Iran’s New Year celebration of Nowruz finds it weathering a perfect storm of US sanctions, low oil prices and Covid-19. The resulting humanitarian crisis may make it even more resilient, as Iranians rally around their government. Iran is facing an existential crisis, brought on by a combination of economic, political and social emergencies which, when combined, threaten to bring the nation to it [...]

Plummeting oil prices have sparked another round of predictions about the economic collapse of Russia – this time from US President Donald Trump, who sounded a lot like his predecessor Barack Obama on the subject. The price of crude oil has crashed to $20 this week, due to a one-two punch of Saudi Arabia flooding the market with record output and a sharp drop in global demand owing to the corona [...]

The situation in northern Syria has grown more volatile since Ankara accused Russia of killing 33 Turkish troops in a Thursday airstrike outside Idlib as Turkey’s NATO allies weigh the option of intervention. An expert told Sputnik NATO involvement is unlikely, but so is Damascus letting up the assault as they try to rebuild their country. [...]

The State Department’s special envoy for Syria has just admitted that the US aims to defend jihadist militants in Idlib against ‘Russian aggression,’ proving once again that the swamp in Foggy Bottom is alive and well. [...]

Global stock markets hit bear territory this week, with oil prices experiencing their biggest plunge since the 1991 Gulf War. Boom Bust is joined by Professor Richard Wolff of the Economic Update to discuss the ongoing oil crisis. He explains that the US, which wanted "energy independence," decided 10-20 years ago to go into the fracking business simply because it was profitable. [...]

A Syrian Air flight has landed at Aleppo International Airport for the first time in years, marking a milestone in the recovery of the city, which has been returning to normal life from the abyss of its civil war. The commercial flight, carrying Syrian officials and journalists, landed in Aleppo on Wednesday, some 40 minutes after taking off from the capital, Damascus. The arrival of the Airbus A3 [...]

Under the 2018 Sochi agreement, Turkey was supposed to disarm and disassociate itself from the terrorist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Its failure to do so has sown the seeds of Turkey’s inevitable defeat in Syria. When Turkey threw its weight behind the anti-Assad rebellion in 2011, it did so believing that it would be able to dictate the outcome on the ground by controlling the main organ [...]

The December 27 rocket attack on the K-1 Air Base in Kirkuk, northern Iraq, which killed a US civilian contractor and injured four US servicemen and two Iraqi security officers, led to a dangerous escalation of tensions between the US and Iran. Iraq’s military and intelligence community believe Daesh (ISIS),* not Iran-affiliated Iraqi Shia Muslim militia group Khaitab Hezbollah, was responsible [...]

Israeli strikes on Damascus suburbs put a civilian aircraft in serious danger and forced it to divert to Russia’s Khmeimim airbase as the Syrian air defense was activated to repel the attack, the Russian military said. An Airbus A320 flying from Tehran to the Syrian capital was forced to make an emergency landing following an Israeli missile attack, the Russian Defense Ministry said. It added th [...]

The Syrian town has been an outpost of the Jabhat an-Nusra* terrorist group in Idlib province. It is situated at a strategic crossroads of the M4 highway connecting Latakia and Aleppo and the M5 connecting Latakia and Damascus. The Syrian army has fully regained control of the town of Saraqib in Idlib Province, according to a military source. [...]

President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Mahmoud Abbas announced on Saturday that all ties between the PNA and Israel, as well as the United States, would be cut following Donald Trump’s unveiling of his long-advertised peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which many saw as being strongly biased towards the Jewish state. [...]

The plan was previously rejected by the Palestinian Authority, which vowed to cut ties with Israel and the US, urging people to participate in protests against the deal. People are gathering near the US Embassy in Lebanon in Beit Aaoukar to protest against the "deal of the century" – a new peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was recently announced by US President Donald Trump. [...]

Following the strike on two US military outposts in retaliation for the Trump-commissioned killing of General Qasem Soleimani, POTUS reported no losses, with the Pentagon eventually saying 64 service personnel sustained what he referred to as “brain injuries”. According to a spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, cited by Press TV, the alleged number of “brain injuries” suff [...]

Moscow doubts the viability of the new peace plan for the Middle East recently unveiled by Donald Trump, as it is incompatible with UN decisions on the matter and does not sit well with the Arab world. Among other things, it cements Israel's sovereignty over the occupied West Bank; the Jewish state would also annex vast swathes of fertile Palestinian lands. Whereas the plan calls for establishing [...]

A spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has accused the US of covering up deaths at a base in Iraq after a ballistic missile attack. The US insists nobody was killed, and that its troops suffered brain injuries. [...]

The Pentagon announced Tuesday that 50 - not 34 - US troops sustained various levels of brain injury from Tehran’s strike on Iraqi bases earlier this month. One expert explained to Sputnik that the Trump administration’s decision to trickle out this information is just a continuation of a series of lies from the White House regarding Iran. Ben Norton, a journalist with The Grayzone and co-host [...]

During self-congratulatory remarks about his “deal of the century” to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, Donald Trump threw in another boast; he claimed US forces defeated “100 percent” of the Islamic State caliphate. Have they? “Thanks to the courage of US forces, the ISIS territorial caliphate — 100 percent — not 95 percent, not 99 or any other percent — 100 percent of their ca [...]

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Thirty-four US service members have been diagnosed with concussions and traumatic brain injuries after Iran conducted ballistic missile strikes on two bases in Iraq with half of them still undergoing medical treatment, Department of Defence spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in a press briefing on 24 January. "With regard to the number of recent injuries here is the latest upda [...]

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal quoted Karim Elaiwi, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s Security and Defence Committee, as saying that Baghdad was considering purchasing Russian S-400 systems amid concerns that the US may stop supporting the country. According to Joey Hood, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, Iraq’s possible acquisition of S-4 [...]

The Russian president made a small but noticeable contribution to keeping the Palestinian Authority in order when he put a fallen peaked cap back where it belonged – on the head of a member of an honor guard. The amusing interlude happened on Friday as Vladimir Putin was visiting the Palestinian city of Bethlehem to meet PA chief Mahmoud Abbas. [...]

Although Western media has a shoddy track record of lying on Syria (and Libya, Iraq...), the US State Department will pump $35 million more into future war propaganda on Syria, under the guise of promoting honest reporting. A US State Department grant, “Support for Independent Media in Syria,” is unabashed in stating one of its main goals is “to advance U.S. Government policy objectives in S [...]

A massive demonstration –called for by a prominent Shia cleric– has flooded the streets of the Iraq's capital Baghdad, with thousands voicing their anger at the US military presence there.  Early on Friday morning, throngs of protesters – men and women, young and old – began amassing at al-Hurriya Square in central Baghdad, near the city's main university. [...]