Region

WASHINGTON — Blunt talk over the US opening to Iran and reticence in Syria will be on the menu when President Barack Obama travels to Saudi Arabia next month to meet King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz.

Obama’s White House years have caused frustration and incomprehension in Riyadh and a rocky ride for Washington’s key strategic relationship with the Gulf kingdom.

His nuclear diplomacy with Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia’s Shiite-led foe in a swirling regional proxy war, and his last gasp reversal on striking Syria last year infuriated the Saudi court.

Since then, Saudi princes have vented in opinion pieces for US newspapers, comparing Washington to a “big bear” reluctant to show its claws and branding an interim nuclear deal with Iran a “dangerous gamble”.

Obama’s upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia was first reported Saturday by the Wall Street Journal quoting Arab officials.

The White House waited until Monday to confirm that Obama would indeed add an unexpected stop in Saudi Arabia onto a previously announced tour of the Netherlands, Brussels and Vatican City in March.

“Whatever differences we may have do not alter the fact that this is a very important and close partnership,” White House Spokesperson Jay Carney said.

While the picture is not all bleak — Saudi Arabia is cheered by US Secretary of State John Kerry’s exhaustive Middle East peace drive and the security and intelligence relationship is tight — differences over Iran and Syria are glaring.

“I would expect it to be a very frank conversation, as they say in diplomatic parlance,” said David Ottaway, senior Middle East scholar at the Wilson Centre.

Simon Henderson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that while the Saudis did not want to humiliate Obama, they would not hide their frustration.

“The undertone is ‘you come here, Mr Obama, we are going to tell you a few facts of life about the Middle East which you don’t appear to appreciate’,” he said.

The Saudis viewed the interim deal world powers clinched with Iran to halt aspects of its nuclear programme in return for some sanctions relief, with undisguised dismay.

The view from Riyadh appears to be that any diplomacy that improves Iran’s position in the region represents a reverse for the kingdom.

“I think it is incredibly difficult for Obama to appease the Saudis,” said Henderson.

Obama’s former defence secretary Robert Gates wrote in his new book that the king told him bluntly that “Iran is the source of all problems and a danger that must be confronted”.

The list of Saudi grievances against the Obama administration begins with disappointment that the president did not do more to live up to his vow for a “new beginning” with the Muslim world delivered in his showpiece speech in Cairo in 2009.

The Saudis fulminated after Obama cast off a long-time US ally in ousted Eygptian president Hosni Mubarak, and threatened by the tide of Arab Spring revolutions, despaired at Obama’s efforts to get on “the right side of history”.

Extraordinary public critiques of Washington by the likes of Prince Turki Al Faisal and Saudi ambassador to Britain, Prince Mohammed Bin Nawaf Bin Abdulaziz, surfaced after Obama blinked on the brink of unleashing US missiles against President Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria to punish the use of chemical weapons.

The perceived climb-down offered ammunition to Middle East critics who doubt the veracity of Obama’s threat to wage war on Iran if nuclear diplomacy fails.

It also fuelled a narrative — which US officials are increasingly trying to dispel — that Washington is disengaging from the Middle East, as Obama brings troops home from foreign battlefields and gazes towards rising Asia.

Saudi frustration that Obama refuses to openly arm anti-Assad rebels spilled over in an emotional intervention by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal during a news conference with Kerry in Riyadh in November.

Syria “is the largest calamity that has befallen the world in the present millennium”, he said in a hushed voice.

“If that isn’t reason enough to intervene, to stop the bloodshed, I don’t know what is.”

While Obama and the Saudi king may agree to disagree on Iran and Syria, the US president will highlight Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian peace effort — which is exactly the kind of US commitment that Saudi Arabia has long demanded.

They also see a common threat from proliferating Al Qaeda franchises bedding into to restive regions of Syria and Iraq.

Obama last visited Saudi Arabia in the first year of his presidency, in 2009, and welcomed the king to the White House a year later.

DUBAI — Bahrain announced Tuesday tougher jail sentences for offending King Hamad, as the country prepares to mark the third anniversary of a Shiite-led uprising against the kingdom’s Sunni rulers.

Separately, a court jailed 24 Shiites for violence and taking part in unlicenced protests.

An amendment to the 1976 penal code says that “publicly offending the king of Bahrain, its national flag or emblem” will carry a minimum one-year and a maximum seven-year sentence, as well as a fine of up to $26,000 (19,260 euros), state news agency BNA reported.

The sentence can exceed seven years if the “offence was committed in the presence of the king”, the report added, without providing details.

Previously, the same charges carried a minimum sentence of only a few days.

In 2012, a criminal court jailed two activists for one and four months, respectively, after their conviction for posting on Twitter remarks deemed insulting to the king.

