Group items tagged

Saudi Arabia announced Sunday it was severing diplomatic relations with Shiite powerhouse Iran amid escalating tensions over the Sunni kingdom's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.

The move came hours after protesters stormed and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and followed harsh criticism by Iran's top leader of the Saudis' execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Iranian diplomatic personnel had 48 hours to leave his country and all Saudi diplomatic personnel in Iran had been called home.

In doing so, he shaped the relationship between religion and politics here as distinctly different from the Shiite theocracy in Iran, where another ayatollah wields supreme power.

Ayatollah Sistani’s son, meanwhile, has kept up direct phone communication to the prime minister’s office, pushing for quicker reforms.

This latest intervention has provoked a new round of questioning by political leaders and diplomats in Baghdad: As Ayatollah Sistani has stepped in, once again, in the name of helping a country plagued by crisis, is he actually creating a fundamental shift toward clerical rule?

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia's eastern Shiite heartland prepared to hold a funeral service Thursday night to honor the executed Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr.

However, an Associated Press reporter who reached the site just after the announcement saw no visible damage to the building.

Iranian protesters responded by attacking the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and its consulate in Mashhad.

American commandos are on the front lines in Syria in a new push toward the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa, but in Iraq it is an entirely different story: Iran, not the United States, has become the face of an operation to retake the jihadist stronghold of Falluja from the militant group.

On the outskirts of Falluja, tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, police officers and Shiite militiamen backed by Iran are preparing for an assault on the Sunni city, raising fears of a sectarian blood bath

But the United States has long believed that Iran’s role, which relies on militias accused of sectarian abuses, can make matters worse by angering Sunnis and making them more sympathetic to the militants.

The battle for Tikrit and its surrounding villages, which pro-government forces won more than a month ago, was seen as a crucial test of the ability of the Iraqi government and its partners — including Shiite militias, Iranian military advisers and the American-led coalition — to win back territory from the Islamic State.

After the victory, an equally important challenge remains: stabilizing the Sunni-dominated area, and repopulating it, without recreating the sectarian animosities that helped the Islamic State seize the territory in the first place.

Another question was who would control the territory after it was wrested from the Islamic State: the Shiite groups or local Sunni forces.

The second deadly car bomb to strike the Beirut area in less than a week exploded on Thursday in a southern suburb of residential apartment buildings that is home to top Hezbollah offices and heavily populated with the group’s supporters.

Despite the attack’s apparently political nature, it struck civilians hardest.

The explosion came six days after a car bomb killed a prominent member of the Future Movement, Hezbollah’s main political rival, who had openly criticized the group. And it came a day after reports of the arrest of a Saudi militant who leads a Lebanon-based affiliate of Al Qaeda, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, which claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in November near the Iranian Embassy in Beirut.

Iran, Emerging From Sanctions, Faces Crisis After Saudi Arabia Embassy Attack

a Saudi state executioner beheaded the prominent Shiite dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr on Saturday

Within hours of the execution, nationalist Iranian websites were calling for demonstrations in front of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and its consulate in the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad

he Syrian government declared Saturday it is ready to attend peace talks scheduled in Geneva later this month

“terrorist groups” will be participating in the meetings, according to the Syrian news agency SANA.

The Geneva negotiations are the first step in a road map laid out last year by the international community to end the Syrian civil war. The

Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia have been escalating on many fronts — over wars in Syria and Yemen, the Saudis’ execution of a dissident Shiite cleric and the Iran nuclear deal. The dispute runs so deep that the regional rivals — one a Shiite theocracy, the other a Sunni monarchy — even clash over the name of the body of water that separates them.

Iran insists that it be called the Persian Gulf, and has banned publications that fail to use that name. Yet this riles Arab nations, which have succeeded in pushing various parties to use their preferred term — Arabian Gulf.

his may be among the most minor of the disputes, but it speaks to the level of hostility and competition between the two, and is taken quite seriously by many with an interest in the region — including the United States Navy, which, for fear of alienating its regional allies, uses the term Arabian Gulf.

A bomb tore through a Shiite mosque in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan, on Friday, killing at least 57 people and wounding more than 100 in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Pakistan in several years.

