Region

ERBIL — Fuel shortages in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region will last for at least another week, government officials said on Sunday, as sweeping advances by Sunni Muslim militants further south put a heavy strain on supply lines.

Queues of motorists, some up to 2km long, have been one of the most visible signs of the militants’ battlefield successes in Iraq for the people of Kurdistan’s regional capital Erbil, a city filled with new office blocks and Western oil workers barely an hour’s drive from Mosul, now in rebel hands.

The fuel shortages have exacerbated pressure on an economy already strained by central government budget cuts and virtual civil war on Iraqi Kurdistan’s southern border.

An influx of displaced families, an attack by the militants of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (ISIL) on Iraq’s largest refinery and fuel smuggling into insurgent-controlled towns have all hit supplies, though government officials say the situation is slowly easing.

“We are not dependent on Iraq for our fuel, we have our own refineries,” one regional government (KRG) official said.

“We expect fuel supplies to be better in the coming weeks. Already the lines are going down,” he said, adding a coupon system would be introduced soon to help ration supplies.

Motorists have already been limited to just 30 litres of gasoline or diesel every second day, with fuel supplies prioritised for ambulances and the KRG’s ‘Peshmerga’ soldiers as they fight a series of border skirmishes with ISIL-led groups.

‘We need to drive’

While heavily subsidised fuel prices have largely remained steady, many taxi drivers are increasing fares due to the time spent waiting to fill their cars. Motorists in Erbil on Sunday said the average line was around three hours long.

“You can’t work for long without petrol, we need to drive,” said Mirin Ahmed, a civil engineer sitting in a queue in his Toyota Land Cruiser at a filling station just outside the city’s Christian sector on Sunday.

While fuel shortages are relatively common in other parts of Iraq following years of violence and under-investment, the Kurdish region has in recent years presented itself as a stable environment for Western firms to do business.

Energy companies such as Gulf Keystone Petroleum and Genel Energy have been some of the biggest investors in the region, hoping to drill what is seen as one of the biggest potential onshore deposits that is still relatively untapped.

“One of the key selling points of the Kurdish region is things are meant to work,” one KRG official said this week. “We need to get this resolved as soon as we possibly can.”

The autonomous region refined about 96,000 barrels per day last year, according to a KRG presentation in London on June 17, while fuel demand is estimated at around 140,000bpd. Turkey has said it will try to increase exports to the region.

The 300,000bpd Baiji refinery near Mosul, which has been defended by Iraqi government forces in a near week-long siege against ISIL-led Sunni militants, has stopped production, straining fuel supplies throughout Iraq.

When Iraqi soldiers retreated from the north of the country after the fall of Mosul 12 days ago, the KRG was able to expand the territory it controls, including the long-disputed oil town of Kirkuk that Kurds consider their historical capital.

However, the KRG’s budget has been hit by a dispute with Iraq over oil sales. KRG officials have accused Baghdad of prioritising fuel supplies to other areas of the country.

The first cargo of Kurdish crude carried to the Turkish port of Ceyhan through a new pipeline was delivered by tanker into Israel on Friday, potentially securing the KRG much-needed revenues. Baghdad has threatened legal action against any buyers, however, decrying any sales outside its control.

BENGHAZI — A Libyan renegade general has called on all Turks and Qataris to leave volatile eastern Libya, accusing the two countries of supporting “terrorism”, his spokesman said on Sunday.

Retired General Khalifa Haftar has declared war on Islamist militants in eastern Libya, part of growing turmoil in the oil producer where the government is unable to control armed groups which helped oust Muammar Qadhafi in 2011 but now defy state authority.

The Tripoli government says Haftar has no authority to act but its orders are routinely ignored in much of the oil-producing country, especially in the east where Islamists, tribes and militias vie for control.

“All citizens of Turkey and Qatar should leave Libya within 48 hours. The deadline started last night,” Haftar’s spokesman, Mohamed El Hejazi, said.

