Free Republic

US secretary of state highlights cooperation with Turkey, but his Turkish counterpart notes deep divide over Kurdish fighters ___ ANKARA, Turkey — US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Thursday that the fate of Syrian President Bashar Assad was up to the war-ravaged country’s people. Speaking after talks in Ankara, he added there was “no space” between Turkey and the US over fighting the so-called Islamic State group — even as his Turkish counterpart reiterated a key point of discord. “I think the .. longer term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people,” Tillerson told...

“…The Islamic State has become especially adept at turning various makes and models of cars into vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs). Armor is fixed to large and small vehicles alike in order to make it more difficult for Iraqi and American forces to destroy them before they reach their target. The US has been able to take out dozens of VBIEDs before their drivers could complete their missions. But the video showcases some of the jihadists’ more successful bombings. In one instance, one VBIED is driven into a security checkpoint and then a second snakes its way through an apartment...

The battle for Aleppo has gripped the world, but it is hardly the only active front across war-torn Syria. One of the next targets for the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad will probably be the heartland of rebel territory, the neighboring province of Idlib. The province west of Aleppo is a stronghold of al-Qaida’s Syria affiliate and is now also packed with tens of thousands of rebels, many of them evacuated from other parts of the country, making it likely to be an even more bloody theater than Aleppo. Idlib has direct links to the Turkish border, and is...

Though the U.S. has no legal right to operate inside Syria, Official Washington is boasting about its plans to liberate Raqqa from ISIS. But another problem: the battle plan makes no sense ___ In her final debate with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton promised that the United States and its allies would follow up the offensive against ISIS-occupied Mosul with an assault on ISIS headquarters in Raqqa in neighboring Syria. Last week, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter assured the press that an offensive was on the way. “It starts in the next few weeks,” Carter said. “That has long been our...

The Kurdish-led al-Bab Military Council in northern Syria is welcoming new female recruits who want to help free their hometown from ISIS militants. Syrian women freed from ISIS, following the example of female Kurdish fighters, are taking up arms in order to help in the next fight. Female residents originally from al-Bab in northern Syria who were living in nearby Manbij when it was liberated have been so inspired by the fighting of the female soldiers in the Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) that they have created their own all-female battalion ahead of the battle for their city. “When ISIS...

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war. The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed. In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called...

<p>Al-Qaida's branch in Syria is considering splitting ties with the global terror group, members say.</p> <p>A Nusra Front official told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the group's leader plans to announce a disassociation with al-Qaida soon. Speaking via text message from northern Syria, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue, said Nusra will merge with other insurgent groups.</p>

Islamic State militants have not only stolen a majority of the military Humvees provided to the Iraq Security Forces (ISF) by the U.S., they are now re-purposing them into car bombs. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi confirmed that 2,300 are in ISIS hands, more than 2/3 of all Humvees provided to Iraq by the U.S. Most were stolen after the terrorist group captured the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014. While the vehicles were designed as a fast means to carry U.S. personnel and their supplies into battle, it turns out they are even better suited to be used...

Since 2011, when the Syrian crisis begun, gradually developing into a civil war (nurtured by internal as well as external forces) the number of dead is estimated around 220,000. It is important to clarify that there is no way to ascertain that number. The UN ceased publishing their own estimates by 2014 as there was no way to verify the actual numbers. Most Syrians have already been displaced two or three times since, in the beginning they sought protection in houses of relatives and friends in neighboring cities which were considered safe. The number of internally displaced people in Syria...

The United Nations called for the swift creation of large-scale reception centers in frontline states such as Hungary and Greece, and one U.N. agency warned that millions more refugees could arrive in Europe if Syria's civil war continues to rage. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said his country, which expects to take in 800,000 asylum seekers this year alone, had finite resources and urged other European countries to do much more to share the burden. He said Germany expected to receive another 40,000 migrants this weekend. And as politicians from the left and right accused Chancellor Angela Merkel's government of...

Russian military officers are now in Damascus and meeting regularly with Iranian and Syrian counterparts, according to a source with close contacts in the Bashar al-Assad regime. “They’re out in restaurants and cafes with other high officials in the Syrian Army,” the source told The Daily Beast, “mainly concentrated in Yaafour and Sabboura, areas that are close to each other, and in west Mezze,” referring to a district in the capital where Assad’s praetorian Fourth Armored Division keeps an important airbase. “The Russians aren’t in uniform, but they’re constantly hanging out with officers from the Syrian Army’s central command.” Other...

While the world’s attention is fixed on the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees swarming into Europe, a potentially far more profound crisis is unfolding in the countries of the Middle East that have borne the brunt of the world’s failure to resolve the Syrian war. Those reaching Europe represent a small percentage of the 4 million Syrians who have fled into Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, making Syria the biggest single source of refugees in the world and the worst humanitarian emergency in more than four decades.

ALEPPO, Syria — Another extraordinary week in Syria, which has seen the fortunes of the once powerful Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) take a sharp turn for the worse, sparking a bloody and bitter interfactional war among Islamist groups for supremacy over rebel territories in the north. So what prompted the allies of yesterday to commit "jihadist fratricide" today? What of the timing of these unprecedented, coordinated attacks across many fronts on ISIS positions, effectively catching them by surprise in a sucker punch that unseated them from many former strongholds? Make no mistake, this is not a “resurgence”...

Podcast. Audio, first part of podcast. News from activity in Syraq and beyond

The Al Nusrah Front, al Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, and its allies in the Jaysh al Fateh coalition are claiming to have completely overrun the Assad regime’s forces at the Al Mastoumah military camp in Idlib. The camp was one of the last remaining regime strongholds in the northwestern province. The jihadists have been promoting the victory on Twitter and other social media. On Al Nusrah’s official Twitter feed for its Idlib operations, the jihadist group said that it and its Jaysh al Fateh allies have fully “liberated” the camp. In other tweets, it said that the regime forces...