Category: 2. Middle East

Senior Republican and Democratic US senators issued a bipartisan call Thursday for a probe into a scandal over an accidentally leaked chat between top officials on Yemen air strikes that has engulfed Donald Trump’s White House.

Republican Senator Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and ranking Democrat Jack Reed wrote to a Pentagon watchdog asking it to “conduct an inquiry” into the incident.

The Atlantic magazine published the full chat — which Trump’s top…

Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has accused Israel of exploiting followers of his minority faith in Syria as part of a broader plan to divide the Middle East along sectarian lines.

Israel wants “to implement the plan it has always had… which is to break up the region into confessional entities and extend the chaos,” said Jumblatt, a key figure in Lebanese politics for more than four decades.

“They want to annihilate Gaza, then it will be the West Bank’s turn… they are trying to…

AFP photographer Yasin Akgul, who was arrested this week covering Turkey’s worst unrest in more than a decade, was freed Thursday from an Istanbul jail, AFP correspondents said, though his lawyer said the charges against him remain.

Akgul was detained in a pre-dawn raid at his home Monday and remanded in custody by an Istanbul court a day later.

He was charged with “taking part in illegal rallies and marches”, drawing outrage from rights groups and the Paris-based news agency.

On Thursday, the…

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday warned “the fate of free societies” was linked to their fight against anti-Semitism, at a conference in Jerusalem, where the attendance of far-right European politicians has divided the international Jewish community.

Guests at the symposium on combating anti-Semitism included the leader of France’s far right National Rally (RN), a party whose cofounder Jean-Marie Le Pen was known for his anti-Semitic comments.

Also in attendance were a…

Israel on Thursday kicked off a conference on fighting anti-Semitism, with the attendance of politicians from Europe’s far right driving division within the international Jewish community.

Among those invited to the symposium are a member of Hungary’s Fidesz party and France’s National Rally (RN), whose cofounder was known for his anti-Semitic comments.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar addressed the conference, decrying a “new anti-Semitism” stoked by “a disturbing alliance between the…

Turkey on Thursday stepped up a crackdown on media coverage of mass protests since the arrest of Istanbul’s popular mayor, deporting a BBC journalist and imposing a 10-day broadcast ban on an opposition TV channel.

The moves came after police detained 11 Turkish journalists, including an AFP photographer, who were covering the worst street protests to hit Turkey since 2013.

The protests erupted on March 19 after the arrest and subsequent jailing of Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, President…

Mohammed Hussein Mohammedie was just 19 when he left Iraq and attempted the perilous English Channel crossing in November 2021.

He died alongside 26 others when their dinghy sank.

His family were refugees from Iran and suffered financial hardship, his father told a UK inquiry into the capsizing of the dinghy in the early hours of November 24, 2021.

“He wanted to be different. He wanted to be brave,” Hussein Mohammedie said of his son’s ambitions to leave Iraq, during the final days of the…