Region

TRIPOLI — A deadly attack on troops, the killing of a rights activist and low turnout marred a parliamentary election Libyan authorities hope will end the political turmoil rife since the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi.

Seven soldiers deployed to provide polling day security in second city Benghazi were killed, and 53 injured, in what security officials said was an attack on their convoy by Islamist militia.

Later lawyer and human rights activist Salwa Bugaighis was shot dead by unknown assailants at her home in Benghazi, hospital and security sources said.

Bugaighis, a former member of the National Transitional Council, the 2011 anti-Qadhafi rebellion’s political wing, was vice president of a preparatory committee for national dialogue in Libya.

The eastern city, which was the scene of a deadly 2012 attack on the US consulate, has been tense since a rogue former rebel commander launched an offensive against powerful Islamist groups late last month, drawing many regular army units to his side.

The electoral commission was also forced to close 18 polling stations in the western town of Al Jemil after unidentified gunmen attacked five of them and stole ballot boxes, a local security official said.

By the time polls closed at 1800 GMT on Wednesday, just 630,000 of the 1.5 million registered voters had cast their ballot, a 47 per cent turnout, according to preliminary estimates by the electoral commission.

The number of registered voters itself is a far cry from the more than 2.7 million who signed up two years ago for Libya’s first ever free election. Almost 3.5 million Libyans are eligible to vote.

A patchwork of militias 

In the past few weeks, Libya has been rocked by a crisis that sees two rival Cabinets jostling for power in a crippling showdown between Islamists and liberals, as violence raged in the east.

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

“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 polling station in Tripoli.

No voting was held in the eastern town of Derna, a stronghold of jihadists, for fear of attacks on polling stations.

In the south, just five out 15 polling stations opened in the Kufra region for “security reasons”, the electoral commission said.

Interim Prime Minister Abdullah Al Thani said the election was “proceeding normally”.

“Regarding the organisation of voting in Derna, there will be measures to take this week,” he added without elaborating.

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 revolt, was elected in the free July 2012 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.

First results Friday or Saturday

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.

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.

The first results are expected on Friday or Saturday.

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.

BEIRUT — A suicide bomber who blew himself up at a Beirut hotel and his accomplice, who survived the blast, are citizens of Saudi Arabia, Lebanese officials said Thursday.

The bomber detonated his explosives at Beirut’s Duroy Hotel during a security raid on Wednesday evening, and died in the blast. Another man was wounded and was being questioned by security agents at a Beirut hospital.

A security and a judicial official told The Associated Press that a preliminary probe shows the two attackers entered Lebanon with Saudi passports on June 11, and had paid for bookings in two other hotels besides the Duroy.

The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to talk to the media during an ongoing investigation. Security forces are pursuing other suspects and on Thursday, special forces in bullet-proof vests and accompanied by police dogs raided at least one hotel in Beirut.

The blast towards the end of Wednesday evening rush-hour took place inside the Duroy Hotel, located near the Saudi embassy in Raouche district, a posh neighbourhood of apartment towers and upscale hotels perched on cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

The Saudi embassy condemned the blast in a statement Thursday, calling it a “terror act”.

The Lebanese Red Cross said 11 other people were wounded in the hotel explosion.

It was the third suicide bombing in Lebanon in less than a week and sparked fears of renewed violence in a country that has been deeply affected by the civil war in neighbouring Syria.

On Monday, a suicide bomber blew himself up near a checkpoint outside a café just after midnight in a primarily Shiite neighbourhood where the militant 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 troops.

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.

Regional tensions are also mounting over the events unfolding in Iraq, where Sunni insurgents — including the Al Qaeda breakaway Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — have seized much of the country’s north as armed forces loyal to the Shiite-led government have melted away.

The 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.

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 sleeper cells, has given rise to concerns that Lebanon could see a new wave of violence linked to the Syrian conflict.

RIYADH — King Abdullah ordered all necessary measures to protect Saudi Arabia against potential “terrorist threats” after chairing a security meeting to discuss the fall-out from Iraq, the state news agency SPA said on Thursday.

The world’s top oil exporter shares an 800km border with Iraq, where the militant Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and other Sunni Muslim groups have seized towns and cities in a lightning advance this month.

Riyadh has long expressed fears of being targeted by jihadists, including some of its own citizens, who have taken part in conflicts in Iraq and Syria, and earlier this year decreed long jail terms for those who travel overseas to fight.

