Free Republic

PARIS (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday there was no discrepancy between the United States and Turkey with regard to what Ankara “will or won’t do” in the fight against Islamic State insurgents. Speaking at a news conference in Paris after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Kerry insisted that Turkey was a “valued member” of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, which has taken over swathes of Iraq and Syria, and said Ankara would define its role “on its own timetable.” Kerry spoke after Turkey on Monday denied an assertion over the weekend...

SURUC Turkey (Reuters) - With medical supplies depleted in the war-ravaged north Syrian town of Kobani, Kurdish activist Blesa Omar rushed three comrades wounded in battle against Islamic State fighters straight to the border to dispatch them to a Turkish hospital. He said he spent the next four hours watching them die, one by one, from what he thinks were treatable shrapnel wounds as Turkish border guards refused to let them through the frontier. "To me it is clear they died because they waited so long. If they had received help, even up to one hour before their deaths, they...

War against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq threatened on Tuesday to unravel the delicate peace in neighbouring Turkey after the Turkish air force bombed Kurdish fighters furious over Ankara's refusal to help protect their kin in Syria. Turkey's banned PKK Kurdish militant group accused Ankara of violating a two-year-old cease-fire with the air strikes, on the eve of a deadline set by the group's jailed leader to salvage a peace process aimed at halting a three-decades-long insurgency. At least 35 people were killed in riots last week when members of Turkey's 15-million-strong Kurdish minority rose up in anger...

<p>Disturbing new photos of ethnic Kurds killed by Islamic State fighters are stoking fears the terrorist army may be using chemical weapons seized from Saddam Hussein’s old arsenals, according to a Middle East watchdog.</p> <p>The pictures, obtained by the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA), show the bodies of Syrian Kurds who appear to have been gassed by ISIS in the besieged Kobani region this July. That fighting came just one month after Islamic State forces surged through the once-notorious Muthanna compound in Iraq, the massive base where Hussein began producing chemical weapons in the 1980s, which he used to kill thousands of Kurds in Halabja in northern Iraq in 1988.</p>

Kurdish health officials and activists in the besieged town of Kobani claim to possess evidence that Islamic State operatives have used chemical agents as a weapon on at least one occasion during clashes with Kurdish fighters along Syria’s northern border. According to several reports, which were compiled by the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center’s Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, the use of the toxins by the Islamic State took place on July 12 in the village of Avdiko, 10 days after the rogue Jihadi group launched an offensive on the Kobani enclave, near the Turkish border. Nisan Ahmed, the health...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A secret decision apparently has been made by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and even Iran to let the strategic Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani on the Turkish-Syrian border fall to ISIS fighters, jeopardizing the lives of some 160,000 Syrian Kurds, WND has been told by a well-placed Middle East expert. In letting Kobani fall to ISIS, the source said, there was agreement “to deal with ISIS later.” The apparent decision aims to diminish the influence of the Kurds in Syria and weaken the prospect of creating a sovereign Kurdistan, which is sought by the Kurds...

Republicans Are Pressing the ISIS Fear Button Hard for Midterm Votes Jihadis pouring across the border. Obama powerless to respond to the chaos. Democrats out to lunch. That’s the picture GOP campaigns and political groups are painting—and it’s working . As the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria flails, Republican congressional candidates and political action groups are spending at breakneck speeds to attach the calamity to Democratic incumbents in vulnerable seats, and the worse it gets overseas, the worse it gets for those Democrats.

In his last speech at the Assembly of Experts on September 4, mullahs’ Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared that the way forward for his regime is to ramp up its “eqtedar” [might]. In the regime's lexicon, “eqtedar” is achieved by one of two ways. One is to expand regional influence through the export of terrorism, officially described as “export of revolution.” It is this policy that has led to the establishment of Lebanese Hezbollah, propped up the Assad regime, and most recently contributed to the rise of Islamic State. The other is development of nuclear weapons to obtain international leverage....

A drop in global oil prices, driven in part by a boom in U.S. shale oil production, is threatening to hit the economies of energy-exporting Russia and Iran harder than Western economic sanctions have done.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “Iran is a natural ally” of the U.S. “As long as Iran is ruled by the ayatollah and bases itself on its sectarian philosophy, we have to be careful. But basically, as a country, Iran is a natural ally of the United States. It’s the ideological, religious component that makes it an antagonist,” said Kissinger, who served as Secretary of State for the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. …

According to a senior diplomatic source in Jerusalem, the chances of a deal being reached on Iran’s nuclear program between it and world powers before the November 24 deadline are slim—but US President Barack Obama is liable to flex on several points, including the deadline. “When there’s a will on the part of both leaders everything is possible, but Israel needs to stand guard so that a bad deal won’t be made,” the source told Walla!, warning against a deal that will leave the Islamic regime with thousands of centrifuges and breakout capability to quickly create a nuclear bomb. The...