Meanwhile Tuesday, the Manama criminal court sentenced 23 Shiites to five years in jail for attacks with petrol bombs and taking part in an unlicenced protest.

Another Shiite was jailed for three years.

Arab Spring-inspired protests in mid-February 2011 were met by a crackdown a month later, backed by Saudi-led Gulf forces that rolled into Bahrain in support of Al Khalifa dynasty.

Demonstrators, that sometimes chant “Down with Hamad”, frequently clash with security forces in Shiite villages outside the capital.

At least 89 people have been killed since the protests began, according to the International Federation for Human Rights.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel’s top court has given the government two months to explain why it has not proposed an alternative route for the West Bank separation wall in a valley near Jerusalem.

The decision, handed down by the High Court Monday, relates to an appeal by Palestinian residents of Beit Jala, who say the proposed route would separate them from their olive groves and divide the local Christian community.

The residents say that if the barrier is built through the Cremisan Valley, 58 families would lose their land and the Roman Catholic Salesian order’s properties would be split, leaving a monastery on the Israeli side and a convent on the Palestinian side.

The Cremisan Valley lies between the sprawling settlement neighbourhood of Gilo in annexed east Jerusalem, and the smaller West Bank settlement of Har Gilo, just a few kilometres to the southwest.

At a hearing last week, the Council for Peace and Security, a group of former high-ranking security officials, proposed an alternative route for the barrier it said would save most of the villagers’ land and better ensure Israel’s security needs.

On Monday, the court ordered the defence ministry to explain in writing “why other alternatives to the route of the fence were not examined... and why an alternative route had not been adopted.”

It also asked why four seizure orders relating to Palestinian land in the Cremisan Valley had not been cancelled.

The ministry has until April 10 to respond.

If the barrier is built along the route proposed by the ministry, the villagers and the Salesian order stand to lose 3000 dunams (300 hectares/741 acres) of land, 700 of which belongs to the church.

But if it follows the route proposed by the Council for Peace and Security, no land will be seized, figures from St Yves Catholic rights group show.

“We definitely have new hope — the answer of the court is a good sign,” said a statement from Zvi Avni, legal counsel for St Yves, which represents the convent and its school.

The same court is considering a separate appeal against the barrier’s route lodged by residents of the nearby Palestinian village of Battir, who say it will destroy its ancient terraces and a Roman-era irrigation system.

On Sunday, the court ordered Israel Railways and the defence ministry to look into the possibility of removing one of the two railway tracks that run near Battir to enable an alternative route, giving them until February 27 to respond.

Friends of the Earth Middle East said the court appeared to be “extremely reluctant to let the military remove a single stone terrace”.

The group said it believes that due to the area’s topography, “it is not possible to build the type of physical structure that the military is proposing without destroying several hundred metres of ancient stone terrace walls.”

In a separate case pertaining to the barrier, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of “severely harming livelihoods” in the Palestinian village Nabi Samuel, just north of Jerusalem, due to works to create an archaeological site on part of the area.

Nabi Samuel has since 2007 been cut off from the West Bank, and most of its residents are not allowed to enter Israel to work.

“It is cruel to now make a tourist attraction out of the part of the village the military destroyed” in 1971, HRW Middle East and North Africa director Sarah Leah Whitson said, calling on Israel to let the seven Nabi Samuel families who fled during the 1967 war “return and rebuild”.

Israel began building the barrier in 2002 at the height of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, arguing that its construction was crucial for security. But the Palestinians see it as a land grab aimed at stealing part of their future state.

UN figures show that Israel has already built around two-thirds of the barrier — a network of towering concrete walls, barbed-wire fences, trenches, and closed military roads that will extend 712 kilometres when completed.

Only 15 per cent of the barrier follows the Green Line, which is recognised by the international community as the border of Israel proper, with the rest inside the West Bank.

SANAA — Shiite rebels and several tribes of the influential Hashid confederation in northern Yemen agreed Tuesday to end fighting that has killed nearly 150 people in a week, both sides said.

But the deal does not include Al Ahmar, the Hashid’s historical leading clan, whose stronghold was overrun at the weekend and whose fighters have fled to the capital.

The Ansarullah [Partisans of God] rebels, also known as Houthis, have been pushing out from the mountains of the far north to areas closer to Sanaa to expand their hoped-for autonomous unit in a promised federal Yemen.

They met with fierce resistance at first from pro-government tribes in the Zaidi Shiite northern highlands led by Al Ahmar.

But at the weekend they seized the town of Huth and Khamri village — the seat of Hashid tribal chief Sheikh Sadeq Al Ahmar — in the northern province of Amran.

