Region

BEIRUT — Syria’s air force carried out a dozen air strikes against the strategic rebel-held Yabrud area near Damascus for the first time on Wednesday, activists and a monitoring group said.

“There were 13 air strikes against Yabrud and its surroundings today,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, without providing immediate details on casualties.

On the ground, an activist who gave his name as Amer told AFP via the Internet that “the [army’s] campaign to take Yabrud has started. The air strikes are accompanied by an attempted ground offensive”.

Located in the Qalamoun mountains, Yabrud lies near the border with Lebanon and on a strategic road linking Damascus to the war-torn country’s third city Homs, which has suffered some of Syria’s worst violence in the past three years.

While Yabrud is under rebel control, it had been mostly immune to the violence engulfing most other opposition areas. Activists had for many months considered it a haven for nonviolent opposition to Syria’s regime.

But recently, the jihadist Al Nusra Front moved into Yabrud as the loyalist army and its Lebanese Shiite ally Hizbollah stepped up fighting in other areas of the Qalamoun mountains, taking over smaller villages from rebel control.

According to the observatory’s Rami Abdel Rahman, troops and Hizbollah have been upping the pressure on Yabrud for several weeks, frequently shelling the town, which is home to a mixed Muslim and Christian population.

On Wednesday, Hizbollah and the paramilitary National Defence Force were backing the army in fighting against Al Nusra Front and local rebels in the Rima area near Yabrud.

Amateur video distributed by activists showed plumes of black smoke rise above Yabrud’s houses and golden hills, as a fighter jet soars through a clear blue sky.

The violence forced families from Yabrud and nearby Flita and Jreijer to flee into Lebanon’s Arsal, just across the border, the UN refugee agency UNHCR’s Dana Sleiman said via Twitter.

A group of 12 Syrian and Lebanese Orthodox nuns taken by gunmen in early December from the historic town of Maalula were believed to have been taken to Yabrud.

Elsewhere, the death toll from air raids on Aleppo’s rebel-held Sakhur neighbourhood on Tuesday rose to 27, including nine children, said the observatory.

The air force’s use of explosive-packed barrel bombs has been widely denounced by rights groups as “indiscriminate”.

In Daraa in the south, air strikes against Tafas village killed nine people, including six children, said the Britain-based observatory.

More than 136,000 people have been killed in Syria’s nearly three-year war, and millions more forced to flee their homes.

BAGHDAD — Militants in pick-up trucks ambushed Iraqi army outposts protecting a major oil export pipeline in the north of the country overnight, killing at least 16 soldiers by shooting them and slitting their throats, security and medical sources said.

No group claimed responsibility for the attack, but Sunni Islamist and other insurgents have been regaining momentum in a campaign to destabilise Iraq’s Shiite-led government.

The attack took place near the Ain Al Jahash area, 30km south of the city of Mosul in Nineveh province, through which a long section of pipeline stretches from Iraq’s Kirkuk oilfield to neighbouring Turkey.

“Dozens of gunmen in pick-up trucks launched orchestrated attacks against army commando soldiers protecting an oil pipeline,” said a security source, adding that an army humvee vehicle had gone missing during the attack. “The soldiers were taken by surprise and this is why we have such a high death toll.”

The OPEC member’s ambitious plans to ramp up its oil output have been held back by poor maintenance, technical problems and now deteriorating security.

More than 1,000 people were killed in attacks across the country in January alone, building on a trend of intensifying violence that made last year the bloodiest since 2008, when sectarian warfare began to abate from its height.

“We have received 16 bodies of soldiers bearing bullets-wounds and with slit throats,” said a doctor in Mosul hospital on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to media.

‘Insulting caricature’

In a separate incident, an Iraqi daily newspaper stopped publishing after two bombs were planted in the entrance to its headquarters in Baghdad on Monday and after threats from an Iranian-backed Shiite militia.

Editors and reporters at Assabah AlJadeed said they had received death threats from the influential Asaib Al Haq militia in response to what it had described as an “insulting caricature” of Shiite Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Some Iraqi Shiite groups that follow Khamenei, including Asaib Al Haq, are fighting in Syria, often alongside President Bashar Assad’s troops and against mainly Sunni rebels.

Dozens of angry protesters carrying photographs of Asaib Al Haq leader Qais Al Khazali gathered in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on Monday demanding the paper be shut down and whoever insulted revered Shiite figures, punished.

