Region

GENEVA — The Red Cross appealed Thursday for a record budget to help Syrians affected by the humanitarian catastrophe in their war-ravaged country, in the largest funding of an operation since the 1990s Balkan wars.

“The scale of the conflict in Syria is unprecedented, and the stark truth is that there is no end in sight,” said Robert Mardini, who heads Near and Middle East operations at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“The bleak reality is that the needs are growing at a much faster pace than the humanitarian aid being provided on the ground,” he told reporters in Geneva.

The ICRC, he said, needs $212 million (153 million euros) this year — $84 million more than previously estimated — to help address the needs of Syrians both inside the country and in the surrounding region.

The amount far exceeded any other ICRC operation worldwide at least since the Balkans crisis 15 years ago, Mardini said.

He acknowledged that regardless of how much aid his organisation or others poured into helping people in Syria, “it is simply not enough and does not match the sheer size of the needs”.

“No words or qualifiers can do justice to what is happening in Syria today,” he said.

Some 150,000 people have been killed during the past three years of civil war and half the country’s population has been forced to flee their homes, including the nearly three million refugees who have flooded into neighbouring countries.

Most of the cash requested by the ICRC — $157 million of it — is meant to go to the organisation’s activities inside the war-torn country, while the remainder will go to aid operations in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq.

More than funding, the main concern for the organisation in Syria was the lack of access to tens of thousands of people in need, especially in besieged areas, Mardini said.

In a bid to overcome constraints linked to violence and mistrust, the ICRC is attempting to intensify its dialogues with different parties to ensure it can bring food, medical care and other necessities to where they are most needed.

“Our priority is clearly Aleppo. We have a very substantial plan of response for Aleppo, that would include medical, surgical aid, food and non-food items,” Mardini said, adding, however, that the organisation was still waiting for the go-ahead from Damascus.

The ICRC also aims to increase its presence on the ground in Syria, with plans to add 50 more local employees bringing the total to 250, and to increase the number of expatriate workers to 65-70 from 40.

In an attempt to reduce the widespread rights abuses in Syria, the organisation has also held around a dozen training classes in international humanitarian law for opposition military commanders.

Since the beginning of the conflict, the ICRC has, however, not been able to hold such courses for members of the Syrian army, Mardini said.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to nominate its ambassador in Iraq to be the new US envoy in Cairo, US officials said on Wednesday, as US-Egyptian ties remain strained following the Egyptian army’s ouster of an elected president last year.

Robert Stephen Beecroft, a longtime diplomat who has been US ambassador in Baghdad since 2012, would replace Anne Patterson, who left the Cairo post last year and is now serving as a senior official on Middle East issues in Washington.

It is not clear when Beecroft would be formally nominated, the officials said on condition of anonymity. US ambassador positions must be confirmed by the Senate.

If nominated and confirmed, Beecroft would be the face of US policy in Cairo at a fraught moment in US-Egyptian ties.

US officials have repeatedly criticised the military-backed interim government for harsh treatment of opponents, particularly those linked to the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, and for allowing courts to hand down death sentences for hundreds of opponents.

But the Obama administration moved last week to expand some military assistance for Egypt and to provide Apache attack helicopters to help Egyptian soldiers battle a burgeoning militancy in the Sinai Peninsula.

US officials continue to withhold other assistance and military hardware, saying they will provide the aid only when Egypt proves it is governing in a truly democratic fashion.

Egyptians are scheduled to select a new president later this month in elections that Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the former military leader who toppled former president Mohamed Morsi last year, is expected to win.

The Obama administration had been expected to nominate Robert Ford, who served as the lead US diplomat on the crisis in Syria, for the Cairo position, but US officials said that the Egyptian government signalled they saw Ford as too close to Islamist parties in the Middle East.

ADEN — Western embassies in Yemen heightened security measures on Thursday after increasingly bold attacks on foreigners by Al Qaeda, even as the militant Islamists lost ground to an army offensive in the south.

