Region

ALGIERS — Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal will resign on Thursday to become campaign director for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the ageing independence leader who is running for re-election, a source close to the presidency said on Wednesday.

Bouteflika, 77, registered his candidacy for the April 17 vote last week, one of the few times he has spoken in public since suffering a stroke last year that has raised opposition questions about his ability to govern.

Sellal will be replaced as premier by Energy Minister Youcef Yousfi, the source told Reuters.

Backed by the National Liberation Front Party and the army, Bouteflika is almost assured five more years in power. But his rare appearances have generated doubts about his health and about what happens if he is too sick to rule.

Sellal himself was the first to announce Bouteflika would run again, but did little to ease questions about the president’s health when he said he would not need to campaign himself because there were plenty who could do that for him.

ADDIS ABABA — East African heads of state met in Addis Ababa Thursday in the latest push for peace in war-torn South Sudan, where almost three months of raging conflict has left thousands dead.

Leaders from the East African bloc, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), were hosted by Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn to “deliberate on the current situation” in the troubled fledgling nation, a statement read.

The one-day meeting comes as South Sudan’s army spokesman reported fresh clashes in the strategic oil city of Malakal, one of the hardest fought battlegrounds in the conflict, and which has switched hands several times.

“There has been fighting between our forces and the rebels in, and around Malakal town for the last two days,” army spokesman Philip Aguer told AFP.

South Sudanese President Salva Kiir was at the meeting, but no direct talks between his government and the rebels were due to take place until next week.

The two sides signed an IGAD-brokered ceasefire agreement on January 23, but heavy fighting has continued.

IGAD and the African Union will “work on how best to implement the cessation of hostilities” agreement, AU commission chief Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who has sent in troops to back Kiir’s forces and fight rebel troops, was also present.

President Omar Al Bashir of Sudan, whose nation is heavily dependent on the oil from landlocked South Sudan which transits through Khartoum to the coast, was also at the meeting.

Earlier this month, officials said that South Sudan’s oil production had been cut by almost a third since fighting broke out, with some of the heaviest fighting in oil producing areas.

South Sudan’s government has been at war with rebel groups since December 15, when a clash between troops loyal to Kiir and those loyal to sacked vice president Riek Machar snowballed into full-scale fighting across the world’s newest nation.

Somalia’s Prime Minister Abdiweli Sheikh Ahmed said that “the IGAD summit is intended to tackle means of implementing previous agreements and the deployment of peacekeeping forces to South Sudan.”

Stalled peace talks in Ethiopia between rebels and the government, which have made little progress, are due to resume on March 20.

Ethiopia’s Hailemariam this week said the peace process was “going very slow, but it is going in the right direction”.

Over 930,000 civilians have fled their homes since fighting began, including over quarter of million leaving for neighbouring nations as refugees, according to the United Nations.

RAMALLAH — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has accused one of his main rivals, Mohammed Dahlan, of involvement in six murders, hinting that he might also be behind the death of former leader Yasser Arafat.

Dahlan, who lives in exile in the Gulf, denied the allegations of his arch foe Abbas, their bitter row now playing out publicly across the Palestinian media and on social media.

Once a prominent official in Abbas’s Western-backed Fateh movement, Dahlan was ousted from the group in 2011 following accusations of corruption. He denied the charges and remains a powerful figure on the sidelines, forging ties with numerous Arab leaders and maintaining links with the splintered Fateh.

Abbas lashed out at Dahlan, who is regularly cited as a possible future president, during a Fateh meeting earlier this week, with his comments later released to the press.

Abbas said an investigation was carried out into Dahlan, for years Fateh’s strongman in the Gaza Strip, during the rule of former president Arafat. “It was found out that six people were killed by orders from Dahlan,” the president said.

He added that Arafat had decided not to release the report. The iconic Palestinian leader died in mysterious circumstances in 2004 and many of his supporters are certain he was poisoned.

Abbas said he did not have any proof that Dahlan was involved, but he read out several statements in which his 52-year-old rival had allegedly criticised Arafat.

“Who killed Yasser Arafat? This is not evidence, but indications that deserve consideration,” said Abbas, who has faced criticism from many Palestinians for pursuing apparently gridlocked peace negotiations with Israel.

An angry Dahlan hit back on his Facebook page, saying Abbas’s speech was full of “lies... stupidity and ignorance of the Palestinian reality”. He added that he would also “unveil the lies” surrounding the death of Arafat, calling it “the most important and most dangerous issue of our modern history”.

In an indication of growing sensitivity over Dahlan, Abbas’s government earlier this month cut the salaries of nearly 100 security men still loyal to him in an apparent effort to undermine his popularity.

Arab media have reported in recent months that Dahlan has met Egypt’s powerful army chief Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and has also reached out to Hamas, the Islamist rulers of Gaza who have always viewed him with deep distrust.

Perhaps seeking to exacerbate tensions between the two, Abbas said Dahlan had known of an Israeli plot to kill Hamas chief armed commander Salah Shehada. The assassination attempt failed, Abbas said.

Shehada died in an Israeli bombing and it was not clear what assassination attempt Abbas was referring to.

Dahlan said there was only one attack on Shehada and accused Abbas of making up stories.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said Abbas’s comments made clear the Palestinian leadership had conspired against his group, which ousted Fateh from Gaza after a 2007 civil war.

DAMASCUS — Syria has decided to close its embassies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia because they have refused to accept the accreditations of its envoys, diplomats posted in Damascus said on Wednesday.

“Syria’s embassies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are to close because these countries have been refusing to accredit the diplomats sent by Damascus since the start of the crisis,” one of the sources said.

The Arab monarchies of the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have supported the three-year-old armed revolt in Syria and called for the overthrow of President Bashar Assad.

DAMASCUS — Syria’s parliament unanimously approved a new election law Thursday allowing multiple candidates to run for president, opening the door — at least in theory — to other potential contenders besides President Bashar Assad.

The vote comes nearly four months before Assad’s seven-year term as president officially expires. Syrian officials say the presidential elections will be held on time and Assad has suggested he would run again, though he hasn’t confirmed whether he’ll seek re-election.

The poll must be held between 60 and 90 days before Assad’s term ends on July 17.

Syria has been ruled by the Baath Party since it seized power in a 1963 coup. Past presidential elections under Assad and his late father, Hafez Assad, had them as the sole candidate.

Under their rule, previous elections asked voters to cast “Yes” or “No” ballots on whether they supported parliament’s nomination of them for the presidency.

The country held a referendum in March 2012 on a new constitution that allowed for a multiparty political system in Syria and multiple presidential candidates.

That referendum, held amid an escalating civil war, was part of gestures of reform meant to defuse the unrest. The opposition dismissed it as an attempt at superficial reforms that do nothing to break the president’s hold on power.

The bill adopted Thursday says only candidates who lived in Syria for 10 consecutive years prior to nomination can run for president. It also stipulates that candidates should be born to Syrian parents and must not have any other nationality.

State television broadcast the vote live, but the parliament speaker did not say how many lawmakers voted for the bill.

Khalid Saleh, a member of the main Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, said any notion that Assad may run for re-election demonstrates “the uttermost disregard for the blood” of the thousands of Syrians killed.

He said in a statement that the election law adopted by parliament was “illegitimate” and said the group “strongly rejects participation of opposition members as candidates against Assad in the presidential elections, as this would imply recognition by us of the legitimacy of his presence in the elections.”

The opposition has categorically refused the notion of presidential elections being held in Syria under the current circumstances. The coalition has called on Assad to step down in favour of a transitional governing body that would administer the country until free presidential and parliament elections can be held.

The Syrian conflict, now entering its fourth year, has killed more than 140,000 people, sent more than 2.5 million fleeing for neighbouring countries and destroyed entire blocks in opposition-held areas of the country.

