Free Republic

Norway seems headed to a political crisis after one of the members of the ruling coalition threatened to quit over the government’s decision to bring back a woman who joined Islamic State — a move that could lead to the government falling. According to Norway’s VG, the family — a 29-year-old woman and two children — was moved from northern Syria to Iraq in preparation for them to be moved and repatriated back into Norway. One of the children, 5 years old, is believed to be seriously ill. According to The Local, the woman is described as Pakistani and traveled...

The impoverished Yazidi community survived ISIS genocidal attacks but has been targeted repeatedly by Turkey since 2017. Turkey again carried out a targeted assassination of Yazidi members of a far-left group in Sinjar in northern Iraq on Wednesday, according to local reports. It is one of several airstrikes Turkey has carried out in the area where members of the Yazidi minority live.  The impoverished Yazidi community survived ISIS genocidal attacks but have now been targeted repeatedly by Turkey since 2017, including a Turkish invasion of Afrin in 2018 that led to ethnic-cleansing of Yazidi villages and a Turkish attack with...

Riyad Dirar, the co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF, stressed that they are among those who are inviting but not invited to the Third Cairo Conference, because they are from the preparatory committee of it. He stressed Egypt's important role in the political solution in Syria and that it supports their position in facing "Turkish aggression" in the region. Dirar said in a statement to North-Press, that the Syrian Democratic Council is included in the preparatory committee for "Cairo 3" conference, and they are seeking to develop the road map...

Hardline conservative Chairman of Assembly of Experts Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati asserted that Kurdistan’s bid for independence from Iraq is an attempt to “disintegrate” and “create another Israel” in the region, speaking at a session of the Assembly of Experts of Leadership in Tehran, Tuesday. Jannati stressed that “today’s important issue about Kurdistan is the climate that they want to disintegrate there and create another Israel in this region.” He went on to call on the Assembly of Experts to “strongly stand up against them because this situation is the demand of the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel,” which he said...

An ISIS-obsessed Queens woman was sentenced Thursday to 15 years in prison — and threw herself a pity party in court for being “so stupid.” Asia Siddiqui has been locked up since her 2015 arrest for allegedly plotting with her ex-roommate Noelle Velentzas to set off explosives in New York. “I’ve beaten myself up over and over for being so stupid,” an emotionless Siddiqui, 35, told Judge Sterling Johnson in Brooklyn federal court, as family members looked on from the gallery. The twisted terrorist wannabe said her loneliness made her turn to writing poetry for the radical jihadist magazine Jihad...

An Iranian defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, told German police that Iran was involved in the September 11th attacks, the Chicago Tribune reported. Zakeri, 28, was providing testimony in the trial of accused plotter Abdel-Ghani Mzoudi, a Moroccan student who lived in Hamburg and was friends with three of the four suicide pilots. According to the defector, the attacks were an al-Qaida/Iranian joint venture, for which ultimate responsibility lay with a man named Saif al-Adel, a Hizbullah official in Iran. The testimony was greeted with pronounced skepticism by some German intelligence officials, saying that it "looks a little bit constructed."...

'The only difference between the government and Boko Haram is Boko Haram is holding a bomb,' Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah claimed The beheading of 10 Christians by Islamist militants in Nigeria has sparked a condemnation by a bishop who accuses the government of using different methods to achieve the same goal of Islamic dominance. In the wake of the Christmas Day attack by Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) and an attack by Boko Haram on Christmas Eve, Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto told Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need of his disgust with the authorities. He...

US Defense Secretary Mark Esper responded on Monday to reports that the US-led coalition to combat the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization has decided to withdraw from Iraq. "There has been no decision to leave Iraq. Period," he said. Earlier it was reported that the commander of Task Force Iraq had written a letter to the Iraqis informing them of the decision to withdraw. .....

American-led coalition forces have paused operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as officials brace for a strike by Iran. President Trump authorized a drone strike on Thursday that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, one of Iran’s highest-ranking and most powerful officials. Iran has vowed retaliation for the strike. Forces led by the United States in the region are now focused on preparing for a potential attack and have temporarily stopped pursuing ISIS targets. In a statement, the Combined Joint Task ForceOperation Inherent Resolve said, "Repeated rocket attacks over the last two months by elements of Kata'ib Hezbollah...

Obama's Benghazi in Baghdad How Obama's Iraq treason created ISIS and led to the attack on our embassy In Baghdad. Fri Jan 3, 2020 Daniel Greenfield 60 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. When Shiite members of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) attacked the American embassy in Baghdad, in a deliberate recreation of the attack on our embassy in Tehran that had ushered in a new age of Shiite terror, the media was quick to label it 'Trump's Benghazi'. The parallels are...