The government’s offensive is the most concerted campaign against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) — seen by Washington as one of the group’s most lethal wings — in nearly two years. The group has been blamed for deadly attacks against security forces, foreigners and oil and gas facilities.

Yemen has said its forces captured Azzan, the last major militant bastion they have been targeting in an offensive that began 10 days ago. Washington is keen to prevent any spillover of violence into neighbouring oil power Saudi Arabia and to stop Yemen being used as a springboard to attack Western targets.

The European Union said on Thursday it had limited its presence in Yemen to essential staff, while France ordered its diplomats to restrict their movement. On Wednesday, the United States announced a suspension of operations at its embassy.

“Like other diplomatic and international actors in Sanaa, we are limiting the presence to essential staff and reviewing our security measures,” said Michael Mann, a spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

A spokeswoman for France’s foreign ministry said its security alertness in Yemen was at maximum level but said the embassy remained open. On Monday, a French security agent was killed in Sanaa.

Britain’s Foreign Office issued a new travel alert on Thursday, advising against all travel to Yemen and strongly urging British nationals to leave the Arabian Peninsula state.

The International Committee for the Red Cross, whose staff have been kidnapped and shot in recent years in Yemen, said it was reducing its exposure in Sanaa, where it described the security conditions as “extremely worrying, unpredictable”.

“There are no private movements within the country except when people go to the airport for their [breaks],” Robert Mardini, head of ICRC operations for the Near and Middle East, told Reuters in Geneva.

Last stronghold

Yemen scored a win against Al Qaeda on Wednesday when special forces killed a militant suspected of masterminding attacks on Westerners, including the French agent on Monday.

Government troops captured the mountainous Al Mahfad area in Abyan province earlier this week, leaving Azzan in Shabwa province as the militants’ main redoubt.

“An official military source in the third military region said that units of the armed forces and the security have entered ... Azzan,” a statement on the defence ministry’s website said. It also said security forces had killed a militant called Abu Musaab Al Kuwaiti.

The Yemeni defence minister told a crowd celebrating the capture of Azzan that the army’s offensive against AQAP would continue, the state news agency Saba said.

Azzan, with a population of about 50,000, and some other towns in the south were declared Islamic emirates in 2011 by Ansar Al Sharia, an AQAP affiliate.

The army drove them out in 2012 but the militants have since rebuilt their presence, exploiting the Sanaa central government’s traditionally weak hold over the region.

“We hope that the entrance of the army and the return of state authority to Azzan and other areas will be the end of the worry and turmoil that we’ve been living with for years,” Azzan resident Mubarak Mahdi said.

ALGIERS — Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika said 10 militants killed by government forces this week included fighters from Libya, Mali and Tunisia, state news reported on Wednesday.

Algeria heightened border security last year after a French military intervention to drive Al Qaeda-linked militants from Mali and an attack on Algeria’s Amenas gas plant near the Libyan border.

Algerian troops killed 10 fighters near Tin-Zaouatine, bordering Mali, and captured rocket launchers, rifles and grenades in an operation that began on Monday and was still ongoing.

“It was an attempted infiltration by a heavily armed terrorist group with elements from Mali, Libya and from Tunisia,” the president said after a meeting with ministers, according to the APS news agency.

It was the first comments by the ailing president since he formed a new government this week following his re-election last month to a fourth term.

Bouteflika, 77, won the election though he did not campaign himself and has spoken rarely in public since a stroke last year that left him in a Paris hospital for three months and raised questions about Algeria’s stability.

Militant attacks are rarer since Algeria ended its decade-long 1990s war with armed Islamists, but the North African branch of Al Qaeda and other militants are still active, especially in the south.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — US National Security Adviser Susan Rice assured Israel at high-level bilateral talks on Thursday that Washington remained determined to stop Iran developing nuclear arms, the White House said.

“The US delegation reaffirmed our commitment to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” said a White House statement released after talks in Jerusalem between Rice, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials from both sides.

“The delegations held thorough consultations on all aspects of the challenge posed by Iran, and pledged to continue the unprecedented coordination between the United States and Israel,” it added.

