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President Donald Trump has said the US will inflict "severe punishment" on Saudi Arabia if the kingdom is found to be responsible for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He said he would be "very upset and angry if that were the case", but ruled out halting big military contracts. Mr. Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government, vanished on October 2 after visiting its consulate in Istanbul...…

Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman (Yisrael Beytenu) on Saturday said that Israel will not provide fuel or gas to Gaza if conflicts continue. Liberman halted the transfer of fuel to Gaza on Friday, after several Gaza terrorists who detonated a bomb on the Israel-Gaza border fence and attacked an IDF position inside Israel. "As long as the violence in Gaza - including sending incendiary balloons and burning tires opposite Israeli towns - does not cease completely, we will not renew the provision of fuels and gas to Gaza," Liberman tweeted. Earlier on Saturday, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said that conflict...

Violence on Friday included incident where four Palestinians were shot dead after breaching security fence Israeli forces have shot dead six Palestinians, including four in a single incident, in one of the deadliest days in months of mass protests along the security fence separating Gaza and Israel, Gaza’s health ministry said. The ministry said four were killed in one location, where the Israeli military said it opened fire on Palestinians who breached the fence and approached an army post. No Israeli troops were harmed, the army added. At least 140 Palestinians were wounded by live bullets, the ministry said. The...

Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s threat to remove any mayors chosen in local elections next March deemed to be “contaminated by terrorism” is a rejection of democracy and an attempt to scare voters away from the main pro-Kurdish party, one of its members of parliament said. Turkish authorities stepped up pressure on the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) following the breakdown of a ceasefire with Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants in July 2015. The government says the HDP is, in effect, the political wing of the PKK. The crackdown gained momentum after a failed coup a year later that...

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) – Syria’s Kurds “have been great partners,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday evening in Washington DC, as he addressed a conference of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA.)Pompeo affirmed that the Kurds would be party to negotiations over Syria’s political future.“We are now driving,” he said, stressing that last word, “to make sure that they have a seat at the table.”Pompeo is the most senior US official to affirm a long-term commitment to Syria’s Kurds.Previously, Amb. James Jeffrey, who was appointed Pompeo’s Representative for Syria Engagement in late August,...

Syrian rebel fighters have pulled the last of their heavy weapons from front-line positions in Idlib Province, meeting the deadline for a truce negotiated by Russia and Turkey — and possibly sparing the civilian population from a bloody government offensive. It was a rare act of unity for the ordinarily fractious rebel forces, who on Monday drove trucks carrying a tank, artillery and missile batteries out of their base in this small town, as a small group of international journalists looked on. “We are now standing in the demilitarized zone,” said Saif al-Raad, a spokesman for the National Liberation Front,...

Xelil Åžirvan, a commander of a group of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, told Sputnik that a US military base had been detected near the town of Al-Qa'im in northwest Iraq on the border with Syria. "According to our data, the United States has set up a new military base in the strategically important region of Al-Qa'im in Anbar province on the Iraqi-Syrian border. Americans are building up their military presence in the region, which is why Iraqi government forces have sent more military reinforcements to Al-Qa'im to boost border protection," he said. A spokesperson for the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led...

<p>The Turkish state and their allied gangs occupying Afrin have pillaged the city and continue to inflict inhumane attacks against the civilian population. Turkey increases the attacks with each passing day to change the demographic make up of the region.</p>

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that he is preparing for a military solution to the violence on the country’s southern border. “If the reality of civil distress in Gaza is diminished, that is desirable, but that is not certain to happen, and so we are preparing militarily,” Netanyahu said in the cabinet meeting. “That is not an empty statement.” The prime minister’s remarks come after the Defense Ministry ordered IDF troops to send reinforcements to the region on Thursday in preparation for a possible escalation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will allegedly fire the head of the country’s domestic intelligence service after he countered claims of “migrant hunts” during one of the many Chemnitz protests. Government sources claim that the German leader has decided to relieve Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) chief Hans-Georg Maassen of his post following a number of incidents including his rejection of a video that allegedly showed angry demonstrators in Chemnitz “hunting” migrants following the murder of Daniel Hillig, Die Welt reports. The sources claim that Merkel decided the fate of the spy chief over the weekend, telling...

