Russian air defense assets in Syria have downed 45 drones targeting their main base in the country, its military said Thursday, after an attack by the Islamic State group on a Syrian army base a day earlier killed seven troops.
The United States on Thursday welcomed Saudi Arabia’s contribution of $100 million to help stabilize parts of Syria no longer held by Islamic State, which comes as the Trump administration looks to cut back on foreign aid.
The number of Christians across the Middle East has been declining for decades as persecution and poverty have led to widespread migration. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, considered Christians infidels and forced them to pay special taxes, accelerating the trend in Syria and Iraq.
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘agreed in principle’ during their latest meeting in Helsinki last month that Iranian forces should leave Syria, according to a report in Bloomberg.
Osama Bin Laden has been dead for years and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s ‘caliphate’ in the Middle East has crumbled, but the global jihadist threat continues to boil as extremists retreat underground to plot terror strikes around the world.
Russian military police have begun patrolling the demilitarised zone between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights, highlighting Moscow’s increasing clout as a Middle Eastern power broker following its intervention in the civil 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.
Aziz Azbar, head of the Scientific Research and Studies Center in Masyaf, also known by its French acronym ‘CERS’, was killed in a car bombing incident alongside his driver on Saturday night in an alleged Mossad operation, a senior official from a Middle Eastern intelligence agency told the New York Times on Monday.
An Israeli airstrike on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights border has eliminated seven terrorists, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said Thursday.
Syria said late Thursday that its air defenses destroyed an unspecified enemy target during an attempted airstrike west of Damascus, as residents reported a series of loud explosions around the Syrian capital.
The Syrian army is expected to complete its takeover of the country’s southwest, near the border with Israel, in the next day or two. This will allegedly restore a familiar situation, in which Syria’s regime is once again stable, even if under the auspices of Russia.
Russia and Israel have reached an agreement to remove Iranian forces in Syria to within 85 kilometers of the Golan Heights border, Russia’s special envoy for Syria told the Sputnik news agency on Wednesday.
The IDF released on Tuesday a video clip showing parts of Israel’s May attacks on more than 50 Iranian targets in Syria in what was the widest military operation launched by the IDF in the war-torn country since 1974.
Israel has reportedly asked Russia to ensure that Syrian government forces do not harm or massacre civilians in the south of the war-torn country as they complete their takeover of the area bordering Israel’s Golan Heights from rebel groups.
The Syrian government regained control of the frontier with the Israel’s Golan Heights for the first time in seven years on Monday, after Islamic State-linked militants gave up their last pocket of territory in the area.
The Russian Defense Ministry said it had thanked the Israeli army for destroying an Islamic State missile launcher which fired two rockets at Israel that landed in the Sea of Galilee.
The Israeli Air Force shot down a Syrian fighter jet that traveled two kilometers into Israeli airspace on Tuesday afternoon, the military said. Syrian state-run media confirmed the jet was shot down but said it was inside its own airspace.
Israel’s David’s Sling air defense system made its operational debut Monday, when an interceptor missile was launched as a precaution against ballistic missiles fired within neighboring Syria, the military said.
Israeli jets reportedly carried out a strike Sunday on a missile production facility in northwest Syria that observers say was supervised by Iranians. In the past, the site was allegedly used to produce and store chemical weapons.
The son of an influential pastor silenced by the Iranian government has been handed a four-month jail sentence for his involvement with illegal house churches, World Watch Monitor has learnt.