Free Republic

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria’s army and its allies will keep fighting in Syria after the battle ends in Deir al-Zor province, where Islamic State has its last significant stronghold, President Bashar al-Assad said on Tuesday. snip Assad said in his meeting with Velayati that the battle would last “until the recovery of security and stability to all Syrian lands”, his office said.

Moscow, Russia - Abdulmajid Abakarov, a 12-year-old boy from Russia's troubled province of Dagestan, had not seen his mother in three years. Zagidat Abakarova, 34, and her two younger children were "forcibly held" in Syria by her husband, who had joined ISIL, Russian officials said. On October 21, the boy waited for her at the airport in Grozny, the capital of neighbouring Chechnya, in an agitated crowd of civilians, security officers and journalists. Days earlier, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov announced the arrival of seven "rescued" wives and 14 children of Russian ISIL fighters who had been killed, sentenced to death...

When Bild reported on Thursday that 30,000 rejected asylum seekers had gone missing without a trace in Germany it was soon picked up in the international media. The only problem? It isn’t true. Bild described the case as the “disappearance scandal”, claiming that German authorities — through sheer disorganization — had lost trace of roughly 30,000 migrants who had been told to leave the country. The tabloid cited government figures from December 2016 which show that 54,437 people were believed to be in Germany at the time who had been asked to leave. At the same time, only 23,617 of...

Doubts have emerged about the story of a Syrian filmmaker who claimed to have survived a murder attempt in Istanbul last month, after videos were published in which he appears to be planning the attempt on his own life to generate publicity for his anti-Assad film. Muhammad Bayazid said he was stabbed ...

Israeli forces struck targets near the Lebanon-Syria border on Wednesday, foreign media reported. The Al-Mayadeen channel, closely associated with the Assad regime, reported the attack targeted a security facility in an industrial zone in a Homs suburb. They also reported Syrian forces responded with surface-to-air missiles. The Lebanese Anshara website reported huge explosions near the villages of al-Eyn-al-Jedida, located in the eastern mountain range on the Lebanon-Syria border. Local residents reported Israeli jets circling the area prior to the explosion......

Or is this just fake news? Did a Russian Missile Really Hit an Israeli F-35? Did a Russian anti-aircraft missile hit one of Israel’s new F-35 stealth fighters? Pro-Russian media are claiming that an Israeli F-35I was hit and damaged by a Russian-made S-200 surface-to-air missile during an Israeli air strike in Syria earlier this month. Israel says one of its F-35s was damaged—after colliding with a bird. The story begins on October 16, when Israel announced that its aircraft had struck a Syrian SAM battery near Damascus that had fired two hours earlier on Israeli reconnaissance planes flying over...

Syria said on Friday that a United Nations report accusing it of using sarin gas in an attack on the town of Khan Sheikhun in April was a "falsification of the truth", AFP reports. The report, seen by AFP on Thursday, says that President Bashar Al-Assad's regime is responsible for the April 4 attack in which sarin gas projectiles were fired into Khan Sheikhun, a rebel-held town in the Idlib province of northwestern Syria. More than 87 people were killed in the attack, which was not the first time that sarin had been used during the civil war in Syria....

Fighting had been on-going over the Fishkhabur border post which is a crucial economic lifeline for the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq Iraqi forces and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters reached an agreement on Friday to stop fighting in northern Iraq, the media office of the US-led anti-Islamic State coalition said. A spokesman for the coalition in Baghdad told Reuters the ceasefire agreement covered all fronts. The announcement comes after Iraqi forces set a tight deadline on Friday for Kurdish fighters to withdraw from an area on the Turkish border that is critical for oil exports. A senior government security source, asking...

The Islamic State just lost its capital at Raqqa and with it the last of the terrorist group's fantasies of establishing a Middle East caliphate. In recent years, ISIS has horrified global audiences with video clips of unspeakable atrocities. What sort of humans could behead, incinerate, drown, torture and blow up innocent civilians, mock and record such horror, and then narrate their macabre videos for a world audience? How could such pre-modern psychopaths ever be defeated, given that in a matter of months ISIS had managed to overrun vast swaths of Iraq and Syria? The zealotry of the Islamic State...

A new report has found out that at least 5,600 Daesh terrorists have returned to their countries, including the US and UK, as the terror group loses ground in Syria and Iraq.The US-based think tank Soufan Center published a report on Tuesday saying that those returning home will be a security challenge for years to come. They include half of the estimated 850 people that left the UK to join ISIL and also 400 of the 3,417 fighters from Russia; 760 of the 3,244 from Saudi Arabia; 800 of the 2,926 from Tunisia; and 271 of the 1,910 from France,...

