Turkey carried out airstrikes against what it said are bases for armed Kurdish groups in northern Syria and Iraq, claiming that they were used as a base for attacks on Turkey, including the explosion at a popular pedestrian mall in downtown Istanbul last weekend that left six dead and dozens wounded. The main suspect in the bombing, a Syrian national identified as Alham Albashir, was arrested soon after the explosion.
The president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Mohammad Eslami, condemned a draft resolution proposed by the United States, Britain, France and Germany that was passed late last week by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors, that calls on Iran to cooperate with the IAEA’s investigators regarding the alleged “traces of uranium” at a number of its undeclared nuclear sites.
Turkey’s Interior Minister Suleiman Soylu said in a statement in parliament on 18 November that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was an arm of US intelligence and reiterated his earlier comments by denouncing Washington for its support for the Kurdish militia.
On 14 November, US occupation troops in Syria looted a new batch of the country’s oil from the al-Jazira region, in coordination with their Kurdish proxy militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
“The American occupation forces took out a new batch of stolen Syrian oil, in 76 tankers, to their bases in northern Iraq, through the illegal Mahmudiyah crossing,” local sources told Syrian media.
On 14 November, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar posted an article that disclosed documents exposing Saudi, Bahraini, Emirati, and US involvement in the Iran riots.
The article recalled a statement by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in 2017 about moving the battle to the Iranian territories to keep the kingdom “safe,” considering that this was the launching point of the strategic endeavor to undermine Iran by striking its internal front.
In what it called retaliation for the deadly Istanbul blast on 13 October, the Turkish military launched over a dozen airstrikes against Kurdish positions in northern Syria in the late hours of 19 November and into the morning of the next day, killing members of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).
On the evening of 16 November, two members of Iran’s security forces were killed and at least eight others were injured in the neighborhood of Khane Esfahan in the city of Isfahan. The assailants who carried out the attack reportedly drove by on motorcycles and opened fire on the security forces stationed in the street.
In the past few days, social media has been flooded with unsubstantiated reports alleging that the Islamic Republic of Iran sentenced 15,000 protesters to death in the wake of street protests and violent riots sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini.
The misleading allegations largely stem from a 6 November report by the UK-based and Saudi-funded Iran International news outlet regarding a letter signed by a majority of Iranian lawmakers.
Pakistan is struggling to strike a balance in its relations with the US and China, as rivalry and competition between the two superpowers are set to spark geopolitical turmoil in South Asia. The growing tension in the region has made Islamabad noticeably ambivalent about its foreign policy postures.
On 5 June, 2014, hundreds of ISIS militants launched a lightning assault on Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. As a result of the mass surrender and desertion of the Iraqi forces, ISIS took full control of the city on 10 June, just 5 days later. The group looted banks, freed prisoners, and captured significant amounts of US-supplied military equipment in the process.
But how did Mosul fall so easily? Why did four divisions of the Iraqi army, some 50,000 soldiers, withdraw without a fight in the face of just hundreds of ISIS militants attacking the city?