Region

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Here is a summary of the key issues that have bogged down eight-months of intensive US efforts to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

The talks are currently scheduled to end on April 29, although Washington is hoping to extend the process into 2015.

Settlements

Israel’s ongoing settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem, which is viewed as illegal under international law, has not slowed during the talks, deeply angering the Palestinians, who say they will not extend the talks beyond April without a complete construction freeze.

In the first six months of the talks, Israel advanced plans for more than 11,700 new housing units, Peace Now figures show.

Israel rejects the notion that settlement expansion runs counter to peace efforts, saying it never committed to any restraints on construction during the talks.

Jewish state

Another flashpoint issue is Palestinian recognition of Israel as “the Jewish state,” which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as the “root of the conflict”. Israel fears that any flexibility on the issue would open the floodgates to millions of refugees, thereby posing a demographic threat to the “Jewish” character of the state.

But the Palestinians have flatly refused the demand, saying it would deny their historical narrative and effectively cancel out the right of their refugees to return to homes they fled from or were forced to leave during the 1948 war that followed Israel’s creation.

They see Netanyahu’s demand as a way to sidestep a negotiated solution to the refugee question.

Jordan Valley

Security arrangements in a future Palestinian state is a major bone of contention, particularly in the Jordan Valley which lies on the West Bank’s border with Jordan. Israel says the valley is crucial to its security and insists on maintaining a long-term military presence there.

The Palestinians reject this, saying it would make a mockery of their sovereignty and merely perpetuate the occupation. They have said they would accept deployment of a third party in the area, but this has been ruled out by Israel.

Prisoners

Under terms of a reciprocal agreement that opened the way for the start of the talks last July, Israel agreed to release 104 veteran Palestinian prisoners in four batches. So far, 78 of them have been freed, but Israel has refused to release the final group without a Palestinian commitment to extend the talks.

The Palestinians say Israel’s demand is “blackmail” and have refused to even consider extending the talks without the prisoners first being freed. They say the commitment to free them was not connected to or dependent upon progress in the talks.

They are demanding another 1,000 prisoners, including heavyweight political names, be freed as the price for extending the talks, but Israel has said it would only release some 400, none of them with blood on their hands.

UN moves

In exchange for Israel agreeing to free 104 prisoners, the Palestinians committed to freeze all moves to seek membership in UN organisations, which is a key part of their strategy to unilaterally further their claim for statehood.

Following Israel’s refusal to free the last 26 prisoners, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said he had begun moves to join several UN organisations and sign on to international treaties in a move that angered the Israelis and prompted Kerry to cancel a planned trip to Ramallah.

ADEN — Ten suspected Islamist militants and six soldiers died during a suicide bombing and assault on the main military headquarters in Aden on Wednesday, Yemen’s defence ministry said.

The attack bore the hallmarks of previous assaults on military installations by Al Qaeda, including one on the defence ministry compound in Sanaa in December and an earlier assault on the headquarters of the Second Division in Hadramout province.

State news agency Saba quoted a security source as saying Al Qaeda militants tried to storm the army’s Fourth Division headquarters in Aden’s Al Tawahi district after detonating a car laden with explosives outside the main gate.

The Fourth Division controls the military in southern Yemen.

Witnesses and the separatist Aden Al Ghad news website also said a 10-year-old boy was killed and four civilians were wounded by shrapnel from a shell that missed its target during subsequent clashes between the army and the militants, who apparently were still holding out in the area.

Tawahi houses some of the country’s main state facilities in Aden, including the presidential palace, the local secret service offices and the local radio and television studios.

Witnesses said they had heard the sounds of rocket-propelled grenades as soldiers closed off roads to the area and engaged the attackers.

Yemen, a Western-allied country that shares a border with top global oil exporter Saudi Arabia, has been in turmoil since mass protests forced long-term leader Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down in 2012. His successor, Abd-Rabbu Mansour, Hadi has been struggling to restore order.

Series of attacks

The security source told Saba news agency that Wednesday’s attack had been foiled at the gate of the army headquarters and troops were hunting militants who arrived in a separate vehicle to engage soldiers after the suicide attack.