“They should leave the part of Libya from Imsaid [at the Egyptian border] to Sirte [in central Libya] and we are not responsible for these two nationalities on the Libyan land.”

A Turkish embassy official declined to comment. Turkey moved staff of its Benghazi consulate to Tripoli this month. Qatar’s mission could not be immediately reached for comment.

Turkey and Qatar both have supported the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement which has been declared a “terrorist” organisation by Egypt and Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia.

There has been speculation among analysts that Haftar has the support of neighbouring Egypt and of Gulf states such as the United Arab Emirates, which like the West are worried about Islamist militants exploiting the chaos in Libya.

Haftar had last week accused Qatar of supporting armed militias in Libya.

The latest fighting in Libya comes days before a parliamentary election that ordinary citizens hope will ease the chronic political infighting that has paralysed decision making since the last vote in the summer of 2012.

WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticised Sunday the “disgraceful” decision by the US Presbyterian Church to divest from three companies that provide supplies to Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank.

On Friday, a group of church elders and ministers voted 310-303 to pull financial investments from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions — a total of about $21 million, according to reports.

“It’s so disgraceful,” Netanyahu said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” news programme. “Most Americans understand that Israel is a beacon of civilisation and moderation.”

He said that while much of the Middle East was “riveted by religious hatred, by savagery of unimaginable proportions”, Israel is “the one democracy that upholds basic human rights, that guards the rights of all minorities, that protects Christians”.

Netanyahu advised the Presbyterians to “fly to the Middle East, come and see Israel for the embattled democracy that it is, and then take a bus tour, go to Libya, go to Syria, go to Iraq, and see the difference”.

“I would give them two pieces of advice — one is make sure it’s an armour-plated bus, and second, don’t say that you’re Christian.”

In a statement ahead of the vote, Presbyterian Church USA had said it was considering divestment in Caterpillar because the company provides bulldozers “used in the destruction of Palestinian homes” to make way for Israeli settlements.

Hewlett-Packard, it said, “provides electronic systems at checkpoints, logistics and communications systems to support the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, and has business relationships with illegal settlements in the West Bank”.

And Motorola Solutions “provides military communications and surveillance systems in the illegal Israeli settlements”.

The decision by the nearly 1.9-million-member Presbyterian Church came as the so-called BDS campaign — Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions — has gathered some steam in the United States.

The three companies said they regretted the Presbyterian move and reaffirmed their belief in human rights and a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

BEIRUT — In a reflection of how intertwined the Syria and Iraq conflicts have become, thousands of Shiite Iraqi militiamen helping President Bashar Assad crush the Sunni-led uprising against him are returning home, putting a strain on the overstretched Syrian military as it struggles to retain territory recaptured in recent months from rebels.

The borders between the two countries are being largely ignored, with fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) said to be crossing freely from one side to the other, transporting weapons, equipment and cash in a development that has potential to shift the balance of power in a largely stalemated battle.

The seizure of large chunks of Iraq by militants does offer Assad a messaging victory: he has long insisted that the uprising against him is the work of foreign-inspired Islamic extremists, suggesting that the West needs to work with him to check the influence of jihadis, and that the radicals, not the divided and weaker pro-Western moderate rebels, are the real alternative to his rule.

The violent actions and speedy successes of the same group in Iraq, against a government the West does essentially support, seem to align with his argument. And he can relish the fact that the US is weighing air strikes against Sunni militants in Iraq — and possibly Syria — while shying away from any military action against his government for the past three years.

But the developments also threaten to upset what has recently been an upward trend by Assad’s forces in the three-year-old Syrian conflict.

The Syrian government is heavily reliant on foreign fighters to bolster its ranks and help quell the largely Sunni insurgency engulfing the country. They include thousands of Shiite Hizbollah fighters, Iranian Revolutionary Guard advisers and Iraqi militiamen who left their homes and headed to Syria to defend what they see as an attack on the Shiite regional axis comprised of Iran, Assad, Hizbollah in Lebanon and Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s government in Iraq.

