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Iraq on Thursday hanged 38 jihadists belonging to the Islamic State (ISIS) group or Al-Qaeda for terrorism offenses, provincial authorities said, according to the AFP news agency. The executions took place the southern city of Nasiriyah. It was the largest number of executions in Iraq on a single day since September 25, when 42 people were put to death in the same prison. "The prison administration executed on Thursday in the presence of Justice Minister Haidar al-Zameli, in Nasiriyah prison, 38 death row prisoners belonging to Al-Qaeda or Daesh (ISIS) accused of terrorist activities," said Dakhel Kazem, a senior official...

Of the 31 states that have declared their opposition to taking in Syrian refugees, one state, Kentucky, has a specific reason to be wary of the background check process: previously two Iraqi refugees who settled in Bowling Green turned out to be al Qaeda-linked terrorists with the blood of American soldiers on their hands, an ABC News investigation found. In the wake of the Kentucky case, the U.S. halted the refugee program for Iraqis for six months, a fact the Obama administration did not disclose to Congress at the time, officials told ABC News in the 2013 investigation.

According to a report from Iraqi News, the Islamic State staged the public execution of six youths from a “resistance faction” in Mosul by handcuffing them and then killing them with a welding machine, before a large crowd of onlookers. “This came in order to create a state of fear and panic among the people,” said a source from within Mosul. The Toronto Sun explains that the Islamic State often uses the term “resistance group” to describe groups of young people who spray graffiti on the walls of occupied cities. Fox News reported the six boys, whose exact ages are...

Throughout the Bush years, liberals repeated "Bush lied, people died" like a mantra. That slander wasn't true then and it's not anymore true now that it has resurfaced. There are many legitimate criticisms of the way the Bush Administration conducted the war in Iraq and even more of the way Obama threw away all the blood and treasure we spent there for the sake of politics, but you have to be malicious or just an imbecile at this point to accuse Bush of lying about WMDs. To begin with, numerous foreign intelligence agencies also believed that Saddam Hussein had an...

World 15 Islamist Kurds suspected of planning attacks arrested across Europe 12/11/2015 BARCELONA, Spain - Radical Kurdish cleric "Mullah Krekar" and 14 other Iraqi Kurds were arrested across Europe on Thursday in a coordinated police swoop on Islamist militants planning attacks, Italian media reported. The Corriere della Sera newspaper said the suspects were arrested in countries across Europe in collaboration with police from Italy, the UK, Norway, Finland, Germany and Switzerland. A non-Kurd, a man from Kosovo, was also arrested. Among the suspects picked up for links to the Islamic State group (ISIS), seven were arrested in Italy, four...

Baghdad, 23 May (AKI) - The number two of the al-Qaeda network, Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited Iraq under a false name in September 1999 to take part in the ninth Popular Islamic Congress, former Iraqi premier Iyad Allawi has revealed to pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. In an interview, Allawi made public information discovered by the Iraqi secret service in the archives of the Saddam Hussein regime, which sheds light on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and the Islamic terrorist network. He also said that both al-Zawahiri and Jordanian militant al-Zarqawi probably entered Iraq in the same period. "Al-Zawahiri was summoned by Izza...

FBI agents have found evidence that Chattanooga shooter Mohammod Abdulazeez was following a radical American member of al Qaeda online in 2013, as well as pages of writing that showed the young man was suicidal and looking for a way to absolve what he considered were his sins, according to a representative of Abdulazeez's family. Video tapes of Anwar al-Awlaki, the high-profile American al Qaeda cleric and recruiter, have circulated on the internet and have been popular in jihadist circles long after al-Awlaki's death by American drone strike in September 2011. ....there is no evidence so far that Mohammod Abdulazeez,...

Global Warming? The Pope is Wrong April 27, 2015 Alan Caruba My thoughts regarding the Pope are rooted in my knowledge of the long record of lies, false predictions, and claims by various environmentalists over the years. When the Vatican announced it would hold a conference on April 28 called “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development”, I wondered why the Vatican is not holding a conference to organize the protection of Christians—particularly in the Middle East—against the wholesale genocide that is occurring. The Pope is not alone in this. There appears to...

Iraq uncovers al-Qaeda 'chemical weapons plot' The authorities in Iraq say they have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons, as well as to smuggle them to Europe and North America. Defence ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said five men had been arrested after military intelligence monitored their activities for three months. Three workshops for manufacturing the chemical agents, including sarin and mustard gas, were uncovered, he added. Remote-controlled toy planes were also seized at the workshops. Mr Askari said they were to have been used to release the chemical agents over the target from a "safe" distance of 1.5km...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...