“The security guarding the Fourth Division headquarters in Aden foiled a suicide attack carried out by terrorist elements of Al Qaeda who had detonated a booby-trapped car at the main gate of the division’s headquarters,” Saba quoted the source as saying.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is one of the most active branches of the network founded by Osama Bin Laden and militants have plotted attacks against international airlines from there.

On Tuesday, two Yemeni soldiers and two Al Qaeda militants were killed during a clash in the western Al Hudaida province, the Interior Ministry said on its website.

The website, quoting a source at the ministry, said the clash broke out when militants tried to free four of their comrades who had been seized in a raid by security forces on their hideout earlier in the day.

Saba later identified two of the captured militants as Saudi citizens.

AQAP, reinforced by Saudi militants with battle experience in Syria and Iraq, has staged a series of spectacular attacks on the Yemeni army since 2011.

Last month, suspected militants killed 20 members of Yemen’s security forces in a dawn raid on a checkpoint located some 120 kms east of Al Mukalla.

BAGHDAD — Campaigning for Iraq’s April 30 general election opened Tuesday, with Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki bidding for a third term as his government grapples with the country’s worst bloodshed in years.

Iraqis face a long list of daily struggles, ranging from lengthy power cuts and poor running water and sewerage to rampant corruption and high levels of unemployment, to say nothing of a seemingly endless stream of attacks which have killed more than 2,200 people this year.

And despite officials vaunting wide-ranging security operations against insurgents and militant training camps, the bloodletting has shown little sign of abating.

Six members of the security forces were killed on Tuesday, as new figures showed unrest was still near its highest level since 2008.

“There are new faces, but these are the same old blocs,” said Mazin Rumayadh, a 26-year-old employee of a Baghdad-based food wholesaler, voicing disdain for the apparent lack of progress since the last general election in March 2010.

“There is no need for them to fill the streets with posters — they are only making the streets dirty and causing traffic jams.

“The elections will bring no change.”

Political parties on Tuesday began plastering posters across Baghdad and the rest of the country, with more than 9,000 candidates vying for one of 328 parliamentary seats.

No single party is expected to win an absolute majority and previous elections have seen lengthy periods of government formation.

Elections in Iraq are rarely fought over political issues, with parties instead appealing to voters along sectarian, ethnic or tribal lines.

On some of the posters already up, for example, tribes voice pride over one of their members running for parliament.

Messages on other posters attempt to link would-be lawmakers with political leaders such as Maliki.

“We started putting up our posters in crowded areas of Baghdad, and in places we know many people live and pass through,” said Munaf Haidari, running in the election for a breakaway offshoot of the premier’s party.

“We have divided Baghdad into different areas, and we are targeting the areas where we have the most supporters,” Haidari said.

Maliki’s State of Law Alliance is widely seen as the front-runner to secure the largest single number of seats in the polls, Iraq’s first since March 2010.

But the bloc will encounter stiff competition in its traditional Shiite-dominated heartland of south Iraq from the Citizens List, a formerly powerful group seen as close to Iran, and Ahrar party that was until recently linked to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr.

In the Sunni-majority west and north, a variety of Sunni blocs are expected to compete for votes including those led by the parliament speaker and a deputy prime minister respectively.

And in the autonomous northern Kurdish region, a historic duopoly could be further dented by a relatively new political party that has made inroads in recent polls.

Fears of greater violence 

The elections come with violence in Iraq at its highest level since 2008, when the country was just emerging from a brutal sectarian war that left tens of thousands dead.

Separate sets of figures released on Tuesday by the UN mission to Iraq and the government differed markedly as to the scale of the bloodshed, but both pegged the violence at near its highest level in more than five years.

The bloodletting continued on Tuesday, with attacks in Tikrit and Mosul, north of Baghdad, killing six members of the security forces.

Analysts and diplomats have voiced fears that militants could try to further step up the pace of attacks in a bid to derail the elections.

