A user's recent social media posts read like a movie: A woman trained as a doctor travels to a war zone. She falls in love and gets pregnant. She suffers the inevitable reality of war in Syria.  The social media user posts on Twitter and Facebook links to a Tumbler blog titled "Diary Of A Traveler". 

The raids involving 800 federal and state police officers — the largest in the country's history — came in response to intelligence that an Islamic State group leader in the Middle East was calling on Australian supporters to kill, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said. Abbott was asked about reports that the detainees were planning to behead a random person in Sydney.

The Barack Obama administration is focusing its public diplomacy efforts on persuading “swing voters” in the Muslim world that the group calling itself the Islamic State (IS) is a bigger threat to them than US policies, the State Department’s top communications official says.

fter all the talk of a "pivot to Asia," America’s return to the Middle East is welcome, but wars do not create peace. Killing Bin Laden did not destroy terrorism, and killing ISIS fighters will not bring stability. American leadership and soft power in the Middle East should be invested in three areas...

Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Djoko Suyanto has said that the government is employing soft power to protect Indonesians from the influence of Islamic State (IS), also known as ISIL, militants.

Terrorists will use Australia's deployment of troops and war planes to the Middle East as an excuse to target Australians, Prime Minister Tony Abbott warned on Monday.  Australia is preparing to contribute 600 troops and up to 10 military aircraft to the increasingly aggressive campaign against the Islamic State extremists in Syria and Iraq, the government announced on Sunday.

Now a former US ambassador who has negotiated his way through some of the world’s most tense political moments says the current threat of the Islamic State is equally severe. “Today we are confronting some of the most difficult problems we’ve had in a long time. Some of them are amenable to some process of negotiation but unfortunately many are not,” Christopher Hill told news.com.au.

Egypt’s tourism industry, battered by three years of political upheaval, violence and street protests, could fully recover by the end of next year if regional turmoil does not spread to the Arab world’s biggest country, the tourism minister said.