Bahrain’s chief prosecutor has formally accused the Iranian military of training opposition fighters to conduct attacks inside the Gulf kingdom, after Manama announced earlier this week that it had seized a boat trying to smuggle explosives from Iran and Syria into the country. Chief prosecutor Osama al-Oufi said the intelligence service reported...

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A study released last week by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Information Center in Tel Aviv, which culled open source materials including jihadist web sites, has assessed that Shiite foreign fighters in Syria may outnumber Sunni jihadists battling in that country’s nearly three year war. The evaluation, which was conveyed last week by...

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The Wall Street Journal yesterday published an extensive report, based on previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence, assessing that Hezbollah is smuggling advanced anti-aircraft, anti-ship, and surface-to-surface missiles into Lebanon. The moves illustrate how both Hezbollah and Israel are using Syria’s civil war as cover for what increasingly is seen as a complex and...

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A massive car bomb – which yesterday tore through Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold of Dahiyeh killing at least five people and injuring scores – marked the point at which Lebanon succumbed to the almost three year Sunni-Shiite conflict raging in neighboring Syria, according to an extended regional analysis published yesterday in the Weekly Standard....

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The Lebanese military announced today that it had fired on Syrian aircraft violating Beirut’s airspace, a move that analysts speculated was designed in part as a public response to efforts – driven by both sides of the almost three-year Syrian conflict – to expand that war into Lebanese territory: The move suggests...

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The Syrian army’s ongoing assault on Aleppo – which over the course of a week has killed nearly 500 people, among them scores of children – has drawn attention to a relatively new and cheap improvised explosive device being deployed by forces loyal to the Bashar al-Assad regime. The Telegraph described...

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A car bomb detonated early yesterday near a Hezbollah base in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley has deepened concerns that sectarian tensions generated by the Iran-backed terror group’s participation in Syria’s nearly three-year-old conflict are spilling over into Lebanon. Shiite Hezbollah has provided critical support to the Bashar al-Assad regime, allowing it to...

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The United Nations late on Thursday confirmed that chemical weapons had been used in the almost three year Syrian conflict, with experts investigating more than half a dozen alleged uses of proscribed weapons and – in what CNN described as “the case that was most clear” – documenting an August incident...

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Islamist forces this weekend overran key facilities which until then had been controlled by the more moderate Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), seizing warehouses containing U.S. military gear sent to the FSA and forcing the group’s commander Gen. Salim Idris to flee the country. Buzzfeed had reported on Tuesday that Washington had...

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Hezbollah and Syrian army forces battling on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime are close to seizing the town of Nabuk, one of the last areas in the Lebanon-adjacent Qalamoun region still controlled by opposition forces, amid renewed concerns from Lebanese officials that blowback generated by Hezbollah’s participation in Syria’s...

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