“Concerned for the national security of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia against any measures that terrorist organisations or any other groups might resort to..., [the king] has ordered all necessary measures to protect the gains of the homeland and its stability, and the security of the Saudi people,” SPA said.

King Abdullah acted a day before he was due to meet US Secretary of State John Kerry in Jeddah to discuss the crisis in Iraq and Syria, and a day after two Saudi men were involved in a suicide bombing in Lebanon.

The Saudi ambassador in Lebanon said on Thursday he was not able to rule out that Wednesday’s attack in a Beirut hotel, which killed one of the Saudis and injured three security guards, was intended to target the embassy, located nearby.

Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia has been one of the biggest supporters of mainly Sunni rebels in Lebanon’s neighbour Syria fighting against President Bashar Assad, who is backed by Riyadh’s main regional adversary, Shiite Muslim Iran.

However, it has shied away from arming rebel groups like ISIL that its fears are connected to Al Qaeda, which waged a campaign of attacks inside the kingdom a decade ago led by veterans of jihad in civil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Saudi Arabia’s envoy in Lebanon, Ali Awad Asiri, said it was important to find out who was behind Wednesday’s bombing in Beirut, in which local security forces said the Saudi bomber was killed and another Saudi wounded and then arrested at the scene.

“We want to know why a Saudi citizen was involved in such a criminal act,” Asiri told television channel Al Hadath. His comment that the attack may have been directed at the Saudi embassy came in a later interview broadcast on Al Arabiya channel.

“We need to know how they were lured into this, who finances them, why they were in that place to carry out this criminal act. We have special ties with the security forces in Lebanon and the Lebanese government,” he said.

CAIRO — An Al Jazeera journalist whose jailing triggered global outrage has donated 15,000 Egyptian pounds to a fund initiated by the president to boost Egypt’s ailing economy, his brother said on Thursday.

Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, who was sentenced to seven years in jail along with two other Al Jazeera journalists for allegedly aiding the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood, made the donation to Tahya Misr (Long Live Egypt), an initiative of President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.

“When we visited the prison yesterday [Wednesday], Mohamed told us to donate 15,000 pounds [about $2,000/1,670 euros] to this fund,” Adel Fadel Fahmy told AFP as he made the donation at a bank on Thursday.

“Mohamed has always been patriotic and feels that the Egyptian economy needs support.”

When asked whether the donation was aimed at securing a pardon from the president for his brother, Adel said: “It is not linked... He [Mohamed] wants to distinguish between his love for Egypt and his disappointment and anger over the verdict.”

“As a family, we don’t expect this small donation to secure a pardon for him. These are two separate issues.”

In a speech on Tuesday, Sisi said he himself would donate half his salary and half of what he owns to help rebuild the country’s shattered economy.

Egypt’s political turmoil that began with the ouster of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011 has ruined its economy, affecting tourist revenues and investments in particular.

Fadel Fahmy and Australian Peter Greste were each sentenced to seven years, while their colleague producer Baher Mohamed was handed 10 years in a decision that drew international condemnation and sparked fears of growing media restrictions in Egypt.

Eleven other co-defendants were given 10-year sentences in absentia, including one Dutch journalist and two Britons.

ADEN — Six suspected Al Qaeda fighters, six soldiers and a civilian woman were killed in a series of militant attacks in the eastern Yemeni city of Seiyun on Thursday, local officials said.

A suicide bomber drove his explosives-laden car into the entrance of an army base, killing four soldiers in the city in Hadramawt province — a territory with some of the country’s dwindling oil reserves. Another militant was killed in clashes that followed.

At around the same time, four militants and two soldiers were killed in a raid on the city’s airport before forces regained control of the facility. A civilian woman was also killed in an attack at a nearby agricultural plant.

Washington and Gulf countries are worried that further instability in Yemen could allow Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Islamist group’s regional wing, to consolidate its position and launch attacks overseas.

AQAP and allied local Islamists have staged attacks on government forces across the country, including many assassinations and car bombs in Hadramawt.

The province and other parts of the former nation of South Yemen have also been rocked by mass protests by a separatist movement.

Seiyun’s airport only had two scheduled flights on Thursday, one to Yemen’s capital Sanaa and the other to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, according to flightstats.com.

ALGIERS/CAIRO — Algeria agreed to ship five cargoes of liquefied natural gas to Egypt before the end of the year, a source at Algerian state energy firm Sonatrach said, helping its north African neighbour with its worst energy crunch in years.

