While his bloody crackdown on Hama grabs headlines, and Bashar Assad's fights for his life against his people, Saudi Arabia eyes the eastern Euphrates Valley and its towns of Deir el-Zour and Abu Kamal for severance from Syria to link up with the Iraqi Anbar province and form a new ...

The Iraqi Prime Minister's delay in confirm his deal with US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta for an American military nucleus to remain in Iraq after the pullout persuaded the US official to cut a back-up deal with semi-autonomous Kurdistan to provide the US army and air force with ...

New US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki quietly agree to at least 15,000 US troops remaining in Iraq after 2011in the guise of diplomats and other civilian personnel with America keeping control of four big air bases – two of them facing Iran. The Iraqi ...

King Abdullah is determined to save his friends from the fate suffered by Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. The second-generation Saudi royals have got together to pull the kingdom away from its long dependence on the US and command its own fate and interests, even at the price of clashing with ...

The accord reached between Saudi King Abdullah and the Bahraini monarch Hamas bin Isa Al Khalifa for the oil island's virtual annexation by Riyadh has so incensed Tehran that armed Iranian-Saudi clashes with the potential for all-out warfare may be unavoidable, debkafile's sources estimate.
Shiite-ruled Iraq would back Tehran in the first Shiite-Sunni collision to be sparked by the wave of unrest sweeping the Arab world.  The annexation was first revealed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly on March 25.

By stepping into Bahrain, the Saudis took the calculated risk of accelerating Sunni-Shiite discord across the region. Because of the challenge to its religious supremacy from Iraq, Tehran is re-thinking the wisdom of its decision to hijack the Arab uprisings.

Iraq's biggest oil refinery at Baiji, 180 kilometers north of Baghdad, was blown up early Saturday, Feb. 26, by an Al Qaeda cell activated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Al Qods Brigades, debkafile's Middle East sources report. Tehran is using the Middle East turbulence to generate fuel shortages in Iraq and boost oil prices worldwide. Thursday night saw the first signs of unrest in Saudi Arabia with demonstrations by young people and by Shiites living and working in the kingdom's eastern oil regions..

The Swedish investigation into the country's first suicide bombing Saturday, Dec. 11, quickly found that the bomb car which exploded during a shopping rush in the heart of Stockholm was part of a well-planned, sophisticated terror operation, prepared several months in advance to inflict a large number of casualties.The Islamist terror group had drawn lessons from the failed Times Square car bombing. Unlike Faisal Shahzad who fled, Taimour al-Abdaly was a walking bomb arsenal.

Iyad Allawi, whose Al Iraqiya party won Iraq's general election last April, was forced to admit Friday, Nov. 12 upon losing the premiership to the pro-Iranian incumbent Nouri Al-Malaki that "the concept of power-sharing in Iraq was dead. For Iraq" he said, "there will be tensions and violence, probably." That day, too, debkafile's sources report, Hizballah's Hassan Nasrallah asserted that what happened in Baghdad is destined for Beirut, marking Tehran's next Middle East target for wresting from Washington.

Terrorists attacking US troops in Iraq are masterminded, trained and abetted by officers of the Lebanese Hizballah. A US intelligence source told debkafile Monday, Sept. 6: "Hizballah is striking US targets in Iraq as sub-contractor for Iran and Syria."Our sources report Hizballah is spearheading their drive to resuscitate the Eastern Front which threatened Israel in the days of Saddam Hussein. Its contemporary form would be led from Tehran.

While most of the equipment goes through the US emergency depot in Kuwait and transferred to Afghanistan as needed, some key items went to the Israeli Defense Forces, including light armored combat vehicles, command vehicles, light and heavy trucks, fuel tankers, all-terrain vehicles, communications vehicles and ambulances .

All of Iraq's communities are getting set for civil war - Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, with Iranian preparing to take over the South.

Spurred by the power vacuum in Baghdad, Iraq's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders are set to leap into inter-communal warfare with regional fallout after Aug. 31 when the US pulls the bulk of its combat troops out as President Barack promised.
In its latest issue out last Friday, DEBKA-Net-Weekly runs an exclusive on their plans for conflicts from which the US and its Transitional Force will not be able to stand aloof - especially if assigned the role of UN peacekeepers.
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Military tensions rise in Iraq as pro-Iranian Shiite militias appear to be planning attacks on American forces, debkafile's exclusive sources report. Tehran is furious over Washington's decision to retain a number of US troops in Iraq, possibly as UN peacekeepers, after the pullout pledged by President Barak Obama to start on September 1. 

US commander in Iraq Gen. Ray Odierno names three Shiite militias recently trained in Iran for a new collision course aside from the nuclear controversy.

In an unprecedentedly wild rampage, even for al Qaeda, raider-units, speeding drive-by gun squads, car bombs and homicidal suicides mowed down checkpoints, liquidated Iraqi soldiers, police and security personnel and murdered civilians in eight Iraqi cities including the capital, Baghdad, Monday, May 10. By the end of the day, more than 100 people were dead and 300 injured.
The gunmen used automatic weapons fitted with silencers to creep up on their victims.

 

Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's unexplained absence from public view after an unpublished attempted assassination may cost him his election victory. Eight days later, he sent a message from his hospital bed asking Tehran to rally its supporters in the Iraqi parliament to stop his rival, Iyad Allawi, gaining ...

Preliminary Iraqi election results show incumbent prime minister Nouri Maliki returned with a commanding 100 parliamentary seats out of 325 and the ability to form a pro-American coalition with Iyad Allawi's secular alliance and the Kurdish bloc that will be stable enough for US troops to depart Iraq on schedule.

Saudi king Abdullah and Syrian president Bashar Assad have no qualms about sending al Qaeda and ex-Baathist gangs out of their Syrian havens to slaughter Shiite pilgrims in Iraq in their determination to prevent prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's election in March.
The US is too busy organizing its ...