The head of Thailand's immigration police said Monday that an 18-year-old Saudi woman who was stopped in Bangkok as she was trying to travel to Australia for asylum to escape alleged abuse by her family will not be sent anywhere against her wishes. The woman, Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, was allowed to temporarily enter Thailand under the protection of the U.N. refugee agency, which was expected to take at least five to seven days to evaluate her case and claims for asylum status.

Women in Saudi Arabia—who have long been subjected to a litany of misogynistic restrictions on their behavior, including totalitarian male guardianship laws—will soon receive text messages to inform them of changes to their marital status as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “reforms” of the country’s monarchic government, CNN reported on Sunday.

President Trump orders US troops out of Syria, declaring victory over the Islamic State group.

U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led fighters captured the last town held by the Islamic State group on Friday, after days of intense battles in the militants' single remaining enclave in eastern Syria, activists said. The fall of Hajin is a blow to the extremists. The town was their main stronghold in the last pocket of land they control in eastern Syria, near the Iraqi border. ISIS still holds some villages nearby.

American Jews have nothing to fear from the new congressional critics of Israel.

Senior American officials were worried. Since the early months of the Trump administration, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and Middle East adviser, had been having private, informal conversations with Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the favorite son of Saudi Arabia’s king. Given Mr. Kushner’s political inexperience, the private exchanges could make him susceptible to Saudi manipulation, said three former senior American officials.

“The settlers came in the middle of the night, no one knew. By morning they had paved a road up to the mountain, set up their tents, and had soldiers protecting them,” Zafer Attayah, a resident of …

Nearly 200,000 years ago, at the confluence of two long-vanished river systems in the heart of Arabia, people climbed a jagged, rocky dyke rising nearly 200 feet above the surrounding plains. There they crafted hand axes and other edged tools from plentiful volcanic stone—and left thousands of them behind. Today, many millennia after the more temperate Arabia the toolmakers knew vanished, those stone tools endure as tantalizing clues to the mysteries of human evolution and migration in the ancient world.

After President Trump's decision to pull out U.S. troops, residents of northeastern Syria tell NPR they feel betrayed. Syrians, led by Kurdish fighters, have lost thousands in the fight against ISIS.

On June 1, an Israeli soldier shot into a crowd, killing a volunteer medic named Rouzan al-Najjar. Israeli officials say soldiers only use live fire as a last resort. Our investigation shows otherwise. We analyzed over 1,000 photos and videos, froze the fatal moment in a 3-D model of the protest, and interviewed more than 30 witnesses and I.D.F. commanders to reveal how Rouzan was killed.

The long read: A decade after it was scuppered by the financial crash, the fantasy archipelago of 300 artificial island ‘countries’ is back in business. Has anybody learned anything?

Saudi Arabia expects to spend about $750 million to build a 37-mile-long canal cutting itself off geographically from its former ally Qatar. The kingdom is accepting a bid for the project—which would transform its Gulf rival from a peninsula into an island—until June 25. Until now, five international companies have submitted bids for the project, which will create a canal about 656 feet wide and 50 to 65 feet deep, Gulf News reported.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Thursday ordered the immediate execution of all convicted "terrorists" of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group, on death row, in swift retaliation for the group's execution of eight captives. Abadi "ordered the immediate execution of terrorists condemned to death whose sentences have passed the decisive stage", his office said, referring to convicts whose appeals have been exhausted.

Syrians working to uncover mass graves in an area once ruled by the Islamic State group need help to preserve evidence, identify human remains and shed more light on...

An eight-year-old Syrian girl whose plight touched the world after she was photographed walking on tuna cans has received prosthetic limbs in Turkey. Maya Merhi, who was born with no legs because of a rare congenital condition, had been living with her father in a refugee camp after fighting forced them from their home in Aleppo province.

I don’t think either Nato or the EU has the slightest interest in chasing the provenance of weapons in the hands of Islamist fighters in Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East

Kuwait has become one of the first country in the Middle East to give full political rights to women. Gulf news agencies reported that the oil rich state has granted full suffrage after decades of campaigning by women’s rights campaigners. Praising Kuwait’s progressive move, regional media commented on the leading role women have been playing in driving the country’s overall development across all sectors, including public works, social services, economy and politics.

Twelve girls' schools have been burnt down by unidentified persons in coordinated attacks in Pakistan's restive Gilgit-Baltistan, triggering protest by local residents who sought safety for educational institutions which are often attacked by the militants, a media report said on Friday.

