Attacks against Lebanese Alawites deepen fears

TRIPOLI, Lebanon (AP) — Lebanese members of the Syrian leader's Alawite sect fear their tiny community will be a casualty of the civil war raging in the neighboring country.

Already, Sunni Muslim extremists have stoned a school bus, vandalized stores and beaten or stabbed a number of men in a wave of attacks against Lebanese Alawites, stoking fears of even more violence should Syrian President Bashar Assad be removed from power.

In one particularly humiliating case, angry Sunnis tied a rope around an Alawite man's neck and dragged him around the streets of Tripoli.

"The Alawites are being subjected to an organized campaign that aims to eliminate them on all levels," said Ali Feddah, a prominent member of Lebanon's Arab Democratic Party, which is mainly Alawite.

Feddah spoke to The Associated Press in his office in Tripoli's predominantly Alawite neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen. Sitting next to a picture of Assad, he said the Alawites face an "existential threat," mainly because of extremist Sunni incitement against them.

His words echo the sentiments of many Alawites, who have long enjoyed privileges in Syria under Assad family rule and now fear for their future. The tiny community in Lebanon, which has long been a Syrian client state, has also benefited from Assad's rule, particularly during Syria's three-decade hold on its smaller neighbor that ended in 2005.

The Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, represents little more than 10 percent of the population in Syria and about 2 percent in Lebanon. Before their ascent in the mid-20th century, the Alawites were impoverished and marginalized, largely confined to the lmountains of the province of Latakia on the Mediterranean coast.

Under the French mandate, the Alawites were granted an autonomous territory stretching in a band along the coast from the Lebanese border to the Turkish border. It lasted a few years until 1937, when their state was incorporated into modern-day Syria.

After the 1963 coup that brought the Baath Party to power in Damascus, Alawites began consolidating their presence in the Syrian government and armed forces.

The uprising against Assad's rule that began in March 2011 quickly became an outlet for long-suppressed grievances, mostly by poor Sunnis from marginalized areas. It has since escalated into an outright civil war.

Many of the rebels trying to overthrow Assad today say they want to replace his government with an Islamic state.

The war, now in its third year, has turned increasingly sectarian with countless cases of tit-for-tat slayings between Sunnis and Alawites. Sunni rebels are often seen in videos posted online referring to Alawites as dogs and heretics.

Abu Bilal al-Homsi, an activist in the central Syrian city of Homs who has links with several rebel groups, said the Assad regime has carried out massacres against Sunnis. He points to waves of sectarian killings this month, allegedly carried out by pro-government Alawite gunmen in the coastal towns of Banias and Bayda. More than 100 civilians were killed in the attacks.

"We will completely wipe out the Alawite sect," said al-Homsi, who does not use his real name because of fear of government reprisals. "There will be no Alawites in Syria. The young and the old will be punished."

Bassam al-Dada, an official in the rebels' Free Syrian Army, disagrees with al-Homsi. "The Alawites have nothing to do with Bashar's crimes," he said.

The U.N. estimates that more than 70,000 people have been killed in the war. Human Rights activists say most of them are Sunnis, but Alawites have also paid a heavy price. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Tuesday the group has documented the names of more than 35,000 Alawites who have died, most of them soldiers and pro-Assad militiamen.

"Their losses statistically are very high. There is a lot of resentment in Alawite regions," said Hilal Khashan, political science professor at the American University in Beirut.

The tensions in Syria are playing out in Lebanon, which is sharply split along sectarian lines and has recently seen repeated bouts of street fighting related to the war across the border.

Northern Lebanon, in particular, is a potential powder keg. It has a strong Sunni population but also has pockets of Alawites.

The Alawites live mainly in Jabal Mohsen, a hilly district where posters of Assad and his father and predecessor, the late Hafez Assad, decorate the streets.

For years, residents of Jabal Mohsen have traded short bouts of automatic weapons fire and volleys of rocket-propelled grenades with residents of the mainly Sunni Bab Tabbaneh neighborhood.

The two districts in Tripoli are separated by a roadway named Syria Street.

The clashes have become more frequent since Syria's uprising began — and so have the targeted attacks.

Ali, an unemployed 25-year-old Alawite from Jabal Mohsen, says he has not been to Sunni neighborhoods of Tripoli for more than a year after he was beaten up in the central Tal neighborhood.

