Free Republic

An Iraqi-American man who made headlines earlier this week by claiming that his ailing mother had died because of President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration lied, according to the imam of his local mosque, Detroit’s Fox 2 reported Wednesday. The original story was that Mike Hager, a U.S. citizen born in Iraq, was visiting relatives in Iraq but was forced to abandon his mother in that country when he tried to return home. Social media exploded with accusations of murder against Trump — including tweets by respected news outlets. But the story was a lie, concocted to feed opposition...

Brent Scher of the Washington Free Beacon reports that the Democratic party’s slate of nominees for DNC chair has agreed to participate in a candidate forum hosted at a restaurant owned by a rabid critic of Israel. The decision to hold it there may give the leading contender for DNC chair — the rabidly anti-Israel and one-time Louis Farrakhan backer Keith Ellison — something of a “home field” advantage. Sadly, however, it’s far from clear that any of the participants will feel out of place. (Tom Perez is the only contender who has not confirmed he will attend.) The restaurant...

The American Civil Liberties Union announced Saturday evening that a federal court in New York had issued an emergency stay on President Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The court’s decision, which will affect people who have been detained in airports, came after the ACLU and other activist groups filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of two Iraqis who were held at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York as a result of the order. “I hope Trump enjoys losing. He’s going to lose so much we’re going to get sick and tired of...

Many were mourning in Malmö on Friday after a 16-year-old boy was shot dead in the city. “Rest in peace,” read many messages left on the Facebook wall of the victim on Friday. Family, friends and Malmö residents paid tribute to the 16-year-old student, Ahmed, who died on Thursday evening after he was found with gunshot injuries in the city’s Rosengård district. […] The boy’s father, who moved with his family from Iraq to Sweden when Ahmed was seven years old, told newspaper Sydsvenskan that his son had wanted to become a doctor. “We fled war and misery to find...

Bent on destroying Israel, and gripped by vicious anti-Semitism, Baghdad ‘pauperized’ its Jews and forced them to leave for the nascent Jewish state in 1951-2. It believed Israel would collapse under the strain. But the immigrants ultimately helped Israel thrive, and it was Iraq that suffered After Adolf Hitler’s defeat in May 1945, many Nazis melted away from the Reich, smuggled out by such organizations as the infamous Odessa group and the lesser-known Catholic lay network Intermarium, as well as the CIA and KGB. They ensured the continuation of the Nazi legacy in the postwar Arab world. Egypt was a...

But they're just good people looking for safety. If you think refugees are going to come to the United States and support the very same Islamic terrorist organizations they’re fleeing, you’re just being paranoid. ...Or you’re an idiot. ...Or worse, you’ve allowed your mind to be warped by Donald Trump. Whatever the reason, you live in a world of unfounded fear and you are to be ridiculed and ignore, in that order. Or, according to Reuters, you’re just a person who has a modicum of common sense. Yesterday, while the President was busy lecturing you about your stubborn refusal to...

Authorities say they have arrested two people on terrorism-related charges in Texas and California. Federal officials said 24-year-old Omar Faraj Al Hardan, a Palestinian born in Iraq, was arrested in Houston on Thursday. According to the federal indictment, Al Hardan has been charged with three counts alleging that he attempted to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a designated foreign terrorist organization. He is charged with one count each of attempting to provide material support to ISIL, procurement of citizenship or naturalization unlawfully and making false statements. Federal authorities told NBC News that...

A man identified as an Iraqi refugee has been arrested in Houston as part of a federal investigation into an alleged terrorist plan with links to two other U.S. cities, state officials confirmed Thursday. Federal officials would not immediately confirm details, but Gov. Greg Abbott and other officials said the suspect is believed to have provided support to terrorists -- including connections to ISIS.

The House of Representatives passed H.R. 4038, a bill to beef up security measures for admitting refugees from Syria and Iraq into the United States, in a vote 289 to 137 on Thursday. Only two Republicans voted against the bill, while 47 Democrats joined the majority in voting to pass the legislation.

More than 60,000 Chaldeans live in El Cajon, the largest concentration in the U.S. outside of Detroit. A San Diego-area nonprofit running an "underground railroad" is trying to save "as many people as possible" from turmoil in Iraq by finding them refuge in Southern California, and it has tens of thousands of Christian Iraqis on its waiting list. Mark Arabo, a first generation Iraqi-American born and raised east of San Diego, founded the Minority Humanitarian Foundation (MHF) in 2014 after he grew tired of waiting for a response from Washington officials to the crisis created by Islamic State militants,...