Issam Khalil, a member of the parliament, dismissed the idea that the law was tailored for Assad.

“The parliament doesn’t accept that but what has been tailored to fit is the will of Syrians alone,” he said at Thursday’s parliament session.

Meanwhile Thursday, a United Nations diplomat said Syria mediator Lakhdar Brahimi told the UN Security Council that the Syrian government used “delaying tactics” during failed peace talks in Geneva.

According to the diplomat, Brahimi said that at the peace talks last month, the opposition agreed to discuss terrorism and the establishment of a transitional governing body in parallel. But Brahimi said the government insisted on concluding the terrorism discussion before starting any talk of a transitional government.

The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because Wednesday’s council meeting was closed.

CAIRO — Egypt’s army blamed the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood for an attack on an army bus which killed one officer and wounded three others in the capital on Thursday, violence underscoring growing security threats to the military-backed government.

The Muslim Brotherhood strongly condemned the attack in an e-mailed statement, saying the targeting of army soldiers and civilians is a “heinous crime that requires a thorough and transparent investigation to bring the perpetrators to justice”.

They accused the military-backed government of trying to implicate the Brotherhood in the attack for political reasons.

An army spokesman said in a statement posted on Facebook: “Masked armed men belonging to the terrorist Brotherhood targeted a bus of the armed forces... which led to the martyrdom of the warrant officer Yusri Mahmoud Mohamed Hassan.”

Islamist militants are expanding their insurgency in Egypt where army chief Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who overthrew Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in July, is expected to announce he will run for president within days.

The most active group, Ansar Bayt Al Maqdis, has claimed responsibility for a series of high-profile attacks on senior security officials, including an assassination attempt on the interior minister last year.

A security crackdown has devastated the Brotherhood, driving Egypt’s most organised political organisation underground. The Brotherhood, which the interim government declared a terrorist group in December, says it is committed to peaceful activism.

Most of its leaders are in prison and it denies carrying out attacks.

Militants based in the Sinai Peninsula near the Israeli border are still a major security threat to the Arab world’s biggest nation despite army offensives, including air strikes.

They have stepped up attacks on soldiers and policemen since Morsi’s ouster, killing hundreds and spreading their campaign to Cairo and other cities.

TUNIS — Tunisian authorities are seeking to regain control of certain mosques they say have become incubators for radical Islamist ideology, which has spread since the 2011 revolution.

The move follows the January resignation of a government led by moderate Islamist party Ennahda, which was heavily criticised for failing to stem a rise in jihadist violence.

The violence came as militants benefited from a post-Arab Spring power vacuum across much of North Africa.

“Two weeks ago we began implementing a strategy to recover mosques outside our control, within a period of not more than three months,” Abdessattar Badr, a senior official at the ministry of religious affairs, told AFP.

According to Badr, around 150 of Tunisia’s 5,100 mosques are outside the state’s control, including some 50 under the influence of radical imams, or prayer leaders. Others say the real number is higher.

Many mosques beyond the reach of the state are controlled by “people who don’t have the least qualification to be imams”, and who “have transformed the mosques into dormitories and restaurants”, the ministry official said.

Interior ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui said that after the ouster of longtime autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who harshly suppressed Islamists, more than 1,000 mosques fell into the hands of extremists.

“They kicked out the imams appointed by the religious affairs ministry on the grounds that they were remnants of the former regime,” Aroui explained.

Today “they are inciting violence against the security forces and the army in their sermons, calling them tyrants,” he added.

“They also call for jihad in Syria and try to spread extremist ideas from abroad into Tunisian society.”

The violence that accompanied the growing assertiveness of radical Islamists in Tunisia culminated last year with the assassination of two secular politicians in separate attacks blamed on jihadists that plunged the country into turmoil.

‘Written commitments’ 

The crisis eventually forced the departure of the Islamist-led government and brought a replacement by an interim Cabinet of technocrats after a long-delayed new constitution was finally adopted in late January.