Already, the vote appears unlikely to take place throughout parts of the western desert province of Anbar, which has been wracked by violence since the beginning of the year, with militants controlling an entire town on Baghdad’s doorstep.

Sunni militants, who regard the Shiite-led government as illegitimate and allied with Iran, are often blamed for violence in Iraq.

BEIRUT — The death toll in Syria’s three-year conflict has exceeded 150,000, an activist group said Tuesday as fighting raged across the country.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that it has documented 150,344 deaths in the conflict that started in March 2011. The figure includes civilians, rebels, and members of the Syrian military. It also includes militiamen, fighting alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces and foreign fighters battling for Assad’s ouster on the rebels’ side.

The observatory bases its tally on the information the group receives from a network of informants on the ground inside Syria.

In January, the UN said it had stopped updating its own tally of the Syrian dead because it can no longer verify the sources of information that led to its last count of at least 100,000 in late July.

Of the 150,344 people who died in the conflict, the majority — or 75,487 — were civilians, including 7,985 children and 5,266 women, The Observatory said. The number also includes 26,561 rebel fighters and 35,601 Syrian soldiers as well as 22, 879 Assad-loyal fighters and 11,220 foreign fighters battling on the opposition side.

Syria’s uprising began with largely peace protests against Assad’s rule. It has since then evolved into a civil war with sectarian overtones, pitting predominantly Sunni Muslim rebels against Assad’s government that is dominated by Alawites, a sect in Shiite Islam. On the opposition side, Islamic extremists, including foreign fighters and Syrian rebels who have taken up hardline Al Qaeda-style ideologies, have played an increasingly prominent role among fighters, dampening the West’s support for the rebellion to overthrow Assad.

That has led to a backlash by Islamic brigades and more moderate rebels who launched a war against Al Qaeda breakaway group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Infighting has raged in the north for months and more than 3,000 fighters have been killed in the rebel-on-rebel violence since the beginning of the year, according to activists. These deaths were not included in observatory’s tally.

BEIRUT — Conflict in Syria kills hundreds of thousands of people and spreads unrest across the Middle East. Iranian forces battle anti-Shiite fighters in Damascus, and the region braces for an ultimate showdown.

If the scenario sounds familiar to an anxious world watching Syria’s devastating civil war, it resonates even more with Sunni and Shiite fighters on the frontlines — who believe it was all foretold in 7th Century prophecies.

From the first outbreak of the crisis in the southern city of Deraa to apocalyptic forecasts of a Middle East soaked in blood, many combatants on both sides of the conflict say its path was set 1,400 years ago in the sayings of the Prophet Mohammad and his followers.

Among those many thousands of sayings, or hadith, are accounts which refer to the confrontation of two huge Islamic armies in Syria, a great battle near Damascus, and intervention from the north and west of the country.

The power of those prophecies for many fighters on the ground means that the three-year-old conflict is more deeply rooted — and far tougher to resolve — than a simple power struggle between President Bashar Assad and his rebel foes.

Syria’s war has killed more than 140,000 people, driven millions from their homes and left many more dependent on aid. Diplomatic efforts, focused on the political rather than religious factors driving the conflict, have made no headway.

“If you think all these mujahideen came from across the world to fight Assad, you’re mistaken,” said a Sunni Muslim jihadi who uses the name Abu Omar and fights in one of the many anti-Assad Islamist brigades in Aleppo.

“They are all here as promised by the Prophet. This is the war he promised — it is the Grand Battle,” he told Reuters, using a word which can also be translated as slaughter.

On the other side, many Shiites from Lebanon, Iraq and Iran are drawn to the war because they believe it paves the way for the return of Imam Mahdi — a descendent of the Prophet who vanished 1,000 years ago and who will re-emerge at a time of war to establish global Islamic rule before the end of the world.

According to Shiite tradition, an early sign of his return came with the 1979 Iranian revolution, which set up an Islamic state to provide fighters for an army led by the Mahdi to wage war in Syria after sweeping through the Middle East.

