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Militant Islamist rebels in Syria linked to Al-Qaeda have asked for “understanding and forgiveness” for cutting off and putting on display the wrong man’s head. In a public appearance filmed and posted online, members of Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham, one brandishing a knife, held up a bearded head before a crowd in Aleppo. They triumphantly described the execution of what they said was a member of an Iraqi Shia militia fighting for President Bashar Al-Assad. But the head was recognised from the video as belonging to a member of Ahrar Al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist rebel group that often...

Lebanese militants have been streaming into Syria in recent months to help that government in its war with the rebels—and by all accounts, they’ve been making a difference in an ongoing and critical battle in eastern Syria. Desperate to slow that tide, Syrian rebels are trying a brutal new tactic to dissuade Hezbollah militants from crossing the border: They’re decapitating captured fighters and sending the heads back home to Lebanon, according to several reports and pictures posted on various sites. One Israeli Facebook page called “News In SOS” quoted and translated Syrian rebel sources late last month saying they sent...

Al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels continue to haunt the predominantly Christian town of Maaloula as regime fighters struggle to regain power there. Maaloula, about 35 miles northeast of Damascus, the capital, is nestled under a large cliff, the summit of which is controlled by the rebels. “Invisible” snipers continue to pepper the residents below. “We never see them, but we hear the shots fired by their Dragunovs,” the Russians’ favorite sniper rifle, said a soldier as he hid behind a wall, Agence France-Presse reported. ... al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels in Maaloula had forced at least one person to convert to Islam at gunpoint...

Nearly half the rebel fighters in Syria are now aligned to jihadist or hardline Islamist groups according to a new analysis of factions in the country's civil war.Opposition forces battling Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria now number around 100,000 fighters, but after more than two years of fighting they are fragmented into as many as 1,000 bands. The new study by IHS Jane's, a defence consultancy, estimates there are around 10,000 jihadists - who would include foreign fighters - fighting for powerful factions linked to al-Qaeda.. Another 30,000 to 35,000 are hardline Islamists who share much of the outlook of...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Al-Qaeda Vows to Slaughter Christians After U.S. ‘Liberates’ SyriaPosted By Raymond Ibrahim On September 5, 2013 @ 12:36 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 13 Comments While U.S. leaders continue pushing for war against the Syrian government, today “Al-Qaeda-linked rebels,”reports AP, “launched an assault on a regime-held Christian mountain village in the densely populated west of Syria and new clashes erupted near the capital, Damascus, on Wednesday…  In the attack on the village of Maaloula, rebels commandeered a mountaintop hotel and nearby caves and shelled the community below, said a nun, speaking by phone from...

Syrians inside the country say the revolution began with peaceful protests from the poor seeking reforms. The movement now brims with violent terrorist operatives aligned with Al Qaeda and Al-Nasra, including extremist fighters from Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq. The mainstream media portrays a false picture of the now-compromised Free Syrian Army. The extremist elements within are not just minority-affiliates. They win the battles, they have the ammunition and the food. They have slowly filled the power vaccuum and they do not fight for a freed Syria, but to establish an ultra-fundamentalist state. American taxpayers have fueled the Syrian Civil War...

Thousands of foreign terrorists traveled to Syria over the past several months to wage jihad, or holy war, in what U.S. officials say is fast becoming a new international terror training ground. Most of the foreign terrorists are fighting for the al Qaeda-linked group the al-Nusra Front and are coming from around the world, mainly from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya, and Tunisia, by crossing the Syrian border with Turkey. The al-Nusra Front is the most well organized and ideologically motivated armed opposition group after the secular Free Syrian Army. “The Syrian opposition is benefiting from a steady flow of foreign...

Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has issued a stern warning to the ringleader of al-Qaeda against the terrorist group’s further intervention in Syria. Sadr said Monday that Ayman al-Zawahiri needs to stay away from Syria’s affairs and allow Sunnis and Alawites to live peacefully in Syria as they always did. He condemned al-Qaeda’s killing of Muslims and said the group and its extremist ways have no place in Islamic nations.

David Cameron and US Secretary of State John Kerry secretly ganged up to persuade a nervous Barack Obama to back Britain’s bid to arm Syrian rebels, it was revealed last night. The Prime Minister and Mr Kerry’s diplomatic ambush of President Obama succeeded when they won his support for a showdown with Russia’s Vladimir Putin – a key ally of Syria’s President Assad – when Mr Cameron hosts a G8 summit in Northern Ireland tomorrow. Obama’s surprise U-turn came 24 hours after Foreign Secretary William Hague slipped into Washington almost completely unnoticed to meet Mr Kerry. In recent weeks, while...

