Middle Orient

This February marks 40th anniversary of Iranian Revolution. 1979 Iranian Revolution—having overthrown the last king of Pahlavi dynasty Mohammed Reza Shah Pehlavi—had led to religious establishment. Iran became ‘Islamic Republic of Iran’. A lot is being talked about how ‘Islamic Republic’ has survived and lived a long period of forty …

“Talk to Iran!” This is the advice some Western politicians have bandied around since 1979, when the mullahs seized power in Tehran. The 40th anniversary of the Khomeinist regime has provided fresh opportunity for that slogan to be promoted again in the European Union and the United States.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that his decision to leave a small number of U.S. troops in Syria did not constitute a reversal of his plan to withdraw all troops from the country. “I am not reversing course,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

U.S.-backed Syrian forces fighting the Islamic State group handed over more than 150 Iraqi members of the group to Iraq, an Iraqi security official said Thursday, marking the biggest repatriation from Syria of captured militants so far.

Tens of thousands of foreign nationals have travelled to Syria and neighbouring Iraq to fight for the Islamic State (IS) group. With the end of the IS territorial “caliphate” imminent, the US has led calls to repatriate the hundreds of men women and children who have been detained on the …

Islamic State looked close to defeat in its last enclave in eastern Syria on Wednesday as civilians poured out and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said the remaining jihadists wanted to fight to the death. More than 2,000 civilians left the village of Baghouz in a convoy of dozens …

Istanbul recently hosted the second “International Islamic Union Congress,” sponsored mainly by the Strategic Research Center for Defenders of Justice (ASSAM), which is headed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief military advisor, Adnan Tanriverdi, a retired lieutenant general and an Islamist.

In January, Lebanon agreed to a new cabinet after nine months of political stalemate. The long-awaited government restructured the balance of power in ways that did not reflect the results of parliamentary elections in May 2018.

U.S. President Donald Trump has declared that the Islamic State (IS) “caliphate” is on the verge of collapse and he called on European allies to “take back” more than 800 militants captured in Syria.

A mortar blast shook the rooftop where Hunter Pugh stood watch over the last stretch of Syria controlled by the Islamic State, and he scanned the winter dawn, trying to decide whether it had been outgoing fire or an attack zeroing in on his post. The answer came from a …