The summer moves were announced as the Pentagon continues to make wide-ranging adjustments, including canceling exercises and delaying troop movements, to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Some 2,500 Army paratroopers who were rushed to the Middle East just days after Christmas remain separated from their friends and families indefinitely as the rapidly spreading coronavirus prevents them from returning home.

A senior Islamic State leader the U.S. had put a $5 million bounty on was killed this week in a coalition airstrike aided by Syrian partner forces, officials said.

Iran on Sunday confirmed that a damaged building at the underground Natanz nuclear site was a new centrifuge assembly center, the official IRNA news agency reported.

The Islamic State group fired several rockets at Bagram Airfield on Thursday, the latest in a string of recent attacks targeting the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan.

A cluster of coronavirus cases has developed at a Kuwaiti air base that houses U.S. Central Command personnel, officials said.

Colt and FN America will compete for each order of a $383 million dollar contract to supply M16A4 assault rifles to Afghanistan, Grenada, Iraq, Lebanon and Nepal, the Pentagon said.

The announcement comes after some U.S. lawmakers last week voiced concerns that U.S. troops in Afghanistan were not properly protected from the pandemic.

Six Afghans who worked at Bagram Airfield were shot dead Thursday just outside the base, an Afghan official said.

Cpl. Eloiza Zavala, 20, a native of Sacramento, was a motor vehicle operator with Combat Logistic Battalion 13 out of Camp Pendleton, Calif.

Some 2,500 members of the 82nd Airborne Division will return home soon after being deployed rapidly to the Middle East just after Christmas amid growing tensions with Iran.

Israel said it successfully launched a new spy satellite into space on Monday as its leaders hinted it was behind a massive fire at an Iranian nuclear site last week.

A suicide car bomber targeted an Afghan police convoy in eastern Nangarhar province on Tuesday morning, killing four officers, including a police commander, a local official said. Three other officers were killed in an attack in the country's south.

The Iraqi military said Sunday that a rocket aimed at Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, home of the U.S. Embassy, struck a residential house and injured a child.

An April 2019 car bombing near Bagram has been thrust into the spotlight amid revelations that intelligence analysts believe those who planned it may have been paid a bounty by a Russian military intelligence unit to kill Americans.

An Islamic State militant fired mortars at U.S. and international troops at Bagram Airfield in what security officials said was the third attack on the base since the U.S. signed a peace deal with the Taliban last month.

The so-called Taliban Five, a group of high-level militant inmates traded for American soldier Bowe Bergdahl during the Obama administration, worked behind the scenes to build support for the agreement, current and former U.S. and Taliban officials say.

U.S. troops have pulled out of a key base in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, the site of some of the fiercest fighting of the war, officials said Friday.

American soldiers have been cleared to wear combat patches for serving in Saudi Arabia since September’s rebel attack on oil infrastructure there.

Under the agreement, the U.S. will pull all its troops out of Afghanistan by May 2021. So far the U.S. has reduced U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan from 12,000 to 8,600.

While Katyusha rockets have been the deadliest thing flying over Camp Taji in recent weeks, officials have long been concerned about the threat of potentially toxic burn pit smoke, a government watchdog has found.

Washington's envoy to Afghanistan on Saturday emphasized the economic benefits of the peace deal with the Taliban, forging ahead with an agreement that has run into new political obstacles in the U.S. and the region.

Coalition strikes took out three Islamic State camp sites in Iraq’s Kirkuk province on Friday, while a jet “blasted” an ISIS cave in Nineveh province.

he Afghan military was responsible for errant mortar attacks that killed or injured dozens at a cattle market in southern Helmand province this week, the United Nations said Tuesday.

U.S. Central Command’s top general said Wednesday that he cannot recommend a full withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan by mid-2021 unless the Taliban demonstrate they no longer support al-Qaida forces there.

The policy change came as a result of DOD’s “continuous reassessment of personnel policies worldwide, not just in the Middle East,” the Pentagon said in the announcement.

It's hard to say what exactly will change in the West Bank if Israel follows through on its plans to annex parts of the occupied territory, but east Jerusalem, which was annexed more than a half-century ago, may provide some answers.

Iran had denied for days its involvement in the plane crash but then announced that its military had mistakenly and unintentionally shot down the Ukrainian jetliner, a Boeing 737 operated by Ukrainian International Airlines. All 176 people on board were killed.

At least 10 doctors and six journalists have been arrested since the virus first hit Egypt in February, according to rights groups.

