Region

CAIRO — Egyptian prosecutors on Monday referred to trial the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and 50 others on charges of inciting supporters to resist security forces during a deadly crackdown against them in August.

Supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi had camped out in an eastern Cairo district for nearly two months before police moved in to break up the sit-in protest, killing at least 600.

The prosecutors said Mohammed Badie, the group’s spiritual leader, and his aides had planned to “bring down the state” and spread chaos by attacking police stations, state institutions, private property and churches to create the impression that the government had lost control of the country.

They also manufactured scenes of protesters being killed during the August 14 dispersal of the Cairo sit-in, prosecutors alleged. They said Brotherhood members stole guns and ammunition from police stations and later used later to kill policemen.

Pro-Morsi protests included armed men and thugs paid to disrupt traffic and intimidate citizens, they added.

The Brotherhood has insisted that its protests were peaceful.

Badie and the Islamist group’s top leaders, including Morsi, are already facing several trials on charges that mostly carry the death penalty.

The trials are part of the military-backed government’s widening crackdown on the group and its Islamist allies. Thousands of the group’s members have been jailed since Morsi’s ouster in a July 3 military coup.

No date has been set yet for the latest trial, in which 19 of the 51 defendants remain at large.

The military-backed government has cracked down hard on the Muslim Brotherhood since Morsi’s ouster, detaining thousands and designating the group a terrorist organisation. 

It also blames the Brotherhood and its allies for a burgeoning militant insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as a string of terror attacks elsewhere in the nation.

In the latest fighting in Sinai, troops backed by helicopters raided suspected militants’ hideouts in the northern part of the strategic peninsula on Monday, killing at least 20 and wounding 25, military officials said.

The officials said the sweep, which led to the arrest of 16 suspected militants, was among the biggest in an ongoing offensive against militants waging an insurgency in the area bordering the Gaza Strip and Israel.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to brief reporters.

The raids are part of an escalation of the fighting in Sinai.

On Friday, army aircraft pounded suspected militants’ positions, killing 13 people. Late last month, militants, some of whom are linked to Al Qaeda, shot down an army helicopter, killing all five men on board, suggesting the use of sophisticated weaponry. 

BEIRUT — At least 26 people were killed in aerial attacks with explosive-packed barrel bombs in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Monday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, according to Agence France-Presse.

The group said 12 men, 11 children and three women were killed when Syrian army helicopters dropped the controversial weapons on neighbourhoods in the east of the city, once Syria’s economic hub.

Rebel-held areas have been subjected to a punishing string of aerial raids by Syria’s army in the past three days, with at least 36 people killed on Sunday and 85 killed on Saturday, according to the NGO.

The observatory said Monday that January 2014 was the bloodiest month in the conflict so far, with 5,794 deaths recorded.

The air raids, which come as government troops are advancing into the eastern and northern parts of the city, have prompted a mass exodus of civilians, the observatory’s director, Rami Abdel Rahman, said.

“Residents of the eastern neighbourhoods began fleeing about three days ago as the pace of the barrel bomb attacks increased,” he told AFP.

“Some of them have gone to Turkey, but many of them have nowhere to go but regime-controlled areas in the west of the city, because of the fighting between rebel forces and the [jihadist] Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL] in other parts of Aleppo.”

A security source in Damascus confirmed that civilians were fleeing to government-held parts of the city, and AFP photographers saw long lines of people at checkpoints separating rebel and government-controlled areas.

Fighting began in Aleppo in mid-2012, with the city quickly being divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east.

The situation has remained a stalemate for months, but the regime’s army has made several advances in surrounding Aleppo province, including capturing an area around Aleppo international airport.

The advances there allowed the government to reopen the airport, which had been closed for nearly a year because of nearby fighting.

Over the weekend, regime forces seized most of the eastern district of Karam Al Turab, state media and the observatory said, and the army is pushing to take additional eastern and northern areas.

