Middle Orient

Lebanon’s Hezbollah was behind a rare roadside bomb attack last month that wounded a motorist in northern Israel, Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi said on Friday. Israel’s military said that security forces had killed a man carrying an explosive belt after he apparently crossed from Lebanon into Israel and …

On Oct. 31, local units previously affiliated with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) launched a large-scale military operation against the al-Hafo-Harfoush group in the southern Syrian city of Daraa al-Balad. The units responsible for carrying out the operation in the Tariq al-Sad and al-Mukhayyam neighborhoods had chosen to remain in …

It has been an accepted fact that ISIS ceased being a territory-controlling entity in Syria after its March 2019 defeat in the town of Baghouz. Yet it is perhaps time to reevaluate this perspective on the group and its insurgent trajectory in the country. While recent massacres of civilians in …

“Our allies in the Gulf no longer honor the deal that was made decades ago even though we still have a big physical military presence in the Gulf, bigger than ever before, and we keep giving Gulf nations a pass on human rights violations. Too often our Middle East allies …

Did Lebanon’s US-backed army commander exploit the Syrian refugee crisis and incite clashes with them to catapult himself into the highly-contested Lebanese presidency? The US silence on Joseph Aoun’s illegal deportations last week is deafening. Since the 2011 outbreak of war in Syria, hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians have …

Terror group has ‘extensive work in Sweden to raise money and finance terrorist activities aimed at Türkiye,’ admits Foreign Minister Billstrom STOCKHOLM The Swedish foreign minister has admitted that the PKK terrorist organization’s extensive activities in his country are the reason Türkiye is preventing Sweden from joining NATO, an intergovernmental …

Rasim Akyol, a fugitive member of the PKK terrorist group, was brought to Türkiye after being captured by the National Intelligence Organization (MIT) in an unspecified country, security sources told media outlets Friday. Photos shared by security sources show Akyol at an undisclosed location between two Turkish flags. Akyol was …

With Russia’s resources focused on the war in Ukraine, Moscow’s foreign policy may play second fiddle. While changes to Russia’s approach to the MENA region are ones of nuance rather than substance, Russia’s move towards the personalisation and regionalisation of its foreign policy there means that individuals and institutions will …

On November 30, 2022, the Islamic State’s spokesman Abu ‘Umar al-Muhajir made the somewhat surprising announcement that the group’s “caliph” and leader Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi had been killed, while adding that the group’s Shura council had agreed on a successor going by the name of Abu al-Hussayn al-Hussayni al-Qurashi.1 …

At least 126 politicians, journalists, lawyers and artists have been detained in an operation that observers call an intimidation tactic before the May 14 elections. More than 120 people were detained across Turkey on Tuesday in an alleged counter-terrorism operation that targeted mainly Kurdish politicians, journalists, lawyers and artists less …