Region

BEIRUT — A senior Hizbollah commander branded by the FBI as one of the world’s most wanted terrorists was killed fighting in Syria, residents of his village in southern Lebanon told AFP Tuesday.

Powerful Shiite movement Hizbollah has deployed thousands of fighters into neighbouring Syria to back President Bashar Assad’s army as he battles insurgents who have been trying to overthrow him for the past three years.

“Fawzi Ayoub was killed fighting in Syria. His funeral was held in [his home village of] Ain Qana yesterday [Monday]. Many people came to the funeral, to give their condolences to his family,” a resident of the village said on condition of anonymity.

According to another resident of Ain Qana, some 50 kilometres southeast of Beirut, “Ayoub was a leading Hizbollah commander in the Aleppo area” in northern Syria.

The FBI’s website says Ayoub was indicted in the United States in 2009 for “wilfully and knowingly” trying to enter Israel, Hizbollah’s archenemy, with a fake US passport “for the purpose of conducting a bombing”.

Ayoub, who had lived in Canada, was arrested in Israel in 2000. He was released three years later in a prisoner swap with Hizbollah.

Another Hizbollah member suspected of trying to assassinate a Lebanese MP in 2012 was killed fighting in Syria in a separate incident, residents of his village of Adsheet, also in southern Lebanon, told AFP.

“Mahmud Hayek, who had been accused of trying to assassinate Boutros Harb, was killed while fighting in Syria,” said a resident speaking on condition of anonymity.

A website based in the Nabatiyeh region, where Adsheet is located, published a homage to Hayek on Monday, accompanied with two photographs of him smiling.

Judicial sources say Hayek was being tried in absentia in a Lebanese military court over a failed assassination bid against MP Boutros Harb, a member of Lebanon’s anti-Damascus opposition.

DAMASCUS — A convoy of chemical weapons inspectors came under attack Tuesday while travelling to the site of a suspected chlorine gas attack in Syria, but all staff members were safe, the international watchdog agency said.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been working with the United Nations to oversee the destruction of the Syrian government’s stockpiles since September 2013, when President Bashar Assad’s administration acknowledged it has chemical weapons and agreed to give them up to avoid the threat of US military strikes.

Syria has since destroyed or handed over more than 90 per cent of the weapons and toxic chemicals it has formally declared. Its sole remaining declared stockpile has been packaged for shipment out of the country to meet a June 30 deadline for destruction.

However, last month allegations surfaced that chlorine gas has been used as a weapon in fighting between the government and rebels. Chlorine is not banned under chemical weapons conventions, and it was not part of Syria’s disclosures. However, using any toxic material in warfare violates chemical weapons treaties and international law.

The circumstances of Tuesday’s attack were unclear. Syria’s foreign ministry initially reported that 11 people, including six members of a UN fact-finding mission and their Syrian drivers, had been abducted by rebels fighting to topple Assad’s government. But the OPCW issued a statement shortly afterward saying a convoy had come under attack but “all team members are safe and well and are travelling back to the operating base”.

Opposition activists could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Syrian foreign ministry said the convoy, which consisted of four vehicles, was heading towards the rebel-held town of Kfar Zeita where activists and Human Rights Watch reported gas attacks on April 11 and April 18 that killed two people.

It said the government had agreed to a daylong ceasefire in the town in the central province of Hama “to facilitate the work of this mission”. As the team reached the nearby government-controlled village of Taibet Al Imam, the government said it was unable to provide protection beyond that point but the team decided to continue without Syrian security forces, according to the statement.

A roadside bomb then hit one of the team’s vehicles, forcing the passengers to move to another car and turn back towards Taibet Al Imam, the ministry said. The ministry said only one vehicle arrived in the village, which is under government control, a fact that might have caused Damascus to issue the statement saying the rest had been abducted.

Syria’s state-run news agency SANA later said the members of the fact-finding mission were released. It was not immediately clear why the government said members of the team had been abducted when the OPCW said all were safe.

A doctor in Kfar Zeita who identified himself as Abdullah Darwish said the team had been expected to arrive in the village on Tuesday and medical officials had prepared for them documents as well as a number of people who suffered during the alleged chlorine attack. But the main rebel group the Free Syrian Army later said the inspection team wouldn’t be coming, Darwish told The Associated Press via Skype.

