Free Republic

Three hundred US Marines have been deployed to northern Jordan to pave the way for the West to arm Syrian rebels. A Patriot anti-aircraft missile system, designed to protect Jordanian territory from attack by Assad missiles, has also been moved into the area.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the prominent Sunni cleric, said Friday that Hezbollah and Iran are "more infidel than Jews and Christians." Coming from the guy who once lauded Hitler for exacting "divine punishment" on the Jews, that really is saying something. That the war in Syria is sectarian was obvious almost from the start, despite the credulous belief that Bashar Assad ran a nonsectarian regime. That a sectarian ruling minority fighting for its life would not fold easily was obvious within months, despite happy guarantees that the regime's downfall would come within weeks. That a sectarian war in Syria would stir similar...

Sexual violence against women in Egypt has increased in the post-revolutionary Islamist rule, according to official reports and rights activists. The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality said in a report published on May 23 that 99.3 percent of Egyptian women have experienced some form of sexual violence. Nearly 50 percent of women reported more harassment after the revolution; 44 percent said the level of harassment remained the same before and after the revolution. Meanwhile, more than 58 percent of men surveyed said harassment increased after the revolution. …

In a further sign that Syria’s civil war is increasingly becoming a theater of battle between Shi’ite and Sunni extremists – under the respective flags of Hezbollah and al-Qaeda – a group of Sunni radicals in Egypt is citing the Syrian situation in its appeal to Sunnis everywhere to support a jihad against Shi’ites. Twenty Egyptian Salafists including Mohammed al-Zawahiri, the brother of al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, urged Sunnis to target Hezbollah and others involved in the fighting in the Syrian town of al-Qusair (al-Qusayr)... thousands of Shi’ite fighters from Hezbollah, Iran and Iraq have been involved in the fighting...

Yet another Islamic cleric recently made it permissible for the Islamic fighters waging a jihad in Syria—politely known as “the opposition”—to rape the nation’s women. Salafi Sheikh Yasir al-‘Ajlawni, a Jordanian of origin who lived in Damascus, Syria for 17 years, posted a YouTube video last week where he said he was preparing to issue a “legitimate fatwa” making it legal (in the eyes of Islam) for those Muslims fighting to topple secular president Bashar Assad and install Sharia law to “capture and have sex with” all non-Sunni women, specifically naming Assad’s own sect, the Alawites, as well as the...

The Sunni minority in Iraq as a whole held power under Saddam – had done since Ottoman rule. That’s over. Their geographic distribution does little to guarantee their place in Iraqi society today. They are more divided than ever from the country’s Shiites. They feel they are second-class citizens, stigmatised and repressed. This has added fuel to the Sunni insurgence, invoking the spectre of al Qaeda extremism. ... The tensions are sustained by violence committed on both sides. The Shiite militias have not been disarmed; attacks against towns or Sunni mosques are frequent. Twenty-nine mosques were targeted in April and...

The Boston terror bombing brings home the fact we are in a state of war, even though our government leaders don’t want to acknowledge it. The attitude by the present administration is eerily similar to what the Clinton administration had, that lead up to the 9/11/2001 terror attacks. Criminalizing terror is in fact ignoring the active war being waged against our country and western society. As if we don’t name it, then it doesn’t really exist. During the Clinton administration, our world trade center was attacked with a truck bomb and our embassies in Africa were bombed killing hundreds. ......

Betrayal in Benghazi The combat code of the US Military is that we don’t abandon our dead or wounded on the battlefield. In US Air Force lingo, fighter pilots don’t run off and leave their wingmen. If one of our own is shot down, still alive and not yet in enemy captivity, we will either come to get him or die trying. Among America’s fighting forces, the calm, sure knowledge that such an irrevocable bond exists is priceless. Along with individual faith and personal grit, it is a sacred trust that has often sustained hope in the face of terribly...

Anjem Choudary and his fellow protestors can be seen fighting with what was reported as other Muslim groups on London's Edgware Road. ... Protestors marched with hard-line Salafist placards and flags, many of which read, "Support Jund Al Sham". ... The protestors were marching in opposition to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who they are known to deplore for his Alawite religion. Protestors also took up the cause against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah, who they deem as "Shia Enemies of Allah" for their Shi'ite Muslim backgrounds. The protestors are thought to be hard-line Salafists, who have...

The draft penal code bill has been amended to include punishments as prescribed in the Quran, such as amputation for theft. ... The committee’s chairperson, MP Ahmed Hamza, told Sun Online the new draft penal code will require amputating persons convicted of theft, while a person convicted of apostasy (renouncing Islam) will also face punishment.

