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Houthi rebels in Yemen say they have captured a large number of Saudi troops after a major attack near the border between the two countries. A Houthi spokesman told the BBC that three Saudi brigades had surrendered near the Saudi town of Najran. He said thousands of soldiers had been captured and many others killed. Saudi officials have not confirmed the claim. The operation was the largest of its kind since the conflict began, the spokesman said. Colonel Yahiya Sarea said Saudi forces had suffered "huge losses in life and machinery". All those captured would be paraded on the Houthi-run...

Syrian President Bashar Assad met on Tuesday in Damascus with an unnamed senior Iranian official to discuss ways to cope with Israeli airstrikes in the war-torn country, reported regime-affiliated Syrian newspaper Al-Watan. According to the report, the Iranian official also discussed with Assad the Trump administration’s Mideast peace plan and presented Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s plan to contend with it. The report comes against the backdrop of recent attacks on pro-Iranian forces in Syria, some which have been attributed to Israel though it denies involvement. In other cases, Israel has taken responsibility for attacks in Syria. In the...

...twenty-one sailors from the M/T Kokuka Courageous who had abandoned their ship after discovering a probable unexploded limpet mine on their hull... At 4:10 p.m. local time an IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) Gashti Class patrol boat approached the M/T Kokuka Courageous and was observed and recorded removing the unexploded limpet mine from the M/T Kokuka Courageous (video attached). The United States has no interest in engaging in a new conflict in the Middle East. However, we will defend our interests.

Two tankers have been targeted this morning while transiting waters near to Fujairah. Frontline’s fully laden LR 2Front Altair was hit by surface attacks, and an enormous fire ensued forcing the crew to abandon ship. The crew were safely picked up by nearby general cargoship, Hyundai Dubai. Bernhard Schulte’s chemical tanker Kokuka Courageous was also hit.

Saudi Arabia's mass execution of 47 prisoners — including prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr — triggered unrest across the Middle East on Saturday, particularly in Iran, where protesters stormed and ransacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran. Photos and video footage posted on Twitter by Iranian journalist Sobhan Hassanvand showed a mob of angry demonstrators smashing windows and setting fire to the Saudi diplomatic outpost in the Iranian capital. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi also condemned the executions. "I'm shocked & saddened at Sheikh Nimr's execution by Saudi authorities," he wrote on Twitter. "Peaceful opposition is a fundamental right. Repression does...

A Kurdish militia in northern Syria has joined forces with Arab rebels, and their new alliance has been promised fresh weapon supplies by the United States for an assault on Islamic State forces in Raqqa, a spokesman said on Monday. The alliance calling itself the Democratic Forces of Syria includes the Kurdish YPG militia and Syrian Arab groups, some of which fought alongside it in a campaign that drove Islamic State from wide areas of northern Syria earlier this year. The Arab groups in the new alliance are operating under the name "The Syrian Arab Coalition" - a grouping which...

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Insurgent commanders say that since Russia began air attacks in support of the Syrian government, they are receiving for the first time bountiful supplies of powerful American-made antitank missiles. With the enhanced insurgent firepower and with Russia steadily raising the number of airstrikes against the government’s opponents, the Syrian conflict is edging closer to an all-out proxy war between the United States and Russia. The increased levels of support have raised morale on both sides of the conflict, broadening war aims and hardening political positions, making a diplomatic settlement all the more unlikely. The American-made TOW antitank...

BEIRUT — American antitank missiles supplied to Syrian rebels are playing an unexpectedly prominent role in shaping the Syrian battlefield, giving the conflict the semblance of a proxy war between the United States and Russia, despite President Obama’s express desire to avoid one. The U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW missiles were delivered under a two-year-old covert program coordinated between the United States and its allies to help vetted Free Syrian Army groups in their fight against President Bashar al-Assad. Now that Russia has entered the war in support of Assad, they are taking on a greater significance than was originally intended. So...

CNN)U.S. military cargo planes gave 50 tons of ammunition to rebel groups overnight in northern Syria, using an air drop of 112 pallets as the first step in the Obama Administration's urgent effort to find new ways to support those groups. Details of the air mission over Syria were confirmed by a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly because the details have not yet been formally announced. C-17s, accompanied by fighter escort aircraft, dropped small arms ammunition and other items like hand grenades in Hasakah province in northern Syria to a coalition of rebels groups vetted by the US,...

In less than a year, the United States has toppled the democratically-elected government of Ukraine, installed a Washington-backed stooge in Kiev, launched a bloody and costly war of annihilation on Russian-speaking people in the East, thrust the economy into a downward death spiral, and reduced the nation to an anarchic, failed state destined to endure a vicious fratricidal civil war for as far as the eye can see. Last week, Washington suffered its greatest military defeat in more than a decade when Ukraine’s US-backed army was soundly routed in the major railway hub of Debaltsevo. Roughly, 8,000 Ukrainian regulars along...

