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Tag: kuwait
U.S. Sending More Consular Officers To Assist Afghanistan Evacuation

U.S. Sending More Consular Officers To Assist Afghanistan Evacuation

By Humeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The State Department said on Thursday it was sending more consular officers to Kabul and other locations, including Qatar and Kuwait, to help with the evacuation effort from Afghanistan after the Taliban seized Kabul on Sunday.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said 6,000 fully processed people were currently at the airport in Kabul and would soon be boarding planes. He added Washington would nearly double the number of consular officers in Kabul, without disclosing how many are deployed.

A source said that White House officials told a congressional briefing on Thursday morning that the United States had evacuated 6,741 individuals, including 1,792 American citizens and legal permanent residents, from Kabul.

The source, who listened to the teleconference, quoted the briefers as saying that the "biggest bottleneck" was getting evacuees through crowds mobbing Kabul airport gates.

"The department is sending consular staffing teams to Qatar and Kuwait to assist with the transit effort and we're preparing teams to surge to other processing locations as well," Price said.

Once the consular capacity in Kabul is doubled, he said the State Department believes it will have the number of officers needed to process individuals and fill flights. The Pentagon has said its aim is to evacuate between 5,000 and 9,000 people a day.

The United States "significantly expanded" overnight the number of American citizens, locally employed staff, Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants and other vulnerable Afghans eligible for departure, Price said, adding that about 20 flights would leave Kabul on Thursday night.

Thousands of people have desperately tried to get past Taliban roadblocks and U.S. troops to reach the airport. On Thursday, the Taliban urged crowds of Afghans waiting outside it to return home, saying they did not want to hurt anyone, a day after firing at protesters and killing three.

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis; Additional reporting by Jonathan Landay; Writing by Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Dozens Killed In Terrorist Attacks On Three Continents

Dozens Killed In Terrorist Attacks On Three Continents

With gunfire and explosions, suspected Islamic terrorists attacked sites in France, Tunisia, and Kuwait on Friday, killing dozens and leaving questions about whether the assaults were coordinated.

In France, two men who reportedly attacked a U.S.-owned gas factory, and killed one person, “whose severed head was found pinned to the factory’s entrance,” and injured two others, have been arrested. One suspect is allegedly linked to the orthodox Muslim Salafist movement.

One suspect drove a vehicle through the factory gates, crashing into gas canisters and causing an explosion, according to The Associated Press. A white flag and a black flag, both with Arabic inscriptions, were found at the scene.

In Tunisia, at a beach resort crowded with tourists, two gunmen killed 28 people around noon local time. Tunisian security forces killed one suspect and the other reportedly fled the scene. Thirty-six people were wounded in the attack. Police are pursuing the second gunman.

And in Kuwait, 25 people were killed in a suicide bombing attack at a Shiite mosque packed with people during Friday prayers. Militants affiliated with the so-called Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, which wounded 202 people, according to the BBC.

On Friday, U.S. intelligence officials were working to evaluate whether the killings in the three countries were connected, and if so, “whether the Islamic State had actively directed, coordinated or inspired them,” according to The New York Times.

“While the Kuwait bomb targeted members of the Shia sect, who are seen as heretics by the hardline Sunnis in ISIS and al Qaeda,” The Daily Beast reports, “the attacks in Tunisia and France were designed to terrify the West.”

Photo: Security forces stand guard outside the Imam Sadiq Mosque, a Shiite Muslim mosque, following a suicide bomb blast on June 26, 2015, in the capital of Kuwait. (Noufal Moodadi/Xinhua/Zuma Press/TNS)

New Arab Coalition Coming Together To Intervene In Libya

New Arab Coalition Coming Together To Intervene In Libya

By Tom Hussain,McClatchy Foreign Staff (TNS)

ISLAMABAD — Three years after the toppling of Moammar Gadhafi, the military chiefs of seven Arab countries are expected to meet in Cairo next week to discuss whether they should intervene in Libya, which is split between two governments, controlled by rival militias, and home now to a blossoming Islamic State affiliate.

Analysts of Middle Eastern affairs said the meeting is likely to increase outside support for Khalifa Hifter, a former Gadhafi general who defected to the United States in the late 1980s and returned to Libya during the 2011 uprising that ended in Gadhafi’s death.

Hifter, who had expected to lead the creation of a new Libyan army after Gadhafi’s fall but was sidelined by the country’s political rivalries, launched an assault last year on what he said were radical Islamist groups that had taken control of much of Libya in the past three years. Libya is now divided between two main factions, one known as Operation Dignity, which is allied with Hifter and based in Tobruk, near the Egyptian border, and another called Libya Dawn, which is based in Tripoli and is backed by several militia factions.

The civil war anarchy has left room for the Islamic State to organize. It now controls Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte. In January, it posted a video of what it said were 21 Egyptian workers being beheaded on a Libyan beach.

Ayham Kamel, director for the Middle East and North Africa for the Eurasia Group, a New York-based political risk advisory firm, said he doubted that the seven countries meeting May 18 in Cairo will agree to send troops to Libya. But increased military support for Hifter’s forces could provide an important edge in what has been the long-running stalemate between the Tobruk government, which the United States and the European Union recognize, and the Tripoli one, which has won a ruling in favor of its legitimacy from the country’s supreme court.

Kamel said supporting Hifter would be the easiest route for the Arab countries, rather than becoming involved in U.N.-sponsored peace talks that have made little progress in months of trying.

Next week’s gathering in Cairo was first reported by the U.S. publication Defense News, which said that participants include seven of the 10 Arab countries that have intervened in Yemen.

But the Libya meeting is a separate initiative pushed by Egypt, which borders Libya on the east. Saudi Arabia is the prime mover behind the Yemen campaign.
The countries sending representatives to Egypt include Jordan and Sudan and four members of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. All seven nations are members of the Saudi-led coalition currently opposing Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Notably, the gathering in Egypt excludes another Gulf Cooperation Council member, Qatar, which supports the Libyan Dawn administration in Tripoli.

Theodore Karasik, a Saudi-focused analyst based in the United Arab Emirates, called the Cairo meeting part of a “grand experiment in Arab-led coalitions” that “will illustrate how different theaters of the Middle East and North Africa are viewed in functional strategic and tactical direction.”

He noted that the one item of interest to analysts as the Yemen and Libya situations play out is “who is politically willing or excluded from operations.”

The May 18 meeting would follow up discussions last month by Arab League military chiefs in Cairo, which were attended by the Tobruk government’s armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Abdul Razzaq Nadhuri.

Since then, the UAE has delivered five Russian-built Mi-35 Hind helicopters. Additional Russian anti-tank and armor-piercing weapons and munitions will soon be delivered, Defense News reported.

Parallel to the military initiative, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry said last week it would host a forum in late May of Libyan tribal leaders supportive of the Tobruk-based government to “unify the Libyan people” and “to give a necessary boost toward political dialogue.”

(Hussain is a McClatchy special correspondent.) (c)2015 McClatchy Washington Bureau, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

AFP Photo/Abdullah Doma