Shiite | featured news

BEIRUT — Gun battles broke out in Beirut early Monday, a day after emotional funeral ceremonies for Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, the intelligence chief whose assassination has exposed long-running sectarian grudges and plunged Lebanon into its worst crisis in years.

Bahrain's king has ordered a state of emergency to be lifted from June 1, after imposing it following weeks of Shi'ite-led street protests in the Gulf Arab kingdom, the state news agency said Sunday.

A military court in Bahrain sentenced four Shiite Muslim protesters to death on Thursday for the killing of two policemen last month during demonstrations against the Sunni Muslim-ruled government ...

Bahrain's opposition asked for U.N. and American intervention in the government crackdown on the Shiite protests trying to loosen the monarchy's grip, in a brief protest Sunday in the capital that disbanded before police could arrive to break it up.

The explosion, two days after an other attack, led to further protests as grieving mourners went on rampage, clashing with the police and setting fire to vehicles and motorcycles parked nearby.

Seven years after the fall of Saddam's regime, democracy is alive in Iraq. But there's still squabbling between Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds. ...

Iraq's electoral commission on Sunday affirmed the victory of a Sunni-backed bloc in the March election after a partial recount of votes in Baghdad failed to back up the Shiite prime minister's claims of fraud.

A coalition led by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was winning in the all-important capital and a Shiite province in the south, according to a partial tally of election results released Saturday.

A car bomb killed four Iranian pilgrims near Iraq's holiest Shi'ite shrine on Saturday, a day before a parliamentary election that Sunni Islamist insurgents have vowed to wreck.

Twin car bombs killed at least 40 people and wounded 145 others on Friday in Iraq's holy city of Kerbala as hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite pilgrims observed a major religious rite, health officials said.