“This Islamic Revolution, based on the narratives that we have received from the Prophet and imams, is the prelude to the appearance of the Mahdi,” Iranian cleric and parliamentarian Ruhollah Hosseinian said last year.

He cited comments by an eighth century Shiite imam who said another sign of the Mahdi’s return would be a battle involving warriors fighting under a yellow banner — the colour associated with Lebanon’s pro-Assad Hizbollah group.

“As Imam Sadeq has stated, when the [forces] with yellow flags fight anti-Shiites in Damascus and Iranian forces join them, this is a prelude and a sign of the coming of his holiness,” Hosseinian was quoted as saying by Fars news agency.

Islam split into its Sunni and Shiite branches during a war over the succession to the leadership of the faith in the generation that followed the Prophet Mohammad’s death in 632.

The hadith, or sayings of the prophet and his companions, have been handed down orally over the centuries and are the most important sources of authority in Islam after the Koran itself. Many date back to those mediaeval battlefields in what are now Syria and Iraq, where the two main Islamic sects took shape.

The historical texts have become a powerful recruitment tool, quoted across the region from religious festivals in Iraq’s Shiite shrine city of Karbala to videos released by Sunni preachers in the Gulf, and beyond.

“We have here mujahedeen from Russia, America, the Philippines, China, Germany, Belgium, Sudan, India and Yemen and other places,” said Sami, a Sunni rebel fighter in northern Syria. “They are here because this what the Prophet said and promised, the Grand Battle is happening.”

Both sides emphasise the ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic state which will rule the world before total chaos.

Although some Sunni and Shiite clerics are privately sceptical of the religious justifications for the war, few in the region express such reservations in public for fear of being misinterpreted as doubters of the prophecies.

“Yes some of the signs are similar but these signs could apply at any time after the fall of the Islamic state [1,000 years ago],” one Sunni Muslim scholar in Lebanon said, asking that he not be identified. “There is no way to confirm we are living those times. We have to wait and see.”

For the faithful, the hadith chart the course of Syria’s conflict from its beginning in March 2011, when protests erupted over the alleged torture of students and schoolboys who wrote anti-Assad graffiti on a school wall in Daraa.

“There will be a strife in Sham [Syria] that begins with children playing, after which nothing can be fixed,” according to one hadith. “When it calms down from one side, it ignites from the other.”

Hadith on both sides mention Syria as a main battlefield, naming cities and towns where blood will be spilled.

Hundreds of thousands of people will be killed. The whole region will be shaken from the Arabian Peninsula to Iraq, Iran and Jerusalem, according to some texts.

Saudi Arabia will collapse. Almost every country in the Middle East will face unrest. One statement says “blood will reach knee-level”.

A widely circulated hadith attributed to Mohammad says Sham, or Syria, is God’s favoured land. Asked where the next jihad will be, he replies: “Go for Sham, and if you can’t, go for Yemen...[though] God has guaranteed me Sham and its people.”

Another refers to Muslims gathering “at the time of war in Ghouta, near a city called Damascus”. Ghouta, east of Syria’s capital, has been a rebel stronghold for the last two years.

A Sunni hadith speaks of a battle in a town called Dabeq, in northern Syria near the Turkish border, and intervention by a foreign army to split the Muslim fighters — seen by some as a reference to a possible Turkish incursion.

Syria’s civil war grew out of the “Arab Spring” of pro-democracy revolts in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 after Assad’s forces cracked down hard on peaceful protests.

But because Assad is a member of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shii’ism, and most of his opponents are Sunni Muslims, the fighting quickly took on a sectarian character, which has largely overwhelmed the political issues.

“These hadith are what the Mujahedeen are guided by to come to Syria, we are fighting for this. With every passing day we know that we are living the days that the Prophet talked about,” said Mussab, a fighter from the Nusra Front, a Sunni hardline group linked to Al Qaeda, speaking from Syria.

Murtada, a 27-year-old Lebanese Shiite who regularly goes to Syria to battle against the rebels, says he is not fighting for Assad, but for the Mahdi, also known as the Imam.

