(Reuters) - The U.S.-led coalition has received orders to start carrying out strikes in support of Iraqi operations against Islamic State fighters in the city of Tikrit and operations are underway, a U.S. defense official told Reuters on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity....

Insurgents have seized a historic town in southern  Syria  from the government, a group monitoring the war said on Wednesday, part of a rebel counter-attack to stop Damascus reclaiming the border zone near Israel and Jordan. A Syrian military source reported heavy fighting...

(Reuters) - The Arab League will discuss the crisis in  Yemen  on Thursday, the regional body's deputy secretary general said, after the country's foreign minister called on Arab states to intervene militarily to halt an advance by the Shi'ite Houthi militia. "Yemen's foreign...

(Reuters) - Saudi Arabia is moving heavy military equipment including artillery to areas near its border with  Yemen , U.S. officials said on Tuesday, raising the risk that the Middle East’s top oil power will be drawn into the worsening Yemeni conflict. The buildup follows a...

(By Lama Shammas; Translation by Yusra Ahmed)   “Syrians are not numbers”, a campaign launched by many activists as a condemnation remark to the atrocious photos of prisoners died under torture in Mezzah Militar y Hospital (601) in Damascus.   Rami al-Asheq, a founder...

The Syrian opposition’s National coalition has formed a committee of 8 members to assess the situation in the northeast of Syria and to set a plan endorsing the coexistence and tolerance between Syrian ingredients of Kurd , Arabs , Assyrians and other minorities. Syria's...

  At least 75 Syrian regime fighters were killed on Tuesday in battles with rebels in Busra al-Sham town southern Syria, rebel commander said. Activists said rebels took complete control of the western part of Busra al-Sham, 40 km east of Daraa,  all the way...

Dozens of people, mostly children were hospitalized following an alleged chlorine bomb attack by Bashar al-Assad’s army on opposition-held Idlib in northwestern Syria, medical sources said Tuesday. "The casualties are unfortunately mostly women and children. Luckily, there have...

(Reuters) - Tunisia's Bardo museum held a ceremonial reopening on Tuesday a week after gunmen claiming alliance with Islamic State killed 20 foreign tourists in an attack aimed at wrecking the country's vital tourism industry. Several thousand Tunisians and foreign visitors to...

Lebanon's former prime minister, Fouad Siniora, testified before the Special Tribunal for Lebanon on Monday recalling how the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri "sobbed" when he recalled a disastrous meeting with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in 2003. Standing outside the Grand...

(Reuters) - Canada will expand its military mission against Islamic State by launching air strikes against the militants' safe havens in Syria as well as Iraq, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Tuesday. That will make Canada the second NATO member nation after the United...

Syrian activists on Tuesday have accused fighters of Jund al-Aqsa militant group of killing three youths from the Ismaili minority who fled to the town of Sarmada in Idlib province escaping Syrian regime's conscription. Early Monday, civil defense crew of Sarmada town found...

Syrian rebels launched an offensive Tuesday against a major government-held city in northwestern Syria, shelling the outskirts and warning residents to remain indoors in the coming days. The target of the operation is Idlib, a city of some 165,000 people and the provincial capital...

PARIS (AFP)- An Airbus A320 plane crashed Tuesday in the southern French Alps, security sources said. One of the sources said the plane belonged to Germanwings, an affiliate of German airline Lufthansa, traveling between Barcelona and Dusseldorf....

(Reuters) - A roadside bomb killed two Egyptian soldiers on Tuesday during a patrol near the town of Sheikh Zuweid, medical and security sources said, the latest in a string of attacks in the Sinai Peninsula bordering Israel and the Suez Canal. Deadly attacks mostly targeting...

(Reuters) - Iraq's request to the U.S.-led coalition for air strikes in the campaign to retake Tikrit from Islamic State insurgents is "imminent", a senior diplomat from a Western nation that is part of the coalition told Reuters on Tuesday. There was no immediate confirmation...

The people of Syria feel "increasingly abandoned by the world" as global attention focuses on Islamic State militants, while violence and government bureaucracy hinder attempts to deliver aid to 12 million people, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said on Monday. In his 13th monthly...

(Reuters) - A U.S. drone strike killed at least nine Pakistani militants in Afghanistan 's Nangarhar province early Tuesday, intelligence officials said, part of an intensifying drone campaign against Pakistani militants in Afghanistan. Tuesday's drone strike was near the site...

(Reuters) - Masked gunmen attacked a bus about an hour's drive from the Afghan capital Kabul on Tuesday and opened fire on all its passengers killing 13 people, local officials said. It is the third time unknown gunmen have targeted bus passengers over the past month. The...

 Islamic State has recruited at least 400 children in Syria in the past three months and given these so-called "Cubs of the Caliphate" military training and hardline indoctrination, a monitoring group said on Tuesday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the...