The OPCW Director-General Ambassador Ahmet Uzumcu expressed concern about the attack, repeating his call to all parties for cooperation with the mission.

“Our inspectors are in Syria to establish the facts in relation to persistent allegations of chlorine gas attacks,” Uzumcu said. “Their safety is our primary concern, and it is imperative that all parties to the conflict grant them safe and secure access.”

The Netherlands-based OPCW, which monitors the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and oversees the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, had sent a 12-member team to Damascus this month to investigate claims that chlorine has been used in a number of locations in Syria. The UN Security Council authorised the OPCW to oversee a fact-finding investigation into the alleged gas attacks.

The Syrian government has agreed to cooperate with the inspectors and their UN security detachment in the parts of the country it controls. The Syrian opposition also has said that rebels will protect UN teams visiting their areas.

In August, a UN team that was trying to reach a Damascus suburb following a chemical weapons attack came under fire. Both the government and the opposition blamed each other for that attack. No one was hurt in the attack and the inspectors eventually arrived in Moadamiyeh, a western suburb of Damascus.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel on Monday approved plans for 50 new settler housing units in annexed East Jerusalem as Pope Francis wrapped up a visit to the region, city officials said.

“The municipality has given the green light to build 50 new housing units in five buildings in Har Homa,” city councillor Yosef Pepe Alalu told AFP.

Har Homa is a settlement neighbourhood in the southern sector of Arab East Jerusalem which was occupied by Israel during the 1967 war then annexed, in a move not recognised by the international community.

It was the first such announcement of Israeli plans to build on land seized in 1967 since the collapse last month of the US-led peace talks.

The talks had struggled to make headway due to an unrelenting flow of Israeli settlement announcements, which were roundly condemned by the Palestinians.

Figures quoted by Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now show that during the nine months of talks, Israel approved plans for nearly 14,000 new settler housing units.

The last time Israel pushed plans for new construction was on April 1 with the re-issuing of tenders for more than 700 new housing units in Gilo in east Jerusalem.

The Palestinians have said they will not return to the crisis-hit talks without a complete settlement freeze.

But Israel has flatly refused, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejecting the notion that settlement building ran counter to peace efforts, saying he never agreed to any “restraints on construction” throughout the talks.

CAIRO — Egyptians voted for a new president Monday in an election expected to sweep to power the ex-army chief who overthrew the country’s first democratically elected leader and crushed his Islamist movement.

The two-day election is the first since the frontrunner Abdel Fattah Al Sisi deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July, a move that unleashed the bloodiest violence in Egypt’s recent history.

Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood is boycotting the vote, as are revolutionary youths who fear Sisi is an autocrat in the making.

But the 59-year-old retired field marshall is expected to trounce his sole rival, leftist Hamdeen Sabbahi, amid widespread calls for stability.

Polling stations opened at 0600 GMT for 53 million registered voters, with Sisi arriving early at one in Cairo to cast his ballot amid a throng of jostling reporters and supporters.

“The entire world is watching us, how Egyptians are writing history and their future today and tomorrow,” Sisi said.

“Egyptians must be reassured that tomorrow will be very beautiful and great,” he said, as supporters shook his hand and kissed his cheeks.

Many view the vote as a referendum on stability versus the freedoms promised by the Arab Spring-inspired popular uprising that ousted veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

Since the revolution, the country of 86 million people has been rocked by sporadic unrest and a tanking economy.

Mubarak’s successor, the Islamist Morsi, lasted one year in office, winning Egypt’s first democratic presidential election only to quickly alienate many who held mass rallies demanding his resignation.

“We need someone who speaks in a determined and strong way. The Egyptian people are frightened by this and respect those who are like this,” said Milad Yusef, a 29-year-old lawyer waiting to vote in Cairo.

Yusef said he had voted for Sabbahi in the 2012 election that Morsi won, but that he would now back Sisi.

“We need someone strong, a military man,” he said.

Sisi has said “true democracy” would take a couple of decades, and suggested he would not tolerate protests disrupting the economy.

He has also pledged to eliminate the Brotherhood, which had won every election following Mubarak’s overthrow after being banned for decades.

The movement is boycotting the election and said Sunday it would reject the outcome. The vote is being monitored by international and Egyptian groups.

