"I'd say there are around 5,000 of us in the country, but if you ask me next week we may well be under 3,000. After twenty centuries of history in Mesopotamia, we Mandaeans, are about to vanish." Anxiety about the future of his people is more than evident in the figures given by Saad Atiah Majid, chairman of Basra's Mandaean Council.

Hundreds of protesters, dozens outfitted in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, took to the streets outside the White House on Wednesday to demonstrate against torture and indefinite detention on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. prison facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The recent escalation in Iranian threats to blockade oil shipments and attack U.S. Navy vessels are meant to push up the price of oil and divert domestic opinion from an economic crisis but are not likely to lead to a war in the Persian Gulf, in the view of Iran experts.

The so-called "Arab Spring" led U.S. network television evening news coverage during 2011, comprising a total of about 10 percent of all the news coverage provided by the three major commercial networks during 2011, according to the latest annual review by the authoritative Tyndall Report.

The Barack Obama administration and the United Nations are struggling to convince the leadership of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group with cult-like characteristics, to vacate a camp in Iraq and allow residents to move to another location in the country or risk the lives of as many as 3,200 people.

Hundreds of people gathered today outside a U.S. military base where evidence against Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking classified information to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, is being presented before a military judge for the first time since Manning's arrest.

Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's suggestion that the end of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq is part of a U.S. military success story ignores the fact that the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military had planned to maintain a semi-permanent military presence in Iraq.

When the United States formally ended its eight-and-a-half year military adventure in Iraq on Thursday with a flag-lowering ceremony presided over by Defence Secretary Leon Panetta Baghdad, hardly anyone here seemed to notice, let alone mark the occasion in a special manner.

As the United States withdraws the last of its 50,000 troops after a nearly nine-year military occupation of Iraq, visiting Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki had one final request: billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons for his ragtag armed forces.

A new book on the influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman sets out to debunk his hawkish, neoliberal views, accusing him of overt racism, factual errors and skewed judgments on issues ranging from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Two weeks after President Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of next month, a familiar clutch of neo-conservative hawks and prominent Republicans are blaming the president for "losing" the Middle Eastern country to its neighbour and long-time Washington nemesis, Iran.

Washington's failure to gain Iraqi approval for a significant U.S. military presence in that country beyond December could make it harder for Afghanistan to agree to a similar deployment beyond 2014.

In a decision promptly denounced by Republicans, President Barack Obama announced here Friday that all U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the Christmas holidays in late December.

Turkish forces have launched an incursion into the mountains of northern Iraq following simultaneous attacks by Kurdish separatists in southeastern Turkey that killed at least 26 soldiers.

Key neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks who championed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq are calling for military strikes against Iran in retaliation for its purported murder-for-hire plot against the Saudi ambassador here.

Officials of the Barack Obama administration have aggressively leaked information supposedly based on classified intelligence in recent days to bolster its allegation that two higher- ranking officials from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were involved in a plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in Washington, D.C.

"Before being deployed to Iraq I never thought I'd come across people who physically resemble my friends and family back in Buffalo," says U.S. marines sergeant William Collins on a rare patrol around Basra's Zubeir district.

In a development that could help resolve an eight-year-old diplomatic and humanitarian standoff, the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group that has several thousand adherents at a military camp in Iraq, has agreed to allow residents to apply for refugee status and be interviewed individually by U.N. officials.

As the George W. Bush administration built the case for war with Iraq in the early 2000s, press accounts picked up bits of leaked intelligence that described a weapons of mass destruction threat from then president Saddam Hussein. But once the U.S. military entered Iraq, they found nothing.

A familiar group of mainly neo-conservative hawks ? many of whom championed the 2003 invasion of Iraq ?released an open letter to President Barack Obama Thursday urging him to retain a substantial military force in that Middle East country beyond this year.

Eclipsed by the war in Afghanistan, growing tensions between Israel and its neighbours, and the continuing reverberations of the so-called "Arab Spring", Iraq is inching back into the news here as a debate over the future of U.S. military forces there gathers steam.

When a middle-aged mother took a taxi alone from Baghdad to Nasiriyah, about 300 kilometres south earlier this year, her 20-year-old driver stopped on the way, pulled her to the side of the road and raped her. And that began a telling legal struggle.

Of all the mistakes and missed opportunities that have characterised U.S. foreign policy since Sep. 11, 2001, few may have been as consequential as the failure to improve relations with Iran.

When Ali Sumerian, an editor for Al-Sabah newspaper, and three local media colleagues sat down for a restaurant meal after reporting on a demonstration in Baghdad's Tahrir Square on Feb. 25 this year, security forces detained them. "We were accused of encouraging an anti-political process," says Sumerian. It was only after their arrest triggered a media outcry, he says, were they released 12 hours later. The four were just some of the journalists attacked and arrested that day.

Rania was 16 years old when officials raped her during Saddam Hussein's 1991 crackdown in Iraq's Shia south. "My brothers were sentenced to death, and the price to stop this was to offer my body," she says.

Ukrainian and Bulgarian workers are currently camped out on a construction site of half-built luxury villas in Baghdad's elite "Green Zone" ? a vast security enclave housing government offices, embassies and international NGOs - demanding their salaries before being shipped back home.

At the height of Iraq's sectarian war in 2006, 30-year-old Samer escaped his Baghdad neighbourhood to join a flood of refugees arriving in Syria. A young man of military age, he was at high risk of being targeted by armed forces that roamed the capital's streets.

Canada has flexed its military muscles, first in Afghanistan for nine years alongside NATO forces, and now in Libya in its supply of ships and combat planes for the rebel forces, but little debate has happened on the ground among Canadians themselves on this direction.

On Apr. 16, 2006, for reasons still unknown to them, two U.S. contractors in Iraq's Red Zone were handcuffed, blindfolded and transported to Camp Cropper, a U.S. military facility located a few miles from Baghdad International Airport.

A United Nations report on Iraq says the human rights situation there remains fragile, and huge development challenges loom as the country transitions out of a near decade-long conflict.