Free Republic

I first met Qassem four years ago, at the height of the European refugee crisis. The BBC had sent me to capture the stories of Mideast migrants, thousands of whom would daily wash ashore on the Greek isles. He was around 15, malnourished and clearly traumatized. As we sat together in a cabin at a ­migrant camp on the island of Lesbos, his hunched body rocked backward and forward. His marginal life amounted to a speck of dust amid the geopolitical earthquakes that were remaking the region at the time. Yet the story he told opened a window onto the...

A group of conservative veterans is preparing to visit Washington to laud President Trump’s withdrawal of troops from northern Syria and to urge Republicans to back his intention to pull out of Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East. Wyoming House Majority Whip Tyler Lindholm, who was in the Navy on 9/11, is helping organize the mid-November gathering featuring speeches at the National Press Club and lobbying visits to Congress. "If you listen to the sound clips of the war hawks who say you can’t pull out now because a vacuum will be created, and we can’t pull out...

"Trump has escalated military operations in Iraq to a degree that has hugely increased civilian deaths in the war against Islamic State militants.... Furthermore, sending in more U.S. forces to fight alongside the opposition (which includes jihadist groups formerly affiliated with al Qaida) will plunge the U.S. deeper into a conflict against Russia. The destabilizing impact of such a move has to be fully contemplated. While the images and videos of children struggling to breathe and survive is sickening, there must be some sober consideration about the realities on the ground in Syria. The truth is hard to come by...

Syrian civil war grew out of a popular uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, part of Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East. The brutal response of the security forces against initially peaceful protests demanding democratic reform and end of repression triggered a violent reaction. An armed rebellion to the regime soon took hold across Syria, dragging the country into a full-scale civil war. Main Issues: The Roots of the Conflict The Syrian uprising started as a reaction to the Arab Spring , a series of anti-government protests across the Arab world inspired by the...

The Texas senator is seeking an implicit contrast with the more hawkish Marco Rubio.Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday warned against the deployment of U.S. forces in the Middle East in hopes of creating democracy, nodding to a portion of the Republican Party exhausted with military escapades abroad. Even as he emphasized the need to defeat the Islamic State group in a speech coming just a week after the San Bernardino, California, shooting rampage that's since been linked to radicalization, Cruz, a 2016 presidential candidate, chastised those rushing to place American troops on the ground to fight the enemy. "Some in...

Texas is taking the gloves off when it comes to the fight over Syrian refugees by suing the federal government. Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office announced the lawsuit yesterday, saying the Obama Administration’s plans go against federal law. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton today announced that he has filed suit on behalf of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) against the federal government to halt the relocation of refugees from Syria in the state, citing the Refugee Act of 1980, which requires that the federal government consult with state authorities in advance of such relocations. The federal government...

DAMASCUS, Syria, June 9 (UPI) -- A human rights observer group says more than 320,000 people have been killed in the Syrian Civil War since 2011. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says it documented 230,618 deaths in the Syrian Civil War between March 2011, when the conflict began, and June 8, 2015.

i>This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison. The former President of Lebanon, Amine Gemayel, is a Maronite Christian. He recently warned of “an exodus approaching biblical proportions.” Gemayel told a gathering in Zurich of Christian Solidarity International (CSI) and other human rights activists that the current wave of church burnings, murders, and riots against Christians in the Mideast is the work of radical Islamists. The former Lebanese leader’s own brother had been assassinated in Beirut by these same jihadists. President Gemayel’s warnings echo those issued two years ago by Vienna’s Catholic prelate. Christoph Cardinal Schönborn in 2012 told a religious...

The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords. Psalm 55:21 There are many things that are difficult to explain about the Obama administration. An apparently free and independent people not only elected him president of the United States, but also re-elected him even as it was apparent that his administration was mostly a miserable failure-- even by the measure of liberals. Historians will long ponder how a president who spent as much money and legislated as much produced very little that actually...

The United States has ridden -- and tamed -- the wild global tiger since the end of World War II. The frantic ride has been dangerous, to us, but a boon to humanity. At the same time, America's leadership role has been misrepresented and misunderstood abroad and at home, including by some of our country's own leaders. Accordingly, our current president, Barack Obama, has decided to climb down from the tiger, with the certain consequence that it will run wild again. The crowning achievement of postwar American policy was the defeat of Soviet communism. After the fall of the Berlin...

