Middle Orient

According to the source inside the command of the Mujahideen during the past four months (March-June 2007), as a result of active offensive operations and diversionary attacks, units of Chechen Armed Forces have established a firm control over the most of the mountain-woody areas in southern Chechnya.

More than 17 people have been killed and hundreds wounded in a gunbattle between security forces and Lal Mosque students here Tuesday that led to put red security alert across the country, said police and hospital sources.

An Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq boasted before last week’s failed bombings in London and Glasgow that his group was planning to attack British targets and that “those who cure you will kill you,” The Times newspaper revealed Wednesday.

Released BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, kidnapped March 12 in Gaza by a group calling itself the Army of Islam, described his nearly four months in captivity as being “buried alive.”

Recently, there have been a series of high-level meetings of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Crops (IRGC) subordinate the Quds Force commanders in Tehran to find new ways in meddling more easily in Iraq.

Senior Iranian leaders know about the operations of Iran’s Qods Force in fomenting violence in Iraq, the U.S. military said on Monday, in some of the most direct accusations yet against Tehran over the chaos in Iraq.

A U.S. military official is charging that Iran is using the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah as a “proxy” to arm Shiite militants in Iraq and that the Quds force – an elite military force in Iran – had prior knowledge of a January attack in Karbala in which five Americans …

Europe’s new envoy to Somalia praised the interim government on Monday for steps to reach out to political opponents ahead of a national reconciliation conference intended to end a bloody insurgency.

Most camera-clicking tourists in the Mediterranean this summer will go home, as usual, without one of the world’s most arresting images — Algiers and its bay.

Egypt’s president has denied that the son-in-law of the country’s late leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was a spy, the state-run news agency reported Monday, breaking the state’s silence soon after the man’s death.