Ali, who declined to give his full name for fear of reprisals, described how he was intercepted by a man who ran toward him, grabbed him by the neck and tried to choke him as he shouted: "Are you from the Jabal?"

He said he denied he was an Alawite and was eventually saved by a Sunni man who knew him.

Last month, a bus carrying school children was attacked on the edge of Jabal Mohsen by a group of extremists who pelted it with rocks for several minutes before troops intervened.

"Since then, all school buses from Jabal Mohsen are accompanied by troops," Feddah said.

Residents say several men have been stabbed and beaten up in the past few weeks. Several shops in Jabal Mohsen were set on fire, their fronts seen shuttered on a recent visit.

Earlier this month, bearded extremists grabbed a Syrian man in Tripoli, beat him up and stripped him to the waist before tying a rope around his neck and parading him through the streets. "I am an Alawite shabih," they wrote on his bare chest, in reference to widely feared pro-Assad militiamen who fight alongside soldiers in Syria.

In Syria, thousands of Alawites have left their homes in war-shattered cities such as Homs, for the relative safety of the overwhelmingly Alawite provinces of Tartous and Latakia.

Syrian opponents of Assad say Alawite fighters are trying to carve out a breakaway enclave in the country's mountainous Alawite heartland by driving out local Sunnis. They say recent killings in overwhelmingly Sunni villages close to Alawite communities are meant to lay the groundwork.

Earlier this month, regime forces from nearby Alawite areas were blamed for killing dozens of civilians in Banias and Bayda, two Sunni communities in western Syria. The violence bore a closer resemblance to two reported mass killings last year in Houla and Qubeir, Sunni villages surrounded by Alawite towns in central Syria.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Turkey's Hurriyet newspaper that having failed to control the entire country, Assad was now executing his "plan B" — which involves opening up an Alawite corridor between central Syria and Lebanon and driving Sunnis away from the area.

"There is an effort to cleanse the region," Davutoglu said in the interview, published last week. "This will cause turmoil in Lebanon too. It could cause a culture of revenge."

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Bassem Mroue can be reached on twitter at http://twitter.com/bmroue

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Attacks on Sunni mosques fuel fears in Iraq

BAGHDAD (AP) — A sharp rise in attacks on Sunni holy sites in Iraq is feeding fears that the country could spiral into a new round of sectarian violence similar to the bloodletting that brought Iraq to its knees in 2006 and 2007.

Majority Shiites control the levers of power in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Wishing to rebuild the nation rather than revert to open warfare, they have largely restrained their militias over the past five years or so as Sunni extremist groups such as al-Qaida have targeted them with occasional large-scale attacks.

That may now have changed.

If it turns out that Iranian-backed Shiite militias are responsible for the recent attacks on Sunnis, it could signal a turn toward cyclical retaliatory violence.

At least 29 Sunni mosques were attacked between mid-April and early May, according to Mahmoud al-Sumaidaie, the deputy head of Iraq's Sunni Endowment, which oversees the sect's holy sites. At least 65 Sunni worshippers were killed, according to a tally compiled by The Associated Press from police reports.

By contrast, two Shiite mosques were hit in bombings that killed one person over the same period, police and hospital officials said. Dozens of Shiites were killed in attacks by Sunni extremists at places other than holy sites during this time.

In all of 2012, there were only 10 recorded attacks on Sunni holy sites, al-Sumaidaie said.

In a sign of increasing fears by the Shiite-led government that the country might be descending into sectarian strife, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki warned last week that terrorists and extremist groups are taking advantage of the turmoil by targeting "certain areas and mosques."

"The attempts to stir sectarian strife again by warlords, terrorists, and militia leaders will not succeed and we will confront them with full force," he said, adding that the army and police would boost security around houses of worship.

Even if the will is there, al-Maliki's government is considered too weak to ensure security and control militias and other extremist Shiite groups that are allegedly linked to and partly financed by Iran.

And many contend that al-Maliki's government planted the seeds for more sectarian tension by becoming more aggressive toward Sunnis after the U.S. military withdrawal in December 2011.

For the past five months, Sunnis have been protesting against what they claim is second-class treatment by the government and to demand an end to some laws they believe unfairly target them. Violence has flared on occasion between security forces and protesters.

But the matter came to a head April 23 after government troops moved against a camp of Sunni demonstrators in the town of Hawija, about 240 kilometers (150 miles) north of Baghdad. The clashes there sparked a wave of violence across Iraq that has killed more than 230 people, posing the most serious threat to Iraq's stability since the last American troops left in December 2011.

