Free Republic

Russia has increased the number of daily airstrikes in Syria several times as it coordinates them with the Syrian army's offensive. Over the past week, Russia destroyed 363 ISIL installations, as the Syrian army continues offensives around the country to combat terrorist groups. Russia's presence in Syria led to a change in the focus of the US-led coalition's strikes against ISIL. The US continues minor airstrikes in Syria, generally using drones and striking near the Iraqi and Turkish borders. However, the drone use has created issues of air control, as Russian aircraft are often forced to fly in close proximity...

Qatar, a major supporter of rebels in Syria’s civil war, suggested it could intervene militarily following Russia’s intervention in support of President Bashar al-Assad but said it still preferred a political solution to the crisis. The comments by Qatar’s foreign minister, made in a CNN interview on Wednesday, drew a swift reply from Assad’s government with a senior official warning that Damascus would respond harshly to such “direct aggression”. Gulf Arab backers of Syrian rebels such as Qatar have been unsettled by Russia’s three-week-old air strike campaign that has allowed Assad’s forces to wrest back some territory to help secure...

Turkey is ready to accept a political transition in Syria in which President Bashar al-Assad stays in symbolic power for six months before leaving office, and is discussing the plan with Western allies, two senior government officials said on Tuesday. NATO member Turkey has long been one of Assad’s fiercest critics, insisting that no lasting peace can be achieved in Syria without his removal from power. “Work on a plan for Assad’s departure is under way ... (Assad) can stay for six months and we accept that because there will be a guarantee of his departure,” one of the officials...

RUSSIA’S power play in Syria appears to be paying off with the superpower making inroads against Islamic State and other extremist groups, leaving its American rivals looking ineffective and highlighting US failures in the region. When Russia decided to involve itself in the war in Syria, American officials accused it of “pouring gasoline on the fire” in Syria and being “unprofessional” for only giving the US an hour’s notice of its intention to launch air strikes. But just weeks later, Russia’s provocative move seems to be paying off. Professor Clive Williams of Macquarie University’s Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter...

Rebels battling the Syrian army and its allies near Aleppo said on Monday they had received new supplies of U.S.-made anti-tank missiles from states opposed to President Bashar al-Assad since the start of a major government offensive last week. The rebels from three Free Syrian Army-affiliated groups contacted by Reuters said new supplies had arrived in response to the attack by the army, which is backed up by Russian air strikes and on the ground by Iranian fighters and Lebanon's Hezbollah. The "Free Syrian Army" refers to a loose affiliation of groups fighting Assad that do not operate with a...

It’s hard to determine which is more surprising: the British aching to send troops and materiel to aid the Confederacy during the Civil War or that the first “Special Relationship” was between the U.S. and Russia against the British. Both of these facts are true and for the latter negating the former, we can thank one Cassius Marcellus Clay. Clay was more than just a namesake for the greatest boxer of all time. He was also a politician, representative, officer in the Mexican War and Civil War, abolitionist, and ambassador with a pedigree in badassery. This man once frightened an...

U.S. military cargo planes gave 50 tons of ammunition to rebel groups overnight in northern Syria, using an air drop of 112 pallets as the first step in the Obama Administration's urgent effort to find new ways to support those groups. Details of the air mission over Syria were confirmed by a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly because the details have not yet been formally announced.

On the summit of Stone Mountain, yards away from where Ku Klux Klansmen once burned giant crosses, just above and beyond the behemoth carving of three Confederate heroes, state authorities have agreed to erect a monument to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Specifically, an elevated tower — featuring a replica of the Liberty Bell — would celebrate the single line in the civil rights martyr’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech that makes reference to the 825-foot-tall hunk of granite: “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.” (snip) Gov. Nathan Deal has green-lighted the projects, and a formal...

On a warm day in August, a couple dozen people gathered for an afternoon picnic at Shawnee Mission Park. Under the shade of a shelter surrounded by leafy green trees, two men cooked burgers and brats on a charcoal grill next to a row of tables topped with red plastic tablecloths and a summery spread of sliced watermelon, barbecue-flavored potato chips and sopapilla cheesecake. The weather would have been perfect if not for occasional gusts of wind that whipped through the grove and threatened to topple the three flags fixed to portable poles next to the dessert table: an American...

Over the last 48 hours, the Russian Air Force has targeted the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) with relentless airstrikes above the provincial capital of the Al-Raqqa Governorate and the terrorist group’s stronghold inside the Deir Hafer Plains in the Aleppo Governorate’s eastern countryside. On Sunday morning, the Russian Air Force struck ISIS again with a flurry of airstrikes above the Tabaqa Military Airport and the Tabaqa National Hospital, destroying another weapons depot belonging to the terrorist located inside the storage facility that is situated to the north of the military barracks. Meanwhile, to the east of the...

