Middle Orient

Turkey and Russia launched joint patrols Friday in northeastern Syria, under a deal that halted a Turkish offensive against Syrian Kurdish fighters who were forced to withdraw from the border area following Ankara’s incursion.

What remains of ISIS — the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — is yet to acknowledge the death of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who died in a raid by US forces in northern Syria on Saturday.

The day after anti-government protests erupted in Iraq, Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani flew into Baghdad late at night and took a helicopter to the heavily fortified Green Zone, where he surprised a group of top security officials by chairing a meeting in place of the prime minister.

With ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed one day and the group’s official spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir the next, there’s a giant hole in the pseudo-Caliphate structure of the so-called Islamic State. The group must now, by its strict religious tenets, find a new (supposed) descendant of the Prophet Muhammed …

Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi has ordered the country’s elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) to help put down anti-government protests that have rocked the country over the past weeks, Western news agencies are reporting.

Earlier in the week, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sochi, Russia, where the two leaders negotiated the contours of a post-American Syria.

US military forces are transporting to safe sanctuaries hundreds of members of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group from the desert region of al-Jazirah in Syria’s northeastern province of Hasakah to neighboring Iraq, a report says.

Israel, which regards Sunni Muslim Gulf states as natural allies against Shi’ite Muslim Iran, has formal diplomatic relations with only two Arab states, neighboring Egypt and Jordan, established in 1979 and 1994 respectively.

The Lebanese army on Monday night moved in to break up a group of hundreds of men on mopeds driving through central Beirut with flags of Hezbollah and the Amal Movement chanting slogans against the mass demonstrations now in their sixth day.

The suspects are accused of conspiring to carry out terrorist attacks, including shooting at security patrols and kidnapping a Jordanian intelligence officer.