Al-Sumaidaie suggested the spate of recent attacks on Sunni mosques might be aimed at pressuring Sunni protesters to quit their anti-government rallies.

"These attacks aim to terrorize the worshippers and they might be a reaction on some issues such as the protesters," he said.

He also accused Shiite militias of being behind the recent attacks on Sunnis, but refused to specify which groups.

In February, Sunni households in mixed areas of Baghdad began receiving threatening leaflets signed by a militant faction known as the Mukhtar Army. The leaflets called Sunnis the enemy and warned them to leave the neighborhood. Their appearance raised new concerns among many Sunnis in the capital because overt threats like that had largely disappeared as widespread sectarian fighting waned in 2008.

The Mukhtar Army was formed by Wathiq al-Batat, a one-time senior official in Iraq's Hezbollah Brigades, which has no direct link to the better-known Hezbollah in Lebanon. Al-Batat has said the militia's aim is to confront Sunnis who might attempt to topple the Shiite-led government in Baghdad in the same manner that Syrian rebels are trying to overthrow Bashar Assad's Iranian-backed regime in neighboring Syria.

Last week, al-Batat was quoted by Iraqi media issuing new threats against "the centers of terrorism and the people with turbans who are calling for terrorism" — an apparent reference to extremist Sunni clerics.

"We will work to intensify the jihadist operations, by using all means, in order to hunt for these terrorists and strike their economic, social and political interests, and we will not exclude anybody who promotes or calls for terrorism," he said.

Under Saddam, Iraq's Sunni minority held a privileged position, while the Shiites were largely oppressed. But since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam, those dynamics have been flipped, and a Shiite-led government now holds power in Baghdad.

Attacks on Sunni mosques have become rare since the peak of the sectarian strife, which was ignited by the bombing of the Shiite al-Askari shrine in the city of Samarra in February 2006. That attack was blamed on al-Qaida in Iraq and set off retaliatory bloodshed between Sunni and Shiite extremists that left thousands of Iraqis dead and pushed the country to the brink of civil war.

The new wave of unrest rolling across Iraq now is worrying in part because of the country's recent past.

Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, warned in an opinion piece in the Washington Post on April 30 that the situation in Iraq has taken "a very dangerous turn" since last month's crackdown in Hawija.

He described the recent violence as reminiscent of the dark days in 2006. Al-Qaida's Iraq arm, he wrote, is regrouping in areas that Iraqi and American forces "cleared at enormous cost," and its ally Jabhat al-Nusra is "attempting to hijack the secular resistance" to Syria's Assad.

"These developments threaten not only to unravel the gains made since 2007, but also to energize the forces of violent extremism in the heart of the Arab world, already burning in Syria," Crocker said.

Ahmed Hussein Saleh, a Sunni resident of Baghdad, said the current political tension has contributed to the deteriorating security situation and the comeback of sectarianism.

"The politicians, Shiite militia leaders, and even al-Qaida, want to restart the sectarian war because it is the only way to keep the people divided and thus rule the country the way they want," said Saleh, who has decided recently not to let his two kids go outside the house on their own, fearing for their safety.

Interior Ministry spokesman Lt. Col. Saad Maan Ibrahim said the ministry has taken extra precautions to try to secure mosques, including deploying more security forces and undercover policemen.

"The ministry is giving this issue top priority now because we are aware that this tactic has been used before in order to create a sectarian war among the Iraqi people, but they failed," Ibrahim told The Associated Press.

He said that an investigation is underway to determine which groups are behind the mosque attacks, and cautioned against jumping to any hasty conclusions.

"Basically, these attacks bear the hallmarks of al-Qaida, but we do not rule out the possibility that the militias from the other side might be behind this violence," he said.

At the Mohammed Fanadi al-Kubaisi mosque in western Baghdad, shards of glass litter the prayer hall nearly three weeks a bomb killed three people on April 26. At the front entrance, dozens of slippers and shoes are still neatly stored in the wooden shelves where worshippers left them before fleeing the in a panic.

The mosque's imam, Hussein Ali, who had just started into his Friday sermon when the bomb placed outside one of the windows blew up, said those who targeted the building "want to reignite the civil war among the people here."

"I am sure that God's revenge will fall upon them sooner or later," he said. "It is only a matter of time."

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Associated Press writer Adam Schreck contributed to this report.

