Free Republic

WORCESTER, Mass. —The mother who was shot along with her son in Worcester says there was no reason for the shooting, and now she's looking for help in finding the shooter. Suldano Bilal, 28, and her son, Yasin, 2, were injured when someone opened fire while they were in the back seat of a car that was being parked that almost hit someone.

MINNEAPOLIS — U.S. District Judge Michael Davis had seen this in his courtroom before — a young Somali-American who hadn’t previously been a troublemaker was now accused of conspiring to leave the U.S. and join the Islamic State group. The 6-foot-5 Davis, who can make defendants fidget with his long, drawn-out silences, stressed the gravity of the charges and tried to gauge whether this particular young man was truly dedicated to jihad or simply misguided and a possible candidate for rehabilitation.

U.S. authorities are seeking to revoke the citizenship of an Oregon imam who they say tried to conceal past associations with radical Islamic groups. Mohamed Sheikh Abdirahman Kariye raised money, recruited fighters and provided training for insurgent groups battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. Department of Justice says in a complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Portland. Kariye was one of more than a dozen people who filed a lawsuit challenging the no-fly list, winning last year a court order saying the government must provide information about why people are on the list. The...

Reports that at least 50 girls were taken from the UK to Somalia for female genital mutilation are being investigated by Scotland Yard.Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Tonge contacted the Metropolitan Police after spotting a large group of girls on a flight from Heathrow last Saturday.The girls were said to be aged 11 to 17 and with their mothers or grandmothers.It comes as Bedfordshire Police secured the UK's first FGM protection order, preventing two girls from going abroad.The Metropolitan Police said officers from the Specialist Crime and Operations Command were investigating Lady Tonge's report.Speaking to the BBC, Lady Tonge said the...

Somali terror group Al-Shabaab could soon scrap its allegiance to Al-Qaeda and pledge loyalty to rivals ISIS instead, MailOnline has learned. Islamic State invited the east-African jihadi group to join forces with them through a propaganda video released in March - urging it to wage jihad on neighbouring Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Now Al-Shabaab members and sources within the Somali army suggest the invitation will be accepted and the group - which commands around 9,000 fighters - will soon extend ISIS's self-proclaimed caliphate to east-Africa. The decision comes at a time when many of Al-Shabaab's local and foreign leaders are...

Greece joins Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe on the latest to be in debt to the International Monetary Fund. As Athenians rallied underneath thunderclouds to show their support for keeping Greece in the eurozone of single currency nations, their broke government defaulted on a $2.2-billion payment to the International Monetary Fund. At midnight on Tuesday, Greece joined Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe as countries in arrears to the IMF. Also at midnight, the bailout assistance package that began in February 2012 formally expired, leaving Greece without access to any emergency finances. In Washington, the IMF acknowledged that Greece had failed to meet...

Hundreds of migrants brought to Italy after being rescued at sea camped on streets near Rome's Tiburtina train station and gathered in Milan's main terminal on Thursday, making a brief stop on their journey to northern Europe. At Tiburtina, migrants from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia were among those resting in the shade under olive and fig trees. Children played in the supermarket nearby, and dozens napped on cardboard under an overpass. Italy is struggling to handle the summertime surge in migrants, with thousands rescued at sea each week and more than 50,000 so far this year. Almost 2,000 have...

More than 220 members of the European Parliament issued a statement, this week, warning about the flagrant rise of breaches of human rights in Iran. They have asserted that Iranian regime is the heart of the crisis in the Middle East. Many representatives in the European Parliament have already declared they will participate in this year’s Iranian resistance reunion. The meeting will take place in Paris on June 13th.

They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of the night, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primeval tomahawks. Around the world, they have run spying stations disguised as commercial boats, posed as civilian employees of front companies and operated undercover at embassies as male-female pairs, tracking those the United States wants to kill or capture. Those operations are part of the hidden history...

Mona Walter is on a mission. Her mission is for more Muslims to know what is in the Koran. She says if more Muslims knew what was in the Koran, more would leave Islam. Walter came to Sweden from Somalia as a war refugee when she was 19. She says she was excited about joining a modern European nation with equal rights for women. But as a young Muslim woman, that was not the Sweden she encountered. A Real Introduction to Islam It was in Sweden that she first experienced radical Islam on a daily basis. "I discovered Islam first...

About 380 migrants are taken by bus to emergency housing in and around Paris PARIS—French police dismantled a makeshift migrant camp that had popped up in the heart of the capital, the latest sign of a major influx into Europe that France and other countries are struggling to contain. About 380 migrants from Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia had set up tents under a subway bridge in northern Paris—the largest migrant camp to appear in the city in recent years, according to authorities. The migrants, including about 76 women and children, were taken by bus Tuesday to emergency housing in and...

