Free Republic

Israel’s Shin Bet security service says it arrested the first known Islamic State cell operating inside the country. The intelligence agency said Sunday that the seven cell members belong to the country’s Arab minority. It said they were caught just before executing an attack and were practicing on animals how to behead people. …

Iran, and not just Russia and Syria, is taking advantage of President Barack Obama's decision to refrain from military force against Syria to collect a shower of diplomatic and political dividends. The new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani announced Tuesday that the coming meeting of the General Assembly opening in New York later this month "may prove the perfect setting to reignite talks about the nation's nuclear program." The US Treasury Department accordingly lifted a string of sanctions restricting humanitarian and athletic exchanges between US and Iranian NGOs and environmental projects, as a counter-gesture of good will. Washington was not put...

For years, it was thought that Israel had destroyed Syria’s nuclear weapons capability with its 2007 raid on the Kibar complex. Not so. New intelligence suggests that Bashar al-Assad is still trying to built the bomb. And he may be getting help from North Korea and Iran. […] Analysts say that the Syrian atomic weapon program has continued in a secret, underground location. According to information they have obtained, approximately 8,000 fuel rods are stored there. Furthermore, a new reactor or an enrichment facility has very likely been built at the site—a development of incalculable geopolitical consequences. Some of the...

As a consequence of the Eurozone crisis, racism is on the rise, in the same way that the 1929 crisis inspired anti-Semitism. But this time the scapegoats are Muslims, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu told a Brussels audience on Thursday (15 January). […] One important message was that the EU, and the West in general, had missed the opportunity provided by the Arab revolutions. The West didn’t mobilize, as it did for Eastern Europe, after the end of the Cold War, Davutoğlu argued. More concretely, he blamed the West for not having supported the “moderate young generation” in Syria, the...

British-Lebanese human rights lawyer urges Egyptian president to expedite release of Canadian-Egyptian reporter.British-Lebanese human rights lawyer Amal Clooney has called on Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to release and pardon an imprisoned Egyptian-Canadian journalist for Al Jazeera, whom she represents. The attorney - who recently wed Hollywood star George Clooney - released a statement Friday, expressing disappointment over the lack of "concrete" progress toward the release of Mohamed Fahmy following a meeting with Egyptian and Canadian diplomats, Egypt's Al-Masry Al-Youm reported. Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird expressed cautious optimism for Fahmy's release after talks with his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shukri...

The Towie fan who fled ISIS terrorists with her toddler son could be sent back to Syria by Turkish authorities. Tareena Shakil, 25, ran away to Syria last year after telling relatives she was going on holiday to Spain with her 16-month-old son Zaheem. But she escaped back across the Turkish border after, she claims, the militants tried to force her into marrying a one-legged fighter. However, instead of being deported to Britain, Shakil, from Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, might be sent back to Syria and into the clutches of ISIS. (snip) Shakil is being held at a facility on the border...

By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyNew England, USA — January 17, 2015 … The above mosque is not in Iraq, Syria, Turkey or Iran. But one would have wished it was. The speaker was Dr. Saud Anwar, mayor of South Windsor, Connecticut. Dr. Anwar is respected for saving lives. Saud Anwar is a physician who specializes in Lung Diseases and Critical Care Medicine. Currently, he serves as Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine of Manchester Memorial and Rockville General Hospitals. Dr. Anwar is involved in humanitarian and peace initiatives nationally and internationally. He is frequently invited to consult for...

A Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee says Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki cannot keep his country together, and a U.S. alliance with Iran might be needed to do so. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday a U.S. partnership with longtime foe Iran makes him uncomfortable but likened it to the United States working with Josef Stalin in World War II against Adolf Hitler. He says the United States has to do what it can to keep Baghdad from falling to insurgents. "We should have discussions with Iran to make sure they don't use this as an opportunity...

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi continues to be the antithesis of longstanding mainstream media portrayals of him. First there was his historic speech where he, leader of the largest Arab nation, and a Muslim, accused Islamic thinking of being the scourge of humanity—in words that no Western leader would dare utter Next, Sisi went to the St. Mark Coptic Cathedral during Christmas Eve Mass to offer Egypt's Christian minority his congratulations and well wishing. Here again he made history as the first Egyptian president to enter a church during Christmas mass—a thing vehemently criticized by the nation's Islamists, including the...