Earlier, Netanyahu said that the best defence against a nuclear Iran was to block it from developing such a weapon in the first place, and he referred to a new round of talks between Tehran and world powers due to open next week in Vienna.

“The most important thing is that Iran does not attain the ability to develop a nuclear weapon, and that needs to be and must be the ultimate and most important goal of the current negotiations with Iran,” he said.

“That needs to be the object of the talks, that is Israel’s position, that needs to be the position of everyone who really wants to prevent the renewed threat of mass destruction by a radical regime,” Netanyahu said at a ceremony marking the 69th anniversary of the allied defeat of Nazi Germany.

The White House statement said the Israeli-US talks Thursday also dealt with “other critical regional and bilateral issues”, without elaborating.

It was Rice’s first trip to Israel since she took office last July and it came shortly after the collapse of US-brokered Middle East peace talks.

Rice was due to meet Thursday evening with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

WASHINGTON — Israel spies on the United States more than any other ally does and these activities have reached an alarming level, Newsweek magazine reported on Tuesday.

The main targets are US industrial and technical secrets, the weekly said, quoting classified briefings on legislation that would make it easier for Israeli citizens to get visas to enter America.

Newsweek said a congressional staffer familiar with a briefing last January called the testimony “very sobering... alarming... even terrifying”, and quoted another as saying the behavior was “damaging”.

“No other country close to the United States continues to cross the line on espionage like the Israelis do,” said a former congressional staffer who attended another classified briefing in late 2013, according to Newsweek.

It said that briefing was one of several in recent months given by the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the FBI and the National Counterintelligence Directorate.

The former congressional staffer said the intelligence agencies did not give specifics, but cited “industrial espionage-folks coming over here on trade missions or with Israeli companies working in collaboration with American companies, [or] intelligence operatives being run directly by the government, which I assume meant out of the [Israeli] Embassy”.

Israel’s espionage activities in America are unrivaled and go far beyond activities by other close allies, such as Germany, France, Britain and Japan, counter-intelligence agents told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, Newsweek said.

“I don’t think anyone was surprised by these revelations,” the former aide was quoted as saying.

“But when you step back and hear... that there are no other countries taking advantage of our security relationship the way the Israelis are for espionage purposes, it is quite shocking.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman rejected the allegations.

“We’re talking about lies and falsehood, simply libel which is baseless and unfounded,” he said.

Lieberman added Israel was not involved in any form of espionage against the United States, either direct or indirect in nature.

GAZA — The Hamas-run government in the Gaza Strip said on Wednesday it had relaxed a ban on Palestinian newspapers published outside the enclave as a gesture of reconciliation to rival group Fateh after their unity deal last month.

The announcement came two days after Palestinian President and Fateh leader Mahmoud Abbas met Hamas’ leader in exile, Khaled Mishaal, in Qatar for their first talks since the unity pact was signed.

The groups have banned newspapers from each other’s territories since Hamas won a 2006 poll and the two parties fought a bloody civil war the following year in which Hamas seized the Gaza Strip and Fateh remained in power in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The return to Gaza of Al Quds, the biggest-selling Palestinian daily in the West Bank, was greeted enthusiastically by Gaza residents who snapped up copies from newspaper sellers shouting out its name.

“We are taking steps to end the era of the ugly division and to advance reconciliation,” Ehab Al Ghsain, a Hamas government spokesman, said about allowing Al Quds back into the Gaza Strip.

“We urge the Palestinian Authority to take similar steps in the West Bank,” he said.

There was no immediate comment from the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank under interim peace accords with Israel, on whether it would relax its own restrictions.

Hamas wants Fateh to lift a West Bank ban on the Gaza Strip’s two pro-Hamas dailies and a newspaper affiliated with the Islamic Jihad group.

Hamas said it would wait for Abbas’ administration to reciprocate before allowing back two other major newspapers it had prohibited.

Al Quds is an independent daily with articles critical of a wide spectrum of political parties. It is printed in East Jerusalem.