Few answers appear in the probe of students in Netherlands suspected of ties to Al Qaeda AMSTERDAM — The guys around the scuba school laughingly called them the "Al Qaeda Diving Team." But for law enforcement officials, it was no joke. Late last year, Dutch counter-terrorism agents investigating a possible Al Qaeda recruitment cell grew interested in the school because a man suspected of recruiting terrorists had become a certified diver and studied to be an instructor there. Iraqi-born Kasim Ali was one of between 50 and 150 Muslim men who had taken classes in recent years with the same...

A former Iraqi intelligence officer who was said to have met with the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks has told US interrogators the meeting never happened, according to US officials familiar with classified intelligence reports on the matter. Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the former intelligence officer, was taken into custody by the US in July. Under questioning he has said that he did not meet with Mohamed Atta in Prague in the Czech Republic, according to the officials, who have reviewed classified debriefing reports based on the interrogations. US officials caution that Ani may have been lying...

SANLIURFA, Turkey — When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe. Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through...

A Texas teen has been arrested for fatally shooting an Iraqi refugee watching his first-ever snowfall, police said. Nykerion Nealon, 17, was arrested early Friday after gunning down Ahmed al-Jumaili outside his Dallas apartment complex March 4, Maj. Jeff Cotner told reporters alongside the victim's father-in-law Friday. Al-Jumaili was shot in front of his wife and brother, three weeks after fleeing Iraq to be in a safer place and reunite with his wife, who had moved to America a year earlier.

(CNN)—An Iraqi man watching his first snowfall in his new American hometown was shot and killed by an unknown assailant, according to Dallas police. Authorities have stepped up patrols in the neighborhood where Ahmed Al-Jumaili lived -- and died -- in their effort to find whoever killed the 36-year-old early Thursday as he and his brother watched the snow while Al-Jumaili's wife took photos.

The Iraqi military launched a major campaign to take back a key city from the self-proclaimed Islamic State over the weekend—a move that caught the U.S. “by surprise,” in the words of one American government official. The U.S.-led coalition forces that have conducted seven months of airstrikes on Iraq’s behalf did not participate in the attack, defense officials told The Daily Beast, and the American military has no plans to chip in. Instead, embedded Iranian advisors and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are taking part in the offensive on the largely Sunni town, raising the prospect that the fight to beat back...

Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 700%. Sweden is now number two on the list of rape countries, surpassed only by Lesotho in Southern Africa. Significantly, the report does not touch on the background of the rapists. One should, however, keep in mind that in statistics, second-generation immigrants are counted as Swedes. In an astounding number of cases, the Swedish courts have demonstrated sympathy for the rapists, and have acquitted suspects who have claimed that the girl wanted to...

AMMAN - Jordan has executed by hanging a jailed Iraqi woman militant whose release had been demanded by the Islamic State group that burnt a captured Jordanian pilot to death, a security source said on Wednesday. Responding to the killing of the pilot, whose death was announced on Tuesday, the Jordanian authorities also executed another senior al-Qaida prisoner sentenced to death for plots to wage attacks against the pro-Western kingdom in the last decade. Sajida al-Rishawi, the Iraqi woman militant, was sentenced to death for her role in a 2005 suicide bomb attack that killed 60 people. Ziyad Karboli, an...

AMMAN/TOKYO - An audio message purportedly from a Japanese journalist being held by Islamic State militants said a Jordanian air force pilot also captured by the group would be killed unless an Iraqi female prisoner in Jordan was released by sunset on Thursday. The message appeared to postpone a previous deadline set on Tuesday in which the journalist, Kenji Goto, said he would be killed within 24 hours if the Iraqi was not freed. The latest audio recording, which could not be verified by Reuters, was posted on YouTube early on Thursday. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a...

December 29, 2008 Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2008/December/08-nsd-1151.html Former Maryland Man Charged with Conspiracy to Act as an Iraqi Agent Defendant Allegedly Worked for the Government of Iraq and Assisted the Iraqi Intelligence Service WASHINGTON – A criminal complaint was filed today charging Mouyad Mahmoud Darwish, age 47, formerly of Maryland, with conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, specifically, as an agent of Iraq, announced United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein and Patrick Rowan, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. Darwish is a Canadian citizen born in Iraq....