Israel condemns Jerusalem church vandalism

Associated Press/Nasser Ishtayeh - A Palestinian elderly woman collects olives from broken olive tree branches in the village of Qusra, northern West Bank, Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2012. Palestinian farmers say Jewish settlers from the nearby settlement of Eli cut more than 70 olive trees overnight. Olives are the backbone of Palestinian agriculture. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh)

A Palestinian farmer collects olives from broken olive tree branches in the village of Qusra, northern West Bank, Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2012. Palestinian farmers say Jewish settlers from the nearby settlement of Eli cut more than 70 olive trees overnight. Olives are the backbone of Palestinian agriculture. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh)

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's foreign minister has condemned the vandalism of the Romanian church in Jerusalem, the latest in a string of attacks on Christian sites in the Holy Land.

Avigdor Lieberman expressed sorrow in a meeting withRomania's visiting foreign minister Titus Corlatean on Tuesday, a day after vandals damaged the church door and tossed garbage at its entrance.

A tiny fringe group of pro-settler extremists are suspected in the vandalism. They have conducted similar attacks on churches, mosques and Israeli army property.

They say the acts called "price tags" are retaliation to what they consider the government's pro-Palestinian policies.

Vandalism also occurred in the West Bank. Residents of the Jewish settlement of Eli said 15 olive trees were destroyed. Palestinians in nearby Qusra said 70 of their trees were damaged

Al-Qaida making comeback in Iraq, officials say

FILE - In this photo file taken on Friday, July 20, 2012, blindfolded and handcuffed suspected al-Qaida members are guarded by Iraqi army soldiers in an Iraqi army base in Hillah, about 60 miles (95 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq. Al-Qaida is slowly resurging in Iraq, and has set up training camps for insurgents in the nation's western deserts as the extremist group seizes on regional instability and government security failures to regain strength, officials say. (AP Photo/Alaa al-Marjani File)

FILE - In this file photo taken on Friday, July 20, 2012, blindfolded and handcuffed suspected al-Qaida members are led away to detention centers in an Iraqi army base in Hillah, about 60 miles (95 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq. Al-Qaida is slowly resurging in Iraq, and has set up training camps for insurgents in the nation's western deserts as the extremist group seizes on regional instability and government security failures to regain strength, officials say. (AP Photo/Alaa al-Marjani File)

BAGHDAD (AP) — Al-Qaida is rebuilding in Iraq and has set up training camps for insurgents in the nation's western deserts as the extremist group seizes on regional instability and government security failures to regain strength, officials say.

Iraq has seen a jump in al-Qaida attacks over the last 10 weeks, and officials believe most of the fighters are former prisoners who have either escaped from jail or were released by Iraqi authorities for lack of evidence after the U.S.military withdrawal last December. Many are said to be Saudi or from Sunni-dominated Gulf states.

During the war and its aftermath, U.S. forces, joined by allied Sunni groups and later by Iraqi counterterror forces, managed to beat back al-Qaida's Iraqi branch.

But now, Iraqi and U.S. officials say, the insurgent group has more than doubled in numbers from a year ago — from about 1,000 to 2,500 fighters. And it is carrying out an average of 140 attacks each week across Iraq, up from 75 attacks each week earlier this year, according to Pentagon data.

"AQI is coming back," U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, declared in an interview last month while visiting Baghdad.

The new growth of al-Qaida in Iraq, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq, is not entirely unexpected. Last November, the top U.S. military official in Iraq, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, predicted "turbulence" ahead for Iraq's security forces. But he doubted Iraq would return to the days of widespread fighting between Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents, including al-Qaida, that brought the Islamic country to the brink of civil war.

While there's no sign of Iraq headed back toward sectarian warfare — mostly because Shiite militias are not retaliating to their deadly attacks — al-Qaida's revival is terrifying to ordinary Iraqis.

Generally, the militant group does not does not launch attacks or otherwise operate beyond Iraq's borders. For years, it has targeted Shiite pilgrims, security forces, officials in the Shiite-led government and — until it left — the U.S. military. On Tuesday, a series of bombings and drive-by shootings killed six people, including three soldiers and a judge, inBaghdad and the former al-Qaida strongholds of Mosul and Tal Afar in northern Iraq.

Each round of bombings and shootings the terror group unleashes across the country, sometimes killing dozens on a single day, fuels simmering public resentment toward the government, which has unable to curb the violence. And the rise of Sunni extremists who aim to overthrow a Shiite-linked government in neighboring Syria has brought a new level of anxiety to Iraqis who fear the same thing could happen in Baghdad.