Pentagon officials warned that a complete withdrawal over the next five months could plunge Afghanistan into crisis, dooming peace talks U.S. officials have been seeking to jump-start between the Afghan government and Taliban militants and worsening already surging violence.

The president of the lower house of Italy's Parliament has slammed Egypt's stance in a probe to bring to justice the torturers and killers of an Italian doctoral student who disappeared in Cairo while researching labor movements in Egypt.

U.S. didn't charge 17 allied countries more than $9 million for meals served at NATO headquarters in Kabul from 2016 to 2019.

A group of former world leaders urged European leaders on Friday to keep pressuring Israel against annexation of parts of the West Bank, warning against complacency after Israel made no move to take over the territory on July 1.

The Taliban remain closely tied with al-Qaida, despite assuring the U.S. they would disavow the terrorist group in exchange for a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the Defense Department said this week.

Israel is fortifying its national survey of exposure to the coronavirus as a second wave of infections threatens to plunge the country back into lockdown.

Former detainees in Syrian government prisons speak of horrific experiences — being packed for months or even years in tiny cells, receiving little food and undergoing constant, severe torture.

A passenger train crashed into a bus carrying Sikh pilgrims at an unmanned railway crossing in eastern Pakistan on Friday, killing 22 people, including seven women, officials said. At least six pilgrims were injured.

Images of U.S. soldiers in the Syrian desert training with an advanced electronic aiming system on their rifles have offered the first indication that the Israeli-made device was being field tested by the U.S. military.

When an Air Force working dog suffering a heat injury in Saudi Arabia needed a blood transfusion, he got it from a Navy dog named Army, in what officials are calling a joint service lifesaving effort.

A federal judge in Washington has approved a plan to speed up visa applications for more than 9,000 interpreters who assisted U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A hospital outside America’s largest base in Afghanistan has been razed after it was irreparably damaged in a Taliban attack last year, when the militants tried to breach Bagram Airfield, officials said.

Iran on Sunday instituted mandatory mask-wearing as fears mount over newly spiking reported deaths from the coronavirus, even as its public increasingly shrugs off the danger of the COVID-19 illness it causes.

An online video and messages purportedly claiming responsibility for a fire that analysts say damaged a centrifuge assembly plant at Iran's underground Natanz nuclear site deepened the mystery Friday around the incident — even as Tehran insisted it knew the cause but would not make it public due to “security reasons.”

U.S. authorities have moved to seize the cargo of four oil tankers carrying gasoline and fuel products from Iran to Venezuela, escalating a sanctions battle with two regimes Washington opposes and a contest over Iranian oil shipments that allegedly finance its nuclear program.

The trial is the first public legal inquiry into Jamal Khashoggi's death, which sparked global outrage and focused attention on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's ruthless pursuit of his critics.

A human skull, a pair of worn trousers and a shoe were among the remains unearthed from a mass grave discovered this week in northern Iraq, a remnant of the brutal rule of the Islamic State group, Iraqi officials said Thursday.

A state-linked technology company in the United Arab Emirates has signed a partnership with two major Israeli defense firms to research ways of combating the coronavirus pandemic.

An accident requiring two screws in his ankle nearly prevented Scott Eastwood from portraying a real life soldier in Afghanistan in "The Outpost" — a role that required a level of athleticism.

Washington's peace envoy told Pakistani officials that Afghanistan's Taliban and Kabul's political leaders were close to starting negotiations to decide the face of a post-war Afghanistan.

President Donald Trump viewed a U.S. troop increase in Afghanistan as a failure and sought to withdraw from the country early in his term, former National Security Adviser John Bolton wrote in a book released to the public Tuesday.

Russian and other foreign mercenaries have entered Libya's largest oil field, the country's National Oil Corporation said on Friday, describing the development as an attempt to thwart the resumption of halted oil production in the war-torn country.

A Trump administration proposal to fix a visa program that allows war zone interpreters to resettle in the U.S. has been rejected as “downright offensive” by a refugee advocacy group.

Iraqi troops were enforcing positions along the border with Turkey, officials said Friday, to prevent Turkish forces from advancing deeper into Iraqi territory after two weeks of airstrikes as Ankara continues to target Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.

A confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that the Israeli leader's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank would not start on Wednesday, the original target date, as the British prime minister made an extraordinary appeal to Israel to call off the plan.

President Donald Trump said in a tweet that U.S. intelligence officials told him a report that the Russian government paid bounties for American and allied troops to be killed in Afghanistan wasn't credible, and therefore didn't brief him about it.

Leaders on the Senate and House Armed Services Committees said Monday that they want answers from the Pentagon and White House about reports that a Russian military intelligence group had paid bounties to kill American troops in Afghanistan.