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Attacks in Iraq kill 9, wound 33

BAGHDAD (AP) — A series of attacks including a blast near an Internet cafe in a Sunni area of Baghdad killed nine people and wounded dozens on Sunday in and around the Iraqi capital.

The attacks came amid heightened sectarian tension following a deadly security crackdown on a camp in northern Iraq run by Sunnis, protesting what they consider to be their second-class treatment by the Shiite-led government. Government investigators say the April 23 incident left 40 people dead, while a spate of follow-up attacks and battles has killed well over 200 more.

The bloodshed has raised fears that the country could be heading for a new wave of sectarian fighting like that which nearly pushed it to the brink of civil war in the middle of the last decade.

Police officials said that the first attack occurred Sunday morning when a bomb went off near Zein al-Abideen mosque in the western suburbs of Baghdad. One passerby was killed, six others were wounded and the outer wall of the mosque was damaged.

Hours later, police said, gunmen stormed the house of a district mayor in Mahmoudiya town, killing the mayor and his son. Mahmoudiya is 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Baghdad.

At night, police said that a bomb exploded near an Internet cafe in a Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad, killing three people and wounding 13 others.

Minutes later, three people were killed and 14 others wounded when mortar shells landed on houses on the western edge of Baghdad.

Hospital officials confirmed the casualties. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.

Violence has ebbed in Iraq, yet insurgent attacks are still frequent.

Meanwhile, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said that his government will continue to follow up on fake bomb detectors sold to Iraq years ago by a British businessman, according to a statement posted on the prime minister's web site.

Al-Maliki's comments came days after a British judge sentenced James McCormick to 10 years in jail for selling fake bomb detectors to several countries, saying the millionaire had shown a cavalier disregard for potentially fatal consequences.

Al-Maliki added that Iraqi authorities had taken the necessary measures regarding this issue a long time ago and that some of the people involved were convicted. He did not elaborate.

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At least 22 killed in Iraq attacks

By Kamal Naama

RAMADI, Iraq (Reuters) - At least 22 people were killed in attacks across Iraq on Wednesday, police and medics said, after weeks of intensifying violence that threatens all-out sectarian conflict.

Iraq has become increasingly volatile as the civil war in neighboring Syria strains fragile relations between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. Tensions are at their highest since U.S. troops pulled out of the country more than a year ago.

In the north of the capital Baghdad, gunmen attacked a police station and occupied it after killing five policemen, medics and police said.

In the western province of Anbar, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives vest in a group of government-backed Sunni "Sahwa" fighters who were collecting their salaries, killing six in a town east of the city of Falluja, police sources said.

"I was there to get my monthly salary as usual, and there was no security measures because the situation was normal ... a person drove his car among us, and suddenly the explosion happened," said Sahwa fighter Rasheed Muslih.

"When I opened my eyes, there was nothing but smoke and several of my colleagues were killed and the others wounded."

The "Sahwa" (awakening) councils, or the Sons of Iraq as they came to be known, have come under increasing attack from Sunni militants who despise them as allies of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Sunnis have been protesting since December against Maliki, whom they accuse of marginalizing their minority sect and monopolizing power since U.S.-led troops toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Government concessions had begun to take the edge off but when security forces raided a protest camp in the town of Hawija on April 23 and more than 40 people were killed, clashes spread to other Sunni areas.

In Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad, police said a roadside bomb killed four policemen. A car bomb in a Shi'ite district in northeastern Baghdad killed at least three people, police and hospital sources said. Another car bomb north of the city of Ramadi killed two policemen and wounded another 10.

Iraq is home to a number of Sunni Islamist insurgent groups including a local al Qaeda affiliate that has launched frequent attacks to undermine the Shi'ite-led government and provoke wider confrontation.

Violence is still well below its height in 2006-07, but provisional figures from rights group Iraq Body Count put violent deaths in April at more than 400 - the highest monthly toll since 2009. About 1,500 people have been killed this year.

In the northern city of Mosul, unidentified gunmen shot a prominent tribal leader in a market and an electoral candidate was also assassinated in a separate incident, police said.

KURDS END BOYCOTT

Iraq's power-sharing government has been all but paralyzed by disagreements between Sunnis, Shi'ites and ethnic Kurds, who run their own administration in the north of the country.

Kurdish ministers, who have boycotted government since March when parliament passed the 2013 budget without their consensus, said on Wednesday they would return to Baghdad, easing deadlock between the central government and the autonomous region.