The April 23 reconciliation pact, envisaging the formation of a government within five weeks and a general election six months later, angered Israel, which suspended already troubled US-brokered peace talks with Abbas. 

Both Israel and the United States classify Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

Deep mistrust and enmity have scuppered previous deals to end the internal Palestinian rift, with both sides struggling to reconcile Hamas’ commitment to fighting Israel with Abbas’ choice to negotiate with it.

In another bid to bolster the unity agreement, Hamas on Monday freed six imprisoned Fateh men in the Gaza Strip who had been convicted of security offences.

HOMS — An operation to evacuate fighters and civilians from rebel-held areas of the flashpoint Syrian city of Homs started on Wednesday, a rebel negotiator and the provincial governor said.

“Three buses have left, carrying 120 people in total, a mixture of wounded and non-wounded civilians and fighters,” negotiator Abul Hareth Al Khalidi told AFP via the Internet.

Homs Governor Talal Al Barazi, quoted by state news agency SANA, also said the operation to evacuate an estimated 2,000 people was under way.

“Homs governor tells SANA correspondent that the first batch of fighters from the old city of Homs has left,” it reported in a breaking news alert.

Barazi earlier told SANA that government forces would sweep the rebel areas for mines and explosives after the evacuation was completed.

The evacuees from rebel-held parts of the city are being granted safe passage to the north of the province and, according to a copy of a deal seen by AFP, fighters will be allowed to keep light weapons.

The deal between the regime and rebels was reached as part of an exchange for a number of hostages being held by opposition fighters in the northern city of Aleppo.

And under the agreement, fighters will also allow aid into two Shiite majority towns in the same province, Nubol and Zahraa, under rebel siege.

It was not immediately clear whether aid had begun entering the towns, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said roads into the two communities had been prepared for deliveries to begin.

Once the Homs operation is complete, the evacuated areas are to be turned over to the government.

The regime will then have control of all but one major area of Homs, once dubbed the “capital of the revolution”.

Waer district is to remain under rebel control for now, but negotiations are under way for a similar deal to that being implemented in the old city.

The old city and surrounding rebel-held areas have been under a tight Syrian army siege for nearly two years.

Earlier this year, around 1,400 people were evacuated from the districts under a UN-Red Crescent operation.

But a group of fighters and civilians, including those with injuries unable to reach evacuation points, stayed behind.

They have faced increasingly tough conditions, with little food or medicine.

More than 150,000 people have been killed in Syria’s conflict since the start of an armed uprising in 2011.

BEIRUT — Lebanon said on Tuesday there is “no decision” to block Palestinians and other refugees from Syria entering the country, after the UN and a rights group criticised the deportation of 41 people.

In a meeting chaired by Interior Minister Nohad Al Mashnuq, the country’s security agencies agreed “there is absolutely no decision to bar them from entry, and the border is open to them”, reported the official National News Agency.

The report came after the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said it was “concerned about the increased restrictions on Palestine refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria from entering Lebanon”.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) had also reported Palestinians being “arbitrarily denied entry” at a border crossing from Syria, and said around 40 people had been deported.

The New York-based rights group said deportations into an active war zone violated international law.

A Lebanese security agency source told AFP on Tuesday that 41 people, including many Palestinians, were returned to Syria after they were caught trying to fly out from Beirut airport using fake visas.

The NNA said: “The decision to deport them was because they committed a criminal offence, because they had forged documents in their possession.”

More than a million people have fled Syria’s brutal war, including around 52,000 Palestinians.

Lebanon has not signed the international refugee convention, but has generally kept its borders open to people fleeing the Syrian conflict.

With more than a million refugees from Syria, including 52,000 Palestinians, Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees from the conflict and now has the highest refugee population per capita in the world.

‘No safe place’

The international community has praised Lebanon, which has a population of just four million, for absorbing so many of those fleeing Syria.

Despite its recent criticisms, HRW urged foreign governments to better assist Beirut in hosting refugees.

