Spotlight
While they are long accustomed to the stench of corruption, two grim and eerily similar tragedies have shocked even hardened Iraqis, who blame graft and negligence for deaths and much more.

More than 920,000 people were displaced inside Syria during the first four months of 2018, the highest level in the seven-year conflict, the United Nations said Monday.

The fire that ravaged a Baghdad warehouse where votes from May's legislative election were stored ahead of a recount was started "deliberately", Iraqi Interior Minister Qassem al-Araji said Monday.

Huthi rebels in Yemen fired a "projectile" at the southwestern Saudi province of Jazan killing three civilians, the Saudi-led coalition fighting the insurgents said.

A failed Iraqi asylum seeker arrived by plane back in Germany on Saturday after admitting raping and murdering a teenage girl, Iraqi Kurdish officials and German media reports said.

Deadly clashes erupted overnight as jihadist fighters attacked two besieged regime-controlled villages in northwestern Syria, a monitor said on Sunday.

United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan has met with family members in France, UAE media reported Sunday, one of his rare appearances since a stroke in 2014.

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad denied Moscow is running the show in his war-torn country, saying in an interview released Sunday his government operates independently of its Russian and Iranian allies.
In a wide-ranging interview in Damascus with the Mail on Sunday, Assad slammed the United States and British military actions in Syria as "colonial" while praising supporter Russia.

The Islamic State group had lost ground Saturday in a town on the Syrian-Iraqi border after pro-regime forces repelled a major attack the day before, a Britain-based monitor said.

A Russian force deployment on the Syria-Lebanon border this week in a Hizbullah stronghold sparked protests by the Lebanese militant group, prompting the force to withdraw from its positions only a day later in a rare sign of tension between the allies.
