Middle Orient

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul vowed Tuesday to defend the country’s secular traditions as he announced a fresh bid for the presidency despite deep-rooted opposition over his Islamist past.

Suicide bombings in a northern Iraqi town Tuesday targeted a religious minority in one of the deadliest attacks in Iraq in months.

In the nine months since she was born, tiny Fatima Jubouri first lost her father, then gunmen killed her mother and uncle and she was left alone and uncared for in a pile of garbage in Baghdad.

A Polish soldier was killed Tuesday in eastern Afghanistan, the Polish Defense Ministry said. He is the first from the European nation to die in the Afghan conflict, according to a CNN count of NATO casualty figures.

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu easily won re-election as head of the rightist Likud party and pledged on Wednesday to reclaim Israel’s leadership.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Tuesday warned Israel of a “great surprise” in the event of another war between the Lebanese guerrilla group and the Jewish state.

Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, has called for a summit of the nation’s main political factions in an attempt to break Iraq’s political paralysis. 

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas plans to hold legislative and presidential elections within six months, PA officials in Ramallah said Sunday.

  The Baghdad government plans to send 6,000 Kurdish soldiers — known as peshmerga — to help secure oil and electricity installations in the multiethnic region of Kirkuk.

Turkey and Iraq agreed to try to end the presence of a Kurdish rebel group in Iraq, Turkey’s prime minister told a news conference Tuesday, while four more US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq as US troop levels reached an all-time high of about 162,000. “We …