Free Republic

Qatar's new Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani is set to announce a cabinet reshuffle, a day after taking over from his father Sheikh Hamad, officials say. ... Sheikh Hamad seized power from his father Sheikh Khalifa in a bloodless coup in 1995, with the support of the armed forces and cabinet, and also neighbouring states. ... In 2003, he named Sheikh Tamim - his second son by his second wife Sheikha Moza bint Nasser - as his heir apparent. ... In foreign policy, the emirate is expected to maintain its alliance with the West while at the same...

Egypt on Saturday called for an open-ended cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, urging Israel and Hamas to return to indirect talks after seven weeks of fighting punctuated by a number of failed truce attempts. The call from the foreign ministry came shortly after Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in Cairo. Egyptian officials did not say how they expected renewed talks to produce a different outcome after repeated failures. …

Iraq's ethnic Kurds are longtime U.S. allies and have put up the toughest resistance to the Sunni extremists in the so-called Islamic State that has captured swaths or Iraq's north and west. They're getting help from U.S. air strikes, but also need heavier weapons of their own to match the firepower of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Weapons have been promised by the U.S. and other countries, but getting them through the central government in Baghdad has hampered the mission, according to Kurdish commanders. "We have heard weapons are coming, but so far we haven't seen any. As...

Secret Jordan base was site of covert aid to insurgents.. .the fighters trained in Jordan became members of the ISIS after their training. Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials. The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used...

Allies: With all the disconcerting things going on in the Mideast, you could be forgiven for missing an event critically important to America's long-term interests: Recep Erdogan's election as president of Turkey. Erdogan's 52% victory over the weekend in a stage-managed election, making him the nation's first directly elected president, heralds a new era of conflict in the Mideast and perhaps the end of NATO as we know it. Turkey has for decades been a key ally to the U.S. and NATO in the Mideast, an anchor in the Cold War against the USSR and friendly toward Israel as the...

We must go back into Iraq. Then when we leave, we must not leave an Iraq. In the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion, there were two strategic errors. The first was when the Americans took down the US flag in Baghdad. In some American stores the sign says: "If you break it, you own it." We broke Iraq, but then we refused to own it – we refused to raise our flag and say: "It's our responsibility now if your power doesn't work or someone tries to rob you." The second great error is the one that's really coming...

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Far from being depleted by its recent sweep into Iraq, the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is pressing deeper into Syria, regaining territory it had lost to the mainstream Syrian insurgents just as the Syrian Army has come within five miles of encircling the insurgent-held section of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. The dual advance is on the verge of dealing a potentially fatal blow to the mainstream insurgents, leaving them besieged in the city while ISIS, a group deemed too extreme even by Al Qaeda, faces the Syrian government across a crucial front line at...

Through his State Department ventriloquist dummy, Barack Obama is denying that there is any truth to a Wall Street Journal article that Obama put a halt to ammunition shipments to Israel. The problem for Obama is that his credibility has long been shot so nothing he or any of his underlings asserts can be believed.At some point, credibility matters and the lack of it can reach a point so low that the default position of those you’re trying to convince is justifiably that you’re lying.Advantage, Netanyahu. White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in...

In 627, Mohammad’s earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, records that his army held off a twenty-five day siege by Mecca’s ruling tribe, the Quraysh, at his redoubt near Medina. When the prophet learned that the Meccan army included some of the city’s Jews, he ordered the attack of a nearby largely defenseless Jewish settlement and tribe, the Banu Qurayza. While the prophet was overseeing the decapitations, “He caught a glimpse of Rihanna, a beautiful Jewish woman, whose husband and father were beheaded before her eyes just hours earlier. Muhammad asked her to become his wife. She refused. So he took her...

On August 8, the Oriental Bishops called on Islamic leaders to issue Fatwas against the genocide committed against Christians and Yazidis in Iraq by the group that calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. ... Extensive links in rest of article at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/publiccatholic/2014/08/muslim-leaders-join-in-condemnation-of-isis/#ixzz3AQtX2EKz

AMMAN — What is happening in Gaza is “a Palestinian appeal to the entire world, calling for an end to occupation, destruction and killing perpetrated against a people seeking freedom, security and dignity”, according to His Majesty King Abdullah. In an interview with Al Ghad Arabic daily, the King described the latest aggression on Gaza as “the bloodiest and most devastating in terms of casualties, especially among women, children and the elderly”. “Entire families have been massacred,” he said in the interview, conducted by Al Ghad Editor-in-Chief Jumana Ghunaimat (see full text of interview). “We will continue to use Jordan’s...

