Shiite - Page 3

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei launched his latest rhetorical broadside at Iran’s arch-rivals in Saudi Arabia from a ceremony commemorating the Muslim holiday of Ramadan on Saturday. Khamenei said the Saudi rulers are “worthless, inept, and villainous.”

Western politicians rarely acknowledge the schism between Shia and Sunni Islam. There is nothing remotely comparable to this schism in any other religion in the modern world.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, a key player in Iran’s nuclear deal with the Obama administration, accused President Donald Trump of responsibility for the deaths of five Shiite demonstrators in a raid conducted by Bahraini police on Tuesday.

The final stages of the battle to liberate the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State (ISIS) will be “extremely violent,” according to a U.S. military commander advising Iraqi forces in the region.

Iraj Masjedi, a general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, assumed his post as the new Iranian ambassador to Iraq on Wednesday. The appointment could be an ill omen of Iran’s influence in post-Islamic State Iraq.

Murtada al-Sanadi is a cleric exiled from his homeland of Bahrain who is now living in Iran where he oversaw earlier this year a wake for a young militant killed by Bahrain’s security forces.

President Donald Trump’s administration has substantially increased military support for the Saudi-led Sunni coalition fighting the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthis in Yemen, countering the growing investment Iran has made in its allies in the war-torn country.

Iranian lawmaker Allaeddin Boroujerdi, who leads the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, has pledged to legally designate the U.S. military and the CIA “terrorist organizations” if the U.S. State Department does the same to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a military arm with longstanding ties to Hezbollah.

Turkey has called Iran’s outrage over its foreign minister’s warnings that Tehran is seeking to establish Shiite states in Iraq and Syria “incomprehensible,” as Ankara attempts to mend an alliance centered on fighting the Islamic State.

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told a German newspaper Tuesday that his government is “ready to send ground troops” to fight the Islamic State in Syria if necessary.

The Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia has voiced optimism about the desire expressed by incoming President Donald Trump to restore U.S. influence across the globe, contain Shiite powerhouse Iran, and fight the Sunni jihadist group Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL).

Recent sweeping gains by the pro-Assad alliance in Aleppo signal the rise of an emboldened Iranian-led radical Shi’ite axis. The more this axis gains strength, territory, weapons, and influence, the more likely it is to threaten regional and global security.

Residents of war-ravaged Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, are facing yet another problem — the management of toxic trash that is posing a looming threat to the health of the people in the country’s ancient capital of Sanaa, home to a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The New York Times makes a strong case that the most important player in Afghanistan’s future is not the United States, but Saudi Arabia, because Saudis are funding both sides of Afghanistan’s endless civil war.

The Iraq Parliament voted on Saturday to integrate an Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia into the national army, sparking fears among the country’s sizable Sunni population.

Hamas leaders have become increasingly worried as the movement has been hemorrhaging militants who join the Islamic State and similarly radical organizations, a source in Hamas told Breitbart Jerusalem.

Amnesty International has accused state sponsor of terrorism Shiite Iran of “broadcasting forced ‘confessions’ extracted through torture” to justify recent mass executions, particularly the hanging of up to 25 Sunni men accused of terrorism in early August.

The Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, has prohibited international schools from designating non-Islamic holidays, such as Christmas and New Year’s Day, as school vacation days, reports the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS).

Eleven Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa, echoing an official U.S. position, have accused Shiite powerhouse Iran of being a state sponsor of “terrorism,” noting that the Islamic Republic is “funding and arming militias that destabilize our region.”

Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) terrorists executed nine fellow jihadis who fled battle by tossing them in burning oil trenches used to impede the vision of U.S.-backed Iraqi military troops fighting to push the militants out Iraq’s second-largest city Mosul, reports the Arabic-language Al Sumaria News, according to various translations.

Authorities from the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq have reportedly forced about 250 displaced Sunni Arab families to leave Kirkuk after Sunni sleeper cells were accused of helping Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) jihadists carry out an attack in the Kurdish-controlled city.

Iran, considered the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, has increased its shipments of military supplies to Shiite Houthi rebels fighting a Saudi-led and U.S.-assisted coalition in Yemen, Reuters has learned from Western and Iranian officials on condition of anonymity.

An Iranian-backed commander in Iraq who is part of a group of Shiite militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) has said his group does not need “anyone’s” permission to fight to retake Mosul from the Sunni Islamic State.

Sunni Saudi Arabia is reportedly investing nearly $600 million on erecting two higher education institutions in restive areas of Afghanistan.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asserted on Tuesday that Turkey’s infantry will participate in the liberation of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, from the Islamic State, despite repeated demands by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi that Turkey stay out of his country.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Iraqi Shiite militia fighters are “pouring into Syria to reinforce the Assad regime’s siege of Aleppo, further complicating the tangled web of alliances the U.S. relies on to fight Islamic State, which can turn an ally on one side of the border into an enemy on the other.”

The foreign ministers of regional rivals Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia have penned op-ed articles published by two major U.S. newspapers this month accusing one another of fomenting the radical Islamic extremism currently plaguing the Muslim world.

The government of Tunisia has urged a military court to ban the transnational Sunni jihadi movement known as Hizb ut-Tahrir (Islamic Party of Liberation), which has been accused of “undermining public order” since it was legalized as a political party in the country back in 2012, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has issued yet another tirade against Saudi Arabia’s control of the holiest site in Islam, Mecca, now claiming that America has “blood” on its hands over a stampede at last year’s hajj pilgrimage that killed thousands.

Islamic authorities in Saudi Arabia have responded to an extensive missive by Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calling the Saudis “murderers” and “puny Satans” in response to a massacre that killed thousands at last year’s hajj. Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti dismissed Iran’s ire by arguing that Iranians are “not Muslims.”

TEL AVIV – An Iranian Grand Ayatollah recently said that the Mahdi – the Shi’ite version of the messiah – will arrive in a “super-modern vessel like a spaceship” and that until that time there will be no “peace, security or decency” on earth.

Between 5,200 and 15,000 known victims are buried in some of the mass graves scattered across Iraq and Syria by Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) jihadists, the Associated Press (AP) has found through exclusive interviews, satellite photos, and research.

Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, started a Latin American tour in Cuba, the latest effort by the Islamic Republic to maintain its growing relationship with nations in the region.

TEL AVIV – Israel orchestrated Muslim infighting between Sunnis and Shiites in order to blow up both groups, or so claims a new cartoon published by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.

The U.S. government has added three senior al-Qaeda leaders based in Iran to the Treasury Department list of “Specially Designated Global Terrorists,” which means they will be subject to sanctions even as President Obama’s nuclear deal pours billions of dollars into Iran’s coffers.

TEL AVIV – “Leave ISIS Be” is the provocative title of an article published in the last week by the Kuwaiti daily, Al-Jarida, which claims that the best way to combat the terror group is to impose recognition of it as a sovereign state, thereby forcing it to accept accountability for its actions on the international stage.