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A 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit the Aegean Sea off Greece and Turkey on Friday, according to the United States Geological Survey. At least 4 people were killed in the quake, according to Turkey’s health minister. The city of Izmir in Turkey has been particularly badly hit with reports of at least 20 building destroyed, cars being crushed and people in the streets following the quake. The earthquake has also caused damage on the Greek island of Samos in the Aegean sea.

French President Emmanuel Macron has accused Turkey having a "bellicose" attitude towards its allies, as the row over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad contiues unabated. In an interview broadcast on Saturday, Macron said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had displayed "belligerent behavior with Nato allies", adding that he hoped "things would calm down" and that the Turkish president "would not tell lies". France-Turkey showdown: A battle to shape the regional order Read More » His comments came as Erdogan, as well as a number of other leaders of Muslim-majority countries, continued to criticise Macron for comments he made describing...

Russia on Saturday pledged to "necessary" help for Yerevan in the conflict with Azerbaijan if fighting reached Armenian territory, after its ally requested security assistance. Armenia's request for assistance from Moscow further raised fears of Russia and Azerbaijan's ally Turkey getting sucked into a decades-old conflict over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan formally asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to begin "urgent" consultations on security assistance as Azerbaijani forces make gains against Armenian separatists who control Karabakh. The request also came after Armenia and Azerbaijan failed to agree a fresh ceasefire during talks in Geneva on...

The beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty, which occurred two weeks after a momentous speech by President Emmanuel Macron in which he unveiled a plan to defend French secular values against “Islamist radicalism,” marked the start of what might turn out to be an all-out war between France and the Islamic world, with Turkey’s Erdoğan leading the Muslim charge. By taking a stand against Muslim extremist violence and suppression of freedom of speech, Macron might find himself facing a new wave of Islamic terror.

DUBAI - Thousands of Muslims, from Pakistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian territories, poured out of prayer services to join anti-France protests on Friday, as the French president’s vow to protect the right to caricature the Prophet Muhammad continues to roil the Muslim world. Demonstrations in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad turned violent as some 2,000 people who tried to march toward the French Embassy were pushed back by police firing tear gas and beating protesters with batons. Crowds of Islamist activists hanged an effigy of French President Emmanuel Macron from a highway overpass after pounding it furiously with their shoes. Several...

A powerful earthquake has struck off Turkey's Aegean coast, north of the Greek island of Samos, officials said. The 7.0 magnitude tremor, about 17km (11 miles) off the coast of western Izmir province, was felt as far away as Athens and Istanbul, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. There was no word on casualties but images from the Turkish city of Izmir showed buildings that had collapsed. An earthquake that struck Izmir in 1999 killed about 17,000 people. Reports said Friday's quake was also felt on the Greek island of Crete. Video on social media showed people searching through the...

Boko Haram has released a new video showing Rev Polycarp Zango, a pastor with the Church of Christ in Nations (COCIN) in Jos, Plateau State, who reportedly went missing penultimate Monday. The cleric was abducted on October 19, while travelling to Gombe State for a conference. According to an online medium, Sahara Reporters, a video from the Islamic State West Africa Province, ISWAP, has confirmed his abduction. In the video, Rev Zango, who spoke in eloquent Hausa, introduced himself as a cleric at COCIN LCC Wild Life Park, in the Plateau state capital. He revealed that he was in...

The police intervened Wednesday evening to prevent "several dozen" members of the Turkish community "to do battle" with Armenians in Décines-Charpieu, a bastion of this diaspora in France, announced Thursday October 29th. Prefecture. A large police force, with around a hundred men, was put in place "with the aim of restoring republican order" in this suburban town of Lyon which houses the Armenian genocide memorial. Nineteen vehicles were checked and the identity of all the protagonists was noted. Twitter: Hundreds Of Turks & Azeris Take To The Streets In Lyon, France Looking For Armenians."Calm returned at 11 p.m., two hours...

Hundreds Of Turks & Azeris Take To The Streets In Lyon, France Looking For Armenians.

5 others, including soldiers, also wounded in attack targeting district commissioner At least two people were killed and five wounded, including soldiers, Tuesday when a car bomb blast targeted an official in the Somali capital Mogadishu, officials said. The bomb attack went off near the Sinka Dher intersection in Mogadishu. “The Al-Shabaab terrorist group targeted the Kahda district commissioner with a car bomb blast killing two people and wounding five others, including soldiers and the Kahda district spy chief,” Abdifatah Hassan, a police captain in Mogadishu, told Anadolu Agency. Speaking to Anadolu Agency by phone, Ismail Mukhtar Oronjo, a Somali...

