KUWAIT CITY, 2 February 2005 — The Kuwaiti Parliament approved tough new powers for the security forces yesterday in the face of a wave of unrest by militants that has rocked the emirate.
Officials said the militants received a crushing blow during a fierce gunbattle on Monday but a militant group warned Kuwait in an Internet statement that it faced a fierce war unless US forces pulled out.
“We have succeeded in eliminating most of the wanted (militants),” Interior Minister Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah told reporters after a seven-hour closed-door session of Parliament called to discuss the violence.
Sheikh Nawaf pledged that the government would hunt down the extremists until it crushed them.
MPs approved a government request for new powers for the security forces to search private homes for illegal weapons and issued a statement expressing full support for the government’s efforts to tackle the unrest.
The bill will now be referred to Emir Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah and come into force one month after its publication in the official gazette, MPs said.
The additional powers were granted for a renewable period of one year.
The government says that large quantities of illegal arms, mostly left behind by Iraqi forces which occupied Kuwait before being expelled in the 1991 Gulf war, remain in private hands.
Kuwaiti authorities have seized significant quantities of arms and explosives in a series of raids over the past month.
Yesterday’s special session of Parliament came a day after security forces fought their biggest battle yet with terrorists, killing five, including a Saudi, and arresting the radicals’ leader, Amer Khlaif Al-Enezi. One Kuwaiti civilian was also killed in the nine-hour gunbattle south of Kuwait City, the fourth in three weeks.
Relatives of Amer publicly distanced themselves from him, saying he and his cohorts should be relegated “to the dustbin of history for what they have committed.” The statement, signed by Amer’s father, Khlaif Al-Enezi, and signed by scores of other relatives, was published by Kuwaiti newspapers.
