Middle East | featured news

In Syria, a rescue operation to retrieve corpses of a massacred family turns up a child who survived. Arwa Damon reports.

Emboldened by faltering diplomacy and a Russian pledge to keep supplying weapons, Syria’s armed forces assaulted insurgent enclaves in the northern part of the country on Tuesday, invading the city of Idlib in an expanded campaign to crush the year-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

The United States is pressing Saudi Arabia to boost oil output to fill a likely supply gap arising from sanctions on Iran, Gulf oil officials said, adding that an increase in production is unlikely to be needed before July.

The call would soon become agonizingly familiar: A 28-year-old Army specialist from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, recently home from Afghanistan, had walked into a parking garage in Salt Lake City with a full set of body armor, ammunition clips and his AR-15 rifle.

Officials say the US mission in Afghanistan will not change in the wake of an American soldier's attack on civilians, and troops are still on course to hand over security control to Afghans by the end of 2014.

The Taliban vowed revenge Monday for an "inhumane attack" in which an American soldier allegedly shot to death 16 civilians in southern Afghanistan and torched their bodies - an assault that has fueled anger still simmering after U.S. troops burned Qurans last month.

A U.S. soldier was detained after 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, were shot dead in what witnesses described on Sunday as a night-time massacre near a U.S. base in Afghanistan's violent south.

President Bashar al-Assad told U.N./Arab League envoy Kofi Annan on Saturday that no political solution was possible in Syria while "terrorist" groups were destabilizing the country.

Nine years ago, the United States invaded Iraq after telling the world that Saddam Hussein had covert weapons programs that could build nuclear arms. In the end, nothing was found. Today, acting on similar fears, Israel is threatening to attack Iran.

A man identifying himself as the deputy oil minister, Abdo Hussameldin, appeared in a video posted to YouTube on Wednesday, and said he had left his post.