Former CIA Director David Petraeus said in a new interview that the rise of the Islamic State was “well known” among people monitoring the situation within the U.S. government, and that it was able to flourish amid the chaos of the civil war in Syria. “ISIS in a sense is the evolution of an organization that we did defeat, Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Petraeus told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in an interview published Monday. “Some of the very hard work we did to help re-establish the fabric of Iraqi society — to bring the Sunni Arabs back into Iraqi society and...

This just came in via Wall Street Journal: BAGHDAD—The Sunni Islamist militant group whose three-week blitz through northern Iraq has nearly upended the country’s fragile unity announced itself as a new Islamist “caliphate” on Sunday, unilaterally declaring statehood and demanding allegiance from other Islamist groups.The announcement, recited in Arabic on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan by spokesman Abu Mohammed Al Adnani into an audio file, effectively renames the group the Islamic State, canceling its previous title of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS.“We have had all the requirements of the Islamic state...

In 2006, I invited the late General Bill Odom to address my Thursday Congressional luncheon group. Gen. Odom, a former NSA director, called the Iraq war "the greatest strategic disaster in American history," and told the surprised audience that he could not understand why Congress had not impeached the president for pushing this disaster on the United States. History continues to prove the General's assessment absolutely correct. In September, 2002, arguing against a U.S. attack on Iraq, I said the following on the House Floor: "No credible evidence has been produced that Iraq has or is close to having nuclear...

The Pentagon Thursday said Islamic militants in Iraq might have captured U.S. equipment and vehicles as an al-Qaeda linked group advanced toward Baghdad. Members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has seized control of two major cities, have been posting pictures on Twitter, claiming to have taken equipment given or sold by the U.S. to the Iraqi army. ADVERTISEMENT A defense official said claims the group had captured a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter were wrong, but that Humvees and armored vehicles might have fallen into the militants' hands. "I don't have any indication that the reports...

The full horror of the jihadists’ savage victories in Iraq emerged yesterday as witnesses told of streets lined with decapitated soldiers and policemen. Blood-soaked bodies and blazing vehicles were left in the wake of the Al Qaeda-inspired ISIS fanatics as they pushed the frontline towards Baghdad. They boasted about their triumphs in a propaganda video depicting appalling scenes including a businessman being dragged from his car and executed at the roadside with a pistol to the back of his head. In the swathe of captured territory across northern Iraq, ISIS declared hardline Sharia law, publishing rules ordering women not to...

Full Title: Al Qaeda-inspired militant group vows to march on Baghdad; President calls escalating violence an ‘emergency situation’//// The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has taken Iraq's second-largest city Mosul and Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit in recent days and vowed Thursday to take over the capital. -SNIP- President Obama says additional American assistance is necessary to help the current Iraqi government fight off the threat posed by rampaging Islamic insurgents. The President, speaking at the White House, offered no specifics as hostilities once again heat up in the nation formerly run by dictator Sadaam Hussein. But Obama...

Iraq was on the brink of disintegration Thursday as al-Qaeda-inspired fighters swept through northern Iraq toward Baghdad and Kurdish soldiers seized the city of Kirkuk without a fight.

Al Qaeda-inspired militants in Iraq vowed Thursday to march against Baghdad after seizing two key cities in the north of the country this week. A spokesman for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) said in audio posted on militant websites commonly used by the group that the fighters have old scores to settle with Iraq's Shiite-led government. The spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, also threatened that Sunni ISIL fighters would capture the southern Iraqi Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf, which hold two of the holiest shrines for Shiite Muslims

Sunni Islamist militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) have rapidly expanded their control of Iraq as a whole. The group is now said to be within range of overtaking Iraq’s biggest oil refinery in the city of Baiji. ... ISIS is an Al Qaeda-offshoot that seeks to create a Sharia law compliant Sunni Islamic caliphate that runs through both Iraq and Syria.

Two and a half years after the last U.S. soldier departed, an al Qaeda offshoot is in control of Mosul and headed for Baghdad—and Iraq’s prime minister is requesting U.S. air strikes. It seems like only yesterday that Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was celebrating as the last American soldiers left Iraq. Now, with an al Qaeda offshoot threatening to take Baghdad, Maliki’s government is quietly asking at least some troops—specifically airmen and drone pilots—to return. While Iraq’s government is not requesting a surge in U.S. ground forces like the one President Bush ordered in 2007, Maliki’s government has been...