AL-ARBAEEN, Libya, April 6, (Agencies): Libyan rebels regained ground in a new advance on an oil port on Wednesday but accused NATO of inaction hindering their quest to oust Muammar Gaddafi.
NATO said Gaddafi was making it increasingly difficult for its pilots to carry out air strikes by ensconcing his forces in heavily populated areas and using civilians as human shields.
In their eastern heartland, ill-trained insurgents thrust back westwards towards the contested oil port of Brega, recovering mostly desert terrain lost in a pell-mell retreat from Gaddafi’s superior firepower the day before.
Rebels returning to the tiny outpost of al-Arbaeen, midway between Brega and their frontline town of Ajdabiyah, spoke of rocket duels close to Brega’s port as both sides strived to end a ragged stalemate in the oil-producing state’s civil war.
There was little doubt the rebels had made ground after falling back at least 40 kms (25 miles) on Tuesday but it was impossible to verify accounts that they were closing in on Brega once again.
There were reports of mortar and rocket battles near the town on Libya’s desolate Mediterranean highway 80 kms (50 miles) west of Ajdabiyah. Fighting had resumed at daybreak after government forces were resupplied with ammunition and swung east from Brega, rebel officer Mohamed el-Masrafy told Reuters.

“God willing, we are going to try to enter Brega today,” said rebel Idriss Abdel Karim, but he and various comrades complained of a lack of support from NATO bombers.
“(Government forces) are scared of NATO air strikes but NATO doesn’t bomb anything in the first place,” he said.
“There have been no air strikes. We hear the sound, but they don’t bomb anything,” said Hossam Ahmed, another rebel.
“What is NATO waiting for? We have cities that are being destroyed. Ras Lanuf, Bin Jawad, Brega, and Gaddafi is destroying Misrata completely,” added Said Emburak, an Ajdabiyah resident.
NATO’s air strikes are targeting Gaddafi’s military infrastructure but only to protect civilians, not to provide close air support for rebels, much to their dismay, as part of a no-fly zone mandated by the UN Security Council.
Still, their claims of abandonment since NATO took over the mission from a US-British-French coalition, whose initial onslaught on Gaddafi’s forced had tilted the war the rebels’ way, put the Western military alliance on the defensive.

Spokeswoman Carmen Romero maintained that “the pace of our operations continues unabated. The ambition and the position of our strikes has not changed”.
NATO, accused of mission failure by Libyan rebels, admitted Wednesday it has to be “particularly careful” with its air strikes as government troops are using civilians as human shields, but vowed to do everything to protect civilians in Misrata.
France pledged to open a sea corridor to the besieged Mediterranean port and rebels played down losing considerable ground to government forces as just the usual stakes in desert warfare.
“NATO forces have been particularly careful to avoid injury to civilians who are in close proximity to the fighting, often precisely because of the tactics of government forces,” the deputy commander of operations, Rear Admiral Russell Harding told journalists.
“Libyan government forces have increasingly shifted to non-conventional tactics, blending in with road traffic and using civilian life as a shield for their advance,” he said at the base in Naples overseeing operations.

The mandate to protect the civilian population was more challenging because of the stipulations of the UN Security Council resolution approving the mission, which explicitly rules out the use of ground troops.
“Because we are not allowed forces on the ground, there is a physical limit to what we are able to do in that respect,” he said.
Libyan forces using these new tactics were moving eastwards “in the direction of Ajdabiya, posing a direct threat to that city and beyond that to Benghazi”, he said.
“In response, NATO has pursued direct strikes on advancing forces and their logistics and munitions supply chains,” he said.
“NATO has also used surgical air strikes to sever the main supply route between Ajdabiya and Misrata,” he said, referring to the city of 500,000 in western Libya that has been besieged by Kadhafi’s forces for more than a month.

Jordan
Jordan has sent fighter aircraft to a European air base to support a no-fly zone over Libya and protect humanitarian flights from the Arab kingdom, Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh was quoted as saying on Wednesday. The Jordan Times newspaper quoted Judeh as saying that Royal Jordanian Air Force fighter aircraft landed at the base two days ago. He did not say how many fighter jets had been sent.
The official Petra News Agency said Judeh told newspaper editors that Jordan was offering “logistical support for enforcement of the no-fly zone mandated by a United Nations resolution”.
It said he told the editors that the fighter aircraft would also protect the aid flights, the first of which landed at Benghazi airport on Monday.
Qatar was the first Arab country to contribute planes to police the no-fly zone. Last Thursday a French armed forces spokesman said fighter jets from the United Arab Emirates had arrived at an air base in Sardinia to support NATO’s Libya operation, meant to protect civilians caught up in a civil war between Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and rebel forces.

Syria
Syria closed the country’s only casino Wednesday and reversed a decision that bans teachers from wearing the Islamic veil — moves seen as an attempt to reach out to conservative Muslims ahead of calls for pro-democracy demonstrations.
Syrian activists called for fresh demonstrations on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to honor more than 80 people killed in a crackdown on protests that erupted nearly three weeks ago.
President Bashar Assad’s decisions were unusual concessions to the religiously observant in Syria, which promotes a strictly secular identity.
The protests brought sectarian tensions into the open as thousands of people took to the streets calling for democracy in a country where Alawites — a branch of Shiite Islam that represents just 11 percent of the population — have been in power for nearly 40 years. The country is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim.
“All these moves will not stop the protests at all,” said Radwan Ziadeh, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC and the founder of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Policy.

