The U.S. State Department has expressed deep concern over the detention of Bahraini opposition leader Sheikh Ali Salman, warning that the arrest could lead to more tensions in the island kingdom.
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.
U.S. Senator John McCain said on Thursday he is blocking President Barack Obama's nomination of Anthony Blinken as the country's number two diplomat, citing sharp disagreement with the nominee's past statements on Iraq.
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 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.
Jordan arrested the deputy head of the country's Muslim Brotherhood on Thursday for criticizing the UAE's move to designate the Islamist political movement and its local affiliates a terrorist group, official sources said.
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.
A senior al Qaeda official wanted by the United States and a local leader of the militant group's affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia, were killed in a drone strike in central Yemen overnight, tribal sources said on Wednesday.
Cloaked in Kurdish flags, thousands of people lined the roads to cheer on a military convoy headed for what was -- until recently -- an obscure Syrian border town, now the focus of a global war against the militants of Islamic State.
When Sunni rebels rose up against Syria's Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Turkey reclassified its protégé as a pariah, expecting him to lose power within months and join the autocrats of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen on the scrap heap of the "Arab Spring".
After helping government forces break Islamic State's grip over a strategic town just south of Baghdad on Saturday, Shi'ite militias decided it was time for payback.
Residents of a Turkish border town, an hour's drive from where Islamic State is battling for control of Kobani, appreciate the quiet they say the Sunni militants brought when they swiftly seized neighboring Syrian territory.
A Saudi court has sentenced 17 people, four of them women, to prison terms of up to 30 years in two separate cases, one of which involving an al Qaeda plot to attack U.S. soldiers in Qatar and Kuwait, the state news agency SPA said.
The Lebanese government has cut back sharply on the number of Syrian refugees it is allowing into the country, the United Nations representative in Lebanon said on Saturday.
Yemen's new Shi'ite Muslim powerbrokers sent fighters towards an al Qaeda stronghold on Wednesday, raising the possibility of clashes between the politically ascendant Houthi movement and the hardline Sunni Muslims of the militant network.
Yemen's president named the country's U.N. envoy as prime minister on Monday in a move welcomed by the Shi'ite Muslim Houthi group which controls the capital, signaling an easing in the country's prolonged political crisis.
An Iranian police plane crashed late on Saturday killing four high-ranking officers investigating the deaths of police in a province that borders Pakistan and Afghanistan, state news agency IRNA reported.
Four opposition groups including the largest, Al Wefaq, will boycott a parliamentary election scheduled for November in Bahrain to protest what they described as a vote where the results would be "fully controlled by the ruling authority".
