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Israel blames Hamas militants for three missing teens

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday defended his security cooperation with Israel against widespread criticism and said his forces are helping in the search for three Israeli teens missing in the West Bank.

Security coordination with Israel serves Palestinian interests because it helps prevent a new uprising, which would "destroy us," Abbas said.

Abbas' blunt comments — delivered at a high-profile gathering of Muslim and Arab officials in Saudi Arabia — were remarkable, considering how unpopular the security coordination with Israelis is among the Palestinians, particularly at a time of a new Israeli crackdown in the West Bank in the wake of the teens' disappearance.

The teens disappeared from a West Bank hitchhiking junction almost a week ago. Israel has blamed the Islamic militant Hamas group for their disappearance, without providing proof.

In response to the disappearance, Israel launched the most significant military ground operation in five years and arrested more than 200 Palestinians, most of them Hamas activists and political leaders, in the aftermath.

Abbas told the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in televised comments Wednesday that he did not know who abducted the teens.

"We are still looking and searching to find out who carried out such an act," he said, adding that those involved "want to destroy us."

He did not elaborate, but appeared to be referring to his government as the target of destabilization attempts.

Palestinian leader blasts abduction of teens

President Mahmoud Abbas takes heat as his forces cooperate in the search for missing Israelis.
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People gather to look at the site of a car bombing in Benghazi, Libya, Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2013. A …

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya on Wednesday condemned U.S. special forces' arrest of a man on its soil suspected of masterminding a deadly Islamist militant attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, describing the detention as a violation of Libyan sovereignty.

In the first official reaction from Tripoli, Justice Minister Saleh al-Marghani said the suspect, Ahmed Abu Khatallah, should be returned to Libya and tried there.

"We had no prior notification. We did not to expect the U.S. to upset our political scene," Marghani told a news conference.

He said Khatalah had been wanted by Libyan authorities for questioning but a lack of security had prevented this.

Said al Saoud, spokesman for the foreign ministry, said:"This attack on Libya sovereignty happened at a time when Benghazi is suffering from many problems."

U.S. President Barack Obama said he authorised the operation in Libya on Sunday in which U.S. commandos snatched Khatallah on Benghazi's outskirts, and that he was being transported to the United States for prosecution.

The September 2012 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, since closed, killed four Americans including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

The North African oil producer is struggling with chronic lawlessness, with the government and parliament in Tripoli unable to control militias, tribes and Islamists who helped oust Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 but are now defying state authority.

(Reporting by Ulf Laessing and Ahmed Elumami; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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A former CIA operative described Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, as the “most powerful operative in the Middle East today.”

Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Qods Force, the foreign arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, is leading the Iraqi reaction to a radical Islamist group's takeover of much of the country, according to a senior Iraqi official quoted by The Guardian.

"Who do you think is running the war? Those three senior generals who ran away?" the unnamed official asked The Guardian's Martin Chulov. "Qassem Suleimani is in charge. And reporting directly to him are the militias, led by Asa'ib ahl al-Haq."

Asaib ahl al-Haq (AAH) organization is one of several Iraqi groups that serve as instruments of Iranian policy through the region, as University of Maryland researcher Philip Smyth explained in a policy brief for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy earlier this week.

Specifically, it is a Shiite militia and Iranian proxy in Iraq that deployed fighters to the Syrian theater to support the regime of Bashar Assad. But Smyth writes that AAH fighters have now been recalled to Iraq to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the al-Qaeda castoff that took over vast stretches of the country's oil-producing north last week.

"Many of the Shiite Islamist forces fighting in Iraq operate as part of Iranian proxy groups that have been attached to [Iraqi Security Forces] and Iraqi army units," Smyth wrote. "Some even operate as a direct part of these official Iraqi military forces."

So it would make sense if Suleimani were calling the shots inside of Iraq itself. He's responsible for arming and organizing sectarian militias that are semi-integrated into the official security apparatus in parts of the country. And he was in Baghdad meeting with Shiite parliamentarians not long before things escalated.

It's a place he knows well. In his profile of Suleimani for The New Yorker last year, Dexter Filkins recounted how the Qods Force chief used his connections in Iraq to play the Americans, Sunni terrorists, and Shiite proxy militias off of one other during the U.S.'s military presence in the country. He even visited Baghdad's Green Zone:

Throughout the war, [Suleimani] summoned Iraqi leaders to Tehran to broker deals, usually intended to maximize Shiite power. At least once, he even traveled into the heart of American power in Baghdad. “Suleimani came into the Green Zone to meet the Iraqis,” the Iraqi politician told me. “I think the Americans wanted to arrest him, but they figured they couldn’t.”

The pro-Iranian Iraqi government that ensured the U.S. military would leave the country in 2011 is essentially Suleimani's creation as well.

Suleimani is deeply invested in keeping together the network of influence and control that he spent much of the past decade building in Iraq. Still a major open question: whether he'll have the U.S. on his side in his efforts.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney stood by their harsh criticism of President Obama during an interview Wednesday night in which they called him “dangerous.”

The pair also announced the formation of a new anti-Obama political group, The Alliance for a Strong America.

“Uh, yes. I think there’s no question,” Liz Cheney told Fox News host Megyn Kelly during a joint appearance on The Kelly File. “He’s made it clear that his desire is to weaken the nation. There’s no question that he’s a dangerous president.”

The appearance came a day after the Cheneys authored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which they accused the president of weakening American interests and of having a failed approach to dealing with the escalating threats to Iraqi security.

The pair also posted a new video online to accompany the announcement of The Alliance for a Strong America, a 501(c)(4) organization, which lists its stated goal as “reversing President Obama’s policies.”

