Middle Orient

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made more detailed allegations about Iran’s secretive relationship with al-Qaida, rekindling a debate about how the United States should respond to the decades-old cooperation between its Mideast rival and the anti-American terrorist network. In an interview that aired Friday on VOA Persian’s …

Iraqi security forces arrested a senior paramilitary leader on Wednesday in a move that will raise tension with powerful Iran-backed militias accused of attacks on international troops and killing hundreds of protesters and activists. The arrest puts Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhimi’s loyalist security forces in the army and counter-terrorism …

The cease-fire that entered into force last Friday brought an end to 11 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas, leaving behind at least 248 Palestinian and 12 Israeli dead, as well as untold destruction in Gaza. Yet even as the fragile truce is holding thus far, the power struggle …

Jordanian authorities have appeared more lenient toward the recent protests that erupted across the kingdom in support of Palestinians. Amid the 11-day conflict that pitted Israel on the one hand and Hamas and the Islamic Jihad on the other, Jordanians took to the streets, organizing protests and sit-ins across the …

Reports say Israel is interested in the Egyptian initiative for indirect talks with Hamas, but conditions Hamas on advancing the return of Israeli captives and bodies of soldiers held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Reports this morning say Israel has conditioned the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip on advancing …

Activists see Israel’s bombing of cultural centers, bookstores and other cultural institutions in the Gaza Strip, as well as the killing of a 17-year-old in a refugee camp in the West Bank, as an attempt to obliterate Palestine’s cultural identity. On May 17, the Israeli army killed 17-year-old Obaidah Akram …

Israel’s leadership must understand that as far as the Biden administration is concerned the two-state solution is back on the agenda. The meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Jerusalem May 25 offered insight into the enormous changes taking place in the …

A spree of rattling allegations by a Turkish mobster has brought into focus the increase in cocaine trafficking in Turkey and its domestic and international ramifications. Long a major route of heroin smuggling from Afghanistan to Europe, Turkey in recent years has seen an increase in cocaine trafficking as well, …

The Syrian Democratic Forces closed the crossings connecting their areas in northeast Syria to government-held areas to prevent the participation of the areas’ inhabitants in the Syrian presidential elections. On May 24, the Kurdish-led autonomous administration in north and east Syria announced in a statement that it was shutting the …

If Biden administration re-enters a nuclear deal with Iran and lifts sanctions on the regime, this will be like giving them another airplane full of cash. President Joe Biden’s national security team appears to be insistent upon reversing policies just because they were attached to the Trump administration, regardless of …