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Breaking News U.S. Military Conducts Operation In Somalia By Barbara Starr September 1, 2014 (CNN) -- U.S. military forces conducted an operation Monday against the Al-Shabaab network in Somalia, Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said. "We are assessing the results of the operation and will provide additional information as and when appropriate," he said.

Reciting a list of assaults on Christians around the world, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder told a large-scale gathering of Israel’s Christian allies that he would continue to speak out against the violence and oppression that is engulfing Christians, especially in the Middle East. Speaking in Budapest on June 15, Lauder said “I will speak out across the globe with world leaders and with ordinary citizens, and I will tell them that we will never tolerate any kind of anti-Christian threats, just as we will not tolerate anti-Semitism.” He was speaking at the Jerusalem Day Convention at the...

The Israeli Air Force downed an unmanned drone (UAV) over the Golan Heights as it attempted to enter Israeli airspace from Syria. Forces fired a surface-to-air Patriot missile at the drone, which came from the area of Quneitra - which has seen fierce clashes between Syrian rebels and regime forces. The Israel Defense Forces told the Associated Press that the drone appeared to have belonged to the Syrian military and had flown accidentally into Israeli airspace. The IDF said that the drone was identified in Israel's air space and shot down by a ground-to-air Patriot missile. The IDF "will respond...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama faced criticism over his foreign policy from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers on Sunday as he wrestled with crises in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Ukraine. Republican lawmakers seized on Obama's comment on Thursday when he said, "We don't have a strategy yet" for confronting the Islamic State militant group, saying it suggested indecisiveness. On Sunday, influential Democrats chimed in with their own critiques of Obama's foreign policy, chiding him for being "too cautious" on Syria, and urging him to do more to help Ukraine resist Russian advances.

US President Barack Obama’s authorization of airstrikes on ISIS targets in Iraq serves as an opportunity to remind ourselves which countries are bankrolling the deadly terror group. The answer: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey and Qatar – three of the United States’ biggest allies in the region. Last night Obama announced limited airstrikes to slow the advance of ISIS fighters and help members of the Yazidi religious minority group who were forced to flee into a mountainous region in the north of Iraq to avoid slaughter. However, the administration has failed to put pressure on several (Persian) Gulf states that are...

(Reuters) - The United States carried out air strikes on Saturday against Islamic State fighters near the besieged Shi'ite town of Amerli in northern Iraq and airdropped humanitarian aid to civilians trapped there, the Pentagon said. President Barack Obama authorized the new military action, broadening U.S. operations in Iraq amid an international outcry over the threat to Amerli's mostly ethnic Turkmen population. U.S. aircraft delivered over a hundred bundles of emergency supplies and more aid was dropped from British, French and Australian planes, officials said, signaling headway in Obama’s efforts to draw allies into the fight against Islamic State. Iraqi...

Under cover of darkness, 40 Filipino peacekeepers made a daring escape after being surrounded and under fire for seven hours by Syrian rebels in the Golan Heights, Philippine officials said Sunday, leaving 44 Fijian troops still in the hands of the al-Qaida-linked insurgents. "We may call it the greatest escape," Philippine military chief Gen. Gregorio Pio Catapang said. The peacekeepers became trapped after Syrian rebels entered the U.N.-patrolled buffer zone between Syria and Israel this week, seizing 44 Fijian soldiers and demanding that their Filipino colleagues surrender with their weapons. The Filipinos in two U.N. encampments refused and clashed with...

RESIDENT OBAMA’S acknowledgment that “we don’t have a strategy yet” in Syria understandably attracted the most attention after his perplexing meeting with reporters Thursday. But his restatement of the obvious was not the most dismaying aspect of his remarks. The president’s goal, to the extent he had one, seemed to be to tamp down all the assessments of gathering dangers that his own team had been issuing over the previous days. This argument with his own administration is alarming on three levels. The first has to do with simple competence. One can only imagine the whiplash that foreign leaders must...

. August 30, 2014 Newt Gingrich : Obama’s Right -- He Has “No Strategy” ===================================================== Americans might be inclined to roll their eyes at this admission from their president given that he spent weeks on vacation while a terrorist group swept away eleven years of work to stabilize Iraq. As I wrote in this newsletter last week, however, the problem has never been the rounds of golf President Obama is playing. It is what has been happening--or rather, what has not been happening--between them. If a month’s vacation in Martha’s Vineyard was the price of our Commander-in-Chief realizing at last...

