Middle Orient

BAGHDAD (AP) — Months of bombings and shootings had left US soldiers of every rank in the army’s 502nd Infantry Regiment emotionally ragged and strained. They had lost dozens of their colleagues — more than most units.

Secretary General of Lebanon’s Hezbollah Hassan Nasrollah has said that the Zionist regime has been caught off guard by Hezbullah resistance fighters on the battlefield, forcing the Zionist troopers to flee.

The US Central Intelligence Agency agents have visited Estonia within the framework of the November NATO summit due to take place in Riga, Latvia, daily SL Ohtuleht writes today. The CIA aircraft Boeing 737-300 with an identification number S0508 spent three days in the airport of Tallinn. 

Hizbollah fighters killed eight people in a rocket barrage on Israel and three Israeli soldiers in clashes in Lebanon on Thursday, the deadliest day of the war for Israel in 23 days of fighting. As world powers struggled to agree on a UN resolution to end the fighting, both sides …

LONDON — British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s stance on the Lebanon crisis has deepened divisions in his Labour Party, further weakening his authority and potentially hastening his departure from office. While working furiously to agree a United Nations resolution to resolve the conflict, Blair has refused from its outset to …

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Thousands of Shiites converged on Baghdad ahead of a major demonstration planned for Friday as British and US officials warned that Iraq’s bitter sectarian conflict could push the country into civil war. Shiite protesters were summoned to the capital by radical cleric Moqtada Sadr in order to …

LONDON — The biggest obstacle to creating an international peacekeeping force in Lebanon is determining who will lead it, while questions remain over troops and transport, defence analysts said on Thursday. The two most likely and experienced candidates to lead the peacekeepers would be the European Union or France, with …

BEIRUT — Fadia Ballout can no longer nurse her son as he screams with hunger. Traumatised by her family’s escape from a southern Lebanese village close to Qana, where an Israeli air strike killed 60 people on Sunday, her breastmilk has stopped. As 18-month-old Hussein latched onto his mother’s breast, …

TYRE — A stinging odour hangs over the Palestinian refugee camp of Bass, at the entrance to the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, the chosen site for a mass grave for the dozens of victims of Israel’s blistering bombardment of the area. “Tyre has now become the morgue for the …

AARIDA, Lebanon — The topsy-turvy world of conflicts in the Middle East has also made its mark at the only remaining safe passage out of Lebanon, the remote Aarida post on the border with Syria. An Iraqi family passing through had had enough of their so-called holiday away from the …