Region

BEIRUT — International mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said on Thursday that a deal between trapped fighters and civilians in Homs city and the Syrian authorities had broken down, as government forces appeared close to retaking the besieged opposition area.

Homs, a religiously-mixed city, was the scene of early protests against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011 and has become a symbol of the destructive nature of Syria’s civil war, with many of its neighbourhoods levelled by army shells.

Hundreds of people remain trapped in the old part of the city, surrounded by government forces and pro-Assad militia. A deal agreed at peace talks in Geneva this year allowed some civilians to leave but further negotiations broke down following heavy fighting this week.

“It is a matter of deep regret that negotiations were brutally stopped and violence is now rife again when a comprehensive agreement seemed close at hand,” Brahimi said in a statement.

“It is alarming that Homs, whose people have suffered so much throughout these past three years is again the theatre of death and destruction.”

In recent months, government forces have recaptured several rebel-held areas and border towns, closing off rebel supply routes from Lebanon and securing the main highway leading north from Damascus towards central Syria, Homs and the Mediterranean.

The opposition National Coalition, a political body in exile, warned of a massacre if Assad’s forces were to push through into the small pocket of rebel-held Homs.

“We warn the international community of a potential massacre in Homs. The Old City has been besieged by regime forces for 676 days,” it said in a statement.

Monzer Akbik, spokesman for the group, said it was “critical that the eyes of the world remain fixed on Homs at this crucial time. The regime has reduced what was the soul of the revolution to rubble and ruin”.

More than 150,000 people have been killed in the civil war, which began as peaceful protests against Assad’s rule, a third of them civilians, according to the anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Millions have fled the country.

JUBA — Rebels in South Sudan battled government forces Thursday in a renewed offensive targeting the young nation’s key oil fields, the army said, amid famine warnings by the United Nations.

Fighters loyal to rebel chief Riek Machar recaptured the town of Bentiu on Tuesday, the state capital of oil-producing Unity, with UN peacekeepers reporting corpses littering the streets.

South Sudan’s army said fighting was ongoing Thursday as it tried to counterattack.

“Bentiu is still under the hands of the rebels but we are closing in,” army spokesman Philip Auger told AFP. “There is still fighting.”

The surge in fighting in the four-month-long conflict comes amid warnings by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that more than one million people are at risk of famine in the war-torn country.

Peacekeepers from the UN mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) patrolling the rebel-held state capital said they had seen between 35 and 40 bodies along the roadside, the majority in
military uniform.

“UNMISS condemns these renewed hostilities in the strongest possible terms,” the mission said in a statement, saying it was “gravely concerned” at the “serious violations” of a broken ceasefire deal inked in January.

“Fighting will only exacerbate an already dire situation,” it added.

Bentiu, one of the most bitterly contested regions in the war, is the first major settlement to have been retaken in a fresh offensive by forces of rebel leader Riek Machar, a former vice president.

The conflict in South Sudan has left thousands dead and forced around a million people to flee their homes since fighting broke out on December 15 in the capital Juba before spreading to other states in the oil rich nation.

Over 12,000 civilians are now sheltering inside the UN base in Bentiu, protected by peacekeepers, with one person wounded inside the camp as bullets hit it from a nearby firefight.

Rebels overran the town on Tuesday, with the army saying it was preparing a counterattack to take it back.

Rebels had previously seized Bentiu in December at the beginning of the conflict, but were chased out a month later.

On Monday, UN peacekeepers rescued 10 employees from the Russian Safinat company as rebels attacked the oil refinery they were constructing north of Bentiu, including Russian, Ukranian and Kenyan citizens.

Five were wounded in the fighting.

The fighting is between soldiers loyal to President Salva Kiir against mutinous troops who sided with Machar, sacked as vicepresident in 2013.

The conflict has also taken on an ethnic dimension, pitting Kiir’s Dinka tribe against militia forces from Machar’s Nuer people.

The UN children’s agency UNICEF has warned that the conflict has triggered a serious risk of famine that will kill up to 50,000 children within months if immediate action is not taken.

Over 3.7 million people are in dire need of food aid, many of them being forced to eat “famine foods” such as grasses and leaves, UNICEF said, which flew in Thursday its fourth cargo airplane loaded with special therapeutic food for malnourished children.

“Worse is yet to come,” UNICEF chief in South Sudan Jonathan Veitch said in a statement Thursday.

“If conflict continues, and farmers miss the planting season, we will see child malnutrition on a scale never before experienced here.”