"Nobody here believes the government's claims that al-Qaida is weak and living its last days in Iraq," said Fuad Ali, 41, a Shiite who works for the government.

"Al-Qaida is much stronger than what the Iraqi officials are imagining," Ali said. "The terrorist group is able to launch big attacks and free its members from Iraqi prisons, and this indicates that al-Qaida is stronger than our security forces. The government has failed to stop the increasing number of victims who were killed since the start of this year."

In the vast desert of western Iraq near the Syrian border, security forces have discovered the remnants of recent insurgent training camps, said Lt. Gen. Ali Ghaidan, commander of the army's ground forces. An army raid last month on Iraq's sprawling al-Jazeera region, which spans three provinces, found a 10-tent campsite littered with thousands of bullet shell casings, Ghaidan told The Associated Press in an interview.

"This indicates that this place has been used as a shooting range to train terrorists," said Ghaidan, one of the highest ranking officials in the Iraqi army.

Two DVDs found in the al-Jazeera raid show mounted anti-aircraft machine guns. Forty gunmen shout "God is great" at a shooting range that a subtitle locates in Iraq's western Anbar province. Separate footage shows pickup trucks with Anbar license plates. The AP obtained copies of two DVDs, which Iraqi officials believe were filmed in the first three months of this year.

"Al-Qaida leaders decided that al-Jazeera is the best area to train their fighters because it is very hard for security forces to reach it," said Shiite lawmaker Hakim al-Zamili, who sits on parliament's security and defense committee and has been briefed on the camps.

Intelligence indicates as many as 2,500 al-Qaida fighters are now living in five training camps in the al-Jazeera area, according to two other senior Iraqi security officials. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information, estimated that only 700 al-Qaida fighters were in Iraq when U.S. troops withdrew. Six months earlier, in June 2011, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the U.S. Senate that 1,000 al-Qaida remained in Iraq.

Earlier this summer, al-Qaida in Iraq launched a campaign dubbed "Breaking the Walls," which aimed at retaking strongholds from which it was driven by the American military. Sabah al-Nuaman, spokesman for the government's counterterror services, acknowledged that Iraqi forces have struggled to contain al-Qaida since the U.S. military's departure.

Iraqi and U.S. officials agree that Iraqi forces have improved their ability to gain terrorism intelligence from informants and prisoners. But they still struggle to intercept technical communications like al-Qaida's cell phone calls, radio signals and Internet messages — one of the methods used by the U.S. military.

"The Iraqi efforts to combat terrorists groups have been negatively affected by the U.S. pullout, but we are trying our best to compensate and develop our own capabilities," al-Nuaman said.

The U.S. withdrew its military as required under a 2008 security agreement negotiated during the White House administration of then-President George W. Bush.

President Barack Obama considered leaving several thousand troops in Iraq past the 2011 withdrawal deadline. But negotiations disintegrated last fall when Baghdad refused to extend legal immunities to any U.S. combat troops remaining in Iraq, meaning they could have been prosecuted for defending themselves if under attack.

Republicans blame Obama, a Democrat, for failing to push Baghdad harder or to find a compromise that would have let U.S. troops remain in Iraq as a safeguard against al-Qaida and deteriorating Mideast stability. On Monday, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney accused the White House of wasting gains the U.S. made in Iraq.

There now are about 260 active-duty troops and civilian Defense Department employees who have diplomatic immunity to remain in Iraq to train security forces on military equipment that Baghdad bought from the United States. Among them are 28 U.S. special operations forces who have been training Iraqi counterterror soldiers in the capital. But the money for their posts runs out at the end of the year unless Congress agrees to restore their funding.

The two senior Iraqi security officials said al-Qaida fighters have been easily moving between Iraq and Syria in recent months to help Sunni rebels overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose Alawite religious sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam. And in Anbar province, some fighters linked to al-Qaida have regrouped under the name of the Free Iraqi Army — an attempt to align themselves with the rebels' Free Syrian Army.

Anbar tribal sheikh Hamid al-Hayes, a retired security official who helped U.S. forces fight al-Qaida in Anbar at the height of the insurgency, said the Free Iraqi Army is recruiting fighters and planning to overthrow the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. "They want to mimic the Syrian revolution," he said. Al-Nauman, the counterterror spokesman, denied that and said the group is merely a subset of al-Qaida fighters who adopted the new name to "attract the support of the Iraqi Sunnis by making use of the strife going on in Syria."

