Region

KHARTOUM — Qatar’s emir held talks in Sudan on Wednesday at a time of strained ties with his country’s Gulf neighbours over its perceived support for the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.

Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani was greeted at Khartoum airport by Sudan’s President Omar Bashir, for what an analyst called a meeting of two regionally isolated regimes.

The leaders held talks at a conference centre along the Blue Nile before Sheikh Tamim left Khartoum after a visit of around three hours.

His stop coincided with unprecedented tensions between Doha and other Gulf states over the widely banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The Sudanese regime, which took power 25 years ago in an Islamist-backed coup, is essentially based on support from the Brotherhood, said Safwat Fanous, a political scientist at the University of Khartoum.

He told AFP that the emir’s visit appears aimed to “break the isolation” of Qatar from its Gulf neighbours and Egypt.

Sheikh Tamim, in a written statement, said his trip would confirm the “continuous joint consultations” between the two countries on regional developments.

The visit also aimed to support “brotherly relations” between people of both nations, he said.

Qatar has been a key backer of Sudan’s government, which is “in desperate need of foreign direct investment”, said Khalid Tigani, chief editor of the Elaff economic weekly.

After the emir’s departure, Sudan’s Finance Minister Badraldin Mahmoud Abbas told reporters that Qatar will provide Sudan with $1 billion to help boost its reserves of hard currency.

Terms of the arrangement were not disclosed.

Qatar also agreed to finance energy and agricultural projects, Abbas said, describing the investments as “huge”.

South Sudan separated in 2011, taking with it the majority of Sudan’s oil production, which accounted for billions of dollars in export earnings.

Since then the Sudanese pound has plunged in value on the black market and inflation has soared.

Diplomatic and other sources said last month that major European and Saudi banks had stopped dealing with Sudan, adding to the sanctions-hit state’s isolation and further straining its cash-starved economy.

Khartoum says the banks are under increased pressure from the United States, which has a 17-year-old trade embargo against Sudan.

Ties between Doha and Khartoum, meanwhile, “are witnessing rapid progress”, foreign ministry spokesman Abubakr Al Siddiq said, quoted by the official SUNA news agency.

Sudanese officials last month said Qatar was providing an unprecedented $135 million to support Sudan’s rich but under-developed archaeological heritage.

Qatar also hosted talks which led to the 2011 Doha Document for Peace in Darfur between Khartoum and rebel splinter groups in the western region of Sudan, where violence has worsened this year.

“This agreement didn’t bring peace to Darfur,” said Fanous of the University of Khartoum. “I think the Qatar role in Darfur is shrinking.”

In early March, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Qatar, a fellow Gulf Cooperation Council member.

Doha supported Egypt’s Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, a former Brotherhood leader, while most Gulf countries hailed Morsi’s overthrow by the army last July and pledged billions of dollars in aid.

Before his ouster as president, Morsi made what Bashir’s regime called a “historic” visit to Khartoum.

Morsi and Sheikh Tamim are among the rare heads of state to visit Sudan, whose leader Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged war crimes in Darfur.

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — Lebanese troops moved into a restive Sunni area in the northern city of Tripoli Wednesday, in the second stage of a plan aimed at quelling deadly Syria-linked violence there, a security source said.

Residents welcomed the deployment, saying they hoped it would help bring normality to the city, and several families displaced by the violence were able to return to their homes.

The move into Bab Al Tebbaneh comes a day after the army entered the neighbouring Alawite district of Jabal Mohsen.

It follows orders from ministers last week for security forces to move into the port city, which has been plagued by violence for months and where at least 30 people were killed in two weeks of fighting in March.

Fighters from the two neighbourhoods have clashed frequently, with decades-old sectarian tensions exacerbated by the war in neighbouring Syria.

Hundreds of people have been killed across the country — including in bomb attacks and battles — since the war in Syria broke out three years ago.

“The Lebanese army completed its deployment into the flashpoint areas [of Tripoli] and army units went into Bab Al Tebbaneh this morning,” said the security source, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity.

“The military removed the barricades from the streets and the rooftops, and opened up the road linking Bab Al Tebbaneh to Jabal Mohsen,” he added.

“They conducted raids and searched for weapons and wanted people. The troops were backed by armoured vehicles, tanks and bulldozers,” said the source, without saying whether anyone was arrested.

A security source said “all the commanders on both sides have disappeared. The army has gone to their houses to find them, with no luck.”

Syria dominated Lebanon for nearly 30 years until 2005, and its civil war has divided the Lebanese squarely into two camps — one supporting President Bashar Assad, the other backing the revolt.

