Middle Orient

By halting the security crackdown on Hamas, Abbas would be paving the way for terrorists to kill him and his associates in the West Bank, as they had already begun to do in 2007 in the Gaza Strip, and possibly again in a coup in 2014.

Israel carried out a cyber terrorist attack that caused disruption at an Iranian port this month, the Washington Post reports.

Al-Qaida-linked fighters attacked Syrian government positions Sunday on the edge of the country’s last rebel stronghold, triggering intense clashes that killed nearly three dozen combatants across both sides, opposition activists said.

Counter terrorism police are investigating whether sleepers from Islamic State have been reactivated to carry out attacks around Europe.

An Israeli district court on Monday convicted a Jewish extremist of murder in a 2015 arson attack that killed a Palestinian toddler and his parents, a case that had sent shock waves through Israel and helped fuel months of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

The Iraqi army launched operation Desert Lions to pursue ISIS remnants across the Jazirah desert north of the Anbar, south of the Nineveh and west of the Salaheddine provinces all the way to the border with Syria.

Some nine years after Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) deployed military advisers and fighters to Syria to prop up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, Israeli and U.S. officials have said Tehran is reducing its presence in Syria.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei says the United States will be “expelled from Iraq and Syria,” adding that “The U.S. government’s long-term performance has led to abhorrence by a major part of the world.”

Bottom Line Up Front The United States recently announced plans to remove two Patriot anti-missile systems from Saudi Arabia, which could be accompanied by a further drawdown of other U.S. military capabilities in the region.The removal of the Patriot missile batteries is emblematic of the Trump administration’s schizophrenic policy on …

Bottom Line up Front Iraq’s new government will struggle to extricate the country from its role as an arena for conflict between Iran and the United States, or necessarily set Iraq on a course for long-term stability.