Top Iraqi officials on Wednesday deepened their efforts to stem the damage from a recently published Reuters report revealing that Baghdad had inked a weapons deal with Iran worth $195 million, breaking a U.N.-imposed arms embargo on the Islamic republic and fueling concerns that the Obama administration had allowed Iraq to slip into the...

A second set of audio recordings purporting to be wiretaps of phone conversations between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his son Bilal – this time with Erdogan instructing Bilal to hold out for more money in a business deal – was anonymously uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday, days after a...

Ongoing political warfare in Turkey – which has pitted the country’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) against rival Islamists linked to U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen – has generated renewed calls for the resignation of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after the publication of audio recordings that seemed to document Erodgan and...

Both Washington and Baghdad continued to scramble on Tuesday in the wake of a Reuters expose documenting a $195 million security deal, spread across eight different contracts, which would see Iraq purchasing weapons from Iran. The move would be violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions prohibiting trading arms with the...

Hezbollah has recruited Shiite radicals from inside Europe to travel to Syria and fight on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime, according to reports published in Lebanese media earlier this week and conveyed Monday by the Jerusalem Post. According to an article in the Beirut- based The Daily Star last...

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif on Sunday declared that ongoing sanctions relief has created a “safe, stable business environment” in Iran and that the country is now “open for business,” a direct response to statements maintaining that the Islamic republic is “not open for business” from among others Treasury Department Under Secretary...

Egypt’s interim cabinet resigned on Monday amid widespread popular dissatisfaction over the country’s ongoing economic woes, with analysts widely reading the development as preparation for Egyptian army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to formally announce a Presidential run. The broadly popular military official is expected to declare his candidacy shortly, and the optics of...

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) reportedly struck a Hezbollah arms cache along the Syrian-Lebanese border late on Monday, with coverage disagreeing as to which side of the border the Israelis had targeted but converging on suggestions that the IAF was after advanced weapons. A security source told Lebanon’s Daily Star that the raid targeted...

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi over the weekend catalogued the topics that Iran expects to negotiate over when comprehensive nuclear negotiations renew, pointedly excluding any mention of Iran’s ballistic missile program while including uranium enrichment and plutonium production. Araqchi who had attended a Commission session on Sunday said Iran declared during...

State Department officials found themselves on the defensive Monday, after an expose published by Reuters revealed that Iraq has signed a $195 million arms deal with Iran for the delivery of weapons to Iraq. Baghdad sources told the outlet that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had been moved to seek arms from the...