Heavy security 

“Forgery will never grant legitimacy to a butcher nor will it lessen the determination of revolutionaries,” said the Brotherhood.

Voting in the pro-Morsi town of Kerdasa, 35 kilometres southwest of Cairo, was low as loyalists of the ousted president stayed indoors.

“Sisi killed youths and now he is grabbing power. This is the biggest evidence that [Morsi’s ouster] was a coup,” Mohamed Gamal, a law graduate who boycotted the vote, told AFP.

Police raided the town in September after 13 officers were killed following Morsi’s overthrow.

The Brotherhood, now blacklisted as a terrorist group, has been decapitated in a police crackdown that has killed more than 1,400 people, including an estimated 700 protesters on one day in August.

Morsi himself has been detained and put on trial.

“This election will not wipe the slate clean after 10 months of gross human rights violations,” Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement.

Hundreds of soldiers and policemen have been killed in militant attacks since Morsi’s overthrow, with the deadliest claimed by an Al Qaeda-inspired group based in the restive Sinai Peninsula.

Sisi has called for a high turnout in the election, billed by the military-installed authorities and the West as a milestone toward elected rule.

The poll will be followed by parliamentary elections this year

Sisi’s sole rival Sabbahi, a veteran dissident, has vowed to defend the democratic aspirations of the 2011 revolt.

“We swear to God that symbols of corruption and despotism [from the Mubarak era] will not return,” he said.

Sisi has raised fears Egypt could see more repression than under Mubarak.

“What tourist would come to a country where we have demonstrations like this?” he asked Egyptian newspaper editors ahead of the vote.

“You write in the newspapers: ‘No voice is louder than freedom of speech!’ What is that?”

The April 6 youth movement, which spearheaded the anti-Mubarak revolt and whose leader has been jailed, has called for a boycott of the election.

DUBAI — Iran said on Monday that world powers were “demanding too much” in negotiations aimed at reaching a deal on Tehran’s nuclear programme by a July deadline, but hurdles could be overcome.

Tehran and six world powers made little progress in the latest round of talks earlier this month in Vienna on ending their stand-off, raising doubts about the chances of a breakthrough by July 20. 

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, speaking in Tehran before a visit to Turkey for talks with European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on ways of advancing the talks, said a compromise was still possible despite the difficulties.

“They should stop demanding too much. We have our red line, and they too want assurances that our nuclear programme will always remain peaceful. We believe these two add up,” the state news agency IRNA quoted Zarif as saying on Monday.

“I feel the realism awakened from the last round of talks will bring us closer to conclusion. We may be able to remove one of two of the previous hurdles, or rather face new ones. In any case, we should make an effort to pass through this phase.”

Iran considers the right to enrich uranium for nuclear energy a red line but that levels of enrichment are negotiable. Enriched uranium provides power for nuclear generating stations but also, if refined to a high level, for atomic bombs.

Western powers suspect Iran’s declared civilian nuclear energy programme is a facade for seeking a weapons capability. The Islamic republic denies this although it has a history of hiding activity from UN nuclear inspectors.

The powers want Iran to agree to scale back enrichment and other proliferation-prone nuclear activity and accept tougher UN inspections to deny it any capability of quickly producing atomic bombs, in exchange for an end to economic sanctions.

Zarif said world powers should refrain from additional pressure on the Islamic republic to force it into concessions.

“Sanctions haven’t served them any purpose, only led to our making 19,000 centrifuges,” he said, according to IRNA, referring to the machines that enrich uranium.

IRNA, quoting an unnamed foreign ministry official, said that Zarif would meet with Ashton in Istanbul for two days to “discuss ways of advancing the talks” ahead of the next round of negotiations starting in June in Vienna.

Iran and the United States have said that the last round in the Austrian capital was slow and difficult.

ALGIERS — An Algerian general on Monday warned of a “worrying” situation on the country’s vulnerable borders, faced with chaos in neighbouring Libya and northern Mali.

“The deteriorating security situation in the neighbouring countries are all factors that require permanent vigilance and rigorous deployment,” Boualem Madi told Algerian radio.

Algeria has been an important ally of the West in fighting armed extremists in the Sahara-Sahel region since the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings which toppled dictators across North Africa.

