Israeli forces and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have engaged in increasingly heavy exchanges of cross-border fire since early October, in the biggest escalation on the frontier since the Iran-backed group and Israel fought a war in 2006.
Hezbollah, one of the most heavily-armed, non-state groups in the world, is the most formidable of Iran’s allies in its “Axis of Resistance”, which includes Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, Iraqi militias and others.
In 2023, Spanish authorities arrested 78 people for offenses related to jihadist terrorism, a 66% uptick compared to the previous year.
The figures, compiled and released by the Ministry of Interior, are the highest recorded in nearly two decades. The rising number of jihadist terror-related arrests represents the continuation of an upward trend that began in 2015, the same year Europe witnessed an unprecedented influx of 1.3 million migrants, the vast majority of whom come from Islamic cultures.
A PKK terrorist who was plotting an attack against Türkiye was eliminated in Iraq, sources said Thursday.
The National Intelligence Organization (MIT) had found that Sadık Şeyh Ahmet, a PKK/KCK terrorist, was operating in the rural areas of Iraq’s Sulaymaniyah and Penjwen regions, said the sources on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on speaking to media.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an Iran-backed joint operations group of Iraqi militias, released a series of statements and video footage claiming rocket and drone attacks on U.S. military personnel in Syria and Iraq, as well as on Israeli sites in the days that followed.
On December 28, 2023, the Syrian opposition Eye of Euphrates website reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) trained militias in Albukamal, Syria, to use Iran-made drones.[1] The training exercises came as Iran-backed militias have also dispersed various weapons systems throughout Deir Al-Zour Governorate.
A December 29, 2023 article by the pro-Hizbullah Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar[1] claimed that Yemen’s Iran-backed Ansar Allah Movement (the Houthis) has formulated “a new comprehensive military deterrence plan” to confront threats to “Yemen’s maritime sovereignty” posed by U.S. actions in the Red Sea and Bab-el-Mandeb. Quoting “Yemeni military sources,” Al-Akhbar stated that an “exceptional meeting” of senior Houthi military and security officials held on the evening of December 27 in the Red Sea port of Al-Hudaydah[2] discussed “several response options to the American mobilization, Washington’s efforts to militarize the Red Sea, and the movement of the tools of the [United Arab] Emirates on the western coast,” after the Houthis received direct and indirect threats from America. The meeting, the first of its kind since the beginning of the Yemen war in 2015, contained “more than one message of challenge to America and its allies in the region and inside [Yemen],” aiming to escalate the Houthi operations against “Israeli ships” by “tightening the naval blockade on Israel” and taking measures against American ships, following the deployment of U.S. warships to protect Israeli shipping.
In the aftermath of the devastating bombings at the memorial service for Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Kerman, where the Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the tragic death of 84 lives and injuries to hundreds of others, concerns about the resurgence of ‘Salafi-Jihadi’ radicalism are once again on the rise. This unsettling turn of events has profound implications for followers of traditional ‘Salafi’ beliefs worldwide, who have historically rejected violence in the name of Islam.
In 2024, 12 percent of “forcibly displaced and stateless people” are expected to be from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, said the United Nations. This displacement will be caused due to war, humanitarian crises, and environmental catastrophes. The number’s recent causes are the civil war in Sudan and the fallout from natural disasters in Turkey, Syria, Morocco, and Libya. This percentage does not include the millions of people in Palestine who have been displaced since 1948.
Color revolutions are political term used to describe turbulent political events: mass street protests and riots in order to achieve a revolutionary change of government. Some revolutionary upheavals are successful and some remain only attempts. However, so far they have taken place in a number of countries at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.
Forty-five years ago this month, a revolution was underway in Iran. It was called an Iranian revolution but its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had a more ambitious project in mind: the founding of a new Islamic empire that would project power throughout the Middle East and far beyond.
In 1989, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei succeeded Mr. Khomeini as “supreme leader” of the misleadingly named the Islamic Republic of Iran.