The constitution, a compromise that reduced the prominence of Islam, tasked the state with ensuring the political neutrality of mosques.

Badr said a committee consisting of representatives from the interior, religious affairs and justice ministries had been formed to enforce the government’s new strategy of reasserting control.

“Every week we draw up a list of mosques to be recovered, after having officially tasked moderate and tolerant imams with supervising them,” he said.

“Before acting, we talk with those who took over the mosques, who then sign a written commitment” to leave them, the ministry spokesman added, without indicating what measures would be taken if they refused.

A similar policy has been adopted in Egypt, where the military-installed authorities have started tightening their grip on mosques and dictating the themes of weekly Friday sermons, in a bid to curb dissent by Islamists loyal to ousted president Mohamed Morsi.

On Tuesday, Tunisian Salafist preacher Khamis Mejri was placed in pre-trial detention for preaching at mosques in the northern city of Bizerte without authorisation.

A law dating back to 1988 bans “any activity in mosques, in the form of speeches, meetings or writings, by people not belonging to the institution that oversees their work, unless authorised by the prime minister”.

Separately, the ministry of religious affairs announced on Monday that it was going to fix the opening hours of mosques in Tunisia, for the first time in three years.

But as in Egypt, some fear the intention is to silence dissent on the pretext of combatting terrorism.

“The ‘neutralisation’ of mosques was a strategy pursued by [former presidents Habib] Bourguiba and Ben Ali, which transformed the mosques into mouthpieces for their regimes,” said Houcine Labidi, imam at the Zitouna Mosque in Tunis.

He called the new policy a threat to democracy.

Under Ben Ali’s rule, regular mosque-goers, particularly those who attended dawn prayers, were often investigated and summoned to the interior ministry, which also drafted Friday sermons.

GAZA CITY — Israel pounded nearly 30 targets in Gaza overnight after militants fired scores of rockets into the south, prompting Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to demand Thursday that it halt its “escalation”.

The rocket barrage, which was the heaviest since an eight-day conflict between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers in November 2012, sent thousands of Israelis fleeing for cover across the south on Wednesday afternoon.

So far, there have been no reports of casualties on either side of the border.

And experts said Israel was not interested in a major confrontation with Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

The latest tit-for-tat violence was sparked by an incident on Tuesday when fighters of the hardline Islamic Jihad group fired a mortar round at troops allegedly trying to enter southern Gaza, prompting an Israeli air strike which killed three of them.

In retaliation, Islamic Jihad’s armed wing, the Quds Brigades, fired scores of rockets over the border on Wednesday, with the group putting the number at 130.

Israel responded with air strikes on 29 targets across Gaza, hitting bases used by Hamas as well as those of Islamic Jihad, which has so far claimed all of the rocket fire.

Security sources in Gaza said there were no casualties in the air strikes as all the sites had been evacuated.

The army said more than 60 rockets had struck southern Israel on Wednesday, five of them hitting populated areas. Another three were intercepted by the Iron Dome air defence system.

Another three rockets struck southern Israel on Thursday morning. The army said one crashed into an open area near the border, while the other two struck between the port cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon.

“Two rockets were fired, one north of Ashkelon, the second south of Ashdod, landing in open areas,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon blamed both Islamic Jihad and Hamas for the escalation and said anyone firing at Israel would be responsible for his own fate.

“Hamas is responsible for the strip and if it does not know how to prevent fire on Israel from its territory, we will act against it and all of its broader interests,” he said.

“Anyone involved in firing on Israel will be taking his life in his own hands.”

No rocket condemnation 

The air strikes, which began at around 2030 GMT on Wednesday, prompted a sharp rebuke from Abbas, who demanded Israel “put an end to its military escalation in the besieged Gaza Strip”, his spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hit back during a tour with visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron.

“As the Teva [pharmaceutical] factory in Ashdod is manufacturing medications to be sent to Gaza, over there they are firing rockets at innocent Israelis,” he told the British leader.

