Region

CAIRO — Egyptian expatriates began lining up Thursday at polling places in more than 100 countries to cast ballots in four days of voting for Egypt’s coming presidential election.

Egyptians dropped their votes into clear ballot boxes at consulates and embassies across the world, with Gulf countries and Australia seeing a relatively high turnout, Egypt’s foreign ministry said. In Jordan, a crowd waved the Egyptian flag and cheered the vote.

The voting comes ahead of Egypt’s May 26-27 vote to elect a new president after last year’s military overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first freely elected president. Retired Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who led the July 3 overthrow after millions protested against Morsi, is widely expected to win on a wave of nationalistic, anti-Islamist fervour.

Sisi faces leftist Hamdeen Sabahi, who has the support of youth groups who led the 2011 uprising against autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

There are nearly 600,000 registered Egyptian expatriate voters around the world. Arab countries, especially the Gulf monarchies and the United States, have large presence of Egyptian expatriates.

Morsi’s supporters, including his Muslim Brotherhood, say they’ll boycott the vote.

RIYADH — Health authorities in Saudi Arabia on Thursday announced the deaths of another three people from the MERS respiratory virus, taking the country’s toll to 160.

The health ministry’s daily bulletin on the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in the Gulf nation said the latest people to die were two women aged 72 and 54 and a 63-year-old man.

Since MERS first appeared in Saudi Arabia in 2012 the authorities have recorded 514 infections from the mystery virus for which there is currently no known antidote.

Other nations including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates and the United States have also recorded cases, mostly in people who had been to the kingdom.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organisation said its emergency committee, which includes global medical and policy experts, had flagged mounting concerns about the potentially fatal virus.

The WHO called on countries to improve infection prevention and control, collect more data on the virus and to be vigilant in preventing it from spreading to vulnerable countries, notably in Africa.

But it has so far stopped short of declaring an international health emergency, which would have far-reaching implications such as travel and trade restrictions on affected countries.

A WHO team carried out a five-day inspection visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this month and pinpointed breaches in its recommended infection prevention measures as being partly responsible for the spike in hospital infections.

A rash of cases among staff at Jeddah’s King Fahd Hospital last month sparked public panic and the dismissal of its director and the health minister.

MERS is considered a deadlier but less transmissible cousin of the SARS virus that appeared in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, 9 per cent of whom died.

Like SARS, it appears to cause a lung infection, with patients suffering coughing, breathing difficulties and a temperature. But MERS differs in that it also causes rapid kidney failure.

BAGHDAD — Militants killed 10 people in an assault on a Baghdad court involving suicide bombers and shot dead five army officers in attacks Thursday amid a surge of post-election violence.

The attacks were the worst in unrest that left 20 people dead nationwide, part of a protracted spike in bloodshed as officials tally votes from Iraq’s April 30 parliamentary election.

The authorities have blamed a variety of external factors for the violence, such as the civil war in neighbouring Syria, but critics say the Shiite-led government must do more to reach out to disgruntled minority Sunnis in order to undermine support for militancy.

In Thursday’s deadliest attack, militants assaulted a court in central Baghdad, killing 10 people and wounding dozens more.

Twin suicide bombings, one of which involved an attacker setting off a car bomb, came minutes apart during morning rush hour in the commercial district of Karrada, near a crossroads that is the site of a hospital, a police headquarters and the court complex.

“What happened near the Karrada court was an attempt by terrorists to break into the court,” said Baghdad security spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan, adding that security forces had “foiled” the assault.

Maan also added that “we lost some security forces” in the first blast, and said the overall toll could have been higher still had security personnel not killed a third suicide attacker.

Ambulances rushed to the scene of the attacks as smoke rose above the city, while security forces closed off nearby roads, worsening already tight morning gridlock.

Elsewhere in Baghdad on Thursday, a car bomb near a row of shops in a predominantly Shiite neighbourhood killed at least three people, while violence outside the capital left seven dead.

In Salaheddin province, militants seized a vehicle transporting five off-duty army officers in civilian clothes and killed them, officials said.

The car’s driver was set free, however.

The officers, who varied in rank between lieutenant and major, were on their way to their unit which is part of the force battling anti-government fighters in the western province of Anbar.

The violence comes two days after a wave of nationwide bloodshed, including nine car bombs in Baghdad alone, killed 42 people in Iraq’s deadliest day since the general election.

