Middle Orient

International disarmament experts arrived Tuesday in the Syrian capital to begin the daunting task of cataloguing the country’s arsenal of chemical weapons ahead of its destruction. Nineteen inspectors from The Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons travelled by road from Lebanon a day after UN experts left Damascus after probing alleged gas …

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon met here late Monday with Nabil El-Arabi, Secretary General of the Arab League, discussing with him issues pertaining to the Syrian crisis. Ban briefed his counterpart on recent developments at the United Nations relating to Syria and expressed strong hopes that the successful

A new bill to replace a parliamentary motion passed last year authorizing cross-border military operations in Syria will be on Parliament’s agenda on Oct. 3, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç has said. 

Turkish President Abdullah Gül has hailed the historic phone conversation between U.S. President Barack Obama and Iran’s newly-elected leader, Hassan Rouhani, on Sept. 27 – the highest-level contact between the two countries since 1979. “I am pleased to learn the phone call between President Obama and President Rohani,” Gül said, …

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was scheduled to have a tête-à-tête meeting with new Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani on Friday in İstanbul to discuss the latest developments in the region, particularly

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has welcomed a draft resolution of the U.N. Security Council to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons. The resolution itself is important, Davutoğlu said Sept. 27, since the Security Council has considered the Syrian crisis as

Iran would open its nuclear facilities to international inspectors as part of broad negotiations with the United States that could eventually restore diplomatic relations between the adversaries and those talks have the backing of the nation’s supreme leader, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said Sunday.

U.S. President Barack Obama and new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani held a historic phone call Friday, in the highest level conversation between the estranged nations in over three decades. Speaking to reporters at the White House, Obama said both men had directed their teams to work

The UN Security Council unanimously passed a landmark resolution Friday ordering the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons and condemning a murderous poison gas attack in Damascus. UN leader Ban Ki-moon, who called the resolution “the first hopeful news on Syria in a long time,” said he hopes to convene a peace conference …

A Syrian activist group says rebels have captured a military post south of the country on the border with Jordan after four days of fighting. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says 26 soldiers were killed in the battle as well as a number of rebels, including seven foreign fighters.