“The policies of the last six years have left America diminished and weakened,” Mr. Cheney says in the video. “Our enemies no longer fear us. Our allies no longer trust us.”

Kelly pressed the former vice president on critics who argue that he deserves more blame for the current situation in Iraq and should not be offering his dissenting opinions on the administration’s foreign policy.

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Iraq Fights Militants Around Oil Refinery

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BAGHDAD (AP) — Sunni militants hung their black banners on watch towers at Iraq's largest oil refinery, a witness said Thursday, suggesting the vital facility had fallen to the insurgents who have seized vast territories across the country's north. A top Iraqi security official, however, said the government still held the facility.

The fighting at Beiji, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Baghdad, comes as Iraq has asked the U.S. for airstrikes targeting the militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. While U.S. President Barack Obama has not fully ruled out the possibility of launching airstrikes, such action is not imminent in part because intelligence agencies have been unable to identify clear targets on the ground, officials said.

The Iraqi witness, who drove past the sprawling Beiji refinery, said militants also manned checkpoints around it. He said he saw a huge fire in one of its tankers. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals.

The Iraqi security official said the government force protecting the refinery was still inside Thursday and that they were in regular contact with Baghdad. The refinery's workers had been evacuated to nearby villages, he said.

Helicopter gunships flew over the facility to stop further militant advances, the official said. The insurgents took over a building just outside the refinery and were using it to fire at the government force, he said.

The army officer in charge of protecting the refinery, Col. Ali al-Qureishi, told state-run Iraqiya television by telephone that the facility remained under his control. He said nearly 100 militants had been killed as his force repelled wave after wave of attacks since Tuesday. The country's chief military spokesman, Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, echoed al-Qureishi's assertion in comments made at a news conference Thursday.

The Beiji refinery accounts for just over a quarter of the country's entire refining capacity — all of which goes toward domestic consumption for things like gasoline, cooking oil and fuel for power stations. Any lengthy outage at Beiji risks long lines at the gas pump and electricity shortages, adding to the chaos already facing Iraq. It produces around 300,000 barrels per day.

Gasoline produced at the refinery largely goes to northern Iraq and its closure has generated a shortage in the region.

The assault on the refinery also has affected global gasoline prices, as the U.S. national average price reached $3.67 per gallon, the highest price for this time of year since 2008, the year gasoline hit its all-time high in America. The price of benchmark crude for July delivery rose 57 cents Thursday to $106.54 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

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In this Tuesday, June 17, 2014 image taken from video uploaded to a militant social media account, w …

Amid the offensive, Iraq formally asked the U.S. to launch airstrikes against positions of the Islamic State, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the U.S. had received a request for air power to stop the militants, but highlighted the uncertain political situation in Iraq.

"The entire enterprise is at risk as long as this political situation is in flux," told a Senate panel Wednesday. He added that some Iraqi security forces had backed down when confronted by the militants because they had "simply lost faith" in the central government in Baghdad.

The campaign by the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic State militants has raised the specter of the sectarian warfare that nearly tore the country apart in 2006 and 2007, with the popular mobilization to fight the insurgents taking an increasingly sectarian slant, particularly after Iraq's top Shiite cleric made a call to arms on Friday.

The Islamic State has vowed to march to Baghdad and the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, home to some of the sect's most revered shrines, in the worst threat to Iraq's stability since U.S. troops left in late 2011. The militants also have tried to capture Samarra, a city north of Baghdad and home to another major Shiite shrine.

In an incident that harkens back to the dark days of Iraq's sectarian bloodletting of 2006 and 2007, the bullet-riddled bodies of four men, presumably Sunnis, were discovered in the Shiite Baghdad district of Abu Dashir on Thursday, police and morgue officials said. The bodies were handcuffed and had gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

Also in Baghdad, a roadside bomb hit a police patrol on a highway in the east of the city, killing two police officers and wounding two, police and hospital officials said. Earlier Thursday, a car bomb exploded inside a parking lot in Baghdad's southeastern Shiite neighborhood of New Baghdad, killing three people and wounding seven, the officials said.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the journalists.

The U.S. has pushed Iraq to present its people a clear coalition to fight the militants, with Vice President Joe Biden offering praise Wednesday for Iraq's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders as a means to tamper the sectarian anger roiling the country. It's unclear whether that will work, as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government has faced widespread dissatisfaction from the nation's sizable Sunni and Kurdish minorities.

Al-Maliki, a Shiite, has rejected charges of bias and instead said the crisis has led Iraqis to rediscover "national unity."

Still, al-Maliki's outreach remain largely rhetoric, with no concrete action to bridge differences with Sunnis and Kurds, who have been at loggerheads with the prime minister over their right to independently export oil from their self-rule region in the north and over territorial claims.

The United Arab Emirates, a key Western ally and important regional trading partner for Iraq, temporarily withdrew its ambassador from Iraq "for consultations." The Gulf federation's foreign ministry cited deep concern at the Iraqi government's "exclusionary and sectarian policies," according to a statement carried Wednesday night by the state news agency WAM.

The statement is likely to further stoke tensions between al-Maliki's ****e-led government and Sunni-ruled Gulf Arab states, particularly Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia. The Baghdad government has this week accused Riyadh of meddling in its internal affairs, responding to a Saudi Cabinet statement Monday that blamed "exclusion and marginalization" policies in Iraq for the ongoing crisis. Iraq also accuses Qatar of interfering in its affairs.

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Associated Press writers Adam Schreck in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Jonathan Fahey in New York contributed to this report.