Middle Orient

On a three-day visit in Washington, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid met yesterday with US national security adviser Jake Sullivan, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris. An unnamed State Department official said this morning that the United States is working to expand the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between …

The new election law was beneficial for large political blocs and independents, but it also harmed a number of large blocs whose presence in the new parliament has become almost marginal. The results of Iraq’s recent parliamentary elections came as a surprise to all, winners and losers included, indicating a …

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the nation “would do what is necessary” to clear Syrian border areas of Kurdish militants after missile attacks killed two Turkish police officers Sunday. Two years since its last Syria incursion, Ankara is hinting at a new cross-border military operation in response to a …

Turkish intelligence helped Iraq capture a senior Islamic State leader who had been hiding out in northwestern Syria, three security sources said on Tuesday, in an operation that points to closer cooperation against remnants of the jihadist group. Iraq announced on Monday that its security forces had captured Sami Jasim, …

Gulf states are in a pickle. They fear that the emerging parameters of a reconfigured US commitment to security in the Middle East threaten to upend a more-than-a-century-old pillar of regional security and leave them with no good alternatives. The shaky pillar is the Gulf monarchies’ reliance on a powerful …

President Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday that Turkey was determined to eliminate threats originating in northern Syria, adding an attack by Kurdish YPG militants that killed two Turkish police was “the final straw.” “We have no patience left regarding some regions in Syria which have the quality of being the …

Marib is a flashpoint city and key stronghold in the Yemen conflict More than 150 Houthi rebels were killed in air raids south of Marib, a major hotspot of Yemen’s civil war, the Saudi-led coalition fighting the militants said on Monday. Hundreds of Iran-backed rebels died in a resurgence of …

Several pro-Iranian parties promise to launch an appeal after early results show losses for parties with PMF links. Pro-Iranian parties and armed groups have denounced early results from Iraq’s elections as “manipulation” and a “scam”. Sunday’s parliamentary election – the fifth in the war-scarred country since the US-led invasion and …

At least four people were killed when a car bomb exploded in the Syrian city of Afrin on Monday, a medical source said, the latest such attack in the northwestern region that is controlled by Turkey and Syrian rebels it supports. The blast wounded another six people, the source said. …

When Saudi Arabia banned the import of Lebanese produce in April because these shipments were being abused to smuggle narcotics into the Kingdom, Hezbollah found itself with a problem. Following the collapse of the Lebanese and Syrian economies, Assad family mafiosi and Hezbollah set about remodeling their nations as narco …