That axis is now under mounting pressure. The militants of the ISIL are carving out an ever-expanding fiefdom along the Iraqi-Syrian border. Earlier this month, they seized Iraq’s city of Mosul — and they have vowed to march on to the Iraqi capital Baghdad as well. In the past few days, the militants seized two strategically located towns along the Euphrates River, including the Qaim border crossing with Syria — advancing their efforts to etch out a large region straddling the two conflict-ridden countries.

“The developments in Iraq are a double-edged sword for Assad,” said Randa Slim, a director at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. “On one hand, these developments help Assad’s narrative to his constituents and to the West that his fight is with terrorists and not against democrats.” On the other hand, she said, the Islamic State’s rapid and successful incursion into Iraq undermines Assad’s claim that he is able to defeat them.

In the most immediate outcome, thousands of Iraqi Shiite militiamen fighting in Syria are heading back home to defend against the Sunni blitz, leaving behind gaping holes in areas under their control.

In interviews conducted by The Associated Press with returning Shiite fighters in Baghdad, many said they were responding to a call to arms issued in recent days by Iraq’s Shiite spiritual leader Ali Sistani. Others said they considered Iraq to be the mother battle.

“Yes, we took part in the fighting in Syria. But now the priority is Iraq,” said Jassem Al Jazaeri, a senior official in Iraq’s Hizbollah Brigades, which is believed to be funded and trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Most of the Shiite Iraqi fighters in Syria — believed by some estimates to number between 20,000 and 30,000 — have been battling rebels in suburbs of the Syrian capital and particularly in the vicinity of Sayida Zeinab, home to a major Shiite shrine by the same name.

Syrian opposition activists say Syrian rebels are already exploiting the vacuum left by the Iraqis to mount attacks. A number of Hizbollah fighters were killed in an attack on the town of Rankous in the Qalamoun region last week. The town fell to government and Hizbollah forces two months ago.

Firas Abi Ali, head of Middle East and North Africa Analysis, IHS Country Risk, said in a recent analysis that the Syrian government will compensate for any redeployment of Iraqi fighters using manpower drawn mainly from Hizbollah.

“However, the Iraqi fighters’ departure would probably temporarily reduce the ability of the Syrian government to mount new offensives and place it on the strategic defensive,” he said.

Another concern for Assad is the possibility that the Islamic State might transfer advanced weapons and vehicles from Iraq across the border into Syria.

A senior Iraqi intelligence official confirmed that fighters have indeed begun doing this. The official, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, said the fighters recently seized depots in Mosul containing up to 400,000 pieces of weaponry and ammunition, and that a quarter of it has been moved to Syria, possibly for storage and safe guarding.

In a report Saturday, the global intelligence outfit Stratfor said the group has seized from retreating Iraqi soldiers armoured vehicles, small arms, ammunition, artillery, communication devices, and possibly more.

“This gear would provide a substantial boost on the battleground in Syria, and the group has indeed already begun to transfer some of this equipment across the border,” said the report.

Opposition activists in eastern Syria say they have not yet seen anything to indicate any game changing weapons at play.

Still, such reports are likely to make the West even less inclined to supply rebels in Syria with the advanced weaponry they need to confront Assad’s military superiority.

“This will translate into less pressure on the Assad regime and more reluctance to arm the moderate Syrian rebel groups for fear that those weapons will fall in the hands of the jihadis,” Slim said.

Observers also say the Iraq chaos is putting a strain on Shiite powerhouse Iran, as it labours to prop up beleaguered allies in both Iraq and Syria. Suleiman Takieddine, a columnist writing in the Lebanese daily As-Safir, said Iran’s ability to endure a long war of attrition on multiple fronts, “economically, militarily and politically”, is in doubt.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama, in charting a new phase of American military engagement in Iraq, pledges that his war-weary country will not be “dragged back” into a lengthy conflict or become ensnarled in “mission creep”.

