Middle Orient

The head of the Turkish armed forces insisted Wednesday on the need for a military incursion into northern Iraq to hunt down Turkish Kurd rebels based there, but said he needed the government’s green light to do so.

America’s No. 2 diplomat in Iraq predicted progress by fall on bringing together Iraq’s feuding factions as violence claimed more lives Wednesday, including 14 people killed in a late night car bombing near a Shiite shrine in the capital.

Tony Blair was Wednesday named special envoy of the Middle East peace Quartet shortly after stepping down as British prime minister and tasked with spearheading efforts to create a Palestinian state.

Israeli army incursions into the Gaza Strip killed at least 12 Palestinians on Wednesday, including eight fighters and a 12-year-old boy, in the bloodiest fighting Gaza has seen since Hamas took control there two weeks ago.

According to sources from Ingushetia, on Tuesday morning of June 26, a mobile squad of Mujahideen attacked a base of Russian occupation gang the so-called “reconnaissance squad”.

Among the impoverished Iraqi refugees queuing for food aid at a Catholic charity in Damascus stands 65-year-old Hirmiz Hanna, puzzled and upset at his fate.

The plight of some 200 Gazans, stranded in no-man’s-land on the Israeli border in a desperate bid to flee last week’s Islamist takeover of the territory, is dividing Israeli opinion.

In a world where more people are on the move than ever, governments jittery about cross-border criminals, terrorists and illegal migrants must not shirk their duty to protect refugees, a UN official said on Tuesday.

Syria has expressed readiness to help curb Middle East instability in exchange for peace with Israel but will not easily give up its alliance with Iran as demanded by the Jewish state.

A roadside bomb explosion in the Somali capital on Tuesday killed five women and a man and wounded nine other people, witnesses said.