Free Republic

Tension is running high between Greece and Turkey. The cause? Turkish Chief of the General Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar paid a visit to Imia, a pair of two small, uninhabited Greek islets in the Aegean Sea, on January 29. He was accompanied by the commanders of the Turkish land, naval and air forces.Imia – which Turkey calls “Kardak” – was a subject of yet another crisis in 1996 that brought Greece and Turkey to the brink of war. Although armed conflict was ultimately averted, Turkey still claims that the islands are Turkish, even though the islands in the Aegean are...

Who Was Tamerlane? Timur was a 14th Century Turko-Mongol military leader who conquered most of the Muslim world, central Asia, and parts of India. His Timurid Empire rivaled the size and power of the Mongolian domain forged by Genghis Khan a century earlier.Known by his nickname, Tamerlane, it's unclear why many people in the Western world have never heard of this brutal and ingenious warlord. To rectify this neglect, the following is a list of interesting facts about Tamerlane. The list includes notable events in his life; analyzes his acerbic personality, and remarks on current impressions of this fascinating...

--------------------------------SNIP-------------------------- Timur’s Tomb and World War II The “curse” Timur’s Tomb changed the course of the War two times, the first time when Stalin opened it, and the second when he returned the remains to the tomb. Stalin ordered anthropologist and historian Mikhail Gerasimov to open the Timur’s Tomb in 1941. At the time, Gerasimov was a known and popular anthropologist famous for reconstructing a face from a skull. His job was to do that with Timur’s skull, and Mikhail succeeded. Soviets opened the Tomb on June 20, 1942. The tomb was immediately filed with odor of camphor, resin, rose...

STOCKHOLM — Swedish police said Saturday that they believe they have captured the man accused of turning a beer truck into a weapon a day earlier by driving it into a crowd of pedestrians in a rampage that left four people dead. Authorities did not divulge the man’s name but said he is a 39-year-old from Uzbekistan who had been known to security services as “a marginal character” for the past year. Police said that when they first investigated him, they had found no connections to extremism. Authorities did not say when the man had come to Sweden. The arrest...

The latest news on the Boston Marathon bombing is that two suspects have been identified: brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. Tamerlan has since died after a confrontation with police in Watertown, Mass., while Dzhokhar is still on the run. Details are sketchy, but the general picture seems to be that the Tsarnaev family is from Chechnya, a republic in southern Russia (i.e., the Russian Caucasus). Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechnya has had a bloody history involving attempts to gain independence from Russia, with subsequent Russian crackdowns and attacks by Chechen terrorists. The...

Regular viewers of Fox News are used to seeing popular host Megyn Kelly on their televisions every afternoon, but on Thursday morning Kelly made a special appearance during the morning to break some surprising information: according to her sources, the FBI was “shocked” to see a magistrate “waltz into” the hospital room of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and read him his Miranda rights. So why were they shocked? According to Kelly, the FBI was under the understanding that they would get much more time with Tsarnaev under the “public safety exemption” before he was read his rights. Adding to the shock: the...

The mother of accused Boston Marathon bombers has continued to defend her two sons from her home in Dagestan, Russia, but if she attempts to return to the United States to bury her older son, or care for the boy that remains hospitalized, she could face arrest on an outstanding warrant for shoplifting. The clerk of the Natick District Court confirmed to ABC News that Zubeidat Tsarnaev, failed to appear at a court hearing on October 25, 2012 to resolve charges that she stole $1,600 worth of garments from a nearby Lord & Taylor department store. The family saga for...

During an appearance on MSNBC, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress attempted to pin the motivations of the Boston marathon bombers on politics, not religion. In so doing, Ellison quite knowingly (because he is a devout Muslim) put forth a faulty premise that Islam is separate from politics. They are inseparable and Ellison knows this. It’s Islam 101. Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamic fundamentalist political party, wrote about this very thing in an article entitled, Essential Features of the Islamic Political System.

According to Andy Bostom, plenty: “Tamerlan(e)” Tsarnaev and Killing From Koranic Piety However, in the end, there was even a more basic, profound warning sign of the Tsarnaev family’s dangerous Weltanschauung—the very name Anzor and Zubeidat Tsarnaev chose for their eldest son: Tamerlan(e). The cover art for my recent book “Sharia Versus Freedom—The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism,” reproduces a miniature painting from a sixteenth century manuscript of the Zafarnama by Sharaf al-Din Ali-Yazdi. The image was housed in the British Library and originally published/produced in Shiraz, Iran, 1552. It depicts soldiers filing before the Islamized Mongol conqueror Amir Timur-i-lang, or...

"The FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 after a request from a foreign government, US law enforcements officials have confirmed. But agents closed the case after finding no cause for concern. In an interview on Russian television, the mother of the two suspects said the FBI had been in contact with her son for several years. It is not known which country made the request, but the BBC's Paul Adams in Washington says it is likely to have come from the Russians." . . ."AnalysisWe may know the names of the suspects in the Boston marathon attacks and also much...

A “foreign government” asked the FBI to look into one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect’s “possibly extremist ties” in 2011, CBS News reported on Friday. The FBI complied and spoke with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, to investigate any possible ties to extremism. The FBI determined Tsarnaev represented no threat, according to CBS News. Tamerlan, believed to be 26 when he was killed overnight in a shootout, dropped out after studying accounting at Bunker Hill Community College for just three semesters. He was an amateur boxer who had hoped to fight on the U.S. Olympic team, a man who said he...

Early on, Issyk Kul also drew attention from researchers for the remains that lie beneath its stunning cobalt waters. It's an endorheic lake (meaning that it has no outlet) with abundant underwater springs, and the water level has fluctuated dramatically over the centuries, submerging settlements, buildings and even entire cities that had been established on earlier shorelines. Issyk Kul was one of the earliest sites for underwater archaeological research in Central Asia, with divers exploring its depths as long ago as the 1860s. In the Middle Ages, the region around the lake was hotly contested by two divergent lines of...

Tamerlane, the name was derived from the Persian Timur-i lang, "Temur the Lame" by Europeans during the 16th century. His Turkic name is Timur, which means 'iron'. In his life time, he has conquered more than anyone else except for Alexander. His armies crossed Eurasia from Delhi to Moscow, from the Tien Shan Mountains of Central Asia to the Taurus Mountains in Anatolia. From 1370 till his death 1405, Temur built a powerful empire and became the last of great nomadic leaders. Character and Personality There are abundant ancient sources written about Tamerlane. We have the primary source from...