“Concerned governments should generously assist neighbouring countries, including Lebanon, so that they can meet the needs of refugees and asylum seekers from Syria,” HRW’s Deputy Middle East and North Africa Director Joe Stork said.

Once numbering 500,000 in Syria, Palestinians have been targeted by both sides in the war, making them one of the country’s most vulnerable groups.

“All civilians in Syria are targets, but the Palestinians are especially vulnerable,” Wissam Sabaaneh of the Palestinian Jafra Foundation told AFP.

Syria’s biggest Palestinian area, Yarmouk in southern Damascus, has been under total blockade by the Syrian army since last year and more than 100 people have died there as a result of food and medical shortages, according to a Syrian monitoring group.

Turkey and Jordan have set up camps for Syrian refugees, but have blocked entry to Palestinians, said Sabaaneh.

“Lebanon is the only place they can go to,” he said.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel insists Iran be denied uranium enrichment capabilities under a potentially imminent nuclear deal, a demand that risks opening a new Israeli-United States rift, officials said on Wednesday.

The dispute, a major topic for a visit to Jerusalem by US National Security Adviser Susan Rice on Wednesday and Thursday, appeared part of Israeli efforts to weigh in on world powers’ difficult talks with Tehran before a July 20 date for a deal.

Though not at the table, Israel matters in Western capitals given its fear of a nuclear-armed Iran and threats to attack its arch-foe preemptively if it deem diplomacy a dead end.

A November interim accord easing sanctions on Iran made clear Washington and five other world powers would let it enrich uranium on a reduced scale under a final agreement distancing it from the means to make a bomb. But Israel wants the Iranians to be stripped of all disputed nuclear projects.

Highly enriched uranium can fuel nuclear warheads. Iran says it seeks peaceful atomic energy and medical isotopes only.

“Are we going to agree on enrichment? No,” an Israeli government adviser briefed on Rice’s visit told Reuters.

“We would be happy to see July 20 pass without a deal,” the adviser said, adding that there was worry in Israel that Obama, facing possible gains by Republican rivals in the mid-term US elections of November, might be tempted to accommodate Iran now.

This view seems unlikely to go down well with Obama, a second-term Democrat who has sparred in the past with Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over strategies for Iran and peace making with the Palestinians.

‘Intensive consultations’

The adviser described Israel’s hard line as sincere but declarative, rather than a prelude to a new Middle East war, and a signal to supporters in the US Congress to keep up pressure on US President Barack Obama not to compromise with Iran.

Rice tweeted that she was “looking forward to robust and intensive consultations” in Israel and that the allies’ security cooperation “has never been stronger”. On Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said her visit to Israel would not produce any new developments regarding Iran. 

Russia, which is among the six world powers negotiating with Iran, said parts of the final agreement could be agreed at a scheduled meeting in Vienna next week.

Some Western diplomats and experts privately acknowledge forcing Iran to halt all uranium enrichment activities, as stipulated in UN Security Council resolutions, is unrealistic given the scale of the programme and resistance from Tehran.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a US official said Rice came to Israel “representing the six powers”, adding: “The question of enrichment, how many [uranium purification] centrifuges Iran should keep, is the big one.”

The US official voiced confidence that a deal with Iran, if achieved, would prevent its heavy water facility at Arak from producing significant amounts of plutonium — another fissile material that could be used for nuclear warheads.

While that would be welcomed by the Israelis, their main focus has long been Iran’s buildup of uranium stocks which might allow it to refine enough fuel for a bomb in short order.

Israel, widely assumed to have the region’s only atomic arsenal, was angered last month when US Secretary of State John Kerry suggested cautious openness to a nuclear deal that would keep Iran 6 to 12 months from the weapons threshold.

A former Israeli security official said Tehran would be five years away from the threshold if the demand for a full Iranian nuclear rollback were met. But the Israeli adviser said the government had not presented any such formulation.

“I’ve not seen or heard anything about what our ‘acceptable’ threshold would be,” the adviser said. “But I do know that less than a year would be unacceptable.”