Region

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel’s defence minister accused US Secretary of State John Kerry of an “incomprehensible obsession” with his push for Middle East peace, drawing an angry response from Israel’s chief ally Tuesday.

The US State Department described Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon’s comments as “offensive,” in a mark of the degree of outrage in Washington at the latest public spat between the two allies, which follows a major row over Iran policy.

Israel’s top-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot quoted Yaalon as expressing hope that Kerry, who has visited the region 10 times since taking office in February 2013, would end his peace push and focus his energies elsewhere.

“The American plan for security arrangements that was shown to us isn’t worth the paper it was written on,” Yaalon was quoted as saying in private conversations with Israeli officials, accusing Kerry of being naive and implying he is a nuisance.

The State Department said Yaalon’s reported remarks were “inappropriate” for a minister in the government of a close ally.

“The remarks of the defence minister, if accurate, are offensive and inappropriate especially given all that the United States is doing to support Israel’s security needs,” spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki told reporters.

Psaki said Kerry and his team “have been working day and night to try to promote a secure peace for Israel because of the secretary’s deep concern for Israel’s future”.

“To question his motives and distort his proposals is not something we would expect from the defence minister of a close ally,” she said.

Kerry coaxed Israelis and Palestinians back into direct negotiations last summer and has since shuttled tirelessly between the two leaderships in a bid to keep the talks alive.

His proposals include a security plan for the border between a future Palestinian state and neighbouring Jordan, involving high-tech equipment to enable Israel to reduce or end its troop presence on the ground, Israeli media say.

But Yaalon said the idea of technology replacing boots on the ground was naive.

“What are you talking about?” he reportedly asked Kerry during a meeting. “I ask you: how will technology respond when a Salafist or Islamic Jihad cell tries to commit a terror attack against Israeli targets? Who will engage them?”

Yaalon said after years of living the conflict, he understood a lot more about the Palestinians than the US top diplomat.

“Secretary of State John Kerry — who arrived here determined, and who operates from an incomprehensible obsession and a sense of messianism — can’t teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians,” he was quoted as saying.

“The only thing that might save us is if John Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us be.”

Yaalon’s public criticism of the US top diplomat earned him a rebuke from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as other government ministers.

“Even when we have disagreements with the United States, it is about the matter at hand and not about the person,” Netanyahu said at the opening of the winter session of parliament.

Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz told army radio that while he agreed with the “content” of Yaalon’s remarks, the defence minister should avoid “personal insults”.

Writing on Facebook, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians, said: “We can oppose negotiations in a responsible and measured way, without compromising relations with our best friend.”

Yaalon’s remarks came on the back of a US-Israeli spat over a landmark deal Washington and other world powers reached with Iran in November on its controversial nuclear programme.

Israel publicly opposed the plan, which will see limited relief for Tehran from Western sanctions in exchange for rolling back parts of its civil nuclear programme, describing it as a “disaster” and a “gift” to its biggest foe.

Israel has also been at loggerheads with its US ally over its drive to expand its settlements in the occupied West Bank, including annexed Arab East Jerusalem, even while the peace talks with the Palestinians that Kerry helped relaunch are under way.

Just last week, Israel unveiled plans to build another 1,800 new settler housing units, hot on the heels of Kerry’s latest visit.

A senior US official on Tuesday reiterated Washington’s opposition to settlement building, which it has called “illegitimate”.

BEIRUT — The Syrian government has retaken territory around the northern city of Aleppo, the military said on Tuesday, after two weeks of rebel infighting that has weakened the insurgency against President Bashar Assad.

The internecine conflict among various rebel groups will allow Assad to portray himself as the only secular alternative in Syria to a radical Islamist regime when peace talks begin in Switzerland on January 22.

His military advances will give the Syrian government delegation greater leverage at the negotiating table.

An army statement said government forces had pushed out from their base at Aleppo’s international airport, southeast of the city, and were moving towards an industrial complex used as a rebel base and Al Bab road, needed by insurgents to supply the half of Aleppo under their control.

It said that government forces, along with militia loyal to Assad, were in “complete control” of the Naqareen, Zarzour, Taaneh and Subeihieh areas along the eastern side of Aleppo, which was the major Arab country’s commercial hub and most populous city before the conflict erupted in 2011.

In the past year, the Syrian government has pushed back at rebels across the country, besieging restive suburbs around the capital and pushing opposition fighters from towns near the Lebanese border and along the road linking Damascus to the coast.

