged to intervene if necessary in Iraq to protect Shiite holy places. Thousands of Shiites have answered Maliki’s call to join the armed forces to defend the country.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague arrived in Baghdad on Thursday, reinforcing the international push for Maliki to speed up the political process.

Under the official schedule, parliament will have 30 days from when it first meets on Tuesday to name a president and 15 days after that to name a prime minister.

In the past the process has dragged out, taking nine months to seat the government in 2010. Any delays would allow Maliki to continue to serve as caretaker.

TRIPOLI — Libyans were voting Wednesday in a legislative election the authorities hope will end political turmoil and deadly violence that has gripped the country since the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi.

Voters in Tripoli and Benghazi took advantage of a public holiday called for the election, trickling in to cast their ballots.

Security was tight around some polling stations in the capital, while totally absent at others.

In the past few weeks, Libya has been rocked by a crisis that saw two rival Cabinets jostling for power amid a crippling showdown between Islamists and liberals, as violence raged in the east, where a rogue general is battling jihadists.

A patchwork of militias, including Islamic extremists, who helped to overthrow Qadhafi in the NATO-backed uprising of 2011 have been blamed for violence that has continued unabated since the end of the revolt.

“These are the last chance elections. We are placing much hope in the future parliament to restore the security and stability of our country,” said Amr Baiou, 32, as he emerged from a voting centre in a residential Tripoli neighbourhood.

The heavily armed rebels who ousted and killed Qadhafi have carved out their own fiefdoms in the deeply tribal country, some even seizing oil terminals and crippling crude exports from a sector key to government revenues.

The General National Congress (GNC), or parliament, which has served as Libya’s highest political authority since the 2011 revolt, was elected in July 2012, in the country’s first ever free polls.

But it has been mired in controversy and accused of hogging power, with successive governments complaining its role as both executive and legislative authority has tied their hands in taming militias.

The crisis came to a head in February when the assembly, whose term had been due to expire, decided to prolong its mandate until December.

That sparked street protests and forced lawmakers to announce the election.

Almost 3.5 million Libyans are eligible to vote but only 1.5 million have registered, a far cry from the more than 2.7 million who registered two years ago.

Voters are choosing from among 1,628 candidates, with 32 seats in the 200-strong GNC reserved for women and would-be MPs banned from belonging to any political party.

Polling ends at 8:00 pm (1800 GMT), and final results are expected in “several days”, according to electoral officials.

‘Shadow MPs’ 

The UN Security Council has expressed hopes that the vote can be a stepping stone out of the chaos.

“These elections are an important step in Libya’s transition towards stable democratic governance,” it said this week.

For analyst Salem Soltan, none of the candidates standing in the elections “carry the political or social weight” needed in the assembly.

The new parliament risks “being run by shadow MPs, who will act according to instructions from warlords and militias,” he said.

But some of those taking part in Wednesday’s poll disagreed.

“We are voting so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past,” said Salah Al Thabet.

“We voted in the first elections just to vote. This time I have really researched the candidates, and I voted for the right people,” added the 62-year-old pensioner, after casting his ballot in central Tripoli.

There are concerns that violence will mar polling day, particularly in the unrest-hit east, scene of a deadly 2012 attack by jihadists on the US consulate in Benghazi.

“Generally, we are optimistic, but there is a risk that the vote will be disrupted in some polling stations, namely in Benghazi and Derna,” both Islamist strongholds, an electoral official told AFP.

Last week, the government instructed the interior ministry and the armed forces to come up with a security plan for the vote.

The task is not expected to be easy.

Authorities have been struggling to build a strong army and police force and now face defections from members of the security forces who have joined the ranks of rogue general Khalifa Haftar who is battling Islamists in Benghazi.

Haftar, accused by authorities of trying to mount a coup, said he would observe a truce during the vote, but the Islamists did not divulge their intentions.

RAMALLAH — Dozens of Palestinian prisoners who had refused food for 62 days have suspended their hunger strike after reaching a deal with the Israel Prisons Service, their lawyer told AFP.

The prisoners began refusing food on April 24 in protest at being held by Israel without charge or trial under a controversial procedure called administrative detention, which can be indefinitely extended for years.

“The strikers, who have reached an agreement with the Israeli prison authorities, have decided to suspend their action with the approach of Ramadan,” Ashraf Abu Sneina said, referring to the holy month which begins this weekend.

