The bodies of dozens of civilians killed in the past two days while fleeing an ISIS-held neighborhood in Mosul lay on Saturday in a street close to the frontline with Iraqi armed forces, a Reuters TV crew reported. The dead included men, women and children. Bags in which they had carried...

Syria's President Bashar Assad has said the worst of his country's six-year war "is behind us" after a string of advances by his forces backed by key ally Russia. In recent months, Assad's troops and allied fighters have retaken territory across the country, including recapturing all of...

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Saturday he wants to use to a trip to Turkey on Monday to try to "normalize" relations with Ankara after a series of rows with the NATO partner. Germany is considering moving its soldiers from Incirlik air force base in Turkey to Jordan or...

Islamist militants kidnapped and beheaded a young shepherd in Tunisian mountains near the border with Algeria, less than two years after his brother was killed in the same way, security sources and residents told TAP state news agency on Saturday. Troops found the body of Khelifa Soltani...

By Faris Rifai (Zaman al-Wasl) Noor al-Samah, a young man from Syria, is being held in a Greek prison after he was sentenced to 300 years imprisonment for smuggling and human trafficking. For al-Samah both the sentence and its length are absurd as someone who was arrested without evidence...

President Donald Trump said the United States "will continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on Earth" as he announced a U.S. pullout from an international accord designed to curb climate change. But facts muddy that claim. Data show that the U.S. is among...

Jordanian border guards on Saturday foiled an attack on the frontier with Syria and killed gunmen riding motorcycles who tried to overrun their position, the army said. It the armed men on motorcycles who belonged to "terrorist groups and coming from Syria" tried to attack a frontline...

Russia is closing in on a deal with Turkey to supply its latest S-400 air-defense system to Ankara, Moscow said Saturday, in the latest sign of restored ties. "Moscow and Ankara have almost finished discussing the technical side of the contract for S-400," Russian state giant Rostec said in...

( Al-Monitor )- Prior to the May 16 meeting between US President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Washington, Turkey had sought for a year to pressure Washington to make a final decision on whether it would cooperate with Turkey in northern Syria or whether it would opt...

A U.S.-backed operation by Syrian forces to capture Islamic State's Syrian "capital" of Raqqa will start in the next "few days", the spokesman for the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia said on Saturday. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias backed by the...

A fresh round of Syrian peace talks is scheduled for mid-June in the Kazakh capital, Syria's envoy to Moscow said Saturday, with sponsors Russia, Iran and Turkey aiming to bolster safe zones in the country. Ambassador Riyad Haddad told Russia's state-run RIA Novosti agency that Damascus had...

The Syrian army said on Saturday it had seized mountainous territory from Islamic State to the east of the road linking Damascus to Aleppo, helping to secure a critical lifeline for the government that has often come under IS attack. The army also said it had seized 22 villages and farms...

A U.S.-backed Kurdish-Arab alliance has seized new territory west of ISIS' Syrian bastion Raqqa, bringing it closer to a final attack on the city, activists said Saturday. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) launched an operation to capture Raqqa in northern Syria last November, and have...

( Financial Times )- By the time he reached Turkey after fleeing his hometown of Raqqa, the de facto capital of Isis in Syria, Hassan was destitute and desperate. And so, over his own misgivings, he helped a friend working with western intelligence to pinpoint the location of an Isis jail in...

An ally of British Prime Minister Theresa May has said income tax will not rise for higher earners, making a new promise to voters less than a week before a national election with opinion polls showing a narrowing of May's lead. The comments from Defense Minister Michael Fallon in an...

By Abdullah Ghadawi (Zaman al-Wasl)- Well-informed sources report that the authorities in Erbil International Airport in Iraqi Kurdistan have prohibited the entrance of Syrian nationals holding passports issued by the opposition Syrian National Coalition. The news comes although,...

( The Washington Post )- Despite pledges to account for every U.S. weapon sent to Syrian fighters battling the Islamic State, the Pentagon’s current plan to ensure they don’t fall in the wrong hands is problematic, experts say. Last month, following the Pentagon’s announcement that it was...

British police have lifted a cordon in the centre of Manchester and seized a car on Friday which they said could be potentially significant to their investigation into last week's suicide bombing in the city. Police are trying to establish the movements of Salman Abedi before he killed 22...

U.S.-backed forces captured a town west of Raqqa from Islamic State on Friday as they push toward the militants' Syrian stronghold, a security source and a monitoring group said. The United States said this week it started distributing weapons to Kurdish YPG militiamen who form a key part of...

Two U.S. aircraft carriers and their escort vessels carried out naval maneuvers in the Sea of Japan this week in a show of force directed at North Korea, a U.S. official said Friday. The USS Carl Vinson and the USS Ronald Reagan led the three-day exercises that ended Friday, with a total of...