Free Republic

CAIRO — Homemade bombs built from pressure cookers, a version of which was used in the Boston Marathon bombings, have been a frequent weapon of militants in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. Al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen once published an online manual on how to make one, urging “lone jihadis” to act on their own to carry out attacks. President Barack Obama underlined Tuesday that investigators do not know if the twin bombing the day before that killed three people and wounded more than 170 was carried out by an international organization, a domestic group or a “malevolent individual.” There has been...

Nobody would like to know the answer to that more than the French. But they must keep the Afghanistan example in mind Those days are over,” said France’s President Francois Hollande last month, when asked if French forces would intervene in the war between Islamist insurgents who have seized the northern half of Mali and the Government in Bamako. But the days in question weren't over for very long. Last Friday France sent a squadron of fighter-bombers to the West African country to stop the Islamist fighters from taking over the capital. “We are making air raids the whole time”,...

A senior leader was killed in a Thursday drone strike, intelligence officials say Three militants were killed Sunday, officials say Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- A senior al Qaeda leader was killed in a drone strike Thursday in Pakistan, two of the country's intelligence officials told CNN on Sunday. Sheikh Khalid bin Abdel Rehman, who also went by the code name Abu Zaid al-Kuwaiti, was killed in the strike near Miran Shah in North Waziristan, one of the seven districts of Pakistan's tribal region bordering Afghanistan, the officials said.

A radical Islamic group has applied for a permit to build one of the largest mosques in the world, in London. The East London super-mosque, known as the Abbey Mills Riverine Center, would hold up to 10,000 worshippers. It would be the largest religious building in Britain and the largest mosque in Europe. By comparison, Britain's largest cathedral, the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool, can hold no more than 3,000 worshippers, and St. Paul's Cathedral, one of the iconic features of the London skyline, has a capacity of 2,500. The 16-acre site near the Olympic Village in West Ham in the...

It has taken more than four weeks, but the facts of the assault on the American consulate in Benghazi are slowly emerging. It is now known that on the evening of September 11, 2012, Ambassador Christopher Stevens conducted a scheduled meeting with a Turkish diplomat. At approximately 8:30 PM, the ambassador saw his visitor out the gate. There were no protesters in front of the consulate then, nor did any of the survivors of the attack report the presence of demonstrators prior to the initial assault. Videotapes recovered from the compound show, at least partially, what happened. At 9:40 PM,...

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton indicated for the first time on Wednesday that there was an explicit link between the Qaeda franchise in North Africa and the attack at the American diplomatic mission in Libya that killed four Americans, including the ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens.

Pakistan's new hate list By Ashok K. Mehta Editorial The Pioneer Wednesday, July 4, 2012 A recent Pew poll has shown that despite the best of efforts, the US is still widely reviled in Pakistan. India is the next most despised. Pakistanis are becoming lyrical about their relations with the US which are on their lowest note ever. They hum two songs: Money Can't Buy You Love; and Who's Sorry Now, referring to their troubled transactional ties including the ongoing dead-locked cost of transportation of logistics to Afghanistan; and the US attack on a Pakistani frontier post. Pakistan is demanding...

A top al Qaeda leader and longtime Osama Bin Laden confidant with a $1 million price tag on his head was targeted in a U.S. drone strike this morning in Pakistan, according to a senior U.S. official. Pakistan officials say that Abu Yahya al-Libi, second-in-command to current al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, was among the 15 people killed when a U.S. drone fired four missiles into a suspected militant hideout in Mir Ali, a town in North Waziristan, at 5:30 a.m. local time Monday. The senior U.S. official confirmed to ABC News that al-Libi was the target of a strike,...

Air strikes have killed 24 Al-Qaeda suspects in their strongholds in the country's south and east, the defence ministry and a tribal chief said on Sunday. A Yemeni air raid late on Saturday killed "16 terrorists belonging to Al-Qaeda network in Kud near Zinjibar," the extremists' stronghold in the south, the defence ministry news website 26sep.net reported. Meanwhile, a tribal chief told AFP a US drone killed eight Al-Qaeda suspects when it fired a missile at their vehicle in the eastern province of Shabwa on Saturday, a tribal chief told AFP. "Al-Qaeda militants were aboard a vehicle on their way...

