Video: Tillerson Calls on Europe to Back Latest Sanctions on Iran 10/23/2017 7:13:16 PM   facebook Google+ ► Print Rex Tillerson US Secretary of State met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Bloomberg, October 22, 2017  - Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called on European governments to join a U.S.-led sanctions regime against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, saying that countries doing business with the Islamic Republic’s force do so at their own risk. The Revolutionary Guards “foment instability in the region and create destruction in the region,” Tillerson told reporters in Riyadh on Sunday after talks with King Salman of Saudi Arabia and other top officials. European countries and companies that do business with the IRGC “really do so at great risk,” he said. Tillerson is in Saudi Arabia looking to counter Iranian influence in the region, including by bolstering an alliance between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. In the same vei...

FSA rebels: We would have won if not for Iran Iranian soldiers have been training Syrian militias since 2012 [Atta Kenare/AFP Photo] In the summer of 2012, the leading commanders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) were confident that momentum was with them. A bomb blast deep inside central Damascus had just taken out four senior commanders of the Syrian army, including the country's defence minister, Dawoud Rajiha, and his deputy, Dawoud Rajiha, who was also President  Bashar al-Assad 's brother-in-law. The explosion, believed to have been carried out by an insider sympathetic to the opposition cause, gave hope to rebels that it was only a matter of time before Assad met a similar fate. WATCH 25:02 What is Iran's endgame in Syria? That hope was bolstered by successes on the battlefield, as ragtag groups of fighters coalesced into more effective armed groups, large swaths of the country started to come into rebel control.  Fateh Hassoun, wh...

General Assembly elects new members to UN Human Rights Council A delegate casts his country’s ballot during the General Assembly’s election UN News Center, 16 October 2017  – The General Assembly today elected, by secret ballot, 15 States to serve on the Human Rights Council, the highest intergovernmental body in the  United Nations  system for matters relating to protection and promotion of human rights worldwide. Newly elected to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council are Afghanistan, Angola, Australia, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Qatar, Senegal, Slovakia, Spain and Ukraine. All would serve three-year terms beginning on 1 January 2018. The 15 new members were elected according to the following pattern: four seats for African States; four seats for Asia-Pacific States; three seats for Latin American and Caribbean States; two seats for Eastern European States; and two seats for Western European and...