(IraqiNews.com) On Thursday, a local source in Nineveh province said, that the ‘Wild Boar’ aircraft which belongs to the U.S. Air Force has carried out four air strikes that killed and wounded dozens of ISIS elements, adding that the aircraft sparked panic in the ranks of ISIS. The source said in an interview for IraqiNews.com, “The U.S. aircraft A-10 Warthog (Wild Boar) carried out, at dawn today, four air strikes on gatherings of ISIS elements in the village of Sultan Abdullah in Makhmour district, southeast Mosul,” adding that, “The raids resulted in the death and injury of dozens of ISIS...

The Islamic State (Isis) have crucified 17 young men in 48 hours in retaliation for a wave of assassinations targeting their fighters. The executions carried out by the jihadist group, which controls vast swathes of land straddling Syria and Iraq, took place in the eastern and northern Syrian cities of Deir Ezzor (or Deir al-Zor) and Raqqa "to send a message to all their opponents after recent assassinations of 12 Syrian, Iraqi and Algerian jihadists," said London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The men, who were shot dead and then crucified for three days, were accused of fighting against Islamic...

Istanbul (AFP)- A teenager from Russia's Muslim region of Dagestan, suspected of a suicide bombing in Istanbul, was said Friday to have been an Islamic State jihadist and the wqidow of an Norwegian extremist...

Muslims never guilty of 'terrorist massacres,' Turkey's Erdogan insistsTurkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly bizarre rhetoric continued this week when he told reporters Muslims have "never taken part in terrorist massacres" and appeared to blame the West for the recent Islamist attacks in Paris.

The head of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ordered the execution of 56 members of the militant group following a defeat in northern Iraq, a Kurdish official told Al Arabiya News Channel. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took the decision after the Islamist militants defeat in Kober...

The US Department of Defense is to send 400 troops and hundreds of support staff to train moderate rebels against Islamic State (IS) in Syria. It is not yet clear where the troops will be drawn from or where they will be based, though Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have offered to host them. The US aims to train more than 5,000 rebels annually for three years.

Dozens of terror suspects were arrested in Belgium, France, and Germany early Friday, a day after Belgian authorities said that they halted a plot to attack police officers by mere hours. Eric Van der Sypt, a Belgian federal magistrate, told a news conference Friday in Brussels that 13 people had been detained in Belgium in connection with the plot, with another two arrested in neighboring France. He added that a dozen searches had led to the discovery of four military-style weapons including Kalashnikov assault rifles. On Thursday, Belgian police had moved against a suspected terrorist hideout in the eastern town...

The White House was dragged kicking and screaming into the war against ISIS. Politically and materially, the Obama administration saw few upsides to engaging in the fight against the brutish Islamist militants despite their rapid advance across Syria and Iraq in the spring and early summer of last year. The administrationÂ’s hand was forced when it appeared as though ISIS was poised to drive the Yazidi minority into extinction. Even then, the White House only cautiously engaged in Iraq and utterly refused to take on the Islamic State in their Northern Syrian stronghold. Since then, the Islamic State has...

While Western newspapers were debating whether or not to reprint the Mohammed cartoons, in Nigeria as many as 2,000 people were massacred by the Islamic State in Nigeria, also known as Boko Haram, in what is being called the deadliest attack by the Muslim group to date. Survivors described the Islamic State setting up efficient killing teams and massacring everyone while shouting “Allahu Akbar”. “For five kilometers (three miles), I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam Karanti village, which was also deserted and burnt,” one survivor said. There’s a word for that. It’s genocide. The Islamic State...

The U.S. military is planning to deploy more than 400 troops to help train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, along with hundreds of U.S. support personnel, a Pentagon spokesman told Reuters on Thursday.

The joke’s on them. Don’t the Saudis know that massive border fences do nothing to enhance domestic security and are, in fact, counterproductive? Well, I guess they’ll find out soon enough. According to reports, the Saudi Kingdom is fed up with defending against ISIS raiding parties that routinely cross over the Iraqi border. In order to stave off these assaults, the Saudis are going to build a massive, 600-mile long border fence across the length of the country’s border with Iraq. But that’s not all. The fence will be double layered with a concertina wire barrier in no man’s...