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The US Department of Defense is to send 400 troops and hundreds of support staff to train moderate rebels against Islamic State (IS) in Syria. It is not yet clear where the troops will be drawn from or where they will be based, though Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have offered to host them. The US aims to train more than 5,000 rebels annually for three years.

Royal Dutch Shell won’t move forward with plans for a new petrochemical plant in Qatar, the company announced Wednesday, citing the “economic climate” facing the energy sector today. The project, dubbed Al Karaana, had been in the works for more than three years. It would have been a joint venture between Shell, which had a 20 percent stake in the project, and state-owned Qatar Petroleum, which had an 80 percent stake. Shell said in a statement that it decided not to move forward with Al Karaana after receiving bids from engineering and construction firms that ”showed high capital costs, rendering...

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro met Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Salman in Riyadh on Sunday as part of a diplomatic tour of OPEC members to discuss falling oil prices, which have hit its economy hard. The Saudi side in the meeting included Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi and several princes including Deputy Crown Prince Muqrin, intelligence chief Prince Khaled bin Bandar and three sons of King Abdullah, who is in hospital, state media reported. No details of the meeting were given by the official Saudi Press Agency and there was no indication that the world's biggest oil exporter was any closer to...

Representatives of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait stressed a dozen times in the past six weeks that the group won’t curb output to halt the biggest drop in crude since 2008...The global oversupply is 2 million barrels a day, or 6.7 percent of OPEC output, Qatar estimates.

Zawahiri: Coming To EgyptPosted By Walid Shoebat On April 1, 2013 @ 12:44 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 6 Comments Several Egyptian newspapers like Masr Al-Jadeeda, Al-Istiklal and Medan have published the story of a secret meeting in Pakistan between Ayman Zawahiri, the main man of al-Qaeda, and Muhammad Morsi of Egypt. According to the reports, in this meeting Morsi promised to smuggle Zawahiri back to Egypt.The leak came from an investigative report by Bloch Pakistan Newspaper. The paper stated that since Zawahiri had to travel between Pakistan and Afghanistan to remain in hiding, an agreement was reached in secret...

As journalists worldwide reacted with universal revulsion at the massacre of some of their own by Islamic jihadists in Paris, Al Jazeera English editor and executive producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr sent out a staff-wide email. “Please accept this note in the spirit it is intended — to make our coverage the best it can be,” the London-based Khadr wrote Thursday, in the first of a series of internal emails leaked to National Review Online. “We are Al Jazeera!” Below was a list of “suggestions” for how anchors and correspondents at the Qatar-based news outlet should cover Wednesday’s slaughter at the Charlie...

Wagdy Ghoneim, just expelled from Qatar along with other Muslim Brotherhood leaders, used to live in the United States. He served as imam at the Islamic Institute of Orange County, California in the early 2000Â’s, and raised funds for Hamas-linked Muslim charity KindHearts. How many people are still in the United States today who learned about Islam from Wagdy Ghoneim? And why doesnÂ’t this Muslim cleric, who has dedicated his life to understanding and teaching the QurÂ’an and Sunnah, see what Barack Obama and David Cameron and Tony Abbott and so many other non-Muslims see so clearly, that the Islamic...

Looks like the diplomatic efforts of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi may have paid off. Khaled Mashaal, who ran the recent Hamas war on Israel from the safety of Doha where he has long kept his organization’s worldwide headquarters, got kicked out of Qatar altogether — along with the Muslim Brotherhood. CNN reports that the expelled officials will likely end up in Turkey: Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal and members of the Muslim Brotherhood have been expelled from Qatar, a Hamas-run news agency reported Tuesday. The officials are most likely headed to Turkey, the report said.The move comes after...

Coptic Christian family — mother, father, and daughter — killed in Libya More information about the Coptic Christian family — mother, father, and daughter — killed in Libya continues to surface. In an interview with the mother’s brother, he explained how the murderers broke into the house in the middle of the night. They handcuffed and killed the father. Then they entered the children’s bedroom, three girls. The mother was there, cried out, tried to fight back, and was killed. They took the oldest daughter, Katherine, and fled with her. The girl’s body was later found in the desert, shot...

And apparently she believes them. What’s a little genocidal Jew-hatred among humanitarians? Pelosi’s statement is boneheaded, but it is understandable in light of the Obama Administration’s willingness to normalize Hamas and accept it as part of a “Palestinian” unity government. “Pelosi: Qataris Have Told Me ‘Hamas Is a Humanitarian Organization,’” by Susan Jones, CNSNews.com, July 28, 2014: (CNSNews.com) – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says the United States must look to Qatar, an ally of the terrorist group Hamas, for advice in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “And we have to confer with the Qataris, who have told me over...