The security forces have trumpeted wide-ranging operations targeting militants, and on Thursday said they killed at least 80 militants, the vast majority of them west of Baghdad in areas that have been contested between government forces and insurgents.

Despite the authorities’ claims that the offensives are having an impact, the violence has continued unabated.

Thursday’s violence was the latest in a protracted surge that has killed more than 3,300 people this year.

Results from last month’s election are not expected until later this month, but political parties have already begun manoeuvring to try to form alliances, with incumbent Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki bidding for a third term in power.

Maliki’s opponents blame him for a marked deterioration in security as well as what they say is insufficient improvement in basic services and rampant corruption.

RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip — A 1975 photo shows Palestinian refugee Fathiyeh Sattari, her eyes wide with worry, as she presents her malnourished baby boy to a doctor at a clinic run by a UN aid agency.

The photo is one of 525,000 in the agency’s archive being digitised to preserve a record of one of the world’s most entrenched refugee problems, created in what the Palestinians call the “Nakbeh,” or “catastrophe” in Arabic — their uprooting in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation.

As Palestinians marked the Nakbeh’s 66th anniversary Thursday, the photos tell the story of the refugee crisis’ transition from temporary to seemingly permanent. Tent camps of the 1950s have turned into urban slums with some alleys so narrow residents can only walk single file past drab multi-storey buildings.

The mother and son of the 1975 photo are part of a family that is now in its fourth generation as refugees. Sattari’s parents fled their home in what is now Israel in 1948. Fathiyeh was born in the Gaza Strip and raised her own family in the Rafah refugee camp. Her son Hassan — the baby with the gaunt face in the photo — is now a 40-year-old father of five, living in another camp.

They appear resigned to never being able to return to their ancestral home. Hassan said he doesn’t believe Israel would ever agree to take back large numbers of refugees who, along with their descendants, now number more than 5 million across the Middle East.

“Without confrontation, we can’t go back,” he told The Associated Press. Instead, he’s banking on education for his children to help them escape. He said he was taking time off from work as a government auditor this week to help his 9-year-old son Abdel-Hai prepare for final exams.

He said he’s too busy to mark the Nakbeh, commemorated each year in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with speeches and wailing sirens on May 15, a day after Israel was founded in 1948.

This year’s commemorations come after a new blow to prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that could include a political solution for the Palestinian refugees. US-brokered negotiations fell apart in April, the latest in more than two decades of failed attempts to set up a Palestinian state next to Israel.

The fate of the refugees is one of the most contentious issues on the table.

Israel opposes a mass return, fearing it would dilute the state’s Jewish majority. In the Palestinian public discourse, a large-scale return is still portrayed as the main goal. The Palestinian leadership has said each refugee has the right to choose his or her fate, including return or resettlement in a state of Palestine or third countries, but also hinted at flexibility in the context of a final deal.

According to UN figures, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out in the 1948 Mideast war, many settling in the neighbouring West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Tens of thousands more were displaced in the 1967 war in which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, lands the Palestinians seek for a state.

Today, some 1.5 million refugees remain in the region’s 58 camps, where the UN Relief and Works Agency has provided education, medical care and food since it was created in 1950 to help uprooted Palestinians. In countries where host governments were more welcoming, such as Syria and Jordan, fewer refugees remained in camps than, for example, in Lebanon.

From the start, the UN agency documented the exodus, accumulating more than 430,000 negatives, 10,000 prints, 85,000 slides, 75 films and 730 video cassettes. In 2009, the UN cultural agency UNESCO inscribed the archive in its Memory of the World List, recognising its historic value.

Last year, the $1 million digitisation began with funding from Denmark, France and the Palestinian private sector. Most of the work is being done at the Danish Royal Library, while more than 50,000 photos are processed in Gaza.

An online database already has close to 2,000 images. In addition, 50 prints were displayed in an exhibit, “The Long Journey”, which opened in Jerusalem in November, then traveled to Amman, and is to reach Gaza, the West Bank and the Lebanese capital of Beirut.

The photo of Hassan and Fathiyeh Sattari will be part of the Gaza exhibit, said Lionello Boscardi of the UN aid agency. He said the photos show the resilience of the refugees and also the UN agency’s efforts to provide basic services.

Fathiyeh Sattari said UN aid was crucial for her family.

She was born in Gaza, three years after her parents fled their village of Sattariyeh in what is now central Israel. She married a cousin, Hamdan, and raised 11 children in a room in the Rafah refugee camp.