A Kurdish delegation visited Baghdad earlier this week to address an ongoing row over land and oil, but there was no apparent breakthrough on that front.

Kurdistan, which has signed deals on its own terms with international oil firms, says it is owed more than 4 trillion Iraqi dinars ($3.5 billion). Baghdad rejects those contracts and has alloted the region a much smaller sum in the budget.

(Additional reporting by Ghazwan Hassan in Samarra, Kareem Raheem in Baghdad and Isabel Coles in Arbil; Writing by Suadad al-Salhy; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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Boston attacks are reminder of violence elsewhere

BAGHDAD (AP) — The blasts that struck the Boston Marathon on Monday were shocking not only for their brazenness and the lives they shattered, but also because attacks like this usually happen in far-off, troubled places — not in the middle of a major American city.

As the chief of emergency services at Massachusetts General Hospital, Alasdair Conn, put it: "This is what we expect from war."

Many who live in countries such as Iraq and Syria where violence remains troublingly common had mixed reactions to the bombings. While they were sorry to hear about the attacks, some expressed dismay that the assaults they face on a regular basis get less attention.

"Nobody cared about the dozens of victims who fell yesterday in Iraq and Syria," said Hazim Khazim, a teacher who lost a cousin in a bombing in Baghdad on Monday, in a reaction typical of many in the region.

Internet cafe owner Hassan Sabeeh in Baghdad was more understanding.

"The Iraqi people can feel, more than anybody else in the world, the misery of the Boston victims and their families," he said. "We sympathize and feel their suffering."

Authorities in the United States are urgently searching for clues into the bombing in Boston that killed three, including 8-year-old Martin Richard. More than 170 people were wounded.

Here is a look at some other countries that have faced violent attacks of their own in recent days:

SYRIA

Syrian warplanes swooped over the quiet town of Saraqeb in the country's north Saturday, dropping bombs on a residential district. The blasts shattered storefronts, set cars ablaze and sent huge plumes of smoke into the sky. Rubble and twisted metal littered the street after the airstrikes, which left 20 dead. Harrowing images like those have become routine for those watching the Syrian civil war unfold. Activists say an average of 120 people get killed daily in violence and clashes across the country.

"In Syria, it's not Boston every day, but many times per day," posted Jean Pierre Duthion, a French expatriate in Damascus who has Tweeted the war.

IRAQ

A bloody assault across Iraq began around an hour after sunrise Monday in the western city of Fallujah when a suicide bomber drove an explosives-packed car into a police checkpoint. Over the next several hours, attackers would detonate more than 20 sets of explosives, most of them car bombs. By the time it was all over — shortly before the Boston bombs struck — 55 people were dead and well over 200 were wounded. No one has claimed responsibility, but the highly coordinated attack bore the hallmarks of a resurgent al-Qaida in Iraq and appeared aimed at sowing fear days before the first elections since U.S. troops withdrew.

Ali al-Moussawi, a spokesman for Iraq's prime minister, condemned the Boston attacks and said Iraq "calls on the world to unite and fight terrorism that targets innocents everywhere."

SOMALIA

A well-planned, complex assault involving two car bombs and nine attackers — including six suicide bombers — aimed primarily at Somalia's Supreme Court complex on Sunday killed more than 30 people. The attackers ran through the labyrinthine court complex, where they took court employees and civilians hostage while rescuers used ladders to help people escape from second-story rooms. Officials say al-Shabab militants carried out the assault but, because of its complexity and the sophisticated nature of the bombs, Western officials said it may have been aided by al-Qaida.

In a Facebook message Tuesday, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud wrote of the Boston attack: "America will awake today stronger than ever."

BAHRAIN

In Bahrain, a series of four small explosions occurred in rapid succession late Sunday, including a gas cylinder blast that set a car ablaze in the Gulf nation's financial district. The attacks suggest a rising influence of militant groups in Bahrain's more-than-two-year-old uprising. Majority Shiites seek a greater political voice in the Sunni-ruled kingdom, which also has high strategic value for Washington as the base for the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet. The blasts came amid a wave of protests seeking to embarrass officials before Sunday's Formula One auto race, the premier international event in the kingdom.