Israel confirmed the agreement, details of which were to be made public later on Wednesday.

“The hunger strike was suspended overnight,” Israel Prisons Service (IPS) spokeswoman Sivan Weizman told AFP.

She said the sides have reached a “short-term agreement” which allowed for the hunger-strikers, all of whom are being treated in hospital due to their rapidly failing health, to suspend their action.

“But this arrangement does not involve any suspension or cancellation of the use of administrative detention,” Weizman said.

“This measure will continue to be used.”

The IPS put the number of hunger strikers at 75 when the deal was reached.

Earlier this month, the IPS said the hunger strike was the longest-ever staged by Palestinian detainees.

Some of the hunger strikers were kept alive with vitamins and sugars, but others took only water for the duration, according to prisoners’ rights group Addameer.

Administrative detention is a procedure dating back to the British Mandate of Palestine (1920-1948) under which prisoners can be held for six-month periods, which can be indefinitely renewed by a court order.

Around 200 of the 5,000 or so Palestinians held by Israel are administrative detainees, although that number looks set to double as Israel presses a major arrest operation in the West Bank following the disappearance of three teenagers believed kidnapped by Hamas.

So far, 371 Palestinians have been arrested — 280 of them Hamas members — with most expected to be slapped with administrative detention orders.

The Palestinian leadership and human rights groups have denounced the use of administrative detention, urging international pressure on Israel to scrap the measure.

Israel’s army did not respond to requests for comment on the procedure, but former IPS commissioner Orit Adato said holding prisoners without charge was the only way to protect Israel’s network of Palestinian informants.

“This procedure is used when it’s clear we have someone dangerous on our hands... but a trial would involve revealing our sources, putting them in danger,” she told AFP.

Earlier this month, UN chief Ban Ki-moon expressed concern about the deteriorating health of the hunger-strikers and demanded that Israel either charge or release them.

In an attempt to prevent further hunger strikes, the Israeli government is planning to pass a controversial law which would allow the authorities to force-feed prisoners. It is to be put to a second and third vote in parliament on Monday.

CAIRO — Four makeshift bombs exploded within minutes of each other at three Cairo metro stations during morning rush hour on Wednesday, wounding at least four people, police and health officials said.

Militants have stepped up attacks in Egypt, mostly against security forces, since the army ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013 and the authorities launched a deadly crackdown on his supporters.

One bomb went off at the station of Ghamra, in central Cairo, while the others occurred at Shubra El Kheima and Hadayek Al Kobba on the outskirts of the capital, a police official told AFP.

The explosive devices were “very primary” and of “low intensity”, the official said.

Four people were hurt in the explosions, senior health ministry official Ahmed Ansari told AFP.

The attacks come nearly a month after ex-army chief Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who led Morsi’s ouster, was elected president.

Since Morsi’s ouster, a crackdown on his supporters has left more than 1,400 people dead and seen at least 15,000 jailed, while hundreds have been sentenced to death in speedy mass trials that have sparked an international outcry.

Much of the violence is focused in the north of the mainly desert Sinai Peninsula, but militants have extended their reach to Cairo and the Nile Delta, carrying out a series of high-profile assaults in the heart of the capital.

Authorities have blamed Morsi’s Muslim brotherhood for the attacks and have listed the Islamist organisation as a terrorist group.

An Al Qaeda inspired jihadist group based in the Sinai, Ansar Beit Al Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem), has claimed some of the deadliest attacks on security forces, as well as a failed assassination attempt against the interior minister in September.

A little-known jihadist group, Ajnad Misr (Soldiers of Egypt), has also claimed a string of attacks on police in Cairo.

The government says the militants have killed about 500 people, most of them security personnel, in the attacks.

BEIRUT — A suicide bomber blew himself up in his room at a Beirut hotel Wednesday as Lebanese security forces raided the premises, causing an explosion that sent flames and a dark cloud of black smoke billowing out of the third-floor windows, security officials said.

The blast towards the end of evening rush-hour took place inside the Duroy Hotel in Beirut’s Raouche district, a posh neighbourhood of apartment towers and upscale hotels perched on cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Lebanese security forces, who detained a second suspected bomber in the sweep, sealed off the area around the hotel and armed gunmen fanned out on the street to secure the location.

The bombing is the latest in a string of attacks and security scares in Lebanon over the past week that have sparked fears of renewed violence in a country that has been deeply affected by the civil war in neighbouring Syria.