BEIRUT/THE HAGUE — Syria has submitted a “more specific” list of its chemical weapons to the global regulator overseeing the destruction of its stockpile after discrepancies were reported by inspectors on the ground, officials said.

Damascus agreed to give up its chemical arsenal after Washington threatened military action following the death of hundreds of Syrians in a sarin gas attack on the outskirts of Damascus during Syria’s civil war last August. But Damascus is several weeks behind schedule in handing over its lethal toxins.

A diplomat said questions had been raised by member states at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) about the details of its chemical arsenal submitted by President Bashar Assad’s government last year.

The officials said the original list had been based on estimates, not exact amounts of toxic agents found in storage and production facilities across Syria.

The joint UN/OPCW mission in Syria found “discrepancies between what they found, and what was on the original declaration”, one diplomat told Reuters.

OPCW spokesman Michael Luhan confirmed a revised list had been submitted. “For some of the stockpile, ranges of quantities had been provided. Now they are being replaced with specific amounts,” he said.

The exact amounts came to light after inspectors visited the sites, took inventory, and packaged the chemicals for transport to the port town of Latakia, he said. Official could not provide specific details about the discrepancies.

Syria initially reported to the OPCW having roughly 1,300 metric tonnes of toxic chemicals, including precursors for poison gas and nerve agents. Luhan said no new chemicals were added in the revised list.

As part of a deal reached with the United States and Russia last year, the Assad government agreed to abandon the weapons of mass destruction and destroy all chemicals in its possession by June 30.

Over 500 metric tonnes of toxins

Syria did not make public the exact list of chemicals, but officials have said it includes more than 500 metric tonnes of highly toxic chemical weapons, such as sulphur mustard and precursors for the poisonous gas sarin, as well as more than 700 metric tonnes of bulk industrial chemicals.

They are being loaded onto Norwegian and Danish ships in the Syrian port town of Latakia as part of a multimillion-dollar operation involving at least 10 countries.

The chemical weapons will be neutralised at sea on a specially-equipped US ship, the MV Cape Ray, while the bulk chemicals will be sent to commercial waste facilities in Finland, Britain and Germany.

But Syria has fallen several weeks behind schedule in handing over the chemicals, having shipped out nearly two-thirds of the stockpile for destruction abroad.

After missing several deadlines, Syria submitted a revised plan to the OPCW, saying it would hand everything over by April 27, or within 10 days.

An official at the OPCW, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed a new list had been submitted, but said it was part of a routine reporting process.

“Sometimes information is not complete, or not in a format we require. It’s not extraordinary,” the official said. “But what they have submitted needs to be seen to come to any conclusions and I better not speculate about what’s in there.”

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — A meeting between Israeli and Palestinian peace negotiators scheduled for Wednesday has been postponed after the killing of an Israeli in a shooting attack in the occupied West Bank.

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the session had been rescheduled for Thursday at the request of the United States. Washington is struggling to extend the talks, on the verge of collapse, beyond an April 29 deadline for a peace deal.

An Israeli official confirmed the meeting had been delayed but declined to say who asked for the postponement or when teams would reconvene to try to breathe new life into the US-driven peace process.

The killing on Monday of an off-duty police officer and the wounding of his wife in a shooting attack on their car in the West Bank as they drove to a Passover holiday dinner struck an emotional chord in Israel.

It drew calls from members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet to postpone the peace talks, at least until after 47-year-old Baruch Mizrahi’s funeral on Wednesday.

There was no claim of responsibility for the shooting. But in a statement on Tuesday, Netanyahu said the Palestinian Authority was to blame for anti-Israeli incitement that he alleged led to the attack, and he complained that President Mahmoud Abbas had not issued a condemnation.

At a meeting in his West Bank office with a group of Israeli lawmakers on Wednesday, Abbas “condemned violence and the killing of Palestinians and Israelis”, said Mohammed Al Madani, a member of the Central Committee of Abbas’ Fateh Party.

The event was scheduled before Monday’s attack. Abbas has held several meetings in the past with Israeli legislators, mainly members of the opposition in parliament.

Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Abbas, told a news conference with the head of the Israeli delegation: “We are against violence and against a return to violence.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry revived the peace talks in July after a nearly three-year hiatus with the aim of ending a decades-old conflict and establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

CAIRO — An Egyptian court sentenced 119 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood of former president Mohamed Morsi to three years each in prison on Wednesday in connection with protests last October against his overthrow, judicial sources said.