Assad’s forces took ground in central Homs province and his forces regrouped as rebel rivalries grew. While the embattled leader avoided US military strikes by agreeing to give up his chemical arsenal, his forces continue to bomb opposition territory from the air and using long-range artillery. But neither side appears to be able to break the overall deadlock.

While the army has been able to take some towns on the outskirts of Aleppo, rebels have held their ground in the districts of the city they entered in 2012 and the government has not made major advances in the urban areas where opposition fighters are dug in.

Foreign jihadists

Fighting between Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and rival Islamists and more moderate rebels have killed hundreds of people over two weeks and shaken ISIL, a militant faction led by foreign jihadists.

But ISIL regrouped and retook much of its stronghold in the eastern city of Raqqa on Sunday from remnants of the Nusra Front, another Al Qaeda affiliate although much more Syrian in makeup, and Islamist units called the Islamic Front.

ISIL took control of the town of Al Bab, east of Aleppo, from other rebels on Monday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

The observatory, which tracks Syria’s war using sources from both sides, said eight fighters from Ahrar Al Sham, a unit within the Islamic Front, were killed by an ISIL car bomb in the western province of Idlib just before midnight on Monday.

Civil war

Syria sank into civil war after a peaceful street uprising against four decades of Assad family rule began in March 2011. The revolt spiralled into an armed insurgency after the army responded with massive and deadly force to suppress the unrest.

As the fighting spread, better-armed hardline Islamists took the fore over more moderate Muslim and secular rebels, who are supported by Gulf Arab and Western nations.

Syria’s foreign ministry dismissed as “fantasy” statements by the pro-opposition Friends of Syria group — including Western and Gulf states — in Paris on Sunday that Assad was a war criminal and peace talks should end his “despotic regime”.

“The Syrian Arab Republic is not surprised by what happened in Paris during the meeting of Syrian people’s enemies and the statements, which are closer to fantasy than reality,” the ministry said in a statement on Monday.

The World Food Programme delivered rations to a record 3.8 million people in Syria in December, but civilians in eastern provinces and besieged towns near the capital Damascus remain out of reach, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

The UN agency voiced concern at reports of malnutrition in besieged areas, especially of children caught up in the civil war, and called for greater access.

The official Kuwaiti news agency said non-governmental organisations had promised to donate a combined $400 million for humanitarian aid for Syria ahead of an international donor conference that will start in Kuwait on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — US federal prosecutors have charged an Iranian-American with trying to ship sensitive documents on the F-35 fighter jet to Iran, according to court documents.

Mozaffar Khazaee, who was arrested last week, is accused of trying to smuggle thousands of pages of F-35 blueprints and technical documents, authorities said in a US government affidavit.

Agents inspected a shipment to the Iranian city of Hamadan that the 59-year-old suspect claimed contained household goods.

Instead, they found “boxes of documents consisting of sensitive technical manuals, specification sheets, and other proprietary material relating to the United States Air Force’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme and military jet engines”.

Khazaee was arrested on January 9 at Newark International Airport in New Jersey before he was able to board a connecting flight to Frankfurt, Germany, en route to Iran, the US attorney’s office for the district of Connecticut said.

Khazaee, who became a US citizen in 1991, was charged with “transporting, transmitting and transferring in interstate or foreign commerce goods obtained by theft, conversion, or fraud,” which carries a potential 10-year prison sentence.

The documents he tried to send included design outlines of the fighter’s jet engine that were labelled as subject to export restrictions, officials said.

The radar-evading F-35 warplane is the most expensive US weapons programme ever and is supposed to form the backbone of the future American fighter fleet.

DAMASCUS — A Palestinian minister on Tuesday accused “terrorists” fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad of blocking aid access to the Yarmouk refugee camp in southern Damascus.

Rebels control swathes of Yarmouk, but for months government forces have imposed a suffocating siege on the camp, where some 20,000 Palestinians live despite terrible shortages.

Palestinian Labour Minister Ahmad Majdalani, who was visiting Damascus to negotiate aid access to the camp, said its Palestinian residents must not be used as “hostages” in the conflict.

An aid convoy heading to Yarmouk was targeted on Monday “some 100 metres away from the agreed meeting point”, on the edges of the camp, Majdalani said at a press conference in Damascus.

