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Two Iranian chess players have been banned from the Iranian National Chess Team, as well as domestic chess tournaments, one for playing a chess match against an Israeli and the other for not wearing a hijab at the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival, Radio Free Europe reported.

It was not immediately clear whether the dismissed players, siblings 18-year-old Dorsa Derakhshani and 15-year-old Borna Derakhashani, would face legal prosecution back home in Iran.

Iran forbids athletes from competing against Israelis in sporting events; often players will feign illness or injury to avoid matches.

Iranian law dictates that all women are obligated to wear the Islamic hijab head covering. Infractions, known as 'bad hijab,' are commonly met with prison sentences and/or corporal punishments such as lashings. This law is extended to Iranians considered to be ambassadors of their country such as sports players and other dignitaries.

Multiple players have decided to boycott the Women's World Chess Championship 2017, which is set to be held in Tehran, due to Islamic dress codes, women's rights issues and risks to certain foreign nationals in the country.

Morality police in Iran usually detain women on the street for wearing bright clothes, a loose hijab or make-up, and men for "unacceptable" hair and clothing styles. They have sealed off barber shops for giving Western haircuts and cafes in which boys and girls were not observing Islamic law.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani came to office in 2013 mainly on the votes of young people, and he has disagreed with strict Islamic rules. Many young Iranians hoped that his presidency would be accompanied by an easing of cultural restrictions.

But hardliners have moved to block any relaxation of the Islamic Republic's social rules, warning of the "infiltration" of Western culture. They harshly criticized Rouhani last year for saying the police should enforce the law rather than Islam.

In 2014, he said "you can't send people to heaven by the whip," a comment that brought a reaction from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

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Iran bans chess players for 'bad hijab,' match against Israeli - Jerusalem Post Israel News

One of the most powerful leaders in the Salafist movement in Egypt often holds court in his well-appointed apartment in Alexandria. On a recent December evening, the sun was about to set outside his window over the massive billboard of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in the neighborhood of dilapidated and congested streets known as home to many of the countrys influential Salafist voices.

The Salafis are Islamists who yearn to practice the faith the way they think it existed at the time of the prophet Muhammad, 1,400 years ago. They are nearly the only Islamists in Egypt who are neither dead nor in prison, in large part due to their shared views with el-Sisinot least among them the belief that Shia Muslims have deviated from Islamic tradition and are attempting to convert Sunni Egyptians to follow in their footsteps.

Inside one of the neighborhood apartment buildings, I met Abdel Moneim el-Shahat, a Salafist leader who has been at the forefront of a campaign in Egypt aimed at keeping Shia Muslims out of the country and confronting those Sunnis, particularly the youth, who dare to convert to Shiism. I traveled to Egypt to meet Salafis, like el-Shahat, to show how the Shia-Sunni divide has reached even a country where less than 1 percent of the population is Shia, according to statistics from the U.S. State Department. The sectarian conflict in the Middle Eastmost acute in Iraq and Syriahas now reached all corners, even in the most unlikely of places.

Over four years, I have researched the contours of Islams sectarian conflictfrom the ground to the Twittersphereto try to understand the causes. A few regional trends are clear: the Salafi leader tweeting in Saudi Arabia with fourteen million Twitter followers clearly shapes the views of someone like Shahat, whom he does not know. The wars in Syria and Iraqperceived to be driven by Shia Irans hegemonic ambitions in the Arab worldalso frame the narrative the Sunnis throughout the region use to bolster their argument that if the Islamic Republic of Iran had its way, the government would rule every Sunni-dominated Arab country. This fear has reached new heights in recent years, after Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guards, the most militant part of the states security apparatus, became heavily involved in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

The Dawa Salafiyya, a particular trend in the movement that opposes violence, has taken up the issue of the Shia to deal with religious minorities in Islam and outside Islam that have deviated from the tradition, explained el-Shahat, who, at first glance appears a bit frightening with his long beard and stocky frame, but is actually an affable man. For Iran, the religious and political perspectives are one in the same. They want to create their [Persian] empire again and that means spreading Shiism. Its

The commonly accepted view holds that rising sectarian tensions in general, and those between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia in particular, are driven primarily, or even solely, by political and geopolitical interests and concerns. As a result, the crucial religious component is downplayed or dismissed outright, leaving Western policymakers ill-equipped to respond to local and regional crises in any constructive way.

