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Turkey is set to invade Syria, as the country had been threatening in recent months, with the U.S. saying it will remove all of its forces from the "immediate area," according to the White House. The news came late Sunday after President Donald Trump spoke to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by phone earlier in the day.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) on Monday condemned President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops in northern Syria, stating the move is a “betrayal” of the Kurds. “The President’s decision to abandon our Kurd allies in the face of an assault by Turkey is a betrayal. It says that America is an unreliable ally; it facilitates ISIS resurgence; and it presages another humanitarian disaster,” Romney, a frequent Trump critic, wrote on Twitter.

The US decision to withdraw forces from northern Syria in anticipation of Turkish assault is only the most recent betrayal Kurds have faced A popular saying goes that Kurds have "no friends but the mountains". ****snip*** The decision on Monday by US President Donald Trump to withdraw American troops from northern Syria in anticipation of a Turkish invasion is only the latest in a long line of betrayals. *****snip**** In 2016, the Turkish military and allied Syrian forces launched Operation Euphrates Shield and entered northern Syria with the express aim of defeating the so-called Islamic State (IS) group that still...

Jim Mattis, the former Marine Corps general and Pentagon chief, has lashed 2020 Democratic front-runner Joe Biden for fueling the rise of ISIS by insisting on the total withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq. "You may want a war over. You may declare it over. You may even try to walk away from it. But the bottom line is the enemy gets a vote, as we say in the military, and we simply have got to understand that terrorism is going to be an ambient threat," he said in an NPR interview. As vice president, Biden was tasked by President...

In a brazen and nearly unbelievable move, the Kurdistan Democratic Party headed by warlord Masoud Barzani has prevented voting by Assyrian Christians of the Nineveh Plain in northern Iraq AINA In a brazen and nearly unbelievable move, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) headed by warlord Masoud Barzani has prevented voting by Assyrian (also known as Chaldean and Syriac) Christians of the Nineveh Plain in northern Iraq. According to a series of reports from inside Iraq, the KDP effectively blocked the delivery of ballot boxes to six major Assyrian towns and villages in the Plains around Mosul including Baghdeda, Bartilla, Karemlesh,...

WHISKY is back on the tables in Mosul, one of Iraq’s biggest cities. Until last year, boozing was punishable with 80 lashes...Families queue at restaurants on the banks of the Tigris. There is not a niqab, or face-veil, in sight....Now Iraq, home to nearly 40m people, is righting itself... About 45,000 Sunnis mustered alongside the Shia-led Hashd al-Shaabi, or “popular mobilisation units”. And millions of Sunnis fled the would-be caliphate to seek refuge in Kurdish and Shia cities. Religious minorities feel safer, too. Over 70% of the 100,000 Christians who fled to Kurdistan have returned to their homes on the...

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Donald Trump’s favorability rating is sky-high here, where citizens are paying surprisingly close attention to the U.S. election and see the developer and political novice as the clear choice for the White House. In dozens of interviews FoxNews.com conducted in various cities across the country this month – with Iraqis from different religions and walks of life – the overwhelming majority support Trump over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Many believe Trump would be tough on terror, and blame Clinton – at least in part – for policies that have destabilized much of the Middle East. "America should...

The Iraqi government said the long-awaited battle to recapture the city of Fallujah began in the early hours of Monday. Video published online overnight purportedly shows heavy bombardment of the city before the advance of ground troops. Prime Minister Haider al Abadi made a televised announcement that the operation had begun, vowing that Iraqi forces would "tear up the black flags" of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Fallujah. Backed up by U.S. and coalition airstrikes, a combination of Iraqi troops, police and Shiite militias made early progress, pushing ISIS militants back out of the farmland surrounding...

The emerging policy shaping the Obama Administration's slow war against ISIS stirs very bad memories for the U.S. military -- Vietnam memories. That policy is "gradual escalation." The Obama Administration does not use the term, but that is what we witness. Gradual escalation proved to be the strategic curse of the Johnson Administration, an error in judgment that, at the time in late 1964, looked so reasonable -- and convenient -- to President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He envisioned leaving America with a transformative legacy, a victory in The War on Poverty. I don't expect the White House press corps to...

Kofi Annan had what perhaps was the quote of the week recently. In an editorial displayed in The Washington Post, Annan said of Iraq: “In a media-hungry age, visibility is often regarded as proof of success, but this does not necessarily hold true in Iraq.” Most of Iraq’s successes have been away from the camera. They have been too far away for most Americans to see. President Bush has stated that “successes” abound in Iraq, but he has failed to elaborate. Therefore, I followed Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s advice and searched for the real facts about Iraq. We do see...

