Middle Orient

Iran has the capacity to meet a major part of Asian and European markets’ natural gas need and is prepared to export the commodity to Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, said the Iranian deputy oil minister on Saturday.

Rival Lebanese leaders say they can agree on a new president in a step seen as vital to defusing a deep political crisis but “everything could still go wrong”, Italy’s foreign minister said on Saturday.

Two Canadian soldiers with the international force in Afghanistan were killed with their interpreter when their armored vehicle hit a homemade bomb on Saturday, the Canadian army said.Here are the figures for foreign military deaths in Afghanistan since the Taliban government was toppled in 2001:

Iraq urged Turkey on Saturday to give it time to implement measures aimed at restricting the movements of Kurdish separatist rebels, a day after Iraq’s president said a Turkish incursion was now “almost inevitable”.

Iraq’s former deputy health minister and a former senior ministry official will soon face trial, the Iraqi government said on Saturday, after accusations they helped Shi’ite militiamen fuel sectarian bloodshed.

The bodies of at least 30 people, including women and children, have been found in a mainly Sunni Arab area of Baghdad, police and government officials said on Saturday.

Afghan security forces need more foreign training and arms to fight the Taliban but when the forces are up to strength the insurgents will not pose a long-term threat to stability, the defense minister said on Saturday.

Two of Pakistan’s leading private television networks, ordered off air during emergency rule, said on Saturday they had been forced to close down altogether after being ordered to halt transmissions via the United Arab Emirates.

At least 30 people have been killed and more than 100 wounded in sectarian clashes between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims in a Pakistani tribal region near the Afghan border, officials said on Saturday.

The widow of a Pakistani journalist, shot dead last year after reporting that an al Qaeda leader was killed by a U.S. missile, was killed in a bomb blast on Saturday in a northwestern tribal region, a family member said.