At a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons, administration officials said.

The deployment of a US aircraft carrier to Iran’s regional waters is nothing but psychological warfare and part of a plan to intimidate Tehran, the head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Gen Hossein Salami, has told parliamentarians in a closed-door session.

B-52 bombers ordered by the White House to deploy to the Persian Gulf to counter unspecified threats from Iran have arrived at a major American air base in Qatar, the U.S. Air Force acknowledged Friday.

The world became aware of ISIS in 2014, but the group’s origins pre-date the Iraq War, when Jordanian-born Iraqi militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi became the force behind the group’s predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

Construction of China’s first full-sized aircraft carrier is well under way, according to satellite images obtained and analyzed by a U.S. think tank.