Free Republic

Spanish police on Tuesday arrested a woman suspected of recruiting pre-teen girls and teenagers to send to areas controlled by the Islamic State armed group in Syria. An Interior Ministry statement said the woman, a Spaniard, was arrested in the city of Arrecife on the Canary Island of Lanzarote. Separately, the ministry said Civil Guard police arrested an Algerian-born man wanted on terrorism charges by Belgium, where he previously resided. The man, whose name was not released, is a suspected member of the Islamic State group and had fought in Syria. He was arrested in Barcelona airport while waiting for...

The Islamic State, or ISIS, has blown up on Monday an historic Christian church in Mosul known as the Mother of Aid. Saeed Mamuzini, media officer of the Mosul branch of the Kurdistan Democratic Party(PDK), told Rudaw the jihadists also killed four children who were near the church at the time of its destruction. Mamuzin said the church was located in central of Mosul dates back to thousands of years. Mosul fell in early June after the rapid capitulation by the Iraqi military, whose members reportedly abandoned their posts as the jihadists advanced. After one year of controlling Mosul, the...

The “moderates” are behaving a great deal like the “extremists.” No one who doesn’t buy the establishment line should be surprised, as the distinction between the two in Syria was always arbitrary.“Syrian Christians Face New Threat From Rebel Alliance,” by Alison Meuse and Deborah Amos, NPR, July 3, 2015: Syrian Christians face new threats from a rebel coalition that is fighting both the self-declared Islamic State and the regime.RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:Christians living through Syria’s civil war face a new threat as an Islamist rebel alliance surges in the country’s north. Today, in the heaviest fighting for months, the Islamist alliance...

Islamic State (IS) has beheaded two women in eastern Syria, the first time the jihadist group has decapitated female civilians, activists say. The women were killed along with their husbands in the city of Deir al-Zour and the town of al-Mayadeen, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported. All four were accused of sorcery.

The French man who beheaded his boss and tried to blow up a chemical plant had a "terrorist motive" and links to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) in Syria, despite his claim that he carried out his grisly act for purely personal reasons, a prosecutor said. "This corresponds very precisely to the orders of Daesh [Isil] which calls regularly for acts of terrorism on French soil and in particular to cut the throats of unbelievers,” said Paris chief prosecutor Francois Molins. "The decapitation recalls the habitual modus operandi of this terrorist organisation," he told reporters.

Twelve students including British, Canadian, Sudanese and U.S. citizens are feared to have travelled from Khartoum to Turkey to try to join the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) group, their university's dean told AFP Sunday. Another group of British students of Sudanese origin from the same private University of Medical Sciences and Technology travelled to Turkey in March and it is believed they crossed into Syria. "We confirmed reports from multiple parties that 12 medical students at the university left for Turkey on Friday," dean Dr Ahmed Babikir told AFP. Khartoum airport authorities confirmed the group had...

The Islamic State group, or ISIS, has executed 26 prisoners over the last week in the captured city of Fallujah, in the Anbar province, said an Iraqi security source. “ISIS militants have executed 20 prisoners in the town of Fallujah and its outskirts on charges of cooperation with security forces and spying on the group,” said the security source. He said those people executed were from the sub-districts of Nassaf, Garma and Saqlawi who had been arrested last year and imprisoned in Fallujah prison. According to the security source, ISIS has executed some 500 prisoners in the city since last...

The Islamic State terrorist army is snatching up the latest off-the-shelf encrypted applications to hide their military planning, with fighters publicly thanking former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for tipping them on U.S. spying tactics.The West’s fertile tech laboratories have unwittingly become the Islamic State’s research and development arm for free messaging software. It uses the apps to recruit followers, defeat the U.S.-led coalition and expand conquests in Iraq and Syria.The Islamic State’s mastery of secure communications is an especially important advance because its commanders do their attack planning — and then execution — via the Internet and smartphones....

For a head of state to visit the White House and not pose for photographers is rare. For a key ally to be left to his own devices while the President withdraws to have dinner in private was, until this week, unheard of. Yet that is how Binyamin Netanyahu was treated by President Obama on Tuesday night, according to Israeli reports on a trip seen in Jerusalem tonight as a disastrous humiliation. After failing to extract a written promise of concessions on Jewish settlements, Mr Obama walked out of his meeting with Mr Netanyahu but invited him to stay at...

Uproar in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has relieved Gen. Qassem Soleimani,the Al Qods Brigades chief and supreme commander of Iranian Middle East forces, of his Syria command after a series of war debacles. He was left in charge of Iran’s military and intelligence operations in Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. This is revealed by exclusive Iranian intelligence sources. Since Soleimani last visited Damascus on June 2, in the aftershock of the historic town of Palmyra’s fall to the Islamic State, the situation of President Bashar Assad and his army has gone from bad to worse. The Iranian general’s...