“Even if I am martyred now, when he appears I will be reborn to fight among his army, I will be his soldier,” he told Reuters in Lebanon.

Murtada, who has fought in Damascus and in the decisive battle last year for the border town of Qusair, leaves his wife and two children when he goes to fight in Syria: “Nothing is more precious than the Imam, even my family. It is our duty.”

Syria’s civil war built upon sectarian conflicts elsewhere, especially in Iraq and Lebanon, leading to a growing sense across the region that all those power struggles in individual countries were part of a titanic battle for the future.

Abbas, a 24-year-old Iraqi Shiite fighter, said he knew he was living in the era of the Mahdi’s return when the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003.

“That was the first sign and then everything else followed,” he told Reuters from Baghdad, where he said was resting before heading to Syria for a fourth time.

“I was waiting for the day when I will fight in Syria. Thank God he chose me to be one of the Imam’s soldiers.”

Abu Hassan, a 65-year-old pensioner from south Lebanon, said he once thought the prophecies of the end of days would take centuries to come about.

“Things are moving fast. I never thought that I would be living the days of the Imam. Now, with every passing day I am more and more convinced that it is only a matter of few years before he appears.”

TRIPOLI — Lebanese security forces set up checkpoints and patrols in the northern city of Tripoli, raided homes and arrested more than 20 people in a push to control sectarian violence fuelled by the war in Syria.

At least 27 people have been killed over the past three weeks in Tripoli in clashes between Sunni Muslims and members of the Alawite sect, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam.

The long-standing rivalry between the two sides has been worsened by the violence in Syria, which is sunk in a three-year-old conflict that has killed over 150,000 people and become increasingly sectarian.

Syria’s President Bashar Assad is an Alawite and the rebels fighting to overthrow him are overwhelmingly Sunni.

On Tuesday, Lebanese security forces raided homes of several figures suspected of involvement in the fighting, including Alawite Rifaat Eid and Ali Eid and Sunni Islamist preacher Omar Bakri, security sources and state media said.

Security forces arrested at least 23 people, confiscated light weapons and deployed at entrances and in neighbourhoods around the city.

But by late afternoon they had not deployed in the Sunni area of Bab Al Tebbaneh, where hundreds of residents protested against the army entering the area.

Lebanon’s current Cabinet was formed in February after nearly a year of political deadlock. The appointment of the new government has raised expectations authorities will bring violence related to Syria under control.

RAMALLAH/BRUSSELS — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed a request to join several UN agencies on Tuesday, in a move that could derail a US push to revive faltering peace talks with Israel.

“The Palestinian leadership has unanimously approved a decision to seek membership of 15 UN agencies and international treaties, beginning with the Fourth Geneva Convention,” Abbas said on television after signing the demand during a meeting at his Ramallah headquarters.

“The demands [for membership] will be sent immediately” to the relevant agencies, he said.

“This is not a move against America, or any other party — it is our right, and we agreed to suspend it for nine months,” said Abbas.

The Palestinians agreed to refrain from seeking membership of international bodies and from pursuing legal action against Israel during the nine months of talks that US Secretary of State John Kerry launched in July.

In return, Israel agreed to release 104 long-serving Palestinian prisoners.

But Israel has refused to release the final batch of 26 prisoners, using it as a bargaining chip to try and extend talks beyond their April 29 deadline.

Meanwhile, Kerry cancelled plans to travel Wednesday to Ramallah after both the Israelis and the Palestinians announced moves likely to scuttle the peace talks.

“We are no longer travelling tomorrow,” a senior State Department official said, shortly after Abbas announced the Palestinians would seek membership of 15 UN agencies.

The Palestinians have also repeatedly threatened to resume their action through international courts and the UN over Israel’s settlement expansion on occupied territories in the West Bank and in annexed Arab East Jerusalem.

Israel on Tuesday reissued tenders for hundreds of settler housing units in the East Jerusalem settlement neighbourhood of Gilo, on top of the thousands of new homes it has announced since July.