But recent US military history is full of warning signs about the difficulty of keeping even a limited mission from expanding and extending. The prospect that this latest mission in Iraq could follow that pattern is particularly risky for Obama, given that he has staked so much of his legacy on having brought America’s long war there to a close.

Already some of the White House’s closest allies worry that Obama’s plan to send in 300 special operations forces to train the Iraqi military could be the first step in pulling the US back into Iraq’s violent sectarian fight.

“I think that you have to be careful sending special forces because that’s a number that has a tendency to grow,” said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, one of Obama’s staunchest supporters.

Anna Galland, the executive director of the liberal group MoveOn.org, said even a limited mission “is a dangerous and troubling development that threatens to lead to broader military engagement.”

Indeed, the US has seen small operations escalate before.

The conflict in Vietnam started with presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy sending limited numbers of military advisers to train and assist local forces. But those numbers increased over time and set the stage for what ultimately became a years-long combat operation.

The wars that began in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade were intended to be combat missions from the start. Few people expected at the time that the Iraq war would drag on for more than eight years, the Afghan conflict for more than a dozen years, or that the US troop presence in each country would peak above 100,000.

Obama acknowledged the risks of mission creep when he outlined plans Thursday to help Iraq combat the Islamic insurgency that has made gains with lighting speed and, according to administration officials, poses a threat to US interests. The Green Beret military advisers set to arrive soon in Iraq will join a previously announced contingent of 275 US forces sent in the last week to secure the US embassy in Baghdad and other American interests.

The deployments mark a sharp shift for a president who oversaw the full withdrawal of American forces from Iraq in late 2011 after Washington and Baghdad failed to reach an agreement to keep a few thousand troops in place. While Obama repeatedly has cited the end of the war as one of his chief achievements, his decision to return some troops to Iraq now raises the question of whether an asterisk ultimately may accompany that claim.

Administration officials insist Obama does not intend to commit the US to another lengthy war in Iraq or put American forces in combat roles. Signaling his reluctance to reengage, Obama also decided to hold off launching air strikes, though he left the prospect of targeted strikes on the table.

The president repeatedly made the case that expanding the US military presence would do little good given that the root of Iraq’s problems is a political system that has excluded the country’s Sunni minority.

“We do not have the ability to simply solve this problem by sending in tens of thousands of troops and committing the kinds of blood and treasure that has already been expended in Iraq,” he said. “Ultimately, this is something that is going to have to be solved by the Iraqis.”

But there are few guarantees when it comes to sending Americans into Iraq’s unstable security situation. Though the troops are not being sent specifically for combat purposes, all are armed and have the right to defend themselves if they are in danger.

“As soon as you put troops or advisers in an area of conflict, they’re at risk,” said Julian Zelizer, a political history professor at Princeton University. “That is the nature of war. It’s unpredictable and it takes twist and turns that you don’t foresee.”

Iraq, with its sectarian divides, violent past and unstable politics, may be particularly susceptible to that kind of unpredictability. Obama appeared to leave himself plenty of room to quickly pull out of Iraq, outlining no timeline for how long the military advisers will stay and no vision for what would constitute a mission accomplished.

Yet it’s that loosely defined mission that leaves some of Obama’s supporters worried about the potential for another open-ended commitment to Iraq. Trying to ease their fears, Obama said he was making decisions with the “dark scars” on his mind of the eight-year war that killed nearly 4,500 American troops.

“What’s clear from the last decade is the need for the United States to ask hard questions before we take action abroad, particularly military action,” the president said.

CAIRO — An Egyptian court confirmed death sentences on Saturday against the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and 182 supporters, in a mass trial of Islamists who ruled Egypt for a year but face a fierce crackdown under the new president, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.

Mohamed Badie and other defendants were charged in connection with violence that erupted in the southern town of Minya following the ousting of the Brotherhood’s President Mohamed Morsi last July, led by then army chief Sisi.

One police officer was killed in the violence.

The court’s decision came two months after it referred the case against Badie, general guide of the now outlawed Brotherhood, and 682 other defendants to a top religious authority, the first step to imposing a death penalty.

