(Reuters) - Iraq's prime minister will seek President Barack Obama's help to acquire billions of dollars in drones and other U.S. arms to fight Islamic State during a U.S. visit next week but wants to defer payment for the purchases, a senior Iraqi official said. Prime Minister Haidar...

  At least 35 people have been killed and 30 wounded in a regime air raid in Aleppo in northern Syria, Syrian Civil Defense officials have said. A regime warplane targeted civilians with a “vacuum bomb” in a crowded local market in the Maadi area under opposition control, Civil...

Beirut (AFP) - Across the Middle East, fierce rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran is heightening sectarian tensions, even in conflicts that analysts say are primarily political. But analysts say their rivalry is driven largely by politics, with sectarian sentiment more a...

An Egyptian court sentenced Mohamed Badie, the leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, and 13 other senior members of the group to death for inciting chaos and violence, a judge said in a televised session on Saturday. The court also sentenced U.S-Egyptian citizen Mohamed Soltan...

Pro-government forces repelled an attack on a key Syrian airport during a fierce battle in which they lost 20 fighters but killed almost as many militants, a monitor said Saturday. “There was an attack on the outskirts of the Khalkhalah military airport in Sweida province on Friday,”...

Islamic State has bolstered its forces north of Syria's second city Aleppo, where it is attacking rivals as part of a broader push beyond its eastern strongholds, a rebel leader and a monitoring group said. The radical jihadist group has in recent weeks conducted a series of attacks in...

(Reuters) - Islamic State militants attacked the capital of Iraq's vast Anbar province on multiple fronts on Friday, seizing two areas on the city outskirts in a setback for a government campaign to retake the desert terrain. The jihadists deployed vehicle and suicide bombs to tear...

(Reuters) - The United States is expanding its intelligence-sharing with  Saudi Arabia  to provide more information about potential targets in the kingdom's air campaign against Houthi militias in Yemen, U.S. officials told Reuters. The stepped-up assistance comes as...

Seventeen Turkish soldiers are to face trial on charges of attempting to disrupt the Turkish government. The 17 were ordered to be held in custody by an Istanbul court on Friday pending trial on charges of "being a member of a terrorist organization" and "attempting to overthrow the...

   Syrian government's former employees, including teachers, have been facing an extraordinary situation in territories controlled by the extremist Islamic State group northeast Syria since they have obliged to 'repent' their work with the Syrian state to avoid death and...

BEIRUT- Doubts have been cast over claims that at least nine Lebanese servicemen being held hostage by ISIS militants were relocated to the group’s stronghold in Syria, parties involved in the negotiations told The Daily Star. A source in contact with ISIS militants in Qalamoun said the...

Talks between representatives of the Syrian government and some members of the opposition have ended in Moscow with no sign of a significant breakthrough. The second such talks in Moscow this year were marred by friction among President Bashar al-Assad's critics, and were not attended by...

(Reuters) - At least 31 people were killed and nine seriously injured near the southern Moroccan city of Tan-Tan when a bus collided with a truck on Friday, the state news agency MAP reported. Most of the victims were killed by the fire that broke out on the bus straight after the...

(Reuters) - Saudi-led air strikes hit Yemen's capital Sanaa early on Friday, targeting weapons storage sites used by soldiers loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, a powerful supporter of Iranian-allied Houthi militias. The air raids, which targeted parts of the Defence Ministry...

 The International Committee of the Red Cross called on Thursday for immediate access to a Palestinian refugee camp in  Syria  which has largely been seized by Islamic State and where 18,000 people are caught up in fighting. The independent aid agency said that emergency...

United Nations  Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday he had asked his Syria mediator to "focus much more to re-launch a political process" in a bid to end the four-year civil war that has killed some 220,000 people and displaced millions. Mediator Staffan...

(Reuters) - Hillary Clinton is expected to announce her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 as early as this weekend, facing no substantial competition but needing to get her organization in place for the long battle to come. A variety of sources in the Clinton...

(By Faris Al Rifai; Translation by Yusra Ahmed)  Fighters of Al Qaeda's Syria wing, the Nusra Front, assaulted a prominent activist for lifting the Revolution’s Flag in Bostan al-Qasr neighborhood of Aleppo last Friday.  Hozaifa Dahman, the attacked activist,...

The United Nations Children's Fund has expressed concern over the use of large number of child fighters by armed groups in Yemen.   "Up to a third of combatants in armed groups in conflict-torn Yemen are children...I have been myself held up at checkpoints by children who...

A leading figure of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party has apologized to the German people for attacks carried out during the 1990s in Germany, a move that analysts see as an attempt to get out of the European country’s terrorist watch list. Cemil Bayik, a leading PKK figure,...