Orientul Mijlociu

For the past year, the news and editorial commentary of the Washington Post has favored a more aggressive posture on the part of the United States and the Pentagon. The Post favors a U.S. naval presence in the Black Sea to break the Russian blockade against Ukraine as well as a more aggressive U.S. posture in the Indo-Pacific to challenge China. The twin notions of challenging Russia and China in their “home waters” conjures up images of daunting challenges that lead to increased defense spending and international tensions. And now the Post has added another adversarial challenge: the Middle East.

Syria’s Kurdish-led forces alleged Maher al-Aghal was also affiliated with Turkey-backed opposition group Ahrar al-Sharqiya.

A US drone strike on Tuesday killed the leader of the Islamic State group in Syria, the US military announced today.

Iran has already been striking the US in the region in dozens of rocket and drone attacks over the past year.

Reports over the weekend said that Iran was upping its rhetoric against any sort of US-backed air defense pact that might link Israel and several Arab countries together. Ostensibly, such cooperation would be defensive, but Iran and its proxies are currently the only real threat to the region.

Dressed in their distinctive black uniforms, fours soldiers of Iraq’s Counter-Terrorism Services last week revisited the scenes of their bloody battles against ISIS in Mosul, the northern city the elite force played a key role in liberating five years ago.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said its forces had neutralized a “terrorist cell” in Salmas near the Turkish border.

The IRGC issued a statement announcing that its ground forces tasked with protecting the border triangle with Turkey and the Kurdistan region of Iraq “neutralized a terrorist cell after intelligence monitoring.”

Even if the US terrorist designation is not lifted, and there is agreement on the JCPOA, the IRGC will still be the power broker of Iranian domestic politics.

As Qatar’s foreign minister visited Tehran Wednesday in an effort to follow up on talks to revive the Iran nuclear deal, there’s no indication the sides have come close to a resolution on the issue of removing the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) from the US terror list.

“People will die because of this vote,” US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said of the Security Council’s failure to reauthorize the cross-border mechanism.

Millions of Syrian lives hang in the balance after Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Friday that would have kept humanitarian aid flowing for another year to Syria’s impoverished northwest.