Middle East | featured news

Western powers risk causing a major conflict in the Middle East if they intervene in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad says in an interview with a British newspaper.

Syrian forces pounded the western city of Homs Saturday with jets and tanks, sustaining fire with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, activists told CNN.

NATO says 13 service members have been killed in a suicide car bombing in Kabul.

Syrian security forces opened fire Friday on protesters and hunted them down in house-to-house raids, killing about 30 people in the deadliest day in weeks in the country's 7-month-old uprising, activists said.

Turkey struggled to provide shelter on Wednesday to tens of thousands left homeless by an earthquake that killed nearly 500, and rescue teams began taking painful decisions to call off searches for those buried alive.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Iran on Sunday not to view the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as an opportunity to try to build its influence in the country.

When a computer attack hobbled Iran's unfinished nuclear power plant last year, it was assumed to be a military-grade strike, the handiwork of elite hacking professionals with nation-state backing.

As night fell over eastern Turkey on Sunday following the most powerful earthquake in at least a decade, citizens were using flashlights and shovels as they clambered over the rubble of collapsed buildings looking for survivors. At least seven aftershocks rattled the region, one of the nation's poorest. The extent of casualties was not immediately known.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry accused President Obama Saturday of endangering U.S. troops by announcing plans to end the nation's military role in Iraq by Christmas. "The last thing you want to do is put those men and women's lives in peril, and I think that's what the president's done by making a political statement to his base that he's going to be out of Iraq by a date certain," Perry said.

Afghanistan would support Pakistan in case of military conflict between Pakistan and the United States, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in an interview to a private Pakistani TV channel broadcast on Saturday.