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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Police in southern California have arrested 60 people and broken up an Iraqi criminal ring accused of selling drugs, machine guns and improvised bombs out of an immigrant social club, authorities said on Thursday. The swoop by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and local police targeted a network operating out of El Cajon, which is near San Diego and close to the border with Mexico.

Fort Huachuca, the nation's largest intelligence-training center, changed security measures in May after being warned that Islamist terrorists, with the aid of Mexican drug cartels, were planning an attack on the facility. Fort officials changed security measures after sources warned that possibly 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists were to be smuggled into the U.S. through underground tunnels with high-powered weapons to attack the Arizona Army base, according to multiple confidential law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington Times. "A portion of the operatives were in the United States, with the remainder not yet in the United States," according to one...

Members of a local Catholic church are in shock because of a crime over the weekend that has also left them hurt and confused. St. Barbara Chaldean Catholic Church was broken into, burglarized, and apparently the target of an attempted arson. "We were shocked," Father Ray Sarkees, the church pastor said. "We're all shocked about it." Several heavy-duty fans cover the floor of the building. They're drying things out after the sprinklers went off. A black scorch mark covers a large area around the altar. Sarkees says a church safe and a sound system were stolen, along with donation boxes....

When Edward Snowden decided he wanted to release details about the NSA's intelligence operations to the public, he reached out to Laura Poitras, a 49-year-old film maker and political activist opposed to the war on terror. As the Washington Post noted on Monday, Poitras had "the odd distinction of sharing a byline in The Washington Post and in London’s Guardian newspaper last week on two blockbuster stories." snip But perhaps it isn't such a mystery why the U.S. government might want to question Poitras if you simply crack open John R. Bruning's 2006 book, The Devil's Sandbox: With the 2nd...

Venezuela’s Tarek El-Aissami The Americas Report | Oct 03, 2008  By Nicole Ferrand [...] Mr. El - Aissami is a Venezuelan national of Syrian descent who, before becoming Minster of Interior and Justice, occupied the position of Deputy Interior Minister for Public Security. His father, Carlos Aissami, is the head of the Venezuelan branch of the Iraqi Baath political party. Before the invasion of Iraq, he held a press conference in which he described himself as a Taliban and called Osama Bin Laden, "the great Mujahedeen, Sheik Osama bin Laden." Tarek's great-uncle Shibli el-Aissami was a prominent ideologist and...

Kellyanne Conway, the adviser to President Trump who coined the phrase “alternative facts,” is facing another firestorm of criticism and fact-checking after she falsely spoke of a “Bowling Green massacre” by Iraqi refugees. She acknowledged and corrected her mistake Friday morning on Twitter. (snip) Ms. Conway did not specify whether she meant an attack in Kentucky, Ohio or Downtown Manhattan, for that matter. But the closest circumstance to what she described occurred in Bowling Green, Ky., in late May 2011. Two Iraqi citizens, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi and Waad Ramadan Alwan, were indicted on federal terrorism charges. According to a Justice...

<p>Chelsea Clinton and Kellyanne Conway traded sharp Twitter jabs Friday — with the former first daughter mocking President Trump’s counselor for inventing a terror attack and the White House aide firing back about how the Clintons “lost the election.”</p> <p>“Very grateful no one seriously hurt in the Louvre attack … or the (completely fake) Bowling Green Massacre. Please don’t make up attacks,” Clinton tweeted Friday morning, the day after Conway appeared on MSNBC to defend Trump’s immigration order.</p>

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...

The tiny Pacific island of Nauru has spent weeks completely cut off from the outside world after its telecommunications network collapsed. Its isolation is so complete that no one is even sure who the country's president is any more. Nauru, an isolated speck in the southwest Pacific with a population of 12,000, is in a "critical situation", according to the last message received by the outside world. That came via an address given three weeks ago by the man last believed to be running the country, President Bernard Dowiyogo, details of which were given on Friday by Radio Australia....

