Free Republic

BAGHUZ, SYRIA/WASHINGTON — In eastern Syria, U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) say Islamic State is trying to slow the attack on the terror group's last scrap of territory in the town of Baghuz by using snipers, suicide bombers and civilians as human shields.A VOA cameraman traveling with Kurdish fighters spoke to several about what appears to be the final days of the battle. SDF officials said Monday the vast majority of civilians have already left Baghuz, but a small number are still trapped in the town by IS. "We don't have an estimate of how many civilians are still inside Baghuz,"...

As the nation speeds toward development of fully self-driving vehicles, here’s a speed bump to consider: Not only is hacking a “real threat,” but “autonomous vehicles provide an avenue for terrorism as well,” Congress was told on Tuesday. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) asked RAND Senior Information Scientist Nidhi Kalra, “How real is the threat of vehicle hacking” when it comes to autonomous vehicles. […] … “[A]utonomous vehicles provide an avenue for terrorism as well because there’s a way to use these vehicles to — you know — the threat is no longer sort of suicide bombers and — that blow...

Clerics Fear To Speak Out Against Them (headline continued) On August 2, 2016, in his column in the Saudi daily Al-Watan, Sattam Al-Muqrin criticized clerics who fear to speak out against suicide attacks, which he states are prohibited by Islamic law. According to Al-Muqrin, terrorist organizations use Islamic texts to brainwash youngsters and recruit them to carry out suicide attacks with the promise of reward in the afterlife. At the same time, clerics issue weak admonitions but otherwise do nothing to combat the phenomenon and do not ideologically confront these groups. The following are excerpts from his column:[1] {pic of...

A television network owned by Yemen's Shiite rebels says a total of 137 people were killed and 345 injured in quadruple suicide bombings that hit a pair of mosques controlled by the rebels in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. Al-Masirah TV raised the death toll on Friday hours after the attacks, making it the deadliest violence to hit the fragile war-torn country.

Mullah Omar, the one-eyed jihadi bandit, condemned an upcoming conference on suicide attacks. The spiritual leader of the Taliban added that his fighters will not lay down weapons until they achieve establishment of a real Islamic state.

Until a few years ago, the global map of Islamist suicide terrorism included a single tiny patch of territory: Israel. Since then, the map has expanded to include first Iraq, where suicide attacks have claimed thousands of lives, and then Afghanistan, where the Taliban use it as a war tactic. Then Pakistan, where suicide attacks have become part of daily life. Wednesday's suicide attack in Chabahar, the principal Iranian port on the Gulf of Oman, has shown that Iran, too, is now part of that sinister map. The double attack, which claimed at least 39 lives, wasn't the first of...

(CNN) -- An Iranian naval commander Monday said his forces are willing to carry out suicide missions when facing enemy forces in the Persian Gulf, according to Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency.

Robert A. Pape is professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of the forthcoming Cato Institute paper "Suicide Terrorism and Democracy: What We've Learned since 9/11." The attacks of September 11th, 2001 brought us face to face with the horror of suicide terrorism. In the years since, pundits have painted al Qaeda as a fearless enemy motivated by insatiable religious hatred. Amid prognostications of doom, we lost sight of the truth: that suicide terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy, and that beneath the religious rhetoric with which it is perpetrated, it occurs largely in...

A few days ago, I posted a translation of a document culled from the captured Iraqi documents that the US found during Operation Iraqi Freedom. This particular memo, dated March 17, 2001, comes from a brigadier general in the Iraqi Air Force and requests a list of volunteers from all units under his command for suicide attackers. The memo explicitly explains the targets for these terrorist attacks, as the original translation from Joseph Shahda shows: The top secret letter 2205 of the Military Branch of Al Qadisya on 4/3/2001 announced by the top secret letter 246 from the Command of...

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber wearing an explosives belt attacked a group of Iraqi men waiting for work in eastern Baghdad on Wednesday, killing at least eight and wounding more than 30, police said.

GAZA CITY : The armed wing of the radical Hamas movement on Wednesday called on its activists to carry out large-scale suicide attacks against Israel in retaliation for a major gunbattle which left 13 Palestinians dead and 35 injured. The sounds of the fierce battle reverberated throughout the city as dawn broke. Among the dead were Mohammed Hilles, 18, the son of Ahmed Hilles, the top leader of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction in Gaza . The family lives in the area. Four of those killed were armed. They included Hani Abu Skhaila, a senior Hamas activist who had survived an...

Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin has warned of "large-scale" suicide attacks if the international community, particularly the US, does not step in to resolve the long-running row over Kashmir. "If the international community, particularly the US, does not take steps to rescue us from India's state terrorism and there is no let-up in the killing of children, molestation of women, looting and arson of properties, the Hizbul Mujahideen will be compelled to shortly launch fidayeen (suicide) attacks," Salahuddin said. The Hizbul Mujahideen leader also supported the use of suicide attacks, terming them "legitimate under the mujahideen's code of conduct." Militants...

MULLAH Malang is waiting impatiently at his home in Pakistan, praying for his sick wife to die. The senior Taliban fighter says his presence is needed in southern Afghanistan, where a new model army of Islamic extremists is gathering following a renewed call to arms by their ousted leader Mullah Omar. Malang’s Taliban superiors have assigned him to help set up mobile training camps in the increasingly lawless border provinces. With their ranks routed and camps destroyed by American forces, the resurgent Taliban have taken to the road to train the next generation in a new style of warfare. Instructions...

RABAT, Morocco - Moroccan police arrested a French citizen Tuesday wanted in connection with the May suicide attacks in Casablanca that killed 31 bystanders. After a manhunt, Robert Richard Antoine Pierre was arrested in the northern city of Tangiers, where he had been living with his Moroccan wife, security officials said. Pierre, 28, is the first non-Moroccan implicated in the series of five nearly simultaneous bombings on May 16 that targeted Jewish and Spanish sites in Casablanca, Morocco's largest city, as well as a major hotel. Twelve attackers - all Moroccans - also died in the bombings. Dozens of Moroccans...

<p>The former stronghold of the militant Islamic group Ansar al-Islam looked like a ghost town yesterday, after die-hard fighters fled into a network of caves and bunkers in the rugged, mountainous terrain along the Iranian border.</p> <p>The militants were chased out Friday under heavy bombardment by US special forces troops and Kurdish soldiers. Fighting resumed at dusk yesterday amid reports US forces were under fire on a ridge above Sargat, another village held by the guerrillas.</p>

<p>A garden where patients at the Central Teaching Hospital for Children could once stroll is now a cemetery. Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press.</p> <p>BAGHDAD, Iraq - The battle for Baghdad cost the lives of at least 1,101 Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, according to records at the city's 19 largest hospitals.</p>

Suicide bomb attack came as unpleasant surprise FdL Marine hopes to regain use of leg, hand A Fond du Lac native injured by shrapnel in a suicide bombing near Baghdad will spend several weeks recuperating locally with his family. Cpl. Brian Wilcox, 23, who is with the First Marine Division based at Camp Pendleton, Calif., is hoping he’ll regain the use of his right leg and hand, which were among areas sprayed with bits of shrapnel when the suicide bomber’s device exploded. Wilcox is exercising his limbs while regaining his strength with rest and steady meals. “The (Iraqi) civilians were...

<p>United States Marine Lance Cpl. Jorge Lopez of Los Angeles leans on his crutches during an interview Wednesday, April 23, at Camp Pendleton, Calif.</p> <p>CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (AP) - Navy Corpsman Ted Bittle spent much of the war in Iraq working to save wounded Marines and Iraqi soldiers and civilians.</p>

AMERICAN military planners have been told to draw up options for possible retaliatory action against Hezbollah and other Middle Eastern terrorist groups in the event of suicide attacks on US forces in Iraq, according to official sources in Washington. Intelligence specialists have concluded that the greatest threat to US military bases in Iraq may come from groups operating out of Syria. Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, is expected to warn Damascus that Washington will no longer tolerate the use of Syrian-controlled territory as a “safe haven” for terror groups. US officials said last week they had already acquired...

US says five servicemen hurt in Iraq suicide attack AS SAYLIYA CAMP, Qatar, April 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Friday that five servicemen were wounded in a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad on Thursday eveningbut nobody was killed. "A vehicle approached a checkpoint and detonated and we had some Marines who were injured by that, four Marines and one medical corpsman as well,"Brigadier General Vincent Brooks told a news briefing at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar. Brooks said the explosion occurred in the vicinity of Saddam City, a sprawling slum inhabited mainly by Shi'ite Muslims in...