Washington

The expected visit next month to Athens by US President Barack Obama to discuss the refugee crisis, the global terror threat and the instability created by military conflicts, will carry added significance, as it will coincide with Greece's increasingly louder appeals for debt relief and the fierce negotiations with its international creditors over its bailout program.

Turkey and the United States have reached an agreement in which Turkish warplanes will join an ongoing operation to capture Mosul, the prime minister has said, adding that Turkey's F-16 Fighting Falcons would be called for duty by the Kuwait-based command center if required.

A Croatian member of the European Parliament, Dubravka Suica, is drawing up a resolution condemning the banned referendum in Bosnia's Serb-majority entity, Republika Srpska, and proposing reforms to the country's constitution. 

The United States' top soldier, Gen. Joseph Dunford, met Turkey's Chief of General Staff, Gen. Hulusi Akar, at the Turkish Embassy in Washington on Oct. 16 to discuss recent regional developments, including an operation to free Mosul from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).        

In Washington, Berlin and Brussels, you can't helping sensing the fear of losing Turkey as an ally and partner of the West. President Recep Tayyip Ergodan is doing everything in his power to enhance that fear and to project the image of a powerful yet unpredictable leader.

The U.S. military deployed to the east of Iraq's Mosul has started shelling Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) targets as part of an operation to retake the city, a Peshmerga commander said on Oct. 15, state-run Anadolu Agency has reported.

"They hit everything, hospitals, orphanages, schools," Hisham al-Omeisy told The Guardian newspaper six months ago. "You live in constant fear that your kids' school could be the next target."

Russia has launched a behind-the-curtains campaign of economic and political measures in order to manipulate five countries in Central and Eastern Europe, to discredit the Western liberal democratic model and undermine transatlantic relations, showed a survey of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and the Bulgarian Center for the Study of Democracy.

The U.S. military launched cruise missile strikes on Oct. 13 to knock out three coastal radar sites in areas of Yemen controlled by Iran-aligned Houthi forces, retaliating after failed missile attacks this week on a U.S. Navy destroyer, U.S. officials said. 

Donald Trump said that it was a great mistake to bomb Yugoslavia in 1999, and that Bill Clinton's administration "made a mess in the Balkans".

Asked about possible change in Washington's policy towards Serbia, that was an ally to the US in two world wards, and South Eastern Europe as a whole, Trump said: