Middle Orient

Hezbollah has not yet responded to statements that over the past three years, the Israeli army has attacked dozens of Hezbollah targets in Syria, a senior Israeli security official said on Saturday. This is surprising since the attacks severely hampered the organization’s logistical and operational efforts to establish itself in …

Offers of money by the Islamic State to join its ranks prove “irresistible” to those hit hard by Syria’s collapsed economy. A man being led by security guards shuffles into an interrogation cell in a military prison in the Kurdish-administered city of Hasakah in northeastern Syria. His hands are cuffed, …

Riyadh-led airstrikes came after Yemen’s Houthis launched a projectile into the southern Saudi province of Jizan, killing two people late last week. The Saudi Arabia-led military coalition fighting Yemen’s Houthi rebels said it launched renewed airstrikes in response to a projectile attack that killed two people near the southern Saudi …

An apparent increase in drug trafficking into the country from both its eastern and western borders, with fallout from instability in Afghanistan and ‘mafia’ groups in Syria as well as use of illicit substances in Iraq, has raised concern. In early December, the directorate tasked with drug control in Iraq’s …

The longer runway at Khmeimim airbase in Syria gives nuclear-capable bombers a place to land, and is one more move in Russia’s plan to expand its capacities in new directions. The end of December is a special month for the Russian military. Every year at this time, practically all the …

The Arab coalition on Sunday released footage and pictures it said provided evidence of Hezbollah and Iran’s involvement in Yemen’s seven-year war and the use of Sanaa airport as a missile launch site. At a press conference in the Saudi capital, coalition spokesman Brig. Gen. Turki Al-Maliki showed footage of …

Shûrâ, Or The Principle Of Collective Deliberation When one evokes the relation between Islam and democracy, (1) the temptation is great to go to texts (Qur’an and Hadîth) and to Muslim political history of experiences of governance with analogies to modern pluralistic systems. (2) Hence the reformist currents of Islamic …

Navy ships assigned to U.S. 5th Fleet confiscated a stockpile of 1,400 AK-47 assault rifles and 226,600 rounds of ammunition in the North Arabian Sea from a stateless fishing vessel Dec. 20. U.S. Navy patrol coastal ships Tempest and Typhoon were conducting a search with embarked U.S. Coast Guard personnel …

Turkish police detained at least nine foreign nationals over their links to the Daesh terrorist group in Istanbul, security sources said Saturday. Anti-terror police squads launched an operation to nab the suspects, believed to be a part of groups planning attacks on behalf of Daesh, said the sources, who requested …

US-backed, Kurdish-led forces in northern Syria announced on Thursday that they had safely deactivated explosives that had been attached to a vehicle outside the city of Hasakah on the previous day. “On the 22nd of this December, the special units of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) defused a car bomb …