In the central Hama province, meanwhile, the observatory said at least five students were killed in rebel rocket fire on a majority Alawite town.

President Bashar Assad is from the Alawite community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, while the uprising against him is dominated by Sunnis.

More than 136,000 people have died since the conflict in Syria began with peaceful anti-government protests in March 2011.

The spike in deaths came despite 10 days of talks between the government and regime in Geneva that ended last Saturday without tangible results.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda’s general command said on Monday it had no links with ISIL, in an apparent attempt to reassert its authority over fragmented Islamist fighters in Syria’s civil war, Reuters reported.

After a month of rebel infighting, Al Qaeda disavowed the increasingly independent ISIL in a move likely to bolster a rival Islamist group, Al Nusra Front, as Al Qaeda’s official proxy in Syria.

ISIL has fought battles with other Islamist insurgents and secular rebel groups, often triggered by disputes over authority and territory. Several secular and Islamist groups announced a campaign last month against ISIL.

The fighting — some of the bloodiest in the war so far — has undermined the uprising against Assad and dismayed Western powers pushing for peace talks between the government and opposition.

Rebel-on-rebel violence in Syria has killed at least 2,300 this year alone, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

ISIL follows Al Qaeda’s hardline ideology and, until now, the two groups were officially linked. Many foreign fighters and ISIL observers, however, say that Al Qaeda central and ISIL had in fact been effectively separated since before the group, which was originally the Al Qaeda branch in Iraq, spread into Syria.

Hardline Islamist rebels, including Al Nusra, have come to dominate the largely Sunni Muslim insurgency against Assad, who is supported by his minority Alawite sect — an offshoot of Shiite Islam — as well as Shiite fighters from Iraq and Lebanon’s Hizbollah.

In a message on jihadist websites on Monday, Al Qaeda General Command said ISIL “is not a branch of the al Qaeda group”.

“...[Al Qaeda] does not have an organisational relationship with it and is not the group responsible for their actions.”

In April, ISIL head Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi tried to force a merger with Al Nusra Front, defying orders from Al Qaeda chief Ayman Al Zawahiri and causing a rift.

An Al Nusra commander in northern Syria told Reuters that the statement meant that his group’s position was no longer one of neutrality.

“Now we are going to war with ISIL and will finish it off once and for all,” he said on condition of anonymity.

WASHINGTON — The White House said on Monday that President Barack Obama will travel to Saudi Arabia in March to meet with King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz to discuss a range of security issues in the Middle East that have caused some strains in the bilateral relationship.

The rare visit, which comes at the end of an Obama trip to the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy, will include discussions about “Gulf and regional security, peace in the Middle East, countering violent extremism, and other issues of prosperity and security”, the White House said in a statement.

King Abdullah met Secretary of State John Kerry in November and discussed concerns about the unwillingness of the United State to intervene in Syria and recent overtures to its arch-rival, Iran.

Saudi Arabia turned down a seat on the United Nations Security Council in October, in a display of anger at the failure of the international community to end the war in Syria.

That month, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief said the kingdom was looking at making a “major shift” in relations with the United States.

The United States and Saudi Arabia have long been close allies on military and energy issues.

RAMALLAH — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would support a five-year Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank provided a NATO force is deployed to ensure security, The New York Times has reported.

Abbas, in an interview published by the paper on Sunday, shifted from his insistence on a three-year time frame for Israel’s withdrawal from occupied territories under any future peace deal.

“At the end of five years my country will be clean of occupation,” Abbas said, insisting however that NATO forces should be deployed during this period to undertake cross-border security and anti-terrorism duties.

“For a long time, and wherever they want, not only on the eastern borders, but also on the western borders, everywhere,” NATO could be stationed, he said.

“The third party can stay. They can stay to reassure the Israelis, and to protect us.”

Abbas’ comments came as the United States tries to coax Israel and the Palestinians into ending a decades-old conflict and bringing about a two-state solution.