“How is it possible that he doesn’t condemn the firing of rockets at innocent civilians? But he did condemn Israel for responding and firing at three terrorists who fired a mortar shell at them,” he said, referring to Tuesday’s border incident.

Cameron, who was to meet Abbas in Bethlehem later on Thursday, said: “I join you in condemning unreservedly the rocket attacks from Gaza.”

Netanyahu, who has said Israel will act “with great force” against anyone attacking it, was to convene a special session of his Security Cabinet in Tel Aviv later, army radio said.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Wednesday that Israel would have no choice but to reoccupy Gaza, from which it withdrew all troops and settlers in summer 2005.

But experts said Israel was not seeking a major confrontation in the territory.

“Israel has no intention of entering a major operation now,” said Yaakov Amidror, who served as national security adviser until November.

“But if there’s a continued response from the other side, the IDF will have to reconsider,” he told army radio, adding that re-entering Gaza was “an option” but not one that Israel would rush into.

“It depends on the other side’s decisions. Hamas is not joining in at this stage and that’s a good thing.”

Washington denounced the rocket fire as “reprehensible” and called for an immediate halt to such “terrorist attacks”.

TRIPOLI — Militia loyal to the Tripoli authorities were advancing on eastern Libya on Wednesday where rebels demanding regional autonomy began exporting oil this week in defiance of the central government.

The offensive came as Islamists buoyed by parliament’s ouster of liberal-backed prime minister Ali Zeidan on Tuesday moved to consolidate their new-found power.

The premier fled the country as the General National Congress (GNC) approved an Islamist-sponsored no-confidence motion, stopping briefly in Malta before flying on to Germany, government sources in Valletta said.

The GNC named Defence Minister Abdullah Al Thani caretaker premier for the two weeks it now has to agree on a permanent successor.

But as Zeidan complained repeatedly while in office, real power over the armed forces lies not with the defence minister, but with GNC President Nuri Abu Sahmein, who on Monday ordered the assault on the rebel-held ports.

In the absence of a large enough regular army force to take on the heavily armed rebels, the advance guard of the task force is composed largely of militia loyal to the GNC.

Rebel fighters of the Cyrenaica Defence Force pulled back to the eastern region’s historic border late Tuesday after militiamen of the Libya Shield Force pushed them out of the central coastal city of Sirte, a rebel commander told AFP.

The commander warned that the offensive by the fighters, mostly from Libya’s third city Misrata, risked plunging the North African country back into civil war.

The advancing force was “a tribal militia, not a regular army unit”, he said, asking not to be identified.

“Our forces have pulled back to Wadi Lahmar,” some 90 kilometres east of Sirte, he added.

The town lies on the historic border between Tripolitania and the Cyrenaica region, whose pre-1963 autonomy the rebels want restored.

The chairman of Sirte city council, Abdelfattah Al Siwi, said there had been a “brief confrontation” between the rival fighters before the rebels withdrew.

The opposing forces were allies during the NATO-backed uprising of 2011 which ended the 42-year dictatorship of Muammar Qadhafi, who made his last stand in Sirte, his hometown.

Oil export terminals blockaded 

But the Cyrenaican fighters’ move at the weekend to load oil onto a North Korean-flagged tanker in a deal not sanctioned by the state-run National Oil Corporation prompted the GNC chief to authorise military action against them.

The rebels had been blockading the main eastern oil export terminals since last July, but the loading of the Morning Glory marked a major escalation of the conflict and triggered Zeidan’s ouster.

The threatened assault on export terminals that constitute a key part of Libya’s oil infrastructure helped push up world prices on Tuesday.

The rebels’ prolonged blockade of the ports already slashed Libyan exports from 1.5 million barrels per day to just 250,000.

But heavy clashes in the region, which was already a major battleground in the 2011 uprising, could deal longer-term damage to Libya’s output.

The eastern rebels are among the Islamists’ most potent rivals, but they also face competition for power from former rebels from the Zintan region, southwest of the capital, who backed Zeidan right up to his ouster.

