AMMAN, Jordan — Three Jordanian intelligence officers and two other employees of the service were killed on Monday in a Palestinian refugee camp near the capital, Amman, in what the government said was a terrorist attack. The government has opened an investigation into the assault, which took place around 7 a.m. at an intelligence office in the Baqaa refugee camp, which was set up after the Arab-Israeli […]
WASHINGTON — An exhausted and ill-equipped Iraqi Army faces daunting obstacles on the battlefield that will most likely delay for months a long-planned major offensive on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul, American and allied officials say. The delay is expected despite American efforts to keep Iraq’s creaky war machine on track. Although President Obama vowed to end the United States’ role in the war in Iraq, […]
PARIS — With the Obama administration having effectively given up on negotiating a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, France tried its hand on Friday at making Middle East peace but ended the day with little to show for its efforts. Even before President François Hollande convened diplomats from 29 countries for the session — including Secretary of State John Kerry but no representatives of either […]
Iran’s top leader said Friday that trusting or cooperating with the United States would be a big mistake, an assertion that seemed to rule out any greater collaboration despite the nuclear deal reached nearly a year ago. The statement by the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made in a nationally televised speech, was the latest in a series of signals that Iran’s senior leadership was not likely to […]
INTERNATIONAL. –(BUSINESS WIRE)–Shifting power relationships in the Middle East are reordering regional geopolitics, entrenching a stalemate of conflict that threatens to further destabilize the region. Wars in Syria and Yemen and against the Islamic State, combined with the balancing of supply and demand in oil markets later this year, will likely return a risk premium to oil prices in 2017, says a new special report by IHS […]
One of Widad Majid’s brothers had to stay in Turkey for treatment of leukaemia, and her marrow could be the only hope for his survival Along with more than a dozen members of her extended family, Widad Majid spent last summer sleeping in sweltering refugee camps, open fields, train stations and a jail cell as she traversed Europe en route from Syria to Sweden, one small girl […]
By ANNE BARNARD May 31, 2016 BEIRUT, Lebanon — Rescue workers pulled children and other victims from the rubble of two hospitals in a city in insurgent-held northern Syria on Tuesday morning after the latest aerial bombardments. The attacks began Monday night, and, witnesses said, they appeared to be airstrikes conducted by Syrian government forces or their Russian allies. Rescue workers and antigovernment activists said that more than 20 […]
Basma Abdel Aziz was walking in downtown Cairo one morning when she saw a long line of people standing in front of a closed government building. Returning hours later, Ms. Abdel Aziz, a psychiatrist who counsels torture victims, passed the same people still waiting listlessly — a young woman and an elderly man, a mother holding her baby. The building remained closed. When she got home, she […]
TEHRAN — In a sign of further tension between regional rivals, Iran will not allow its citizens to travel to Saudi Arabia for the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in September, Iran’s state television reported on Sunday. The decision, which means that tens of thousands of Iranians cannot make their spiritual journey to the main pilgrimage site of Islam, came after several failed rounds of talks between […]
By TIM ARANGO May 28, 2016 BAGHDAD — American commandos are on the front lines in Syria in a new push toward the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa, but in Iraq it is an entirely different story: Iran, not the United States, has become the face of an operation to retake the jihadist stronghold of Falluja from the militant group. On the outskirts of Falluja, tens of […]
WASHINGTON — American Special Operations forces and the Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters they are advising this week pushed closer to Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in northern Syria. Defense Department officials confirmed that photographs taken by an Agence-France Presse photographer in the village of Fatisah that were released on Thursday showed American commandos, dressed in camouflage, assisting fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces during […]
The UAE on Tuesday announced that it would allocate 15 per cent of its projected budget to humanitarian contributions over the next four years. Dr Maytha Al Shamsi, Minister of State, made the pledge while addressing a session of the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, highlighting the directives of President Sheikh Khalifa, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, […]
