“A few days ago, US officials announced that it was Iran, not America, that had given up core demands. They lie. Iran has not given up on anything essential. On the contrary, Iran has obtained the essential demands it wants.” — Sayed Zahra, deputy editor of Bahrain’s Akhbar Al-Khaleej, August 31, 2022.
Al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch released a video on Saturday showing a United Nations worker who was abducted in the war-torn country more than six months ago, the SITE Intelligence Group reported.
Five UN staff members were kidnapped in Yemen’s southern province of Abyan in February while returning to the port city of Aden “after having completed a field mission,” UN spokesperson Eri Kaneko told AFP at the time.
The Asayish swept more than 50 per cent of the camp and arrested 121 ISIS suspects, including 15 women.
The Asayish in a press conference on Thursday said the Asayish arrested 121 suspected ISIS cells in Syria’s al-Hol camp during the seventh day of the “Security and Humanity” operation.
Hamas executed five Palestinians in Gaza, including two on charges of cooperating with Israel, the militant group announced on Sunday – the first known executions in Gaza in more than five years.
In a statement, the Ministry of Interior said the two were convicted of communicating with “hostile foreign parties,” a reference to Israel.
A diplomatic crisis is brewing in the Maghreb region amid tension between Morocco and Tunisia after President Kais Saied received the leader of the Polisario Front.
Tunisian President Kais Saied’s decision to receive Brahim Ghali — the leader of the Polisario Front, a rebel group fighting for independence in the Western Sahara — late last month has developed into a diplomatic crisis with repercussions spilling into the sports world.
Moscow’s Struggle to Sustain Its War in Ukraine
In April, just weeks after he launched the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin maintained that the West could never strangle Russia’s economy. The barrage of American and European sanctions had not succeeded and would not succeed in bringing his country to its knees. “We can already confidently say that this policy toward Russia has failed,” he told his officials. “The strategy of an economic blitzkrieg has failed.”
A prudent regard for the tragic, unexpected turns history can take would urge leadership in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing to weigh carefully the trajectory they are on and how seriously they want to test moving in another direction.
Despite the West’s containment strategy, Moscow is deepening its convergence with China and maintaining strong ties with India.
The next iteration of Russia’s quadrennial Vostok exercise has just begun in its far east region, involving more than 50,000 troops, 140 aircraft and 60 warships. Vostok (which means “east” in Russian) is one of four exercises Russia routinely conducts every four years, the others being Zapad (west) Tsentr (center), and Kavkaz (south), the directions corresponding to the locations of the drills within the country.
The return of a two-bloc world that plays by the rules of realpolitik means that the West will need to dial back its efforts to expand the liberal order, instead returning to a strategy of patient containment aimed at preserving geopolitical stability and avoiding great power war.
Остановка «Северного потока» на неопределенный срок заставляет переосмыслить всю текущую ситуацию в газовых отношениях России и ЕС. До сих пор РФ, пользуясь высокой зависимостью Европы от своих энергоресурсов, могла успешно добиваться одностороннего изменения газовых контрактов (переход на рубли) и одновременно поэтапно снижать объем поставок, взвинчивая цены на газ в ЕС. Очевидно, основной целью было оказать давление на власти ключевых государств, что должно было способствовать урегулированию текущих масштабных разногласий в сфере безопасности.