Police officials said that at least one gunman on a motorcycle had killed two police guards before entering the mosque and detonating what appeared to be a suicide vest, while another official said there were two attackers.

Asked if they were able to identify the bodies, he said that in many cases the police had just brought severed body parts to the hospital.

American commandos are on the front lines in Syria in a new push toward the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa

: Iran, not the United States, has become the face of an operation to retake the jihadist stronghold of Falluja from the militant group.

another example of how United States and Iranian interests seemingly converge and clash at the same time in Iraq.

It is not poison or a dagger that takes the lives of the young lovers, but a suicide bomb. The Montagues and Capulets are divided not just by family, but also by religious sect. And the dialogue in the Iraqi adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” is sprinkled with references to Blackwater, Iranians and the American reconstruction effort.

When King Salman became Saudi Arabia’s ruler this year, few people expected much change. He was 79 and reputedly in ill health

But since taking the throne in January, Salman has shaken up Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy and the royal family’s succession plans.

He has launched a bombing campaign against Shiite rebels in Yemen and increased support for rebels in Syria, signaling a more assertive role for an oil-rich kingdom that traditionally relied on the United States for security. Salman’s goal, analysts say, is to guard Sunni Muslims against what he sees as the growing influence of Shiite Iran.

THE last several months have brought a dramatic escalation in conflict across the Middle East, almost all of it involving tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims

The kingdom has sent planeloads of weapons and millions of dollars to Sunni militants in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, many of them Salafi extremists. In contrast to Tehran, Riyadh has no compunction ab

And yet, as new and disturbing as these developments may appear, the linkage of sectarian and secular interests is a return to the classic geopolitics of religion in the Middle East

Days after seizing the Syrian desert city of Palmyra, Islamic State militants blew up the notorious Tadmur Prison there, long used by the Syrian government to detain and torture political prisoners.

The demolition was part of the extremist group’s strategy to position itself as the champion of Sunni Muslims who feel besieged by the Shiite-backed governments in Syria and Iraq.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has managed to advance in the face of American-led airstrikes by employing a mix of persuasion and violence.

the narrative that official Washington has tried to perpetrate - that the war was "ended" by more US troops - is simply untrue. The war was burning itself out before more troops arrived; the surge failed to use this lull to construct a multi-sectarian democratic government (which was its own criterion for success); the current forces pit a Sadr-Maliki Shiite government against increasingly alienated Sunnis now re-aligning with al Qaeda, and possibly also against the Kurds in the north, where tensions are rising again and could easily spiral into a civil war as US troops leave. What Petraeus achieved was a face-saving withdrawal. That was all.

We must learn this lesson: the US is a terrible neo-imperialist power. This whole enterprise designed to rid the world of danger has increased danger in the world; an attempt to end a torture regime led to widespread torture by Iraqi government forces, and, of course, by the US itself; a bid to encourage democracy will in all likelihood lead to either chaos or a Shiite strongman; an endeavor seeking to weaken Iran has ended in empowering it. These are conservative lessons, not liberal ones - of the hellish consequences of good intentions in places we do not understand and cannot control.

Millions of Shiite Muslims from Lebanon to India commemorated on Tuesday the slaying of a revered figure, Imam Hussein, by weeping in mosques, hosting plays, recreating a bloody battle, and for a minority, also flagellating themselves.

From Libya to Palestine to parts of the Egyptian Sinai, armed—and increasingly hard-line—Islamist groups are making significant inroads. This is the Arab world’s Salafi-Jihadi moment.

In Libya and Syria, even non-Salafi groups like the Brotherhood are adapting to the new world of anti-politics, allying themselves with local armed groups or working to form their own militias.

This is one of the great tragedies of the past few years—that a movement meant to demonstrate that peaceful protest could work ultimately demonstrated the opposite.

The group's rise in Iraq -- and its capture of thousands of square miles of land -

"We have not defeated the idea," he is reported to have said. "We do not even understand the idea."

A global caliphate secured through a global war. To that end it speaks of "remaining and expanding" its existing hold over much of Iraq and Syria. It aims to replace existing, man-made borders, to overcome what it sees as the Shiite "crescent" that has emerged across the Middle East, to take its war -- Islam's war -- to Europe and America, and ultimately to lead Muslims toward an apocalyptic battle against the "disbelievers."