On the October 12 broadcast of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition, host Ari Shapiro discussed Iran's appeal as a tourist destination with Iranian-born, U.K.-based writer Kamin Mohammadi. While Mohammadi is no regime puppet--she was vocal in her opposition to the 2009 crackdown--her Twitter feed is lately full of anti-Israel rhetoric and government retweets, and she did her best to put an absurdly positive spin on Iran for NPR. Mohammadi praises Iran's history, beauty, and culture, pointing out that parts of the country are quite modern, and that those coexist with artifacts of ancient civilizations. All true--and irrelevant to the question...

Parallels between the current negotiations with Iran over nukes and those with North Korea and China over the end of the U.S. - U.N. “police action” in Korea should be considered in evaluating the former. That is the purpose of this article.Among the conclusions to be drawn is that Obama's America and the rest of the "international community" are heading down a foolishly misguided path in nuke negotiations with Iran. The path is likely to lead to results more inconclusive and substantially worse than did negotiations to end the Korean Conflict. Korea negotiationsNegotiations looking to the end of the Korean conflict began on July 10, 1951 at Kaesong, a...

BEIRUT, March 5th (Reuters) - Syria has been under intense pressure to relinquish its political and military grip on Lebanon and on President Bashar al-Assad announced a gradual Syrian troop pull back from Lebanon. Here is a factbox on Lebanese-Syrian relations. DRAWING BORDERS Britain and France carved out modern-day Syria and Lebanon from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after World War One, in a division never fully recognised by some Arab nationalists in both countries. The French aimed to create a state led by Christians previously under Muslim rule but expanded its borders in 1920 to include many...

Defense Minister Ehud Barak has done it again. Speaking on Wednesday at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Barak warned that if Israel can't cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, it should consider surrendering Judea and Samaria in exchange for nothing. Even the diehard leftists in the media had a hard time swallowing his words. After all, when Barak was premier, he oversaw Israel's unilateral surrender of south Lebanon in 2000. Barak promised that by giving Hezbollah south Lebanon, Israel would force the Iranian proxy army to disarm and behave like a Western political party. Whoopsie....

Lowry: The CIA's record leading up to Sept. 11 was one of failure By Rich Lowry Article Last Updated: 08/25/2007 09:07:06 AM MDT The new report from the CIA's inspector general about the spy agency's pre-9/11 failings could be titled, ''What We Did During Our Holiday From History.'' The stretch between the end of the Cold War and the Sept. 11 attacks was supposed to be a shiny new era of globalized peace and prosperity, to which an intelligence service was considered quaintly irrelevant. The CIA conformed to the zeitgeist by remaining quaintly irrelevant. George Tenet presided over the agency,...

The satellite image shows large pink tarpaulins pulled across two buildings. Close by, it appears that topsoil has been moved and a security fence taken down. The image, taken earlier this week and provided to CNN by DigitalGlobe, is of an Iranian military facility at Parchin, one widely suspected by Western diplomats as a secret part of the country’s nuclear program. It’s one of several developments on Iran’s nuclear program that worry experts - others being: the failure of another round of talks between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iranian officials; reports that Iran has increased the number...

A study by a Washington think tank that closely follows the Iranian nuclear program, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), concludes that Iran could have tested a nuclear trigger in a device at the disputed Iranian site of Parchin. AOL Defense obtained a copy of the draft report. The Iranian military testing ground of Parchin has emerged as the front line in the continuing struggles between the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Iran. Iran has refused to let inspectors from the IAEA visit the site, some 30 kilometers southeast of Tehran, where they suspect...

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Yukiya Amano declared Friday, May 4, that “Parchin (the suspected site of nuclear-related explosion tests) is the priority and we start with that,” he may have missed the boat. As he spoke, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak said it was possible that Iran was already putting in place the infrastructure for building a nuclear bomb in 60 days. In this regard, debkafile’s military sources disclose that Iran had by the end of 2009 early 2012 completed the construction of a new chain of underground facilities deep inside the Dasht e-Kavir (Great Salt Desert) -...

The incident occurred at the Parchin military compound, not far from the Iranian capital, according to the Iranian Students News Agency. Two workers were killed in an explosion that took place at a military explosives factory southeast of Tehran, near the suspected nuclear reactor in Parchin, IRNA, the official Iranian news agency, reported Monday. The agency quoted Iran’s Defense Industries Organization, which said a fire occurred Sunday night, killing two people. The agency did not provide additional information. The semi-official ISNA news agency also reported that an explosion occurred at a military base near Tehran, killing two people. “Unfortunately, two...