But US-backed peace talks are faltering over a number of seemingly irreconcilable issues, including that of security arrangements in a future Palestinian state.

Israel insists it be allowed to maintain a long-term military presence, notably in the Jordan Valley, where the West Bank borders Jordan.

But the Palestinians demand that Israel withdraw entirely to make way for an international force.

The Palestinians would only have a police force and no army under a final status agreement, Abbas said, so a NATO force would undertake anti-terrorism and cross-border security tasks.

“We will be demilitarised,” Abbas told the Times. “Do you think we have any illusion that we can have any security if the Israelis do not feel they have security?”

Hardline Israeli officials slammed Abbas’ proposal, opposing the notion of evicting Jewish settlers from their homes in the occupied West Bank.

Abbas’ “programme cannot be implemented, because he still wants to expel 400,000 settlers from their homes”, Housing Minister Uri Ariel, himself a settler, said in remarks broadcast by Israeli public radio.

Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin told the radio Abbas “does not want peace, since he refuses to recognise Israel as a Jewish state”.

“We cannot talk of progress while he says he doesn’t want to throw us into the sea just now, but later instead,” Elkin charged.

Israel demands Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

But the Palestinians refuse this, fearing it will preclude the right of return for refugees who fled or were driven from their homes when Israel was created in 1948.

It is unclear what would be the fate of Israeli settlers under a final peace deal, although local media reports say the idea of land swaps or even leasing land from Palestinian authorities have both been floated.

Settlements are illegal under international law.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel has offered Turkey $20 million in compensation to the families of those killed and wounded in its botched 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, Haaretz newspaper reported on Monday.

Citing unnamed Western diplomats briefed on ongoing negotiations with Ankara, the daily said Turkey had yet to respond to the offer.

Bulent Arinc, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, said major progress had been made but that a few points still had to be ironed out.

“We are not yet ready to sign... but a solution is close,” Arinc told reporters.

Once-close relations between the two nations fell apart after Israeli commandos killed nine Turkish nationals during a botched pre-dawn raid on a six-ship flotilla seeking to break Israel’s naval blockade on Gaza in May 2010.

The assault provoked a major diplomatic crisis between the former regional allies, with Ankara demanding a formal apology and compensation for the families of the victims.

Talks finally began in March 2013 after Israel extended a formal apology to Turkey to get relations back on track following top-level intervention by US President Barack Obama.

The talks stalled for several months but were revived in December when Israeli negotiators travelled to Istanbul and Turkey lowered its demands for compensation, Haaretz said.

Western diplomats quoted by the paper said Ankara had demanded $30 million, but Israel was initially willing to give only $15 million.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later decided to up Israel’s offer to $20 million, with an extra $3 million available “if necessary to secure an agreement”, the paper said.

The funds will not be paid directly to the families of the dead and the wounded but will be deposited in a humanitarian fund and distributed to them in accordance with defined criteria, it said.

Netanyahu’s office refused to comment on the report.

DUBAI/WASHINGTON — Iran was set to receive the first $550 million installment in previously blocked overseas funds early this week as part of an interim nuclear deal, the United States confirmed on Monday.

Iran’s official IRNA news agency earlier on Monday reported the money went into an Iranian Central Bank account in Switzerland. A US Treasury spokeswoman confirmed the development by email.

Under a November 24 nuclear agreement, six major powers agreed to give Iran access to $4.2 billion in its oil revenues frozen abroad if it carries out the deal. Tehran gets limited sanctions relief in exchange for steps to curb its nuclear programme.

Iran says its nuclear programme is solely for peaceful purposes, such as generating electricity and medical isotopes.

Some payments under the six-month deal — which officially began January 20 — depend on Iran keeping its commitment to dilute half of its 20 per cent enriched uranium to no more than 5 per cent enriched uranium.

Iran cannot get its next installment of $450 million on March 1 unless the International Atomic Energy Agency confirms Tehran has done half the necessary dilution of its enriched uranium, according to a Treasury fact sheet.