It has long been charged that Antifa operatives enter the crowds of pro-freedom rallies and say and do things in order to discredit those rallies. In the protests in Chemnitz against mass Muslim migration, this man made a Hitler salute, which was picked up by the international media as proof that the rallies were full of neo-Nazis. But this man has now been unmasked as a supporter of the Red Army Faction, a Communist terrorist group. Even the German media is admitting it. But it is unlikely there will follow any retractions from the media outside the country, which is...

Thousands have marched through a German city after racist violence flared up following the arrest of an Iraqi and a Syrian over a fatal stabbing. Marchers demonstrated both for and against migrants in the eastern city of Chemnitz. Sunday and Monday evenings saw outbreaks of violence triggered by the arrest of two suspects allegedly involved in the stabbing of Daniel Hillig, a 35-year-old German-Cuban. Following the arrests, mobs attacked people they took to be foreigners, including an Afghan, a Syrian and a Bulgarian man.

Michael Kretschmer, prime minister of the German state of Saxony, knew he was entering the lion’s den. But even he looked unprepared for the boos, whistles and catcalls that greeted him in Chemnitz, a city boiling over with rage and hurt.  Addressing a town-hall meeting of locals reeling from the murder of a 35-year-old man in the city last weekend, Mr Kretschmer insisted they should have distanced themselves from the rightwing extremists who hijacked their peaceful protest over the killing, which authorities suspect was carried out by a Syrian and an Iraqi. “It’s not a good thing to be in a...

CHEMNITZ, Germany — Waving German flags, with some flashing Nazi salutes, the angry mob made its way through the streets, chasing after dark-skinned bystanders as police officers, vastly outnumbered, were too afraid to intervene. A Syrian refugee and father of two, Anas al-Nahlawie, watched horrified from a friend’s fourth-floor balcony. They were hunting in packs for immigrants just like him, he said. “Like wolves.” For a few perilous hours over two days this week, the mob owned the streets of Chemnitz, where anger exploded after word spread that an Iraqi and a Syrian asylum seeker were suspected in a knife...

CHEMNITZ, Germany (Reuters) - Far-right demonstrators clashed with leftist protesters in the eastern German city of Chemnitz on Monday after an Iraqi and a Syrian were arrested over a fatal stabbing that had triggered violent demonstrations. Over a thousand leftist protesters massed near a giant statue of Karl Marx in Chemnitz on Monday evening to protest attacks on foreigners that occurred during an impromptu demonstration on Sunday after reports spread on social media about the stabbing of a 35-year-old German man. Nearly the same number of demonstrators waving German and Bavarian flags gathered nearby, some breaking through police barriers aimed...

The German city of Chemnitz was in lockdown Saturday after armed police launched a huge manhunt for a Syrian suspected of planning a bomb attack, as the country grapples with a weakened sense of security following recent terror assaults. Police, who told people to stay in their homes, named the suspect as 22-year-old Syrian Jaber Albakr. Photographs posted on social media showed armed police clad in black balaclavas and helmets at an apartment building in the eastern city. Germany has been on edge after suffering two attacks claimed by the Islamic State group (IS) in July -- an axe rampage...

Basic translation. The police bust yesterday netted bomb-making material from a site in Chemnitz, Germany. The bomb-maker is a young Syrian guy immigrated in 2015. Some screw-up occurred with the German cops, and the young Syrian got away, while they got the material and two of his associates. Nation-wide search underway for the bomb-maker. Within the last hour, state-run news has noted that there is info that this bomb episode was possibly designed for one of the two Berlin airports.

German police have launched a manhunt for a suspected Syrian bomb plotter after raiding a building in the eastern city of Chemnitz. The suspect was identified as Jaber Albakr from Damascus and police urged anyone with information about his whereabouts to come forward. "We have to assume that the person is dangerous," Tom Bernhardt, spokesman for the state criminal police, was quoted as saying. An image released by police showed a dark-haired man wearing a hooded sweatshirt. He was said to have been wearing similar clothes when he was last seen. Police raided an apartment in the Fritz-Heckert-Gebiet neighbourhood after...

The United States on Monday asked judges at the International Court of Justice to throw out a claim by Iran to recover $1.75 billion (€1.5 billion) in national bank assets seized by U.S. courts. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the assets must be turned over to American families of victims of the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, among others. The hearings at the tribunal were separate from Iran’s claim relating to current U.S. sanctions against Tehran. Iran’s claim in both cases is based on a 1955 Amity Treaty, which was signed 24...