He said “the source of fire was known... to be controlled by Al Nusra Front, Ahrar Al Sham and Suqur Al Golan,” directly accusing rebel groups battling Assad’s troops.

Majdalani added “all these groups are known for their terrorist links and methodology”.

The minister also said Palestinians “everywhere know... that those who have taken the camp hostage are these groups, not the Syrian authorities”.

Some 45 people have died in recent months because of food and medical shortages in Yarmouk, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group has said, with the most recent death on Tuesday.

Monday’s aid convoy was the sixth to have failed to enter the camp.

Palestinian sources have told AFP the convoys were blocked from entering by gunfire, but did not specify who was responsible.

But the opposition Yarmouk local coordination committee said Assad loyalists had blocked the convoy.

“The Syrian regime and the [pro-Damascus] Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command... kickstarted a clash targeting the Palestinians and everyone else there, to continue with their brazen policy of starvation,” the activist group said via Facebook.

The convoy of six trucks carried 1,700 30-kilogramme food parcels, each of which could feed a family for 20 days.

In a reflection of the desperation in the camp, footage distributed by activists on Tuesday showed a young man from Yarmouk crying for assistance.

“We don’t have the money to pay for a kilo of rice, we don’t have money to pay for a kilo of bulgur... We don’t have anything to do with this conflict. We just want to eat and drink, we want to be safe,” he wept.

BEIRUT — A Lebanese group loyal to Al Qaeda vowed Tuesday to keep up its attacks against Iran, Hizbollah and Israel, less than a fortnight after the death of its leader, Majid Al Majid.

The Saudi-born Majid, whose group claimed responsibility for a November attack on the Iranian embassy in Beirut, died in the custody of Lebanese authorities, who said he was ill before his arrest.

“His project will continue, God willing, in striking Iran, its party [Lebanese Shiite group Hizbollah] and the aggressor Jews [Israel], and in defending oppressed Sunnis everywhere,” the Abdallah Azzam Brigades said in an online statement.

The group also lashed out against Lebanon for “arbitrarily detaining” Islamists, and said Lebanese miliary intelligence was under the control of “Iran’s party”, another reference to Hizbollah, which is closely allied with Shiite Iran.

It criticised “attacks against Sunnis orchestrated by Iran’s party, which controls Lebanon’s military intelligence and manipulates it at will”.

It said Iran “manipulates all Lebanese state institutions to protect both its interests and those of its Baathist ally in Syria”, a reference to President Bashar Assad’s regime.

According to a judicial source, Majid died from poor health on January 4, days after he was arrested.

His body was later sent back to his native Saudi Arabia, after the Saudi embassy had expressed relief over his arrest.

The brigades’ statement said Majid was detained while he was “unconscious” and in intensive care.

“The medical devices that were allowing [Majid] to breathe were pulled out, and God had mercy on him and received him as a martyr,” it charged.

The statement was issued to express condolences over the death of Majid, whom it termed the “prince of the Levant, who has gone to meet his God”, and whose passing “has filled [our] hearts with sadness”.

The November attack on the Iranian embassy in Hizbollah’s south Beirut stronghold killed 25 people.

Majid had “directly supervised the preparation of” the twin suicide bombing, the statement said.

The attack came as tensions rose in Lebanon over the role of Hizbollah in the conflict in neighbouring Syria.

Hizbollah publicly confirmed last April that its fighters were supporting Assad’s regime against the Sunni-dominated rebels, who are backed by most Lebanese Sunnis.

BAGHDAD — Iraq is struggling to tighten control of its border with Syria, alarmed by a resurgent Al Qaeda force that seeks to build an Islamic state across a frontier drawn in colonial times.

The Baghdad government has deployed troops and new US- and Russian-made weaponry to try and cut the militants’ cross-border supply lines, hoping that can kill off the threat. But as US forces found before them, it is a near-impossible task.

The Syrian civil war that has inflamed sectarian tensions across the region, and a desolate geography favouring smugglers and guerrillas are just two of Baghdad’s difficulties in getting a firm grip on the 600-km desert boundary.

Another is tribal ties that span the border, with Iraqis regularly sending food, supplies and weapons to Syrian relatives enduring that country’s war. Iraq says Sunni Islamists have gone back and forth from Syria during the conflict.

Some local people, like desert tribesmen elsewhere, are reluctant even to recognise international borders.