Al-Qaida in Iraq for years had a hot-and-cold relationship with the global terror network's leadership. It was the Syrian civil war, now in its 19th month, that prompted global al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri last February to embrace the Iraqi insurgency in hopes of recruiting fighters and support against Assad.

Before that, in 2007, Zawahri and Osama bin Laden distanced themselves from the Iraqi militants for killing civilians instead of only targeting the U.S. military and other Western targets. Now, there's little doubt that Zawahri's appeal to al-Qaida in Iraq bolstered its legitimacy and injected confidence into the insurgency just as the U.S. troops left.

___

Associated Press Writer Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad contributed to this report. Follow Lara Jakes on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP

NATO backs Turkey in standoff with Syria

In this Sunday October 7, 2012 citizen journalism image provided by Edlib News Network, ENN, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, Free Syrian Army fighters check a tank that was captured from the Syrian Army in Khirbet al-Jouz, in the northern province of Idlib, Syria. The Turkish state-run Anadolu news agency said Sunday that the rebels had regained full control of Khirbet al-Jouz. (AP Photo/Edlib News Network ENN)

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the legislators of his ruling party in parliament in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2012. Erdogan said Turkey was prepared to counter any threats from Syria. “Every kind of threat to the Turkish territory and the Turkish people will find us standing against it,” Erdogan said.(AP Photo)

BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO is ready to defend Turkey, the alliance's top official said Tuesday, in a direct warning toSyria after a week of cross-border artillery and mortar exchanges dramatically escalated tensions between the two countries.

Ankara has sent additional fighter jets to reinforce an air base close to the frontier with Syria where shells killed five Turkish civilians last week, sparking fears of a wider regional crisis. Syria has defended its shelling of neighboring Turkey as an accidental outcome of its 18-month-old civil war.

The comments by NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen were the strongest show of support to Turkey since the firing began Wednesday — though the solidarity is largely symbolic.

NATO member Turkey has sought backing in case it is attacked, but despite publicly supporting Syria's rebels Ankara isn't seeking direct intervention. And the alliance is thought to be reluctant to get involved militarily at a time when its main priority is the war in Afghanistan.

"Obviously Turkey can rely on NATO solidarity," Fogh Rasmussen said ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels. "We have all necessary plans in place to protect and defend Turkey if necessary."

When pressed on what kind of trouble on the border would trigger those plans, NATO's chief said he could not discuss contingency plans. "We hope it won't be necessary to activate such plans, we do hope to see a political solution to the conflict in Syria," he said.

NATO officials said the plans have been around for decades and were not drawn up in response to the Syria crisis. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press.

In an address to lawmakers from the ruling party, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated that Ankara will continue retaliating for attacks from Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

"Every kind of threat to the Turkish territory and the Turkish people will find us standing against it," Erdogan said. "Soldiers loyal to Assad fired shells at us, we immediately reacted and responded with double force. We shall never stop responding."

At least 25 additional F-16 fighter jets were deployed at Turkey's Diyarbakir air base in the southeast late Monday, Turkey's Dogan news agency said, quoting unidentified military sources. The military's chief of staff inspected troops along the border with Syria on Tuesday.

But despite the flare-up in recent days, there appears little appetite in Turkey for a war with Syria, said Volker Perthes, the director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Only a sudden change in the situation on the ground could draw Turkey into what has so far remained a domestic conflict, said Perthes.

"If the humanitarian situation becomes even worse, where you have more massacres, where at some point even the Russians wouldn't block a U.N. Security Council resolution ... then who could do the job of protecting civilians? It would be Turkey in the first place," he said.

Joshua Alvarez, managing editor of the Istanbul-based Kalem Journal, said it was very unlikely that Turkey would call on NATO and force a decision on a commitment unless hostilities with Syria sharply increase.

"Turkey will continue to seek as many reassurances as it can, but Turkey will not put its foot down and demand a commitment from NATO," said Alvarez. "Turkey is aware of NATO's extreme reluctance about repeating a 'Libya-styled' campaign in Syria, a much more complex and difficult scenario. Turkey wants no part of such a campaign, either. "

NATO established a no-fly zone to protect civilians during last year's Libyan revolt against longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Western diplomats said enforcing the zone required taking out Libya's air defenses and attacking tanks and military vehicles that posed threats to civilians.