A document released in late May by pro-Muslim Brotherhood clerics incited the Egyptian population to “strive for the complete elimination” of their current government, according to a new report. Calling the military-backed government a “criminal and murderous regime,” the radical clerics said public figures associated with it should be put to death, in accordance with Sharia law. The document also demands the release of Morsi, who it refers to as the “legitimate elected president.” […] “According to the Sharia, it is the duty of the ummah—its leaders and its people—to oppose this regime and strive for its complete elimination by...

In Jerusalem flyers were spread throughout the old city claiming to be ISIS.The bulletin which had the ISIS logo demanded that all Christian Arabs must leave eastern Jerusalem by the end of Ramadan accused of being “Israeli collaborators”. ISIS also demanded that in the case the Christians refuse to leave that Muslims in eastern Jerusalem are mandated to kill all the Christians living there.Photo Credit: Islamic State / JerusalemAl-Quds (Jerusalem Newspaper), the main Arab newspaper there had posted a reply from Theodosios (Hanna) of Sebastia, the Archbishop from the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. In his reply the Archbishop condemned the...

Turkey has been accused of allowing Islamic State jihadists to cross its border to attack the Kurdish town of Kobane. Twin car bombs exploded close to the crossing point with the Turkish town of Mursitpinar, and Kurdish activists and residents claimed they had come across the border, despite its being heavily policed on the Turkish side. Convoys of cars carrying up to 40 Isil fighters - reportedly using the uniform of Kurdish YPG militia as a guise - then attacked Kobane from three sides in the early hours of Thursday morning. Kobane became an important symbol in the battle against...

Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) jihadists crucified two boys in Syria for “not fasting” in observance of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, reported U.K.-based monitor group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).“SOHR had been informed that [ISIS] ‘crucified’ 2 boys under the age of 18 on the wall of al- Hesbah office in al- Bo Kamal Street in the city of al- Mayadin [in Syria’s Deir Ezzor province], where IS militants hanged 2 signs on their neck that ‘not fasting in Ramadan,’” said the monitor group on Monday.Quoting al-Mayadin residents, the observatory’s founder Rami Abdel Rahman reportedly said the children’s bodies...

A 23 year-old Syrian woman and Islamic State defector now offers a chilling account of the treatment of female recruits by terror leaders. Using the alias “Um Asma” and fully covered by a niqab with only a slit for her eyes, the young woman told German press: “The caliphate is not what you think it is. Women are whipped, sold and stoned. Corpses are on display publicly for weeks,” reports Fox News. Before outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011, Asma says she led an ordinary life, listening to music, dancing and even hanging out with Christians. But after the...

The Islamic State's caliphate turns one year old on June 29, and few inside its domains, aside from the true believers who have traveled all over the world to live in the Islamic promised land, are likely to be celebrating. Like all totalitarian states, it has swiftly established for its citizens an environment of oppression and fear, supported (in a new twist) not by a personality cult centered upon the specter of a ubiquitous, all-seeing, all-knowing leader, but by the guilt-manipulation of religious duty. Obey the Islamic State's dictates, no matter how egregious, or else you'll not just be tortured...

A family of five from Sakhnin is feared to have joined Islamic State in Syria, as efforts continue to track down their whereabouts. The couple and their three children, the youngest of whom is 18 months old, first traveled to Turkey and before attempting to enter Syria, according to the report by Israel Radio on Monday. Since that point, all contact with the family has been lost. Only several days prior, the family traveled to Romania to attend the graduation of a relative living there. There are suspicions that they were influenced during that trip.

It has been almost a year since June 29, 2014, when the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) declared the formation of a new caliphate and dropped the second half of its name, rebranding itself as simply the Islamic State. It has survived nine months since Barack Obama vowed to “degrade and ultimately destroy” it.It has survived, and has continued to attract Muslims from all over the world, even after virtually every major world leader and Islamic group has condemned it as un-Islamic. And it shows no sign of going anywhere anytime soon.All this is well-known. What is...

Three men from London, including a former British boxing champion, planned to travel to Syria to fight with Islamic State (IS), a court has heard. Ex-boxer Anthony Small, 33, is accused of trying to go to Syria after spreading terrorist material online. He was arrested after two other men - Michael Coe and Simon Keeler, both 34 - were found with false documents in the back of a lorry at Dover last year. All three defendants deny the charges against them. They are all charged with engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts.

The New York Police Department is working to recruit more Muslims, and is asking for help within the community to better refine outreach aimed at stifling the lure of overseas terror groups, officials said Monday. Right now, there are about 800 Muslim uniformed police officers out of about 35,000, according to the NYPD Muslim Officers Society. Of those, only about 20 are higher ranked officials. Lt. Adeel Rana, commanding officer of the community affairs immigration outreach unit, said there has been a slow increase over the past decade, but it has been rapidly changing in the past year and a...