Free Republic

Following a recent strike its F-16IQ Viper multi-role jets flew against ISIS terrorists in neighboring Syria, the Iraqi Air Force has released a detailed infographic showing how many combat and combat support missions each of its aircraft types have flown over the past nearly four years. Of particular note is that the country’s An-32 cargo planes have conducted more airstrikes than either Iraq’s F-16s or its Aero L-159 Advanced Light Combat Aircraft, or ALCA, light attack jets. The Iraqi Air Force released the infographic, with its text unfortunately only in Arabic, on its official social media accounts on April 23,...

WHISKY is back on the tables in Mosul, one of Iraq’s biggest cities. Until last year, boozing was punishable with 80 lashes...Families queue at restaurants on the banks of the Tigris. There is not a niqab, or face-veil, in sight....Now Iraq, home to nearly 40m people, is righting itself... About 45,000 Sunnis mustered alongside the Shia-led Hashd al-Shaabi, or “popular mobilisation units”. And millions of Sunnis fled the would-be caliphate to seek refuge in Kurdish and Shia cities. Religious minorities feel safer, too. Over 70% of the 100,000 Christians who fled to Kurdistan have returned to their homes on the...

, Kurdistan region ‘Iraq’,— Attendance at Qur’anic schools, religious centers and mosques has declined in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, according to an official at the ministry of religious affairs. “Less learners have these days been seen visiting the Quran learning centers,” Mariwan Naqshbandi, spokesperson of the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs at the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), told Rudaw He said that attendance at centers where students learn the Quran has declined by about 70 percent, and that the number of people visiting mosques and other religious centers has dropped by some 20 percent “Not only the Quran centers, but...

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The US Ambassador to Iraq, Douglas Silliman, along with the Kurdistan Region’s Prime Minister, Nechirvan Barzani, on Monday announced the start of constructing a new US Consulate in the capital of the semi-autonomous region. In a statement delivered at a ceremony in Erbil, Barzani said that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) welcomes the construction of the compound, one of the largest in the world, and that “it is a sign of US confidence and trust in the Kurdistan Region, now and in its future.” He mentioned that the project is an indicator that Washington wants to...

A Syrian-born German national accused of helping to plan the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States has been detained by Kurdish forces in Syria, a senior Kurdish commander told AFP on Wednesday. “Mohammed Haydar Zammar has been arrested by Kurdish security forces in northern Syria and is now being interrogated,” the top official said, but did not provide further details. Zammar, who is in his mid-fifties, has been accused of recruiting some of the September 11 hijackers. He was detained in Morocco in December 2001 in an operation involving CIA agents, and was handed over to the Syrian...

A senior official at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) allegedly granted asylum to more than 1,200 applicants without valid legal reasons for their approval. She has since been removed from her position. The employee headed the BAMF office in Bremen and worked with three lawyers who assisted her in wrongfully granting asylum to refugees from other federal states, according to joint research conducted by Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), NDR and Radio Bremen. Many of the applicants were said to have been Yazidis, a Kurdish religious minority living mainly in northern Iraq and northern Syria. During the reign of...

One of the biggest ongoing problems of U.S. foreign policy is a failure to understand what we’re really up against. This problem is nothing new, although Barack Obama took it to new heights by banning all mention of Islam and jihad from counterterror training, with many of his loyalists still in place and hampering our ability to deal realistically with the jihad threat today. This myopia goes back decades. In Theodore H. White’s America In Search of Itself, there is this telling passage about the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979: Of the negotiating effort, the most biting summary was...

Iran's supreme leader warned top officials Wednesday that their country was facing threats of espionage and subversion from foreign foes who sought to undermine the Islamic Republic and its increasingly large sphere of influence in the Middle East. {snip} Iran has also shored up its relations with neighboring Iraq, where a 2003 U.S. invasion installed a Shiite Muslim government much friendlier to Iran and spurred a Sunni Muslim insurgency that ultimately helped to form ISIS... With ISIS largely defeated, these paramilitary fighters were made official members of the country's armed forces and they have threatened to expel the U.S. military...

Time to call out the phony militant racists Arab Muslims who cry "racism"... Some pose as "leftists socialists", only to jump on their hate wagon. latest, Fresno State professor stirs outrage, calls Barbara Bush an 'amazing racist' BY BRYANT-JON ANTEOLA bjanteola@fresnobee.com April 17, 2018 09:13 PM Updated April 18, 2018 04:05 PM A Fresno State professor called former first lady Barbara Bush an “amazing racist” who raised a “war criminal,” and expressed no concern that she could be fired or reprimanded for her outspokenness on social media. Randa Jarrar, who in her Twitter messages describes herself as an Arab-American and...

Revenues from oil and gas sold to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are now the largest source of funds for the Islamic State (ISIS), as the militant group faces mounting military pressure in both Iraq and Syria. The Wall Street Journal reports that officials from the U.S. and Europe said the Assad regime, despite pronouncements that it is fighting the extremist group, is directly supporting ISIS through the purchase of energy, needed to power the Syrian capital Damascus and other parts of the country. Amos Hochstein of the U.S. State Department told the Journal that the group’s “revenue...