Firdos Square was the site of the famous statue of former dictator Saddam Hussein that was torn down after the US-led invasion of 2003, setting in motion the ascendancy of Iraq’s Shiite majority.

GENEVA — Even as he fights to hold on to power, Syrian President Bashar Assad has agreed to destroy a significant part of his arsenal and to join negotiations whose stated aim is to remove him from his post.

Those seemingly contradictory moves may point to a shrewd strategy: Negotiate, play for time and hold the West at bay while his troops wear down an increasingly divided and dysfunctional rebel force on the battlefield no matter the cost.

So far the strategy has been working.

Since peace talks began in Switzerland on January 24, Assad’s forces have stepped up the pace of aerial bombardment against opposition-held areas and increased attacks in the north and around Damascus. Opposition groups say nearly 1,900 people were killed during the first week of talks last month — including more than 800 in the northern city of Aleppo alone by dozens of crude helicopter-dropped “barrel bombs”. Some 220 others died in fighting between Islamic extremists and other rebels.

In addition, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented 2,454 deaths so far in February, making it likely to be one of the deadliest months so far in the Syrian civil war.

“You want to negotiate from a strong position. You want to show exactly how immune you are internationally. And I think nothing says that more than conducting attacks during peace talks. It creates an impression of non-vulnerability,” said Firas Abi Ali, an analyst with the think tank IHS Jane’s.

For Assad, protracted, UN-brokered peace talks are a chance to engage with the international community — much of which shunned him soon after the uprising began in March 2011. Peace negotiations sponsored by the US and Russia offer Assad a means to claim relevance — just as the deal last year to destroy his chemical weapons to avoid US military strikes helped bolster his standing.

That agreement, brokered by Moscow, called for destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal by mid-2014 and took armed US intervention off the table. Assad signed on, but has already missed several deadlines with no consequences.

“The Syrian regime which pretends it is coming to Geneva kicking and screaming in fact loves nothing more than a process because it can claim that it’s the only side with which the world can negotiate,” said Rime Allaf, a political commentator who specialises in Middle East affairs.

The talks’ objective is finding a political solution to a three-year-old conflict that has killed more than 130,000 people and displaced millions from their homes. The Syrian war has fanned regional sectarian hatreds, attracted thousands of jihadi foreign fighters and extremists and destabilised neighbouring countries like Lebanon and Iraq.

But the two sides have been unable to agree even on an agenda. The opposition — backed by the US — wants the talks to focus on establishing a transitional governing body that excludes Assad. That’s a non-starter for the government which has not budged from its demand that halting “terrorism” must be the priority.

For negotiations to have any hope of success, analysts believe they must reflect the reality on the ground. Assad has little incentive to give major concessions when his forces still hold 13 of 14 provincial cities and continue to make slow but steady headway against arms-strapped rebels in Homs, Aleppo and around his seat of power Damascus. The rebels are more fractured than ever, bogged down in infighting against an Al Qaeda splinter group.

More importantly, Assad can still count on the unwavering support of strong allies Russia and Iran.

“Assad still thinks he can regain control of Syria even after all these events,” Allaf said.

This line of thinking is perhaps justified in light of the international community’s unwillingness to get involved. Military action against Assad appeared all but certain last year following a chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds. The weapons deal removed that option, leaving the US and its allies with no alternative but a political process which Assad has no interest in wrapping up quickly.

Many Syrians have little faith in the seemingly toothless process, which is already drawing comparisons to the so-called Oslo talks on interim peace deals between Israelis and Palestinians which have dragged on intermittently since the early 1990s.

Opposition spokesman Louay Safi rejected such parallels Tuesday, saying the talks will not go on indefinitely. “There will come a time when it will be clear that the regime does not want a solution and we will ask the international community to act,” he said.

Western diplomats have sought to play down such doubts. “This is not a time-wasting exercise,” said one diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak on the record. Others have expressed quiet concern that the government will continue to block negotiations, forcing the opposition to withdraw at some point with no Plan B in the wings.

Mohammad Ballout, an analyst with the Lebanese daily As-Safir newspaper covering the talks in Geneva, said the world has no choice but to engage with Assad because it fears the collapse of the Syrian state.