Those preliminary sentences triggered outrage among Western governments and rights groups, with the United States and European Union both saying they were appalled by the rulings.

Since Morsi’s overthrow, which was followed by protests by his supporters, hundreds of Islamist protesters have been killed and thousands jailed in a crackdown by security forces. Five hundred army and police officers have also been killed.

Sisi, who won a presidential election last month, said in the run-up to the vote that the Brotherhood — Egypt’s oldest, most organised and successful political group — was finished and would not exist under his rule.

Amnesty International described the verdicts as “the latest example of the Egyptian judiciary’s bid to crush dissent”.

There was no immediate reaction on the ruling from the Brotherhood, whose members are either in jail or on the run.

Outside the Minya court compound, around 200 people, mostly relatives of defendants that were freed, gathered to celebrate the ruling. “Long live justice, long live Sisi,” they chanted.

Out of a total 683 defendants, around 100 are in detention and the rest were tried in absentia. Four were jailed for life while 496 were acquitted, according to judiciary sources. All verdicts can be appealed before a higher court.

“Those rulings are a continued farce,” prominent Egyptian human rights activist and lawyer Gamal Eid said on Saturday.

“And the state is still insisting that the judiciary is independent. I don’t know how we can believe that when we see rulings like that. It is against logic and common sense. It is a joke,” he said.

US aid

The United States has said it would be unconscionable for Egypt to carry out mass death sentences against the Brotherhood and that Cairo’s actions would have consequences for resumption of suspended US aid.

The US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is due to tour the Middle East this week, is expected to pay a brief visit to Egypt on Sunday, according to local Egyptian media reports.

Egypt, the biggest Arab state, which controls the strategic Suez Canal, has been among the largest recipients of US military and economic aid since its 1979 peace treaty with US ally Israel.

Some of that support was put on hold after Morsi’s overthrow, the latest round in a decades-old struggle between Egyptian authorities and the Islamist movement.

The 70-year-old Badie was first jailed under President Gamal Abdel Nasser nearly 50 years ago, alongside the Brotherhood’s then leader and ideologue Sayyid Qutb who was executed in 1966.

Qutb’s revolutionary writings in jail are believed to have inspired generations of Islamist militants including Ayman Al Zawahri, the Egyptian doctor who succeeded Osama Bin Laden as Al Qaeda leader, although the Brotherhood itself has renounced violence decades ago.

The same court that sentenced Badie on Saturday has already confirmed death sentences on 37 Brotherhood supporters in rulings that were part of a final judgment on 528 Muslim Brotherhood supporters who received initial death sentences.

In a separate case, a Cairo court referred Badie and 13 Brotherhood supporters on Thursday to the Mufti, a top religious authority, on charges of murder and firearms possession related to clashes during the protests last July.

Badie and other senior Brotherhood leaders including Morsi are standing trial in other cases.

Sisi held a brief meeting at Cairo airport late Friday with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah whose country, like Egypt, has branded the Brotherhood a terrorist organisation, viewing its Islamist doctrines as a threat to Saudi dynastic rule.

The Egyptian state had in November issued a law that banned protests without police permission. Many liberal and Islamist activists have been arrested in the past few months for protesting without a licence.

BEIRUT — The Syrian army has carried out a series of air strikes against a town in eastern Syria that was captured by fighters from an Al Qaeda breakaway group a day earlier, killing 16 people, activists said Saturday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the warplanes pounded parts of Muhassan with six air strikes, adding that the casualties included three civilians.

Fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant stormed Muhassan along the Euphrates River on Friday, raising their black flags around the town after rebels from the Western-backed Supreme Military Council defected to the jihadi group, activists said.

The town is in the eastern province of Deir Al Zour, which borders Iraq and where the Islamic State has been on the offensive since late April against rival jihadi and Islamic groups.

It comes as militants from the group seized an Iraqi crossing on the border with Syria after a day-long battle in which they killed some 30 Iraqi troops.

