Jim Mattis has resigned on principle as Pentagon chief after President Trump decided to slash U.S. troop presence in Syria and Afghanistan, citing in a letter the need for ‘a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned’ with the president’s.
A Tehran-based agency has quietly fed propaganda through at least 70 websites to countries from Afghanistan to Russia. And American firms have helped.
A top Iranian general claimed US military personnel and assets in the Middle East were within range of his country’s missiles Wednesday, amid ongoing tensions between Tehran and Washington.
The US special envoy to Afghanistan hopes to cement a peace deal with Taliban insurgents by April 2019, local media reported on Sunday.
The Islamic State has lost the vast majority of physical territory it once held, but fully defeating the terrorist group and rooting out sleeper cells that have spread across the Middle East and Africa ‘could take years,’ the Defense Department inspector general said in a sweeping report Monday that suggests final victory remains far off.
The United States is pulling some of its anti-aircraft and missile batteries out of the Middle East, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing US military officials.
The United States is already not party to the International Criminal Court, but in a striking decision announced Monday by National Security Advisor John Bolton the Trump administration said it would not cooperate at all with the tribunal – and will moreover take punitive steps against it if it goes after U.S. or allied nationals.
The United States on Monday will adopt an aggressive posture against the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, threatening sanctions against its judges if they proceed with an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Americans in Afghanistan.
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis arrived in Kabul on Friday to meet the new commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan and discuss progress on talks with the Taliban, despite deteriorating security and turmoil within the Afghan government.
The leader of ISIS in Afghanistan was killed in an airstrike on Saturday along with 10 other fighters, officials said.
Although the Taliban overran a base in northern Afghanistan, and Afghan forces were battling insurgents for a fifth day in the eastern city of Ghazni on Tuesday, the U.S. military reported that the city ‘remains under Afghan government control.’
The Taliban is on the verge of dramatically expanding its control over southern and eastern Afghanistan in a surprise offensive that has caught Afghan and American forces off guard and thrown a vexing new wrench into the Trump administration’s strategy for ending the nearly 17-year-old war there.
The Islamic State extremist group has up to 30,000 members roughly equally distributed between Syria and Iraq and its global network poses a rising threat — as does al-Qaeda, which is much stronger in places, a United Nations report says.
As Afghanistan edged ever closer to becoming a narco-state five years ago, a team of veteran U.S. officials in Kabul presented the Obama administration with a detailed plan to use U.S. courts to prosecute the Taliban commanders and allied drug lords who supplied more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin — including a growing amount fueling the nascent opioid crisis in the United States.
Israel has attacked Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias in Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday, casting such actions as potentially helping to stem a Syrian Sunni Muslim refugee exodus to Europe.
More than 50 senior Taliban commanders were killed in an artillery strike on a meeting in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday, as fighting continues across the country.
At least 57 people were killed when a suicide bomber struck a voter registration center in Afghanistan’s capital in an attack claimed by the Islamic State terror group.
The US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, eviscerated Iran’s rulers before the Security Council on Wednesday as the global body debated the ongoing civil war in Syria.
The US has set a record for the number of guided bombs dropped from a single bomber in a series of strikes against the Taliban.
Israel’s U.N. ambassador is accusing Iran of attempting to turn Syria into ‘the largest military base in the world’ to destabilize the region, threaten Israel and ‘terrorize the entire free world.’