Five North Koreans in a small boat crossed the sea border into South Korean waters Saturday, a Coast Guard official said, in an apparent bid to defect to the South. The five people, including four men and one woman, have expressed their wish to live in the South as defectors, the Yonhap news...

The leaning minaret of Mosul's Grand al-Nuri Mosque survived conquests by the Mongols and the Ottomans, neglect under Saddam Hussein, and air raids during the Iran-Iraq War and the U.S. invasion in 2003. But after three years of Daesh (ISIS) rule, it is now little more than a pile of stones...

( Middle East Monitor )- Iraqi officials have declared that Daesh’s caliphate is finished. On June 29, after months of urban warfare and US air strikes, Iraqi forces say they are on the verge of expelling the militants from their last holdouts in Mosul. “Their fictitious state has...

U.S.-backed Iraqi forces pressed Islamic State fighters holding out in Mosul's Old City on Friday, while in Syria the militant group launched a counter-attack against an alliance of militias trying to oust it from its de facto capital of Raqqa. In Iraq, dozens of civilians poured out of...