Middle Orient

ANKARA (Reuters) – The Turkish military said on Tuesday it had opened fire on 21 Kurdish PKK fighters trying to enter Turkey from northern Iraq. The General Staff, in a statement on its Internet site, said its forces opened fire on the guerrillas late on Monday 3 km (2 miles) …

GAZA (Reuters) – Envoys from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction visited the Gaza Strip on Tuesday to brief members there on his bid for reconciliation with the territory’s Islamist Hamas rulers, officials said. It was the first Fatah mission to Gaza since Hamas took over a year ago, triggering …

LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) – Israel and Syria agreed this week to hold new rounds of indirect peace talks mediated by Turkey in July, Turkey’s foreign minister said on Tuesday. Israel and Syria concluded a second round of indirect peace talks on Monday and agreed to continue the negotiations, though not face-to-face …

GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli air strikes killed six Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, medical workers said, amid Egyptian efforts to broker a truce between Israel and militant groups in the Hamas-controlled territory. The Islamic Jihad militant group said five of its members were killed when a missile …

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – An Egyptian-mediated truce that appears likely between Israel and Hamas will begin with only a gradual and partial easing of an Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, officials said on Tuesday. “If Hamas keeps the ceasefire, we can gradually deliver more goods and supplies,” an Israeli official …

GENEVA (Reuters) – The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan drove up the number of world refugees for a second straight year in 2007, the United Nations said on Tuesday. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said there were 11.4 million refugees under its responsibility at the end of 2007, …

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanon will soon form a national unity government in line with a Doha agreement to end the country’s political crisis, Arab League chief Amr Moussa said on Sunday.

(Reuters) – Iraq has sent army and police reinforcements to the southern city of Amara to prepare for a crackdown on Shi’ite militias. The operation will be the latest in a series of offensives by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that are intended to stamp the government’s authority over areas once …

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The movement of Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will not compete in local elections under its own name but join with other groups and ask its followers to vote for those candidates, Sadr officials said on Sunday.

(Reuters) – A U.S. soldier was killed on Thursday in the Kadhimiya district of northwestern Baghdad, when his vehicle was struck by a bomb, the U.S. military reported.