The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Manama

Gulf countries, cautious about the nuclear standoff between the United States and Iran, signalled loudly at a regional security conference on Saturday their opposition to any military option against Tehran.

Washington, wrong-footed by its own National Intelligence Estimate in its accusations that Iran wanted nuclear weapons, has emphasised that no options have been ruled out in forcing it to end its nuclear enrichment programme.

The NIE on Tuesday said that Iran, which insists its current programme is for peaceful power generation, had halted a secret nuclear weapons programme four years ago.

"We want the military factor (of Iran's nuclear programme) to be eliminated," the secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Abdulrahman al-Attiyah told AFP on Saturday.

"What we care for in the GCC is finding solutions that enhance security and stability t and believe in dialogue as a way to solve the crisis," between the West and Iran, he said.

Gulf countries remain wary of Iran's nuclear ambitions but do not want to see its standoff with the West escalating into a military confrontation.

"We are not for the military confrontation option," said Attiyah.

Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Hamed bin Jassem al-Thani went further, calling on Washington to engage Tehran in dialogue to reach a solution.

"Direct talks do not mean agreeing (from the start) with the other party," he told conference delegates on Saturday, among them US Defence Secretary Robert Gates.

Qatar, one of the key US-allies in the region, hosts the US army's Central Command which directed the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

But in a surprising move, it invited Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to attend a GCC annual summit on Monday, making him the first Iranian president to take part in a Gulf leaders summit.

"I don't think we can try to solve our problems through trying to seal Iran (off from) the region. They are a very important player," he said defending Qatar's decision.

He also reiterated that being "pushed into a military confrontation with Iran" would not be in the interest of the GCC countries.

Toby Dodge, a Middle East consulting senior fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said the GCC fears of military escalation in the Gulf were justified.

"Iran would retaliate to any (US) military action and the Gulf region would be affectedt I assume that their strategy is to support an active US policy to restrain Iran (on the nuclear front), but short of military action," he told AFP.

But he said that the GCC fears go beyond Iran's nuclear programme to encompass Tehran's "ambition for regional hegemony." GCC countries are worried about "Iran's dominance in the region," agreed Mamoun Fandy, who is also an IISS senior fellow for Gulf security.

"Iran is winning in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Iran is winning the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt," he told AFP referring to Tehran's clout over Islamist movements in the Sunni-dominated Arab countries.

AP, Islamabad

A suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into a police outpost Sunday, killing six people in an area where the military has been battling Islamic militants loyal to a fugitive cleric, an official said.

Four civilians - including two children - and two policemen died in the attack at the Nimgole post, said Amjad Iqbal, a spokesman for the military command center in Pakistan's Swat Valley. Several others were injured.

The outpost is near Imam Dheri, the headquarters of pro-Taliban cleric Maulana Fazlullah that troops captured Thursday. "There's nothing we could say about the perpetrators before investigating, but involvement by remnants of Fazlullah's militants can't be ruled out," Iqbal said.

The attack occurred a day after the commander of military operations in Swat said insurgents in the area were on the run but remained dangerous.

Militants seized tracts of the Swat valley, a former tourist destination 100 miles from Islamabad, this summer, raising concern about the spread of Islamic militancy from the Pakistan-Afghan border.

Followers of Fazlullah had fended off security forces sent to reinforce the area's beleaguered police since July, but have been scattered by a major army operation launched last month.

Maj. Gen. Nasser Janjua said Saturday his 20,000-strong force has retaken all the towns seized by the militants, killing 290 of them and capturing 140, while driving a hard-core group of some 400-500 into the Piochar side valley.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani army has driven Islamic militants from all the towns in a scenic northern valley and killed 290 of the followers of a pro-Taliban cleric who has called for a holy war against the government, a general said Saturday.

AFP, Baghdad

Another spate of bloodshed involving a suicide bomber, a rocket attack and a US military operation left at least 24 people dead across Iraq on Saturday, police and the military said.

Iraqi soldiers fired on a suicide car bomber as he sped toward their checkpoint in a northern oil hub Sunday, and two of the troops died when the vehicle exploded, police said.

The attack in Beiji came just a day after a suicide truck bomber disguising his payload as a construction delivery attacked a police station in a residential neighborhood of the northern city. Eight people died in Saturday's attack, police said.

Six people were killed when a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-packed car into a police building in Iraq's northern oil refinery town of Baiji, a security official said.

The bomber attacked the headquarters of the quick reaction force in Baiji, north of Tikrit, the home town of executed dictator Saddam Hussein, an official from the US-Iraqi operated Joint Coordination Committee (JCC) office in the town told AFP.

The JCC oversees security in the province of Salaheddin, of which Tikrit is the capital.

The rocket attack, in which a missile slammed into the home of a local leader of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's movement, killed the activist, his wife and two children, police said.

Uday Hamid Ali, from Sadr's office in the town of Al-Nuamaniyah, 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of Baghdad in Wasit province, died with his family when the rocket hit their house, police officer Ali Fadhel said.

A medic at Nuamaniyah hospital confirmed receiving their bodies.

US air and ground assault teams, meanwhile, killed 12 suspected Al-Qaeda militants and detained 13 in raids across Iraq on Saturday, the American military said.

Ten suspected militants were killed near Yusifiyah, south of Baghdad, in an operation targeting Al-Qaeda members, a statement said.

AFP, Jerusalem

Activists built a mock Palestinian "settlement" in the West Bank on Saturday to protest a potential Israeli expansion there as Israel's housing minister vowed to proceed with a similar project in occupied east Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Authority, the United States and the United Nations have warned that the expansion of settlements could derail the Middle East peace process, revived just last month at a US-sponsored international conference.

Around 40 activists gathered in the hotly contested E-1 corridor early Saturday morning to erect a small shanty-style house near the massive Maale Adumim settlement in the West Bank outside Jerusalem. The Israeli government has plans for a vast project there aimed at linking Jerusalem to Maale Adumim, home to 30,000 Jewish settlers.

"We have built the first house of a Palestinian town. This land is Palestinian and should be dedicated to a Palestinian expansion and not an Israeli expansion," said Jonathan Polak, an Israeli pacifist.

AFP, Washington

The US intelligence community came under fire over the weekend on two fronts, as conservatives criticized a recent CIA report on Iran's nuclear program and the Justice Department announced a probe into the agency's destruction of videotapes showing interrogations of terror suspects. The intelligence services are still trying to restore their credibility following the debacle over alleged weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the main justification for the US-led 2003 invasion. After months of increasingly bellicose rhetoric from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney over the threat of Iran's nuclear program, the US intelligence agencies on Monday declared with "high confidence" that Iran halted a secret nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure. The assessment of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) overturned long-held US policy assumptions that Iran is bent on obtaining nuclear weapons, regardless of international demands or sanctions. Democrats in Congress, who said the Bush administration was overstating the Iranian threat, now took a back seat to conservative Republican critics, who said the report understated the Iranian threat. Chief among them was former US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, who wrote in a commentary this week that "the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported."

AP, Tokyo

Japan's crown princess celebrated her 44th birthday on Sunday, still suffering from a stress disorder that has kept her from most official duties and public appearances since 2003. Officials say Crown Princess Masako is gradually recovering from "adjustment disorder," a stress-induced illness, and needs rest and quiet. She has been seen occasionally at family events, particularly with her daughter, Princess Aiko, who is now in kindergarten. Masako is taking medication for her illness and sees a counselor. Masako, a former diplomat and graduate of Harvard and Oxford, married Crown Prince Naruhito, heir to the throne, in 1993. She was under intense pressure to bear a son, and suffered a miscarriage in 1999. Her daughter was born in 2001.