The 1975 photo shows her with her second-oldest, Hassan, at a UN clinic. She said Hassan was emaciated because of an infection and because she had trouble breastfeeding.

For years, her husband and others in the camp worked in Israel as day labourers. A brother-in-law, Ibrahim, worked in Israel’s Rishon Lezion, near the ancestral village, of which only a few houses remain. The children studied in UN schools, and one of Fathiyeh’s five sons works as a physician in Italy.

After the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising in 2000, Israel kept out Gaza workers, and the Sattaris became more dependent on UN aid, including packages of rice, sugar and cooking oil.

Today more than 800,000 refugees in Gaza receive food aid, UN officials said. Refugees make up the majority of the population of 1.7 million in the tiny Mediterranean coastal strip, where poverty has deepened since Israel and Egypt blockaded the territory following a takeover by the Islamic Hamas in 2007.

Hassan Sattari is ambivalent about the aid. He received a good education, but believes the support inadvertently prolonged Palestinian exile. “Without UNRWA, there would have been greater pressure for a solution,” he said.

Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the UN agency, dismissed that idea.

“What perpetuates the refugee problem is the failure of the political parties to solve it,” he said.

LONDON — Concern about the deadly new Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus has "significantly increased" but the disease is not yet a global health emergency, the World Health Organisation said on Wednesday.

The virus, which causes coughing, fever and sometimes fatal pneumonia, has been reported in more than 500 patients, mainly in Saudi Arabia, and has spread to neighbouring countries, as well as in a few cases to Europe, Asia and the United States. It kills about 30 per cent of those who are infected.

The WHO's emergency committee, which met for five hours in Geneva on Tuesday, said on Wednesday that the seriousness of the MERS situation had increased in terms of public health impact, but there is no evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission of the virus.

Because of that, "the conditions for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) have not yet been met," the WHO said in a statement.

The virus is from the same family as SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which killed around 800 people worldwide after it first appeared in China in 2002.

The WHO’s assistant director general for health security, Keiji Fukuda, said the main reason for not declaring MERS an emergency was that despite a surge in cases, the evidence did not suggest it was spreading easily from person to person.

“It’s the [viruses] that can really sustain transmission in communities which pose the greatest danger of spreading around the world and causing large numbers of illnesses and deaths,” Fukuda told reporters on a telephone briefing.

“[And] there is no convincing evidence right now for an increase in the transmissibility of this virus.”

Rising concern

Ben Neuman, a virus expert at Britain’s University of Reading, said the WHO committee’s decision was “a measured and sensible reaction to an evolving epidemic”.

“It is important to remember that MERS still does not spread very efficiently between people,” he said. “It is a very serious disease if you are unlucky enough to catch it, but the odds of catching the virus — even in Saudi Arabia — are still very small.”

Global health regulations define a PHEIC as an extraordinary event that poses a risk to other WHO member states through the international spread of disease, and which may require a coordinated international response.

Fukuda said the emergency committee would meet again in a few weeks’ time to review the MERS situation.

International fear about the new virus has grown in recent weeks with a surge in cases detected in Saudi Arabia, where 495 people have been infected — 152 of whom have died — since the virus first emerged in 2012.

Scores of other MERS cases have also been detected in other countries throughout the Middle East region, and there have been at least eight cases imported into seven further countries, including Malaysia, Lebanon and the United States.

Dutch health authorities said on Wednesday that a man returning to the Netherlands from Saudi Arabia had been admitted to hospital there with MERS.

Saudi Arabia, which has been at the epicentre of the MERS outbreak since the virus was first identified in September 2012, has been criticised by the WHO for failing to implement basic hygiene and infection control measures in hospitals — allowing the virus to spread in clusters of health workers.

Recent outbreaks of MERS in Jeddah’s two main hospitals — King Fahd and King Faisal — were partly due to “breaches” in recommended infection prevention and control measures, the United Nations health agency said.

Gloves, masks, handwashing

Fukuda stressed the need for countries where MERS cases are common to take immediate action to improve infection prevention and control measures to try to halt its spread.

“Infection control is issue number one,” Fukuda said, explaining that simple measures such as ensuring health workers wear gloves and masks and wash their hands between patients were vital. “This is most urgent for affected countries.”

He added that key scientific investigations should also be started as soon as possible to better understand the risk factors behind the disease. These include case-control, serological, environmental and animal studies.

News in the past fortnight that MERS had reached the United States, imported via two healthcare workers who had travelled from Saudi Arabia, added to global concern.