“The alternative to Bashar Assad is not a democratic one, with all due respect to the opposition,” he said. “The alternative to Bashar Assad is chaos at best and Islamic fiefdoms with no central government at worst.”

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama weighed into two international struggles Tuesday, vowing to come down like “a tonne of bricks” on firms that violate sanctions against Iran and acknowledging that Syrian peace talks are far from reaching their goal.

“There’s enormous frustration here,” Obama said of the Syrian peace talks.

Obama made the remarks at a joint news conference with French President Francois Hollande, a key partner in both the Syrian and Iranian efforts.

The United States and France are among the countries that signed an interim nuclear agreement with Tehran. The agreement halts progress on the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme in exchange for easing international sanctions. Talks on a final deal begin next week in Vienna, Austria.

Speaking on companies doing business with Iran in violation of sanctions still in place, Obama said: “We will come down on them like a tonne of bricks” if they don’t hold up their end.

The Obama administration has objected to the interest French businesses have shown in Iran since the sanctions were eased. More than 100 French executives visited Tehran last week, a trip Secretary of State John Kerry told his counterparts in Paris was “not helpful”.

Hollande said he told the French businessmen that sanctions remain in effect and no commercial agreements can be signed without a long-term, comprehensive nuclear deal. But he said he’s not president of the French employer’s union and companies make their own travel decisions.

The United States and France have been working to end the violent civil war in Syria, a former French colony. But peace talks between the Syrian government and opposition forces have gained no traction.

An agreement to strip Syria of its chemical weapons stockpiles is being carried out. But there are concerns on both sides of the Atlantic that Syria is stalling on its obligations.

When Obama threatened a military strike against Syria following a chemical weapons attack there last year, France was the only European ally ready to join that effort.

The United State and France have rebuilt a relationship that “would have been unimaginable even a decade ago”, after President George W. Bush launched an unpopular war against Iraq.

Obama says the transformation stands as a testament to how Washington and Paris have worked to transform their alliance, as the two leaders worked to project a renewed relationship between their countries after hitting a low point more than a decade ago over France’s staunch opposition to the American-led war in Iraq.

There has been some tension between the US and its allies in Europe and elsewhere following revelations that their leaders had been subject to spying from the National Security Agency.

Obama said there is no country with which the United States has “a no-spy agreement”. But he says the United States endeavours to protect privacy rights as it collects foreign intelligence.

Obama also announced that he’s accepted Hollande’s invitation to travel to France for the June 6 ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

CAIRO — Suspected militants blew up a gas pipeline in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Tuesday and gunmen shot dead a policeman in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia, security officials said.

Attacks in the Sinai and violence targeting soldiers and policemen across Egypt have surged since the military’s overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July.

In Ismailia, two unknown gunmen riding a motorcycle shot dead the policeman while he was standing at a traffic light, officials said.

Since January 23, 18 policemen have been killed in militant attacks, according to an AFP tally based on reports by security officials.

In the Sinai, which borders Israel and the Gaza Strip, militants Tuesday planted a bomb under a pipeline that transports gas to an industrial area south of Al Arish city, security officials said.

No one was injured in the attack, the fourth this year in the restive peninsula.

The army has poured troops into the mountainous and underdeveloped Sinai Peninsula

to combat the growing militancy.

Militants had previously forced a halt to gas supplies to Israel and Jordan by repeatedly targeting the pipeline following the 2011 overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.

An attack on January 27 was claimed by an Al Qaeda inspired group, Ansar Beit Al Maqdis or Partisans of Jerusalem.

The group has claimed most of the deadliest attacks in Egypt since the army ousted Morsi, saying that they were in revenge for a deadly crackdown by the security forces on his supporters.

More than 1,400 people have been killed in the crackdown, according to Amnesty International, and thousands jailed.

RAMALLAH — A top Palestinian official said on Tuesday a framework agreement being crafted by US Secretary of State John Kerry to buttress troubled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks may be doomed to fail.

Nabil Abu Rudeinah, spokesman to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said the deal due to be submitted to the two sides in the coming weeks would be “useless” if it allowed them to nominally accept its principles but to express reservations.

“Use of the word ‘reservations’ bogs down the peace process and the use of this concept in the past has got the process stuck,” Abu Rudeinah told Reuters.

