Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says the report by an international chemical weapons watchdog that confirmed a chemical attack in Syria doesn't back claims by the U.S. and its allies that the substance was dropped from aircraft. President Bashar Assad and his ally Russia have denied the...

( Expression )- MOSUL. Falah Aziz says he's cut the head off 50 living people and killed 130 people in total. He calls himself the beheader. "Just that feeling, I can't explain how at ease I am with it," is his response when asked what it feels like to cut someone's head off." He is Iraqi and...

Israel's military says aircraft struck a Syrian military post that earlier fired a mortar into the Israeli-controlled side of the Golan Heights. It said the Syrian shell caused no injuries Friday, the latest in several such incidents of this week. The fire was spillover from battles in the...

The White House envoy coordinating the US-led coalition fighting Daesh (ISIS) was holding talks in Ankara Friday a day after visiting a Syrian Kurdish militia deemed by Turkey to be "terrorists". The visit by Brett McGurk, which was not announced in advance, comes a month after Turkish...

The German government said it would welcome Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan as an important guest during the meeting of G20 leading economies in Hamburg from July 7-8, despite Berlin's decision Thursday to bar other public events by Erdogan. Spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters he had...

Germany's parliament voted Friday to punish social media giants with fines of up to 50 million euros ($57 million) if they systematically fail to remove illegal hate speech.  Berlin took the measure, one of the toughest in the world, after a surge in racist and incendiary speech online,...

Iraqi government forces attacked Islamic State's remaining redoubt in Mosul's Old City on Friday, a day after formally declaring the end of the insurgents' self-declared caliphate and the capture of the historic mosque which symbolized their power. Dozens of civilians fled in the direction...

The United States imposed sanctions on two Chinese citizens and a shipping company on Thursday for helping North Korea's nuclear and missile programs and accused a Chinese bank of laundering money for Pyongyang. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the actions were designed to cut off...

The dollar was on course for its worst quarter in seven years on Friday, recovering only marginally against major peers after a week of hawkish central bank jawboning on inflation that has shaken major currency markets. It gained around 0.2 percent against the euro in early trade in Europe,...

Five suicide bombers attacked Lebanese soldiers as they raided two Syrian refugee camps in the Arsal area at the border with Syria on Friday and a sixth militant threw a hand grenade at a patrol, the army said. Seven soldiers were wounded. A Lebanese army statement said one suicide bomber...

The US Treasury Department on Thursday slapped sanctions on a Chinese bank over illicit activities in North Korea, including facilitating the production of weapons of mass destruction. Bank of Dandong which "acts as a conduit for illicit North Korean financial activity, is a foreign bank of...

A man was arrested after trying to drive a car into a crowd in front of a mosque in the Paris suburb of Creteil Thursday, police said, adding that no one was injured. The man's motives were unclear, and he had not succeeded in reaching the crowd because of barriers in front of the mosque, police...

Iran's state news agency quoted a representative of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday as saying Islamic State's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was "definitely dead". "Terrorist Baghdadi is definitely dead," IRNA quoted cleric Ali Shirazi, representative to the Quds...

A Moscow jury convicted five men on Thursday in the assassination of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on a bridge near the Kremlin two years ago, ending a nine-month trial that his supporters said had failed to bring the true masterminds of slaying to justice. The brazen killing so close to...

Women and children involved with groups like Daesh (ISIS) are increasingly returning to their home countries in Europe, with some posing a terror risk, a senior EU official said Thursday. The "new trend" of females and juveniles coming back from Middle East war zones means European countries...

( Al-Monitor )- Congress is threatening to cut funding for Iraq’s vaunted Kurdish peshmerga fighters if the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) ends up splitting with Baghdad. The House Armed Services Committee released a draft annual defense bill this week that makes continued funding for...

More than 16 years into the Afghanistan war, the United States and its NATO allies wrangled anew on Thursday over how to meet the need for more troops to counter the resurgent Taliban and help the Afghan forces break a stalemate in the fight. At a meeting in Brussels, NATO agreed to send...

President Donald Trump's temporary ban on people from six predominantly Muslim countries and all refugees entering the United States is finally scheduled to take effect later on Thursday, but in a scaled-back form that still allows in some travelers. The rollout of the controversial measure...

 Turkey would respond to any kind of harassment fire from PKK/PYD-held northwestern Afrin region of Syria, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said Thursday. Kurtulmus’s comment came as Turkey deployed military troops to the border line near Afrin region last week. He said that his...

A parole committee has decided to grant early release to Israeli ex-prime minister Ehud Olmert, who is serving a 27-month prison sentence for corruption, his lawyer said Thursday. "The committee accepted all our arguments," Olmert's lawyer Shani Illouz told public radio. "As of now, Olmert...