Yet this consensus flies in the face of my own experience working, living and traveling in the region over the past thirty years. Rather, the Sunnis see the Shias primary motivation as tied directly to their theology, and that any political gain in the process is an added bonus. This is the widespread belief among Sunnis across the Middle East, from Syria and Lebanon to Yemen. This point is well documented in my recent book, published in December: The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Shia-Sunni Divide (Oxford University Press).

Although the Shia-Sunni divide has persisted for centuries, the Arab uprisings dramatically escalated the conflict for several reasons.

First and foremost, religious identity has become more relevant to Arabs than in recent decades. The notion of citizenshipbeing an Iraqi or a Syrianbecame less important, due in part to the virtual collapse of states and governments. Second, the political leadership of Shia Iran and its Sunni neighbors, chiefly Saudi Arabia, have openly fanned the flames of sectarian rivalry in their pursuit of power and territory.

In addition, instability and polarization in the region breed a lack of religious freedom. And in a country like Egypt, all freedoms have been curtailed since the uprisings began, the first of which occurred in January 2011 and led to the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

In this sense, the Shia community illustrates the nature of the barriers to the exercise of freedom of religion and belief more generally, for other sects, the wider citizenry, and even the Sunni majority itself, wrote Amr Ezzat, who has been studying the problem in Egypt for the last few years. It also sheds light on the problematic issue of diversity within Islam, especially in the case of the Sunni-Shia divide, which is a special case of intra-Islamic diversity because it is linked to disputes over models of (religious) authority and their legitimacy.

In Egypt, the Salafis and religious scholars at Al Azhar, a 1,100-year-old university complex and mosque and the historic seat of learning for Sunni Islam, share the belief that there is a Shia threat. Azhari scholars are considered among the most authoritative on religious matters. But some differ over whether the Shia are real Muslims.

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Why Iran's Shia Threat Is Very Real for Faraway Egyptians - The National Interest Online

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster looks on as President Donald Trump announces him as his national security adviser at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday. Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster looks on as President Donald Trump announces him as his national security adviser at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday.

In April 1991, I met a young U.S. Army captain in the moonscape of southern Iraq. He was frustrated.

Just weeks earlier, the officer and his troops were part of the wave of U.S. forces that drove Saddam Hussein's Iraqi military out of Kuwait. The Americans kept advancing, pushing some 150 miles into southern Iraq but then they received orders to halt in place.

The captain and his men sat and watched from a distance as Saddam's army regrouped and crushed an uprising by Shiite rebels in Nasiriya and other cities throughout southern Iraq.

"The rebel leaders begged us for weapons," said the captain, explaining that he was not allowed to help them. Later, the rebels returned and pleaded with the U.S. forces to simply drive into the city, believing that would scare out the Iraqi army. "All we could do was wish them luck," the American officer said.

That captain was H.R. McMaster, then just 28.

An old problem

McMaster, now 54, has since put away his desert camouflage and today wears three stars and a chest full of honors. But as President Trump introduced him as his new national security adviser on Monday, McMaster essentially faces the same challenge as 26 years ago how to fix Iraq.

This time, he must try to do so from within the White House, as one of several top aides competing to make policy both within and outside of the formal National Security Council. Based on McMaster's track record, he may not shrink from dealing candidly with Trump's other staffers.

"The president doesn't have a lot of experience in national security policy, in military policy," NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman told NPR's Morning Edition. "But let me tell you something: this guy (McMaster) is no shrinking violet. He's very blunt, he's very smart, and he's not going to suffer fools gladly."

Before the 1991 Iraq invasion, the U.S. had never fought a full-fledged war in the Middle East. Since then, the region has been the military's main focus and that looks likely to continue during the Trump administration. The U.S. is currently involved in wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and carries out periodic airstrikes elsewhere in the region.

While Trump's national security policy is still taking shape, he has now become the fifth consecutive commander in chief to carry out military action in Iraq.

Here's the condensed version of 26 years of U.S. military history in Iraq: President George H.W. Bush ordered Saddam kicked out of Kuwait, but left the Iraqi dictator in power. President Clinton upheld a no-fly zone over northern and southern Iraq, but did not dislodge Saddam. President George W. Bush invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam in 2003, and the Iraqi insurgency followed. President Obama withdrew the final U.S. troops at the end of 2011, but ordered air strikes in August 2014 to counter the emergence of the Islamic State.

