Four American and two international peacekeepers were wounded Thursday in two bomb blasts on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and required medical evacuation, U.S. defense officials said.

All six troops were with the Multinational Force of Observers (MFO), an international coalition set up to keep the peace between Egypt and Israel after a treaty was reached between the two nations at Camp David, Md., in 1978. The two international troops hit an improvised explosive device with their vehicle, and then the four Americans were hit with a second explosion on another vehicle while attempting to respond and provide help, said Maj. Roger M. Cabiness II, a military spokesman at the Pentagon.

The multinational force evacuated the soldiers by air with non-life-threatening injuries, said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, another Pentagon spokesman, in a statement. The attacks occurred in the northeastern section of the Sinai, which has become increasingly volatile as militants inspired by the Islamic State have launched several large attacks.

U.S. military officials in Washington did not identify from which service the wounded Americans are from, but the MFO traditionally comprises U.S. soldiers and National Guardsmen in a unit called Task Force Sinai. It falls under the command of U.S. Army Central, which oversees Army operations in the Middle East, and includes at least 600 U.S. troops.

Cabiness said that the Pentagon is concerned about deteriorating security conditions in a northeastern part of the peninsula where Egyptian troops and the MFO are exposed to risk. The area is home to MFO North Camp, a base about 10 miles west of the Egypt’s eastern border with Israel. Several improvised bomb attacks have killed Egyptian troops in recent months.

“We are considering what, if any, additional measures might be needed to ensure force protection,” Cabiness said. “This includes bringing in additional equipment if necessary.”

U.S. officials will continue to consult with the governments of Egypt and Israel and with the MFO as it considers any potential changes, military officials said. The force has traditionally been lightly armed and protected.

A rival government controlling western Libya has asked Arab and European countries to hold a regional conference this month to help the North African country stem a flow of migrants, a minister said on Thursday.

Libya has turned into a major transit route for migrants fleeing war and poverty. As two governments fight each other, smugglers exploit a security vacuum to bring Syrians into Libya via Egypt or nationals of sub-Saharan countries via Niger, Sudan and Chad and ship them by boat to Italy.

Two boats packed with migrants sank off the Libyan coast in the past week, killing around 200 people.

“We call for a regional conference at the end of September … to stop this tragedy,” said Mustafa Laqlaib, justice minister in a Tripoli government not recognised by world powers.

“Libya cannot address the flow of migrants alone,” he told reporters. “Libya is just a transit country.”

World and most Arab powers only deal with Libya’s official government based in the east since losing a year ago the capital Tripoli to an armed group, which set up a rival administration.

But the eastern-based government, working out of a remote city, has no control of western Libya from were boats are launched due to its proximity to the Italian island of Lampedusa.

The Tripoli government has asked the European Union for help to train and equip its navy which was largely destroyed during a 2001 uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi. But all cooperation was frozen in 2014 as the European Union has boycotted Tripoli officials.

The United Nations has been hosting peace talks between the two administrations to form a unity government but a Tripoli-based rival parliament, facing divisions, has so far refused to sign a preliminary agreement.

The migrants pay thousands of dollars for the land and sea passage with smugglers often beating and torturing them to press for more money for the final leg of the trip by sea in unseaworthy vessels, rights groups say.

The Bolivian-flagged Haddad 1 freighter which was recently seized off the coast of Crete and was headed for Libya was carrying significant amounts of weapons and ammunition, with Coast Guard officials arguing that this is a very important case.

In a statement issued by the Coast Guard, Greek authorities has recovered a total of 419,950 9mm rounds of ammunition and about 5,000 police-style shotguns from two of the 14 containers that were on the Haddad 1. The weapons and ammunition were purposely hidden behind other items. The remaining containers are expected to be investigated by Friday.

According to Coast Guard sources, the ship owning company of the Haddad 1 is based in Alexandria, Egypt. The crew of four Syrians (one of whom is the ship’s captain) two Indians and one Egyptian is currently being interrogated in order to determine if they were involved with anyone in Greece.

The caretaker Minister of Shipping Christos Zois praised the Coast Guard officers who planned and carried out the operation for their major efforts and announced that more evidence and information on the significant case would soon become available.

