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.
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.’
In the wake of Vice President Mike Pence’s announcement last October that the United States government would provide direct aid to persecuted Iraqi Christians struggling to rebuild following the liberation of the Nineveh Plains, the Trump administration has taken concrete steps to follow through on its promises.
A series of eight earthquakes hit the Iran-Iraq border area and rattled Baghdad on Thursday, apparent aftershocks of a temblor that struck the mountainous region in November and killed over 530 people. Four people suffered minor injuries in Iran, state television reported.
The Iraqi government estimates $100 billion is needed nationwide to rebuild cities and towns left in ruins by more than three years of war against the Islamic State group. Local leaders in Mosul, the biggest city held by IS, say that amount is needed to rehabilitate their city alone.
Now that they’ve helped vanquish the Islamic State from much of Iraq, a battle-hardened militia with close ties to Iran may be training its sights on the remaining U.S.-led coalition troops scattered across the country.
Sophisticated weapons the U.S. military secretly provided to Syrian rebels ended up with the Islamic State, a study said Thursday.
Three days after declaring victory over the Islamic State group, Iraq’s prime minister warns that the group’s extremists might “erupt again somewhere else” without international cooperation in combatting the militants.
An Iraqi military parade in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone celebrated final victory over Islamic State on Sunday, with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi looking on as troops marched in formation, their bodies spelling ‘victory day’ in Arabic.
Iran has virtually completed a ‘Shiite Crescent’ of influence across the heart of the Middle East, using a string of battlefield successes to link a network of allies and proxy forces now spanning from nation’s border with Iraq all the way to Lebanon.
The head of a large Iranian-backed Iraqi militia that has been fighting in Syria said his group was ‘fully prepared’ to fight Israel if Damascus asked it to.
Two attackers shot several civilians on Monday in the Nahrawan area southeast of Baghdad before one blew himself up and the other was killed by security forces, the Iraqi Interior Ministry said, without providing official casualty figures.
The Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah is preparing to pull its cadre of commanders and military advisers from Iraq, with the group’s leader saying Monday it had achieved its goal of defeating the Islamic State in the Middle East country.
Gadi Eisenkot has offered to share Israeli intelligence about Iran with Saudi Arabia, in remarks published in a rare interview with a Saudi newspaper published in London.
Six Russian long-range bombers struck Islamic State targets near the town of Albu Kamal in Syria’s Deir al-Zor Province on Wednesday, the Russian Defence Ministry said in a statement.
A huge rescue effort is under way after a powerful earthquake struck Iran’s mountainous border with Iraq, killing more than 400 people and injuring more than 7,000.
A powerful earthquake that rocked northeastern Iraq on Sunday (Nov 12) killed at least six people and injured 150 others in the country, officials said.
Saudi Arabia is more aggressively confronting its rival Iran on multiple fronts. It’s a policy that risks sharpening several conflicts in the Middle East, even though so far it has failed to score any successes in stemming Tehran’s influence.
Hundreds of thousands of persecuted Christians, Yazidis and other minorities driven from battered northern Iraq are still in a perilous limbo, as humanitarian groups struggle to make sense of a new Trump Administration initiative rolled out after Vice President Mike Pence’s October 25 promise to ‘stop funding ineffective relief efforts at the United Nations’ and ‘provide support directly to persecuted communities through USAID.’
As the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria comes to a close, U.S. military and counterterrorism officials are setting their sights on the group’s growing presence in the war-torn country of Yemen.