Middle Orient

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has ordered an end to a years-old nightly curfew in Baghdad in a bid to ease restrictions on daily life despite persistent violence, officials said Feb. 5. Lifting the curfew is a major change to a longstanding policy aimed at curbing violence in the capital …

Secretary of State John Kerry welcomed to the State Department senior diplomats from nearly 60 nations, including more than 35 Washington-based ambassadors from partner countries in the international coalition against ISIL. Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL John Allen and other senior US officials briefed the …

Egypt President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, Lebanese Mufti Abdul Latif Derian, and Grand Mufti of Egypt Shawqy Allam met on Tuesday to discuss extremist ideologies and the religious relations between Egypt and Lebanon. During their talks, Al-Sisi pointed out the importance of correcting religious discourse and re-defining the concepts and the …

Syrian Kurdish militias, who drove out Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants from the center of Kobane after 134 days of battle, are launching operations into the villages surrounding the Syrian border town in a bid to clear the last frontiers of the battle from the Islamists. …

Sustained US-led airstrikes along with the Kurdish ground forces have forced the Islamic State out of key Syrian border town Kobane, the Pentagon has said. “Kurdish ground forces, supported by our air component, were successful in retaking the town of Kobane, which again shows the emptiness of Daesh’s claims of …

Turkey’s border with Syria has again witnessed tension in the wake of Kurdish forces’ success in driving jihadists from Kobane, with Ankara contrastingly attracting international applause and domestic opprobrium over the affair. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, meanwhile, slammed the Kurdish parties fighting there for ruining the town, once home …

 Kurdish fighters backed by intense U.S.-led airstrikes pushed the Islamic State group entirely out of a key Syrian town on Monday, marking a major defeat for the extremists whose hopes for an easy victory when they pushed into Kobane last year dissolved into a bloody, costly and months-long siege. As …

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has said Turkey is unable to close its 510-mile-long border with Syria, which has been crossed by thousands of foreign terrorist volunteers. “We cannot put soldiers everywhere on the border. In any case, there isn’t any state on the other side [of the frontier],” Davutoğlu said on …

The US-led coalition continued to strike ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq, with a total of 19 airstrikes between 8am on January 19, and 8am on January 20, local time, the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) said in a statement released Tuesday. In Syria, attack, bomber, …

French and US Presidents, Francois Hollande and Barack Obama respectively, discussed over the phone Tuesday developments in the Middle East and the fight against terrorism. Hollande thanked Obama for the US support following the “terrorist attacks” that took place in Paris recently, the president’s office said in a statement and …