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

A mortar shell killed four worshippers when it struck a church in the Central African Republic's capital on Sunday. They were among more than 20 people killed over the weekend amid ongoing violence since rebels took the city of Bangui and ousted the mineral-rich country's president. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, reported widespread and grave violations since the rebel coalition took Bangui on March 24, including targeted killings, arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, recruitment of children, rapes, disappearances and kidnappings.

AFGHANISTAN

Eight members of the same family were killed Monday when a trailer towed by a tractor in which they were riding struck an explosive device in southern Afghanistan. They were among 14 killed across the country on the day the Boston blasts hit. Most roadside bombs planted by the Taliban are meant to target Afghan security forces or coalition troops, but civilians are often the victims. So far, April has been the deadliest month this year for Afghan and foreign civilians and security forces, an ominous sign as the annual fighting season gets underway with improved weather.

PAKISTAN

Pakistan has been hit by a spate of violence related to the country's upcoming election. On Monday, gunmen on a motorcycle killed supporters of an independent candidate running for election in the South Waziristan tribal region while his convoy was on the way to a campaign stop. A bomb Tuesday hit a convoy of vehicles carrying another candidate, killing three people and wounding seven others. Another bomb attack on a security vehicle killed one soldier and wounded four, intelligence officials said.

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Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez in Kabul, Afghanistan, Michelle Faul in Johannesburg, Zeina Karam in Beirut, Brian Murphy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Rebecca Santana in Islamabad, Jason Straziuso in Nairobi, Kenya, and Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad contributed reporting.

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Follow Adam Schreck on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamschreck

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1 injured in attacks in Turkish capital

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Assailants on Tuesday fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the headquarters of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party and hurled two hand grenades at the Justice Ministry's parking lot, slightly wounding one person, officials said.

Interior Minister Muammer Guler said no one was injured in the attack on the ruling Justice and Development Party headquarters, while the spouse of a Justice Ministry employee was treated for a slight injury in the second assault.

Guler said the attack on the party headquarters shattered windows but caused no major damage. Erdogan had left Turkey hours earlier for a visit to Denmark.

The minister said a terrorist group was responsible for the attacks, but he declined to identify it.

The attacks follow a police crackdown on a banned left-wing group, the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front . That group, autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels and Islamic militants have all carried out attacks in Turkey.

Tuesday's grenade attacks came as Turkey is holding peace talks with the Kurdish rebels' jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in a bid to end a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people since 1984. Turkish leaders had warned of possible attacks aimed at derailing the talks.

"We were expecting possible sabotage attempts," Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin told reporters after inspecting the damage at his ministry. "(But) no sabotage attempt can turn us back from this path."

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Cyberwar manual lays down rules for online attacks

LONDON (AP) — Even cyberwar has rules, and one group of experts is putting out a manual to prove it.

Their handbook, due to be published later this week, applies the venerable practice of international law to the world of electronic warfare in an effort to show how hospitals, civilians and neutral nations can be protected in an information age fight.

"Everyone was seeing the Internet as the 'Wild, Wild, West,'" U.S. Naval War College Professor Michael Schmidt, the manual's editor, said in an interview before its official release. "What they had forgotten is that international law applies to cyberweapons like it applies to any other weapons."

The Tallinn Manual — named for the Estonian capital where it was compiled — was created at the behest of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, a NATO think tank. It takes existing rules on battlefield behavior, such as the 1868 St. Petersburg Declaration or the 1949 Geneva Convention, to the Internet, occasionally in creative or unexpected ways.

Marco Roscini, who teaches international law at London's University of Westminster, described the manual as a first-of-its-kind attempt to show that the laws of war — some of which date back to the 19th century — were flexible enough to accommodate the new realities of online conflict.

The 282-page handbook has no official standing, but Roscini predicted that it would be an important reference as military lawyers across the world increasingly grapple with what to do about electronic attacks.

"I'm sure it will be quite influential," he said.

The manual's central premise is that war doesn't stop being war just because it happens online. Hacking a dam's controls to release its reservoir into a river valley can have the same effect as breaching it with explosives, its authors argue. Legally speaking, a cyberattack which sparks a fire at a military base is indistinguishable from an attack that uses an incendiary shell.

The humanitarian protections don't disappear online either. Medical computers get the same protection that brick-and-mortar hospitals do. The personal data related to prisoners of war have to be kept safe in the same way that the prisoners themselves are — for example by having the information stored separately from military servers which might be subject to attack.