On Tuesday, US health officials said two health workers based at a Florida hospital who had been exposed to a patient with MERS had begun showing flu-like symptoms.

A new Palestinian government will need the approval of the Hamas-dominated parliament, the Islamist movement's prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said Wednesday, Agence France-Presse reported.

Hamas signed a reconciliation deal last month with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which is dominated by its bitter rival Fateh, in a surprise move that aims to overcome a years-long intra-Palestinian split.

"Any government that does not obtain the confidence of the parliament will have no constitutional legality, and Fateh and Hamas have agreed on this," Haniyeh said in a speech to Hamas MPs in Gaza.

"The legislative council [parliament] will also monitor the consensus government's work," he said.

Hamas has dominated the Palestinian parliament since winning a landslide victory in the last parliamentary election, held in 2006.

But the US and Europe have since backed the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads Fateh, and boycotted the Islamist movement.

Under the terms of the April 23 reconciliation deal, the two sides would work together to form an “independent government” of technocrats, to be headed by Abbas, that would pave the way for long-delayed elections.

Representatives from both Fateh and Hamas have met several times for talks on a final line-up for the government to end their division after Hamas expelled Fateh from Gaza in a week of deadly clashes in 2007.

The reconciliation agreement incensed Israel, putting the final nail in the coffin of faltering US-led peace talks between Israel and Abbas’ Palestinian Authority.

A senior Fateh official arrived in Gaza City on Tuesday for talks on forming a unity government, according to AFP.

Meanwhile, Hamas on Wednesday cleared out of the private Gaza residence of Abbas, in the most concrete sign yet that the rivals are moving towards reconciliation, The Associated Press reported.

The Islamic Hamas took over the residence when it seized Gaza from the Western-backed Abbas in 2007, leaving him with only parts of the West Bank. Since then, the rivals have become entrenched in their respective territories, setting up separate governments.

On Wednesday, Hamas security forces removed belongings from the Abbas villa in Gaza City. They loaded mattresses, desks and chairs onto pickup trucks and drove out of the gated compound.

The security forces, which had used the compound as a base, barred camera crews and photographers from filming or taking pictures as the items were driven away, but later allowed them into several rooms on the ground floor.

A modest living room with a flat-screen TV was devoid of decorations, but two large photo albums on a shelf contained pictures of Abbas with various leaders and officials, including former US mediator Dennis Ross.

Iyad Al Bozum, a spokesman for the interior ministry in Gaza, confirmed that security forces cleared their belongings from the residence, but that a formal handover of the villa requires another government decision.

“Our presence there during the past seven years was to protect the place,” he said.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Arab Israelis are increasingly voicing a Palestinian identity and national demands, as hate attacks by Jewish extremists and laws perceived as discriminatory have multiplied.

Some 10,000 Arab Israelis rallied in northern Israel earlier this month for the right of return for Palestinian refugees who fled or were driven from their homes during the war that led to the creation of Israel in 1948.

It was a much higher than usual turnout for the annual commemoration of the Nakbeh (Arabic for catastrophe) and drew an angry response from Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

He described the protesters as a "fifth column", and thundered that they should "march directly to Ramallah", a Palestinian city in the West Bank "and stay there".

A growing number of Arab Israelis are visiting the cities of West Bank, if only to spend the odd weekend, as they search out all things Palestinians.

“The Palestinian people are one, wherever they live,” said Shaher Mahamed, from the Arab Israeli town of Umm Al Fahm, on a visit to the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

“My ID card says I’m Israeli, but my heart is Arab Palestinian, and always will be.”

More than 760,000 Palestinians — estimated today to number more than 5 million with their descendants — fled or were driven from their homes in 1948 and commemorate Nakbeh Day on Thursday.

The 160,000 who stayed behind are now known as Arab Israelis and number about 1.4 million, some 20 per cent of Israel’s population.

Each weekend, growing numbers of Arab Israelis pack out cafes and hotels in the West Bank and flock to the markets, combining visits to relatives with cheaper shopping and leisure.

“The Palestinians who live inside Israel coming here to shop in Nablus has really given a boost to the city’s markets,” said clothes shop owner Abu Hussein.

‘Nationalism and marginalisation’ 

The reassertion of a Palestinian identity by growing numbers of Arab Israelis comes after a string of attacks on Christian and Muslim properties by suspected Jewish extremists, and after several new Israeli laws they perceive as infringing on their civil rights.