Obama later ordered thousands of American troops into Iraq and Syria to help indigenous fighters against ISIS, the strategic situation that Trump and McMaster inherit today.

To put this in perspective, 26 years before McMaster first charged into Iraq in 1991, the U.S. was just ramping up its involvement in Vietnam in 1965.

A tough job

McMaster's long history with Iraq is a sobering lesson of just how tough his job will be. He earned a silver star in 1991 for heroism in a massive tank battle known as "73 Easting." During the second Iraq war, he was considered one of the architects of the 2007-2008 surge that beat back the Iraqi rebellion.

In between his stints in Iraq, McMaster, a West Point grad, earned a doctorate in military history from the University of North Carolina. His dissertation expanded into a highly acclaimed 1997 book on the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. The central theme is generals who deferred to politicians and came to regret it.

As he moves into his White House office, McMaster's most immediate challenge will be helping to coordinate the effort to drive the Islamic State out of its last stronghold in Iraq, the western side of Mosul.

The Trump administration has inherited an operation in mid-stream. With the U.S. providing air power and advisers to the Iraqi military on the ground, ISIS was recently pushed out of the eastern part of the city in fighting that took roughly four months.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Sunday announced the offensive to take the western part of the city, which is bisected by the Tigris River. If ISIS is uprooted, it will no longer hold any urban areas in Iraq, and would be a greatly reduced force from the one that spread across Iraq in 2014.

But as McMaster knows all to well, military victories in Iraq are ephemeral without a political solution that follows. It's a lesson he's relearned many times over the past 26 years.

Greg Myre, an NPR national security correspondent, covered the 1991 Gulf War for The Associated Press. Follow him @gregmyre1.

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New Trump Adviser HR McMaster Faces An Old Challenge - Iraq - NPR

The U.S. military is "not in Iraq to seize anybody's oil", Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said, distancing himself from remarks by President Donald Trump,as he held talks with Iraqi leaders on Monday.

Mattis was the highest-ranking Trump administration official to visit Iraq since Trump irked Iraqis with a temporary ban on travel to the United States and for saying America should have seized Iraq's oil after toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Trump told CIA staff in January: "We should have kept the oil. But okay. Maybe you'll have another chance."

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Mattis, however, flatly ruled out any such intent. "We're not in Iraq to seize anybody's oil," he told reporters traveling with him late on Sunday, ahead of his arrival.

"All of us in America have generally paid for our gas and oil all along and I'm sure that we will continue to do so in the future," said Mattis, a retired Marine general who once led forces in Iraq.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis addresses a news conference during a NATO defence ministers meeting at the Alliance headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, February 16, 2017. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir/File Photo REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

His remarks are the latest sign of differences with Trump. Trump has acknowledged that Mattis disagrees with him about the usefulness of torture in interrogation and said he would defer to his defense secretary on the issue.

Mattis has been more critical than Trump of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and distanced himself from Trump's labeling of the media as "the enemy of the American people", saying he had no problems with the press.

A retired Marine general who led American troops in Iraq, Mattis has sought an exemption from Trump's travel ban for Iraqis who have served with U.S. troops, including translators.

He said he had not seen a new executive order which the administration is considering. "But I right now am assured that we will take steps to allow those who have fought alongside us, for example, to be allowed into the United States," Mattis said.

Mattis' visit came a day after Iraqi Prime Minister Haideral-Abadi announced the start of a ground offensive on westernMosul, where Islamic State militants are under siege along with an estimated 650,000 civilians.

It was unclear whether Trump's remarks on oil had come up during Mattis' with Abadi, who has told Washington that Iraq's oil is the property of Iraqis.

Mattis also met Iraq's defense minister and top U.S. officials in Iraq.

Will U.S. Forces Stay After Mosul?

Influential Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Monday called on Iraq's government to order the withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces after the battle of Mosul is over.

"The Iraqi government has to demand that all occupying and so-called friendly forces leave Iraq in order to preserve the prestige and the sovereignty of the state," Sadr said.

Mattis declined to address Sadr's remarks directly, describing them as an internal political matter.

But he said he was reassured after his talks in Baghdad that Iraq's leaders recognized the value of its relationship with the United States.

"I imagine well be in this fight for a while and well stand by each other," he said, repeatedly praising the resilience of Iraqi forces.

The U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Lieutenant General StephenTownsend, has said he believes U.S.-backed forces will recapture both of Islamic State's major strongholdsMosul and the city of Raqqa in Syriawithin the next six months.