TRIPOLI — When a militia holding Libya’s eastern ports loaded a North Korean-flagged tanker with oil earlier this month, the Libyan parliament sacked its own prime minister and turned to US commandos to bring its cargo back.

For days the government had threatened to blow up the tanker, called Morning Glory, if it left port. When it sailed off, pro-governmental militiamen even gave chase on boats carrying jeeps mounted with anti-aircraft and cannons.

But that failed, and when the tanker reached international waters Libya’s parliament fired Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, who fled to Europe. A few days later, US Navy SEALS boarded the tanker to end the debacle.

The Morning Glory affair is one of the starkest symbols yet of how weak Libya’s central authority is. Three years after a NATO-supported revolt toppled Muammar Qadhafi, Libya is at the mercy of rival brigades of heavily armed former rebel fighters who openly and regularly defy the new state.

Libya’s parliament agrees on little, its interim government has no army to enforce security let alone impose its will, and a new constitution meant to forge a sense of nation remains undrafted.

In the vacuum, ex-fighters have briefly abducted Zeidan from his Tripoli hotel room, stormed the foreign ministry, and taken over the interior ministry, even before the renegades made their failed attempt to export oil.

Lawmakers joke that they may need to use the secret tunnels Qadhafi built under the capital so they can escape the marauding gunmen.

“Really there is no army, I thought there was one, but then I realised there really isn’t any,” ousted premier Zeidan said from Germany where he fled.

For many Libyans, the joy of freedom after decades under Qadhafi has given way to confusion. Libya has descended into a scramble over the future shape of the nation, with ex-rebel commanders, former exiles, Islamists, tribal leaders, and federalists all jostling for position.

At stake is the stability and integrity of this vast North African territory, rich in both oil and gas.

Neighbouring Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, has made its uprising work. A new constitution was adopted in January, Islamist and secular parties have compromised, and elections are due this year.

Libya, by contrast, is floundering.

“There was a euphoria that accompanied the overthrow of the dictator that did not take into account some of the stark realities... What is the unifying idea here?” one Libya-based Western diplomat asked.

“It’s not as though removing Qadhafi was going to mean the ... box would open and out pops Dubai. All the problems that were covered over, papered over or bribed over or suppressed, they are emerging again.”

Pulling teeth

Working his phone to resolve another Tripoli blackout, Libyan Electricity Minister Ali Mihirig knows better than most how hard it will be to get the country working together. Back in Libya after three decades living in Canada, Mihirig is not only in charge of electricity but has spent the past year as a mediator and negotiator among the country’s myriad factions.

“It is like pulling teeth,” he said of convincing former fighters to put down their guns and abandon their bases.

“It is painful, it is hard, sometimes you need anesthesia... We have strong armed groups... Fortunately or unfortunately, they don’t agree with each other, which keeps this process going.”

The government has negotiated with militia chieftains to give up command posts they seized when they liberated Tripoli. The army is recruiting more and the government co-opted former fighters by putting thousands of them on the state payroll.

But that has often empowered rival militias and created a mishmash of security forces and quasi-official military units. Even on a casual drive outside Tripoli, visitors pass checkpoints manned by guards whose ragtag uniforms are no clue to affiliation.

The former rebel groups, political factions and tribes are proving more loyal to their vision of Libya than to the compromises required in a unified state.

In Benghazi, in the country’s east, three key ports have been seized by a group of former oil security forces who defected with their leader Ibrahim Jathran, a former Qadhafi fighter, last summer. They want more autonomy for the region.

Ethnic Amazigh, the berber people who have long felt oppressed by Libya’s Arab majority, have also targeted the country’s oil infrastructure. Armed Amazigh shut down the vital El Sharara oil field for two months last year to demand more rights in the new constitution.

An Islamist militia, the Operations Room for Libya’s Revolutionaries, has been accused of kidnapping Zeidan and briefly snatching five Egyptian diplomats in Tripoli to secure the freedom of their commander who was arrested in Egypt. Its commander, Shaban Hadia, denied all kidnapping allegations.