Evidence has emerged of another Islamic State militant group (ISIS) mass execution, this time in the Syrian Christian desert town of Al-Qaryatain. The militant group killed at least 116 civilians in executions committed in the days before the Syrian regime recaptured the town, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a U.K.-based monitoring group with an extensive network of contacts in Syria. “ISIS has over a period of 20 days executed at least 116 civilians in reprisal killings, accusing them of collaboration with regime forces,” SOHR chief Rami Abdelrahman told the Agence France-Presse news agency.

Evidence has emerged of another Islamic State militant group (ISIS) mass execution, this time in the Syrian Christian desert town of Al-Qaryatain. The militant group killed at least 116 civilians in executions committed in the days before the Syrian regime recaptured the town, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a U.K.-based monitoring group with an extensive network of contacts in Syria. “ISIS has over a period of 20 days executed at least 116 civilians in reprisal killings, accusing them of collaboration with regime forces,” SOHR chief Rami Abdelrahman told the Agence France-Presse news agency.

Iran has transferred elements of its elite 65th Brigade to Syria. On arrival they assumed command of the Syrian Malik Ashtar commando brigade. Tehran announced that elements of its Special Operations 65th Brigade (which compares itself to US Green Berets), had been deployed to Syria to bolster the Assad regime’s depleted frontline forces. The transfer took place during Iranian Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri’s three-day visit to Damascus when a series of accords boosting their military cooperation accords were signed. The 65th Brigade is one of four Iranian special operations outfits. It was the first regular Iranian military...

US-backed Syrian Kurdish militias reported Sunday, Oct. 22, the capture of Syria’s biggest oil field of al-Omar in the eastern Deir Ez-Zour province. They were pressing on with their offensive against the Islamic State after capturing Raqqa. Al-Omar is located on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River. The Kurds’ takeover pre-empted its grab by a mixed force of Russian-backed Syrian army contingents and Hizballah, which had halted 6 km short of al-Omar. While in the hands of ISIS, this field pumped up to 10,000 barrels today and is capable of producing up to 40,000 bpd. If repaired and brought...

German federal prosecutors have opened up more than 900 terrorism-related cases so far this year, including 800 related to radical Islamists, according to a report published in the German language newspaper Welt am Sonntag on Sunday. The number of terrorism cases has jumped nearly four-fold compared to last year, when federal prosecutors opened about 250 proceedings. In 2013, there were about 80 terrorism cases in the courts. The sharp rise has stretched manpower at the Karlsruhe-based federal prosecutors office, the newspaper reported. Nearly 300 terrorism cases have been transferred from federal authorities to state prosecutors. […] Not all of the...

Rapid advances by Russian- and Iranian-backed government forces in eastern Syria are thwarting the U.S. military’s hopes of pressing deeper into Islamic State territory after winning the battle for Raqqa. An expansion of territory held by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad is also likely to provide Assad with additional leverage in political negotiations over Syria’s future, talks the United Nations hopes to reconvene next month. In a statement this week, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said the “latest developments” in Syria pointed “to the urgent need to reinvigorate the political process.” The recent government gains have cut off the...

I realize that it must be intensely humiliating for members of the Obama foreign policy team to see President Trump making good on his promise to eliminate ISIS. The rapid fall of the Jihad Caliphate is showing up the bloody fecklessness of the Obama administration, which, after the President ridiculed ISIS as the jayvee, was forced to lamely account for its failure effectively dispatch it. But Marie Harf has gone the extra mile into absurdity in dealing with the shame, actually trying to credit her former boss, President Obama, with the victory. She was, in other words, “harfing.” The Urban...

The U.S. military must figure out how to keep Iraq from breaking apart while also preventing neighboring Iran from turning Iraq into a proxy state.. It makes no sense for a nation to treat its enemies kindly and its allies harshly. Any nation that tries this foolish approach will see its enemies grow stronger and more dangerous, and will lose its allies when it abandons them. ... The man most responsible for the failure of the U.S. to give adequate support to the Kurds is Brett McGurk, President Trump’s special envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS. He held...

Germany has made no secret of its desire to see its new law copied by the rest of the EU. When employees of social media companies are appointed as the state's private thought police and given the power to shape the form of current political and cultural discourse by deciding who shall be allowed to speak and what to say, and who shall be shut down, free speech becomes nothing more than a fairy tale. Or is that perhaps the point? Perhaps fighting "Islamophobia" is now a higher priority than fighting terrorism? A new German law introducing state censorship...

We congratulate the Syrian people and the Syrian Democratic Forces, including the Syrian Arab Coalition, on the liberation of Raqqa. The United States is proud to lead the 73-member Global Coalition that supported this effort, which has seen ISIS’s so-called caliphate crumble across Iraq and Syria. Our work is far from over but the liberation of Raqqa is a critical milestone in the global fight against ISIS, and underscores the success of the ongoing international and Syrian effort to defeat these terrorists. In January, ISIS was actively plotting terrorist attacks against our allies and our homeland in Raqqa. Nine short...