Free Republic

A man from Pankisi Gorge stabbed his sister in the chest with a knife for refusing to wear a hijab. The brother, 35, inflicted 7 wounds on his 33 year old sister, a former police officer. Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge is located in the northeast of the country. The majority here are Kists, a subgroup of Chechens adhering to the Sunni branch of Islam. The wounded woman underwent emergency surgery at the local hospital. His brother was arrested and is under investigation for attempted murder. The stabbed woman worked for several years as a police officer at Duisi police station, but...

Washington DC thinks we are stupid, they really do. The professional political class has yet to grasp the understanding that “WWW” as a prefix in the internet stands for “World Wide Web”. We are quite capable of connecting, collecting and digesting information directly from the heart of the issues being debated. Despite all the DC pontifications, obfuscations, and professional talking points to the contrary, we know in Syria there are two options, support Bashir Assad or support radical Islamists, that’s it. There is no mysterious “moderate” third option; the “rebels” are radical islamists. President Obama and Republican Senator John McCain...

Thousands of children in swaths of war-torn Syria, now controlled by dreaded Islamic State militants, can no longer study math or social studies under new diktats issued by the jihadists. While sports is banned, the children will not be allowed to learn about elections and democracy. Instead, the children will be subjected to the teachings of the radical Islamist group. And any teacher who dares to break the rules "will be punished." ... The Sunni militant group has captured a slew of Syrian and Iraqi cities in recent months as it tries to establish a caliphate, or Islamic state, spanning...

The Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) is being touted as the newest “threat” to the American homeland: hysterics have pointed to Chicago as the locus of their interest, and we are told by everyone from the President on down that if we don’t attack them – i.e. go back into Iraq (and even venture into Syria) to root them out – they’ll soon show up on American shores.How is this supposed to work? Well, you see, that monster who beheaded James Foley had a British accent, and there are reports of more than a few Brits (and Americans) traveling to...

Siege of Mecca, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria: US and Gulf Destabilization PoliciesMurad Makhmudov and Lee Jay WalkerModern Tokyo Times In the 1980s the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and some other nations began to fund Sunni Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan. This meddling came hot on the heels of the Siege of Mecca in Saudi Arabia in 1979. Therefore, funding radical Sunni Islamism in Afghanistan came at a very opportunistic time for the rulers based in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan became the central base in training international jihadists and spreading Islamism in Afghanistan. Irrespective of the motives in...

Sunni politicians in Iraq have suspended talks to form a new government, in protest of a mass killing inside a mosque in the northeastern province of Diyala. In a statement on Saturday, Salim al-Jabouri, speaker of the Iraqi parliament, denounced as "terrorists" the Shia armed group suspected of killing at least 73 people inside a Sunni mosque.... Jabouri and Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak are demanding that outgoing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the main Shia parliamentary bloc hand over the perpetrators within 48 hours and compensate the families of victims, the AP news agency reported. [....] The attack on...

ISIS is an expression of the murderous hate within Islam. We are not only at war with an acronym, but with the dark hatred in the hearts of men, some of whom are in Iraq, Pakistan, and some of whom live next door Know your enemy. To know what ISIS is, we have to clear away the media myths about ISIS. ISIS is not a new phenomenon. Wahhabi armies have been attacking Iraq in order to wipe out Shiites for over two hundred years. One of the more notably brutal attacks took place during the administration of President Thomas Jefferson....

The battle of our centuryFATHER RAYMOND J. DE SOUZAIt is not a war between religions. It is a war within Islam that has lethal consequences for all those it touches. It began dramatically on Sept. 11, 2001. Our century is characterized by a lethal theological war in the house of Islam, with brutal consequences for the whole world, whether it be lower Manhattan or northern Iraq. Centuries are not exactly 100 years long. The late British historian Eric Hobsbawm proposed a more persuasive division of history with his "long 19th century," which began with the French Revolution in 1789 and...

US drones fired on an Islamic extremist mortar position in northern Iraq on Tuesday to protect Kurdish forces battling to rescue a group of Yazidi civilian refugees, the military said. The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), the region's most powerful Sunni jihadist group, has driven thousands of members of the Yazidi minority from their homes and is besieging the refugees on an exposed mountain. Last week, the United States launched an air campaign to break the siege of Mount Sinjar, bring humanitarian relief to the Yazidis and support Kurdish troops protecting their capital Arbil. "US military...

Yazidis fleeing a jihadist onslaught in northern Iraq say neighbours took up arms alongside their attackers, informing on members of the religious minority and helping the militants take over. "The (non-Iraqi) jihadists were Afghans, Bosnians, Arabs and even Americans and British fighters," said Sabah Hajji Hassan, a 68-year-old Yazidi who managed to flee the bloody offensive by the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group. "But the worst killings came from the people living among us, our (Sunni) Muslim neighbours." "The Metwet, Khawata and Kejala tribes -- they were all our neighbours. But they joined the IS, took heavy weapons from them,...