More than 50 people were killed in the October 6 protests called by Morsi’s supporters, one of the bloodiest days since his overthrow by the military on July 3. Judge Hazem Hashad acquitted six people in the case. They faced charges including unlawful assembly and thuggery.

The army-backed authorities have banned the Muslim Brotherhood and driven it underground, killing hundreds of its supporters and arresting thousands in the weeks after Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, was toppled by the military following mass protests against his rule.

Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the general who ousted Morsi, declared last month that he would run in a presidential election that he is expected to win easily.

In another case last month, a court in southern Egypt sentenced 529 Morsi supporters to death in a ruling that drew criticism from rights groups and Western governments.

The Muslim Brotherhood was Egypt’s best organised political party until last year but the government has accused it of turning to violence since Morsi was overthrown. The Brotherhood says the group remains committed to peacefully resisting what it views as a military coup.

Many of the Brotherhood’s leaders, including Morsi, are on trial. Morsi is charged with crimes including conspiring with foreign militant groups against Egypt, which carries the death penalty.

In a separate case, a judge sentenced a prominent Islamist preacher and politician to seven years in jail on charges of forging his mother’s citizenship documents so he could contest the 2012 presidential election won by Morsi.

Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a hardline Salafist Islamist, was arrested after Morsi’s downfall. He was disqualified from the election when it emerged his mother held US citizenship — dual nationality that meant he could not run.

Abu Ismail was sentenced to an additional one year in prison on Saturday for insulting the court.

MUSCAT — Oman said it would extend curbs on the hiring of foreign workers in construction and housekeeping as part of efforts to save more jobs for local citizens and limit outflows of money from the economy.

Hiring of expatriates by private companies in those two sectors will be banned for six months from May 4, the official Oman News Agency (ONA) quoted Minister of Manpower Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Al Bakri as saying on Monday.

The ban was originally introduced for a six-month period last November. Similar restrictions exist for several other industries such as carpentry and aluminium product making.

It is not clear how much of an impact the ban will have; exceptions to the policy will be made for companies working on government projects, smaller enterprises and firms managed full-time by their owners, ONA reported.

Oman is spending billions of dollars on infrastructure projects to diversify its economy beyond oil, and it seems unlikely to starve these projects of labour. Many Omani families employ domestic workers from abroad.

But Sheikh Abdullah’s order suggests growing concern in the government about the economy’s dependence on foreign workers — a concern shared by some other Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, which is deporting tens of thousands of illegal workers.

Expatriate workers in Oman rose to 1.53 million in February from 1.47 million registered a year earlier, government data shows. By contrast there were just 184,485 Omani citizens working in the private sector in February; the country’s total population, including foreign residents, is officially estimated at 4 million.

The government does not release regular, timely data on unemployment among its citizens, but discontent with limited job opportunities and corruption triggered sporadic street protests in 2011.

In February last year, the Council of Ministers said the government would aim to limit foreign workers to 33 per cent of Oman’s population, but it did not give a time frame and the rise in employment of expatriates since then suggests officials have found it hard to curb numbers in a growing economy.

Most foreign workers in the construction and oil industries come from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, while many domestic workers are from Indonesia and the Philippines.

Salim Al Sheedi, head of the Oman Society of Contractors, a construction industry association, said the ban would benefit well-established companies in the sector by preventing other firms from bringing in workers without properly supervising them.

By excluding smaller companies from the ban, the policy will also benefit Omani entrepreneurs and managers, he added.

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — A Saudi man has died of MERS in the western city of Jeddah, where authorities have sought to calm fears over the spreading respiratory illness, the health ministry said Wednesday.

The ministry said five more people were infected with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), including two medics, all in Jeddah.

The latest death of a 52-year-old brings to 71 the total number of people to have died from MERS, out of 205 infections in Saudi Arabia, it added.

Health authorities on Tuesday reported the death of a 59-year-old, also in Jeddah, as well as four other infections in the same city, including three medics.

Last week panic over the spread of MERS among medical staff in Jeddah forced the temporary closure of an emergency room at a major hospital, prompting Health Minister Abdullah Al Rabiah to visit the facility in a bid to calm the public.

“The situation concerning the coronavirus is reassuring,” said a government statement.

Local media reported Wednesday at least four doctors at Jeddah’s King Fahd Hospital resigned this week after refusing to treat patients affected by MERS, apparently out of fear of catching the virus.

The MERS virus was initially concentrated in the eastern region of Saudi Arabia but has now spread across other areas.

The World Health Organisation said Friday it had been told of 212 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS infection worldwide, of which 88 have proved fatal.