The Geneva talks on Iranian nukes have turned into a "pull my finger" charade. Iran says that it's only making electricity, not nuclear bombs. The U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany are somehow all supposed to agree on reeling Iran in -- but let's face it: Russia and China are close Iranian allies and trading partners, while even Germany and France have significant geopolitical ties to Russia through, for example, the European defense conglomerate EADS and the Nord Stream pipeline running Russian gas into Europe. And Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman reportedly bragged to Russian journalists at the...

Japan-China: Two Chinese navy ships sailed through the international waters between Okinawa and Miyako in the Ryukyus. Yesterday two bombers flew between the two islands. Syria: The fighting has continued with no let up. The government has made small gains in multiple areas. However an al-Qaida-affiliated group of the al Nusra Front drove government forces from the village of Maaloula. This is one of the three villages in the world that still speak a variation of Western Aramaic, which is the language thought to be closest to the language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. As occurs whenever a Christian village is captured,...

President Obama's on-and-off-again planned American attack on Syria is nothing new. Besides its five declared wars, America has a habit of intervening all over the world. Even apart from clandestine CIA operations, and even after the unhappy end of the Vietnam War, we have attacked lots of countries and non-state militias. The roll call of recent American military interventions is quite astounding: Cambodia, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Liberia, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Zaire and Afghanistan. Even the notion of Past American isolationism is a myth. In the four years between 1912 and 1916 alone, the U.S. sent...

Syria: The Asad government continues to insist that it did not use chemical weapons in the attack on 21 August. It approved an extension of the UN inspection team's visit and requested that it investigate three gas attacks against Syrian soldiers since 21 August. Lebanon's Daily Star reported on 26 August that at least four Hizballah fighters are receiving treatment in Beirut after coming into contact with chemical agents in Syria, a security source said. The source said four or five members came into contact with the chemical agents while searching a group of rebel tunnels in the Damascus suburb of Jobar over...

Well apparently a president can’t just make new lows for respect of American moral authority in one single term and then let it go at that. Nope. Apparently after getting stiff-armed by our ideological enemies once in the first Obama term- turning his back on American values and getting called out on it- the administration felt the need to demonstrate crumbling American might and values by going back to that well early in the second term too. During the first term, we suffered the embarrassment of the Chinese Communist who publicly lectured Obama about straying away from capitalism and taking...

For a man who regards Brussels as the biggest threat to Britain’s freedom since the Second World War, the choice of beer for Nigel Farage was obvious when we met at the Westminster Arms on Friday: Spitfire. It is brewed by Shepherd Neame in Kent to celebrate the Battle of Britain. Farage, a man of Kent, gulped down the first pint in 15 minutes, ordered a ‘reload,’ polishing off his second in another ten; and the moment we stepped outside, he lit up a fag.

At least 42 Syrian soldiers were killed in a well-coordinated ambush Monday after seeking refuge across the border in Iraq following clashes with rebels in their home country, officials said. The attack in Iraq's restive western province of Anbar is likely to significantly raise concerns that Iraq could be drawn into the Syrian civil war. Iraqi officials said the Syrians had sought refuge through the Rabiya border crossing in northern Iraq during recent clashes with rebels and were being escorted back to Syria through a different border crossing farther south when the ambush occurred. The gunmen struck near the area...

Nearly two years after the start of Syria's popular uprising, the conflict has evolved into a slow-moving, brutal civil war with many players and no clear end in sight. Multiple rebel groups across the country continue to fight President Bashar al-Assad's forces, using any weapons they can get their hands on. While the rebels are using many modern weapons, they've also come up with their own makeshift solutions. In these weapons workshops, anti-aircraft guns are welded to pickup trucks and armor shields are attached to machine guns and cars. Mortar shell nose cones are turned on lathes and explosives are...

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Dr. Jonathan Spyer, senior fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, recently visited Syria and traveled in rebel-held territory. Here are his observations, given in an interview with PJ Media Middle East Editor Barry Rubin. – This is your second trip to Syria to observe what’s happening there. How have things changed since your earlier trip?The first and most immediately noticeable change was that in the northern governates of Aleppo and Idleb, the Assad regime no longer really exists on the ground. In February, making the border crossing from Turkey was potentially quite dangerous because the Syrian...