The capture of the Qaim border crossing deals a further blow to the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, which has struggled to push back against Islamic extremists and allied militants who have seized large swaths of the country, including the second largest city Mosul, and who have vowed to march on Baghdad.

Sunni militants have carved out a large fiefdom astride the Iraqi-Syrian border and have long travelled back and forth with ease, but the control of crossings allows them to more easily move weapons and heavy equipment to different battlefields.

The Syrian army has stepped up its air strikes against suspected Islamic State positions in Syria in recent days in an apparent attempt to relieve pressure on the Iraqi army fighting the group in neighbouring Iraq.

Meanwhile, Syria’s state-run news agency said a car bomb has exploded in a government-held part of the northern Syrian city of Hassakeh, killing at least three people and wounding several others. It said the car was driven by a suicide attacker.

Car bombs are common in the Syrian conflict, which began in March 2011 with largely peaceful protests against President Bashar Assad’s rule but escalated into an insurgency and civil war with sectarian overtones. Opposition activists say more than 160,000 people have been killed, nearly a third of them civilians.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli occupation forces have arrested 10 more Palestinians in the West Bank as they press their search for three teenagers believed to have been kidnapped, the army said Saturday.

“Ten people were arrested overnight, bringing to 330 the number of wanted Palestinians arrested since the beginning of the operation,” a spokeswoman said.

Israel accuses Hamas of kidnapping two 16 year olds and a 19-year-old who went missing June 12 at a hitchhiking stop in the West Bank, an allegation the Islamist group has dismissed.

Public radio said those arrested included people who had been released from Israeli jails as part of the 2011 deal to free soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been captured and then held by Hamas for five years.

The army declined to confirm that report.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation said some 50 former prisoners have been placed back in administrative detention by Israel and 380 Palestinians had been arrested since June 12.

Israeli media said teams of firemen and police specialised in rescue operations were in the Hebron area, searching wells, reservoirs and caves.

The search was ongoing inside Hebron city itself, where a 14-year-old Palestinian boy was killed on Friday by the army as well as in Ramallah, where the army said it had raided the premises of the Hamas television channel.

In the West Bank city of Nablus, a 60-year-old man died of a heart attack as Israeli troops searched outside his house, Palestinian security sources said.

Separately, a rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, striking near Ashkelon city without causing any casualties, the army said.

The missing Israeli teenagers are Gilad Shaer, 16, from Talmon settlement near Ramallah, Naftali Frenkel, 16, from Nof Ayalon, and Eyal Ifrach, 19, from Elad, both in central Israel.

BAGHDAD — Shiite fighters paraded in Baghdad Saturday in a dramatic show of force aimed at Sunni militants who seized a Syrian border crossing, widening a western front in an offensive threatening to rip Iraq apart.

Meanwhile, Washington readied a new diplomatic bid to unite Iraq’s fractious leaders and repel insurgents whose lightning offensive has displaced hundreds of thousands, alarmed the world and put Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki under growing pressure domestically and overseas.

And in a sign the broad alliance of jihadists and anti-government elements behind the assault might be fracturing, internecine clashes killed 17 fighters in northern Iraq.

Iraqi security forces on Saturday announced they were holding their own in several areas north of Baghdad.

But officials said insurgents led by the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized one of three official border crossings with Syria.

Militants took control of the area a day after 34 members of the security forces were killed in the border town, giving the fighters greater cross-border mobility into conflict-hit Syria.

The takeover of Al Qaim leaves just one of three official border crossings with Syria in the hands of the central government. The third is controlled by Kurdish forces.

ISIL already hold parts of the western province of Anbar, which abuts the Syrian border, after taking all of one city and parts of another earlier in the year.

It is unclear what impact the latest move will have on the overall offensive, as militants already have free reign along most of the 600-kilometre border, neither side of which is controlled by government forces.

Internecine clashes

ISIL aims to create an Islamic state that will incorporate both Iraq and Syria, where the group has become a major force in the rebellion against President Bashar Assad.

