Middle Orient News

Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama may discuss the Syria crisis on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit next week in Bali, a Kremlin aide said on Thursday. “It would be rather logical to meet (Obama) in Bali, taking into account the work on the Syrian issue,” …

A mortar shell hit the compound of the Chinese Embassy in Syria’s capital Damascus, damaging the building and injuring a Syrian employee. It was the first time that the Chinese Embassy was hit since the Syrian conflict broke out 2-and-a-half years ago.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul on Tuesday warned of an emergence of radical Islamists in Syria in the neighbor’s long-running armed conflict. “Civil war is the most merciless of wars. As these conflicts drag out, radicalism and extremism take root to establish their own infrastructure and threaten not only the

International disarmament experts arrived Tuesday in the Syrian capital to begin the daunting task of cataloguing the country’s arsenal of chemical weapons ahead of its destruction. Nineteen inspectors from The Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons travelled by road from Lebanon a day after UN experts left Damascus after probing alleged gas …

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon met here late Monday with Nabil El-Arabi, Secretary General of the Arab League, discussing with him issues pertaining to the Syrian crisis. Ban briefed his counterpart on recent developments at the United Nations relating to Syria and expressed strong hopes that the successful

A new bill to replace a parliamentary motion passed last year authorizing cross-border military operations in Syria will be on Parliament’s agenda on Oct. 3, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç has said. 

Turkish President Abdullah Gül has hailed the historic phone conversation between U.S. President Barack Obama and Iran’s newly-elected leader, Hassan Rouhani, on Sept. 27 – the highest-level contact between the two countries since 1979. “I am pleased to learn the phone call between President Obama and President Rohani,” Gül said, …

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was scheduled to have a tête-à-tête meeting with new Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani on Friday in İstanbul to discuss the latest developments in the region, particularly

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has welcomed a draft resolution of the U.N. Security Council to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons. The resolution itself is important, Davutoğlu said Sept. 27, since the Security Council has considered the Syrian crisis as

Iran would open its nuclear facilities to international inspectors as part of broad negotiations with the United States that could eventually restore diplomatic relations between the adversaries and those talks have the backing of the nation’s supreme leader, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said Sunday.