In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Kerry said that enabling Israeli and Palestinian leaders to “have some objection” to drafted parametres “is the only way for them to politically be able to keep the negotiations moving”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads a governing coalition that includes a far-right party which could bolt over land-for-peace terms of any statehood deal with Palestinians.

Abbas also faces political pressure not to bend on issues at the core of the decades-old conflict, such as the fate of Palestinian refugees and future of Jerusalem.

Veterans of Abbas’ own Fateh Party have been sceptical of his decision to restart talks with Israel, which resumed in July after a three-year break. Top officials have mooted a return to protests and even armed violence should they fail.

The US-backed negotiations are scheduled to expire at the end of April. Washington has said the framework agreement would be a basis to prolong the talks, but Palestinian officials have yet to accept any extension.

Palestinians want a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel captured those areas in the 1967 war, and in 2005 pulled its troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip — land now hedged in by an Israeli blockade and run by Hamas Islamists opposed to Abbas’s peace efforts.

Red lines

Abu Rudeinah cautioned against the Kerry document traversing any Palestinian “red lines”.

He said the framework agreement must clearly recognise the 1967 lines as the outline demarcating the two states, designate East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital and call Israel’s settlements on occupied land “illegal”, hardening Washington’s current description of them as “illegitimate”.

Over half a million Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Most countries consider the settlements illegal, a term disputed by Israel.

Failure to salvage the talks, which have yet to show signs of progress, may lead to a showdown between Israel and the Palestinians in international bodies. Israeli officials say boycotts and political isolation of their state may soon follow.

Setting conditions for a final peace deal, Netanyahu has ruled out a return to what he has termed “indefensible” pre-1967 war lines. He has also demanded a long-term Israeli security presence on the future eastern border of a Palestinian state and has called on Abbas to recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

The Israeli leader is due to meet US President Barack Obama next month in Washington, where they will discuss the negotiations along with US efforts to ease tensions with Iran over its nuclear programme.

TUNIS — Tunisia’s new constitution, adopted in late January after two years of acrimonious debate, started coming into effect on Monday when it was published in the official journal.

The country’s leaders signed the charter at the end of last month, three years after the uprising that toppled longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and ignited the Arab Spring.

The charter was printed by the state publisher, and was available as a red booklet on Monday evening in a bookshop in the centre of Tunis.

A copy had already been delivered to the governorate of Tunis, an official at the body told AFP.

Assembly Speaker Mustapha Ben Jaafar had ordered the document to be printed in a special edition of the official journal, and the constitution will come into force in stages following its publication.

Some articles of the basic law will not be immediately applicable, as they depend on the election of a new parliament and president, or the formation of new institutions, such as the constitutional court.

Since 2011, Tunisia has faced sporadic violence, including the assassination of two opposition politicians last year which sparked a major political crisis between the majority Islamist party Ennahda and their secular opponents.

SANAA — Northern Shiite rebels and a faction demanding southern autonomy Tuesday rejected a six-region federation plan for Yemen, which was agreed by parties during the “national dialogue” aimed at securing the country’s political transition.

A panel headed by President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi on Monday agreed the plan, which will be inserted into a new constitution and will divide Yemen into six federal regions — four in the north and two in the south.

But Shiite rebels in the north claimed the division of the republic would not distribute wealth evenly, while a southern faction said the plan did not meet their aspirations for autonomy.

“We have rejected it because it divides Yemen into poor and wealthy” regions, said Mohammed Al Bakheiti of the Shiite rebel group Ansarullah.

The six regions laid out in the plan include four in the north comprising Azal, Saba, Janad and Tahama, and two in the formerly independent south, Aden and Hadramawt.

Under the plan the northern province of Saada, bastion of Ansarullah rebels, also known as Houthis, is part of the Azal region — a zone that also includes Sanaa, Amran and Dhamar — that has no significant natural resources or access to sea.

“Saada has stronger cultural, social and geographical links with [coastal] Hajja, and Jawf” on the border with Saudi Arabia, Bakheiti said.

Mohammed Ali Ahmed, head of the People’s Congress of the South — a Southern Movement faction, told AFP that “our positon is clear... We reject these decisions because they do not meet the aspirations of our people in the south.”

Southerners are demanding “the right of self-determination and regaining a sovereign state”, said Ahmed, who headed a delegation that withdrew from the national dialogue in November in protest at proposals for multiple units for the north.