“Palestinians inside Israel have never lost their national awareness. But at the moment it’s growing,” said Nadeem Nashef, director of an Arab youth organisation based in the northern Israeli city of Haifa.

The attacks, and attempts “to give more privileges to Jews, have pushed people into taking firmer [nationalist] positions,” Nashef said.

Mordechai Kedar, professor of Arab studies at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, agreed.

“The attacks that have taken place in the last few weeks, such as the burning of cars and scrawling of [racist] graffiti, ignite feelings of nationalism and of marginalisation,” he said.

The uptick in racist attacks has alarmed Israeli police, who have begun working in tandem with the internal security service Shin Bet to prosecute what some politicians are calling “terrorist” acts.

But despite the government’s proclamation of its determination to root out the racism of the extremists, Arab Israelis feel they are simultaneously marginalised by the establishment.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this month defended plans to enshrine in law Israel’s status as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

For Palestinians, accepting Israel as a Jewish state would mean accepting the Nakbeh and potentially precluding the right of return for 1948 refugees and their descendents.

In March, Israel raised the threshold of votes parties need to get seats in parliament, in a bill boycotted by all opposition MPs on the basis that it marginalises minority parties such as the Arab nationalist Balad.

But Mordechai argued that Arab Israelis still want to stay put, given the alternatives in the Middle East.

“They still prefer to live inside Israel rather than another Arab country,” Kedar said.

DAMASCUS — The resignation of the UN's Syria envoy weeks before President Bashar Assad's expected re-election has dealt a new blow to already dim hopes for a negotiated end to the war.

The international standoff was underlined Wednesday with Damascus reacting to Lakhdar Brahimi's announcement that he will step down on May 31 by accusing him of bias and interference in domestic politics.

And with no sign of an end to more than three years of war that has killed 150,000 people and displaced nearly half the population, new suspicions have emerged that Syria is using chemical weapons on its own people.

Brahimi, backed by the United States and Western allies, had coaxed Assad and Syria's fractious opposition to attend peace talks in Geneva this year.

But negotiations broke down amid bitter recriminations after only two rounds, and the war has slipped into a fourth year.

Brahimi, who resigned Tuesday after nearly two years in the job, said he was "very sad that I leave this position and leave Syria behind in such a bad state".

Asked what his message to Syrians would be, Brahimi said: "Apologies, once more, that we have not been able to help them as much as they deserve; and, tell them the tragedy in their country shall be solved."

UN chief Ban Ki-moon blamed the failure to find peace on “a Syrian nation, Middle Eastern region and wider international community that have been hopelessly divided in their approaches to ending the conflict.”

Accusations of bias

But Al Watan, a daily newspaper close to the Assad regime, put the blame on Brahimi Wednesday.

“Brahimi is Saudi Arabia’s man,” it said, in reference to the wealthy Sunni kingdom’s backing for the Sunni-dominated uprising against Assad.

“He demonstrated his partiality for the opposition, particularly during the Geneva meeting by expressing his support for the National Coalition and its chief, Ahmad Jarba.”

State news agency SANA said there were numerous reasons for Brahimi’s failure, focusing on what it said was his interference in domestic affairs.

“A mediator cannot interfere in the sovereign affairs of states,” it said, without elaborating.

But British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who will host a meeting in London on Thursday of the pro-opposition Friends of Syria, blamed the regime.

Responsibility for the “collapse of... negotiations rests wholly with the regime’s refusal to engage in negotiations that addressed the issues at the heart of the Syrian conflict,” he said after Brahimi’s announcement.

Insisting that a negotiated solution is the only way forward, he said Assad and his backers “need to re-engage in the political process, and show they are serious about reaching a political settlement.

The Friends of Syria would talk Thursday “about how we can turn this dialogue into meaningful political process.”

Regime vote 

But with Assad’s regime insisting on proceeding with the presidential election on June 3, prospects for a resumption of peace talks seem dim.

Torbjorn Soltvedt, analyst at British think-tank Maplecroft, said Assad’s bid for another term “has removed any pretence that the Syrian regime is engaging in meaningful talks with opposition over a potential transitional government.

“Assad’s focus remains firmly fixed on the battlefield, and on forcing a situation in which the Syrian government can dictate the terms of any settlement.”

Assad faces two other candidates in the country’s first multi-candidate presidential vote, but he is expected to easily win.

His challengers are little known, and have so far hewed the government’s line, deeming the conflict a war against “terrorism”.

