Eurasia

Turkey and Russia launched joint patrols Friday in northeastern Syria, under a deal that halted a Turkish offensive against Syrian Kurdish fighters who were forced to withdraw from the border area following Ankara’s incursion.

Saad al-Hariri resigned as Lebanon’s prime minister on Tuesday, declaring he had hit a “dead end” in trying to resolve a crisis unleashed by huge protests against the ruling elite and plunging the country deeper into turmoil.

What remains of ISIS — the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — is yet to acknowledge the death of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who died in a raid by US forces in northern Syria on Saturday.

Iran and Russia on Tuesday condemned U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to maintain a military presence near oil fields in northeastern Syria, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying any exploitation of resources would be illegal.

It is a country unto itself, and nobody knows what to do with it. In a barren prison camp in northern Syria – tens of thousands of ISIS members are running what feels like a mini caliphate – abiding by the rules of the extremist terror group, and abiding by …

The day after anti-government protests erupted in Iraq, Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani flew into Baghdad late at night and took a helicopter to the heavily fortified Green Zone, where he surprised a group of top security officials by chairing a meeting in place of the prime minister.

A group of men shouting Hezbollah and Amal Movement slogans attacked protesters and overrun a sit-in blocking a major highway before chasing the demonstrators down the hill to Martyrs’ Square and destroying the 13 day-old sit-in.

BEIRUT – Hundreds of Lebanese supporters of the militant Hezbollah group, some wielding sticks, attacked a protest camp set up by anti-government demonstrators in central Beirut, burning some of its tents and dismantling others Tuesday.

With ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed one day and the group’s official spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir the next, there’s a giant hole in the pseudo-Caliphate structure of the so-called Islamic State. The group must now, by its strict religious tenets, find a new (supposed) descendant of the Prophet Muhammed …

Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi has ordered the country’s elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) to help put down anti-government protests that have rocked the country over the past weeks, Western news agencies are reporting.