The offer of five 145,000-cubic-metre cargoes was made after a visit by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi to Algiers, his first trip abroad since taking office. Sisi was seeking Algeria’s support to counter Islamist militancy and cooperation on the chaos in neighbouring Libya.

“We did not reach a deal on pricing yet, but it is almost a deal,” the source said of the agreement, which is part of talks over supplying Algerian gas for Egyptian power stations.

Egypt’s oil ministry spokesman Hamdy Abdel-Aziz said he did not have any information on the status of the negotiations between the two countries, which began early this year.

The two north African countries both have long borders with Libya where, three years after the fall of Muammar Qadhafi, a weak central government is struggling to contain Islamist militants and brigades of former rebels and militias.

Sisi, who was in charge of the army when it forced Egypt’s Islamist president Mohamed Morsi from power after mass protests, has been criticised by many countries for a heavy-handed crackdown on dissent. But Egypt’s strategic position still makes it an important security partner for the West.

Egypt’s steadily declining gas production and foreign firms’ wariness about any increasing investment have combined with price subsidies and rising consumption to create the country’s worst energy crisis in decades.

The country of 85 million relies heavily on gas to generate power for households and industry. Previously unheard of winter power cuts this year emphasised the extent of the crisis.

Egypt has been scrambling to secure natural gas supplies, which its mainly oil-producing Gulf Arab allies cannot provide. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait have given $6 billion in petroleum products since the army ousted Morsi last summer.

Not all Gulf countries have been generous with the government after Morsi’s ouster. Qatar, which backed the Brotherhood, sent Egypt LNG shipments last summer but negotiations for further supplies stalled over political tensions.

WASHINGTON — The US cargo ship MV Cape Ray left the Spanish port of Rota on Wednesday and headed for Italy, where it will load Syrian chemical weapons materials to be destroyed.

“The transit to Italy is expected to take several days,” Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said in a statement.

Once the weapons and chemical materials are on board, the Cape Ray will head “for international waters to begin neutralisation of the chemical agents” at sea, he added.

Syria has shipped out 1,300 tonnes of chemical agents. Only the most dangerous elements — dubbed “priority 1” and used in mustard gas and Sarin — will be destroyed on board the US ship.

There are about 700 tonnes in this category, US undersecretary of defence Frank Kendall has said.

The Pentagon said at the beginning of the year that the process to destroy the agents and materials will take between 45 and 90 days.

The Cape Ray has been equipped with two Field Deployable Hydrolysis Systems — portable treatment plants capable of “neutralising” the most dangerous Syrian chemical agents.

The process should destroy more than 99 per cent of the chemicals, reducing the lethal agents into a sludge similar to low-level hazardous industrial waste.

Private waste treatment facilities will handle the disposal of that sludge.

Destroying chemical agents at sea will be a first, but the technology has been around for decades, according to Adam Baker, a chemical engineer with the US military’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Centre.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel on Thursday named two Hamas Islamists as leading suspects in the June 12 kidnappings of three settler teenagers, in the most concrete report yet of results after weeks of searches in the occupied West Bank.

An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed reports that troops were seeking Marwan Kawasme and Amar Abu Aysha, fighters in their 30s from the Hebron area of the occupied West Bank, both of whom have served time in Israeli prisons in the past.

Israel’s Shin Bet Security Agency said in a statement both men had been wanted and at large since the kidnappings, adding that several other Palestinians suspected of involvement in the abductions were being questioned.

Aysha was jailed without trial under so-called administrative detention for six months in 2005, about the time his brother was killed by Israeli forces as he attempted to throw explosives at soldiers, Israeli security officials said.

Kawasme once served a 10-month prison term and trained for military action in the Hebron area, in addition to being involved with Hamas recruitment efforts there, the officials said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the suspects were only part of the group behind the kidnappings and reiterated his call on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to abrogate a unity pact with Hamas, a group that holds power in the Gaza Strip and calls for Israel’s destruction.

Israeli authorities have been searching for two weeks for the youths aged 16 and 19, one of whom is a dual US-Israeli national, who disappeared near a Jewish seminary at a West Bank settlement.

Israel scaled back its searches for the youths on Tuesday after arresting several hundred Palestinians in house-to-house raids throughout the West Bank which led Palestinians and some rights groups to accuse it of imposing collective punishment on civilians.

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.