By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem — January 1, 2015 … Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a discussion this afternoon on the Palestinian Authority’s application to various international treaties, and made the following remarks at the end of the meeting: “We expect the International Criminal Court to reject outright the Palestinian Authority’s hypocritical act because the Palestinian Authority is not a state,” said Netanyahu. “It is an entity in alliance with a terrorist organization, Hamas, which perpetuates war crimes. The State of Israel is a nation of laws with a moral army that upholds international law. We will defend...

Overnight, five more Guantanamo Bay detainees were released from American custody as the process of emptying out the prison facility accelerates. That brings the total of Guantanamo detainees released just this month to nine. “The two men from Tunisia and three from Yemen — who have been at the camp for a dozen years — had been cleared for release from the prison by a government task force but could not be sent to their homelands,” Fox News reported on Wednesday.Of the approximately 800 Guantanamo prisoners who were housed in that facility during the Bush administration, only 127 now remain....

US President Barack Obama acknowledges that Iran would become a “very successful regional power” if a long-term nuclear agreement is reached. “They have got a chance to get right with the world,” Obama said in an interview with NPR News, which was taped at the White House on Dec. 18 and aired on Monday. More than a year ago, Iran agreed to an interim agreement to suspend 20-percent uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions pending on a long-term deal. Despite progress in the talks, Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council...

All politics are local, except for oil politics. The Russians think these low oil prices are an American-Saudi conspiracy. American commentators believe that the Saudis have driven down prices to punish North Dakota’s shale oil revolution and drive its high-cost producers out of the game. In Canada, the paranoia in Calgary is that the Saudis and other Gulf oil producers want to drive the oil sands out of business. But what are the Saudis up to and are they powerful enough to control prices? This week the Saudi minister blamed low prices on oversupply from North America. But that is...

It is no secret that Al Jazeera is the media arm of Qatari foreign policy, which has suffered a successive series of setbacks, particularly in Syria. But some time ago, signs that changes had taken place in the editorial line of Al Jazeera began to emerge, as evident in the terminology the Qatari satellite channel started using. For example, Al Jazeera no longer refers to opposition fighters as “rebels.” Moreover, Al Jazeera has been giving airtime for discussions about the mistakes of the Free Syrian Army. Soon enough, coverage of Syria in Al Jazeera news bulletins started decreasing. A few...

An Update from the Qatar Awareness Campaign Several recent news reports point to the possibility that Qatar, the host nation of the Muslim Brotherhood, may be genuine in their attempt to reconcile with their Arab neighbors. After expelling the Qataris and isolating them diplomatically, the United Arab Emirate, Saudi Arabia, and even Egypt appear to have reached an accord with Doha. The Nazi-rooted Muslim Brotherhood was long ago banished from Saudi Arabia (in the late 1920s), and Egypt has violently suppressed them many times, notably after the assassination of Sadat. Yet the daily report out of the Middle East suggests...

Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer, author of The Last Line, and Ret. Col. David Hunt joined Bill O’Reilly to give an update on the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap. Lt. Colonel Shaffer told Bill the Obama administration paid $5 billion and released five top Taliban Gitmo detainees in exchange for deserter Bowe Bergdahl. Obama celebrated the release of deserter Bowe Bergdahl with a White House press conference in the Rose Garden in May 2014.Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who was part of the negotiations, told Bill O’Reilly the US paid out $5 billion and traded five top Taliban detainees for Bergdahl. Bill O’Reilly:...

Spanish soccer team FC Barcelona has reportedly decided not to renew its sponsorship deal with a Qatari group linked to the country’s royal family because of Qatar’s alleged involvement in funding Islamic extremist terrorist groups. Israel’s Channel 2 reported Friday night that Barcelona, arguably the world’s most popular soccer team, will not renew the deal, which has so far brought in close to $200 million, because of mounting concerns related to the gulf state’s involvement in financing terrorism. Israeli leaders have frequently charged that Qatar funds Hamas, the terror group that rules Gaza, and the TV report also cited alleged...

Relying on allies that aren’t allies is yet another consequence of the Washington establishment’s determined refusal to face the realities of the jihad, and to formulate policy based on those realities. “Qatar ‘broke promise to US over Guantanamo detainee,'” by David Blair, the Telegraph, December 12, 2014 (thanks to Lookmann): Qatar broke an “explicit” promise by allowing a former Guantánamo detainee who had trained with al-Qaeda to leave the country and visit Britain, a new report has found. Jarallah al-Marri, who attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan before the terrorist attacks on September 11, was freed from Guantánamo in...

Baghdad - Iranian military commanders deployed in Iraq played a key role in recent victories against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fighters throughout the country, according to Iraqi security officials and Shia militia leaders. Iran was the first country to respond to the Iraqi government's calls for international help in the battle against ISIL, which overran vast swaths of the country's north and west this summer and were advancing towards the capital. Dozens of Iranian military commanders - including Qassim Sulaimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force - have joined Iraqi security forces in battlefields north...