Middle East, Militants | featured news

The olive orchards and wheat fields lining the Gaza Strip border with Israel were always sparsely populated, but on Monday the area was a virtual no-man’s land. Fearing an Israeli ground invasion of the coastal strip, hundreds of families have fled.

First head of state to visit the Palestinian territory since Islamist Hamas militants seized control there 5 years ago.

The brazen shooting of a defiant teen blogger has stirred the conscience of Pakistan, a nation plagued for decades by violent extremism. An angry chorus of voices in social media, on the street, in newspapers and over the airwaves has decried the attack against 14-year-old Malala Yousufzai as cowardly and an example of a government unable to cope with militants.

When they left their village north of Cairo on August 27, Ahmed Waguih and Bahaa Zaqzouq told their families they were going on holiday. A few weeks later and hundreds of miles away, the cousins were killed mounting a cross-border raid into Israel.

The detailed information being prepared could be used to kill or capture some of the militants suspected in the deadly attack on the American mission in Benghazi.

The White House is now describing the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazias a “terrorist attack,” a shift in emphasis after days of describing the lethal assault as a spontaneous eruption of anger over an anti-Islamic film made in California.

Wanis el-Sharef, eastern Libya's deputy interior minister, said Thursday the attacks were suspected to have been timed to mark the 9/11 anniversary and that the militants used protesting civilians as cover. He said an unspecified number of militants suspected of taking part in the attack have been arrested and that others were being closely monitored by police to see whether they are linked to a group.

A militant who fought alongside Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and is now the leader of a group affiliated with Al-Qaeda in South Yemen has struck a deal with the United States and Saudi Arabia to send 5,000 Al-Qaeda fighters into Syria according to reports out of the Middle East.

Hundreds of Islamic militants solidified their control over a town in southern Yemen Sunday after seizing tanks in clashes with fleeing soldiers, military officials said. Opponents of the country’s embattled president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, accused him of allowing the militants to freely seize Zinjibar in a bid to stoke Western fears that al-Qaida would take over the country if he responded to demands by demonstrators to step down.

Al Qaeda has acknowledged that Osama bin Laden is dead, dispelling the doubts of some Muslims over whether the militant group's leader had really been killed by U.S. forces, and vowed to mount more attacks on the West.