Rival militias are also lined up on competing sides of Libya’s divided parliament where Islamists, represented by the Justice and Construction Party, a branch of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, are deadlocked with the National Forces Alliance, a group of nationalist and liberal parties led by a former Qadhafi official.

But the two most powerful groups in the country are the militias west of the capital, one in the mountain town of Zintan and the other in the port city of Misrata. Bristling with weaponry and a sense of entitlement, the rivals both claim the mantle of champions of the revolution. Each brigade is loosely allied to competing political factions, and neither shows any sign of disarming nor falling in behind the government in Tripoli.

“We are keeping our weapons, not because we want to end the state, but we are waiting for a real organisation to appear,” said Khalid Imohammed, a former military commander in Zintan.

The view from Zintan

Imohammed was a supermarket manager during the Qadhafi years. He took up arms early in the uprising, at first to defend his town, and then to oust the Libyan leader.

These days he feels a new sense of outrage. Like many in Zintan, an impoverished town of around 35,000 people some 140km west of Tripoli, he complains that he has seen little of the oil riches or development he believes the capital and other cities enjoy, and laments the lack of basic services, new schools, hospitals, even a basic water supply.

“Winning this war was a gift from God and made with the courage of the Zintan people,” Imohammed, dressed in traditional brown robes, said. “And what did we get? We didn’t see any change. Now we are in a different war, a political war. But they are just fighting for private gain, not like our sacrifices.”

Zintan city council leader Mohammed Al Waqwaq puts it more succinctly: “Zintanis felt it was a duty to fight. And that duty was not rewarded.”

That’s one reason the group has not given up their greatest prize: Saif Al Islam, Qadhafi’s son, who was captured by the Zintanis, and is still held by them despite requests by both Tripoli and the International Criminal Court in the Hague to hand him over.

City council leaders say Saif will be held and tried in Zintan because it is the only place that can guarantee his security. Tripoli cannot even protect its own prime minister, they say.

The Misrata model

Some 160km from Zintan, the coastal city state of Misrata has been booming since the 2011 uprising. Its port, Libya’s biggest, saw a record number of containers uploaded last year, while the city has big plans for hotels, shopping malls and foreign language schools.

Misrata suffered some of the worst fighting during the rebellion against Qadhafi. But dozens of new outlets from fashion retailers to restaurants now flourish.

“The experience of the war has brought people to work together and help each other,” said Mohammed Al Swayah, manager in the free port authority, who goes on to list business opportunities for foreign firms.

Diplomats have another explanation for the better security in Misrata: regular military units check all vehicles that enter the city, a procedure rare elsewhere in Libya. Misratan entrepreneurs are also paying former rebels to provide security.

Locals are convinced Misrata can be a model for the country. “We in Misrata started already in July 2011 (during the uprising) a plan for future industrial development,” said Bashim Al Tarablus, head of a local business council. “In Benghazi, the revolution was over in three days but they didn’t plan anything for long.”

The Misratan forces make up most of the Libya Shield, the semiofficial armed body created by the transitional parliament to protect Tripoli against a resurgence of pro-Qadhafi forces. Though seen by many as Islamist-leaning, the Shield is a potential backbone of a new army. It is also a powerful counterweight to the Zintan brigades.

‘Difficult to do’

One of the main reasons Libya is failing to pull together is the almost complete absence of strong state institutions.

Libya’s first modern ruler was King Idris, an inward-looking tribesman who mostly stayed at home in the east. Idris was followed by Qadhafi, who shaped the country in his own image.

Both men shunned state institutions and accountability, relying instead on tribes and the largesse and jobs of international oil companies. That helped to buy loyalty and eased social tensions. But while public service ballooned — today some 1.2 million Libyans, almost a fifth of the population, work in the public sector — institutions were neglected.

“Each person is looking only after his [own] interest and not working as nation,” said Ali Mohammed Salem, deputy central bank governor who estimates it will take at least five years to build up an efficient state.

The United Nations and Western governments have cajoled Libya’s factions to keep the transition on track. A committee has been elected to start writing the constitution, and the parliament has agreed it will run elections as soon as possible.