Behind the Headlines by Justin RaimondoAntiwar.com April 8, 2002 WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA POSTREL?Post-9/11: Who speaks for libertarianism – the Old Right or the Neocon Clones? A note from the author: I apologize, in advance, for the sheer length of this column, but since it addresses the sell-out of basic libertarian principles by people and institutions who purport to speak in its name, I thought it important to address these questions thoroughly, with extensive quotations from those I name. Too bad, in attacking Antiwar.com, these pathetic losers didn't do the same – but then what can one expect from craven...

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Sunday voiced alarm over the growing “alienation” between Russia and the West, stressing the need for dialogue as post-Cold War tensions peak. Speaking to the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, Steinmeier said last month’s poisoning of a former Russian spy in England, which Britain and its allies blame on Moscow, was “a very serious incident”. “But we should be at least as worried about the galloping alienation between Russia and the West, the consequences of which stretch far beyond this case,” the former foreign minister said. Moscow vehemently denies involvement in the nerve agent poisoning of...

I was born during a war, though you wouldn’t have known it. There was clean water and electricity and nutrition enough to see an eight-pound baby girl into the world on a cold December night in Texas. It was the Gulf War . The devastation was somewhere over there, not here. Two more wars began before I went into middle school; one ended — formally, anyway — after I had gone to college, the other continues to this day. While I was in college, we took military action in Libya, too. Again, there was no rupture on the home front,...

A district court judge ruled the Syrian regime — and specifically its ruler, President Bashar al-Assad — are liable for the murders of three Americans by al-Qaeda because of the regime’s massive support for the terrorist group’s branch in Iraq. In addition to those three Americans, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, Iraqis and others have been killed or injured due to Assad’s sponsorship of al-Qaeda and other jihadists. The lawsuit was filed by the families of Laurence Michael Foley, a U.S. diplomat in Jordan assassinated by al-Qaeda in 2002; Staff Sgt. Keith Matthew Maupin, killed in Iraq in 2004...

For a while, Turkey and Israel were the unexpected couple, the increasingly Muslim state buying the Jewish state’s weapons and Israel offering Turkey a potentially strategic gas and oil pipeline. That all changed when Israeli commandos raided the so-called Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May 2010 in international waters of the Mediterranean. Nine activists were killed, including eight Turkish nationals and one Turkish American, and many were wounded. That was a turning point in the relations between the two countries. But three years later, the two sides appeared to mend relations. But as the Syrian civil war spiraled out of control...

A new discovery off the coast of Bahrain is estimated to contain at least 80 billion barrels of tight oil, the kingdom's biggest ever find, its oil minister said on Wednesday. Independent appraisals by U.S.-based oil consultants DeGolyer and MacNaughton and oilfield services company Halliburton had confirmed Bahrain's find of "highly significant quantities of oil in place ... with tight oil amounting to at least 80 billion barrels, and deep gas reserves in the region of 10-20 trillion cubic feet," Oil Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa al-Khalifa said. Russia's entire oil reserve is 80 billion barrels. Tight oil is a...

It is a terrible thing to be a people without a state or province to call its own. Just ask the Kurds, who now find themselves under the hell of Turkey's ruthless ruler, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who may as well be one of the Turkish sultans of the past. For he has unleashed a campaign of genocidal fury against people of his ever-expanding realm. And no one can say the world hasn't been given fair warning of his genocidal intentions. At latest report, his troops and some Syrian puppets under his control were driving farther and farther east, planning to...

The latest high-level attempt to normalize Turkish-EU ties has failed. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s much publicized meeting with European Council President Donald Tusk and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, in the Bulgarian seaside resort of Varna on March 26, did not produce any results on issues that have been clouding ties.There was no indication that fresh life would be breathed into Turkey’s bid for EU membership. All Turkey obtained was an assurance that its dormant bid remained on the table and that dialogue between Turkey and the EU would continue, even though there is little chance that stalled negotiations will resume...

France has offered to mediate in the conflict in northern Syria, where Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish fighters in January. Ankara is battling to drive out the Kurdish YPG militia, which it sees as an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). President Emmanuel Macron met members of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces, including the YPG. Mr Macron expressed hopes for dialogue between Turkey and the militia. His office said he had "paid tribute to the sacrifices and the determining role" of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group. France...

An MP of the ruling party (in Turkey) blames a Jewish bank for JFK's assassination, Jews are blamed for the Kurdish referendum and for planning last year's failed coup. There is much more.The writer is a Turkish journalist and political analyst formerly based in Ankara. She now lives in the United States.More from the author ► When the Kurdish-controlled city of Afrin in northern Syria fell to Turkey on March 18, many Turkish Twitter users celebrated it, using anti-Semitic epithets that referred to the Kurdish PKK fighters there as “servants of Jews”, “bastards of Jews,” “underbred Armenians and Jews” and...