Crucially, political and sectarian animosities felt by the Sunni population of the western province of Anbar towards the Shiite-led central government weaken its authority there.

“It’s not winnable, to control this part of Iraq’s borders,” said Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi analyst at the Gulf Research Centre think tank, referring to Anbar and its neighbour to the north, Nineveh.

“Even the Americans couldn’t do it,” he said, referring to the US occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011.

Al Qaeda-linked militants, feeding off widespread Sunni resentment at perceived mistreatment by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government, swept into the Anbar cities of Fallujah and Ramadi on January 1. Ramadi is now back under government control.

Maliki is trying to enlist tribal support to stamp out Al Qaeda’s latest incarnation in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), whose rise has helped drive violence back to the worst level in at least five years.

His task is unusually complicated, for ISIL, which announced its formation in 2013 out of pre-existing groups, operates on both sides of the border, fighting the governments of both Maliki and Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Maliki said Iraqi border forces had reduced the passage of Al Qaeda fighters, weapons and smugglers. “But we have not been able so far to close all the crossing points they can infiltrate due to the difficult environmental and geographic conditions,” he told Reuters in an interview this week.

“There are also border cities which are half-Iraqi, half Syrian and their tribes have family connections, they are cousins.”

The size of Anbar — comprising a third of Iraq’s territory and bordering Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan — means that tenuous control of its borders is an important vulnerability.

“ISIL’s expansion in Syria ... has offered a tremendous platform to recruit, train and fundraise in ways that positioned the group to both stoke and exploit sectarian tensions in Iraq,” Brian Fishman wrote for the Combating Terrorism Centre, a research unit at the US Military Academy at West Point.

The Syrian-Iraqi border was drawn in the 1920s, when colonial powers France and Britain carved the two countries out of the remnants of the Ottoman empire after World War I.

Almost a century on, much of it remains just a line on a map.

There are two major border crossings between Iraq and Syria, one in Anbar and one in Nineveh, northwest of the city of Mosul. They are manned by Iraqi forces and fortified with blast walls, barbed wire and watchtowers.

But many minor Iraqi posts in between consist only of small, single-storey buildings with a watchtower and staffed by half a dozen security personnel.

These posts can be as much as 10km apart and their defenders have only light weapons and a single military vehicle, security officials said. Border guards there lack the equipment needed to monitor the frontier properly, they said.

Desert and shrub

The border in Anbar, usually patrolled by just a few thousand guards, is mostly open expanses of desert and scrub that allow ISIL fighters easy access to rear bases in Syria.

Hillsides, hidden caves and tracks have made the region a haven for smugglers for generations — and more recently for militants.

After the US invasion in 2003, the border became a source of tension as an anti-American, Sunni insurgency mounted.

Iraq and the United States often accused Syria of allowing insurgents to cross the border, a charge denied by Damascus.

No one doubts that Sunni fighters flow both ways today. Some Iraqi Shiites are also in Syria fighting for Assad’s forces.

Maliki said his government had banned the involvement of Iraqis in Syria. “We absolutely refuse to be involved in the crisis in any way,” he said. “No weapons, no supplies and no fighters.”

The border area features large cave systems and valleys, several of which extend for dozens of miles across the border and are used by ISIL to set up training camps, living quarters and arms depots, Iraqi security sources say.

Alarmed by the contagion spreading from Syria’s war, the government launched Operation Iron Hammer on December 23 to try to break the link between ISIL in Iraq and Syria.

“We want to separate the two frontiers, as each is feeding off the other,” said a senior security official in Baghdad.

Iraqi forces used Russian Mi-35 attack helicopters for the first time, as well as warplanes and US Hellfire missiles supplied after Maliki visited Washington in November.

“When we cut off its funds and support by blocking the route from Iraq to Syria, Al Qaeda will be finished in Syria, as it will be in Iraq,” the security official said.

Iraqi military officers say the new weaponry, as well as satellite imagery and other US-supplied intelligence, has given them new capabilities to hit a previously elusive enemy.

“There was some hesitation among the Americans with regard to providing us with light and heavy weapons,” Maliki said.

“But after the wisdom shown by Iraq in dealing with the recent crisis ... everyone rushed, Congress and the US administration, and asked us to provide a list of weapons we need to fight the terrorist gangs and Al Qaeda organisations.”

But the extent to which Iraq’s military campaign in Anbar border regions has damaged ISIL remains uncertain.

