Why Turkey took advantage of wars in Ukraine and Gaza to forge firm military, economic alliance with Somalia
The opening of a training facility in Mogadishu has increased Turkey’s strategic depth in the Horn of Africa, projecting the country towards both sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean. And the use of Turkish drones in Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict has shown Turkish defence arrangements have become a factor in local dynamics.
Israel pounds Beirut’s southern suburbs after US truce push as 47 Palestinians are killed in Gaza
The conflict in Lebanon has dramatically escalated over the past five weeks, with most of the 2,800 deaths reported by the Lebanese health ministry for the past 12 months occurring in that period.
Hezbollah’s new leader Sheikh Naim Qassem endorses Lebanon ceasefire talks without Gaza precondition
Speaking on September 30, Naim Qassem said Hezbollah would choose a successor to its slain secretary general “at the earliest opportunity” and would continue to fight Israel in solidarity with Palestinians.
Israel bans United Nations humanitarian agency as Palestinians say 100,000 residents trapped
Israel continued battering Lebanon on Monday, including an early-morning airstrike on a district in the southern port of Tyre that left seven dead, the Lebanese health ministry said. Lebanon’s health authority said Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed at least 2,710 people and injured 12,592 others in the past year.
When bombs began raining in Lebanon: In Beirut, my father is a man who belongs to a house, garden…a place; now he’s homeless
These days, we spend our nights on my sister’s balcony, checking WhatsApp. My siblings and I do our best to keep the mood light for our parents, encouraging them to stay active and talk with us. But it’s tough. They live independent lives in the south, but here, everything is new and strange. Watching them struggle from afar was unbearable. Now I carry a new kind of burden, of watching their silence and sadness.
Taliban morality law: New code stipulates length of men’s facial hair, considers woman’s voice ‘intimate part of the body’
Without doubt, the part of the law that has received the most media attention is Article 13, which stipulates that a woman’s voice – when engaged in singing, reciting, and reading in public – is considered awrah, or an intimate part of the body. It goes on to say that a woman should “cover” her voice when out in public.
Israel’s military says its jets hit Iran’s missile manufacturing facilities and surface-to-air missile arrays
Arab states situated between Israel and Iran have been particularly worried that use of their airspace could prompt retaliation against them. Jordanian television quoted a source in the country’s armed forces as saying no military planes had been allowed through its airspace. A Saudi official also said that Saudi airspace had not been used for the strike.
Israel launches missile attack targeting Iran’s military sites as risk of wider Middle East wars rises
Initially, nuclear facilities and oil installations all had been seen as possible targets for Israel’s response to Iran’s October 1 attack, but in mid-October the Biden administration won assurances from Israel that it would not hit such targets, which would be a more severe escalation.
Journalist captures Israeli strike on building near ‘interests and facilities’ in Beirut linked to Hezbollah top brass
Minutes before the bomb brought down the building, two smaller projectiles were fired at the roof in what Israel’s military often refers to as warning strikes, according to AP journalists at the scene. It is a practice Israel has followed in staging strikes in Gaza during past wars.
US secretary of state Blinken lands in Israel to revive Gaza ceasefire but protagonists unlikely to budge
Israel is accelerating military operations to push Hezbollah away from its northern border while thrusting into Gaza’s densely packed Jabalia refugee camp in what Palestinians and UN agencies fear could be an attempt to seal off northern Gaza from the rest of the enclave.
