Iraq Struggles to Form Government After Sharply Divided Election
The Iraqi parliament met on Monday for the first time since the elections in May, but it remains unclear which bloc of allied political interests will form the new government.

The Iraqi parliament met on Monday for the first time since the elections in May, but it remains unclear which bloc of allied political interests will form the new government.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) on Wednesday published some educational materials distributed by the Iran-supported Houthi insurgents in Yemen. The level of vicious anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism fed to children by the Houthis may come as a surprise to American news consumers who think of them as merely a political or tribal insurgency.

Yemen’s Iranian backed Shiite Houthi rebels supported a call by the United Nations for an investigation into the legality of recent Saudi airstrikes as the humanitarian toll in Yemen continues to rise.

A wave of demonstrations swept across central and southern Iraq, the heartland of the country’s Shiite majority, this week, the human rights group Amnesty International reported on Friday.

Forces loyal to the Russian- and Iranian-backed regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad launched nearly 1,270 airstrikes on rebel-held territory near Israel’s Golan Heights on Sunday alone, marking the latest move in an offensive to clear insurgents out of southern Syria, according to a monitor group.

Several Iraqi officials who suffered losses during last month’s legislative elections, including the prime minister, are claiming the fire that engulfed the country’s most massive ballot warehouse this weekend was a deliberate act intended to sabotage a vote recount prompted by allegations.

In an interview with the Kurdish Rudaw news service published on Thursday, Shiite militia member Ahmed Ali Hussein declared that his group was proud to be added to America’s list of terrorist organizations. He also worried that fresh U.S. sanctions on Iran would cut off Tehran’s financial support for his organization.

Despite years of discord and distance between them, Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad Iraj Masjedi said this week Iraq’s Shiite cleric and political leader Muqtada al-Sadr is a “dear and influential friend and brother” of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Final numbers for Iraq’s parliamentary election, which took place on Saturday, will not be available until this Friday, although estimates appear to show Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s coalition leading.

The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah on Monday praised provisional parliamentary election results as vindicating his Shiite group’s armed operations.

TEL AVIV – A prominent Shiite Iraqi interfaith activist told BBC Arabic earlier this month that the Islamic State terror group’s violence, including beheadings, is “deeply rooted in Islam” and that that makes it “a hundred times more evil.”

TEL AVIV – The downing of an Israeli F-16 by Syrian air defenses two weeks ago was due to pilot error, an investigation carried out by the Israel Air Force published Sunday found.

TEL AVIV – There are 10 Iranian military bases in Syria, two of which are close to the border with Israel, that are training militias from the Assad regime for a future war with Israel, an analyst for an American think tank said in an article published Monday.

Despite protests calling for greater economic restraint in funding projects to promote Shiite Islam around the world, Islamic leaders during a Friday prayer called for more money to go towards Shiite seminaries in Iran.

Just weeks after a top Iraqi Shi’ite commander was filmed in South Lebanon overlooking northern Israel, a senior Syrian Shi’ite militia commander has paid the same visit to the border.

At least 40 people were killed and dozens more wounded in multiple blasts at a Shiite cultural center in Kabul on Thursday, officials said, in the latest deadly violence to hit the Afghan capital.

Center for Security Policy Vice President for Research and Analysis Clare Lopez joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss fallout at the United Nations from President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and look ahead to the national security challenges facing America in 2018.

Syrian army forces backed by Iranian-backed militias pushed deeper into the last rebel-held enclave near a strategic border area with Israel and Lebanon in a new expansion of Tehran’s influence in the war-torn country.

WASHINGTON, DC – Former Sen. Joseph Lieberman and retired General Charles Wall laid out their visions for the “the way forward” regarding the United States’ policy on Iran during a panel discussion at the National Press Club on Tuesday.

The United States Congress is considering a bill that would impose sanctions against Shiite militia groups in Iraq that act as proxy forces for Iran.

The United Nations documented a “sharp increase” in jihadi attacks primarily targeting Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan, including worshippers inside mosques, shrines, and other religious sites as well as imams and religious scholars.

TEL AVIV – Iraq’s parliament voted unanimously to criminalize displaying the Israeli flag in public, likely in response to September’s Kurdish independence referendum for which Israel expressed open support.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s announcement that the Kingdom would return to a “moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world” did not go over well at the pro-Erdogan Turkish paper Yeni Safak, where columnist Ibrahim Karagul accused the Saudis of joining a U.S.-Israeli plot to water down Islam and divide the Muslim world.

TEL AVIV – Iraqi Kurdistan’s warnings that it could face another genocide at the hands of the growing alliance between Iraq and Iranian forces in the region if the West continues to ignore its predicament are legitimate, an expert on Islamic terror said on Wednesday.

TEL AVIV – In its ongoing attempt to drive the U.S. and Iraq apart, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Iraq’s U.S.-backed prime minister on Thursday that America was not to be trusted and he should not depend on it when fighting the Islamic State, Reuters reported quoting Iran’s state TV.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday announced that it passed three bipartisan measures that target Hezbollah, the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s Lebanese Shia proxy.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), a leading member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee, warned on Monday that the Iranian regime’s threats against Israel are growing through the expansion of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s political and military footprint across the Middle East.

“Iranian militias that are in Iraq, now that the fight against Daesh and ISIS is coming to a close, those militias need to go home. The foreign fighters in Iraq need to go home and allow the Iraqi people to regain control,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Sunday.

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the fate of the Iran nuclear deal after President Trump’s announcement of decertification on Friday.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – From its warmongering in Iraq, Syria, and to a degree in Yemen, to its meddling in Lebanon, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories and Turkey, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its terrorist proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, have caused chaos in the Middle East region since it came to power in 1979.

The Rohingya received very little sympathy from Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun of Syria, who said during an interview with Indian media that Rohingya refugees are a security threat to host countries such as India, while the government of Myanmar has been targeted by a propaganda campaign.

Shiite-led Arab lawmakers in Baghdad, Iraq, are punishing their Kurdish counterparts for voting in the independence referendum held by the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq last week, banning them from participating in parliament and urging the country’s judicial branch to take punitive measures against them.

TEL AVIV – An Iraqi cleric recently said Muslims should imitate the Jewish people and praised them for having emerged from the Holocaust to win the “respect of the world through science,” while Muslims are seen as “the world’s headache.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Tuesday he is confident that U.S.-backed Iraqi forces will finish off the Islamic State militants clinging to strongholds that are shrinking in size and number.

Kuwaiti authorities on Saturday arrested 12 convicted members of a “terrorist cell” with ties to Iran and Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah after a weeks-long manhunt.

Turkey, in support of Sunni Turkmen, is expected to oppose Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s decision to allow Iran-allied Shiite militias to participate in the offensive to retake Tal Afar, considered the Islamic State’s (ISIS/ISIL) largest remaining stronghold in northwestern Iraq.

Shiite Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, and a Sunni jihadist organization linked to al-Qaeda recently reached a ceasefire after clashes in Lebanon near the country’s border with Syria left more than 150 people dead.

An Iran-backed Shiite terrorist organization appears on the U.S. State Department list of the top deadliest and most prolific jihadist groups in the world for the first time in years.

The hunt for evidence that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead continued on Wednesday, while Iraqi forces battled ISIS holdouts in the officially liberated city of Mosul.

Saudi Arabia has alleged that its military arrested three members of Shiite Iran’s hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who were plotting to carry out a terrorist attack on a major offshore oilfield in the Persian Gulf.
