Region

KIRKUK, Iraq — Thirteen Iraqi policemen were killed in a Daesh terror group attack against a checkpoint in the country's north early Sunday, security and medical sources said.

The attack, in the region of Al Rashad around 65 kilometres south of Kirkuk city, took place just after midnight, a senior Iraqi police officer told AFP.

"Members of the Daesh organisation targeted a federal police checkpoint," said the officer, who did not want to be named.

"Thirteen were killed and three wounded" among the security forces, the officer added.

A medical source based in Kirkuk confirmed the toll.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Daesh seized swathes of Iraq in a lightning offensive in 2014, before being beaten back by a counter-insurgency campaign supported by a US-led military coalition.

The Iraqi government declared the extremists defeated in late 2017, but they retain sleeper cells which continue to hit security forces with asymmetric attacks.

Extremist cells regularly target the Iraqi army and police in northern Iraq, but this attack was one of the most deadly this year.

A July 19 bombing claimed by Daesh officially killed 30 people in Al Woheilat market in Sadr City, a Shiite suburb of Baghdad.

International coalition troops in Iraq currently number around 3,500, of which 2,500 are US troops.

But Washington has been drawing down its military presence amid attacks on facilities it uses by Iran-aligned armed groups and has said that from next year the role of US troops will be limited to training and advising their Iraqi counterparts.

Last Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron visited Iraqi Kurdistan and expressed concern about a Daesh “resurgence” in both Iraq and Syria.

He also said that French soldiers deployed in Iraq as part of the international coalition will remain in the country “no matter what choices the Americans make”.

KHARTOUM — Sudanese authorities have seized a shipment of weapons at Khartoum airport arriving from neighbouring Ethiopia, state media said on Sunday.

The shipment, which was confiscated late Saturday, arrived on an Ethiopian Airlines passenger flight, prompting an immediate launch of investigations, the SUNA news agency reported.

Authorities were informed of "the arrival of a weapons shipment from Addis Ababa on an Ethiopian Airlines flight" into Sudan, SUNA said.

"It was immediately confiscated by customs authorities."

SUNA quoted officials as saying that the weapons had originally been sent from Russia to Ethiopia in May 2019 and were held by authorities there for two years.

"Without prior warning, authorities in Addis Ababa allowed for its shipping into Khartoum on a passenger flight," the report added.

The shipment of 72 boxes reportedly contained weapons and night-vision binoculars.

"There are suspicions that they were meant to be used in anti-state crime, to impede the democratic transition, and prevent transition to civilian rule," SUNA reported.

Sudan has been undergoing a rocky transition since the April 2019 ouster of Islamist president Omar Al Bashir following mass protests against his rule.

The country is currently led by a joint civilian-military ruling council.

The development comes at a time of souring relations between Khartoum and Addis Ababa over Ethiopian farmers’ use of a fertile border region claimed by Sudan.

The two countries have also been at odds over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), in a regional dispute that involves Egypt.

Addis Ababa broke ground on the project in 2011.

Late last month, Ethiopian officials said they had thwarted an attack on the GERD by armed groups “who have been trained and armed by Sudan”.

Sudan flatly denied the allegations, saying they were “baseless”.

Ethiopia has been grappling with a grinding conflict in its northern Tigray region since last November.

The fighting has sent tens of thousands of refugees into Sudan.

BAGHDAD — Iraq will allow only 40,000 foreigners, 30,000 from Iran, to attend the Arbaeen pilgrimage later this month in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala, authorities said on Sunday, due to the pandemic.

Arbaeen marks the end of the 40-day mourning period for the killing of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, by the forces of the caliph Yazid in 680AD.

The annual pilgrimage usually sees millions of worshippers, mostly Iraqis and Iranians, converge on the central city of Karbala on foot.

Some 14 million attended in 2019, according to official figures, a third of them foreigners who came mostly from Iran, the Gulf, Pakistan and Lebanon.

Last year, Baghdad limited the number of foreigners to 1,500 per country because of the risk of COVID-19 infection.

This year, “30,000 pilgrims from the Islamic republic of Iran”, Iraq’s Shiite-majority neighbour, will be allowed to attend, according to a decision by Iraq’s health and security committee.

There will be a quota of “10,000 pilgrims from Gulf countries, Arab countries and the rest of the world”, it added.

The committee, presided over by Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi, said foreign pilgrims would be allowed to arrive only by air.

Arbaeen is marked 40 days after the Shiite commemoration of Ashura.

Millions of pilgrims thronged Karbala last month for that event, ignoring COVID-19 fears.

Health authorities have expressed alarm at similar gatherings during the pandemic.

“We have warned the Iraqi health ministry against all types of religious tourism,” the World Health Organisation’s representative for Iraq Ahmed Zouiten told AFP, expressing fear that such gatherings could become super-spreader events.

Iraq, a country of around 40 million, has officially recorded almost two million COVID-19 cases and more than 21,000 deaths since the start of its outbreak.

Vaccination rates are low and measures such as social distancing and mask-wearing are widely ignored.

ALGIERS — The runner-up in Tunisia’s 2019 presidential election, Nabil Karoui, has been placed in pre-trial detention in neighbouring Algeria, accused of “entering the country illegally”, local media reported Sunday.

Karoui and his brother Ghazi, an MP, had faced a hearing before a magistrate in the north-eastern city of Constantine, the Ennahar newspaper wrote citing “judicial sources”.

Constantine prosecutors could not immediately be reached for comment.

