Middle Orient

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.

A slew of new sanctions in Trump administration’s final weeks could complicate Biden’s pledge to rejoin the Iranian nuclear agreement.

President Tayyip Erdogan’s nationalist ally said Turkey’s pro-Kurdish HDP party, the country’s third biggest, should be banned for separatism – a move the HDP’s co-leader condemned on Thursday as a bid to silence six million voters.

A new report from Human Rights Watch describes squalid conditions at a facility detaining mostly Ethiopian migrants in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia is detaining hundreds of migrants in inhumane, degrading conditions at a deportation center in Riyadh, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a new report that alleges guards have also …

Egypt and Iraq are expanding defense industry ties in a sign of deepening engagement among Cairo, Baghdad and Amman. Egypt is working to enhance its cooperation and relations with Iraq, notably in the military field.

Reported border clash worsens conflict between Kurdish factions in triangle where US, Turkish and Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish forces come into play. Tensions between the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iraq (KDP) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) have sharply escalated amid claims that a PKK-linked Syrian militia that is backed …