Middle Orient

The Daesh “caliphate” that was once the size of Britain has been reduced to a tiny patch of land near a village in eastern Syria, the anti-Daesh coalition said on Thursday.

US-backed forces in Syria said Wednesday they were detaining foreign Daesh group fighters on a “daily basis,” days after confirming the capture of German militants Martin Lemke.

Any transfers of suspected foreign militants and their relatives out of Syria should be transparent, Human Rights Watch told AFP, as camps in the northeast fill with families of different nationalities.

On Feb. 5, al Qaeda’s propaganda arm, As Sahab, released a 45-minute video featuring the group’s global emir, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The bulk of the video, titled “The Way to Salvation,” is dedicated to explaining why the jihadists have not succeeded in countries that experienced the 2011 Arab uprisings. That is, …

Yesterday, a low-quality video depicting an IED attack on a regime checkpoint in southern Syria was uploaded to the internet. A relatively unknown group, the Popular Resistance, claimed credit within the video itself.

The seizure of the northern Syrian province of Idlib by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) from other armed opposition groups in early January once again brings to the fore the debate over its ties to al-Qaeda (AQ). HTS grew out of the Nusra Front (NF) in 2017, when it was required …

Martin Chulov reported [1] for The Guardian yesterday, February 7, the Islamic State’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had survived a coup attempt last month by foreign fighters within the ranks of the terrorist organization in its holdout in Hajin in eastern Syria near the town of Al-Bukamal on the border …

The picture sent shockwaves through Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s grassroots: A poor Egyptian member of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan in Arabic) handcuffed by the Turkish police, put aboard a Turkish Airlines plane to fly back to Cairo, to be tortured and eventually executed. Is President Erdoğan not a staunch …

Talk to any senior European Union official and you are sure to hear the Islamic Republic in Iran designated as “a threat to regional stability.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel endorses Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment of Iranian behavior as “unacceptable.”

After years of ambiguity, Israel is increasingly going public with its strikes on Syria. Retaliatory attacks carried out last week were conducted in broad daylight, a rare occurrence. In contrast to prior strikes, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) immediately took responsibility for the attacks and announced them in real time …