Although the American Revolution resulted in independence for the United States and World War II made it an international power, the American Civil War was arguably the most important war in American history. It truly was an American watershed. In order to appreciate that war’s significance, it must be understood what the Civil War was about. Contrary to all-too-popular opinion, the Civil War was not about states’ rights. Instead it was all about slavery and white supremacy. As shown in my just-released book, The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North...

Turkey will not allow "terror to take root" or "fait accompli situations" next to its borders, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday, in an apparent reference to Russian air strikes in neighboring Syria. Erdogan made the comment in a parliamentary speech in Ankara. The Russian air force began air strikes in Syria on Wednesday, targeting areas near the cities of Homs and Hama in the west of the country, where President Bashar al-Assad's forces are fighting a number of insurgent groups, though not Islamic State, which is based mostly in the north and east.

Hundreds of Iranian troops have arrived in Syria in the last 10 days and will soon join government forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies in a major ground offensive backed by Russian air strikes, two Lebanese sources told Reuters. "The (Russian) air strikes will in the near future be accompanied by ground advances by the Syrian army and its allies," said one of the sources familiar with political and military developments in the conflict. "It is possible that the coming land operations will be focused in the Idlib and Hama countryside," the source added. The two sources said the operation...

The recent arrival of the Russian military advisors has found the Syrian Arab Air Force (SAAF) specifically concentrated on the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham’s (ISIS) positions in the eastern Syrian provinces of Deir Ezzor, Al-Hasakah, Homs, and Al-Raqqa. On Wednesday morning, the Syrian Air Force launched a series of airstrikes above the Al-Raqqa Governorate that targeted ISIS’ supply route from the aforementioned province to the Deir Ezzor Governorate; this supply route is considered ISIS’ lifeline in both Iraq and Syria due to the long highway that stretches from Al-Raqqa to the Iraqi Al-‘Anbar Governorate. The specific locations the...

A team of marine archaeologists last week recovered a 9,000 pound cannon from the CSS Georgia, a Civil War ironside that has rested at the bottom of the Savannah River since 1864. The Dahlgren rifled cannon was previously undiscovered by several high-tech, multibeam sonar surveys, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wrote in a press release. The ship must be moved for a $700 million project to deepen the river to proceed.

This past weekend, the Russian Air Force was given full access to the Hmaymat Military Airbase inside the Latakia Governorate’s western countryside after the Syrian Arab Army’s Central Command approved the Russian Navy’s recent delivery of Sukhoi fighter jets through the Syrian port-city of Tartous. The Hmaymat Military Airbase is located inside the Bassel Al-Assad International Airport, which sits just east of the densely populated coastal city of Jableh in western Latakia. With full access to the Hmaymat Military Airbase’s airfields, the Russian Air Force possesses a temporary airbase to begin their aerial operations above the Islamic State of Iraq...

The Civil War began over a simple question: Did the Constitution of the United States recognize slavery — property in humans — in national law? Southern slaveholders, inspired by Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, charged that it did and that the Constitution was proslavery; Northern Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, and joined by abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, resolutely denied it. After Lincoln’s election to the presidency, 11 Southern states seceded to protect what the South Carolina secessionists called their constitutional “right of property in slaves.” The war settled this central question on the side of Lincoln and Douglass....

43% of Republicans could imagine supporting a military coup in the United States. A law professor at West Point was forced to hastily resign after it emerged that he had authored a number of controversial articles. In one he suggested that legal scholars defending the rights of suspected terrorists could be considered legitimate military targets, while in another he examined a potential military coup in the United States, arguing that officers may have a duty to sieze control of the federal government if the federal government acted against the interest of the country. The United States military has long...

The California Legislature on Tuesday sent the governor a measure that would bar the naming of public buildings, including schools, after Confederate leaders from the Civil War. Sen. Steve Glazer (D-Orinda) said the bill "shines the light" on the practice of naming buildings in a way "where we are celebrating traitorous leaders" who "attempted to break our nation in two to continue to enslave black people." His bill would affect two schools named after Gen. Robert E. Lee, one in Long Beach and the other in San Diego. Senate passed the bill, SB 539, by a 31-2 vote, with two...

While the tweeted images have no landmarks on the ground as reference points, the Iranian state-sponsored FARS news agency released a report that Syrian aircraft bombed opposition forces in Idlib, including al-Nusra fighters on Wednesday. The possible sighting of Russian aircraft in Syrian skies comes just two days after the Jerusalem-based newspaper YNET released a report indicating that Russian pilots and aircraft would be arriving in Syria in “the coming days” with the purported mission of flying airstrikes against the Islamic State and opposition forces that are threatening the Assad regime.