But it shares 6,000 kilometres of mostly desert borders with seven countries, including Libya, Mali and Tunisia, making it increasingly vulnerable.

“We must remain very, very, very vigilant,” General Madi said.

“All means have been mobilised to control and master the situation on our borders, to guarantee the stability and territorial integrity of the country.”

The senior military official said Algeria was playing a “pivotal” role in “the security strategy and fight against cross-border terrorism led by all the countries of the Sahel”.

Burt he warned that Algeria had to remain “omnipresent on all fronts inside the country, to deal with remaining terrorist cells, and on the borders to confront organised cross-border crime in cooperation with neighbouring countries”.

UNITED NATIONS — United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday called on Lebanon’s political rivals to end the country’s presidential stalemate.

A spokesman for Ban said the UN chief “regrets that the Lebanese parliament was unable to elect a new president within the time frame set by the constitution.”

Ban urged Lebanon’s leaders “to engage intensively to ensure the election of a new president without delay”.

Lebanon has been plunged into a leadership vacuum after President Michel Sleiman’s mandate ended on Sunday with rival political blocs still divided over a new leader.

Over the past two months Lebanon’s parliament convened five times to try to elect a successor to Sleiman but failed each time due to a lack of quorum.

Lebanon’s political paralysis is mainly due to a deep rift between two rival camps over the conflict in Syria, the powerful neighbour that dominated Beirut for 30 years until 2005.

Ban’s spokesman said the UN leader urged “Lebanese leaders to ensure the continued effective functioning of the institutions of the state, to guarantee that the government is able to address the challenges facing the country and to meet Lebanon’s international obligations”.

RIYADH — Saudi Arabia has arrested nine university professors for their alleged links to the banned Muslim Brotherhood movement, media reported on Monday.

Investigators found the professors, two Saudis and the rest from neighbouring countries, had been involved with “foreign organisations” based on “voice recordings and e-mails” linked to them, Okaz daily reported.

It identified the organisation as the Muslim Brotherhood, designated by the interior ministry in March as a “terror” group.

The investigation should be completed by mid-June, said the daily which is close to the government.

If convicted, the group could be jailed for 10-15 years, after which the foreigners would be deported, it added.

Saudi Arabia and its neighbour the United Arab Emirates have cracked down on Islamists accused of links to the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.

Riyadh had hailed the Egyptian military’s ouster of Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist president who hails from the Brotherhood. It has also pledged billions of dollars to the army-installed government in Cairo.

The kingdom, along with other absolute monarchies of the Gulf, fears the Brotherhood brand of grassroots activism and political Islam could undermine its own authority.

But in the past Saudi Arabia gave refuge to many Brotherhood members who suffered repression in the 1960s under the regime of Egypt’s first modern military ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Traditionally, members of the group were active in academic institutions in the kingdom.

On Sunday, Saudi Education Minister Khaled Al Faisal was quoted by media as saying that this was the reason behind the “spread of extremist ideology” in the kingdom.

“We offered them our children and they took them hostage... The society left the stage for them, including schools,” he said.

TRIPOLI — Gunmen shot dead a newspaper editor who was an outspoken critic of Islamists in Libya’s volatile east on Monday, in a targeted killing that came hours after he warned the Islamist-led parliament of a civil war if it didn’t bow to widespread demands to disband and allow early elections.

Libya is deeply polarised, with a renegade general having launched an armed campaign against Islamists, who dominate the elected parliament and who on Sunday approved a new prime minister days after thousands held demonstrations demanding the assembly halt sessions. The demonstrators also accused it of financing Islamist militias.

A security official said the 50-year-old Moftah Abu Zeid, chief editor of the Brnieq newspaper, was attacked while driving down a main street in the eastern city of Benghazi, cradle of the 2011 revolt that toppled and killed longtime ruler Muammar Qadhafi. Over the last three years the city has seen near-daily attacks targeting security forces, activists, judges and moderate clerics.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to reporters, said the assailants fled the scene.

The paper posted pictures of the slain journalist’s body on its Facebook page and an image of his silver car, with the driver’s side window shattered. The daily Al Wasat quoted a medical official as saying that Abu Zeid was shot three times in the head and abdomen.