TThe rhetoric about the so-called “War on Terror” has led us down the wrong path for 20 years. Terrorism is a tactic. We are not at war with terror. Similarly, our fight is not against radical or extreme Islam. When it comes to the Middle East, particularly Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, it is imperative that we understand the true nature of the threat. We are fighting Islamic Fascism—the political idea in which state actors or nonstate actors are using Islam to rule people through the use of violence. This is not about Islam itself, but rather about belligerents hijacking...

I was readying a piece about Qasem Soleimani when I got the news: President Trump ordered a game-changing U.S. military attack that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force, among other military officials at Baghdad International Airport early Friday, the Pentagon confirmed.Soleimani is the military mastermind whom Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had deemed equally as dangerous as Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In October, Baghdadi killed himself during a U.S. raid on a compound in northwest Syria, seven months after the so-called ISIS "caliphate" crumbled as the terrorist group lost its final swath of Syrian territory in March. Justice has been served. Iran is outraged: Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted...

The best way to neutralize Iran is to have them overstretch. An older, forgotten grand strategy where adversaries bleed each other is in the Western interest. Here’s all one needs to know about what is happening in Iraq: As France 24 reported, “Iraqi security forces made no effort to stop the protesters as they marched to the heavily-fortified Green Zone after a funeral held for those killed in the US air strikes, letting them pass through a security checkpoint leading to the area.” Consider that for a moment, and let the anger surge through your veins.These are the same people...

Qassem Suleimani, the head of the elite Quds Force in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, fully deserves his reputation as one of the world’s leading terrorist masterminds. For a decade a more he has been the driving force behind an array of Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups, from Hizbollah to Hamas, which have orchestrated a reign of terror throughout the Middle East. From a purely British perspective, he was responsible for training and equipping the Shia militias in southern Iraq who killed scores of British troops during the dark days of Iraq’s sectarian conflict following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein,....... So you can imagine...

Chinese activity beyond its borders does not inherently threaten America. The twin narratives of Trump ‘abandoning’ the Middle East and any Chinese presence as a threat to America are false. While his critics claim the president “eyes the exits” from the Middle East, they excoriate him for “abdicating a strong U.S. role” in the region, which some claim is enabling China’s rise. This common characterization of Trump’s foreign policy may be worrisome, but it is also demonstrably wrong.Far from eyeing the exits, Trump continues a concerning trend of deepening U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. As important, Chinese activity...

Three years gone, thousands of lives lost, tens of billions in debt-funded spending, and we’re right back where we started, with a permanent entanglement in the longest war in U.S. history. President Trump plans to pull about 4,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan early in 2020, officials in his administration reported in mid-December, a partial withdrawal that would put American force levels in our longest war exactly where they were when Trump entered office. Three years gone, thousands of American and Afghan lives lost, tens of billions in debt-funded spending, and we’re right back where we started, with an apparently permanent...

KYIV—Ukraine arrested one of the world’s most dangerous international terrorists last month in a special operation conducted by local, Georgian and American special services. Al-Bara Shishani, the former commander of the so-called Islamic State and deputy head of its intelligence operations, was detained on the outskirts of Kyiv. Shishani had been presumed dead for more than a year, but was hiding here and plotting international terrorist attacks, according to Ukrainian authorities. In fact, this country torn by a Russian-backed separatist war has become a kind of Twilight Zone for terrorists of many stripes who have found ways to cross its...

A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday ordered the resentencing of a Staten Island, New York man for attempting to provide material support to Islamic State and kill an FBI agent, saying his 17-year prison term was “shockingly low.” The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said Fareed Mumuni’s trial judge abused her discretion in imposing a term that was 80% below the 85 years recommended by federal guidelines, and even below the 18-year term for co-defendant Munther Omar Saleh, who was not accused of attempted murder. In a 2-1 decision, the court said U.S. District Judge Margo...

ISIS-aligned jihadists have released a video claiming to show the execution of 11 blindfolded Christian men in Nigeria, in what analysts say was a barbaric act that was clearly timed to coincide with Christmas, according to reports.

After several years of deadly occupation by ISIS and Al-Qaeda the Christians in Aleppo, Syria were free to celebrate Christmas this year. Thousands of Christians flooded the city center to celebrate Christ’s birth today in Aleppo. Thousands of Syrians peacefully enjoying Christmas celebrations and festivities in the streets of #Aleppo, #Syria, free from Obama and Hillary’s Al-Qaeda “rebels”. Aleppo had the largest population of Christians in Syria prior to 2011. It was overtaken by jihadists in 2016 & since been liberated. #Christmas celebrations in the ancient city of #Aleppo, #Syria, are a beautiful sight to see. Thank God, Al-Qaeda &...