Trump is looking for a plan to accelerate the campaign against Islamic State, which could lead to an additional deployment of U.S. forces, who currently number less than 6,000 in Iraq and Syria.

The Pentagon may also look at increasing the number of attack helicopters and air strikes and bringing in more artillery, as well as granting greater authority to battlefield commanders fighting Islamic State.

Townsend told a news conference in Baghdad he had been putting U.S. military advisers closer to front lines in Mosul than before, a move that would increase risk but bolster their ability to aid Iraqis, including by directing air strikes.

"We adjusted our posture during the east Mosul fight and we embedded advisers a bit further down into the formation," he said.

Townsend added he was certain victory in Mosul was within sight. "The Iraqi security forces are going to take that city back. No doubt about it," he said.

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Defense Chief Contradicts Trump on Iraq and Oil - Newsweek

Everyday objects such as this clay toy (c3,000 BC) will be appear alongside items recovered from the 2003 looting. Photograph: AYMAN AL-AMIRIi/Iraq Museum, Department of Antiquities;Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities;and Ruya Foundation

The Iraq Museum of Baghdad is to display 40 ancient artefacts at the Venice Biennale this year, including several that were recently returned after its looting in 2003. The exhibition will be the first time all the objects have been legally allowed out of the country.

Ancient clay pots, medical objects, musical instruments and figurines of deities and animals will be among the items on display, some of which date back to 6,100 BC.

It will be the first time since 1988 that permission has been granted for anything from the museums collection to leave Iraq. The museum reopened in 2015 after being closed for 12 years while the stolen and smuggled objects taken during the invasion of Iraq were recovered.

The display in the National Pavilion of Iraq at the biennale will be in direct response to what co-curator Tamara Chalabi describes as the cultural genocide happening at the hands of Islamic State across Iraq and Syria.

It is more important than ever that people outside of Iraq see these objects and understand their cultural significance, at a time when they are being nihilistically destroyed in Palmyra, in Nimrud, in Mosul, said Chalabi, speaking on the second day of an attempt by Iraqi forces to reclaim western Mosul from Isis.

These objects do have a universality that transcends geography and I think thats such an important message to be relaying at this time and against the global backdrop of a place like Venice. It fights a cultural prejudice people have and the perception that there is no art now left in Iraq or nothing left worth saving.

The Ruya Foundation, which is organising the exhibition at Venice, had to fight against an open reticence from the Iraqi authorities and people at the museum to let any objects out of the country, Chalabi said.

The closed attitude is very entrenched in authorities, which is obviously a result of the looting and a desire to protect what has been left, so they were hard to persuade.

The idea of loaning or having visiting exhibitions is just absent, and yet they are sitting on some of the most interesting antiquities in the world. Ironically, up until now, unless something has been looted and stolen, its been almost impossible for it to come out of Iraq.

For Chalabi, a historian, it was important to include a few of the 15,000 objects which were looted from the museums collection during the fall of Saddam Hussein, a third of which have subsequently been returned. Among the recovered objects to go on display in Venice are a small weight measure shaped like a dove and a clay figurine of a fertility goddess. Both were returned to the museum from the Netherlands in 2010.

Rather than selecting the museums rarest items for the pavilion, simple artefacts representative of the collection as a whole were prioritised. Everyday objects will be showcased, such as a contract of adoption and a clay school text, both from the Babylonian period.

The collection is under such strict security that the curators were not allowed into the museums storage and instead had to have each item brought out specifically.

The exhibition will be titled Archaic, and will also feature new work of eight Iraqi artists. Chalabi said the pavilion offered a rare opportunity to bring together Iraqs ancient and contemporary culture, which is shrouded in mystery and prejudice for so many people.

She said she hoped it would finally open up cultural channels in and out of Iraq, and break away from the thinking that the only way to preserve and save the collection was to keep it hermetically sealed inside the museum.

There such a dichotomy between the ancient and the current and everything else in the middle gets lost, she added. So this is trying to connect the two Iraq as the cradle of civilisation, Garden of Eden of ancient times, and then the war, destruction and chaos of today and create a dialogue between the old and the new.

The historian is the daughter of Ahmed Chalabi who, as the leader of the exiled US-funded Iraqi National Congress, advised the government of George W Bush to go to war

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Answering 'cultural genocide': Iraq's looted treasures to be displayed at Venice Biennale - The Guardian