Middle East Experience

The Stop Iranian Drones Act makes it the responsibility of the US to prevent Iran and Iranian-aligned terror groups from acquiring drones.
Source: Jerusalem Post
Full Article: US House of Representatives passes the Stop Iranian Drones Act

Some 960 families have settled in a displacement camp in the neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan region, while others have sought shelter with relatives..
Source: Albawaba
Full Article: Yazidi families displaced anew by violence in northern Iraq

Jordan notified Washington it was ready to discuss the issue with Israel after the end of the holy month of Ramadan next week..
Source: Albawaba
Full Article: Jordan intensifies push for restoration of Al-Aqsa status quo

In Lebanon elections, opposition and independent candidates make up 284 of the 718 hopefuls, up from 124 four years ago..
Source: Albawaba
Full Article: In new form of protest, Lebanon activists run in parliamentary elections

Ukrainian investigators have identified more than 8,000 cases of suspected war crimes since Russia's invasion, Ukraine prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova told a German TV channel on Thursday.“It's actually 8,600 cases only about war crimes, and more than 4,000 cases that are connected with war crimes,” Venediktova told the Deutsche Welle broadcaster.Venediktova has been investigating and tallying the mounting cases of suspected crimes by Russian forces since their invasion of Ukraine on February 24.There are now more than 8,000 investigators gathering evidence on the ground, she said, including state security services, national police and foreign investigators.For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.The alleged crimes documented include “killing civilians, bombing of civilian infrastructure, torture” and “sexual crimes” that are being reported in the “occupied territory of Ukraine”, Venediktova said.Investigators have no access to occupied territories such as Mariupol, Donetsk or Lugansk, but “we can interview people who were evacuated from those territories”, she said.They are also using “radio connections and audio connections of the occupants”.Venediktova herself has spent the last two months travelling the length and breadth of unoccupied Ukraine gathering evidence.In an interview with AFP in March, she described Russian President Vladimir Putin as the “main war criminal of the 21st century”.Cases she had already begun investigating at that point included a maternity hospital wrecked by shelling and a burnt-out theatre that had been sheltering children.Venediktova said the cases will be prosecuted in Ukraine's domestic courts. But the highest prize would be conviction in an international court.Ukraine is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) but it has accepted its jurisdiction in the past, leaving the door open to a tribunal.Read more:Ukraine investigating 10 Russian troops over Bucha: ProsecutorsSome Russian forces leaving Mariupol: US officialWeapons deliveries to Ukraine threaten European security: Kremlin
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: Ukraine says identified ‘more than 8,000 cases’ of suspected war crimes

A senior US official said Monday that she feared a “long-term conflict” between Russia and Ukraine following Vladimir Putin’s “Victory Day” speech.“He [Putin] didn’t announce a withdrawal. He didn’t announce a deal with the Ukrainians,” US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in an interview with CNN. “So I suspect, and we all assess, that this could be a long-term conflict that could carry on for additional months.”For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.Thomas-Greenfield spoke hours after Putin gave a speech during a military parade in Moscow. The Russian president, who ordered an invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, claimed, without providing evidence, that Western countries were planning on invading Russia and Crimea.Western officials, including American officials, had predicted that Putin would use the occasion to escalate the conflict and officially declare war on Ukraine. So far, he has called Russia’s invasion a “special military operation.”But Thomas-Greenfield said Putin could not declare victory and that he failed in achieving his objectives in Ukraine.“His efforts in Ukraine have not succeeded,” the US diplomat said, adding that Putin was unable to “bring [Ukrainians] to their knees in a few days.”Thomas-Greenfield also said that Putin had “no reason” to declare victory or war, already in its second month.She reiterated previous American calls for Putin to withdraw his troops out of Ukraine immediately and “bring this unconscionable war to an end.”Separately, the US diplomat said that Russian forces were stealing from and attacking Ukrainian farmers.“There is some evidence that Russia, not only have they been attacking farmers’ fields, they’ve been taking equipment, but also that they have removed grain from silos and taken that grain into Russia,” Thomas-Greenfield said.Thomas-Greenfield condemned Russian behavior and said their actions showed the world “that there are no limits… to their willingness to use every single tool to bring the Ukrainian people down.”Read more: US has completed training hundreds of Ukrainian forces on new weapons: Pentagon
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: US official slams Putin, fears ‘long-term conflict’ between Russia and Ukraine

