Free Republic

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday and said he would put, “boots on the ground” in the areas where ISIS is getting its oil. Trump further stated that he would “take the oil” for the U.S. Richard Haass: From your position, taking them out strongly, would that involve a potential reintroduction of U.S. ground forces in a combat way? Donald Trump: Let me tell you what I would do. I would, they have great money because they have oil. They have much oil. I would, every place where they have oil, I would knock the...

Feminists have a lot to complain about. They post sexy pictures online to protest Silicon Valley "discrimination" against women, they think office temperatures are biased against women, they hold parades to demand the right to be called "sluts," they demand written consent for sex, they complain that women can't negotiate salaries, that movies feature too few 50-year-old women, and so on. These seem like really big issues, perhaps, until you see what is happening in the Middle East. ISIS fanatics have executed 19 women for refusing to have sex with its fighters, a Kurdish official has said. They were put...

Senior defense officials told NBC News that the F-16 Falcons stationed at Turkey's Incirlik base will begin air patrols "within a few days." The U.S. started launching airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq just a little more than a year ago and armed drones at Incirlik have already been conducting airstrikes against ISIS and al Nusra forces in Syria. But manned aircraft fighting ISIS have previously been flown from the Persian Gulf — hundreds of miles away from ISIS targets in Syria. Incirlik is just a little more than 100 miles from the Syrian border.

A Canadian Jewish businessman has spearheaded efforts to rescue Iraqi Yazidi and Christian girls from slavery after the girls were captured by ISIS troops, using money donated privately by business contacts. The businessman has cited Oskar Schindler, who rescued Jewish children from the holocaust, as his inspiration. Last summer the world looked on in horror as ISIS swept through north Iraq, home to Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, and Yazidis. Hundreds of thousands fled before them, but thousands more starved to death in the desert, or were captured by Islamic forces. Girls in particular were bartered for in the markets, standing...

Russian and Saudi officials to meet over Middle East issues -- just after news surfaces of a secret meeting between Russia, Iran. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir will visit Moscow on Tuesday to discuss Syria conflict and the Islamic State group with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign ministry said Saturday. The two ministers last met in Qatar on August 3 when Lavrov, Jubeir and US Secretary of State John Kerry held a three-way meeting, with the situation in Syria topping the agenda. The ministers will continue "a discussion on ways to resolve the crisis in Syria," the...

Some observers have noticed something rather peculiar about Turkey’s new bombing campaign against Islamic State positions. The curious thing about the airstrikes on ISIS targets, Ankara’s critics say, is that they aren’t really occurring. Instead, Turkey is aggressively hitting PKK targets and although Turkey made it clear in its appeal for NATO support that it doesn’t discriminate between one "terrorist" group and another, commentators say the air raids have been noticeably one-sided. "Opponents [of] President Tayyip Erdogan [have] pointed out the air strikes against the PKK have so far been heavier than those against the Islamist radicals," Reuters notes.As we’ve...

Tyler S. Drumheller, a high-level CIA officer who publicly battled agency leaders over one of the most outlandish claims in the U.S. case for war with Iraq, died Aug. 2 at a hospital in Fairfax County. He was 63. The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Linda Drumheller. Mr. Drumheller held posts in Africa and Europe over a 26-year career during which the CIA’s focus shifted from the Cold War to terrorist threats. He rose to prominent positions at CIA headquarters, serving as chief of the European division at a time when the agency was abducting al-Qaeda...

While attending the Iraqi army’s artillery school nearly 20 years ago, Ali Omran remembers one major well. An Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Omran for wearing an Iraqi flag pin into the bathroom because it included the words “God is great.” “It is forbidden by religion to bring the name of the Almighty into a defiled place like this,” Omran recalled being told by Maj. Taha Taher al-Ani. […] Now al-Ani is a commander in the Islamic State group, said Omran, who rose to become a major general in the Iraqi army and now commands its 5th Division fighting IS....

Thousands of Iraqis braved the scorching summer heat to stage a huge protest in central Baghdad on Friday, calling on the prime minister to dissolve the parliament and sack corrupt government officials. Security forces and riot police sealed off Iraq’s iconic Tahrir Square and searched anyone who entered the area, but tens of thousands of men, women and children thronged the sprawling square, waving Iraqi flags. “In the name of religion, the thieves robbed us,” they chanted long into the evening. Men with the government-backed Popular Mobilization Forces, the umbrella group made up predominantly of Shiite militias, pulled up in...

The United States on Thursday handed over to Iraqi authorities the widow of a senior ISIS leader who had been detained by US forces since May, the Pentagon announced. Nasrin As'ad Ibrahim, also known as Umm Sayyaf or "Mother of Sayyaf", was the wife of Abu Sayyaf or "Father of Sayyaf," who was killed in a U.S. special forces raid in Syria in May. She is now being held by the interior ministry of Iraq's autonomous province of Kurdistan, the U.S. Defense Department said. "The decision to transfer Umm Sayyaf to the Iraqi government was based on the U.S. government...

