Sunni

Iraq’s year-long political stalemate ended with a literal bang on Thursday, as Parliament elected former water resources minister Abdul Latif Rashid as president just hours after a barrage of rockets hit Baghdad’s secure Green Zone, where central government offices are located.

A court in Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia sentenced a Saudi woman and adherent of Shia Islam to 34 years in prison on Monday for using her personal Twitter account to “create public turmoil and destabilize civil and national security” by re-Tweeting posts demanding the Saudi government release women’s rights activists from prison, Turkey’s Hürriyet newspaper reported on Wednesday.

At least one person was killed on Tuesday during clashes between police and members of a rebel Shiite group called Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) in Abuja, Nigeria.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told visiting Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad on Tuesday that Tehran will support its “strategic ally” in Damascus until “final victory” is achieved in the long-running Syrian civil war.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has allegedly torn down around 16,000 mosques in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, an Australian think tank said in a report published on Thursday.

Saudi state media reported on Sunday that Bahrain foiled a terrorist attack this year allegedly plotted by a group calling itself the “Qasem Soleimani Brigade,” acting with the support of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), itself a designated terrorist organization.

Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Latif Derian, the highest-ranking Sunni Muslim cleric in Lebanon, added his support Wednesday to calls for an independent international investigation of the massive Beirut explosion on August 4.

Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Mohammed Allawi withdrew his candidacy on Sunday, roughly a month after he was nominated for the post.

The Pentagon confirmed Monday that the Islamic State terror chief’s remains were disposed of “appropriately” after his suicide to prevent capture this weekend.

Iraqi President Barham Salih on Monday condemned violence against protesters and journalists during demonstrations across the country and called on the Iraqi military to protect them.

Each September brings the Muslim holiday of Ashura, commemorated for different reasons and observed in very different ways by Sunnis and Shiites.

Hundreds of terrorists from the Shiite Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) this week reportedly attacked the national assembly in the Sunni-dominated African country, triggering a violent confrontation with authorities that left at least two militants dead and some police officers injured, Western and local media reported.

A truce deal between the Saudi Arabia-led Sunni coalition and the Iran-allied Shiite Houthi rebels in the Yemeni port city of Hodeida – considered a lifeline for millions of people at risk of starvation in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – remains elusive as the war reaches its fourth anniversary on Tuesday.

Baghdad-sanctioned Shiite militiamen allied with Iran, including fighters who want to push U.S. troops out, have gained control of many of the Sunni territories in Iraq they helped liberate from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL).

In a bizarre article published on Christmas Eve, the New York Times saluted the murderous Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah for its wonderful Christmas spirit, applauding the group for helping to “ring in the season” and implying the United States has unfairly designated it as a foreign terrorist organization.

U.S. military officials, human-rights activists, and sources within Syria’s fractious insurgency are painting a grim picture of growing Iranian influence, achieved in part by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah paying rebel commanders formerly supported by the United States to switch sides.

The Nigerian army reportedly killed up to 21 people when it fired live bullets into a crowd of protesters on the third day of demonstrations by the African country’s leading Shiite Muslim movement in the capital of Abuja on Monday.

Iraq’s security forces, mainly Baghdad-sanctioned militias allied with Iran, have “forcibly disappeared” 78 Sunni Arab males, including children as young as nine, over the course of Baghdad’s military campaign against the Sunni Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimated in a report released on Thursday.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) on Wednesday published some educational materials distributed by the Iran-supported Houthi insurgents in Yemen. The level of vicious anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism fed to children by the Houthis may come as a surprise to American news consumers who think of them as merely a political or tribal insurgency.

Several Iraqi officials who suffered losses during last month’s legislative elections, including the prime minister, are claiming the fire that engulfed the country’s most massive ballot warehouse this weekend was a deliberate act intended to sabotage a vote recount prompted by allegations.

Final numbers for Iraq’s parliamentary election, which took place on Saturday, will not be available until this Friday, although estimates appear to show Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s coalition leading.

Center for Security Policy Vice President for Research and Analysis Clare Lopez joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss fallout at the United Nations from President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and look ahead to the national security challenges facing America in 2018.

Syrian army forces backed by Iranian-backed militias pushed deeper into the last rebel-held enclave near a strategic border area with Israel and Lebanon in a new expansion of Tehran’s influence in the war-torn country.

WASHINGTON, DC – Former Sen. Joseph Lieberman and retired General Charles Wall laid out their visions for the “the way forward” regarding the United States’ policy on Iran during a panel discussion at the National Press Club on Tuesday.

The United Nations documented a “sharp increase” in jihadi attacks primarily targeting Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan, including worshippers inside mosques, shrines, and other religious sites as well as imams and religious scholars.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s announcement that the Kingdom would return to a “moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world” did not go over well at the pro-Erdogan Turkish paper Yeni Safak, where columnist Ibrahim Karagul accused the Saudis of joining a U.S.-Israeli plot to water down Islam and divide the Muslim world.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), a leading member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee, warned on Monday that the Iranian regime’s threats against Israel are growing through the expansion of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s political and military footprint across the Middle East.

The Rohingya received very little sympathy from Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun of Syria, who said during an interview with Indian media that Rohingya refugees are a security threat to host countries such as India, while the government of Myanmar has been targeted by a propaganda campaign.

Shiite-led Arab lawmakers in Baghdad, Iraq, are punishing their Kurdish counterparts for voting in the independence referendum held by the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq last week, banning them from participating in parliament and urging the country’s judicial branch to take punitive measures against them.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Tuesday he is confident that U.S.-backed Iraqi forces will finish off the Islamic State militants clinging to strongholds that are shrinking in size and number.

Turkey, in support of Sunni Turkmen, is expected to oppose Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s decision to allow Iran-allied Shiite militias to participate in the offensive to retake Tal Afar, considered the Islamic State’s (ISIS/ISIL) largest remaining stronghold in northwestern Iraq.

Shiite Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, and a Sunni jihadist organization linked to al-Qaeda recently reached a ceasefire after clashes in Lebanon near the country’s border with Syria left more than 150 people dead.

Turkey is building an “International Islamic University” that is intended to challenge the dominance of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo as the seat of Sunni Muslim scholarship.

The hunt for evidence that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead continued on Wednesday, while Iraqi forces battled ISIS holdouts in the officially liberated city of Mosul.

Saudi Arabia has alleged that its military arrested three members of Shiite Iran’s hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who were plotting to carry out a terrorist attack on a major offshore oilfield in the Persian Gulf.

The Iranian government says five of the militants who carried out a double terrorist attack in Tehran Wednesday were Iranian members of the Islamic State and noted that they had joined the Sunni group and joined the jihad in Syria and Iraq.