Saad al-Hadithi spoke to The Associated Press after an earlier statement from the prime minister's office seemed to dismiss the idea entirely. "Baghdad is the capital for all Iraqis and it's not possible for a wall or a fence to isolate the city," the earlier statement said. The plan for the wall was originally drafted by the Interior Ministry as an effort to curb near-daily attacks carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and cut down on checkpoints inside the city that snarl traffic. The Interior Ministry's spokesman, police Brig. Gen. Saad Maan, told The Associated...

Some 60 years later, in Baghdad the Jews are a ghostly memory. A FEW hours in the Shorja open market in Baghdad can teach you a lot – about the Middle East’s past, its present and its apparent future. What’s to be found there is informative. What is absent – equally so. My fixer Yusuf hadn’t wanted to take me to Shorja. I was in Baghdad for a reporting project on the Shi’ite militias. Between heading for Anbar with Kata’ib Hezbollah and up to Baiji with the Badr Corps, we had a few hours of down time in Baghdad, so...

After the pro-Western government of China was forced to flee to the island of Taiwan in 1949, when the Communists took over mainland China, bitter recriminations in Washington led to the question: "Who lost China?" China was, of course, never ours to lose, though it might be legitimate to ask if a different American policy toward China could have led to a different outcome. In more recent years, however, Iraq was in fact ours to lose, after U.S. troops vanquished Saddam Hussein's army and took over the country. Today, we seem to be in the process of losing Iraq, if...

Iraqi security forces attempting to retake control of the western city of Ramadi were routed in heavy fighting Sunday, the worst defeat for Iraq’s central government since Islamic State militants stormed across the country. In a replay of last year’s military debacle, elite units abandoned their U.S.-provided equipment to Islamic State fighters and fled the area, leaving several hundred soldiers surrounded in the last government-held enclave in the city. Multiple security sources, none of whom agreed to be identified, speaking from both within the besieged Anbar Provincial Operation Center as well as with the units fleeing the city, described the...

“My greatest fear,” General Raymond Odierno, the then commanding general of U.S. forces in Iraq, told me in early 2010, “is that we stabilize Iraq, then hand it over to the Iranians in our rush to the exit.” General O (as he is known), had recently watched the 2007 movie Charlie Wilson’s War, which recounts how U.S. interest in Afghanistan ceased once the mujahedeen defeated the Soviet Army in 1989 and drove them out. Now, he had a premonition that the same could happen in Iraq. “I’ve invested too much here,” he said, “to simply walk away and let that...

On a recent Saturday evening, Ahmed al-Shabibi relaxed at a hookah café in England with other Iraqi friends – both Shiite and Sunni Muslims – when the conversation turned to the ongoing battle to reclaim the city of Tikrit from Islamic State jihadists. A Sunni in the group lamented Iranian interference in the fight and boasted that such meddling never would’ve occurred under the former Sunni dictator, Saddam Hussein. Al-Shabibi said he and the others agreed because, “Saddam, as you know, had a very interesting idea of security.” Nostalgia for Saddam is hardly new, but it appears to be reaching...

BAGHDAD - - A year after ISIL fighters captured Fallujah in Iraq’s Anbar province, the country’s Shiite-led government remains incapable of mounting a major offensive to retake the city or any of the key areas still held by the group. In January last year, Fallujah, 70 kilometres west of Baghdad, became the first major city to fall to ISIL. This was followed by a summer campaign that seized the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, and Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, along with most of northern and western Iraq. Iraq’s slow-moving fight against ISIL has also highlighted the country’s sectarian tensions, given...

President Barack Obama says the United States can’t and shouldn’t intervene in every world crisis. But he says when innocent people face a massacre and the U.S. has the ability to stop it, the nation shouldn’t look away. […] Obama says he won’t allow the U.S. to be dragged into another war in Iraq. …

The recent turmoil in Iraq brought on by the rise of the Sunni extremist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ironically struck a blow to the American LeftÂ’s endlessly repeated narrative that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq prior to the war. The State Department and other U.S. government officials have revealed that ISIS now occupies the Al Muthanna Chemicals Weapons Complex. Al Muthanna was Saddam HusseinÂ’s primary chemical weapons facility, and it is located less than 50 miles from Baghdad.The Obama administration claims that the weapons in that facility,...

16.52 The remaining chemical weapons from Saddam Hussein's regime are stored in two sealed bunkers, both located at the Al Muthanna Chemicals Weapons Complex, a large site in the western desert some 80km north west of Baghdad. This was the principal manufacturing plant for both chemical agents and munitions during Saddam Hussein’s rule. Thousands of tonnes of chemical weapons were produced, stored and deployed by the Saddam Hussein regime. Iraq used these weapons during the Iran - Iraq War (1980 to 1988) and against the Kurds in Halabja in 1988.