Free Republic

TEL AVIV – Egypt is accusing Turkey of providing more than 10,000 Turkish passports to members of ISIS, the Islamic State, to facilitate travel of fighters across the region. An Egyptian intelligence official who asked not to be named told WND his country delivered a report to the U.S. documenting the astonishing claim. The official further charged that Istanbul is serving as the “headquarters” for ISIS planning. “Turkey continues to allow free passage to Iraq and Syria to IS fighters,” the official added. If the Turkish passport charge is true, it would present a worldwide ISIS travel threat. Already, there...

Turkey, via their Deputy Prime Minister, is putting the word out on the street that it is open to a restoration of ties with Israel, even acknowledging that it is NOT Turkey’s place to criticize the recent Israeli election: snip Wow. The admitted refusal to criticize Israel over the election is definitely a change of pace for Turkey. I mean, when has Erdogan ever missed an opportunity to openly bash Israel? He was just ripping Netanyahu in January for just showing up to the Paris march against ‘radical Islam’, accusing him of killing 2500 Palestinians in the war last year....

Turkey has criticised United States Secretary of State John Kerry for suggesting that negotiations would have to be opened with President Bashar al-Assad to end the conflict in Syria. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the state-run Anatolia news agency on Monday that all Syria's current problems, on the fourth anniversary of the start of the uprising in March 2011, were caused by Assad’s government. "What is there to be negotiated with Assad?" Cavusoglu was quoted as saying at the end of his visit to Cambodia. "You are going to have what [kind of] negotiations with a regime that has killed...

Aloof. Polite. Cajoling. Extremely attentive. Restrained. Dishonest. Inscrutable. Malicious. The rebels from northern Syria, remembering encounters with him months later, recall completely different facets of the man. But they agree on one thing: "We never knew exactly who we were sitting across from." In fact, not even those who shot and killed him after a brief firefight in the town of Tal Rifaat on a January morning in 2014 knew the true identity of the tall man in his late fifties. They were unaware that they had killed the strategic head of the group calling itself "Islamic State" (IS). The...

According to a report by al-Jazeera, several American generals are skeptical that Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen will succeed.  A “senior commander at CENTCOM” claimed the Saudis did not keep the operation secret from American authorities because they feared the Obama Administration inform Iran, but rather because the Saudis feared the Pentagon would dismiss their battle plan as a “bad idea” and try to talk them out of it. “Military sources said that a number of regional special forces officers and officers at U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) argued strenuously against supporting the Saudi-led intervention because the target of the intervention, the Shia...

A senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said Sunday that inspectors would be barred from military sites under any nuclear agreement with world powers. Gen. Hossein Salami, the Guard’s deputy leader, said on state TV that allowing the foreign inspection of military sites is tantamount to “selling out.” “We will respond with hot lead (bullets) to those who speak of it,” Salami said. “Iran will not become a paradise for spies. We will not roll out the red carpet for the enemy.” Iran and six world powers — the US, the UK, France, Germany, China and Russia — have reached...

Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka says he will travel to Moscow to participate in events marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe on May 7 and 8, but he will not attend a Victory Day military parade in the Russian capital on May 9. In an interview with Russia's ITAR-TASS, Lukashenka said he will preside over a Victory Day parade in Minsk on May 9 instead.

Ukraine's army chief of staff has listed for the first time some of the specific Russian military units alleged to be fighting against Kyiv alongside pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine. Viktor Muzhenko, in an interview published by Ukraine's Defense Ministry on April 18, said, "Regular Russian army troops are still in Ukraine" despite a cease-fire agreement signed in February which ordered the withdrawal of foreign fighters from the front line. Russia has repeatedly denied claims by Kyiv and the West that it is arming and sending troops to help separatists who have gained control of parts of the east. Muzhenko...

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Israel on Saturday against selling weapons to the pro-Western government in Kiev as retaliation for Moscow’s recently announced weapons deal with Iran. Speaking to official state media in Russia, Putin said that any such deals between Israel and Ukraine would be “counterproductive” and would “only cause a new round of hostility.” “The death toll would rise, but the result would not change,” Putin was quoted as telling Rossiya, the official state-run television channel.

Around mid-April, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia –who once wrote a letter to Barack Obama beseeching the president to reconsider his foreign policies which enable the persecution of Christians in Syria — spoke again of the threat of Christian extinction in the Mideast during a meeting with Greek Defense Minister Panagiotis Kammenos. In the Russian Patriarch’s own words: "I regularly get reports of horrible crimes that are committed there against Christians, especially in northern Iraq. I have visited those places and I remember that there were many churches and monasteries there. The city of Mosul alone had 45...