In July, Karoui’s former opponent, President Kais Saied had suspended parliament and granted himself sweeping powers, hitting judges, MPs and businessmen with arrests and travel bans in a supposed anti-corruption purge.

Karoui was arrested in late August by Algerian border police, with Tunisia releasing a warrant for his arrest the day after.

Algeria and Tunisia are bound by an agreement stipulating the extradition by either country “of any person prosecuted or convicted” in the other.

Any extradition request must be “accompanied by an official document from the authorities”.

Karoui founded the private Tunisian channel Nessma TV, which is partly owned by Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

He has been under investigation since 2017 in a money laundering and tax evasion case.

He was arrested in 2019 and spent more than a month in prison at the height of the presidential election campaign.

TEHRAN — Iran urged the United States Saturday to stop its addiction to sanctions against the Islamic republic and accused President Joe Biden of following the same "dead end" policies as Donald Trump.

Foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh made his remarks a day after the US Treasury announced financial sanctions against four Iranians accused of planning the kidnapping in the US of an American journalist of Iranian descent.

"Washington must understand that it has no other choice but to abandon its addiction to sanctions and show respect, both in its statements and in its behaviour, towards Iran," Khatibzadeh said in a press release.

On Friday, the Treasury announced sanctions against "four Iranian intelligence operatives" involved in a campaign against Iranian dissidents abroad.

According to a US federal indictment in mid-July, the intelligence officers tried in 2018 to force Masih Alinejad's Iran-based relatives to lure her to a third country to be arrested and taken to Iran to be jailed.

When that failed, they allegedly hired US private investigators to monitor her over the past two years.

Khatibzadeh in July called the American charges “baseless and absurd”, referring to them as “Hollywood scenarios”.

Under Trump’s presidency, Washington unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and six major powers.

The multilateral deal offered Iran relief from sanctions in return for curbs on its nuclear programme.

It was torpedoed by Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from it in 2018.

Biden has said he wants to reintegrate Washington into the pact, but talks in Vienna that began in April have stalled since the ultra-conservative Ebrahim Raisi won Iran’s presidential election in June.

At the end of August, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused Biden’s administration of making the same demands as his predecessor in talks to revive the accord.

And on Tuesday, Iran’s new Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian suggested that the Vienna talks would not resume for two or three months.

Tehran is demanding the lifting of all sanctions imposed or reimposed on it by the US since 2017.

RABAT — More than 200 Moroccan and Algerian civil society figures on Saturday appealed for a “return to reason” following the decision of Algiers to cut diplomatic ties with Rabat.

Intellectuals, academics and other civil society actors, most of them Moroccan, signed a petition rejecting the “current situation which could lead to an unnatural confrontation... contrary to the interests of the two peoples and the region”.

The signatories called for a “return to reason” and “moves against escalation and hatred”.

Late last month, Algeria announced it was cutting diplomatic ties with Morocco, accusing it of “hostile actions” after months of high tensions between the North African rivals.

Morocco has called the severing of ties “completely unjustified” and said the decision was based on “false, even absurd pretexts”.

Relations between Algiers and Rabat have been fraught in past decades, especially over the flashpoint issue of the disputed Western Sahara, where Algeria backs the pro-independence Polisario Front.

In July, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI deplored the tensions and invited Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune “to make wisdom prevail” and “work in unison for the development of relations” between the neighbouring countries.

Rabat had severed diplomatic relations with Algeria in 1976 for several years after Algiers recognised the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, proclaimed by the Polisario.

The border between the two countries has been closed since 1994.

TRIPOLI — Two Libyan army units used heavy artillery in an exchange of fire overnight centring on a barracks in a densely populated area of southeast Tripoli, the military command said.

An attack early Friday saw members of a security group set up by ex-premier Fayez Al Sarraj target Al Tekbali barracks, the headquarters of 444 Brigade, Tripoli military commander Abdelbaset Marouane said on Facebook.

The elite 444 Brigade posted on Facebook that one of its officers, Second lt. Omrane Belgassem, was killed.

Brig. Gen. Marouane said in a video message that the security group attacked the barracks after midnight on his orders after 444 Brigade “ceased to obey military orders”.

The noise of heavy artillery in action was heard throughout the city from just after midnight and lasted until early on Friday morning.

Columns of smoke still hung in the air near the barracks after the fighting stopped, a resident of the heavily populated Salaheddine area in the suburbs told AFP by phone.

Presidential council chief and supreme army commander Mohamed Al Manfi ordered “all forces which have clashed or are still clashing in Tripoli to immediately cease fire and return to their barracks without delay”.

Also using Facebook, he threatened those who fail to obey his orders with criminal prosecution and warned: “Further such incidents will no longer be tolerated.”

The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) in a statement expressed its “grave concern” about the clashes and urged all parties to “exercise maximum restraint”.

UNSMIL also called on “all relevant authorities to assume their responsibilities in ensuring the protection of civilians and in exercising control over their respective units”.

“UNSMIL reminds all parties of their obligations under international humanitarian law to ensure the protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure,” the statement said.

The incident was a reminder of the precarious security situation in the North African country nearly a decade after the overthrow of dictator Muammar Qadhafi.

Repeated outbreaks of fighting ended with a UN-backed ceasefire last year.

That paved the way for peace talks and the formation of a transitional government this March, ahead of elections set for December.

But preparations are marred by disputes between key stakeholders over when to hold elections, what elections to hold, and on what constitutional grounds.