Author: Steven Sahiounie

The US is working on ways to expand storage space to add several hundred million more barrels to it, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said at a White House briefing, as quoted by Reuters. “We’re also exploring potentially having the ability to store another several hundred million barrels, so we’re looking at lots of different options,” Mnuchin said after announcing that the federal government was drafting a plan to prop up troubled local oil producers. The federal government already leased out 23 million barrels worth of storage space in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to nine energy companies, and oil is already flowing…

An Iranian official said this weekend that it was the blood and sacrifices of Hezbollah that prevented Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh) terrorists from reaching European capitals. “The German government’s actions against the Lebanese people by designating Hezbollah as a terrorist organization violates international laws and violates the right to self-determination, which is a legal basis in human rights law,” the constitution spokesman for the Guardian Council, Abbas Ali Kadkhadai, said, as reported by Lebanon’s Al-Ahed News. The Iranian official criticized the German government for claiming to defend human rights, while supporting the designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist entity. “The German government,…

The mastermind behind the recent assassinations in Deir Ezzor was captured by the U.S.-led coalition and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the North Press Agency (NPA) reported on April 29, citing security sources in the SDF. The terrorist, Moeen Taha al-Hamad, was apprehended by the SDF in the town of al-Busayrah in the southeastern Deir Ezzor countryside. “Moeen Taha al-Hamad was the mastermind of the assassinations carried out by ISIS in Deir Ezzor … He is responsible for the murder of many innocents, he also planned dozens of operations,” a security source of the SDF told the NPA. A second…

At least 26 Turkish-backed Syrian militants were killed while fighting for the Government of National Accord (GNA) in Libya in the past few days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on May 2. According to the UK-based monitoring group, the militants were killed in the course of clashes with the Libyan National Army (LNA) on different frontlines. “According to the observatory’s sources, the dead [militants] were killed during clashes on the axes of Salah Al-Din neighborhood south of Tripoli, the Ramla axes near Tripoli airport and the axes of the al-Hadba project, also in the battles of Misrata…

The choice in the November US presidential election could be which rapist to elect, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, American political analyst and activist Myles Hoenig has said. Hoenig, a former Green Party candidate for Congress, said in an interview with Press TV on Saturday that it is Biden who should be advising Trump on sexual predatory behavior. He made the remarks after the Republican president took the side of Biden over sexual allegations against the former Democratic vice president. Biden is currently embroiled in sex scandal after his former Senate staffer Tara Reade accused him of assaulting her in the…

A series of airstrikes by the Saudi-led military coalition have hit trucks carrying imported food and medicine in Yemen’s central province of al-Bayda, as the Riyadh regime presses ahead with its devastating onslaught against the impoverished Arab country. Three drivers were injured and a number of people, including foreign nationals, went missing as the shipments owned by local traders went up in flames, Arabic-language al-Masirah television network reported. The report added that the bombing happened on Saturday morning, when the trucks were awaiting at a customs zone recently established in the Afar area of the province. The chairman of the…

A major Iraqi resistance group has warned about a fiendish plot by the United States to transfer members and field commanders of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group from neighboring Syria to the Arab country. In a statement published on Saturday, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, part of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), or Hashd al-Sha’abi, expressed serious concerns over latest US military activities in Iraq, among them the transfer and relocation of troops and military hardware. The group then dismissed the withdrawal of American troops from a number of bases across Iraq as “a smoke screen operation,” adding that Washington is…

The country was planning to make the newly acquired air defence systems operational in April despite numerous protests from the US, which had been pressuring Ankara to ditch the systems for good. In April, Turkey was unable to deploy the S-400 air defence systems it obtained from Russia last year, as planned due to the ongoing pandemic, but will ultimately do so at a later date, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin stated during an online conference with members of the Atlantic Council. “There has been a delay because of the coronavirus but it will move forward as planned”, the spokesman said.…

In April, US President Donald Trump announced via his Twitter that he had given the green light to the American Navy to attack and sink small Iranian military vessels if they start harassing US military ships. The Iranian news agency Tasnim has quoted the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy Commander Admiral Alireza Tangsiri as saying that US actions during last month’s incident in the Gulf rode roughshod over regional security. “They [the US ships] entered the area of our naval drills despite the fact that we earlier announced about holding the exercises. They are looking to undermine security with such steps,…

US servicemen have shot dead a Syrian civilian, who drove a car in the province of Deir ez-Zor, Syria’s state media reported, citing local civilian sources. According to the SANA news agency, the car slanted off the road near the Conoco oil field, which prompted the US servicemen to open fire. The US troops, jointly with the Arab-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, maintain control over parts of northeastern Syria. The American military is concentrated around oil and gas fields in the provinces of Al-Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor. Earlier in the month, an American officer and two members of the Syrian Democratic…