Speaking to Al Manar, the television station of Assad ally Hizbollah, candidate Hassan Al Nuri praised Syria’s army and Assad’s father and predecessor Hafez Assad.

“I’ve always admired his personality,” he said of the former president.

Maher Al Hajjar, the other candidate, told Syrian state television he was running “because of the terrorism that is targeting Syria,” saying “external Arab, regional and international forces were targeting the Syrian people.”

With diplomacy stalled, new allegations of chemical weapons use by Syria’s regime have emerged.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Tuesday that, “in recent weeks, new, smaller quantities of chemical arms have been used, mainly chlorine.”

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons watchdog, which is overseeing the removal of Syria’s toxic arms, has sent a mission into the war-torn country to investigate.

CAIRO — An Egyptian court Wednesday sentenced 79 supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi to jail terms of between five and 10 years over their involvement in deadly clashes, judicial sources said.

The defendants were convicted for participating in clashes between Morsi supporters and opponents that killed 12 people in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria last July, after the military overthrew the Islamist president, the sources said.

Since Morsi’s ouster, his supporters have been staging weekly protests calling for his reinstatement.

The rallies have often degenerated into violent street clashes with security forces and civilian opponents.

Eleven defendants were given 10 years in jail, 13 were jailed for seven years, 55 were jailed for five years and seven acquitted, the sources added.

They were accused of murder, attempted murder, carrying weapons, and torturing 16 people in an Alexandria mosque, the sources said.

At least 1,400 people, mostly Islamists, have been killed in street clashes since Morsi’s overthrow, and thousands have been jailed.

Hundreds have been sentenced in mass trial.

Morsi himself faces three trials on various charges, including collusion with militant groups.

Almost 500 security men have also been killed in a wave of militant attacks carried out in retaliation for the crackdown on Morsi supporters.

RIYADH — Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah appointed his son as governor of Riyadh province on Wednesday in a move that strengthens his branch of the ruling dynasty as it approaches a difficult decision over how to transfer power to the next generation.

Prince Turki Bin Abdullah’s elevation to one of the most important positions held by ruling family members in the absolute monarchy comes months after another son of the king, Prince Mishaal Bin Abdullah, was made governor of Mecca province.

Moves in the ruling family are closely watched at home and abroad for clues on who will rule the world’s top oil exporter, a country which also a huge influence over Muslims through its guardianship of Islam’s holiest sites.

The Saudi line of succession does not pass directly from father to son, as in European monarchies, but has moved along a line of brothers born to the country’s founder King Abdulaziz who died in 1954.

As that line nears its end, the Al Saud dynasty is grappling with how to move the succession down to the next generation of the family.

King Abdullah, who is over 90, has made a series of changes and appointments over the past two years that have consolidated the position of his allies in the family.

The most recent was the appointment of Prince Muqrin, the youngest of King Abdulaziz’s sons to survive into adulthood, as deputy crown prince, a newly created position that makes him next in line to rule after King Abdullah and Crown Prince Salman.

That move was seen as delaying the moment when the Al Saud will have to decide on a prince from the younger generation to take charge, and prompted speculation about a wider deal between different branches of the family.

Prince Turki’s promotion from his previous job as deputy governor was made in a series of royal decrees carried on state media, which also removed the deputy defence minister, Prince Salman Bin Sultan, from his post.

Prince Salman Bin Sultan, a younger brother of former intelligence chief Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, and a key figure in organising Saudi Arabia’s support for Syrian rebels, had met visiting US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel on Tuesday evening.

The decrees said Prince Salman had left the defence ministry position at his own request, a wording used every time a senior prince departs a post. He was replaced by the outgoing Riyadh governor Prince Khaled Bin Bandar.

Until 2011, the position of Riyadh governor had been held for five decades by Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz, who was made crown prince in 2012.

The province is home to the country’s capital and is the heartland of the Al Saud’s traditional support base. Prince Turki Bin Abdullah was born in 1970.

Besides appointing sons as governors of Riyadh and Mecca provinces, two of the three most important in the country, Abdullah has also made one of his sons, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Abdullah, deputy foreign minister.

However, his most senior son, and the one seen as most likely to one day become king, is Prince Miteb Bin Abdullah, who is head of the Saudi Arabian National Guard.

His main rival as a likely candidate to rule from among the next generation of the family is Interior Minister Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, say many Saudis and foreign analysts who follow the succession process.