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.
War-ravaged Yemen, currently gripped by a humanitarian crisis and cholera epidemic, is spiraling towards “total” collapse as an unable or indifferent world just stands by watching, declares a high-ranking United Nations official.
Shiite-majority Iran has once again fired a mortar shell into the restive Balochistan province of its predominantly Sunni neighbor Pakistan, this time killing at least one individual.
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.”
TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s Supreme Leader said that Saudi Arabia is a “cow being milked” by the United States.
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.
Former President Barack Obama struggled over his failure to stop the brutal war in Syria as president, telling an audience that at least he tried.
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.
As tensions mount in the Middle East, one cannot help but wonder whether eschatological factors are playing out or whether nations looking to influence outcomes in a positive way still have roles to play. Those of us unwilling yet to accept end-of-world prophecies prefer the emphasis be put upon the latter.
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.
Christian and Yazidi Iraqis lament the dire future facing their minority communities in new video footage obtained by Breitbart News. Both groups have nearly been eradicated by the genocidal Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL).
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on world powers to increase aid to help people fleeing the Iraqi city of Mosul which government forces have been battling to retake from Islamic State.
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.
The government of Bahrain announced Sunday that it had arrested over a dozen individuals believed to have planted a bomb on a police bus and received training from Hezbollah and the government of Iran.
Contents: Terrorist bombings in Damascus, airstrikes in Idlib, break Syria’s ceasefire; Russian troops join Americans, Kurds, Sunni rebels in Manbij, Syria; Syria’s Bashar al-Assad says that the Americans are invaders.
Contents: Al-Nusra descendant claims credit for massive terror attack in Damascus, Syria; Al-Nusra becomes Levant Liberation Committee (LLC) and gains at expense of ISIS
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.
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.
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.