In Bab Al Tebbaneh, a semblance of normality returned with shops re-opening on aptly named Syria Street, the road dividing the Sunni neighbourhood from neighbouring Jabal Mohsen.

Syria Street is a commercial road that acts as the makeshift frontline during clashes between the Sunnis, who support the rebellion against Assad, and the Alawites, who back him.

A Sunni sheikh from Bab Al Tebbaneh led a peace march to neighbouring Jabal Mohsen Wednesday morning, saying it was to show “that we are family and this phase of violence is over”.

The 45-year-old father of four, Ayman Kharma, said he hoped the plan would allow his family to begin repairing their home in Syria Street.

“Our house was hit four times by shells. Eventually, it was burned down” in the fighting, he said.

“We had to move out to my wife’s family home. I hope the state pays us compensation, and that we can return and fix our home.”

Bab Al Tebbaneh and Jabal Mohsen both suffer from deep poverty and marginalisation, and many people have said they would not have fought if they had jobs.

“The security plan will only work if it is accompanied by a development plan to rehabilitate this area,” Kharma added.

Ali Fidda, an official of the Arab Democratic Party in Jabal Mohsen, told AFP residents there also welcomed the plan.

“We hope it is a solution that brings an end to the bloodshed in this city,” Fidda said. “The residents welcome any plan that restores security.”

But he also warned that deep divisions in Tripoli and the region would need to be solved in order for a lasting peace to take root.

“In order for true reconciliation to happen, you need the leaders to reconcile their differences first,” said Fidda.

Separately, three rockets launched from Syria hit Labweh, a Hizbollah bastion in eastern Lebanon, a security source told AFP, adding that there were no casualties.

The village has suffered multiple rocket attacks from across the Syrian border, several of which have been claimed by jihadists who support Syria’s revolt.

WASHINGTON — Iran has chosen a former hostage-taker involved in the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran to serve as its ambassador at the United Nations, Sen. Ted Cruz said Tuesday in vowing to bar him from entering the United States.

Cruz said it was outrageous that Iran had selected Hamid Aboutalebi, who was a member of a Muslim student group that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, and was seeking a visa for him. The Texas Republican said he was offering legislation to ensure that Aboutalebi would be prevented from entering the country.

“It is unconscionable that in the name of international diplomatic protocol the United States would be forced to host a foreign national who showed a brutal disregard of the status of diplomats when they were stationed in his country,” Cruz said in a speech on the Senate floor. “This person is an acknowledged terrorist.”

Hamid Babaei, a spokesman for Iran’s Mission to the United Nations, had no comment Tuesday on his government’s choice for ambassador.

Cruz said Aboutalebi has insisted his involvement in the group — Muslim Students Following the Iman’s Line — was limited to translation and negotiation. But the senator said the organisation still features Aboutalebi’s photograph on its website to mark the takeover of the embassy.

Cruz said his legislation would require the president to deny a visa to a UN applicant if the president determines the individual has engaged in terrorist activity. He said there was a bipartisan effort to get the legislation passed expeditiously.

Cruz called the ambassadorial choice by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani “willfully, deliberately insulting and contemptuous” and questioned the Obama administration’s continued talks with Iran about its nuclear programme.

Republican Sen. John McCain described it as “really kind of an in-your-face action by the Iranian government, sending a guy who was responsible for the absolutely, totally illegal incarceration of American citizens”.

For many senior political figures in present-day Iran, the 444-day hostage crisis was a watershed moment. It thrust them into the world spotlight and still carries considerable political currency within Iran, but also shows the broad spectrum of views within the country since the Islamic revolution.

Some Iranians who were closely linked to the US embassy seizure later moderated their views towards outreach to the United States and the West. In one notable shift, a former spokeswoman for the hostage takers, Masoumeh Ebtekar, is now considered an important voice among Iran’s moderates, having served as a vice president under reformist President Mohammad Khatami. She currently is a vice president and head of Iran’s environmental protection agency in Rouhani’s administration.

JIB JANINE, Lebanon— Grimacing, Mustafa Ahmad slid the scarred stump just below his right knee into his new prosthetic leg. Extending his arms for balance, he slowly rose and hobbled across the packed dirt floor towards the door of his ramshackle tent.

Wild-haired children peered through a gap in the plastic sheet that serves as the wall of his tent, trying to catch a glimpse of the procedure that finally fitted Ahmad with a prosthesis, more than two years after losing his leg during a bombing raid on his hometown in northern Syria.