JUBA — A boat carrying civilians desperately fleeing heavy violence in South Sudan sank while crossing the Nile River, killing some 200 people, a military official said Tuesday, as fighting between rebels and government forces moved closer to the capital.

Warfare in the world’s newest state has displaced more than 400,000 people since mid-December, with the front lines constantly shifting as loyalist troops and renegade forces gain and lose territory in battles often waged along ethnic lines.

Lt. Col. Philip Aguer, the South Sudanese military spokesman, said there was fighting about 70 kilometres north of the South Sudanese capital of Juba. Heavy fighting also erupted Tuesday in Malakal, the capital of oil-producing Upper Nile state, which renegade forces briefly held before government troops retook it, he said.

As control of certain regions has changed, tens of thousands of residents have fled their homes to escape fighting that often pits the Dinka ethnic group of President Salva Kiir against the Nuer group of Riek Machar, the former vice president who now commands renegade forces. A boat on the Nile — fleeing the violence in Upper Nile State and carrying mostly women and children— sank on Saturday, killing at least 200 people, according to Aguer.

The violence has displaced 413,000 people, including more than 73,000 who sought refuge in neighbouring countries, according to the United Nations. Some of the fiercest battles have been fought in Jonglei, South Sudan’s largest state, where for months government troops had been trying to put down a local rebellion. South Sudan’s government now says it has made peace with the leader of that rebellion, David Yau Yau, a renegade colonel from the Murle tribe who appears to have cut a deal with the Dinka-led government against Machar’s mostly Nuer forces.

South Sudan has a history of ethnic rivalry, and its many tribes have long battled each other in recurring cycles of violence.

Nearly 10,000 people have been killed in the latest fighting, according to one estimate by an International Crisis Group analyst.

The Associated Press has seen video showing a representative of Kiir’s government meeting with Yau Yau in Jonglei’s Pibor county earlier this week after the militia leader agreed to integrate his fighters into the national army. In the video bodies of men in combat fatigues litter the bushes, but it is impossible to tell if the dead are rebels or government troops.

Troops from neighbouring Uganda appear to be actively fighting on behalf of Kiir, who is reportedly seeking the long-term commitment of Ugandan troops in the fight against renegade forces.

In Ethiopia, where peace talks are taking place, a spokesman for the rebels, former South Sudan Brig. Gen. Lul Ruai Kong, said Ugandan helicopters and fighter jets are bombing rebel positions.

Another pro-rebel official, Gideon Gatpan Thaor, said fighters described being hit with a smoky weapon that burns, possibly white phosphorous.

A Ugandan military official denied Ugandan forces are already involved in active combat but admitted that is where they are headed following the rebels’ threat to take Juba, where fighting erupted on December 15 before it spread across the oil-producing East African country.

Lt. Col. Paddy Ankunda, the Ugandan military spokesman, said Tuesday that Ugandan and South Sudanese army officials are drafting a “status of forces agreement” that will soon be signed by both countries after Kiir requested the Ugandans extend their deployment.

When that pact is signed, he said, “there could be things under the agreement which the forces might engage in.” He said a Ugandan army colonel previously with the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia has been appointed as head of Ugandan forces in South Sudan, part of wider efforts by Uganda to formalise a mission that is increasingly controversial at home and abroad.

On a recent trip to Juba, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni warned Machar that East African countries would unite to “defeat” him if he did not start talks with the government.

It now appears Museveni is going it alone, sending to South Sudan thousands of men and hardware that may have given government forces an edge against rebels who threatened Juba. Kiir has refused to release the political detainees who are Machar’s allies, one of the conditions set by the rebels before they can sign any ceasefire deal with the government.

Ugandan officials initially said troops were deployed to South Sudan to protect key installations such as the airport as well as to facilitate civilian evacuations.

Amid rumours some Ugandan forces have been killed or wounded in South Sudan, Ugandan lawmakers on Tuesday met for a special session to discuss the legality of the deployment.

Museveni is highly influential in Juba, where his prestige is based in part on his decades long support for the armed secessionist movement that eventually led to the creation in 2011 of the new state of South Sudan.

PRAGUE — Palestinian diplomats have apologised for hiding illegal weapons at the Prague embassy where a blast killed the ambassador on New Year’s Day, the Czech foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

“A high-ranking Palestinian foreign ministry official... issued an official apology from the Palestinian side for the illegal presence of weapons on the premises of the Palestinian embassy,” the ministry said in a statement.