Ankara's reluctance to go it alone in Syria was voiced Tuesday by Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan.

"Whichever step we take, it will be taken in consultation with our friends and our allies and in agreement with them," he said. "This is not a Syrian-Turkish bilateral issue, it is a humanitarian issue and we think that at the same time it's an issue that should be viewed as a regional security issue. The Arab League is involved, the Islamic Conference Organization is involved and NATO is a part of it."

Syrian opposition activists estimate more than 32,000 people have been killed since March 2011 when the uprising against Assad's regime began. Initially, regime opponents launched a wave of peaceful protests that were met by repeated attacks by security forces, and the conflict has gradually turned into bloody civil war that has motivated tens of thousands of civilians to flee Syria. The fighting has devastated entire neighborhoods in Syria's main cities, including Aleppo in the north. Syria's government has always blamed the uprising on what it calls foreign terrorists.

A Sunni extremist group called Jabhat al-Nusra claimed responsibility for an attack on Syrian air force intelligence compound in the Damascus suburb of Harasta Monday evening. A statement on a militant website by the group's media arm, Al-Manara al-Bayda, said the bombing aimed "to avenge the killing of Muslims and those who suffered injustice."

The Syrian state-run news agency did not report the explosion and there were conflicting reports on how badly the compound was damaged. There were no official reports on casualties, but the pro-government Al-Ikhbariya channel said on Monday the blast was heard across Damascus.

Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency, reported that Syrian Nation Council leader Abdulbaset Sieda visited rebel-controlled areas in Syria on Tuesday.

It said he entered Syria from the Bab al-Hawa border crossing and "made observations in rural areas" of Idlib province before traveling to Aleppo's Etarib area where he met with commanders of the Free Syrian Army. If confirmed, the trip would be Sieda's first into Syria since he became the council's leader in June.

Anadolu quoted Sieda as saying: "We are here to see what the opposition in Syria and the opposition outside of Syria can do together to serve the Syrian people."

Sieda made the trip ahead of an Oct. 15-17 meeting of Syrian opposition groups in Qatar.

Meanwhile, two Syrian rebels told The Associated Press that seven military and intelligence officers belonging to Syria's ruling Alawite minority have defected to Jordan. The rebels said they helped the seven cross into Jordan on Monday, and that the highest-ranking figure among them was an army colonel.

Defections by Alawites, who make up the backbone of Assad's regime, are relatively uncommon. Almost all the defections have been from Syria's Sunni majority, who dominate the rebellion.

Three other Alawite intelligence officials came to Jordan three weeks ago, said the two rebels, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the Assad regime. Jordanian officials declined comment.

___

Jordans reported from Istanbul. AP writers Barbara Surk and Zeina Karam in Beirut, and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.

U.S. officer got no reply to requests for more security in Benghazi

People demonstrate during a rally to condemn the killers of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and the attack on the U.S. consulate, in Benghazi September 12, 2012. On the back of the burning of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the killing of staff connect to it, demonstrators on Wednesday gathered in Libya to condemn the killers and voice support for the U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three embassy staff were killed Wednesday in the attack on the Benghazi consulate and a safe house refuge, stormed by Islamist gunmen blaming America for a film they said insulted the Prophet Mohammad. REUTERS/Esam Al-Fetori (LIBYA - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. security officer twice asked his State Department superiors for more security agents for the American mission in Benghazi months before an attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, but he got no response.

The officer, Eric Nordstrom, who was based in Tripoli until about two months before the September attack, said a State Department official, Charlene Lamb, wanted to keep the number of U.S. security personnel in Benghazi "artificially low," according to a memo summarizing his comments to a congressional committee that was obtained by Reuters.

Nordstrom also argued for more U.S. security in Libya by citing a chronology of over 200 security incidents there from militia gunfights to bomb attacks between June 2011 and July 2012. Forty-eight of the incidents were in Benghazi.

A brief summary of Nordstrom's October 1 interview with the Republican-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was contained in a memo prepared by the committee's minority Democratic staff.

Nordstrom's actions and those of his superiors are likely to figure prominently in a House committee hearing on Wednesday that will be Congress' first public examination of what went wrong at the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi.

The State Department has defended security procedures in Libya and convened its own independent review board. A State Department official declined to comment on what Nordstrom told lawmakers in private, noting that Nordstrom would testify at the public hearing on Wednesday and "that's something that will come out in the hearing."