The Israeli military said Sept. 3 its air force had attacked a Hamas military position in the Gaza Strip overnight from which gunfire had hit homes in southern Israel.

Shots from Gaza had on Wednesday hit a number of houses in Netiv Haasara, just north of the Palestinian enclave, causing damage but no casualties, it said in a statement.

“In response to the shooting, an IAF (Israel air force) aircraft targeted a Hamas military post in the northern Gaza Strip, from where the shots were fired,” it read.

The army could not say whether the shots from Gaza had been deliberate or stray fire from the Hamas position, identified in Israeli media as a training base.

Palestinian security sources said two missiles fired from the plane hit a training facility in Beit Lahiya belonging to Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, causing damage but no casualties.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/israel-targets-hamas-base-after-gunfire-from-gaza.aspx?pageID=238&nID=87912&NewsCatID=352

A recent string of militant attacks on high-profile targets across Egypt has underscored a growing threat: the fragmented jihadist groups now competing for influence over this country’s Islamist insurgency.

Since June, Egyptian insurgents have used car bombs, suicide attacks, a prominent political assassination and the beheading of a foreign oil worker to terrorize the country. The attacks have marked the most intense period of militant activity since the homegrown insurgency began two years ago.

Instead of a single group, a cluster of independent but increasingly dangerous cells linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have carried out the violence, security experts say. And rivalries between the jihadist groups are expected to spur more attacks.

At least two factions have launched attacks under the Islamic State banner, including a new cell that claims to be operating for the powerful jihadist movement in Cairo. In July, a former army officer announced that his own al-Qaeda-linked group would battle the government. Egyptian officials suspect the former special forces officer, Hisham al-Ashmawy, in two major attacks in June and in a deadly attack on government forces at an army checkpoint last summer.

The army expelled Ashmawy in the mid-2000s after he showed signs of religious radicalization, according to accounts from security officials in the Egyptian press. Now his military training is helping the insurgents, officials say.

“There has been a spread of terrorism both geographically and ideologically across Egypt, and it’s a real problem for the country,” said Zack Gold, visiting fellow and Sinai expert at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies.

“There are multiple and competing jihadi strains in Egypt that are all moving in the same direction. All have similar styles and targets,” Gold said. If they continue to expand, “they will compete with each other for supporters, funding and recruits,” he said. “And this will drive more and larger attacks.”

Egypt has a long and violent history of Islamist militancy, including a jihadist insurgency in the 1990s that the state eventually vanquished. When the president was ousted in a popular uprising in 2011, however, many of those same militants either escaped or were released from jail. Some formed Islamist political parties, but others headed to Egypt’s Sinai desert, where Bedouin tribesmen had routed police during the revolt.

The Sinai Bedouins, who maintain a distinct dialect and culture from mainland Egyptians, had long complained of discrimination and neglect at the hands of the state. The government, in turn, viewed the Bedouins with suspicion and treated the Sinai population as a security threat.

So in the chaos after the rebellion began, the Bedouins in North Sinai took the opportunity to banish security forces. The lawless desert was a prime spot for the jihadists to train, smuggle weapons and begin staging attacks on Israel. Some tribesmen didn’t have the power to stand up to the militants. In other cases, young Bedouin men joined the militant groups.

They eventually coalesced into a single movement called Ansar Bayt al-Maqdes, which later declared itself the “Sinai Province” of the Islamic State.

But it was the 2013 military coup and bloody state crackdown on the Islamist opposition that propelled the insurgency into its current — and more deadly — form. The Sinai-based jihadists shifted their focus from Israel to Egypt, eventually helping kill hundreds of police and soldiers they declared apostates for murdering fellow Muslims.

Ashmawy used his military training and combat experience to help Ansar Bayt al-Maqdes launch some of the more devastating attacks. In addition, the militants recruited police and army informants who alerted them to security forces’ movements, officials said.

“What the state hasn’t faced before are groups that have this same level of sophistication and determination” to carry out attacks, said Mokhtar Awad, research associate at the Center for American Progress. Authorities also believe that Ashmawy masterminded the July 2014 assault on an army checkpoint in Egypt’s remote Western Desert, which killed more than 20 soldiers, Awad said.