“They need to come to some kind of national consensus on what kind of country they want. It is easy to say and very difficult to do. To do that you need some political leadership,” said another Western diplomat.

The army, built around a core of 8,000, is training with the help of US, British, Italian and Turkish aid. But most programmes have just started.

Shaban Hadia, the commander of the group blamed for kidnapping Zeidan and the Egyptian diplomats, said his group is actually helping maintain security.

“We are now an alternative until the army and the police are created,” the former rebel said. “The country now lives in a quagmire, and that is because our government is weak.”

For Mihirig, the electricity minister turned negotiator, progress is slow but steady.

“It will be a long way before Libyans realise the importance of building democracy, of building a state, and that using arms is not an option anymore,” he said. “The next three to five months are very critical for Libya and will define where the state will go.”

BEIRUT — Lebanon’s parliament on Tuesday passed a law making domestic violence a criminal offence, after a years-long campaign by civil society groups in a sectarian Arab country steeped in conservativism.

Large sectors of Lebanese society have traditionally regarded beatings of women and children as religiously and socially acceptable.

New York-based Human Rights Watch described the bill as “historic”, but pointed to gaps which did not ensure full protection for women.

For its part, leading Lebanese women’s rights organisation Kafa was critical of the law in its current form.

It fails to specifically enshrine protection for women, said Kafa, adding that the law used religious terminology in place of rights-based terms.

Ghassan Mkhayber, an MP who played a key role in lobbying for the law, told AFP: “It is a big step forward in protecting women, we should be proud.

“We now have a law that provides effective protection for women ...

“It’s not the ideal text, but it’s a first step,” Mkhayber said, while stressing that the law must now be enforced.

The law passed after a Kafa-led campaign which saw thousands of demonstrators take to the streets of Beirut on March 8, International Women’s Day.

It came after several women died allegedly from beatings by their husbands.

For Kafa’s Faten Abu Shakra, who led the campaign, the law “does not specifically focus on women”.

She opposed the introduction “by religious men of religious language” into the bill, which fails to specifically refer to marital rape as a crime.

It criminalises causing “harm”, including “beatings” and “threats”, to obtain sex, but the term “conjugal right” is used without mention of consent.

MP Mkhayber said the term aimed to appease Lebanon’s powerful clerics, who had been opposed to the bill outright.

According to Rothna Begum of Human Rights Watch, the law is “a positive step forward in ensuring protection for women from domestic violence”.

She told AFP: “It includes positive steps such as providing for restraining orders against abusers; temporary accommodation for the survivors of abuse.”

The law also “assigns a public prosecutor in each of Lebanon’s six governorates to receive complaints and investigate cases of violence; and establishes specialised family violence units within Lebanon’s domestic police to process complaints.”

But “parliament should seek to urgently reform this new law if it is to ensure women full protection from domestic violence including criminalising marital rape.”

DUBAI — A top Dubai security official, General Dahi Khalfan, has claimed Qatar as forming part of the United Arab Emirates, adding a new dimension to a dispute with Doha.

“Qatar is an integral part of the UAE,” the outspoken Khalfan, a longtime critic of the Doha-backed Muslim Brotherhood, wrote on Twitter on Monday, demanding his country “reclaim” Qatar.

“We must put up signs on our borders with Qatar stating: ‘You are now entering the UAE’s eighth emirate’,” said Khalfan.

The UAE is a seven-member federation.

Leading up to the region’s independence from Britain, Qatar and Bahrain in 1968 joined the Trucial States, as the UAE was then known, but their union fell apart three years later.

The Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain last month withdrew their envoys to Doha, accusing it of meddling in their internal affairs by supporting Islamists.

Qatar is a staunch supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, viewed by most conservative monarchies in the Gulf as a threat to their grip on power.

Khalfan, who was Dubai’s police chief before being promoted to second in command of security, has more than 600,000 followers on Twitter.

His comments on Qatar sparked a wave of controversy on the social network.

A Kuwaiti user compared him to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, whose troops invaded Kuwait in 1990 calling it Iraq’s 19th province.