Free Republic

For years, it was thought that Israel had destroyed Syria’s nuclear weapons capability with its 2007 raid on the Kibar complex. Not so. New intelligence suggests that Bashar al-Assad is still trying to built the bomb. And he may be getting help from North Korea and Iran. […] Analysts say that the Syrian atomic weapon program has continued in a secret, underground location. According to information they have obtained, approximately 8,000 fuel rods are stored there. Furthermore, a new reactor or an enrichment facility has very likely been built at the site—a development of incalculable geopolitical consequences. Some of the...

Clint Eastwood's record-breaking film, scoring six Oscar nominations, is galvanizing moviegoers in both red and blue states.... Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is smashing records at the North American box office, where it topped Friday's chart with $30.5 million from 3,555 theaters for a debut in the $75 million-$80 million range over the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, well ahead of expectations. That would mark the largest opening of all time for the month of January, as well as one of the top grosses ever for a non-tentpole, much less an R-rated, modern-day war film.

BAGHDAD - - A year after ISIL fighters captured Fallujah in Iraq’s Anbar province, the country’s Shiite-led government remains incapable of mounting a major offensive to retake the city or any of the key areas still held by the group. In January last year, Fallujah, 70 kilometres west of Baghdad, became the first major city to fall to ISIL. This was followed by a summer campaign that seized the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, and Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, along with most of northern and western Iraq. Iraq’s slow-moving fight against ISIL has also highlighted the country’s sectarian tensions, given...

The Kurdish Female Peshmerga fighters operates inside Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Their main task is to keep the civillian population safe from terrorist activity. Some female Peshmerga fighters operates as civillian (Asayish) and the primary intelligence agency operating in the Kurdistan region to keep an eye on the area for security reason. They investigative arms and intelligence gatherers operating in the Kurdistan Region. There is a small number of female Peshmerga fighters on the frontlines with the PKK members fighting the Islamic State in Kerkuk and Shingal.

Middle Eastern Kingdom building 600-mile wall and ditch along its border with Iraq in effort to insulate itself from the chaos engulfing its neighbours. When a raiding party from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant attacked a Saudi border post last week, it was no mere hit on a desert outpost. The jihadists were launching an assault on the new, highest profile effort by Saudi Arabia to insulate itself from the chaos engulfing its neighbours. The Saudis are building a 600-mile-long “Great Wall” - a combined fence and ditch - to separates the country from Iraq to the north....

Then Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced, on July 14, 2014, the Civilian Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (CEJA), designed to ensure that government employees and contractors working overseas can be prosecuted for criminal acts they commit abroad. His committee had heard testimony from Jamie Leigh Jones, a 20 year old woman from Texas who took a job with Halliburton/KBR in Iraq in 2005. Jones testified that, during her first week in Iraq, she was drugged and gang-raped by coworkers. Haliburton/KBR, she said, moved her into a locked trailer when she reported this assault. She testified that she was kept...

The Islamic State (Isis) have crucified 17 young men in 48 hours in retaliation for a wave of assassinations targeting their fighters. The executions carried out by the jihadist group, which controls vast swathes of land straddling Syria and Iraq, took place in the eastern and northern Syrian cities of Deir Ezzor (or Deir al-Zor) and Raqqa "to send a message to all their opponents after recent assassinations of 12 Syrian, Iraqi and Algerian jihadists," said London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The men, who were shot dead and then crucified for three days, were accused of fighting against Islamic...

(IraqiNews.com) On Thursday, a local source in Nineveh province said, that the ‘Wild Boar’ aircraft which belongs to the U.S. Air Force has carried out four air strikes that killed and wounded dozens of ISIS elements, adding that the aircraft sparked panic in the ranks of ISIS. The source said in an interview for IraqiNews.com, “The U.S. aircraft A-10 Warthog (Wild Boar) carried out, at dawn today, four air strikes on gatherings of ISIS elements in the village of Sultan Abdullah in Makhmour district, southeast Mosul,” adding that, “The raids resulted in the death and injury of dozens of ISIS...

Istanbul (AFP)- A teenager from Russia's Muslim region of Dagestan, suspected of a suicide bombing in Istanbul, was said Friday to have been an Islamic State jihadist and the wqidow of an Norwegian extremist...

Muslims never guilty of 'terrorist massacres,' Turkey's Erdogan insistsTurkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly bizarre rhetoric continued this week when he told reporters Muslims have "never taken part in terrorist massacres" and appeared to blame the West for the recent Islamist attacks in Paris.

