Sunni

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.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took to Twitter to condemn a statement from President Donald Trump that Americans would “grieve and pray” over the victims of Wednesday’s Islamic State (ISIS) attack in Tehran, calling the White House remark “repugnant.”

In the latest development in an ongoing diplomatic crisis in the Arab world, the Saudi Arabian government has shut down the office of the Al-Jazeera news outlet operating there, according to multiple news sources.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Sunday became one of many observers to describe the London Bridge terror attack, along with the previous week’s atrocity in Manchester, as a “wake-up call.”

A long-simmering international crisis in the Middle East boiled over on Monday as some of the most powerful nations in the Arab world severed ties with Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism and taking sides with Shiite Iran against Sunni Muslim governments.