Visiting UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed here on Thursday the significance of creating a new Iraqi government as a gateway to rebuilding Iraq. Speaking at a short news conference following a just-one-hour meeting with top Shi’ite cleric Ayatollah Al-Sistani in Najaf for the first time, Ban said the formation of …

At least 11 people, including three children and a woman, were killed and eight others wounded when a mortar shell fell on a district of Aleppo city, north Syria, on Thursday. The area is controlled by the regular forces, according to a statement by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights …

The US welcomed the decision by all parties to end the violence in the Central African Republic after they signed a “Cessation of Hostilities Agreement.”

Turkey has considered closing its embassy in Tripoli because of growing security concerns in the country, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has said, adding that efforts to evacuate Turkish citizens in Libya were underway. 

Pro-Russian rebels in the east of Ukraine reportedly shot down two fighter jets of Kiev’s military forces, agencies from the country said. Two Su-25 aircraft were shot near the Savur-Mogila memorial, in the Shakhtarsk region near Russia’s border. 

Iraqi lawmakers elected a veteran Kurdish politician as the nation’s new president on Thursday, hours after an attack on a prison convoy killed dozens of people, brutally underscoring the challenges faced by the country’s leaders as they struggle to form a new government.

Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk resigned on Thursday after his governing coalition collapsed, plunging the former Soviet State into political limbo. The news came hours after the coalition that had supported Mr. Yatsenyuk’s Fatherland party dissolved, a move that all coalition members had sought.

The EU Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Brussels Tuesday decided to add three additional Syrian persons and nine entities to its blacklist in view of the gravity of the situation in Syria. The Council in a statement said Syrian regime officials are involved “in the violent repression of the civilian …

Ukrainian troops on Tuesday wrested back control of the strategically-important town of Severodonetsk from pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, the interior ministry said. Ukraine’s security forces were in control of “all the vital facilities” in the city of around 110,000, located roughly 120 kilometres (75 miles) to the north of …

Tunisian Prime Minister Mehdi Jomaa on Tuesday,  arrived in Algeria as head of a government delegation to discuss border security and counterterrorism cooperation with the Algerian officials. Jomaa was accompanied by Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalam and Defence Minister Ghazi Jribi ahead of a high level meeting with top Algerian officials.