Elsewhere, 17 fighters were killed in clashes Friday evening between ISIL and the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandiyah Order (JRTN), another Sunni insurgent group, in militant-held territory in northern Kirkuk province.

The Sunni insurgents driving the offensive are made up of a broad alliance of other groups, such as loyalists of now-executed president Saddam Hussein.

Analysts say it is unclear if that grouping can hold together given its disparate ideologies.

The battle for Tal Afar had entered its seventh day, Maliki’s security spokesman said on Saturday, with government forces holding some neighbourhoods but not all of the strategic northern town.

He also said a number of security personnel had been killed and wounded in the days of fighting with militants, but declined to specify how many.

In Baghdad, thousands of fighters loyal to powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr paraded with their weapons in the Sadr City district, vowing to fight the offensive which was launched on June 9.

Rank upon rank of fighters, dressed mostly in camouflage but some wearing black, carried Kalashnikov assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, light machineguns and rocket launchers.

Some of the unit leaders carried Iraqi flags, while others held signs with messages including “We sacrifice for you, O Iraq”, “No, no to terrorism” and “No, no to America”.

Fighters interviewed by AFP stressed they were not against any specific religious sect, and that their aim was to defend the country.

Kerry’s diplomatic push

Similar parades were held in large southern cities including Basra, Najaf and Kut, all in the Shiite heartland.

The parades in Baghdad and clashes elsewhere came as US President Barack Obama dispatched Secretary of State John Kerry to Europe and the Middle East in a new push for unity among Iraq’s fractious political leadership.

While Kerry is expected to travel to Iraq itself, it is not known when he will do so.

Obama’s refusal so far to agree to Iraq’s appeal for air strikes on the ISIL-led militants has prompted Baghdad’s powerful Shiite neighbour Iran to claim Washington lacks the will to fight terror.

Meanwhile, Washington says Iran has sent a “small number” of operatives into its neighbour.

Obama told CNN on Friday: “There’s no amount of American fire power that’s going to be able to hold the country together.”

The president, who based his political career on ending the costly eight-year US intervention in Iraq, has insisted that Washington is not slipping back into the morass, but has offered up to 300 advisers and left open the possibility of “targeted and precise military action”.

Washington already has an aircraft carrier in the Gulf and is flying manned and unmanned surveillance flights over Iraq, while senior US officials say special forces being sent to advise Iraq could call in air strikes if necessary.

The US’ push for broader leadership came as Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, a revered cleric among Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority, called on people to band together against the insurgents before it was too late.

UN aid agencies said they were rushing supplies to Iraq to help more than one million people displaced by the latest violence and unrest earlier this year.

BEIRUT — Syrian President Bashar Assad’s feared younger brother Maher Al Assad has re-emerged in public two years after he was said to have been seriously wounded in a bombing, in a picture on the Internet.

Beirut-based Syrian singer George Wassouf downloaded on his official Facebook page a picture showing Maher wearing a navy blue T-shirt, jeans and looking relaxed.

The picture shows Wassouf standing next to the two brothers on a recent visit to Damascus.

On July 18, 2012, a powerful bomb struck a senior command centre in Damascus where Syria’s top brass were meeting.

State media said the attack killed defence minister General Daoud Rajha, Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat and General Hassan Turkmani, head of the regime’s crisis cell on the uprising against the regime.

A rumour at the time suggested that Maher, who commands the army’s elite Fourth Division that oversees security in the capital and the Republican Guard, was at the meeting and had lost both legs in the attack.

An official source dismissed the rumour, saying Maher was not at the meeting.

Maher, who is in his mid-40s, has a reputation as an impassive military leader.

Observers have said he played a central role in the regime’s crackdown on popular demonstrations against the rule of the Assads that broke out in March 2011.

Bashar Assad won a presidential election earlier this month, securing a third, seven-year term in office in a poll dismissed as a farce by his detractors.

Media reports have said Wassouf travelled to Damascus to congratulate Assad on his election victory.