Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday accused the United States of trying to divide Iraq along sectarian and ethnic lines and urged Iraqis to withstand any such plans.
At least 43 people were killed and more than 240 wounded on Thursday in two suicide bomb blasts claimed by Islamic State in a crowded residential district in Beirut's southern suburbs, a stronghold of the Shi'ite Muslim group Hezbollah.
The overpowering stench of the rubbish piling up in Lebanon's streets has become a potent symbol of the political rot protesters blame not only for the garbage crisis but a gridlocked sectarian power system unable to meet citizens’ most basic needs, from electricity to water, health to education.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said the battle over the northern town of Baiji and its refinery - Iraq's largest - was critical to the fight against Islamic State.
Iraq's former prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, on Tuesday denounced as worthless a parliamentary report which blamed him and others for the fall of Mosul to Islamic State last year and called for them to be referred to the judiciary.
Bahraini authorities have arrested several people in connection with Tuesday's deadly bombing and suspect the attack was a "foreign attempt" to harm the Gulf state's stability, local media reported on Wednesday.
The head of one of Iraq's fiercest Shi'ite militias called the U.S.-led coalition's campaign against Islamic State ineffective and accused Washington of lacking the will to uproot radical Sunni jihadis controlling large swathes of Iraq and Syria.
Bahrain said on Saturday it had foiled an arms smuggling plot by two Bahrainis with ties to Iran and announced the recall of the Gulf island kingdom's ambassador to Tehran for consultations after what it said were repeated hostile Iranian statements.
Saudi-led coalition forces announced on Saturday a five-day humanitarian ceasefire would take effect in Yemen starting Sunday evening at the request of exiled president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter made a surprise visit to Baghdad on Thursday to get a first-hand assessment of the campaign against Islamic State as Iraq tries to retake the fallen capital of Sunni-dominated Anbar province.
Two deadly car bombs hit the capital Sanaa and a southern city in Yemen on Tuesday, state news agency Saba reported, a day after air strike and clashes killed almost 200 people nationwide.
A year after declaring his caliphate, it is clear that the secret of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's success is the army and state he has built from the remnants of Saddam Hussein's military, and the allegiance he has won or coerced from alienated Sunni Muslims in Iraq, Syria, and beyond.
After 11 weeks of air strikes that have failed to change the balance of power in Yemen, Saudi Arabia is running out of options to restore President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's exiled government to Sanaa.
The United States is expected to announce on Wednesday plans for a new military base in Iraq's Anbar province and the deployment of around 400 additional U.S. trainers to help Iraqi forces in the fight against Islamic State, a U.S. official said.
Sunni Islamist groups have overrun Syrian army outposts and villages in the Idlib province, closing on coastal strongholds of President Bashar al Assad's government, rebels and a monitor said on Saturday.
Political sources on Monday reported progress in efforts to convene a dialogue among Yemen's warring factions as warplanes from a Saudi-led coalition carried out air strikes on Monday against Yemen's Houthi group across the country.
In his battle against militant Islam, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is relying not just on bomber planes and soldiers but on white-turbaned clerics from Al-Azhar, Egypt's 1,000-year-old center for Islamic learning. He wants clerics to counter radicalism in the classroom.
Iraq's Shi'ite paramilitaries said on Tuesday they had taken charge of the campaign to drive Islamic State from the western province of Anbar, giving the operation an openly sectarian codename that could infuriate its Sunni population.
Iraqi forces regained ground from Islamic State militants in western Iraq on Sunday, advancing towards the city of Ramadi one week after it fell to the insurgents.
Shi'ite Muslim militiamen and Iraqi army forces launched a counter-offensive against Islamic State insurgents near Ramadi on Saturday, a militia spokesman said, aiming to reverse potentially devastating gains by the jihadi militants.