“General security was conducting a raid and were able to arrest one suspect, while another blew himself up,” Lebanon’s military prosecutor, Saqr Saqr, told reporters at the scene. “Three general security officers were wounded. An operation is under way at the hotel. Every room is being searched to see if there are more explosives.”

Lebanese Interior Minister Nohad Machnouk said the raid was a “preventative strike” by authorities, and that the “suicide bomber was going to detonate himself elsewhere and they managed to stop him.” He said the suspect in custody was wounded, and is currently under guard at American University Hospital in Beirut.

A general security official said the raid was part of ongoing efforts to pursue suspected militants in Lebanon. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief journalists.

Security agents later encircled a building nearby that houses furnished apartments before raiding it as well.

Moahamed Obeid, who works as a waiter at the Duroy’s restaurant, said two SUVs carrying security agents arrived at the hotel, which is located a block from the Mediterranean, just after a party began at 7:30 local time.

“People got suspicious and seconds later we heard a strong explosion,” Obeid said, standing around 50 metres from the hotel. “Clients started running away, some to the kitchen and others through the back door.”

He said one employee at the hotel was wounded.

Damage appeared to be confined to the third and fourth floors of the hotel. The explosion started a fire on the third floor, and thick black smoke billowed above the hotel as fire engines struggled to contain the blaze.

A string of security incidents over the past week has rattled Lebanon, and Beirut in particular, after what had been a calm and stable stretch of several months.

On Monday, a suicide bomber blew himself up near a checkpoint outside a cafe just after midnight in a primarily Shiite neighbourhood where the Hizbollah group has a strong presence. The bombing killed one person and wounded 20.

An Al Qaeda-linked group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, has warned that such attacks will continue as long as Hizbollah takes part in Syria’s civil war alongside President Bashar Assad’s military.

Another bombing in eastern Lebanon last week killed a police officer and wounded several others.

The bombings, coupled with the detention last Friday in Beirut of people accused of being part of alleged Sunni extremist militant sleeper cells, has given rise to concerns that Lebanon could see a new wave of violence linked to the Syrian conflict.

Syria’s civil war has spilled into neighbouring Lebanon on numerous occasions and inflamed sectarian tensions. A series of car bombs have struck Shiite areas across Lebanon, killing dozens of people. The operation also came amid mounting regional tensions over the events unfolding in Iraq.

BAGHDAD — US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Mideast nations on Wednesday against taking new military action in Iraq that might heighten already-tense sectarian divisions, as reports surfaced that Syria launched air strikes across the border and Iran has been flying surveillance drones over the neighbouring country.

A senior Iraqi military official confirmed that Syrian warplanes bombed militants’ positions Tuesday in and near the border crossing in the town of Qaim. He said Iraq’s other neighbours — Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — were all bolstering flights just inside their airspace to monitor the situation. 

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

American officials said the strikes appeared to be the work of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government. They said the target was the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a Sunni extremist group that seeks to carve out a purist Islamic enclave across both sides of the Syria-Iraq border.

“We’ve made it clear to everyone in the region that we don’t need anything to take place that might exacerbate that sectarian divisions that are already at a heightened level of tension,” Kerry said, speaking at a meeting of diplomats from NATO nations. “It’s already important that nothing take place that contributes to the extremism or could act as a flash point with respects to the sectarian divide.”

Kerry said Baghdad needs to take steps to ensure that Iraq’s military can defend the country without relying on outside forces. The US is sending 300 military advisers.

Nevertheless, the involvement of Syria and Iran in Iraq suggests a developing Shiite axis among the three governments in response to the raging Sunni insurgency. And in an unusual twist, the US, Iran and Syria now find themselves with overlapping interests in stabilising Iraq’s government.

US officials believe the leadership in Baghdad should seek to draw Sunni support away from the militants led by the Islamic State. The insurgency has drawn support from disaffected Iraqi Sunnis who are angry over perceived mistreatment and random detentions by the Shiite-led government.

Kerry said Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki appears to be standing by his commitment to start building a new government that fully represents its Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish population. But he said the US is watching closely to make sure any new political process does not repeat past mistakes of excluding Iraq’s minorities.

On Wednesday, Maliki rejected calls for an interim “national salvation government” in his first public statement since President Barack Obama challenged him last week to create a more inclusive leadership or risk a sectarian civil war.