Pakistan is one of the world’s most dangerous countries, grappling with terror attacks, poverty, religious extremism and crumbling public services. But its new government is aiming to tackle a different problem by planting 10 billion trees within five years to fight the effects of global warming by restoring the country’s depleted forests.

China's business ties with Iran are open, transparent and lawful, its foreign ministry said on Wednesday, after US President Donald Trump said companies doing business with Iran would be barred from the United States. New US sanctions on Iran have taken effect despite pleas from Washington's allies.

An airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition fighting Shiite rebels hit a bus in a market in northern Yemen on Thursday, killing at least 20 people, including children, and wounding as many as 35, Yemeni tribal leaders said. The Saudi-led coalition, meanwhile, said it targeted the rebels, known as Houthis, who had fired a missile at the kingdom’s south the previous day, killing one person.

In August 2013, Egyptian photographer Mosa’ab Elshamy witnessed the military killings of hundreds of protesters

"Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans." An idealistic young American couple was killed in an Islamic State-claimed terrorist attack last month while on a cycling trip around the world. Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, both 29, last year quit their office jobs in Washington, DC, to embark on the journey. Austin, a vegan who worked for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Geoghegan, a vegetarian who worked in the Georgetown University admissions office, decided that they're were wasting their lives working.

State prosecutors in Saudi Arabia are calling for the death penalty for Israa al-Ghomgham, a human rights activist from Qatif who was arrested in 2015. If executed, it will be the first time the country has carried out capital punishment on a woman.

The United States has spent far more time obscuring its role in the Saudi-led war in Yemen than in explaining any rationale for it. By any reasonable assessment, the U.S. government should have stopped providing direct military support to the Saudi Arabia-led air campaign in Yemen on the day after it started. Washington’s participation began on March 26, 2015, when a White House spokesperson announced...

The Pentagon has issued a warning to Saudi Arabia that it is prepared to reduce military and intelligence support for its campaign against rebels in neighboring Yemen if the Saudis don't demonstrate they are attempting to limit civilian deaths in airstrikes following a strike on a school bus that killed 40 children earlier this month, CNN has learned.

The Pentagon is alarmed about Russian propaganda that indicates the Syrian government could be preparing to attack the rebel-held province of Idlib, a Defense Department spokesman said.

An Israeli soldier who was convicted of killing a wounded Palestinian attacker said he had “no regrets” in his first interview since he was released from prison. Elor Azaria was 19 when he shot Abdel Fattah al-Sharif in the head at point-blank range as he was lying on the ground in the West Bank city of Hebron in 2016. He served nine months of his 14-month manslaughter sentence and was released three months ago.

Known for his progressive views, Odah is the first Sunni scholar to be sentenced to death in crackdown led by Saudi crown prince

Letters: Artists from Europe and beyond support the appeal from Palestinian artists to boycott the contest next year

A new report reveals today how the French State and several French companies have participated in the bloody Egyptian repression of the past five (...)

We are living in the age of advanced technology and observing the biggest innovations and thrilling changes in the technology. Each and every industry is transforming itself from a manual work process

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said in a surprise announcement that he would grant citizenship to the roughly 1.5 million Afghan refugees who were born in Pakistan. Khan made the pledge during a public event in Karachi on Sunday, The Guardian reported. “Afghans whose children have been raised and born in Pakistan will be granted citizenship inshallah (God willing) because this is the established practice in countries around the world,” Khan said. “They are humans. How come we have deprived them and have not arranged for offering them national identification card and passport for 30 years, 40 years?”

A court in Baghdad sentenced to death a senior Islamic State figure and former deputy to its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Ismail Alwaan al-Ithawi was sentenced on Wednesday, September 19 to death by hanging, said Judge Abdul Sattar Birkdar, spokesperson for the Supreme Judicial council. Ithawi, who went by the kunya, or nom de guerre, Abu Zeid al-Iraqi is an Iraqi national in charge of ISIS’s religious rulings and education curriculum, and sat on an important leadership committee.

Israel’s critics often describe the country as being above the law, but until now this has never been brazenly declared by its government. Documents published this week shows a legal representative of the Israeli government audaciously claiming that Israel can “legislate anywhere in the world,” that it is “entitled to violate the sovereignty of foreign countries,” and that it “is allowed to ignore the directives of international law in any field it desires”.