As a 72-hour ceasefire takes hold in Israel, New York Times Gaza-based reporters remain locked in a peculiar moral equivalency between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas bent on the nation's destruction, with reporters taking pains on social media and television to stick up for Hamas, dismissing the idea of Hamas harassment of journalists as "nonsense," and even criticizing Hillary Clinton for taking on the group.. Reporter Anne Barnard appeared on Sunday's edition of CNN's Reliable Sources, hosted by former Times colleague Brian Stelter. When Stelter asked Barnard about the "biggest misconceptions" in the coverage offered by naysayers "thousands of...

They DO have a strategy, but they prefer to appear indecisive. That’s because the strategy would likely provoke even greater criticism than the false confession of endless dithering. The actual strategy is detente first, and then a full alliance with Iran throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It has been on display since before the beginning of the Obama administration. During his first presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama used a secret back channel to Tehran to assure the mullahs that he was a friend of the Islamic Republic, and that they would be very happy with his policies....

Yemen's president is accusing Iran of provoking current unrest in his country as Shi'ite Houthi rebels advance on the capital Sana'a. -excerpt- He claimed in a statement that Iran was trying to “trade Sana'a for the Syrian capital, Damascus,” a reference to Iranian support for Syria's Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.

The bloody-handed butchers of ISIS behave like the worst Islamofascist gang we have seen so far -- worse than the Taliban, worse than Hamas and Hezb’allah, worse than Al Nusra, worse than the Muslim Brotherhood, worse than all the little maniac gangs of cutthroats who have been practicing Jihad on innocent men, women and children for decades. In addition to which, ISIS has better PR, spreading its graphic images of human butchery of Christians, Yazidis, and Shi’ites, and other “infidels” around the world with amazing speed. On top of that, ISIS has engaged in Blitzkrieg warfare, overwhelming the defenses of...

Tyler Durden 08/30/2014The Islamic State is nothing if not ambitious. Despite no record of current 'airplane' assets in their annual reports, ISIS has begun detaining and forcing Syrian pilots to train militant fighters to fly stolen aircraft. According to CNN Arabic, the pilots (and their planes and helicopters) were abducted when the terrorist group gained control of Tabqa military base. It appears that if beheadings, executions, and whippings are not enough to strike fear into the hearts of the locals, then (just as America is tryiung to do), an air assault will greatly demoralize. We can only imagine how this...

George Galloway has been taken to hospital with a suspected broken jaw after he was attacked on a London street, his spokesman has said.

Kirkuk (Iraq) (AFP) - Iraq was massing forces Wednesday for an operation to break a two-month jihadist siege of the Shiite Turkmen town of Amerli, amid growing fears for residents short of food and water. The imminent counter-offensive comes amid reports that US President Barack Obama is weighing a decision to authorise air strikes and aid drops in the area to assist around 12,000 residents trapped in the northern town. According to a civilian volunteer commander, thousands of Shiite militiamen from groups including Asaib Ahl al-Haq and the Badr Organisation are gathering in the Tuz Khurmatu area of Salaheddin province,...

The latest genius to come up with this particular plan is Pat Buchanan. It’s not unique, but it’s a refreshing change from all the proposals that we ally with Iran to stop ISIS. Alternative proposals that we ally with Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy to stop ISIS are on the table. Here’s why it’s stupid 1. Assad is getting his ass kicked by ISIS and most of the other rebel groups. In other words what is the point of this alliance exactly? We’re already allied with an Iranian client in Baghdad that’s incapable of fighting its own battles and is...

A Sinai-based militant group said on Thursday it had beheaded four Egyptians, accusing them of providing Israel with intelligence for an airstrike that killed three of its fighters. Four headless corpses were found in the Sinai Peninsula earlier this month, security sources said -- the first time that any decapitations had been made public in Egypt. The men had been abducted by gunmen two days earlier while driving in the town of Sheikh Zuwaid, which is just a few kilometers from the Gaza Strip. In a video released on Twitter, Egypt's most dangerous militant group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, said the...

Iran has conducted "mechanical" tests on a new, advanced machine to refine uranium, a senior official was quoted as saying on Wednesday, a disclosure that may annoy Western states pushing Tehran to scale back its nuclear programme. Iran's development of new centrifuges to replace its current breakdown-prone model is watched closely by Western officials. It could allow the Islamic Republic to amass potential atomic bomb material much faster. Tehran says its nuclear programme is peaceful and that it produces low-enriched uranium only to make fuel for a planned network of atomic energy plants. If processed to a high fissile concentration,...

Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who is the head of the Muslim Scholars Association and who serves as spiritual mentor for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, attacked the Islamic Caliphate State established by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in large parts of Syria and Iraq. In an interview with a Turkish news agency, Qaradawi said that the caliphate is meaningless as it does not meet the requirements as dictated by Islam. It should be noted that Sheikh Qaradawi supports Hamas, operates a jihad against Israel, and in the past has made rulings permitting suicide bombings ...