Several politicians, including Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who has been named as a possible contender to replace Maliki, have called on him to step down and form an interim government that could provide leadership until a more permanent solution can be found.

Maliki, however, insisted the political process must be allowed to proceed following recent national elections in which his bloc won the largest share of parliament seats.

“The call to form a national salvation government represents a coup against the constitution and the political process,” he said. He added that “rebels against the constitution” — a thinly veiled reference to Sunni rivals — posed a more serious danger to Iraq than the militants.

He called on “political forces” to close ranks in the face of the growing threat by insurgents, but took no concrete steps to meet US demands for greater inclusion of minority Sunnis.

Maliki’s coalition, the State of the Law, won the 92 seats of the 328-member parliament in the election. In office since 2006, Maliki needs the support of a simple majority to hold on to the job for another four-year term. The legislature is expected to meet before the end of the month, when it will elect a speaker. It has 30 days to elect a new president, who in turn will select the leader of the majority bloc in parliament to form the next government.

Qaim, where the Syrian air strikes took place, is located in the vast and mostly Sunni Anbar province. Its provincial government spokesman, Dhari Al Rishawi, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that 17 people were killed in an air raid there.

The White House said intervention by Syria was not the way to stem the insurgents, who have taken control of several cities in northern and western Iraq.

“The solution to the threat confronting Iraq is not the intervention of the Assad regime, which allowed ISIL to thrive in the first place,” said Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman. “The solution to Iraq’s security challenge does not involve militias or the murderous Assad regime, but the strengthening of the Iraqi security forces to combat threats.”

In fighting Wednesday, Sunni militants launched a dawn raid on a key Iraqi oil refinery they have been trying to take for days, but security forces fought them back, said Col. Ali Al Quraishi, the commander of the Iraqi forces on the scene.

A mortar shell also smashed into a house in Jalula, northeast of Baghdad, killing a woman and her two children. That town in the turbulent Diyala province is under the control of Kurdish fighters known as peshmerga.

Also Wednesday, a report by Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency said an attack near Iran’s western border with Iraq has killed three Iranian border guards. They were killed Tuesday night while patrolling along the border in western Kermanshah province. A border outpost commander was among the three killed, Fars quoted a local security official, Shahriar Heidari, as saying.

Heidari said an unspecified “terrorist group” was behind the attack but provided no details.

A US official said Wednesday that Iran has been flying surveillance drones in Iraq.

American and Iranian officials have had some direct discussions on the matter, though the Obama administration has ruled out the prospect of direct military involvement. The US is also conducting aerial surveillance over Iraq.

The US officials spoke only on grounds of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to discuss the issue publicly.

In the face of militant advances that have virtually erased Iraq’s western border with Syria and captured territory on the frontier with Jordan, Maliki’s focus has been the defence of Baghdad, a majority Shiite city of 7 million fraught with growing tension. The city’s Shiites fear they could be massacred and the revered Al Kazimiyah shrine destroyed if Islamic State fighters capture Baghdad. Sunni residents also fear the extremists, as well as Shiite militiamen in the city, who they worry could turn against them.

The militants have vowed to march to Baghdad and the holy Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala, a threat that prompted the nation’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, to issue an urgent call to arms that has resonated with young Shiite men.

Maliki, who has no military background but gets the final say on major battlefield decisions, has looked to hundreds of thousands of Shiite volunteers who joined the security forces as the best hope to repel the Islamic State’s offensive.

While giving the conflict a sectarian slant — the overwhelming majority are Shiites — the volunteers have also been a logistical headache as the army tries to clothe, feed and arm them. Furthermore, their inexperience means they will not be combat ready for weeks, even months.

Still, some were sent straight to battle, with disastrous consequences.

New details about the fight for Tal Afar — the first attempt to retake a major city from the insurgents — underscore the challenges facing the Iraqi security forces.

Dozens of young volunteers disembarked last week at an airstrip near the isolated northern city and headed straight to battle, led by an army unit. The volunteers and the accompanying troops initially staved off advances by the militants, but were soon beaten back, according to military officials.

They took refuge in the airstrip, but the militants shelled the facility so heavily the army unit pulled out, leaving 150 panicking volunteers to fend for themselves, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.

The ill-fated expedition — at least 30 volunteers and troops were killed and the rest of the recruits remain stranded at the airstrip — does not bode well for Maliki’s declared plan to make them the backbone of Iraq’s future army.