“I feel like I want to take a long walk, to go see my friends and neighbours,” he said later, his forehead glistening with perspiration. “I feel like my leg is back. I feel normal, like I’m back the way I was.”

Syria’s civil war, which entered its fourth year last month, has killed more than 150,000 people, but an often overlooked figure is the number of wounded: More than 500,000, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. An untold number of those — there’s no reliable estimate — suffered traumatic injuries that have left them physically handicapped.

Syria’s conflict is not unique in this regard. All wars maim and kill. What varies is the weapon associated with the carnage. In Cambodia, it was landmines. In Iraq, roadside bombs and suicide bombings. In Syria’s case, the culprit is largely artillery and air strikes.

It was shrapnel from a government air strike in November 2011 on the town of Deif Hafer in Aleppo province that tore off part of Ahmad’s leg.

“When I first woke up in the hospital, I felt pain and I knew my leg was gone,” said the shy 19-year-old with a mop of dark hair. “I felt that I was done. I could no longer walk or work or go out. It was me and my bed. I lost all hope.”

With few options in Syria, Ahmad initially relied on crutches to get around. He and his father later cobbled together a homemade prosthesis out of plastic and socks. He used it for six months before tossing it aside.

“It wasn’t very comfortable,” he said. “It hurt my leg, and it was short so I limped when I walked.”

As violence ravaged northern Syria in early 2013, Ahmad, his parents and 11 siblings left Deir Hafer for Lebanon. They now live at the edge of a plowed field in a cluster of flimsy shelters hammered together out of wood, nails and plastic sheeting outside the wown of Jib Janine in the Bekaa Valley.

He received his new prosthetic leg from Handicap International, a non-governmental organisation that, among other things, helps Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan who have lost limbs in the war.

“The hardest thing in the past two years was feeling that I didn’t have anyone. It was over for me, I felt that I was done. I was thinking I’d never get a leg and would never be able to walk again,” he said. “Now that I got the leg, I can get a job, go and come as I please, see my friends.”

Once outside the tent, Ahmad slowly limped down a dirt path running along a small ditch. Old men and women observed quietly from their tents. Children scampered across the dusty earth to catch his every move.

The amount of time needed to adjust to a new limb varies, said Henri Bonnin, a field director for Handicap International. Older adults generally struggle more than young people, as do amputees who lose their leg above the knee. Another determining factor is the quality of the original surgery, which varies widely in a conflict like Syria’s where many amputations take place in a field hospital or makeshift clinic.

“These are emergency amputations, so it’s not an orthopaedic surgeon, it’s a general surgeon or a dentist who is performing this,” Bonnin said. “It’s done in a severe emergency to save a patient’s life.”

Under such conditions, many doctors cut the bone straight across, not at an angle as they should to create a better stump, he said. If the stump is flat instead of cylindrical, patients need a second or third surgery — a painful procedure — to correct the problem and allow for a prosthesis.

The physical toll is gruelling and apparent to all. But just as difficult for many Syrians is the psychological side of losing a limb.

That has been the case for 34-year-old Reem Diab. On October 25, 2012, a shell slammed into her house in the town of Khan Sheikoun in central Syria, killing her husband, Mustafa, and her 15-year-old daughter, Batoul.

For months afterward, Diab was an emotional wreck. Her hair was falling out. Simple tasks proved overwhelming.

But what also haunted her, she said, was the fear that her surviving daughter and two sons would be terrified of their mother and the stump that ended just below her right hip. She refused to see them, and sent them to live with their uncle and grandmother instead.

“Psychologically, I was not welcoming of anyone, not even my children,” Diab said. “I did not want them to see me in this situation and not be able to cope with it.”

She came to Lebanon two months after her amputation, and was fitted with a prosthetic leg in April 2013. A physiotherapist and psycho-social worker from Handicap International visited her for more than a dozen sessions to help with her physical and mental rehabilitation. She slowly adjusted to the prosthesis, although it’s been difficult.

“It’s not like your actual leg,” she said. “It feels like a strange object. There’s no balance.”

She now lives with her children in a tent set up on the roof of a building in Chtaura, Lebanon. Her mother, father, five brothers and their families share the rooftop with them, cramming into a few rooms slapped together from concrete blocks.

Urged on by a physiotherapist, Diab limped down the concrete stairs and into the dusty street outside, where she hobbled along the pavement, wincing as she walked.

“My children got used to seeing me with the prosthetic,” she said. “They asked me things like, ‘Why did you leave us?’ But they’re happy that I can walk now.”

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.