Middle East | featured news

Iran claimed Sunday that it had recovered data from an American spy drone that went down in Iran last year including that it was used to spy on Osama bin Laden's house weeks before he was killed by U.S. forces. Iran also said it was building a copy of the surveillance aircraft.

Afghan security forces on Saturday arrested five insurgents suspected of planning massive attacks on crowded areas of the capital Kabul, an intelligence spokesman said.

U.N. ceasefire monitors visited the battered Syrian city of Homs and met its governor on Saturday, hours before the U.N. Security Council was to vote on a draft resolution to authorize the deployment to Syria of up to 300 unarmed military observers.

A Pakistani airliner with 131 people on board crashed in bad weather near Islamabad's international airport on Friday, a civil aviation official said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned photographs of U.S. soldiers posing with the mangled bodies of Afghan insurgent bombers as "inhuman" on Thursday, calling for a rapid transition from NATO to Afghan security to prevent more such incidents.

American support for a U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan continues to erode rapidly and has now hit a new low, according to a poll from the Pew Research Center in Washington.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is tightening his grip on the country during the decrease in violence brought on by U.N. demands, experts on the region say.

Already tense U.S. and NATO ties with Afghanistan were dealt another blow on Wednesday with photographs appearing in an American newspaper of U.S. soldiers posing with the maimed bodies of dead Afghan insurgents.

The Syrian government renewed attacks on one besieged city and violently tried to take over another, opposition activists said Tuesday, five days after a so-called cease-fire that is showing more signs of disintegrating.

Six United Nations military observers arrived overnight and were ready to begin, depending on the cooperation of the Syrian government, a spokesman for the special envoy Kofi Annan said.