Is another shoe about to drop on the Clinton Foundation, and on Hillary Clinton’s problematic rollout? Newsweek’s Rory Ross reported this morning that the largest individual donor to the Clinton family business has conducted trade with Iran, perhaps in breach of US sanctions. Ukrainian energy mogul Victor Pinchuk has connections to the Clintons that go back almost a decade, and financial connections to the regime in Tehran that go much farther: The fourth richest man in Ukraine, Pinchuk owns Interpipe Group, a Cyprus-incorporated manufacturer of seamless pipes used in oil and gas sectors.Newsweek has seen declarations and documents from...

The commander of the US army in Europe has warned that Nato must remain united in the face of a "real threat" from Russia. "It's not an assumption. There is a Russian threat," Lt-Gen Frederick "Ben" Hodges said. "You've got the Russian ambassador threatening that Denmark will be a nuclear target if it participates in any missile defence programme. And when you look at the unsafe way Russian aircraft are flying without transponders in proximity to civilian aircraft, that's not professional conduct." Gen Hodges spoke to the Telegraph on the sidelines of a military debriefing after an exercise to move...

Ukraine's parliament has voted to ban "propaganda of the totalitarian communist and Nazi regimes," a major rebuke to the country's Soviet-era masters in Moscow and to Russia. A total of 254 members of the 450-seat Vekhovna Rada voted on April 9 in favor of the legislation in the former Soviet republic, which is deeply at odds with Russia over its annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in a conflict that has killed more than 6,000 people. Under the legislation, the communist government that ruled between 1917 and 1991 -- the Soviet era -- is condemned as a criminal regime...

‘This is the new America. We had better get used to it,’ says TV commentator after president leaves door open to Iran’s sanctions demand, defends Putin’s missile sale Israeli analysts expressed shock and amazement Friday night at President Barack Obama’s stated openness to Iran’s demand for the immediate lifting of all economic sanctions, and his defense of Russia’s agreement to supply a sophisticated air defense system to Iran. There was no immediate official Israeli response to the president’s comments, which were made after the start of Shabbat in Israel, when politicians generally do not work. “Jaws dropped” around the studio,...

The depth of Greece's financial woes have been laid bare as official figures showed the country has fallen further into the red following the election of its Leftist government. Greece's primary budget surplus, which excludes its debt interest payments, shrunk to just over €1bn during January and February, compared to €3.17bn over the same period in 2014, according to figures from the Ministry of Finance.

Since October 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has regularly referred to the concept of a "Mastermind" (ust akil, "supra-intellect," in Turkish) that, he says, is plotting against Turkey. This concept has been applauded by the Islamist pro-AKP media. Erdogan's December 12, 2014 speech, which focused on this "mastermind" concept, inspired the production of a two-hour "documentary" by one of the leading Turkish television channels, the pro-AKP A Haber. The film, titled "The Mastermind," first aired on March 15, 2015 and has been broadcast repeatedly since then; in addition, the Turkish Islamist pro-AKP media are circulating the film on their...

Two videos uploaded to the Internet purportedly reveal Russia’s first truly new infantry fighting vehicles in decades and a new self-propelled howitzer. One of the videos even shows intriguing closeups of what’s probably Russia’s new Armata tank. If the videos are authentic, it’s a sign that the Kremlin’s long-delayed rearmament plans are making progress.

About 300 US paratroopers have arrived in Ukraine to train the Ukrainian National Guard which is fighting pro-Russian rebels in the east, the US army said in a statement. The troops from the 173rd Airborne Brigade arrived on Tuesday and Wednesday in Yavoriv, western Ukraine, to spend six months training three battalions of Ukrainian troops, said the statement dated Thursday.

Moscow (AFP) - Armed police on Thursday raided the office of a Russian rights group led by exiled Vladimir Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, during the president's marathon annual phone-in session. A group of police and special forces searched the Moscow office of Open Russia, a rights network led by Khodorkovsky, for protest flyers, Khodorkovsky's spokeswoman Kulle Pispanen wrote on her Facebook page. "As we're preparing for the phone-in, masked men came to the office," Pispanen wrote. "They are looking for posters and flyers for a protest on April 19 that we were not planning to participate in and which has...

In a car park outside a block of flats in Moscow, a dozen Russian teenagers in camouflage are practising army drills. A young lieutenant barks out orders. They form a wobbly line and march up and down on the spot. Inside another group of kids are learning how to handle weapons - firing blanks down an empty hall way to improve their aim. This after-school club is ostensibly part of a drugs prevention programme: a programme of evening activities with a patriotic military slant, aimed at keeping local kids away from drinking and shooting up. But for the club's organiser,...