Middle Orient

At a gathering in Riyadh of the global alliance to defeat IS, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked partners to repatriate their detained citizens and announced new funding for stabilization work in Iraq and Syria. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged countries to take responsibility for their citizens …

Officials in northeast Syria tell Al-Monitor that women in Islamic State internment camps are forcing young boys to impregnate women as part of an alleged IS campaign to “go forth and multiply.” Sitting on a classroom chair, his fingers drumming nervously on a tablet, a young boy slowly raises his …

US troops conducted a total of 38 missions against ISIS in Iraq and Syria during May, according to US Central Command. 21 of those missions took place in Iraq, and 17 were conducted in Syria, all with partner forces, Task & Purpose reported. 31 suspected ISIS operatives were detained, and …

The United States and Saudi Arabia urged countries to take back citizens captured in the fight against Islamic State, with the kingdom’s top diplomat saying it was “absolutely unacceptable” that wealthy countries skirted that responsibility. “I would say to those countries, you must step up,” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal …

The Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fuad Hussein, confirmed on Thursday that 3,000 Iraqi terrorists detained in Syria have been returned to Iraq, where the majority of them have been tried, according to the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ahmed Al-Sahaf. During his speech at the ministerial meeting …

U.S. officials tasked with tracking Islamic State are seeing worrisome signs that the terror group’s core leadership is strengthening control over its global network of affiliates despite a series of key losses. Specifically, the United States is raising concerns about the group’s General Directorate of Provinces, a series of nine …

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is fond of stating “There is no Plan B” to emphasise the refusal to veer away from the two-state paradigm, over which there is international consensus. Yet Israeli colonialism in Palestine has rendered the two-state framework defunct. “Israel was established against a historical trend of mass …

In May, an investigation into the 1948 massacre of a Palestinian village carried out by Zionist militias revealed the locations of several new mass graves. The first-of-its-kind study has corroborated survivors’ testimonies and challenges longstanding Israeli denial of the killings. The investigation, carried out by human-rights-focused research group, Forensic Architecture, …

What lies behind Riyadh’s recent spate of diplomatic initiatives – and how likely are they to succeed? Over the past few months, Saudi Arabia has attracted international attention with one diplomatic initiative after another – from its beginning of normalisation with Iran, to peace talks with the Yemeni Houthis, to …

Despite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad being welcomed back onto the international stage, all is not well at home. His country is broken into three parts, which, at best, are in a state of uneasy coexistence and at worst are stuck in a low-intensity active conflict. In the country’s northwestern Idlib …