Middle Orient

The United States faces an increased threat of attack from Al Qaeda, which will likely try to use battle-hardened associates in Iraq to strike inside the United States, an intelligence report warned on Tuesday.

Libya said on Wednesday the ball is in Europe’s court over the fate of six foreign medics reprieved from a death sentence for infecting children with the AIDS virus but who are still anxiously waiting to return home after eight years behind bars.

Israel has been passing messages to Syria for months through Turkey and has yet to receive assurances peace talks would lead Damascus to sever ties with Iran, Hamas and Hizbollah, officials said on Wednesday.

The top Iraqi leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq has been arrested and told interrogators that Osama Ben Laden’s inner circle wields considerable influence over the group, the US command said Wednesday.

Republicans in the US Senate on Wednesday blocked a Democratic measure which would have required President George W. Bush to pull most combat troops out of Iraq by the end of April 2008.

A year after his Fateh movement was trounced at the polls, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Wednesday he will call new legislative elections, a move designed to freeze the Islamist Hamas from power.

Al-Qaeda has regenerated and is plotting attacks against the United States, according to a US intelligence report.

At least 16 Pakistani soldiers are reported to have been killed in an ambush against a military convoy near the Afghan border.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has called for early elections in the Palestinian territories, denouncing Hamas and declaring “even the devil cannot match their lies”.

The U.S. military on Wednesday announced the arrest of a senior leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, an insurgent who, the military said, is casting himself as a “conduit” between the top leaders of al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq.