Ali

REUTERS

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has secured the necessary majority in Friday's election, defeating his conservative rival, Ebrahim Raisi, according to the country's Interior Minister.

Rouhani has secured over 23.549 million votes, while Raisi has garnered around 15.786 million.

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmuş has said the government will hold an official ceremony in Ankara to mark the birthday of Caliph Ali, 27 years after the last time it was celebrated with the Alevi community of Turkey.

Many firefighters were feared trapped under the rubble after Iran's oldest high-rise, the 15-storey Plasco building in downtown Tehran, collapsed live on TV on Jan. 19, following a fire.

Children have been peering through the screen for the last couple of years in some of the finer examples of Turkish cinema. They are trying to make sense of the adult world, most often appropriating the problems of the adult world to the miniature worlds of their own.

On his cell phone, Abdallah shows me a video of Ghada Shouaa, a retired Syrian heptathlete who won her country's first and, so far, only Olympic gold medal in the 1996 Atlanta Games.

The 53rd Antalya International Film Festival ended on Oct. 23 with a closing gala and the traditional Golden Orange award ceremony held at the EXPO 2016 Antalya Congress Center. 

Shiite Muslims in Turkey commemorated on Oct. 11 the Battle of Karbala, a bloody clash that took place more than 1,000 years ago in Karbala, located in present-day Iraq.

Hundreds of explosives have been deactivated and hundreds of barricades and trenches removed during a blanket curfew in the southeastern Turkish town of Cizre that came into effect for military operations targeting militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), according to official sources.

One soldier has been killed while six security officers have been wounded in an explosion that took place as a bomb squad was trying to dispose a bomb placed by outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants in the Sur district of the southeastern province of Diyarbak?r. 

Aid workers scrambled Jan. 15 to help a hunger-stricken Syrian town where a teenager became the latest victim to succumb to starvation, as Western powers sought U.N. action on lifting blockades.