A 15-year-old girl in the Maldives whose stepfather is accused of repeatedly raping her and killing the resulting baby risks being flogged for “fornication” with another man under the nation’s strict Islamic law. In the course of inquiries into the rape case, police investigators say they unearthed evidence of the girl having had consensual sex with another man, which is an offence in the Indian Ocean holiday destination, a police source said. Women, including minors, having consensual sex outside marriage can be charged in the Maldives, where convicts can be publicly flogged. Minors receive the punishment when they reach 18,...

Gunmen on Thursday pulled 20 Shiite Muslims from a bus and shot them dead in northwestern Pakistan, the second such incident in six months

(CNSNews.com) - Sunni Muslim terrorists committed “about 70 percent” of the 12,533 terrorist murders in the world last year, according to a report by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The information comes from the 2011 NCTC Report on Terrorism, which is based on information available as of March 12, 2012. “Sunni extremists accounted for the greatest number of terrorist attacks and fatalities for the third consecutive year,” the report says. “More than 5,700 incidents were attributed to Sunni extremists, accounting for nearly 56 percent of all attacks and about 70 percent of all fatalities.” The report says that in 2011,...

A Bahraini court has sentenced a man to two years in prison for making insulting comments about one of the Prophet Mohammad's wives... Aisha, a revered figure for Sunni Muslims, in comments online. "The accused entered a website and made comments that were so morally filthy and depraved that the tongue could not pronounce them, and they slandered Aisha ... Underlying tensions between Sunnis and Shi'ites in Muslim countries are often ignited by such issues concerning figures from early Islam and the different interpretations of Sunnis and Shi'ites over the historical events of that period. Such slander cases have become...

Checkpoint 20 was the last piece of American-controlled terrain on the road to Hawr Rajab and our linkup point with Sheik Ali Majid al-Dulaimi. Before heading out, Lt. Col. Mark Odom surveyed the terrain from the rooftop of the nearby American combat outpost, a heavily sandbagged structure surrounded by concrete walls to guard against car bombs... snip-- Still, a series of broader concerns lingered in the background. Could the Americans’ success with the Sunni tribes in the provinces of Anbar and Diyala be transferred to other areas of the country? Even if the sheik delivered, did he and the Americans...

BAGHDAD, April 11 — Arms that American military officials say appear to have been manufactured in Iran as recently as last year have turned up in the past week in a Sunni-majority area, the chief spokesman for the American military command in Iraq said Wednesday in a news conference. The spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said that detainees in American custody had indicated that Iranian intelligence operatives had given support to Sunni insurgents and that surrogates for the Iranian intelligence service were training Shiite extremists in Iran. He gave no further description of the detainees and did not...

KARABILA, Iraq, Feb. 18 — In a remote patch of the Anbar desert just 20 miles from the Syrian border, a single blue pillar of flanges and valves sits atop an enormous deposit of oil and natural gas that would be routine in this petroleum-rich country except for one fact: this is Sunni territory. Huge petroleum deposits have long been known in Iraq’s Kurdish north and Shiite south. But now, Iraq has substantially increased its estimates of the amount of oil and natural gas in deposits on Sunni lands after quietly paying foreign oil companies tens of millions of dollars...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 — Saudi Arabia has told the Bush administration that it might provide financial backing to Iraqi Sunnis in any war against Iraq’s Shiites if the United States pulls its troops out of Iraq, according to American and Arab diplomats. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia conveyed that message to Vice President Dick Cheney two weeks ago during Mr. Cheney’s whirlwind visit to Riyadh, the officials said. During the visit, King Abdullah also expressed strong opposition to diplomatic talks between the United States and Iran, and pushed for Washington to encourage the resumption of peace talks between Israel and...

Political bickering, poor governance and economic woes - with foreign debt of $53.7b - weigh down the country THERE'S much about Beirut that recalls Singapore: the greenery, the lively, urban lifestyle, good schools and eating places, a colourful port, low crime. But look again. One in four passers-by is not Lebanese, but Syrian - about a million of them in a nation of barely four million native Lebanese. Some 30,000 Syrian troops man roadblocks. Other Syrians work as labourers in the booming construction business. Some beg. And some - installed in Lebanon's intelligence service - help monitor the movements of...

Islamic double-standards Posted: January 22, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com I've never been one to defend the French, but it seems to me Paris is getting a bit of a bad rap from the Islamic world these days. Muslims throughout France and around the world seem to have become fixated on the nation's decision to ban religious symbols in public schools – including the hijab, or head scarves worn by Muslim girls and women. There have been massive demonstrations and rallies around the globe over this "abuse of religious freedom." What I find so amazing about this story...