Abdel Karim Al Khaywani, an Ansarullah spokesman, said “we reached a peace agreement Tuesday with the Bani Suraim, Usaimat and Uzer”, all Hashid tribes in Amran, where fighting erupted on January 5.

The agreement, reached without Al Ahmar, stipulates an “end to fighting... reopening of roads and allowing supporters of Ansarullah to move freely” in areas under tribal control, he told AFP.

Sources say divisions within the Hashid confederation could have contributed to the defeat of Al Ahmar because many tribes have sided with the rebels.

The divisions are the result of a rift between Hashid chief Sheikh Sadeq and ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who also belongs to the confederation and can still count on the loyalty of some of its tribes.

Al Ahmar sided with the Arab Spring protests that forced Saleh to step down in February 2012 after 33 years in power.

A tribal source confirmed the agreement and said “Al Ahmar dignitaries have evacuated their strongholds in Amran”.

The deal with the rebels marks “a revolt by the Hashid against Al Ahmar and their 50-year-long injustice,” he said, adding that the agreement was overseen by Ali Hamid Jelidan of the Bani Suraim, who is known for his close ties to Saleh.

The ex-president has seemed reluctant to retire from political life and is accused by opponents of impeding the UN-backed transition in Yemen.

The Houthis, who take their name from their leading family, rose up against Saleh’s government in 2004 and have fought an on-off conflict in the far north ever since.

President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has pledged that Yemen will adopt a federal constitution in a bid to address regional grievances that have fuelled violence across the Arab world’s poorest country.

But at a ceremony last month to mark the conclusion of a troubled 10-month national dialogue, he put off any decision on the thorny issue of how many component units the federation will have, promising that a special commission will decide.

WASHINGTON — Last year’s agreement to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons left President Bashar Assad in a strengthened position, and there appears little chance rebels will soon force him from power, the US intelligence chief told Congress on Tuesday.

“The prospects are right now that [Assad] is actually in a strengthened position than when we discussed this last year, by virtue of his agreement to remove the chemical weapons, as slow as that process has been,” said James Clapper, director of national intelligence.

Clapper, testifying before a US House of Representatives intelligence committee hearing, did not specify why last September’s agreement on chemical arms had boosted Assad’s position.

But before the pact, worked out by the United States and Russia, the Obama administration had appeared on the verge of launching military strikes against Syria in reprisal for a poison gas attack in the Damascus suburbs which killed hundreds.

President Barack Obama in August 2011 called on the Syrian president to give up power following the lethal suppression of anti-government protests by Assad’s security forces.

Clapper said Assad’s government is likely to remain in power, absent a diplomatic agreement for a new transitional government, which most observers consider a long shot.

“I foresee kind of more of the same, sort of a perpetual state of a stalemate where ... neither the regime nor the opposition can prevail,” he told the House intelligence committee.

Reuters reported last week that Syria has given up less than 5 per cent of its chemical weapons arsenal and will miss this week’s deadline to send all toxic agents abroad for destruction.

Clapper said the weapons removal was occurring at a “slow pace”, and that two shipments totalling about 53 metric tonnes had left Syria so far.

Russia, Syria’s ally, said on Tuesday that Damascus would soon ship more toxic agents abroad for destruction.

TUNIS — Tunisian police killed seven Islamist militants, including a senior commander wanted for the assassination of two opposition leaders, after a clash outside Tunis where the armed group had stashed arms and bomb belts.

The raid was one of the deadliest since Tunisian forces cracked down on the banned Islamist militant movement Ansar Al Sharia, whose leader declares allegiance to Al Qaeda, and which Washington lists as a foreign terrorist group.

Gun battles broke out late on Monday night when police surrounded a house in the Raoued suburb north of Tunis, leaving one police officer and seven militants dead, the interior ministry said, without naming the group.

Among those killed was Kamel Ghadghadi, a senior member of the Ansar Al Sharia, wanted for killing seven soldiers, some of whom had their throats slit, and for assassinating opposition leaders Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi.

“Ghadghadi is among those killed. This is the best present for Tunisians a year after the murder of Belaid,” Interior Minister Lofti Ben Jeddou told reporters at a news conference.

Officials showed reporters a photograph of what they said was Ghadghadi’s corpse, wearing a suicide bomb belt. Other explosive material and weapons were also found in the house.

Raoued is a poor district close to luxury beach resorts just outside the capital. Heavily armed counterterrorism police patrolled near the white-washed house where the fighting took place, its outer wall pockmarked by bullet holes.

Ansar Al Sharia was one of the more radical movements to emerge after Tunisia’s 2011 uprising ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, whose autocratic regime suppressed and jailed Islamist leaders.

Militant challenge

The rise of ultra-conservative Salafi movements who promote the establishment of an Islamic state has alarmed many in Tunisia, one of the most secular nations in the Arab world with a strong tradition of liberal education.