I must offer this premise. There is no easy way out nor an easy path to follow. But we are indeed down a path, one that attacks the Sunni backed ISIS. We now have picked sides in a religious war. What must be realized in this region of the world, the Mideast, is that borders drawn by westerners are of little matter to they who live in the region. And that is precisely what the national delineations are, lines drawn by westerners. From the Sykes–Picot Agreement which in a fatigued fog resulting from WW I drew up the borders of...

A prominent Christian leader of the Chaldean community unveiled the "systematic beheading of children" and other horrendous crimes committed by ISIS. He said that the Sunni extremists are committing genocide against Christians in Iraq and with the aim to instill the Sharia Law as the law of the land. In the interview with CNN's Jonathan Mann, Chaldean-American businessman Mark Arabo said that the "world hasn't seen an evil like this for generations." "There is a park in Mosul, where [ISIS] they actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick and have them in the park," he explained. "More...

Taliban insurgents halted minibuses in western Afghanistan, identified 14 Shiite passengers and shot them dead by the side of the road .. marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ... The Taliban, like other Sunni extremist groups, view the country's minority Shiite community as apostates, and have targeted Hazaras

A classified military assessment of Iraq’s security forces concludes that many units are so deeply infiltrated by either Sunni extremist informants or Shiite personnel backed by Iran that any Americans assigned to advise Baghdad’s forces could face risks to their safety, according to United States officials. The report concludes that only about half of Iraq’s operational units are capable enough for American commandos to advise them if the White House decides to help roll back the advances made by Sunni militants in northern and western Iraq over the past month. Adding to the administration’s dilemma is the assessment’s conclusion that...

To the villagers who fled, Zowiya is now a graveyard for all they’ve ever known. Their houses have been razed, their neighbors are dead, and their tribal codes have been violated in ways they never dreamed possible. For the extremist fighters who overran Zowiya this week in a fury of mortars and bullets, the ruins of the Sunni Muslim village carry a different symbolism: an example for any “turncoats” who dare resist the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. “What we saw is nothing like anything in all of history, not even under Hulagu,” said a 55-year-old survivor of the attack, Abu...

With the raging war between the Sunni and the Shiites in Iraq, and with the presidents apparent animosity toward the Iraqi government it seems important to understand if Obama has ties to the Sunnis or to the Shiites. Does anyone on FR know the answer to this?

While the blitzkrieg of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham and its allies that saw the groups take control of Mosul on June 10 and quickly approach the outskirts of Samarra has slowed considerably, the advance has not stopped. ISIS continues to attack in Diyala and Salahaddin provinces, and has set its sights on oil infrastructure. Yesterday, ISIS took control of the Ajeel oil wells, which lie east of Tikrit and Bayji in Salahaddin provinces. There are four wells listed in the area: Ajeel, Ajeel 6, Ajeel 24, and Ajeel North 1, and they put out an estimated...

BAGHDAD — Iraqi security officials said Wednesday that fighters with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were advancing on the Haditha Dam, the second-largest in Iraq, raising the possibility of catastrophic damage and flooding. Worries about the dam came as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki criticized his political rivals but did not reject entreaties by Western leaders, including a personal visit by Secretary of State John Kerry, to help defuse the crisis by forming a new government with more equitable power sharing among competing groups. The ISIS militants advancing on the Euphrates River dam, about 120 miles northwest of...

Sunni rebels in Iraq say they have fully captured the country's main oil refinery at Baiji, north of Baghdad.The refinery had been under siege for 10 days with the militant offensive being repulsed several times. The complex supplies a third of Iraq's refined fuel and the battle has already led to petrol rationing. Insurgents, led by the group Isis, have overrun a swathe of territory north and west of Baghdad including Iraq's second-biggest city, Mosul. They are bearing down on a vital dam near Haditha and have captured all border crossings to Syria and Jordan. A rebel spokesman said the...

KIRKUK, Iraq – The insurgents came at midday, walking across a canal, advancing under cover of mortar fire toward the cluster of three Iraqi villages. Within eight hours, Shiite residents who fled said the Sunni insurgents had expelled thousands of them from the majority-Sunni province, helped by local Sunnis in neighboring villages. "You cannot imagine what happened, only if you saw it could you believe it," said Hassan Ali, a 52-year-old farmer siting in the al-Zahra Shiite mosque, used to distribute aid in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, where the displaced had fled, some 50 miles (80 kilometers) away....