Covering his betrayal of America with discredited falsehoods The president’s speech on the Iranian deal, delivered at American University on Wednesday, was vintage Obama, as in a compendium of demagoguery, historical revisionism and outright lying. Nothing emphasized that more forcefully than the portion of the Obama’s speech addressing the war in Iraq. Obama insisted U.S. involvement there was the result of “a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy, a mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking work of building international consensus, a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported.”...

On July 31, the New York Times reported that an American-trained, Syrian Rebel group, known as Division 30, came under intense attack from a hard-line, Al Qaeda affiliated group, known as the Al Nusra Front... It is... significant to note that, according to a US Department of Treasury report issued last year, Al Nusra has received significant funding from "Al-Qaida’s network in Iran." That's right: Iran. "Al-Qaida’s network in Iran.".... The Treasury Department noted in its report that... "Al-Qaida’s network in Iran has facilitated the transfer of funds... to al-Qaida core and other affiliated elements, including the al-Nusrah Front in...

Earlier, fighters with the League of Righteous Shiite militia tortured and murdered. But now they intend to save Iraq from the Islamic State. Can it work? A trip to the front in the city of Baiji explains much about the current state of the war. A man lifts his camera and stretches. For a moment he is no longer protected by the wall — but it’s one moment too long. A bullet strikes him in the side and passes through his chest. Hussein Fadhil Hassan, 22, the cameraman for the Shiite militia League of the Righteous, is killed immediately, hit...

President Obama took sharp aim at critics of the Iran nuclear deal on Wednesday, saying many of those who backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq now want to reject the accord and put the Middle East on the likely path toward another war. Obama also sketched out further setbacks he claimed would be set in motion by a snub from Congress: undercutting America’s standing in global diplomacy, leaving Washington isolated and putting ally Israel in greater peril. “Now more than ever we need clear thinking in our foreign policy,” Obama told an audience at American University — the same venue...

I tried. I really did. But I could only make it through the first ten minutes of Barack Obama’s speech on global warming, especially given the fact that the EPA is making rules on a subject they obviously know nothing about. Barack wasted no time throwing lies at his audience. “The economy is on the road to a recovery from a great recession” I suppose that is true, as long as you recognize the fact that Black unemployment has gone up 40% and that nearly half of the unemployed are no longer looking for work. Remove these millions from the...

ISTANBUL—The U.S. and Turkey have reached an understanding meant to assure the Ankara government that plans to drive Islamic State militants from a proposed safe zone in northern Syria won’t clear the way for Kurdish fighters to move in. Officials from both countries on Monday disclosed details of the discussions that grew out of Turkey’s recent decision to step up its cooperation with the U.S. in the fight against Islamic State. The U.S.-led coalition fighting the extremist group has conducted numerous airstrikes over the past year to back the Kurdish YPG militia in northern Syria, which has proved to be...

<p>Alex Horton is a member of the Defense Council at the Truman National Security Project. He served as an infantryman in Iraq with the Army’s 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division.</p> <p>I got home from the bar and fell into bed soon after Saturday night bled into Sunday morning. I didn’t wake up until three police officers barged into my apartment, barking their presence at my door. They sped down the hallway to my bedroom, their service pistols drawn and leveled at me.</p>

BAGHDAD -- U.S.-led airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria have likely killed at least 459 civilians over the past year, a report by an independent monitoring group said Monday. The report by Airwars, a project aimed at tracking the international airstrikes targeting the extremists, said it believed 57 specific strikes killed civilians and caused 48 suspected "friendly fire" deaths. It said the strikes have killed more than 15,000 Islamic State militants.

Some 60 years later, in Baghdad the Jews are a ghostly memory. A FEW hours in the Shorja open market in Baghdad can teach you a lot – about the Middle East’s past, its present and its apparent future. What’s to be found there is informative. What is absent – equally so. My fixer Yusuf hadn’t wanted to take me to Shorja. I was in Baghdad for a reporting project on the Shi’ite militias. Between heading for Anbar with Kata’ib Hezbollah and up to Baiji with the Badr Corps, we had a few hours of down time in Baghdad, so...

The view that 2015 has not been a particularly good year for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has much to recommend it. Within Syria, the government has lost control over most of the province of Idlib, and was recently dislodged from Palmyra by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The key cities of Aleppo in the north and Deraa in the south remain under threat; increased coordination among Syria's notoriously fractious armed rebel groups is an important factor in this regard, as is improved relations among their sponsors.