Snippet: "Iran and its terrorist proxy groups’ influence in Latin America remains a troubling security threat to the region and world, experts said at a congressional hearing on Tuesday."

MOSCOW — A Western military attack on Syria will only create more problems in the region, lead to more bloodshed and result in the same sort of “catastrophe” as previous Western interventions in Iraq and Libya, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Monday. “Hysteria is growing and confrontation is incited,” Lavrov said in what he portrayed as an emergency press conference. He said the United States and its European allies have condemned the regime of Bashar al-Assad without any evidence that it actually used chemical weapons in an assault on a Damascus suburb on Aug. 21. China's president aims to...

This summer, friends and I took a cruise in Alaska where the tourist shops often featured the Russian matryoshka dolls.  The dolls originated in Japan but were made popular in Russia around the time of the Russian Revolution, a century ago.  You've seen them -- you pop open an outer doll, and nested inside is another.  The magic of the art is that you keep opening layer after layer, only to find another even smaller doll, until at last the final incarnation is just a kernel in size.  The successive dolls vary from near exact duplicates with hard-to-identify slight...

France has called on the United Nations to authorize using "all means" necessary to end the carnage in Syria, bringing the civil war closer to the edge of a proxy war between Russia and the Western alliance. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday accused the United States of supplying weapons to Syria's opposition, hours after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton charged that Moscow is sending a new shipment of attack helicopters to Damascus. Lavrov spoke during a brief visit to Iran, which along with Syria are two of Russia’s favorite nations for investment of nuclear development and arms...

Iran is providing a broad array of assistance to Syrian President Bashar Assad to help him suppress anti-government protests, from high-tech surveillance technology to guns and ammunition, U.S. and European security officials say. Tehran's technical assistance to Assad's security forces includes electronic surveillance systems, technology designed to disrupt efforts by protesters to communicate via social media, and Iranian-made drone aircraft for overhead surveillance, the officials said. They discussed intelligence matters on condition of anonymity. "Over the past year, Iran has provided security assistance to Damascus to help shore up Assad. Tehran during the last couple of months has been aiding...

Well, things in Syria are getting a bit more complicated. Weeks after the news that special operators from NATO countries may be inside Syria advising the rebels, comes the news that Russia has dispatched counterterrorism troops to the embattled nation. Now, some news reports say the Russian’s claim they’ve just sent a Navy tanker to support anti-piracy operations in Middle Eastern waters and that any troops aboard that ship are simply there to protect the tanker’s civilian crew and that there are no Russian counterterror troop in Syria. Now, the ship is docked in the Syrian port of Tartus on...

A Russian military unit has arrived in Syria, according to Russian news reports, a development that a United Nations Security Council source told ABC News was "a bomb" certain to have serious repercussions. Russia, one of President Bashar al-Assad's strongest allies despite international condemnation of the government's violent crackdown on the country's uprising, has repeatedly blocked the United Nations Security Council's attempts to halt the violence, accusing the U.S. and its allies of trying to start another war.

The State Department has said the U.S. and other countries are consulting with Iraq about Iranian flights of weapons to Syria after Iraq’s prime minister denied a report in The Washington Times saying Baghdad is allowing such flights. “We are concerned about the overflight of Iraq by Iranian cargo flights headed to Syria,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Friday, adding that the U.S. and other nations want to work with Iraq to be “absolutely sure about any cargo that’s overflying its territory.” Earlier Friday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued a statement saying that his government does not allow...

Iran could provide nuclear weapons to Hamas and Hizbullah for a nonconventional attack on Israel, according to a chilling scenario presented in a new report. "Furthermore, even a minimal nuclear capability would enable Hizbullah and Hamas to conduct ongoing low-level attacks — even severe ones — against Israel, in the confidence that Israel would be deterred from massive retaliation. This would require a declared capability, or at least a strongly suspected one." Freilich, a former member of Israel's National Security Council, said Hamas or Hizbullah could smuggle a bomb into Israel through ships, airlines or an unmanned aerial vehicle. Other...

Note: Photo included. SNIPPET: "An Iranian-backed Shia terror group that claims it seeks reconciliation with the Iraqi government has kidnapped a US civilian in Baghdad. The US recently released the top leader of the group under the guise of a reconciliation program, but the release actually was related to a hostage exchange. The Asaib al Haq, or the League of the Righteous, kidnapped Issa T. Salomi, a US civilian contractor, in Baghdad in late January. Salomi went missing in Baghdad sometime after Jan. 23, the US Department of Defense noted in a press release on Friday. The League of the...