As I watched a BBC news story about how order is being restored to Somalia, I could not help but notice the beach guard with his AK 47 and the very nice,  leather magazine pouches for 30 round magazines.   They seem to be attached to a load bearing system with shoulder straps.  From the uniformity of the pouches, it appears to be at least a local cottage industry.  The top flap seems to protect the magazines from sand, and I expect that in Somalia, a desert country, mold and decay are not huge problems.  I wonder how the leather...

A total of seven Minnesota men have been indicted after prosecutors say they tried to fly to Syria to join the Islamic State. An indictment filed back in February charging 21-year-old Hamza Naj Ahmed of Savage has added 19-year-old Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman of Columbia Heights, 19-year-old Adnan Farah of Minneapolis, 19-year-old Hanad Mustafe Musse of Minneapolis, 20-year-old Guled Ali Omar of Minneapolis, 21-year-old Abdirahman Yasin Daud of Minneapolis, and 21-year-old Mohamed Abdihamid Farah of Minneapolis. They have all been charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. Additionally, Omar, Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, Abdurahman, Musse and...

An Islamist radical recruited to Somalia from Minneapolis inspired the would-be “Texas Terror” killers, who were gunned down in Garland, Texas Sunday night by a sharp-shooting law enforcement officer before they could carry out their mass-murder plot at an art exhibit sponsored by First Amendment heroine Pamela Geller. It’s just the latest example of how and why Minneapolis—and specifically the congressional district of Muslim Democrat Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) —has become ground zero for the threat to the United States from Islamist terror groups such as ISIS and Al-Shabaab. ... The terrorist threat emanates from the Minneapolis neighborhood known as...

ABC News is reporting this morning that one of the two gunman shot last night in Garland, Texas has been identified as Elton Simpson, a many previously investigated by the FBI for links to terrorism: One of the suspects in the shooting in Garland, Texas late Sunday has been identified as Elton Simpson, an Arizona man who was previously the subject of a terror investigation, according to a senior FBI official. Overnight and today FBI agents and a bomb squad were at Simpson’s home in an apartment complex in north Phoenix where a robot is believed to be conducting an...

As of this morning, the arrests seem rather mysterious, except for the context of missing young men from the Twin Cities Somalian ex-patriate community. The FBI rounded up a half-dozen suspects in Minneapolis and in San Diego in a Joint Terrorism Task Force operation, but otherwise the feds have been mum about the specifics of the threat or threats: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO The FBI arrested several people in Minneapolis and San Diego on Sunday as part of a joint terrorism task force investigation, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger confirmed Sunday evening. A Somali woman who...

Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Moscow on Monday where the issue of Middle East peace talks will be raised, Russian authorities announced Thursday. “The two leaders will hold talks concerning key aspects of Russian-Palestinian relations and their future, with particular attention on the trade, economy and humanitarian sectors,” the Kremlin said in a statement according to AFP. There will also be “an exchange of ideas on the process of Israeli-Palestinian talks and other problematic regional situations,” the statement continued, adding that North Africa would also be on the agenda. …

The Kenyan government has given the UN three months to relocate the world's largest refugee camp over the border to Somalia. Nairobi has vowed a tough response following the recent massacre by Somali jihadists. The United Nations Dadaab camp in northeast Kenya houses hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-torn Somalia, and authorities have in the past accused Islamists of hiding within the camp. "We have asked the UNHCR to relocate the refugees in three months, failure to which we shall relocate them ourselves," Deputy President William Ruto said in a statement on Saturday, adding that the government will secure...

President Obama, keynote speaker at the 130th annual Gridiron event. President Obama took advantage of his unchallenged podium at the 130th annual Gridiron Club dinner to sideswipe the likes of Gov. Scott Walker, conservative former neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Fox News talking head Bill O’Reilly – as well as those who question the truth about his birth certificate. Early in the presentation, Obama thanked Clarence Page, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, for his years of friendship, saying they go “way back,” various media reported. And that’s when Obama made his first snipe at those who still wonder at...

“We have come to be kill and be killed,” the Muslims screamed out as they shot the Christians. Where did they get the idea to scream out something like that? From the Qur’an: “Indeed, Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties for that they will have Paradise. They fight in the cause of Allah, so they kill and are killed.” (9:111) Not that this has anything to do with Islam! Piles of bodies and pools of blood running down the corridors: survivors of the Kenya university massacre described how laughing gunmen taunted their victims amid scenes...