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

Experts are still struggling to understand MERS, for which there is no known vaccine.

A recent study said the virus has been “extraordinarily common” in camels for at least 20 years, and may have been passed directly from the animals to humans.

SANAA — Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) chief Nasser Al Wuhayshi has pledged in a rare video appearance to pursue the war against the Western “crusaders” everywhere possible.

The video posted online shows Wuhayshi addressing scores of jihadists in a rugged terrain as he welcomes 19 militants who escaped a Sanaa prison in February.

“We will continue to raise the banner of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and our war against the crusaders will continue everywhere in the world,” he says in the video.

Al Qaeda usually uses the term crusaders to refer to Western powers, especially the ones which have intervened militarily in Muslim countries, mainly the United States, Britain and France.

In a brazen two-pronged jailbreak, AQAP militants slammed a car bomb into the eastern gate of a Sanaa prison as others attacked the guards at its main entrance.

The attack allowed 29 inmates to escape, including the 19 jihadists.

Wuhayshi vowed last August to free incarcerated members of his group.

He himself escaped in February 2006 from the political security prison in Sanaa along with 22 other members of AQAP.

He was named the group’s leader a year later.

WELLINGTON — A New Zealander with terrorism links was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen last year, Prime Minister John Key said Wednesday, with Canberra confirming that an Australian was also killed in the attack.

The man who called himself “Muslim Bin John” was born in New Zealand and had been attending “some sort of terrorist training camp” in Yemen, Key said.

“I was advised it was highly likely he was killed in the latter part of 2013 but it took some time to confirm that through DNA,” he told reporters.

The Australian newspaper said that the man died in a US Predator drone strike on five Al Qaeda militants travelling in a convoy of cars in Yemen in November.

It said he was a dual New Zealand-Australian citizen and another man, from the eastern Australian state of Queensland, was also killed. Both men were believed to be in their 20s.

Key confirmed the deaths were the result of a drone strike and said New Zealand had no prior knowledge of the operation.

He defended the use of drones, saying: “They are legitimate at certain times, where countries are trying to contend with dangerous situations and they’re trying to deal with terrorists without putting their own people in harm’s way.”

Asked if this specific drone strike was legitimate, he replied: “I suspect so yes, given that three of the people killed were well-known Al Qaeda operatives.”

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed the deaths, stressing that it had no prior knowledge of the operation in which they died.

The Australian newspaper said US officials notified their Australian counterparts about the possibility its citizens had been “collateral damage” in the strike on November 19.

The pair were not the intended targets of the strike which also killed three others, including Abu Habib Al Yemeni, who was reportedly a companion of Osama bin Laden, it said.

However, they were “foot soldiers” for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) who may have been involved in kidnapping Westerners for ransom, the report said, quoting an unnamed source.

At the time, Yemeni authorities said that a drone strike in Hadramawt province killed three Al Qaeda suspects when a missile hit their vehicle.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Dozens of Palestinians were wounded in clashes with Israeli forces that erupted Wednesday when Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al Aqsa Mosque compound was opened to Jewish visitors, an AFP correspondent said.

Security spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP that Palestinians threw “stones and firecrackers” at police when they opened the walled compound’s gates.

Israeli forces responded with stun grenades, Rosenfeld said, and closed the complex to the Jewish visitors after a small number had toured the site.

An AFP correspondent at the scene said dozens of Palestinians were wounded by rubber-coated bullets and stun grenade canisters, and were staying inside the Al Aqsa Mosque out of fear they would be arrested when leaving.

The compound, in Jerusalem’s Old City, is revered as the location of the biblical Jewish temples and is considered Judaism’s holiest place.

It also houses the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.

Rosenfeld said the situation on “Temple Mount”, the Jewish term for the complex, was “calm again” and police had left the site.

He noted that in a separate incident elsewhere in Jerusalem’s Old City a security officer was lightly wounded by stones thrown by Palestinians.

Non-Muslim visits to the Al Aqsa complex are permitted and regulated by Israeli forces, but Jews are not allowed to pray at the site.

Jews are marking Passover, a seven-day holiday which in ancient times was marked by mass pilgrimage to the Temple Mount.

On Monday, Israeli forces arrested five Jews suspected of intending to sacrifice a goat at the Al Aqsa Mosque complex, in a bid to reenact an ancient Passover ritual.

Jewish fringe groups have vowed to build a third Temple, but Israeli political and religious authorities have repeatedly dismissed the idea.