The police in east Germany have begun searching for 22-year-old Syrian man Jaber Albakr after they discovered explosives in his apartment in Chemnitz, located near the Czech border. They believe he has planned a large terror attack:
“The search for the suspect is ongoing,” Saxony state police t...
Obama administration will be allowing plane makers Airbus and Boeing to sell jetliners to Iran, clearing the way for one of the most high-profile business deals since the lifting of nuclear sanction on Islamic Republic earlier this year. The easing of commercial restrictions is part of President Obama-led initiative to reward Iran for signing a Nuclear Agreement in...
Two Syrians in Germany attacked innocent civilians on Sunday. One killed a pregnant woman with a machete while the other detonated a bomb outside of a music festival.
The bomber recently pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, which has led authorities to call it a terrorist attack. Authorities call...
One year after the Obama-backed Nuclear Deal came into effect, Islamic Republic of Iran remains the leading sponsor of international terrorism, says a policy paper published by British policy think-tank Henry Jackson Society. According...
I guess I knew this case was percolating through the system, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.
The Supreme Court upheld a law which paved the way for terror victims to recover damages from Iran. The Opinion is here.
The legal issue was not terrorism, but whe...
Remember the famous ‘snapping back’ of sanctions that President Obama promised last year if Iran were to violate the Nuclear Agreement? The New York Times had hailed the ‘snap back’ as a diplomatic masterstroke, writing “snapback mechanism [to reimpose sanctions on Iran] is one of the most unusual parts of the deal. In the event...
In another demonstration of President Obama’s inability to formulate a coherent policy in the face of fresh Iranian violations of missile test bans, the United States both imposed new sanctions on and eased trade with Iran on the same day on Thursday.
Iran’s renewed aggression is unmistakable even to those whose willful...
Communist North Korea is heavily involved in training and arming the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Islamist allies in the Middle East. According to recent revelations by former US intelligence officer Dr. Bruce Bechtol, North Korea has a more extensive military partnership with Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and even Hamas —...
Emails released from Hillary Clinton’s Secretary of State cache show Google executives interest in Syria.
Jared Cohen, Head of Google Ideas at the time contacted the State Department in 2012 about a project that encouraged Syrian government defectors. Google planned to work with Al Jazeera to disseminate their defector map.
The...
In a rather surprising move, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin announced Monday that he would begin withdrawing troops from Syria the very next day. Those of us watching the Middle East carefully were not only surprised by the move but also intensely curious about possible motivations and what the move will ultimately...
This is actually a big deal, if for real.
The Russian air force and associated troops manning the airfield and anti-aircraft systems have been responsible for many of the recent gains by Syrian, Hezbollah, and Iranian-backed foreign militias fighting to keep Assad in power.
Russia Today, generally perceived as pro-...
While President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have assured us that the nuclear deal with Iran has delayed war, Tony Badran in a devastating critique of the administration’s foreign policy last week wrote, “Middle Easterners are not so lucky: They get to fight their wars with Iran...
According to the head of Iran’s state-run oil company NPC, two leading German companies are set to invest a total of €12 billion in Tehran’s petroleum and gas sector. The latest agreement could make Germany the first big foreign investor in Iranian oil sector, after the nuclear deal was signed seven...
International financial sanctions against Iran are being lifted today as part of the Iran Nuclear Deal. The influx of tens of billions of funds are expected first to go to support Iranian efforts to destabilize the Middle East, including helping Assad in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza.
Not coincidentally,...
On Wednesday the Iranian Central Bank argued before the United States Supreme Court that Iranian-owned assets in U.S.-based accounts cannot be used to satisfy judgments against Iran.
The narrow legal question in Bank Markazi v. Peterson is whether and to what extent Congress can dictate the outcome of a pending suit...
With the news that Iran has seized two American boats and detained 10 American sailors in the Persian Gulf just ahead of the State of the Union earlier this week, I’d like to go back to something that President Barack Obama said a little more than a year ago. Even though the...
The fallout from the execution of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia on Saturday will roil the Middle East region for some time to come. Below, I review the recent developments since our last posts (see here and here) and discuss some of the lessons to be learned from...