After the deadly blast, police found 12 firearms at the embassy, including sub-machineguns and sidearms that were not officially registered in the Czech Republic.

They have refused further comment on the weapons pending the results of an official probe.

The DNES newspaper said police found Skorpion VZ61 sub-machineguns and VZ82 sidearms produced in the former Czechoslovakia and supplied to the Palestine Liberation Organisation before communism fell in Czechoslovakia in 1989.

The Palestinians also apologised “for the incident that resulted in the tragic death of Palestinian ambassador Jamal Al Jamal on January 1”, the ministry statement added.

Jamal, 56, died only three months after taking office, following an explosion that occurred soon after he opened a safe.

Czech police have described it as an accident, but have refused further comment pending their investigation.

The late diplomat’s daughter Rana Al Jamal, however, believes her father was murdered.

Czech foreign ministry spokeswoman Johana Grohova refused to identify the official who issued the apology on Monday.

“Both sides have agreed it is necessary to wait for the outcome of the police investigation... The Palestinian side has expressed its resolve to fully accept its conclusions,” the Czech foreign ministry said.

“The Palestinian side stressed it had drawn the relevant conclusions and taken the necessary measures to prevent similar incidents from happening,” it added.

DUBAI — The ruler of Dubai, a Gulf trade and investment hub with strong links to Iran, said in remarks broadcast on Monday that the international community should ease sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

Under a deal struck in November, Iran is expected to curb its nuclear activity in exchange for a limited easing of the international sanctions. The pact will come into force January 20, Iran and world powers agreed on Sunday.

Asked whether he thought it was time to lift the sanctions, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who is also the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, told British broadcaster the BBC: “I think so and give Iran a space... Iran is our neighbour and we don’t want any problem, he said, adding that “everybody will benefit”.

Despite a decade of sanctions, Iran has managed to get most of the commodities and goods it needs via Dubai’s flourishing re-export market, although new embargoes imposed by the United States and its allies in late 2011 and early 2012 have hit it hard.

The vast majority of trade between Iran and its Gulf Arab neighbours is routed through Dubai, home to tens of thousands of ethnic Iranians and one of seven emirates making up the United Arab Emirates.

Iran says its atomic energy programme is aimed purely at electricity generation and other civilian purposes, although past Iranian attempts to hide sensitive nuclear activity from UN non-proliferation inspectors raised concerns.

“I think they’re telling the truth when they say just for civilian power”, Sheikh Mohammed said in the interview.

Sisi should stay in army

Shortly after the November 24 deal, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif went to the UAE to try and improve relations with the US ally.

Across the Gulf from Iran, the UAE stands to benefit directly from any easing of sanctions under the nuclear deal that have dampened regional trade.

Zarif met Sheikh Mohammed during his December visit and the UAE was the first Gulf Arab state to cautiously welcome November’s nuclear deal. The UAE foreign minister flew to Iran days after the agreement was signed, on a trip planned before the deal, calling for a partnership with the Islamic Republic.

The six Sunni Muslim-ruled members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are wary of Iranian power in the Middle East, fearing the Shiite Muslim-led country is seeking regional dominance and stirring sectarian tension. Tehran denies this.

But they have also welcomed Iran’s “new direction” under President Hassan Rouhani and said Tehran should do more to promote stability in the region.

Sheikh Mohammed also said Egypt, which is due to vote on a constitutional referendum this week, was better off without Islamist president Mohamed Morsi who was deposed by the army in July after mass protests against his rule.

The UAE is deeply mistrustful of the Muslim Brotherhood and relations soured when Morsi became Egypt’s first freely elected president after the downfall of autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

The UAE, along with Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia, have championed army chief General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi who deposed Morsi, and have poured billions of dollars to shore up the country’s beleaguered economy since Morsi’s downfall.

There has been widespread speculation about whether Sisi, who is depicted by his supporters as a saviour who will restore stability to the shaken country, would run for presidential elections slated for later this year.

Sheikh Mohammed said Sisi was better off in the army, saying: “I hope he stays in the army. And someone else [stands] for the presidency.”

On Syria, Sheikh Mohammed said the UAE was only comfortable supporting displaced Syrians in Jordan and Turkey, as opposed to providing support to rebel groups, some of whom are extremist in nature.