(The Daily Star)- A coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shi'ite militia plans to cross the border into Syria to fight alongside President Bashar Assad after "clearing" ISIS  from Iraq, a militia spokesman said Saturday. Iraqi Shi'ite militiamen are already fighting on Assad's side in the...

Turkey hit 50 Daesh and 15 PKK/PYD targets as part of Operation Euphrates Shield in northern Syria, the military said on Saturday. The Turkish General Staff said in a statement that three Syrian opposition fighters were martyred and four others were wounded during Friday's clashes. ...

(The Daily Star)- Iraqi officials said Saturday that the security forces foiled an attack by ISIS extremists on the city of Ramadi, capital of the western province of Anbar. The reported thwarted attack led to 11 arrests and comes after a string of diversionary attacks by the extremists...

Twenty-five people were killed, six of them gendarmes, in two days of violence around the town of Bambari in the troubled Central African Republic, the U.N. force MINUSCA said Saturday. Six police and four civilians were killed in an ambush by armed men Friday morning, while Thursday, 15...

Russia failed to win re-election to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday, beaten out by Hungary and Croatia, following lobbying by rights groups against Moscow's candidacy because of its military support for the Syrian government. In a secret ballot by the 193-member U.N....

 Witnesses say a car bomb has exploded in the southern city of Aden at a checkpoint steps away from the central bank, which has been relocated recently from the rebel-held capital, Sanaa. The bomb injured three soldiers and caused panic in the busy commercial district of Crater, the...

Iranian-backed Iraqi Shi'ite paramilitary groups said they started an offensive on Saturday against Islamic State positions west of Mosul, assisting in the campaign to take back the city. The militias, collectively known as Hashid Shaabi or Popular Mobilization Forces, started moving in the...

Two suicide bombers killed at least five people Saturday in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, the heart of a seven-year-old insurgency by Islamist Boko Haram militants, a military source and residents said. The first attack occurred at 0600 GMT in front of a camp for displaced...

(The Daily Star)- Iraqi paramilitaries launched an operation Saturday to retake the town of Tal Afar from ISIS and cut extremist supply lines from Mosul to Syria, a spokesman said. Forces from the Hashed al-Shaabi, a paramilitary umbrella organisation dominated by Iran-backed Shiite...

(The Daily Star)-  A Palestinian attacked Israeli troops with his car and then with a knife in the occupied West Bank before being shot and seriously wounded, the army said Saturday. The attack happened late Friday near the Jewish settlement of Ofra, northeast of the city of Ramallah,...

 The United States accused the Syrian government Friday of using "starvation as a weapon of war" -- a war crime under the Geneva Conventions -- stepping up the rhetoric against Bashar Assad and his Russian backers. Rejecting the Kremlin claims that attacks on Aleppo have stopped, a U.S....

Iraqi Shi'ite militias backed by Iran said on Friday they would soon join the fight against Islamic State on a new front west of Mosul, a move which could block any retreat by the jihadists into Syria but might alarm Turkey and the United States. The Shi'ite militias, with thousands of...

Turkey expects to take delivery of its first Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) F-35A fighter jets in 2018 and has decided to order a second batch, the Undersecretariat for Defense Industries said on Friday. It did not say how many more of the fighter jets it planned to order but two U.S....

(Middle East Eye)- A Russian fighter flew dangerously close to a US warplane over eastern Syria, US defence officials said on Friday, highlighting the risks of a serious mishap in the increasingly crowded airspace. The near miss occurred late on 17 October, when a Russian jet that was...

OPEC officials meeting in Vienna to work out the details of their plan to reduce oil production failed to reach agreement after hours of talks on Friday, amid objections by Iran which has been reluctant to even freeze its output, OPEC sources said. The High Level Committee of experts will...

A Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman on Friday said an expert examination of pictures showing a strike on a Syrian school that UNICEF said killed 22 children, had shown they were fake. "Today after expert analysis of photographs from the Syrian village of Hass, it turned out that there was...

Warships from the US Navy and allied nations have intercepted four weapons shipments from Iran to war-ravaged Yemen since April 2015, a US admiral said on Thursday. Yemen has been rocked by conflict since Houthi rebels overran the capital Sanaa and other parts of the country in late 2014,...

In the midst of war, political chaos and a regional refugee crisis, Iraq still managed to be the world's most generous country to strangers in 2016, according to an annual global survey of charitable giving. Eighty-one percent of Iraqi respondents reported helping someone they didn't know in...

When Army Capt. Hugh Miller heard a group of policemen trading stories about a militant called Farouq al-Qahtani at their base in Afghanistan’s Konar province one day four years ago, he didn’t know what all the fuss was about. “I don’t think I even sent a report up about it,” Miller, who was...

The FBI is reviewing new emails linked to Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, the bureau’s director James Comey said in a letter Friday. "In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear pertinent to the investigation," Comey wrote...