Region

BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s coalition should withdraw its support for his bid for a third term and pick another candidate, Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Al Sadr urged, amid parliamentary deadlock over the formation of a new government.

Maliki has come under mounting pressure since Islamic State militants took swathes of the north and west of Iraq last month and declared a caliphate on land they and other Sunni armed groups have captured in Iraq and Syria.

In a statement published on his website late on Saturday, Sadr said Maliki “has involved himself and us in long security quarrels and big political crises” and suggested that preventing Maliki from serving a third term would be a “welcome step”.

“It is necessary to demonstrate the national and paternal spirit by aiming for a higher, wider goal from individuals and blocs and by that I mean changing the candidates,” said Sadr, who gained political influence during the US occupation.

The radical cleric and his political allies had previously advocated the next prime minister should be a Shiite chosen from outside of Maliki’s State of Law coalition.

“I remain convinced that the brothers in the State of Law coalition must present the candidate for prime minister ... because it is the biggest bloc within the National Alliance,” Sadr said.

State of Law is part of the National Alliance, a bloc comprising the country’s biggest Shiite parties, including both Maliki’s list and his foes.

Dhiya Al Asadi, secretary general of the Al Ahrar bloc, the Shiite political party loyal to Sadr, told Reuters: “We are fine with any State of Law candidate as long as he is not Maliki.”

The United States, Iran, the United Nations and Iraq’s own Shiite clerics have called on Iraqi politicians to overcome their differences to face the insurgency.

Analysing video

Maliki’s military spokesman Qassim Atta told reporters on Sunday “the security apparatus is working” to analyse a video posted online of a man purporting to be the leader of Islamic State praying at the Grand Mosque in Mosul.

The city is one of those seized by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) last month before the group changed its name and declared its leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi caliph, a title held by successors of the Prophet Mohammad.

Interior ministry spokesman Saad Maan had earlier said the 21-minute video, which carried Friday’s date, was “false”.

Atta said the video was being “cross-referenced with intelligence data to determine whether it is in fact” the reclusive Baghdadi.

Before the video was released on jihadist forums and Twitter accounts associated with the group, reports appeared on social media that Baghdadi would make his first public appearance.

Government forces were on Sunday continuing to battle Islamic State militants south of the rebel-held city of Tikrit, which the army has yet to retake after an offensive began on June 28, Atta said.

He said forces had killed 14 militants since Saturday in Al Dayoum and Wadi Shisheen areas near Tikrit and troops were reinforcing the village of Awja, recaptured three days ago, and preparing to push 8km north into the city.

Maliki’s opponents blame his divisive rule for fuelling the political crisis and want him to step aside. They accuse him of ruling for the Shiite majority at the expense of the Sunni and Kurdish minorities.

He has remained defiant, insisting on Friday that he will not give up his quest for a third term in power.

The first meeting of the Iraqi parliament since its election in April collapsed last week without agreement. Kurds and Sunnis walked out, complaining Shiite lawmakers had not yet determined who they would put forward as premier.

Maliki’s main Shiite rivals say there is consensus among some in the Shiite coalition and among the Sunnis and Kurds against his bid for a third term.

“There is a wish by all political blocs except the State of Law ... [for] the change,” said Ali Shubber, a leading member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), a Shiite party that came second to Maliki’s State of Law in April’s election.

“We feel that it must take place in order to change the political equation.”

Another Shiite politician, former prime minister Iyad Allawi, called on Maliki on Saturday to give up his bid for a third term or risk the dismemberment of Iraq.

BAGHDAD — Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the enigmatic self-proclaimed “caliph” of a state straddling Iraq and Syria, is increasingly seen as more powerful than Al Qaeda’s chief.

The leader of the powerful Islamic State (IS) militant group was on June 29 declared “caliph” in an attempt to revive a system of rule that ended nearly 100 years ago with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

In a video posted online on Saturday, purportedly the first known footage of Baghdadi, he ordered Muslims to obey him during a Ramadan sermon delivered at a mosque in the northern militant held Iraqi city of Mosul.

“I am the wali [leader] who presides over you, though I am not the best of you, so if you see that I am right, assist me,” he said, wearing a black turban and robe.

“If you see that I am wrong, advise me and put me on the right track, and obey me as long as I obey God.”

The man now touted as the world’s most prominent jihadist, who has rarely been seen in public, appeared in Saturday’s video sporting a long beard, bushier and greyer than in the few previously released images.

His appearance follows the June 29 declaration by IS spokesman Abu Mohammad Al Adnani of a pan-Islamic “caliphate” with Baghdadi as its leader.

Baghdadi, born in Samarra in 1971 according to Washington, apparently joined the insurgency that erupted shortly after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, at one point spending time in an American military prison in the country.

In October 2005, American forces said they believed they had killed “Abu Dua”, one of Baghdadi’s known aliases, in a strike on the Iraq-Syria border.

$10-million bounty 

But that appears to have been incorrect, as he took the reins of what was then known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in May 2010 after two of its chiefs were killed in a US-Iraqi raid.

Since then, details about him have slowly trickled out.

In October 2011, the US treasury designated him as a “terrorist”, and there is now a $10-million (7.3-million-euro) bounty for his capture.

This year, Iraq released a picture they said was of Baghdadi, the first from an official source, depicting a balding, bearded man in a suit and tie.

US officials said last year that the jihadist was probably in Syria, but information about his whereabouts since has been unclear.

If authenticated, Saturday’s video would indicate growing confidence of the once secretive Baghdadi, one of the world’s most wanted militants.

