Author: Steven Sahiounie

On August 31, fighter jets of the Russian Aerospace Forces carried out a series of airstrikes on the northwestern Syrian region of Greater Idlib, which is occupied by al-Qaeda-affiliated Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and several other terrorist groups. The airstrikes hit the outskirts of the town of Sarjah in the southern countryside of Idlib, where HTS maintain a number of positions, as well as the remains of a food preservation plant in the western outskirts of Idlib city, which is being used as a headquarters by the terrorist group. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the airstrikes…

 The websites of four major ports in the Israeli-occupied territories were knocked offline by a group of Iraqi hackers. It comes weeks after a group of pro-Palestinian hackers from Bangladesh shut down the websites of two commercial Israeli ports. Sabereen News, a Telegram news channel associated with the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) or Hashd al-Sha’abi, reported that a hacker group calling itself “ALtahrea Team” took down the websites of Jaffa Port, the Port of Haifa, Acre Port as well as the Port of Eilat on Wednesday. Back on August 2, the Hebrew-language Yedioth Ahronot daily newspaper reported that a…

Russians will no longer be able to file their applications under a simplified procedure The German-advocated suspension of a visa-facilitation agreement with Russia was supported by a majority of EU members, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said. Scrapping the deal was seen as an alternative to a proposed full ban on the issuance of tourist visas to Russian citizens. There was no unanimity among EU members for the harsher general visa ban, the Hungarian minister said in a video address on his Facebook page on Wednesday. But the proposal to suspend the agreement only requires a qualified majority of…

 Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov met on Wednesday in Moscow. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, had left Tehran for Moscow on Tuesday night and arrived in Moscow on Wednesday to meet with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov; the two officials met today. In the meeting, Lavrov stated: “Today, we will discuss issues such as the unconditional revival of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal knownas the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the crisis situation in the region.” Amir-Abdollahian, for his part, said: “I am glad that the relations…

An air strike hit the neighborhood near a hospital in the capital of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region late on Tuesday, said the head of another hospital which received casualties, less than a week after fighting shattered a four-month old ceasefire. Kibrom Gebreselassie, chief executive of Ayder General Hospital, said on Twitter that an area near Mekelle General Hospital had been hit. The extent of the damage and casualties was unclear. Ethiopian government spokesman Legesse Tulu, military spokesman Colonel Getnet Adane and the prime minister’s spokeswoman Billene Seyoum did not respond to requests for comment on the air strike. Getachew Reda,…

On Monday, the IAEA’s mission left Vienna and arrived in Kiev on Tuesday where the delegation met Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky Members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission, on their way to the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, have already joined the queue at the line of engagement to cross over to the liberated area, said the head of the Zaporozhye Region’s military-civilian administration, Yevgeny Balitsky. “This mission is not on our territory yet, they are queued up somewhere [near Zaporozhye]. We were asked to fast-track the process, but I refused, saying let them stand in line and have…

Taiwan has vowed to take “counter-attack” measures in case China enters its territory, as it announced firing warning shots at a Chinese drone over its region. The Army Kinmen Command claimed that soldiers shot at a Chinese drone for the first time on Tuesday afternoon, adding that the autonomous and uncrewed vehicle then left for Xiamen. Tensions have been on the rise on the island of Taiwan after Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, traveled to the region on August 2, despite warnings from Chinese authorities that the trip, according to the latter, violated the “One China” policy. Less…

The US authorities must admit that the military campaign in Afghanistan ended in defeat, bringing nothing but misery and the collapse of false hopes to that Asian state, the Russian embassy in Washington said in a commentary issued on Wednesday. “The twenty-year US military campaign in Afghanistan ended a year ago. The results of the longest war in the history of the United States are deplorable,” the embassy said in a message on its Telegram channel. “The humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in Afghanistan a year later, threatening to become even more lethal scalewise than 20 years of military conflict were.…

Steven Sahiounie, journalist and political commentator The latest death toll has risen to 30 Iraqis as Baghdad descends into chaos and violence, with another 390 protesters wounded from bullets and tear gas inhalation. In March 2023, it will mark the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, and yet the country has never recovered and still has no stable democracy. The Green Zone is a high-security area in Baghdad housing the Iraqi government as well as some foreign embassies. Security forces reported at least seven rockets fell in the zone yesterday. Muqtada Al-Sadr gave a speech today asking his…

The protesters and sit-in participants in Baghdad’s Green Zone were given 60 minutes to leave the Green Zone of Baghdad by the Influential Iraqi cleric and the leader of the Sadr movement Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr called on his loyalists in the government zone to withdraw after nearly 24 hours of fierce clashes with security forces and Popular Mobilization Units (PMU). In a televised speech Tuesday, Sadr gave his supporters, hundreds of whom stormed the government palace and have been holding an ongoing sit-in outside the parliament building, an hour to leave. Supporters of the influential Iraqi cleric fired rocket-propelled grenades…