Qasem Soleimani

Turkey's foreign minister on Jan. 5 spoke with U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres and his Qatari counterpart over the phone, diplomatic sources said late on Jan. 5

Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, in separate phone conversations with Guterres and Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, discussed the killing of top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in a U.S. drone airstrike in Iraq.

Two rockets hit near the U.S. embassy in Iraq's capital on Jan. 5, witnesses told AFP, hours after the ambassador was summoned over a U.S. strike that killed top Iraqi and Iranian commanders.     

Jan. 5's attack was the second night in a row that the Green Zone was hit and the 14th time over the last two months that U.S. installations have been targeted.  

Tens of thousands of Iranians thronged the streets of Tehran on Jan. 6 for the funeral of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani who was killed in a U.S. airstrike last week and his daughter said his death would bring a "dark day" for the United States.

Iran withdraws from nuclear deal commitment and pledged to begin enriching uranium for its technical needs.

This comes amid a continuing escalation of tensions between Iran and the US following the death of Iran's supreme military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, in a US air strike in Baghdad.

Iraq's parliament called on Jan. 5 for U.S. and other foreign troops to leave as a backlash grows against the U.S. killing of a top Iranian general, and President Donald Trump doubled down on threats to target Iranian cultural sites if Tehran retaliates.   

The Middle East is "coming to a boil" with many problems and Turkey has been showing efforts to control and cease the "temporary" tensions between the U.S. and Iran by using diplomatic means, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has long been preparing for his 7 January meeting with US President Donald Trump and is as past Greek leaders pinning his hopes on a clear statement of US support for the inviolability of regional countries' land and maritime borders which Turkey is disputing in the case of Greece and Cyprus.

China voiced opposition to the abuse of military force by the U.S. in Iraq, days after a U.S. drone strike killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad and a senior Iraqi figure.

The statement by Foreign Minister Wang Yi came after he spoke to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov to discuss the tension in the Middle East, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Turkey has joined an international diplomatic campaign to defuse tension between the United States and Iran after the assassination of the latter's top military figure with calls on all related parties to act with restraint and common sense to avoid a larger conflict in an already unstable Middle East.

The United States will not dare to hit 52 targets in Iran, as US President Donald Trump threatened earlier, said Iranian Armed Forces Commander Abdolrahim Mousavi, RIA Novosti reported.

"In the course of a possible conflict in the future, in which I doubt they will have the courage to strike, it will become clear what those numbers are - 5 and 2," Mousavi added.