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Donald Trump’s favorability rating is sky-high here, where citizens are paying surprisingly close attention to the U.S. election and see the developer and political novice as the clear choice for the White House. In dozens of interviews FoxNews.com conducted in various cities across the country this month – with Iraqis from different religions and walks of life – the overwhelming majority support Trump over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Many believe Trump would be tough on terror, and blame Clinton – at least in part – for policies that have destabilized much of the Middle East. "America should...

U.S. QUESTIONS EGYPT ON WMD, MISSILES WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The United States has again launched an examination of Egypt's missile and weapons of mass destruction programs. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton held talks over the weekend in Cairo with Egyptian leaders on a range of what U.S. officials termed were sensitive subjects. They said the issues included Egypt's WMD and missile programs and Cairo's cooperation with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and North Korea. "All of the testimony and evidence found in Iraq have shown significant Egyptian involvement in Iraq's missile and WMD programs," a U.S. official said. "The issue has...

In examining notes taken of their conversations with the victim’s mother, I was taken aback by how contemptuous they are of her. They talk down to her, as if she were the perpetrator, not the mother of the victim of this monstrous attack. It is outrageous. And it gets worse. The supposedly seven-year-old rapist who put his penis in the girl’s mouth, urinated on her and in her mouth, and who reportedly owned the blue pocket knife that he used to threaten her, was never even removed from his home. That family still lives next door to the victim. For...

One in three babies in Germany are born to parents who haven’t tied the knot, according to a new report. The report by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research this week showed that 35 percent of babies born in Germany in 2014 came into the world with unmarried parents. And the study also revealed that there was great contrast between former East and West Germany, according to broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. The more religious and wealthy West saw 29 percent of new little bundles of joy born to unwed parents, compared to nearly 60 percent in the former states of socialist East...

* French, US intelligence agencies warned Germany of suicide bomb attacks * Their report identified seven Iraqis living in Munich as potential attackers * Two Munich stations evacuated after warnings of 'serious, imminent threat' * Soldiers on the streets of Paris, extra police in London, Madrid and Istanbul ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ German police are hunting seven suspected suicide bombers who planned to blow themselves up in Munich train stations during the New Year's Eve celebrations, it has been reported. French and US intelligence agencies are said to have given Germany the names of the seven suspects, thought to be from Iraq and...

Matt Drudge is weighing in on the results in Colorado, where Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) received at least 30 of the 37 delegates following the state Republican Party Convention last weekend.

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.

ISIS set four captured Iraqi men on fire by hog-tying them upside down, hanging them from a pole, then burning them alive. Once again, the savage execution was captured on video and shared on social media accounts friendly with the terror group as part of its propaganda and fear campaign. The four men in orange jumpsuits introduce themselves on camera and are made to watch videos of other ISIS executions before they’re marched out to the desert, with chains around their wrists and ankles, to their fate. After a man wearing camouflage and a mask explains how the men must...

Once part of one of the most brutal dictator's army in the Middle East, over 100 former members of Saddam Hussein's military and intelligence officers are now part of ISIS. Now they make up the complex network of ISIS's leadership, helping to build the military strategies which have led the brutal jihadi group to their military gains in Syria and Iraq. The officers gave ISIS the organization and discipline it needed to weld together jihadi fighters drawn from across the globe, integrating terror tactics like suicide bombings with military operation

INTELLIGENCE agents from Prague to Swansea are uncovering a trail of clues that point to President Saddam Hussein of Iraq having a hand in al-Qaeda’s terrorist missions. Iraqi ministers have spent the week protesting Baghdad’s innocence to the United Nations, but will not say why some of its diplomats who met Mohammed Atta, one of the suspected September 11 hijackers, disappeared from their European posts after that date. Nor will Baghdad explain why Saddam’s agents were spotted at various times this year with Atta in Germany, Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic. Many in the Pentagon are sure Saddam ...

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...