The head of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ordered the execution of 56 members of the militant group following a defeat in northern Iraq, a Kurdish official told Al Arabiya News Channel. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took the decision after the Islamist militants defeat in Kober...

On Thursday, a local source in Nineveh province said, that the ‘Wild Boar’ aircraft which belongs to the U.S. Air Force has carried out four air strikes that killed and wounded dozens of ISIS elements, adding that the aircraft sparked panic in the ranks of ISIS. The source said in an interview for IraqiNews.com, “The U.S. aircraft A-10 Warthog (Wild Boar) carried out, at dawn today, four air strikes on gatherings of ISIS elements in the village of Sultan Abdullah in Makhmour district, southeast Mosul,” adding that, “The raids resulted in the death and injury of dozens of ISIS elements.”...

WASHINGTON - A new book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because — he said — it had been dead for a decade. New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of...

While Western newspapers were debating whether or not to reprint the Mohammed cartoons, in Nigeria as many as 2,000 people were massacred by the Islamic State in Nigeria, also known as Boko Haram, in what is being called the deadliest attack by the Muslim group to date. Survivors described the Islamic State setting up efficient killing teams and massacring everyone while shouting “Allahu Akbar”. “For five kilometers (three miles), I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam Karanti village, which was also deserted and burnt,” one survivor said. There’s a word for that. It’s genocide. The Islamic State...

The Book Behind the Bombshell By ROMESH RATNESAR In the abstruse world of espionage, it's not always easy to know when you are in on a secret. So when intelligence sources approached New York Times reporter James Risen in late 2004 with evidence that the Bush Administration was running a covert domestic-spying program, Risen says he "wasn't sure what to believe." As Risen and Times colleague Eric Lichtblau looked into the story, more whistle-blowers came forward, convincing the reporters that the eavesdropping claims were credible. At that point Risen asked a few "very senior" government officials what they knew about...

The joke’s on them. Don’t the Saudis know that massive border fences do nothing to enhance domestic security and are, in fact, counterproductive? Well, I guess they’ll find out soon enough. According to reports, the Saudi Kingdom is fed up with defending against ISIS raiding parties that routinely cross over the Iraqi border. In order to stave off these assaults, the Saudis are going to build a massive, 600-mile long border fence across the length of the country’s border with Iraq. But that’s not all. The fence will be double layered with a concertina wire barrier in no man’s...

The cabinet agreed on Wednesday to push for a new law aimed at stopping people from leaving Germany to fight for Islamist movements in the Middle East. Potential jihadists affected by the law would have their ID card confiscated for up to three years and replaced with a new one that does not allow them to travel outside Germany. The original draft law was to confiscate the regular ID cards for only 18 months. The law already allows authorities to confiscate the passports of people suspected of having terrorist connections, but many German citizens who have gone to fight for...

Spouting off to an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention, Clint Eastwood looked as if he were slipping into doddering dementia, but he’s shrewder and more focused than ever in his Iraq War picture American Sniper. It’s a cracker­jack piece of filmmaking, a declaration that he’s not yet ready to be classified as an Old Master, that he can out-Bigelow Kathryn Bigelow. Morally, though, he has regressed from the heights of Letters From Iwo Jima (2006). In more ways than one, the Iraq occupation is seen through the sight of a high-powered rifle. The movie is scandalously blinkered....

How the Islamic Republic Is Shaping Iraq & SyriaPosted By Majid Rafizadeh On January 15, 2015 @ 12:48 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 1 Comment It appears that President Obama continues to believe that resuming diplomatic relationships with the Iranian ruling clerics — through efforts such as striking a final nuclear deal, lifting the UN Security Council sanctions, directly or indirectly cooperating with the Iranian military in the region — is an informed policy.This position has led to the unprecedented level of compromises being made on the part of the Obama administration. Some of these compromises are not written in...

Sunday's Der Spiegel had a massive expose on the continuing efforts of Bashar al-Assad to build a nuclear weapons plant, which included evidence that Iran is constructing such a plant for Syria in Qusayr, less than two kilometers from Syria's border with Lebanon. The issue came up in the State Department's Monday daily briefing. Disturbingly, spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the United States did not plan to raise the issue in the Iranian nuclear talks, claiming that those talks only deal with Iran's nuclear capabilities and not with Syria's. According to findings of Western intelligence agencies, however, the situation...