Iran's new workshop at Natanz for making parts for centrifuges, machines that enrich uranium, has been set up underground, UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said on Thursday, a move apparently aimed at protecting it from possible attacks.The workshop uses machines from a now-closed facility at Karaj that suffered what Tehran says was a sabotage attack by its arch-foe Israel. The workshop can make parts essential to advanced centrifuges that are among the most efficient in Iran's enrichment program.The International Atomic Energy Agency informed its member states two weeks ago that Iran had moved the machines to Natanz without specifying where at the sprawling site, which includes the underground Fuel Enrichment Plant where Iran has thousands of centrifuges operating.For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.Grossi told a news conference the workshop had been set up in “one of the halls” of the FEP. Diplomats say the plant is roughly three floors below ground, possibly to protect it from potential air strikes.Until now Iran has used the FEP only for enrichment. It is the one facility where the 2015 nuclear deal with major powers allows Iran to produce enriched uranium, but only with its first-generation IR-1 centrifuges, which are far less efficient than Iran's more advanced models.“They said that it is ready to operate,” the IAEA's chief inspector, Massimo Aparo, said of the workshop.The 2015 deal has been eroding since then-President Donald Trump pulled the US out of it in 2018. Iran later breached various restrictions the deal imposed on its nuclear activities, like caps on the purity to which it enriches uranium or its stockpile of enriched material.It is now also enriching uranium at the FEP with advanced centrifuges and is enriching at other sites where the deal does not allow it. Talks to revive that deal have stalled.Read more:Iran confirms centrifuge workshop moved to underground Natanz nuclear siteIran moves equipment for making centrifuge parts to Natanz, IAEA saysIran opens new centrifuge-parts workshop at Natanz: IAEA report
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: Iran moves centrifuge-parts workshop underground at Natanz, IAEA says

Jordan’s King Abdullah is scheduled to meet with top US officials in Washington this week, including President Joe Biden, according to sources familiar with his trip.Abdullah was the first Arab leader to meet with Biden at the White House last year after the US president was elected.For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.Talks are expected to touch on bilateral relations, with Jordan being one of the largest recipients of US aid in the region and on the recent violence in Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israelis.Sources have told Al Arabiya English that the Jordanian king will also meet top officials from the State Department and other US lawmakers on Capitol Hill.Led by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Abdullah will have a sitdown with a small group of members of Congress toward the end of this week, the sources said.Abdullah has been in the US for several days, and he met with top American military officials in Tampa, Florida last week. On Monday, he was in New York, where he met with religious figures and discussed the violence and its threat to religious minorities in Jerusalem, according to the Royal Hashemite Court.Abdullah was initially scheduled to meet with Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier, but the top US diplomat tested positive for COVID-19 last week.Read more: US condemns Israel’s plans to expand settlements in occupied Palestinian lands
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: Jordan’s King Abdullah to meet Biden, other top US officials this week: Sources

Turkey rejected on Thursday Greece’s accusations that Turkish military aircraft conducted unauthorized flights over Greek islands, pointing the finger of the blame at Athens over “provocative flights” violating airspace controlled by Ankara.Greece made on Wednesday a formal protest to Turkey accusing it of conducting unauthorized military flights over inhabited Greek islands.Turkish Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Tanju Bilgic said on Thursday Greece’s statements “do not reflect the truth”. The official instead said that Ankara’s military flights were in response to provocations and violations by Athens.For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.“On 26-28 April 2022, the Greek Air Force conducted provocative flights in close proximity of the Turkish coast and repeatedly violated the Turkish airspace over Didim, Datça and Dalaman. The Turkish Air Force reciprocated to these provocative flights and violations in accordance with their rules of engagement,” Bilgic said in a statement.He added: “Given that Greece was the party that started and escalated the said tension, making unfounded allegations against Turkey is totally incompatible with the recent positive agenda and good neighborly relations between the two countries.”Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Thursday he contacted NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to report the airspace violation by Turkey.“I spoke earlier with the Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg to inform him of the latest provocative behavior of the Turkish armed forces violating Greek airspace, dangerously overflying Greek Islands, such as Samos, Lesvos, Chios, Karpathos, to name but a few. And I made it clear to Secretary General Stoltenberg that this type of behavior by a NATO ally in the Southeast flank of the Alliance is simply unacceptable,” Mitsotakis said during a press conference with his Finnish counterpart.He added: “It undermines European security as well as the unity of purpose of NATO at a time when amongst NATO members it is indispensable for all of us to remain united, as we face the continued aggression of Russia in Ukraine.”Neighbours and fellow-NATO members Greece and Turkey have had a series of air and sea border disputes.Tensions between the two countries increased since 2020 thanks to Ankara’s plans to explore for oil and gas in the eastern Mediterranean.
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: Turkey rejects Greece’s charges of illegal military flights: Athens ‘started tension’