Just hours after the GNC vote, the Islamist-controlled Tripoli military council ordered the “withdrawal of all forces occupying strategic positions, particularly inside Tripoli international airport and on the airport road”.

That was a clear reference to the Zintan militia who have been deployed at the airport ever since the 2011 uprising, during which they played a major role in capturing Tripoli from Qadhafi’s forces.

Zeidan had warned that his ouster was likely to trigger a power grab by the Islamists.

“I’m not hanging on for the sake of it but because I’m eager not to surrender the country to a certain party who threaten to lead it in a direction that does not serve the national interests,” he said on Saturday.

Zeidan was denied even an honourable exit, with a prosecutor slapping a travel ban on him for suspected involvement in the embezzlement of public funds.

Former information minister Mahmud Shammam, who now runs a private television channel, charged that the prosecutor responsible was known for his “favouritism towards a certain political current”.

PARIS — The Syrian conflict has claimed more than 140,000 lives, nearly half of the population is displaced, the rebellion has been hijacked by jihadists and President Bashar Assad is still firmly in the saddle.

As the war rages into its fourth year and with no diplomatic and military solutions in sight, world powers appear at a loss as to how to deal with what has now joined the alarming club of “intractable conflicts”, according to Chatham House think tank researcher Christopher Phillips.

And as the international community shifts its focus onto the crisis in Ukraine, the dragging conflict — which has pitted Assad’s traditional ally Russia against the West — now risks being put aside.

“It’s quite tragic that Ukraine is happening at this moment when Syria can ill-afford to have attention elsewhere but it is almost inevitable that the longer it goes on, the more people will be distracted and begin to view Syria as something that can’t be fixed,” Phillips said.

Peace talks in Geneva in January and February that for the first time brought representatives of the regime and the opposition to the table together failed to yield concrete results.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, one of the main players in Geneva, defended the talks by asking: “How many years did the Vietnam talks take? How many years did Dayton take in Bosnia-Herzegovina?”

But there is a rising feeling that it will take years for the crisis to be resolved.

To further complicate matters, the West has become increasingly wary of the opposition after the emergence of Al Qaeda-linked Islamist fighters in its ranks.

Infighting and factionalism within the moderate wing of the opposition has not helped either.

The West wants “neither Assad nor the Islamists”, a European diplomatic source said.

Western nations have also been alarmed by the growing number of jihadists from their countries going to fight in Syria whom they fear could pose huge security threats if they returned as battle-hardened veterans.

‘War will go on for 10 years’ 

“The longer the war is going on and the more the sort of Al Qaeda type groups have emerged in the opposition-held northern parts of Syria, the more it has become a security concern,” Phillips said.

“That’s why it’s begun to prompt some to say: ‘Well actually we should accept Bashar Assad in power and actually support his government indirectly to contain that sort of security threat of Al Qaeda and so on,’” he said.

“And we’ve already heard reports of Western intelligence agencies contacting the Syrian regime about a sort of joint counter Al Qaeda strategy in Syria,” Phillips added.

Assad’s ouster was an unwavering Western demand at the start of the crisis in 2011 but he appears to have strengthened his position following a September deal under which Damascus agreed to destroy its chemical arms arsenal.

Assad has said he will likely run for elections scheduled in mid-2014.

On the military level, neither the regime — backed by Russia and Iran — nor the opposition, which is armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, appear close to victory.

Analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross told the US Senate recently the most probable scenario was that the conflict would last for a decade.

“Given the failures of both diplomacy and war to date, it seems likely that Syria will remain divided between the Assad-controlled west and a mix of competing rebel factions in the east,” said Anthony Cordesman from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Adam Baczko, a researcher at the Paris-based Noria think tank, warned of security threats — particularly as the West “had handed over the keys to regional actors” — and recalled the huge humanitarian crisis that resulted from the conflict.

“For the United States, Syria is far away, for us it is at our border,” he said.