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the department's "posture is to be as cooperative as we possibly can" at the Wednesday hearing. In addition to Nordstrom, it will feature testimony by Lamb, Patrick Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management, and Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood, who headed a security support team at the Tripoli embassy.

Debate over whether the Americans were caught unprepared for the assault by militants on the diplomatic mission in Libya's relatively lawless eastern section has put the administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, on the defensive in the run-up to the November presidential election.

A leading Republican on the committee probing the attack, Representative Jason Chaffetz, told Reuters Tuesday he thought security decisions U.S. officials made for the Benghazi mission had turned out to be "deadly" ones.

The top U.S. intelligence authority, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, says the four Americans were killed in an organized terrorist assault, but the attackers have not been identified.

Separately, a U.S. official confirmed to Reuters that in addition to the four Americans who were killed in the Benghazi attacks on September 11, three more Americans were injured. Only one of those remains in hospital, the official said.

MEMO CALLED FOR FIVE US AGENTS AT BENGHAZI

Nordstrom, a State Department regional security officer, told lawmakers that Kennedy issued a "decision memo" in December 2011 requiring that the Benghazi post be manned with five diplomatic security agents, but that it usually had only three or four.

"He (Nordstrom) stated that he sent two cables to State Department headquarters in March and July 2012 requesting additional Diplomatic Security Agents for Benghazi, but that he received no responses," the memo said.

At some point, however, it appears Nordstrom learned the views of Lamb because he told the committee she "wanted to keep the number of U.S. security personnel in Benghazi artificially low," the memo said.

"He said that Deputy Assistant Secretary (for international programs) Lamb believed the Benghazi post did not need any Diplomatic Security Special Agents because there was a residential safe haven to fall back to in an emergency, but that she thought the best course of action was to assign three agents," the memo said.

It is unclear who made the final decision about how many agents were stationed in Benghazi.

"Sadly, that was a deadly decision," Representative Chaffetz said of leaving the mission with just a few security agents.

"Look at the result -- the first (U.S.) ambassador killed since the 1970s," Chaffetz said in an interview.

The Oversight and Government Reform committee has been investigating the handling of security at the U.S. mission in Benghazi before the attack. The committee's Republican Chairman Darrell Issa and Chaffetz, a subcommittee chairman, have led the probe.

Chaffetz said he suspects the devotion of so much effort and money to Iraq and Afghanistan has drained resources away from security for U.S. diplomatic efforts in other parts of the world. U.S. troops have withdrawn from Iraq but thousands of security contractors remain there, he said.

"We have 15,000 (security contractors) in Iraq, and we have a hard time having more than two dozen in Libya," Chaffetz said. "It doesn't seem to balance itself out right."

Democrats counter that Republicans have pushed for cuts in the funding of the very embassy security that they now are charging is insufficient.

The Democratic staff memo that outlined Nordstrom's pleas for more security also said that House Republicans voted to reduce embassy security funding by about half a billion dollars below the amount requested by the Obama administration since 2010. The Democratic-led Senate had been able to restore "a small portion" of these funds, the memo said.

Ambassador Chris Stevens died of smoke inhalation when he was trapped alone inside the burning building in Benghazi in an attack that began on the evening of September 11.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a conference in Florida on Tuesday that there was no advanced warning about the Libya attack.

He scoffed at media portrayals of him as "hapless and hopeless" for acknowledging on September 28 a shift in the intelligence assessment of the Benghazi assault, calling it a deliberate terrorist attack instead of an event stemming from spontaneous protest, as initially thought.

Clapper suggested it was unrealistic for anyone to expect the U.S. intelligence community to have a "a God's eye, God's ear certitude" right after an attack like the one in Libya.

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria and Phil Stewart; Editing by Warren Strobel and Cynthia Osterman)

Video: Ex-SEAL's family: Libya security questions change nothing

British police arrest 2 at Heathrow Airport in probe into terrorist activity in Syria

LONDON - British police say they have made two arrests at London's Heathrow Airport as part of an investigation into travel to Syria in support of alleged terrorist activity.

Scotland Yard said in a statement released early Wednesday that anti-terror officers arrested a man and a woman, both 26, after they flew into the airport from Egypt late Tuesday.

Police did not make clear whether the suspects were thought to be returning from or heading to Syria. The statement said that officers were searching two homes in east Londonas part of the investigation.

The statement added that the pair were arrested on suspicion of the "commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism" but did not release their names, nationalities, or any other identifying information.