He said Syria’s government does not understand that citizens “should be free to demonstrate peacefully.” Instead, the government “wants to solve the problems through killing and oppression.”
Assad banned the niqab, the full Islamic face veil that reveals only a woman’s eyes, in July as part of his campaign to mute sectarian differences. Hundreds of primary school teachers who were wearing the niqab at government-run schools were transferred in June to administrative jobs, angering conservative Muslims.
Human Rights Watch called on Syria’s president to rein in his security forces and stop them from firing on anti-government demonstrators.
“President Bashar al-Assad should immediately order Syrian security forces to stop using unjustified lethal force against anti-government protesters,” the New York-based rights group said in a statement late Tuesday.
Citing lists compiled by Syrian rights group, HRW said the number of demonstrators and bystanders killed since protests erupted in Syria mid-March was at least 100.

“For three weeks, Syria’s security forces have been firing on largely peaceful protesters,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW’s Middle East director.
Russia on Wednesday came out in support of Syria’s reported intentions to adopt major reforms as President Bashar al-Assad faces pressure to pursue political change and end emergency rule.
President Dmitry Medvedev, who last year became the first Russian or even Soviet-era leader to travel to Syria, spoke to his Syrian counterpart by phone to express his support for his government plans to launch reforms, the Kremlin said in a statement.
“The president supported the intentions of the Syrian leadership to start internal reforms announced by Bashar al-Assad with the aim of preventing an unfavorable development of the situation (and) human casualties, for the sake of preserving civilian peace,” the Kremlin said.

Yemen
Defying a deadly government crackdown, tens of thousands of protesters on Wednesday poured into the streets of Yemen’s second largest city in the latest demonstrations against the long serving president.
Two groups of protesters met up in the city center where a general strike had closed shops and banks in what activists were calling the “Tsunami of Taiz” and the largest demonstration in this troubled southern city to date.
More than 120 people have been killed since Yemen’s protests calling for the removal of President Ali Abdullah Saleh began on Feb 11, inspired by popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.
In Taiz alone, 16 people were killed Monday when government forces opened fire on demonstrators.
The rising death toll across the country has helped inflame public opinion against the government and sent even more people flooding into the streets of the Arab world’s most impoverished country.
Running out of food, water and oil, Yemen is wracked by a tribal rebellion in the north, a separatist movement in the south and the presence of an al-Qaeda affiliate operating in the remote mountainous hinterlands. Saleh has been a US ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, but there are signs he is losing American support.

Yemen’s central government, run by Saleh for the last 30 years, is weak and relies on the support of the powerful tribes. It is widely seen as riddled with corruption.
“People will not accept anything but him leaving,” said activist Boushra al-Moqtari, adding that demonstrators went back into the streets in “defiance of the regime’s threats.”
Several cities in the country now host permanent “protest camps” in the main square, mimicking the two-week long Tahrir Square sit-in that brought down Egypt’s president in February. On Friday, hundreds of thousands demonstrated against Saleh across the country.
The president has offered to step down at the end of this year if a transfer of power acceptable to him is reached. But the opposition fears that Saleh, a consummate survivor, is just stalling for time, in hopes that he can find a way to stay in power or just hand over control to one of his sons.
The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Yemen’s neighbors Oman and Saudi Arabia, has also offered to try to mediate a peace deal.

Egypt
Egyptian authorities arrested the former housing minister, a security source said on Wednesday, a step which may add to worries among real estate investors that land transactions made under previous governments may be voided.
Ibrahim Soliman was the second former housing minister to be arrested in connection with deals approved while in office, part of a campaign against corruption targeting figures from the era of deposed President Hosni Mubarak.
Soliman was responsible for several controversial contracts with real estate developers.
Property companies have already been reeling under a string of legal challenges contesting their land holdings since a court ruled last year that a deal with Talaat Moustafa Group (TMG) , the country’s biggest developer, was illegal.
TMG has been in a long-running legal battle for its $3 billion Madinaty project because the land was not auctioned and was sold below market value.
That suit has prompted several copycat cases, including one against Egypt’s second biggest listed developer Palm Hills and Egyptian Resorts.

Palm Hill’s Chairman and Chief Executive Yasseen Mansour is also facing trial in a case connected to the other housing minister, Ahmed el-Maghrabi, for profiteering and wasting public funds.
An Egyptian panel has summoned ousted president Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal for questioning in the latest corruption probe against figures of the former regime, state media said Wednesday.
Gamal Mubarak would appear before the panel next week, state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper reported, adding that the former president’s chief of staff, Zakaria Azmi, would be quizzed on Friday.
The panel, which was set up to investigate illicit gains, would question Gamal about “complaints brought against him that he inflated his wealth” illegally, the daily reported.

Gamal, Mubarak’s younger son, held a senior position in the ruling party and was believed to have had presidential ambitions, which he denied.
The widely held belief that his father would appoint Gamal as his successor helped galvanise opposition to the former president, who was forced to step down in February after 18 days of protests.
Although Mubarak’s resignation was the protesters’ main demand, demonstrations have continued to press for the trial of him and former regime officials.
The former president, under house arrest in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, faces a financial investigation by a military-appointed panel, the official MENA news agency reported on Tuesday.