Middle Orient

The leader of the Islamic State blew himself up last month in an operation carried out by the rebel Free Syrian Army in Daraa province in southwest Syria. Abu al-Hassan al-Hashemi al-Quraishi, who had led the Islamist ISIS since March, killed himself and his aides using a suicide belt after …

Damascus’ low-key reaction to Turkey’s recent strikes on Syrian Kurdish targets suggests it might acquiesce to Turkish military moves that would contribute to ending the US military presence in the north.

Ankara demands “concrete steps” from Sweden and Finland before giving the nod to NATO’s Nordic enlargement, including an “asset freeze,” a demand that hasn’t been expressed publicly before. Turkey will wait for more concrete steps — including a freeze of “terror assets” in Sweden and Finland — before giving a …

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has signaled his intent to soon launch the ground phase of Operation Claw-Sword, a military operation designed to clear areas along Turkey’s southern borders of fighters from affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, which the United States lists as a terrorist organization. A …

The protests across Iran are continuing as the Iran revolution 2022 campaign against the mullahs’ regime expands to more cities throughout the country. On Saturday when Iranian regime Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei held a session with members of the regime’s Basij, a paramilitary force affiliated to the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), college students …

The Turkish ministry of defense claims to have killed 471 Kurdish militants in 271 separate attacks in Syria and Iraq since the start of the operation The Turkish Minister of Defense, Hulusi Akar, visited the Turkish troops on the border with Iraq on 27 November to inspect the ongoing operations …

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on 26 November that large reinforcements of US military troops and equipment made their way into northern and eastern Syria, coming in from the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR) through the illegal Al-Waleed border crossing.

Colonel Davoud Jafari, a senior official of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Division, was assassinated in Syria on 22 November. The IRGC claimed that Israel was responsible for the attack.

On 24 November, the Iraqi government announced its decision to redeploy troops to the borders with Iran and Turkey, following recent attacks by Tehran and Ankara against Kurdish positions in the Iraqi Kurdistan semi-autonomous region, Al-Awsat news reported.

A Turkish drone strike on a top Kurdish commander’s headquarters came within 130 meters of US troops in Syria on Tuesday. The Pentagon warned on Wednesday that Turkey’s airstrikes against Kurdish forces in northeast Syria endanger US troops and threaten to undermine years of progress in the war against the …