In an interview with the Libya Al Ahrar TV network broadcast late Sunday, Abu Zeid said that he had met with Gen. Khalifa Haftar, who is leading an offensive against Islamic militants in the city, and warned of a civil war if the parliament remained in place. Another paper, London-based Al Quds Al Arabi, had quoted him three days ago as saying that he received a warning to leave the country in 24 hours.

His newspaper last week carried a front-page picture of Haftar, and the editor, who was also a human rights activist, later said militiamen halted a shipment of the last issue on its way from Benghazi to the capital Tripoli.

Islamists have condemned the offensive launched earlier this month as a “coup”, while several prominent government officials, diplomats and military units have rallied to Haftar’s cause, hoping he can bring stability to the petroleum-rich North African country.

Haftar has said his campaign is aimed at imposing order and breaking the power of Islamists who lead the elected parliament, whom he accuses of opening the door to Islamic radicals.

The escalating conflict between Haftar’s forces and the Islamists is the biggest challenge yet to the country’s weak central government, which has struggled to rein in heavily armed former rebel brigades turned militias.

On Sunday, the embattled parliament approved an Islamist-backed government headed by Ahmed Maiteg despite a boycott by non-Islamists and the threats from Haftar.

Nadia Rashed, an independent female lawmaker, said the new government was “illegitimate and unconstitutional” because it was approved without the minimum number of votes required.

Maiteg — who hails from the western city of Misrata and whose relatives command Islamist militias — offered to include the interim prime minister, Abdullah Al Thinni, in his new line-up, but Thinni refused.

Thinni’s interim government had demanded that parliament disband and hold early elections in order to defuse the tensions. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for next month, but it’s not clear whether the vote can be held in the increasingly unstable country.

Thinni was promoted from defence minister to interim prime minister after the Western-backed premier Ali Zidan was pushed out of office in a no-confidence vote in March.

In a televised speech aired on Libya’s state television channel, Maiteg said the people should hold tight to “legitimate institutions”.

He said his government was committed to “building the state” and supporting the upcoming parliamentary elections, slated for June 25. He said his Cabinet, which is likely to be dissolved following the election of a new parliament, will have a comprehensive vision of solving problems “in this critical stage”, starting with security.

“State sovereignty and dignity is our priority,” he said.

BEIRUT — Syrian rebels made advances on Monday in the war-torn country’s northwest, seizing several army checkpoints as they inched closer towards taking over two major bases, a monitor and activists said.

The advance in Idlib province came as Al Qaeda’s Syria branch, Al Nusra Front, claimed responsibility for two car bomb attacks that killed 12 people a day earlier in the central city of Homs.

In Idlib, rebels and their jihadist Al Nusra Front allies took over “the Salam checkpoint, west of the town of Khan Sheikhun, after fierce battles against regime troops”, the Syrian Observatory for Human Right said.

The Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC), a network of activists across the country, said the Salam checkpoint was “the last regime position in the Khan Sheikhun area”, in the south of Idlib province.

Khan Sheikhun “is now completely liberated”, the group said.

The observatory, meanwhile, said opposition fighters have blocked access to the highway linking the south of Idlib province to rebel-held Morek in the north of neighbouring Hama province.

While rebels have been losing ground in the centre of Syria, they have in recent weeks been making steady progress in Idlib and north of Hama.

The observatory, meanwhile, said the latest advance brings rebels closer to taking over the Wadi Deif and Hamidiyeh army bases in the area, which opposition fighters have besieged for more than a year.

Elsewhere, the Al Nusra Front claimed responsibility for two car bomb attacks on Sunday in the central city of Homs that according to the governor killed 12 people.

“God generously made it possible for the jihadists of Al Nusra Front in Homs... to break through the strongholds of the regime’s shabiha [militia]... despite the many obstacles, security barriers and checkpoints,” the jihadist group said on Twitter.

The statement said the first car bomb was parked in the district of Zahraa, in eastern Homs, and the second in the west of the city.

Both suicide car bombs “were detonated at the same time, in order to secure the highest death toll possible”, the militants said.

Homs Governor Talal Al Barazi told AFP on Monday that the toll from the first car bomb attack had risen to 12 dead and 23 wounded, revising an earlier death toll of 10.

The second attack in the west of Homs wounded seven people.

Homs has seen some of the worst violence in Syria since the outbreak of the 2011 uprising against President Bashar Assad that turned into a civil war.