Barack Hussein Obama Financially Supporting a Worldwide Christian Genocide of Women and Children Members of the Free Syrian Army reportedly attacked the Christian-dominated al-Duvair village in Reef on the outskirts of Homs on Monday, where they massacred its citizens, including women and children, before the Syrian Army loyal to Bashar al Assad intervened on behalf of the Christians. This reported attack comes shortly after intense fighting in the city of al-Qusseir over the weekend, in which Bashar Al-Assad’s forces inflicted heavy casualties on the rebels. Assad’s forces launched an offensive in April in an effort to cut off supply lines...

Up to 380,000 barrels of crude oil were previously produced by wells around the city of Raqqa and in the desert region to its east that are now in rebel hands - in particular Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda off-shoot which is the strongest faction in this part of the country. Now the violently anti-Western jihadist group, which has been steadily extending its control in the region, is selling the crude oil to local entrepreneurs, who use home-made refineries to produce low-grade petrol and other fuels for Syrians facing acute shortages.

Mr Kerry told the meeting in Istanbul that the US would provide Syrian rebels $123m in new, non-lethal aid. He said President Barack Obama was committed to a "democratic, unified, post-Assad Syria". More than 60,000 have died in the two-year uprising against Bashar al-Assad. Mr Kerry also announced that all aid from the 11 countries known as the Friends of Syria would now be channelled through the Turkey-based Free Syrian Army group headed by Gen Salim Idris. The meeting in Istanbul brought together the foreign ministers of countries opposing the government of President Assad. Mr Kerry said the meeting had...

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Western nations will suffer the consequences for what he said was their support for al Qaeda militants in his country's civil war. "The West has paid heavily for funding al Qaeda in its early stages in Afghanistan. Today it is supporting it in Syria, Libya and other places, and will pay a heavy price later in the heart of Europe and the United States," he told Syrian television channel al-Ikhbariya, according to extracts published on the Syrian presidency's Facebook page on Wednesday. Assad was speaking a week after Syria's rebel al-Nusra Front, one of the...

The United States criticised Syria at a security conference on Sunday for "giving safe haven to terrorists" attacking Iraq, weeks after a U.S. raid on Syria it said was targeting al Qaeda militants, delegates said.

Sky News said they had spoken to Syrian cabinet minister Amr Salem. "Syria has real hard knowledge," the channel quoted him as saying. A Sky News correspondent said the Syrians were offering to tell the US where many fundamentalists were. He said the channel was told specifically there were cells of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network in Lebanon, and Syria knew of their whereabouts. Since Syrian troops pulled out of Lebanon last year, the cells have grown, he said. "We know where they are and we can tell you," the correspondent said Sky News was told Syria was...

Jordan's King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al Qaeda bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," King Abdullah told the San Francisco Chronicle. Jordanian officials estimated that the death count could have been as high as 20,000 - seven times greater than the Sept. 11 attacks. Abdullah said that trucks containing 17.5 tons of...

September 24, 2003 Contact: (212) 481-1500 Attn: NEWS EDITOR SYRIA'S TIES TO AL QAEDA AND OTHER TERRORIST GROUPS I. Introduction Syria's links to terrorist groups have received widespread public attention in recent weeks. The New York Times revealed on September 24, 2003, that a U.S. Air Force translator has been indicted for providing Syria with information about the Guantanamo Bay prison for Al Qaeda terrorists, and a Muslim chaplain in the U.S. Army has been detained on similar charges. Undersecretary of State John Bolton, testifying before Congress on September 16, 2003, acknowledged that Syria "offers physical sanctuary and political protection...

An Ottawa telecommunications engineer who was deported to Syria by the United States last fall is about to be charged by Syrian officials with terrorist-related activity, leaving virtually no hope for his return to Canada.The pending charges are the latest development in the mysterious case of Maher Arar, who was arrested by U.S. immigration officials during a stopover at a New York airport last September while returning to Canada from a family visit overseas."This is very discouraging," said Ottawa-area MP Marlene Catterall, who saw Mr. Arar last week in Damascus. "The whole thing leaves me somewhat astonished."Ms. Catterall said...