Ansar Al Sharia was blamed for storming the US embassy in Tunis in late 2012. The moderate Islamist government at the time declared Ansar Al Sharia a terrorist organisation after accusing the group of murdering the opposition leaders.

Three years after its Arab Spring uprising, Tunisia is led by a caretaker government that took over after Islamist Ennahda Party stepped down in a compromise to end a crisis sparked in part by the killing of Belaid and Brahmi.

Tunisia formally celebrates a new constitution on Friday, with French President Francois Hollande and other dignitaries invited to the ceremony to mark the North African country’s progress to democracy.

The threat of Islamist militancy is among the new government’s main challenges. A suicide bombing at a beach resort late last year — the first such attack in a decade — underscored Tunisia’s vulnerability to jihadi violence.

Tunisian militants have used the turmoil in neighbouring Libya to get weapons and training. Some have travelled to Syria to fight for Islamist rebel groups in the civil war there.

DAMASCUS — Khulud Shehab’s withered hands push two of her children out of Yarmouk in southern Damascus, anxious to flee the hell and hunger of the Palestinian refugee camp as fast as possible.

For seven months, the Syrian army has imposed a punishing siege on the camp to try to force out rebels holed up inside.

Khulud and her family are among the lucky few to be allowed to leave, after a deal was struck following months of negotiations between Syrian authorities and Palestinian factions in Yarmouk.

“Just look at them. You can imagine what it’s like inside,” Khulud tells an AFP journalist, displaying her cracked hands.

“It’s disastrous. People are literally dying of hunger,” says the slight and dark-eyed mother.

“We were boiling herbs and bits of cactus we found in the fields near our house,” to eat and survive, she adds.

Amid the crush of leaving Yarmouk, Khulud has lost track of her husband and one of her daughters as the family negotiated streets strewn with the rubble of buildings destroyed in months of fierce fighting.

The camp began as a home for Palestinian refugees in the 1950s, but Yarmouk evolved over the decades into a bustling residential and commercial district, home to some 150,000 Palestinians as well as Syrians.

It became a war zone when rebels who took up arms against President Bashar Assad moved in and won the support of some Palestinian groups in the fight against regime forces.

The violence forced tens of thousands of residents to flee but an estimated 18,000 remained trapped inside Yarmouk after the army imposed a total blockade on the camp last June.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, says at least 88 people have died from hunger or lack of medical care since the blockade began.

After months of negotiations a deal was reached in late December between a committee of local rebels and 14 Palestinian factions inside Yarmouk to allow long-denied food into the camp.

Crowds gather for food parcels

Despite some false starts, aid began entering Yarmouk in January and some of the trapped residents were allowed to leave for humanitarian reasons.

“Seeing the road open like this is the best thing that has happened to me in a long time,” says Khulud.

“I’m overjoyed to be able to leave, and I hope that the others will be able to follow.”

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, first distributed aid in the camp on January 18 and then again from Thursday to Sunday.

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said at least 3,709 food parcels have entered Yarmouk since January 18, with large crowds gathering at distribution points.

Palestine Liberation Organisation official Anwar Abdul Hadi said at least 450 people have been allowed to leave — mainly women, children and elderly men.

“Letting civilians leave eases the suffering of residents,” he tells AFP, hoping that more will follow.

Umm Alaa, five children in tow, is among those overwhelmed with relief.

“I don’t know where I’m going to go, but I absolutely wanted to get out, even if I had to sleep in the street,” she says.

Her first priority was to get to the paediatric hospital in Damascus’ Mazzeh district to seek treatment for a son suffering from acute malnutrition and who has developed muscular dystrophy.

‘Humanitarian cases only’

Sheikh Mohamed Al Omari, head of the reconciliation committee that arranged the December deal, says only humanitarian cases were able to leave.

Palestinians already outside the camp had to submit a request to the committee on behalf of their relatives trapped inside.

“We contact a doctor in the camp who can judge which cases are most urgent,” Omari says.

Gunshots ring out as Umm Alaa, Khulud and others leave Yarmouk and Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) ambulances enter to evacuate those too ill to walk.

At the Batikha roundabout, 15 Red Crescent volunteers hand out sesame seed biscuits and water to those staggering out of Yarmouk and write down their names.

PRC doctor Atef Ibrahim says that all of those who are ill will be transferred to Jaffa hospital in Mazzeh, adding that most are children suffering from dehydration, pregnant woman and diabetics.

Outside Yarmouk a huddle of relatives stands waiting for loved ones.

Among them is Afaf Shehabi, looking out for her daughter Aala Al Aidi and her grandson aged two.

Aala and the child walk out alone. She is now a widow, her husband killed by shellfire.