“That was the very first time a military checkpoint was actually overrun,” Awad said of the desert attack. “The logistics must have been insane to be able to carry that out. And Ashmawy knows the area very well.”

Ashmawy split with Ansar Bayt al-Maqdes when the group joined the Islamic State as its “Sinai Province,” Gold and Awad said. The reasons are unclear, but media reports at the time said Ashmawy opposed the Islamic State’s harsh tactics against civilians in Iraq and Syria.

Egyptian officials say they believe Ashmawy ordered a failed suicide attack on a tourist site in Luxor and the assassination of state prosecutor Hisham Barakat in Cairo in June. In that attack, a powerful car bomb targeted Barakat’s vehicle convoy outside his home, fatally wounding the prosecutor and shattering windows in the neighborhood.

Those operations were followed in July and August by massive car bombs outside the Italian consulate in Cairo and the internal security headquarters in a nearby suburb. The Islamic State swiftly asserted responsibility for both attacks. Analysts say they believe a pro-Islamic State cell is also operating in Cairo independently of the group’s affiliate in Sinai, which is separated from mainland Egypt by the Suez Canal.

A loyal Islamic State cell in Cairo, Awad said, wouldn’t necessarily need to coordinate with their fellow militants in Sinai. And according to Gold, the presence of Islamic State operatives in Cairo adds to the image of an Egyptian state under siege.

A bigger threat, Awad says, is if either Ashmawy or the Islamic State begin recruiting more widely among the country’s disaffected Islamist youth.

“That’s the real measure of whether or not this jihad can be an existential threat to the Egyptian state,” Awad said.

Egypt’s military will flood the area along the border with Gaza with water, in a new bid to destroy underground tunnels between Sinai and the Palestinian territory, a Palestinian security source told Anadolu Agency.

“The Egyptian army has begun to build huge pipelines along the border with the Gaza Strip,” the source said.

He said the project “aims to destroy underground tunnels by filling the area with water.”

There was no comment from Egyptian authorities on the report.

Blockaded by Israel since 2007, Gaza used to receive much-needed supplies through the network of smuggling tunnels on its border with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Since the 2013 military coup against President Mohamed Morsi, Egyptian authorities have cracked down on the smuggling tunnels along the border with Gaza.

Egypt claims the tunnels are used in militant activities inside Sinai.

Last year, Egyptian authorities began to establish a buffer zone in North Sinai’s city of Rafah along the border with Gaza following a spate of militant attacks against army and security forces.

http://www.aa.com.tr/en/rss/585871–egypt-army-to-flood-gaza-tunnels-with-water-source

British travellers to Morocco have been warned of a “high threat” of terrorism in the North African country.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office changed its terrorism threat level in amended travel advice for Morocco yesterday.

The revised travel advisory said: “Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places visited by foreigners.

“Protective security measures are in place at many Moroccan hotels and sites popular with tourists. Security measures, including security personnel, may be visible in certain areas.”

The FCO added: “The Moroccan authorities have warned of an increased threat linked to the growing number of Moroccans sympathetic or belonging to international terrorist organisations operating in Syria, Iraq and Libya, and regularly report the disruption of terrorist cells.

“There is considered to be a heightened threat of terrorist attack globally against UK interests and British nationals, from groups or individuals motivated by the conflict in Iraq and Syria.

“You should be vigilant at this time.”

Seventeen people were killed and 25 injured in an explosion at a restaurant in Marrakech in April 2011.

Prime Minister Habib Essid received, Tuesday, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Anne Patterson.

In a statement to TAP at the end of the meeting, she said focus was laid on bilateral co-operation regarding co-ordination and permanent exchange of information between the two countries on terrorism.

The meeting also discussed the general situation in Tunisia, particulaly in the economic and security fields, she said, reaffirming her country’s sustained support to the Tunisian democratic process.

Reform of the penitentiary institution and mechanisms of its modernisation were also tackled, the U.S. official pointed out, with  emphasis on the need to step up the exchange of expertise and training of Tunisian security units, besides financial assistance.

http://www.tap.info.tn/en/index.php/politics2/29226-permanent-exchange-of-information-between-tunisia-and-u-s-a-on-terrorism