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Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states launched airstrikes against rebel forces in Yemen’s capital and across the country in defense of what Riyadh called the nation’s legitimate government. The attacks began Thursday morning, hours after Yemen’s president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, fled the southern port city of Aden by boat when Iranian-backed Houthi militants closed in. The decision by Saudi Arabia and the region’s Sunni monarchies to intervene on Mr. Hadi’s behalf raises the stakes in their rivalry with predominantly Shiite Iran, which has raged in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the region. The raids also risked further inflaming sectarian...

Yemen's crisis is getting worse and then some. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have started bombing rebel positions inside Yemen. The Sunni Kingdom added that it would do "anything necessary" to deter the Iran-backed Shiite rebels who are taking over Yemen and trying to oust US-backed President Abd Rabbah Mansur Hadi. A Saudi source told Reuters that ground troops might be needed in Yemen to "restore order." Saudi Arabia is reportedly contributing as many as 150,000 troops and 100 warplanes to the campaign against the Houthis.

This is big news. Saudi Arabia and a Sunni coalition (UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait) has now begun bombing Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen: AL ARABIYA – Warplanes of the Royal Saudi Air Force bombed the positions of Yemen’s Houthi militia and destroyed most of their air defenses, Al Arabiya News Channel reported early on Thursday. Arab Gulf states had announced that they have decided to “repel Houthi aggression” in neighboring Yemen, following a request from the country’s President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi. In their joint statement Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait said they “decided to repel Houthi militias, al-Qaeda...

Saudi Arabia is moving heavy military equipment including artillery to areas near its border with Yemen, U.S. officials said on Tuesday, raising the risk that the Middle East’s top oil power will be drawn into the worsening Yemeni conflict. The buildup follows a southward advance by Iranian-backed Houthi Shi'ite militants who took control of the capital Sanaa in September and seized the central city of Taiz at the weekend as they move closer to the new southern base of U.S.-supported President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

A television network owned by Yemen's Shiite rebels says a total of 137 people were killed and 345 injured in quadruple suicide bombings that hit a pair of mosques controlled by the rebels in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. Al-Masirah TV raised the death toll on Friday hours after the attacks, making it the deadliest violence to hit the fragile war-torn country.

LAHORE, Pakistan –  Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers exploded themselves near two churches in the eastern city of Lahore on Sunday as worshippers were gathered inside, killing 14 people, officials said, in the latest attack against religious minorities in the increasingly fractured country. In the tense aftermath, angry mobs lashed out at people they suspected of involvement in the attacks -- including one person who was burned to death --  and Christian crowds set fire to cars in a show of defiance in the country's second largest city and the prime minister's seat of power.Life in Pakistan is increasingly fraught with...

All this, ISIS (Sunni) vs Iraq (Iran-Shiite) mortal enemies from Islam's earliest days have fought this same battle for centuries. The enmity for each other is so intense, they consider each other more abominable than Jews. As an illustration, Iran announced that the first order of business once their nuclear aspirations have been realized was to nuke Saudi Arabia's oil fields, their number one Sunni arch enemy. Notice, Israel is not their first target. The 'Law of Unintended Consequences' is an unforgiving maiden .George Bush was warned of the genocidal miasma to come if he dared remove Saddam from power....

Wearing a camouflage uniform with militia patches and a green headband, Nawar Mohammed is the image of an Iraqi Shiite fighter except for one detail: he is Sunni. Mohammed is one of some 250 Sunni residents of Al-Alam who joined Asaib Ahl al-Haq, an Iranian-backed Shiite militia with a fearsome reputation for kidnappings and killings targeting their community, to battle the Islamic State group after it seized their town. It would once have been all but unthinkable for a member of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority to join a Shiite militia, but opposition to ISIS, which overran large areas north and...

IRBIL, IRAQ — Iraqi security forces and Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias appeared Thursday to be on the verge of victory in a two-week effort to recapture Saddam Hussein’s hometown from the Islamic State, which has held the symbolically important city since June. But the seemingly certain triumph of a force with little Sunni Muslim participation in the center of Iraq’s Sunni heartland has raised another troubling issue: the extension of Iran’s influence in a country where the Shiite Muslim neighbor is already the most significant outside player. The forces that appeared Thursday to have cornered the last Islamic State fighters...

On Tuesday, a man convicted of blinding another man in an acid attack was himself forcibly blinded in one eye, according to Amnesty International and Tasnim News, a semi-official news website. The punishment is believed to be Iran's first case of Qasas, meaning retribution in kind, Tasnim News said. Amnesty International denounced the sentence. "This punishment exposes the utter brutality of Iran's justice system and underlines the Iranian authorities' shocking disregard for basic humanity," said Raha Bahreini, Amnesty International's Iran researcher. "Meting out cruel and inhuman retribution punishments is not justice. Blinding, like stoning, amputation and flogging, is a form...