Two Islamic extremist terrorists were sentenced to death Wednesday in Mali for carrying out one terror attack and planning two others, including the 2015 hostage crisis in which two gunmen killed 20 people at a hotel. Fawaz Ould Ahmed and Sadou Chaka pleaded guilty and expressed no remorse for the three attacks, French news agency AFP reported. Ould Ahmed, a Mauritian national, said he was personally responsible for a March 2015 attack where he shot five people at a restaurant in the Malian capital of Bamako, according to Reuters. Ould Ahmed and Chaka are best known, however, for planning the...

A Turkish government minister has called French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo “b*stards” and “sons of b*tches” over a new satirical cartoon showing President Erdogan in his underwear. The frontpage cartoon of the magazine, which features Erdogan in his underwear looking at the bare bottom of a woman in an Islamic veil and bears the caption “in private he is very funny”, has earned the anger of the Turkish leader, who has now threatened legal action. On Wednesday, the Turkish presidency’s communications directorate released a statement on the subject of the cartoon, according to Le Monde, saying: “The necessary legal and...

The photographs from the Turkish occupation zone Serêkaniyê (Arab. Ras al-Ain) in northern Syria basically confirm only once again what the autonomous administration and human rights organizations have long denounced: The terrorist militia "Islamic State" (IS) is one of the proxy troops of NATO partner Turkey acting for Ankara in Syria. The footage, which has been circulating on online networks such as Twitter and Facebook since Sunday, shows "demonstrators" in Serêkaniyê protesting against French President Emmanuel Macron. In early October Macron had presented his law against Islamist separatism and announced that his country would increasingly counteract the development of...

ISLAMIC State is taking over swathes of Africa like it did in Syria and Iraq with "staggeringly brutal" tactics, the Pentagon has warned. According to a report from West Point, the US officer training academy, the group's expansion and regrouping on the continent shows "Islamic State is far from defeated". "By the summer of 2020, it had become resolutely clear that the Islamic State was a changed organisation, but by no means a beaten one," the report, published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Centre, said. The Pentagon report said there has been a "marked upward curve of claimed cumulative attacks...

The southern Turkish province of Hatay was rocked by an explosion on Monday in what officials have described as a suspected terror attack. Video posted to Twitter on Monday purported to show the moments leading up to the explosion. One Twitter account tweeted, “Breaking: this is allegedly footage of a terrorist attack in #iskenderun, Turkey. The terrorist clashed with the police before he detonated a suicide vest bomb.” In the video, several pops can be heard before a bomb blast can be seen on the sidewalk of a city street. Anadolu Agency, a state-run Turkish news outlet, also shared video...

Christian human rights leaders have called on the Trump administration to issue sanctions on Turkey in response to its actions in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, and warned that Turkish actions were guided by "animus" against Christians. The calls came during a panel discussion, hosted by the group In Defence of Christians Friday, titled “Turkey is Committing Another Christian Genocide. Why is the Trump Administration Silent?” The event focused on Turkish actions in the recent conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The historic conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan has reignited in recent weeks. The two countries, formerly part of the Soviet Union (USSR),...

Three martyred in the blast in Shia Hazara market in Quetta Hazar Ganji on Sunday. A remote-controlled bomb exploded in Quetta. Due to that, at least three people embraced martyrdom and seven sustained injuries. According to police, the explosion took place at the Hazarganji fruit market on the outskirts of Quetta. They said the terrorists had planted explosives in a motorcycle. Preliminary investigations revealed that the terrorists used explosives weighing four to five kilogrammes in the attack. National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) in Islamabad had recently issued a threat alert for Peshawar and Quetta. It said that banned militants of...

Explosion in the northwestern city’s mosque which also serves as a religious school kills seven people and wounds at least 109 others. Islamabad, Pakistan – An explosion at a religious school in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar has killed at least seven people and wounded 109 others, police and health officials say. The blast occurred at the Speen Jamaat mosque, which also serves as a religious school for the local community in the city’s Dir Colony area, at 8:30am local time (3:30 GMT) on Tuesday, a police official told Al Jazeera shortly after the blast. “[Students] were reading the...

Suspected Fulani extremists murdered a Christian man in an ambush-style attack as he and two others walked home from work. According to the Emancipation Centre for Crisis Victims in Nigeria, Justine Patrick was 25 when he was killed earlier this month. He was walking home from work with his coworkers Daniel Gyang and Sele Dung through some maize fields about an hour before sunset on Oct. 14, Gyang said. Patrick walked behind Gyang and Dung. “We never knew that a group of seven Fulani had already ambushed us,” Gyang said. The attackers rushed from the bush, raising sticks, machetes and...

Two facilitators from the Bible Society of Cameroon’s literacy program in the Far North region have been killed by Boko Haram over the past few weeks. After a two-year lull, attacks by Islamic militant group Boko Haram in that region are on the rise again, and are claiming many victims. Among the lives recently lost were two literacy facilitators from the Bible Society of Cameroon’s Alpha Program in the Parkwa language. One of them died in early August, and the second in mid-September. Jonas, 42, an elder in the Union of Evangelical Churches in Cameroon, was killed on the night...