Warren Weinstein, pictured above, is a 70-year-old Jewish American and former USAID worker who was kidnapped from his bed late August in Pakistan. Now, a newly released audio message from al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri claims responsibility for Weinstein’s disappearance and says the militant Islamist group is holding the man hostage. This supports a U.S. official’s claim that ”it’s entirely possible that al Qaeda or one of its militant allies may be holding Mr. Weinstein.” In the 30-minute long statement, which is reportedly circulating on jihadi-websites, al-Zawahiri states: “I tell the captive soldiers of al Qaeda and the Taliban and...

LONDON — Abu Sohaib spends most of his time online these days, following the news from his native Libya. He is in constant contact with friends on the ground there, helping them map out strategy to fight the rule of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. “I would like to be there myself; I tried to go,” he said, pausing to look at the car keys in front of him. “But Tunisia and Egypt wouldn’t let me in even after their revolution.” Abu Sohaib, his nom de guerre, is on a watch list for suspected terrorists not only in Libya and its neighboring...

CBS News has learned that a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in June killed senior al Qaeda commander Ilyas Kashmiri. Kashmiri was believed to be a key planner of the Mumbai Terror attacks in 2008 and, according to sources, was involved in planning terror strikes in Europe last fall, which led to alerts across the continent. Most recently, Kashmiri was al Qaeda's military operations chief in Pakistan, and was suspected of plotting attacks against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to Kashmiri.

Rarely does the world have a chance to experience the just death of a villain. Once, executions were commonplace – the killer, bank robber, or horse-thief would be tried, sentenced, and publicly hanged, shot, or guillotined. Governments thought of it as justice – an eye for an eye, as Hamurabi would say – and as a necessary warning to other potential criminals that, yes, villains do get caught and punished. But over the years, society softened – photos and videos humanized the villains while their victims were forgotten with the passage of time, and many in the west seemingly lost...

Terrorists are plotting deadly Christmas attacks in what could make for holiday travel chaos. Iraqi authorities have obtained confessions from captured insurgents who claim Al Qaeda is planning suicide attacks in the United States and Europe during the holiday season. Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani said that the botched bombing in central Stockholm last weekend was among the alleged plots the insurgents revealed.

(CNN) -- A senior U.S. law enforcement official has told CNN that U.S. intelligence believes the principal author of the new online al Qaeda magazine is an American citizen who left for Yemen in October 2009. The magazine -- called "Inspire" -- appeared last week. Running to nearly 70 pages online, it included articles on bomb-making and encrypting electronic messages, as well as an interview with fugitive Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al Awlaki.

In an interview earlier today with the South African Broadcasting Corporation to air in a few hours, President Obama disparaged al Qaeda and affiliated groups' willingness to kill Africans in a manner that White House aides say was an argument that the terrorist groups are racist. Speaking about the Uganda bombings, the president said, "What you've seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself. They see it as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill...

It's called Jihad Recollections and is a production of Charlotte, NC al Qaeda supporter Samir Khan's self-styled jihad media company, as-Fursan. You can download a PDF version at the links provided by Sammy here. The magazine is 70 pages of the same kind of garbage that you'd expect from al Qaeda itself, and certainly not from an American living in North Carolina. It seems to be imitating several other jihad magazines, which started with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's Voice of Jihad. In addition to links to al Qaeda produced videos all within a clear context of support (note...

Al-Qaida operatives who have been detained for years in Iran have been making their way quietly in and out of the country, raising the prospect that Iran is loosening its grip on the terror group so it can replenish its ranks, former and current U.S. intelligence officials say. This movement could indicate that Iran is re-examining its murky relationship with al-Qaida at a time when the U.S. is stepping up drone attacks in Pakistan and weakening the group's leadership. Any influx of manpower could hand al-Qaida a boost in morale and expertise and threaten to disrupt stability in the region.

Two United States citizens residing in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been arrested and charged with trying to aid Al Qaeda terrorists. According to the indictment obtained by CBS News, the men, Wesam El-Hanafi, 33, and Sabirhan Hasanoff, 34, are charged with one count of "conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization." The charge carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

In fact, terrorists have not pulled off another attack on the scale of 9/11 anywhere in the world. A 2007 study by Canada's Simon Fraser University found the global death toll from terrorist attacks has substantially decreased since 2001. While al-Qaeda plots do sometimes succeed--like the double-agent operation that killed seven CIA officers in Afghanistan last month--they have become, Rand terrorism expert Brian Jenkins points out, less frequent and less potent.