Free Republic

Two days before Mosul fell to the Islamic insurgent group Isis (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Iraqi commanders stood eyeballing its most trusted messenger. The man, known within the extremist group as Abu Hajjar, had finally cracked after a fortnight of interrogation and given up the head of Isis's military council. "He said to us, 'you don't realise what you have done'," an intelligence official recalled. "Then he said: 'Mosul will be an inferno this week'.' Several hours later, the man he had served as a courier and been attempting to protect, Abdulrahman al-Bilawi, lay dead in...

In August of 2012, Barack Obama established a red line against Syria as a warning to not use chemical weapons against rebel forces, including ISIS. When a chemical attack outside Damascus killed more than 1,400 people there was a lot of finger pointing and saber rattling. Obama did nothing. A year later Syrian President Bashar al Assad voluntary turned over his chemical weapons for destruction. And now, three and a half years after Assad's act, America's top intelligence official confirmed that ISIS has been manufacturing and deploying chemical agents in Iraq and Syria During testimony before the Senate Armed Services...