Author: Steven Sahiounie

A US drone strike against an Afghan village in Alisher, Khost Province destroyed a home, killing a family of six, including multiple children. The Khost Provincial council confirmed the incident, and criticized the matter. The Pentagon had initially claimed the incident killed three Taliban fighters, but has since confirmed that they are “aware” of reports of civilian deaths, saying they are working with local officials on this. The US killing civilians and insisting they killed fighters has been a recurring problem for decades in Afghanistan. While the Pentagon often agrees to joint inquiries into the reports of civilian deaths, they rarely publicly…

A cousin of ringleader of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was purportedly killed in a US military operation in Syria, has been captured in Iraq’s oil-rich northern province of Kirkuk. Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi security analyst, wrote in a post published on his Twitter page on Wednesday that “forces from the Hawija police station had managed to arrest a Daesh commander identified as Hamed Shaker Saba’ al-Badri inside the city of Kirkuk. He is the cousin of Baghdadi and better known by the nom de guerre Abu Khaldun.” Hashemi added that Abu Khaldun was “one of the most senior Daesh leaders, who…

US President Donald Trump has criticized French President Emmanuel Macron for describing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as “brain dead”. During a meeting on Tuesday with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in London on the sidelines of a meeting of alliance leaders Trump said his French counterpart’s comments were “very insulting” and “nasty.” “I think that’s very insulting … NATO serves a great purpose,” Trump insisted. Trump said he had been “very surprised” by Macron’s “tough” statement which he regarded as “very disrespectful.” “It’s a tough statement. When you make a statement like that, that is a very, very…

Iranian authorities have arrested key members of a group planning to cause unrest at university campuses in Iran, the country’s intelligence ministry said in a statement issued on Tuesday. The “counterrevolutionary” group’s plans to cause a disruption during celebrations of Students’ Day, celebrated on 7 December, were foiled thanks to the vigilance of committed students and relevant institutions, the ministry stated. Iran has been experiencing widespread protests since mid-November, which began over a sharp hike in fuel prices. The unrest led Iranian authorities to temporarily shut down the country’s Internet. Prominent rights group Amnesty International placed the death toll at 208…

by Oleg Burunov In October, President Donald Trump, who previously announced his intention to withdraw all US forces from northeastern Syria, said that some American troops would remain there to “guard oil” from Daesh* militants. During a NATO meeting in London on Tuesday, President Donald Trump reiterated his “we keep the oil” mantra in light of the US troops’ withdrawal from northern Syria ahead of a Turkish military operation against Kurdish forces in the area in October. “We left their border. We’ve been on their border long enough. They’re doing just fine on their border. We kept the oil. I kept the oil”,…

BY MONA ISSA Lebanon was one of the earliest experiments for sectarianism by France and other imperial powers. While it suffers from corruption and sectarianism, it also suffers from accumulated financial burden. The economic basis of the country is founded on the fiscal terms of the old aristocrats, who are what we call the “international financial class” today. This class, according to the Economist, monopolizes 18 out of 20 of all major banks in Lebanon. However, the Lebanese banking sector is hardly ever Lebanese. Engineered and driven by IMF, neoliberal fiscal policy, and their Lebanese billionaire minister-proxies, the West bloc in…

Hundreds of Syrian refugees have headed home in the first batch to leave Lebanon since protests broke out in the small Arab country more than a month ago. Since the early hours of Tuesday, scores of Syrians boarded buses in several locations in Lebanon before heading back to their hometowns in Syria. Vanessa Moya of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said some 225 Syrian refugees were scheduled to head back to Syria, raising the number to about 27,000 refugees who have returned to Syria over the past two years, AP reports. Thousands of Syrians have returned home from Lebanon since…

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) says Turkish-backed militants are plundering historical artifacts in Syria’s northwestern province of Aleppo and smuggling them over the border to sell in Turkey. The Britain-based war monitor group, citing reliable sources requesting anonymity, reported on Tuesday that the militants have been systematically looting antiquities in the Afrin district, particularly in the city of al-Nabi Hori – also known as Korsh — ever since Turkish military forces and their Syrian proxies launched an operation to push Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militants away from a “safe zone” along Syria’s border with Turkey. The SOHR highlighted that Turkish-affiliated militants,…

By Arabi Souri The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs slammed the regime of Donald Trump for its attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries after the US State Department issued a statement to interfere in the works of the Syrian Constitution Committees deliberations in Geneva. A spokesperson for the ministry said to the Syrian official news agency SANA ‘the dialogue is a Syrian-Syrian one and no one has the right to interfere in it or support any party under any pretext.’ The spokesperson outlined that the role of the United Nations represented by its special envoy Geir Pederson is limited to facilitating…

Iran has begun mass production of the new submarine-launched Jask cruise missiles, said Iranian Navy commander Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi. The information was released by the official during an event to demonstrate new weapons and new Iranian military projects. Despite the revelation, the navy commander did not disclose details or characteristics of the missile, it is only known that Jask can be fired from submarines. The missile was first shown in action to the public in February this year during the Veleyat-97 naval exercises. Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi also reported that work on updated versions of the weapon is already…