Free Republic

As soon as legendary journalist Sy Hersh's controversial story on the Osama bin Laden raid was published Sunday night, critics pounced and skeptics ripped his account because of its reliance on anonymous sourcing and its lack of documentary evidence. Now a respected New York Times foreign correspondent, who was based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, writes about a key detail "in Seymour Hersh's Bin Laden story that rings true." Carlotta Gall writes that she also learned from sources that Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI, had kept bin Laden prisoner since 2006 and that the CIA learned about his location from a Pakistani...

Racing down a road with his men in pursuit of retreating Russian soldiers, a battalion commander came across an abandoned Russian armored vehicle, its engine still running. Inside there was a sniper rifle, rocket propelled grenades, helmets and belongings. The men were gone. “They dropped everything: personal care, helmets,” said the commander, who uses the code name Swat. “I think it was a special unit, but they were panicking. It was raining very hard, the road was bad and they drop everything and move.” After months of static fighting and holding the line under withering Russian artillery barrages, Ukrainian soldiers...

It was supposed to be the bright spot in a grim day. Of a dozen unclaimed bodies set for burial recently at Bucha City Cemetery, one had just been identified. The dead man’s family was present and would be able to bury him with full ceremony. His grave would be marked with his name instead of just a number. But there was a hitch. No one could find the body. (snip)When Russian troops retreated at the end of March from the region around Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, they left behind a trail of more than 1,200 bodies. At least 458 dead...

Turkey is working to negotiate an exit for the wounded Ukrainian soldiers sheltering in the bunkers of a steel plant in the port city of Mariupol, but its efforts have been complicated by the fluidity of the fighting on the ground and because neither Russia nor Ukraine has given clearance for the plan, Turkey’s presidential spokesman said Saturday. In an unusually candid interview by teleconference call from Istanbul, the spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, said Turkey had been talking to Ukraine and Russia, trying to find an agreement even as both sides kept changing their positions. “It really depends how the Russians...

ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party on Sunday was facing defeat in local elections in the Turkish capital, Ankara, and possibly even Istanbul, its largest city, a result that shook the nation as Mr. Erdogan suffered the first major electoral setback of his decade and a half in power.The municipal balloting around the country came nine months after national elections that extended Mr. Erdogan’s hold on power. It was closely watched as a barometer of his standing with voters after Turkey’s economy fell into recession and he assumed sweeping new executive powers.Mr. Erdogan claimed victory over all in the...

WASHINGTON — The White House sent out a message aimed at mollifying Turkey’s president on Tuesday, suggesting that the United States was easing off its support for the Syrian Kurds. That message was quickly contradicted by the Pentagon, which said it would continue to stand by the Kurds, even as Turkey invaded their stronghold in northwestern Syria. The conflicting statements appeared to reflect an effort by the administration to balance competing pressures. Turkey, which has been furious over American support for the Kurds, is a NATO ally, while the Kurds have been critical American partners in the war against the...

What if the United States has been waging the wrong war against the wrong enemy for the last 13 years in Afghanistan? Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, who's spent more than a decade covering Afghanistan since 2001, concludes just that in her new book, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014.

Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. Colleagues at The Times began questioning officials in Washington about which high-ranking officials in Pakistan might also have been aware of Bin Laden’s whereabouts, but everyone suddenly clammed up. It was as if a decision had been made to contain the damage to the relationship between the two governments. “There’s no smoking gun,” officials in the Obama administration began to say. America’s...

New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall tells ABC News she was assaulted by plain-clothed government security agents while reporting in Quetta, a Pakistani city near the Afghan frontier where NATO suspects the Taliban hides its shadow government. Akhtar Soomro, a freelance Pakistani photographer working with Gall, was detained for five-and-a-half hours. According to Gall, the agents broke down the door to her hotel room, after she refused to let them enter, and began to seize her notebooks and laptop. When she tried to stop them, she says one of the men punched her twice in the face and head. "I...