Vladimir Putin had no victories in Ukraine to proclaim on Victory Day. Nor did his speech at the Red Square military parade offer any clear pictures of when a victory may come or how it would be achieved.Instead, the Russian president’s address Monday seemed to suggest that the war that many expected would be brief and decisive could be a long and brutal grind.Victory Day commemorates another campaign of grisly determination: the Red Army’s offensive against Nazi forces that eventually brought the Soviet troops to Berlin, ending the European theater of World War II. The suffering was immense on the battlefield and among civilians; the Soviet Union lost 27 million people in the war.The pain of all the deaths combines with the defeat of odious opponents to give Victory Day a deep emotional resonance in Russia. Putin on Monday tried to portray the war in Ukraine as having the same high moral purpose as the fight against Adolf Hitler’s forces.For the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.He repeated his frequent contention that Ukraine is in thrall to Nazism and that this war, too, is necessary to repel a malign aggressor – even though Ukraine had made no incursions into Russia and is led by a president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust.The strategy appears aimed in part at diverting attention from Russia’s failure to overcome the smaller Ukrainian military.“The regime has no more screws to turn. The brakes have clearly failed, and only one pedal is left: conflating what Russia is doing in Ukraine with the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany. This explains why the Kremlin continues to insist that in Ukraine it is fighting neo-Nazis cultivated by the West,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote shortly before Victory Day.“Every word is a lie, of course,” he added, “but the regime has no other justification for what is happening in Ukraine. So the discourse has been reduced to agitprop and shouting,”Ahead of the holiday, expectations were wide that Putin would push for at least one unequivocal military success that he could flaunt in his speech. That might have been the city of Mariupol, but despite Russian forces laying waste to the city, a determined Ukrainian contingent still puts up resistance while holed up in a steel mill.Some speculated that recent explosions in Moldova’s separatist region of Transnistria, where Russia has about 1,500 troops based, could be provocations to justify Russia trying to take control of that area by Victory Day. But Russia has only bombed a railway bridge in Ukraine that is the main transport link to Transnistria.The most intense speculation was that Putin would use Victory Day to declare the fight in Ukraine was a full-fledged war, rather than a “special military operation” as the Kremlin insists it be called, and that this would prompt a general mobilization to bring in vast numbers of new soldiers. But he did not do that either.”There seems an awareness of the political risks at home of national mobilization. So there is a real sense in which the Kremlin is faced with growing difficulties and dilemmas in this war that it has chosen to unleash,” Nigel Gould-Davies, a fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told The Associated Press.In any case, announcing a national mobilization would not foretell a swift end to the war.“Mobilization isn’t like a button you press and then suddenly Russia has more access to military power than before. It takes time to mobilize and not just to call up, but to conscript the population essentially, but also to supply them as well. And so it wouldn’t make any immediate difference,” Gould-Davies said.An indelible image for Victory Day is the dramatic photo of a soldier raising the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag atop the Reichstag in 1945, ruined buildings stretching to the horizon. Putin’s speech gave no hint of whether he envisions a similar scene of occupation as the final goal of the Ukraine war, or whether Russia would settle for partitioning off of the eastern republics that it has declared are sovereign states.And Putin has never explained what his call for “denazification” of Ukraine entails.The speech was full of emotion and self-justification, yet empty of information.“It’s the dog that didn’t bark,” Gould-Davies said. “There was no new announcement, but no clear way out of the problems that they have created for themselves.”Read more:Nazis, invasion threat to Russia, NATO: Full transcript of Putin’s Victory Day speechZelenskyy on Victory Day: Russia adopting Nazi philosophy, Putin imitating HitlerMacron: Putin’s stance ‘warlike’, no peace through ‘humiliation’ of Russia or Ukraine
Source: Al Arabiya
Full Article: Putin’s Victory Day speech passionate but empty