Obama's Cairo Speach: A self-deluded fool gave it, a man determined to avoid confronting the enemies of mankind until an Islamic-inspired genocide required it “A greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum” The speaker had what one might imagine, given his background, a better insight into Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East than others who had preceded him. He said he was seeking “a new beginning” that was “based on mutual interests and mutual respect” because his nation and those in the Middle East shared “common principles—principles of justice and progress, tolerance and dignity of all...

Ahead of a possible presidential run, Hillary Clinton appears to be distancing herself from what she called President Barack Obama's foreign policy "failure": the decision not to intervene during the early stages of the Syrian civil war. In an interview with The Atlantic published on Sunday, the former secretary of state says the "failure" of the United States to those protesting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad led to the rise of al-Qaida-inspired groups like ISIS, the militants currently creating havoc in Syria and Iraq. “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who...

BAGHDAD — Thousands of desperate Iraqi Yazidis who have been trapped by Islamist extremists on a parched mountaintop for almost a week trekked Friday into Syrian territory, seeking refuge in another war-ravaged country.

WASHINGTON (AP) - For years, Kurdish officials have beseeched the Obama administration to let them buy U.S. weapons. For just as long, the administration has rebuffed America's closest allies in Iraq. U.S. officials insisted they could only sell arms to the government in Baghdad, even after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki broke a written promise to deliver some to the Kurds. Their peaceful, semiautonomous northern region had been the lone success story to come out of the 2003 U.S. invasion. The U.S. has resisted arming the Kurds because Washington's aim is to keep Iraq united. A strong Kurdish army could hasten...

WASHINGTON - The Iraqi government delivered a planeload of ammunition to Arbil, the capital of Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region, on Friday in an unprecedented act of military cooperation between Kurdish and Iraqi forces, a US official said. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iraqi security forces, under the command of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite Arab, delivered the mostly small-arms ammunition in a C-130 cargo plane to resupply the Kurdish Peshmerga forces as they fight militants from the Islamic State. The Obama administration is working with the Iraqi government to ensure that additional requests from the Kurdistan...

Even before it finished defusing the tunnel threat from the Gaza Strip Monday with the detonation of the last of 31 Hamas attack Supporters of Iraqi Hezbollah brigades tunnels, the Israeli army began marching in military uniforms step on a shifting its attention to the representation of an Israeli flag / AP possibility of a similar threat from Hezbollah along the border with Lebanon. Residents of communities on the northern border have periodically reported hearing the sound of underground digging over the years but despite probes by army engineers, no signs of tunneling into Israeli territory have ever been However,...

The Islamic State (IS), formerly known as ISIS, has launched an initiative to conquer land in Lebanon, even though the terrorist group does not have a strong presence there. The Lebanese army continues to fight after IS captured its first portion of Lebanese land, border town Arsal, on Sunday. Four civilians are dead. Soldiers surrounded the town of 40,000 residents and continue to shell it in an effort to liberate the people from IS. Residents have fled, but the people stuck in the middle are the refugees who fled Syria during the civil war. The United Nations said that “[M]ore...

As Operation Protective Edge winds down, there is growing speculation about the next and far more serious military threat that the country may be forced to confront. On its northern border with Lebanon, the Israeli army is faced with the daunting prospect of 100,000 long-range rockets far more accurate and effective than the missiles used by Hamas in its recent confrontation and far more likely to cause damage to life and property than the former offensive.   Hizb'allah, which launched a 34-day offensive against Israel in July, 2006, is the Hamas threat multiplied tenfold.   The former conflict is believed to...

U.S. airstrikes on Islamic State positions have begun. Fighter jets also bombed Islamic State militants in northwest Iraq on Thursday night. But it's not clear who the pilots were. The Pentagon immediately denied a New York Times report that the U.S. carried out Thursday's strikes. Iraqi military officials told CNN and the Wall Street Journal that the Iraqi Air Force had struck ISIS targets near Erbil, which is the regional capital of Iraqi Kurdistan and host to hundreds of U.S. military advisers. The Iraqi Air Force is poorly equipped, consisting of several Cessna planes carrying American-supplied Hellfire missiles, some American-...