First Lt. Trevarius Ravon Bowman, 25, from Spartanburg, S.C., died at Bagram Airfield on Tuesday, the Defense Department said in a statement.

Analysis

Moscow and Washington are intertwined in a complex and bloody history in Afghanistan, with both suffering thousands of dead and wounded in conflicts lasting for years.

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has introduced a bill that would require Congress to oversee the drawdown of American troops from Afghanistan, amid concerns that too rapid a withdrawal would threaten U.S. and global security.

A fire and an explosion struck a building above Iran's underground Natanz nuclear enrichment facility early on Thursday, a site that U.S.-based analysts identified as a new centrifuge production plant.

The families of three Special Forces troops slain by a Jordanian soldier at a military base in Jordan in 2016 are calling on Congress to suspend aid to the key U.S. Mideast partner until it extradites the killer.

What exploded in the incident early Friday that sent a massive fireball into the sky near Tehran remains unclear, as does the cause of the blast.

On a concrete blast wall topped with barbed wire near Kabul’s Green Zone, Afghan artists have painted a large mural depicting George Floyd next to an image dedicated to Afghan migrants who recently died in Iran.

Iraqi authorities released on bail Monday some men with ties to an Iran-backed militia detained under suspicion of carrying out a series of rocket attacks against the U.S. presence in the country, Iraqi government and militia officials said.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting Iran-backed rebels in Yemen said Thursday that it unleashed a new air campaign on the war-torn country's capital and on other provinces, in retaliation for drone attacks on Saudi Arabia that were claimed by the rebels.

Abandoned by their governments and under the care of a Kurdish-led force that does not want them, the women and children inside the al-Hol camp annex are among nearly 14,000 foreigners from more than 60 countries being held in northeastern Syria due to suspected ISIS links.

A roadside bomb killed at least six Afghan civilians Sunday in southern Helmand province, including a woman and two children, an official said. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Peace talks with the Taliban are unlikely to start if violence remains high throughout Afghanistan, the head of the country’s reconciliation team said this week.

Afghanistan will soon complete a prisoner release that the Taliban have demanded before starting peace talks to end nearly two decades of war, the country’s president said.

Kabul’s failure to tackle corruption will weaken its bargaining position during peace talks and risks angering governments who are “weary of paying Afghanistan’s bills,” a U.S. official has warned.

Iraqi security forces arrested over a dozen men suspected of a spate of rocket attacks against the U.S. presence in Iraq, the Iraqi military said Friday.

The U.S. has conducted airstrikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan as the insurgent group attacked Afghan security forces, a spokesman for the U.S.-led NATO mission in the country said.

A program to provide U.S. visas for interpreters who worked with American forces during the war in Afghanistan is understaffed, uncoordinated and reliant on outdated technology, a State Department Inspector General report said.

Abdul Saboor, who killed Air Force Lt. Col. John Darin Loftis and Army Maj. Robert Marchanti II in 2012, was set free Friday after four years of time served, officials said.

The war in Afghanistan was the world’s deadliest conflict for children last year, the fifth consecutive year the country has held that status, a United Nations report said.

A British Pakistani man and three others convicted in the kidnapping and killing of a U.S. journalist, whose sentences were overturned in April, will remain in government custody for another three months, officials said Thursday.

Analysis

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears determined to carry out his pledge to begin annexing parts of the occupied West Bank, possibly as soon as Wednesday.

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo urged the United Nations Security Council to work together to extend an expiring arms embargo on Iran, warning Tehran would quickly become a greater threat to the region if allowed to do so.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the commander of Libya’s eastern-based forces Wednesday that there can be no military solution to the conflict he launched in April 2019 against the U.N.-supported government in the capital, Tripoli.

A ruling by Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Monday paves the way for a man convicted of involvement in the gruesome 2002 murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl to walk free later this week.

The Iraqi army is now good enough to fight the remaining Islamic State fighters, but American forces will probably have a continued presence in the country to support counter-terrorism operations for the foreseeable future, the commander of U.S. Central Command said Thursday.

A car bombing and mortar shells fired at a busy market in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province on Monday killed 23 people, including children, a statement form a provincial governor's office said.

A group of 175 legal scholars and attorneys specializing in international law have urged President Donald Trump to rescind his authorization of sanctions and visa denials for International Criminal Court staff members investigating war crimes in Afghanistan.

While President Donald Trump faces no danger of arrest, the charges underscore heightened tensions between Iran and the U.S. since Trump unilaterally withdrew America from Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers.