The Obama administration’s approach toward nuclear talks with Iran is generating unease among Washington’s traditional Arab and Israeli allies – and will at a minimum need to be counterbalanced by robust pushback against other elements of Iran’s foreign policy – according to [PDF] testimony submitted last Thursday to the Senate Committee on Foreign...

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Gains being made across Iraq by the radical Sunni group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) – Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul on Tuesday, Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit on Wednesday, and what appeared to be further gains aimed at marching on Baghdad on Thursday –...

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Bashar al-Assad’s re-election earlier this week is viewed by Iran as “a defeat for the United States and some Arab countries in the region,” according to an analysis published Friday by a Harvard-affiliated scholar. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, an Iranian-American political scientist who serves on the board of the Harvard International Review, writes:...

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Last week’s round of balloting in Syria – in which Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad reportedly won 88.7% of the vote in the war-torn country – marked a defeat for the West and for Western conspiracies, per Friday remarks issued by Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah: Assad won a new seven-year term in...

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Former Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri declared yesterday that Tuesday’s re-election of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad was a “farce.” The Daily Star reported on the politician’s remarks: “This election was a farce. It was dark, fabricated, bloody, abhorrent and all of the things that senior officials have described it as,”...

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Yesterday the Palestinian Authority announced the formation of a unity government together with the terrorist organization Hamas. Though State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki announced that the U.S. would “work with” the new regime, Israeli officials as well as an array of U.S. lawmakers are deeply skeptical that doing so would be...

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A “top-ranking overseas operative of Hamas” was arrested last week, according to a report Friday in the Times of Israel. The operative gave Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, details about how Hamas operates inside of Israel. According the report, Mahmoud Toameh “gave the security agency a wealth of details” on...

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Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Thursday conveyed reports that forces loyal to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime had “rained barrels bombs on Aleppo” over the course of the day, part of what the wire described as “a campaign against rebels in the northern city where dozens have been killed this week”: The use of...

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Reuters on Thursday flatly assessed that “Syria has made no progress in relinquishing a last batch of chemical weapons [CWs],” noting that the Bashar al-Assad regime is using claims of nearby fighting to excuse the “increasingly likely” scenario under which it would fail to meet a final deadline set for it to dismantle...

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Al Arabiya late Tuesday conveyed reports from Syrian opposition groups accusing the Bashar al-Assad regime of having launched a chemical weapons (CW) attack against rebel-heavy areas the day before, which the groups indicated had left more than 130 people in need of medical attention: The Hama Media Center said the...

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