His appearance at the Mosul minbar, or pulpit, in the typical garb of a Sunni Muslim scholar, could also signal a shift from the battlefield to a more spiritual role for the self-proclaimed “caliph”.

Baghdadi, whose group advocates an extreme form of Islamic law and a return to the lifestyle of the first Muslims, pulled out a “miswak” — a twig used as a traditional toothbrush and reportedly used by the Prophet Mohammad — and cleaned his teeth before beginning his sermon.

He is touted within IS as a battlefield commander and tactician, a crucial distinction compared with Al Qaeda chief Ayman Al Zawahiri, and has attracted legions of foreign fighters, with estimates in the thousands.

At the time Baghdadi took over the group in April 2010, when it was ISI and tied to Al Qaeda, it appeared to be on the ropes after the “surge” of US forces combined with the shifting allegiances of Sunni tribesmen to deal him a blow.

But the group bounced back, expanding into Syria in 2013.

Baghdadi sought to merge with Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, Al Nusra Front, which rejected the deal, and the two groups have mostly operated separately since.

CAIRO — Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi said on Sunday a referendum on the independence of Iraq’s Kurdish region would lead to a “catastrophic” break up of the country, which is facing an onslaught by Sunni Islamist militants.

The comments from Sisi, leader of the most populous Arab nation, indicate a growing fear in the region that the division of Iraq could further empower the insurgents who have declared a “caliphate” on land seized in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

“The referendum that the Kurds are asking for now is in reality no more than the start of a catastrophic division of Iraq into smaller rival states,” Egypt’s MENA news agency quoted Sisi as saying during a meeting with local journalists.

The president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish north, Massoud Barzani, asked the region’s parliament on Thursday to prepare the way for a referendum on independence.

Iraq’s five million Kurds, who have ruled themselves in relative peace since the 1990s, have expanded their territory by up to 40 per cent in recent weeks as the Sunni Islamist militants seized vast stretches of western and northern Iraq.

Egypt, a traditionally regional diplomatic heavy weight, has been embroiled in domestic turmoil for three years since a 2011 uprising ousted autocratic president Hosni Mubarak.

Sisi said he warned the United States and Europe about the ambitions of the Islamic State militants, which have shortened their name from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

“ISIL had a plan to take over Egypt,” Sisi said. “I had warned the United States and Europe from providing any aid to them and told them they will come out of Syria to target Iraq then Jordan then Saudi Arabia.”

Sisi, Egypt’s former army chief, last year orchestrated the ouster of the state’s Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, who was elected in a free vote, in reaction to mass protests against his rule.

Sisi’s interim government that ruled until his election had cracked down on Islamists. Thousands of Islamist activists and members in Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood group have been jailed since Morsi’s ouster last July and hundreds of street protesters were killed.

The Muslim Brotherhood group, the state’s oldest and most organised movement, is now banned and declared a terrorist organisation.

DUBAI — A police officer died in a “terrorist” blast in a Shiite-populated village in the Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, an interior ministry official announced Saturday.

“Police officer Mahmud Farid died Saturday before dawn from wounds sustained in a terrorist explosion at East Ekar,” near Manama, said national security chief General Tareq Al Hassan in a statement published by national news agency BNA.

An investigation has been opened to identify and arrest those behind the attack, he added without giving further details.

Attacks on security forces have been on the rise in Bahrain in recent months, with three police officers, one from the United Arab Emirates, killed in a bomb attack in a Shiite-populated town on March 3.

Another officer died on February 15, also by a bomb blast, in a Shiite village during protests marking the third anniversary of Shiite-led demonstrations, taking their cue from Arab Spring uprisings elsewhere in the region and demanding democratic reforms in the absolute monarchy.

Security forces boosted by Saudi-led troops ended the protests a month later, but smaller demonstrations frequently take place in Shiite villages, triggering clashes with police.

BEIRUT — The military chief of Syria’s main Western-backed rebel group warned Saturday that the country risked a “humanitarian disaster” if allies do not send more aid to help his moderate forces halt the advance of Islamic militants.

Extremist fighters of the Islamic State group control a swath of land straddling Syria and neighbouring Iraq, mostly running across the Euphrates River, where they have established their self-styled caliphate. Most of the land was seized last month in a lightning push across Iraq.

In recent days, fighters from the group have been pushing into rebel-held territory around the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, close to the Turkish border. They are also consolidating their rule along a corridor of land in the eastern Syrian province of Deir el-Zour that leads to neighbouring Iraq.

“We call on urgent support for the FSA with weapons and ammunition, and to avoid a humanitarian disaster that threatens our people,” said Brig. Gen. Abdel Ilah Al Bashir, commander of the Free Syrian army. “Time is not on our side. Time is a slashing sword,” he said.

His statement underscored the distress many of the country’s many rebel fighters, whose battle to overthrow President Bashar Assad has been overshadowed by the advance of Islamic State fighters.

In northern Syria, where the extremists have been pushing back rebels, Syrian government forces also seized a key industrial area, allowing them to choke off rebel-held parts of Aleppo, already brutalised by indiscriminate bombing.

Bashir called on rebel allies, chiefly the United States, but also neighbouring Turkey and regional supports Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to speedily send help. He said the Islamic State fighters will not halt at Syria’s borders.

“If we do not receive support quickly, the disaster will not stop at the borders. We put the international community before its historic responsibility,” he said.

Also Saturday, Syrian activists said that a father, mother and their six children were killed in a government airstrike in the southern town of Dael.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the eight civilians were killed in shelling early Saturday. The activist collective, the local coordination committees, also reported the incident.

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.