Yemen’s parties had been divided on whether to split the future federation into two or six regions.

Sanaa feared that a straight north-south divide could set the stage for the disgruntled south to secede.

The southern question has been a major stumbling block in the talks, with hardline factions of the Southern Movement boycotting the discussions since the beginning of talks and demanding complete secession.

After the former North and South Yemen united in 1990, the south broke away in 1994, triggering a brief civil war that ended with the region being overrun by northern troops.

The national dialogue was stipulated by a Gulf-brokered and UN-backed roadmap that ended a year of Arab Spring-inspired protests against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who stepped down in 2012 after 33 years in power.

TEHRAN — Iran’s prosecutor general said Tuesday that opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi will remain under house arrest over anti-government protests until they “repent”, Fars news agency reported.

Mousavi and Karroubi have been held incommunicado under separate house arrests since February 2011, accused of orchestrating massive, unprecedented street protests sparked by a disputed presidential election in 2009.

Prosecutor general Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie said they had committed a “great crime and treason”.

“Until time the sedition leaders [agree to] repent... the situation will remain as before,” he said.

The protests turned deadly when authorities resorted to a heavy-handed crackdown in which thousands of protesters, reformist activists and journalists were arrested.

Mousavi and Karroubi had claimed that the 2009 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president for a second term had been rigged.

The fate of Mousavi and Karroubi — both of whom are reportedly suffering health problems — has attracted global attention and triggered heated debates at home.

GENEVA — Syrian peace talks appeared bogged down Tuesday, with the UN mediator acknowledging little progress has been achieved and the two sides failing even to agree on an agenda to move negotiations forward.

Following a three hour, face-to-face meeting, UN-Arab League mediator Lakhdar Brahimi told reporters “we are not making much progress”.

“We need cooperation from both sides here and lot of support from outside,” he added.

In Washington, President Barack Obama agreed that the talks were far from achieving their goal of ending a civil war that has claimed 130,000 lives, destroyed the country and threatens to destabilise the whole Middle East.

“There’s enormous frustration here,” Obama said at a joint news conference Tuesday with French President Francois Hollande.

Talks between President Bashar Assad’s government and the pro-Western opposition began last month, then adjourned after a week, resuming Monday after a 10-day break. But a frustrated Brahimi said the current round was proving “as laborious as it was the first week”.

The Assad government wants the talks to focus on fighting “terrorism”. The opposition wants to talk about a transition government to replace Assad. Brahimi has proposed discussing both in parallel but with apparently no success.

“I’m not sure whether I can impose an agenda on people who don’t want to, you know,” Brahimi said. “How can you, put a gun on their heads? You know, it is their country. This is a huge responsibility they have.”

Each side blamed the other for the impasse.

“Clearly there has been no progress today,” opposition spokesman Louay Safi told reporters, blaming the government for blocking a common agenda.

“These people are not here to come up with a political solution, but they’re insisting on killing people in Syria to maintain the rule of the one person and dictatorship,” he said.

Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad blamed the opposition for “another lost day”.

“This group of opposition, the coalition, is insisting to waste your and our time,” he said. “Today they wasted all the time discussing nothing, saying that there is no terrorism in Syria.”

With no sign of movement, attention was directed at a meeting planned in Geneva on Friday between Brahimi, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov and Wendy Sherman, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs. UN officials played down the significance, saying that as co-sponsors of the peace talks the Russians and Americans confer periodically with the UN.

Monzer Akbik, a senior member of the Syrian opposition delegation, raised the possibility that the delegations may meet separately Friday with the US and Russian officials.

But Mekdad objected to the notion that the two outside powers might try to intervene in the negotiations.

“If this meeting is between the Russians and Americans and the UN, they are free of course to meet,” he said. “But we stress... that any dialogue, discussion or negotiation must be between the Syrian sides only because they are the ones concerned with such a dialogue.”

In Syria, the government said Tuesday it had allowed 111 men of fighting age to leave rebel-held areas of Homs after they were questioned and cleared of rebel links, state media said.

Since Friday, 1,151 civilians, mostly women, children and elderly have been evacuated from the city, Syria’s third largest. Homs has been under government siege for more than a year.

The UN child agency said at least 500 children among those brought out of the city’s rebel-held area. UNICEF said its staff reported the children were “terrified, frail and emaciated” when they left the city.