Cyberwar can lead to cyberwar crimes, the manual warned. Launching an attack from a neutral nation's computer network is forbidden in much the same way that hostile armies aren't allowed to march through a neutral country's territory. Shutting down the Internet in an occupied area in retaliation against a rebel cyberattack could fall afoul of international prohibitions on collective punishment.

The experts behind the manual — two dozen officers, academics, and researchers drawn mainly from NATO member states — didn't always agree on how traditional rules applied in the context of a cyberwar.

Self-defense was a thorny issue. International law generally allows nations to strike first if they spot enemy soldiers about to pour across the border, but how could that be applied to a world in which attacks can happen at the click of a mouse?

Other aspects of international law seemed obsolete — or at least in need of an upgrade — in the electronic context.

Soldiers are generally supposed to wear uniforms and carry their arms openly, for example, but what meaning could such a requirement have when they are hacking into distant targets from air conditioned office buildings?

The law also forbids attacks on "civilian objects," but the authors were divided as to whether the word "object" could be interpreted to mean "data." Did that leave a legal loophole for a military attack that erased valuable civilian data, such as a nation's voter registration records?

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Online:

The Tallinn Manual: http://www.ccdcoe.org/249.html

Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphae.li/twitter

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Five killed in Islamist car bomb attacks in north Mali

GAO, Mali (Reuters) - Five people were killed in a remote Malian town on Friday in car bomb attacks by Islamists on Tuareg MNLA rebels with close links to French forces, a spokesman for the Tuareg fighters said.

Violence in northern Mali underscores the risk of French and African forces becoming entangled in a messy guerrilla war as they try to help Mali's weak army counter bombings and raids by al Qaeda-linked Islamist militants.

Friday's car bomb attacks in In Khalil, 1,700 km (1,000 miles) northeast of the capital Bamako, came a day after a car bomb killed two people in the northern city of Kidal and French and Malian troops killed 15 Islamists on the streets of the city of Gao.

Sporadic gunfire was also heard in Gao on Friday, and a Malian officer said an Islamist fighter was still holed up near the banks of the Niger River.

Moussa Ag Assarid, a Paris-based representative of the pro-autonomy MNLA Tuareg fighters, said suspected Islamists had first tried to drive into a building in In Khalil, but the car was destroyed by fighters ahead of impact.

A second car then drove into the group's local operations center and exploded.

Aside from the two bombers, Ag Assarid said three MNLA fighters were killed and three others wounded. It was not possible to independently verify the report.

The MNLA swept across northern Mali in April, taking advantage of a power vacuum left by a coup in Bamako. But its revolt was eclipsed by a loose alliance of Islamist jihadists, including al Qaeda's North African wing, AQIM.

France is six weeks into an offensive to clear Islamist fighters from Mali's north, which Paris said was in danger of becoming a springboard for attacks on the region and the West.

In the meantime, the MNLA says it has retaken control of Kidal and towns around the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains, where Islamists are believed to be hiding near the Algerian border.

FRENCH WITHDRAWAL PLAN

France has established close links with Tuareg rebels on the ground and has set up a base at Kidal's airport but has kept a low profile in the town.

In Gao, the hub for French and Malian military operations in Mali's north, Malian government troops were carrying out house-to-house searches on Friday after a day of fighting.

"The buildings must be filled with dead enemy who still have unexploded grenades, guns and Kalashnikovs in their hands," Colonel Massaoule Samake told Reuters TV.

French army chief Admiral Edouard Guillaud, visiting Ottawa, told Reuters he was not surprised by the latest attacks and said he expected more to come.

"It's simply the continuation of attacks by MUJWA, which will probably want to try more attacks in the coming days. It was sadly predictable and the next attacks will fail just like they did yesterday."

MUJWA is a splinter faction of al Qaeda's North African wing AQIM which, in loose alliance with the home-grown Malian Islamist group Ansar Dine, held Mali's main northern urban areas for 10 months until the French offensive drove them out.

Paris has said it plans to start withdrawing some of its 4,000 troops from Mali next month. But rebels have fought back against Mali's weak and divided army, and African forces due to take over the French role are not yet in place.

Asked whether France still planned to start withdrawing troops in March, Guillaud replied: "This is obviously conditions-based, that's obvious. But ... I don't see any reason not to begin some drawdown."

(Reporting by Joe Penney in Gao, John Irish in Dakar, David Ljunggren in Ottawa and Nicholas Vinocur in Paris; Writing by John Irish; Editing by David Lewis and Andrew Roche)

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