Giving Iran access to U.S. dollars in order to boost its international business profile would erode diplomatic leverage against the Islamic Republic and jeopardize the international banking system, experts said in a conference call with the Foreign Policy Initiative last week. Mark Dubowitz and Eric Lorber, respectively the executive director and senior advisor of the Foundation...

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Four Iranian special forces soldiers were killed in Syria, a week after Iran announced that elite units would be deployed to help Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad stay in power. The four commandos, who are the first members of the official Iranian armed forces to die in the Syrian civil war, were sent as military advisers, Iran’s Tasnim...

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A five-year-old Syrian girl’s life was saved twice in recent weeks by Israeli doctors: Once when they treated her wounds from a firefight between rival militias, and again when she was diagnosed with cancer. Israel’s Channel 10 reported that the girl received her diagnosis at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital two weeks after she had had...

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Hezbollah is building a fortified base in Syria, the global intelligence company Stratfor reported Wednesday. The site lies near the border city of Qusayr, which Hezbollah, along with the Syrian army and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), captured from Syrian opposition forces in June 2013. “According to one source close...

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Low-level members of Hezbollah are growing increasingly frustrated with the Iran-backed terrorist militia, with many saying that they just want to be paid so they can go home. Hanin Ghaddar, the managing editor of the Lebanese news website NOW, came to this conclusion after interviewing after interviewing a number of young men who have been...

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Describing the seizure of the Syrian city of Palmyra by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad from the Islamic State as a switch “from one tyranny to another,” a refugee from Palmyra called both Assad and ISIS “enemies of normal Syrian people” during an interview published in The Independent on Thursday. Mohamed Alkhateb was studying at a...

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The Middle East, as we know it, is crumbling. Civil wars rage across the region, millions have become refugees, and hundreds of thousands are dead. Borders that have existed for over a century are ripe for reshaping. All of this has given rise to a major threat to Western democracies: The Islamic State. ISIS has filled...

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The U.S. House of Representatives this week overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Iran-backed regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and its allies, and calling for the establishment of a war crimes tribunal to investigate these violations. The non-binding measure, which passed 392-3, denounced a litany of crimes perpetrated...

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During an official visit to Moscow on Wednesday, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin told Russian President Vladimir Putin that any future agreement on Syria must not strengthen Iran and Hezbollah. According to a Haaretz reporter, Rivlin also said that Israel considers Iranian and Hezbollah outposts on the Israeli-Syrian border to be a red line. “We...

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Syrian refugee Aboud Dandachi wrote an essay Monday in Tablet in which he expressed gratitude to his “true friends,” including Jewish and Israeli people and organization who have assisted him and other refugees. Dandachi, a former high-tech worker who created a website called Thank You Am Israel, wrote appreciatively that it “is astonishing,...

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