Middle Orient

Turkey’s President Received By Saudi Crown Prince In Jeddah

Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Jeddah on Monday on the first leg of a three-state Gulf tour with business and investment at the top of the agenda. The Turkish president is leading a massive delegation of government ministers and officials, and about 200 business leaders, investors and company owners. He …

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Israel Strikes In Syria Kill 3 Pro-regime Fighters: Monitor

Israeli air strikes on Wednesday near Syria’s capital Damascus killed three fighters loyal to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and wounded four others, a war monitor said. Syrian state news agency SANA earlier reported two soldiers had been wounded in the strikes overnight Tuesday-Wednesday. It quoted a military source as saying …

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Prospect Of Palestinian Civil War Behind Israel’s Desire To Save Abbas – OpEd

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has the perfect opportunity to exit the stage. But he will not. Abbas’ brief visit to the devastated Jenin refugee camp last week demonstrated the absurdity and danger of the PA and its 87-year-old leader. As he walked, Abbas struggled to keep his balance, in …

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World Powers Continue To Squabble As Syrians Suffer – OpEd

Millions of lives at stake. Families in dire need of international aid. Russia plays games with them all at the UN Security Council. Repeat every six months until further notice. Welcome to the Syria debate at the UN. This has been the case ever since 2014. The UNSC authorizes the …

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Russia, Iran coordinating to expel US troops from Syria: Report

The US army has been reinforcing its occupation in Syria over the past few months In a report released by Al-Monitor on 14 July, a high-ranking US military official was quoted as saying that Russian and Iranian forces in Syria have been coordinating with the specific aim of forcing Washington’s …

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Iraq did not notify US of oil for gas deal with Iran

Whether or not US officials will consider the deal a violation of US sanctions on Iran, and therefore attempt to block it, is unclear Iraqi officials did not notify their US counterparts before reaching the recent deal to barter oil for natural gas with Iran, the Associated Press reported on …

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Iraqi PM meets Assad in Damascus

The two-day visit is the first by an Iraqi premier to Syria since before the start of the war In the first visit by an Iraqi prime minister to Syria since before the start of the US-backed war in 2011, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani visited Damascus on 16 July for a …

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US loots new batch of Syrian oil, reinforces bases in occupied Hasakah

Washington’s theft of Syrian oil has the intended goal of funding the de-facto Kurdish administration of northeast Syria US occupation troops in Syria smuggled a new shipment of stolen oil from the resource-rich Jazira region to their bases in Iraq on 10 July with the help of their Kurdish proxy …

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Oil, politics, and sovereignty: The Iraq-Turkiye legal dispute

Despite Turkiye’s professed support for Iraq’s sovereignty, its actions, including nine years of illegal oil imports from Kurdistan, reveal quite the opposite, with the repercussions now affecting global oil supply. In a joint press conference held in 2019 at Turkiye’s Presidential Complex in Ankara, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his …

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MbS to Blinken: ‘No’ to Israeli normalization, ‘yes’ to Syrian reconciliation

In his interview with CNN on 9 July, US President Joe Biden announced that “we are still far away” from reaching agreements to normalize Saudi-Israeli relations, establish a Saudi civilian nuclear program, and a Washington guarantee for Saudi security. What Biden revealed was based primarily on his feedback from a …

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