Orientul Mijlociu

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s statement on May 13 that Turkey would not consider Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership favorably, has exposed the conflict that has been going on behind closed doors since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The plan to make Sweden and Finland, which are members of the European Union but not NATO members, join NATO due to the fear of Russia and the demand of the USA was uttered in the first days of the crisis.

Independent reformist candidates won at least 13 seats in elections for Lebanon’s parliament, and Hizbullah and its allies appear likely to lose their majority in the 128-member assembly, according to reports. The results of the weekend election were announced on Tuesday by Lebanon’s Interior Ministry; Voter turnout was historically low with a reported 41% participation rate. It is the country’s first parliamentary election since being seized by a major financial crisis.

Iran is just “a few weeks away” from having enough enriched uranium to build its first nuclear bomb, Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz told an Institute for National Security Studies conference at Herzliya’s Reichman University.

The Iraqi Air Force killed three suspected ISIS militants in an airstrike on the country’s western Anbar province, the military’s Security Media Cell announced on Thursday.

The strike killed three suspected ISIS members hiding in a tunnel believed to have served as a “hostel” for the group in Wadi Ashwa near Kubaisah in Anbar Province, according to the Media Cell.

It was a sea of yellow as thousands of men, women and children waving Hezbollah flags and wearing the group’s trademark yellow caps rallied on a giant plot of land in the ancient eastern city of Baalbek in support of the heavily armed militant group.

Emboldened by an oil price surge since Russia invaded Ukraine, Iran’s clerical rulers are in no rush to revive a 2015 nuclear pact with world powers to ease sanctions on its energy-reliant economy, three officials familiar with Tehran’s thinking said.

Twenty years ago, the firebrand mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, led his party to a landslide victory in a parliamentary election that would transform Turkish politics. What followed were two decades of uninterrupted control of the government by the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which set out to prove that an Islamist party was not a threat, but could in fact move the country forward.