Middle Orient

By December 19 morning, all clashes around Ain Issa, in the northern countryside of Raqqa, ended. Turkish forces have not shelled the town and its outskirts for the last few hours.

With the closure of the file of the Syrian mercenaries in Azerbaijan, who were recruited by the Erdogan terrorist regime, there appeared the absence of 240 Syrians whose fate has not yet been identified, as 7,000 Syrians have been displaced from their villages as a result of the Turkish bombing.

The situation in Syria remains unchanged. The Russian military continues to conduct reconnaissance activities in the Idlib and Aleppo regions. According to the Russian media AviaPro, Russia is preparing a large-scale operation against a camp near the Syrian-Turkish border.

he drastically upended situation along the southern edge of the South Caucasus has affected Iran in several complex ways. Among the three large powers surrounding the region—Iran, Russia and Turkey—only Iran borders on the formerly Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani territories of Zangilan, Jabrayil and Fuzuli, which adjoin Upper (“Nagorno) Karabakh. Iran’s northwestern …

In 2018, veteran Palestine solidarity campaigner and Jewish anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein was expelled from the Labour Party after being smeared as an anti-Semite. As has been seen so often during Labour’s manufactured anti-Semitism crisis, the charges cited by party lawyers referred not to actual “anti-Semitism”, but to legitimate criticism of …

Pakistan has returned $1 billion to Saudi Arabia as a second instalment of a $3 billion soft loan, as Islamabad reaches out to Beijing for a commercial loan to help it offset pressure to repay another $1 billion to Riyadh next month, officials said on Wednesday according to a report …

China has agreed to bail out Pakistan by providing it with $1.5 billion to help to repay a $2 billion debt to Saudi Arabia, according to the Express Tribune.

Four guards fired on unarmed crowd in Baghdad in 2007, killing 14 and sparking outrage over use of private security in war zones Donald Trump has pardoned four security guards from the private military firm Blackwater who were serving jail sentences for killing 14 civilians including two children in Baghdad …

Turkey has long pursued a policy of soft-power diplomacy in the Balkans. More recently, the defence sector has come to the fore. When, in the midst of a reignited war over the Caucasus mountain region of Nagorno-Karabakh, President Aleksandar Vucic said Serbia was considering buying Turkish armed drones, it was …

The assassination of Iran’s top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, raises a lot of questions about what an all-out war between the United States and Iran might look like.