Iran's leader on Thursday condemned the military intervention by its main regional rival Saudi Arabia in Yemen as genocide, sharply escalating Tehran's rhetoric against the two-week-old campaign of air strikes.
Iraqi forensic teams began on Monday excavating 12 suspected mass grave sites thought to hold the corpses of as many as 1,700 soldiers massacred last summer by Islamic State militants as they swept across northern Iraq.
On April 1, the city of Tikrit was liberated from the extremist group Islamic State. The Shi'ite-led central government and allied militias, after a month-long battle, had expelled the barbarous Sunni radicals.
Even by Afghanistan's standards of often-shifting alliances, a recent meeting between ethnic Hazara elders and local commanders of the Taliban insurgents who have persecuted them for years was extraordinary.
Saudi Arabia is pushing for Sunni Muslim Middle East countries to set aside differences over political Islam and focus on what it sees as more urgent threats from Iran and Islamic State.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met Gulf Arab foreign ministers in Riyadh on Thursday to brief them on progress in the nuclear talks with Iran and offer reassurance that any deal would not damage their interests.
Thousands of Iraqi soldiers and Shi'ite militiamen sought to seal off Islamic State fighters in Tikrit and nearby towns on Tuesday, the second day of Iraq's biggest offensive yet against a stronghold of the radical Sunni Islamist militants.
Tens of thousands of Yemenis demonstrated in several cities on Saturday against the rule of the Shi'ite Muslim Houthi movement as clashes between Houthis and Sunnis in a southern mountainous region left 26 dead.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, growing frustrated with hardline resistance to a nuclear deal with the West, accused opponents on Saturday of effectively "cheering on" the other side in Tehran's grueling negotiations with world powers.
After the traditional call to prayer, Edina Lekovic stood in front of some 150 women seated on the floor at an interfaith center in Los Angeles, and delivered a sermon, a role traditionally reserved for Muslim men.
Behind black gates and high walls, Iraqi national security agents watch 200 women and children. Boys and girls play in the yard and then dart inside their trailers, located in a former U.S. military camp and onetime headquarters for Saddam Hussein’s officials in Babel province’s capital Hilla.
The self-styled sheikh behind a siege at a Sydney cafe had been charged as an accessory to murder and with multiple sexual offences. He also harbored deep grievances against the Australian government and had found little kinship in the city's large Muslim community, where he was seen as deeply troubled.
Three months after he took office with a mission to unite his broken, warring country, Iraq's new prime minister has swept away the divisive legacy of his predecessor with a burst of rapid and dramatic measures.
United Nations sanctions monitors have said photographs taken inside Iraq appear to confirm that the head of Iran's elite military Quds Force, one of Iran's most powerful people, has been in the country in violation of a U.N. travel ban.
U.S. air support and pledges of weapons and training for Iraq's army have raised expectations of a counter-offensive soon against Islamic State, but sectarian rifts will hamper efforts to forge a military strategy and may delay a full-scale assault.
Bahrainis voted in the second round of a parliamentary election on Saturday, a poll boycotted by the tiny Gulf monarchy's Shi'ite-led opposition which accuses the government of gerrymandering and says parliament lacks powers.
Bahrainis voted on Saturday in the first parliamentary elections since 2011 when mostly Shi'ite protesters took to the streets demanding more democracy.
Iraqi forces said on Sunday they retook two towns north of Baghdad from Islamic State fighters, driving them from strongholds they had held for months and clearing a main road from the capital to Iran.
France will start delivering military equipment to the Lebanese army in the first quarter of 2015 as part of a $3 billion contract to help the force fight jihadis from neighboring Syria, a French defense ministry source said on Wednesday.
Yemen's Houthi movement, which seized the capital Sanaa in September, on Saturday rejected a new power-sharing government that President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi announced on Friday, thwarting his efforts to end the country's political crisis.