Books of The Times By MICHIKO KAKUTANI The title of Janine di Giovanni’s devastating new book, “The Morning They Came for Us,” refers to those terrible moments in ordinary Syrians’ lives when the war in their country becomes personal. Those moments when there is a knock on the door and the police or intelligence services take a family member away. Those moments when a government-delivered barrel bomb […]
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Two teams of suicide attackers waged coordinated assaults on Monday deep inside Syrian government territory, killing scores of people and piercing a sanctuary for supporters of President Bashar al-Assad. Merely pulling off the bombings was a logistical feat that calls into question the effectiveness of Syria’s defenses. To reach the areas attacked, the jihadists would have had to move large quantities of explosives and […]
This is the age of the disgruntled — in domestic politics and foreign affairs alike. Anti-establishment sentiment within countries is somehow echoed by the way the rule book of international relations is being torn up. These dynamics feed on each other. They are at play in America (the rise of Donald Trump), Europe (growing populism) and Asia (nationalism and an arms race). Finding a way to […]
By HELENE COOPER May 21, 2016 WASHINGTON — An American drone strike targeted the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, United States officials said on Saturday, in the most significant American incursion inside Pakistan since Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, in 2011. In a statement issued on Saturday, Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, said the […]
|By Matein Khalid| The April payrolls data demonstrated that US economic growth has hit a soft patch. The US economy only added 160 jobs in April, less than the expected 203,000 average in the first three months of 2016. One disappointing data point does not imply a macroeconomic trend reversal since the US economy added 2.8 million jobs between March 2015 and March 2016. Statistical and measurement errors […]
ABU DHABI // A novel about the Palestinian diaspora and how life in exile compares with living under Israeli rule has won the ninth International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Rabai Al Madhoun was on Tuesday night declared the winner of the most prestigious literary award in the Arab world for his third novel, Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba. The Palestinian author received US$50,000 (Dh183,600) […]
DUBAI // New routes will soon open up around conflict zones for flights across the Middle East in an aim to redesign and improve the region’s airspace. With crises raging in Syria and Iraq, commercial flights have been affected with longer routes and more heavier traffic on those routes to avoid war-zones. “The Civil Aviation Authority has weekly meetings to table issues between civilian and military aircraft […]
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR April 25, 2016 HANOVER, Germany — The United States will significantly increase the number of military personnel, including Special Forces, in Syria to fight the Islamic State, President Obama said on Monday as he concluded a six-day trip to the Middle East, Britain and Germany. Mr. Obama, whose comments came in a speech in which he pressed for European unity, said that he would add 250 […]
By TIM ARANGO April 25, 2016 BAGHDAD — Iraqi forces, backed by American airstrikes and advised by American officers, have been making strides in Anbar Province, slowly taking back territory from the Islamic State. But in Falluja, a city in Sunni-dominated Anbar that has been in the hands of the Islamic State longer than any other in Iraq or Syria, civilians are starving as the Iraqi Army and militias […]
|By Matein Khalid| “Stop the murder, stop the lies, out, out, you nest of spies!” So chanted the crowd outside South Africa House on Trafalgar Square in the autumnal mists of London circa 1988. The anti-apartheid struggle was the moral compass of my generation, from the Soweto riots to Steve Biko’s murder to the horrific “necklacings in the townships and killing fields of the Limpopo to Madiba’s release […]
|By Matein Khalid| I was surprised by the dovishness of the Federal Reserve’s FOMC policy statement last week given the white hot US labour market and metrics of wage inflation. Hence the $29 rally in gold, the plunge in the Volatility Index to 15, the fall in the US dollar and the surge in oil/mining shares. The Yellen Fed is still worried about deflation risk in China, Europe […]
|By Alaa Alghamdi| Tensions are running high in the Middle East as the relationship between Saudi Arabia and their neighbour Lebanon starts to strain. Saad Hariri’s return after five years has shown to onlookers that Lebanon is a country not at ease with itself, with mixed feelings being vocalised – both by his supporters and his enemies. Saudi Arabia has for many years served Lebanon by financing various sectors of society in the country that divides […]