President Idriss Deby of Chad said on Wednesday he knew the whereabouts of Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram, and called on him to surrender or risk being killed. Chad's army has waged a series of battles against Boko Haram as part of a cross-border military campaign and has re-taken territory the militant group held in northeastern Nigeria. ... The Chadian army is considered one of the best in the region, backed by a strong air force. It first deployed to help Cameroon fend off Boko Haram and is now pressing southwest into Nigerian territory...

The Iraqi Security Forces, supported by several Iranian-backed Shiite militias and Sunni tribal fighters, have launched an offensive to retake Tikrit from the Islamic State... Massive columns of Shiite militas, including some groups that are listed by the US as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, have been leading the fight in Tikrit. The operation, which involves more than thirty thousand Iraqi security personnel and militia forces, started on the morning of March 2. According to Al Jazeera, Iraqi forces and allied militias attacked the city from three sides while Iraqi aviation launched an aerial bombardment.

We know Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. He has said he'll stand with the Muslims with things get ugly in his book. He has said the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet Mohammed. He has said Muslims built America. He has threatened to shoot down Israeli jets. He has given the Muslim "one finger in the air" sign last summer. Obama has justified ISIS actions by saying "The Crusades" just as ISIS has done in many videos. He has a ring that says there is no God but Allah. But what kind of Muslim is...

Three attackers with grenades, Kalashnikovs and explosive suicide vests struck at the Imamia mosque in Peshawar, the main city in Pakistan's restive northwest, around the time of the main Friday prayers. The attack comes two weeks after a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in southern Pakistan killed 61 people ... violence has been on the rise in Pakistan in recent years, most of it perpetrated by hardline Sunni Muslim groups against minority Shiite Muslims, who make up around a fifth of the population. The suicide bombing at a mosque in southern Sindh province on January 30 was the deadliest...

Last summer, the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swept from Syria into northern Iraq, routing Iraqi security forces and seizing the city of Mosul. Soon afterward, the group declared the establishment of a dubious "caliphate" in the area it controls and rebranded itself the Islamic State. With Iraq's army weakened and radical militants advancing on Baghdad, the country's Iran-backed Shia militias — which have their own history of sectarian abuses — fought back, halting the Islamic State's progress. The militias have successfully combated Islamic State fighters on the ground with the assistance of air...

1. Ahmad Abu Adass In 2005, the last year of his life, Ahmad Abu Adass was 22 and still living with his parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He was kind and liked people, his friends later told investigators, but none of them thought he was very sophisticated. The best way to describe him was simple, one said. He was generous and a little naïve. He was very weak, physically. A Sunni Muslim of Palestinian descent, Adass had become interested in religion and now spent many hours at the Arab University Mosque near his home. It was there, after a prayer session,...

Fahad Qureshi, who founded Islam Net and is considered an Islamic leader in Norway, told a large group of Sunni Muslims that, contrary to media claims that it is only “radicals” and “extremists” who support barbaric punishments for those who violate sharia, regular Muslims support such things, including the “death penalty for homosexuals” and “stoning for adultery.” Fahad Qureshi, who founded Islam Net and is considered an Islamic leader in Norway, told a large group of Sunni Muslims that, contrary to media claims that it is only “radicals” and “extremists” who support barbaric punishments for those who violate sharia, regular...

Translation of part of article (para 2) "Meanwhile, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most prestigious center for Sunni teaching, has asked for the killing and Crucifixion of ISIS terrorists, expressing disdain for the barbaric murder of the Jordanian pilot. In a very tough statement broadcast after the video in which Maaz al-Kassasbeh is seen burned alive, the religious authority has asked for, 'The killing, the crucifixion and the mutilation of the ISIS terrorists' "

NORFOLK Ayaan Hirsi Ali stood before a slide of the caged Jordanian pilot about to be set afire by Islamic State group extremists. That, she said at Chrysler Hall on Tuesday night, will be the norm if they are not defeated. "You are going to see people beheaded, their hands and legs cut off, the mass enslavement of women," warned Hirsi Ali, a sharp critic of Muslim leaders and radicals and an advocate of women's rights. "We have had over a long period of time... even before the Reagan administration, so many warning signs that we have ignored," Hirsi Ali...

When Hasan Erol and other parents learned that their children’s school would be converted to specialise in Islamic education, they hit the streets. Yeşilbahar Middle School is among five in Istanbul’s staunchly secular district of Kadıköy to have been earmarked for conversion into imam-hatips, religious schools in which 20% to one-third of hours are dedicated to Sunni Islamic study. “They want to transform this area into something else,” says Erol, whose 13-year-old son goes to the school. “They want to make it more conservative by bringing imam-hatips here.” Yeşilbahar was spared. Authorities relented in the face of protests and a...