Free Republic

Iranian Rev Guards Gen. Soleimani sets up a forward war-room in Syria after Assad’s army and Hizballah failed to recover strategic Abu Kamal from ISIS. The Revolutionary Guards Al Qods chief Gen Qassem Soleimani, supreme commander of Iranian warfronts in Syria and Iraq, was seen on Sunday morning, Nov. 19, at the scene of the Abu Kamal battle, the key southeastern town near the border with Iraq (in Deir ez-Zour province), after Syrian and Hizballah forces had failed to recapture the town from an Islamic State counteroffensive.Military sources reporting this, disclose that Soleimani’s deputy Khairallah Samadi was killed in battle....

The Al Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant, al Qaeda in Iraq's affiliate in Syria, led an assault today that resulted in the takeover of a major dam on the Euphrates River in northern Syria. Additionally, the terror group claimed credit for a suicide assault on an intelligence headquarters in the city of Palmyra. The Al Nusrah Front spearheaded today's assault on the "strategic" dam in Thawra in Raqqa province, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Nusrah Front led "other factions" of the insurgency to take control of Thawra, which "is considered one of the...

Dan Gross, the newly hired president of the Brady Campaign, counts the shooting of his brother Matt in 1997 at the Empire State Building as a seminal event in in his life. He may not call it that but he left a high paying partnership at JWT (formerly known as J. Walter Thompson Advertising) to start what eventually became the Center to Prevent Youth Violence. From his bio at the Brady Campaign: Dan founded CPYV after his brother was severely wounded in a shooting at the Empire State Building in February 1997. Prior to co-founding and directing the Center to...

American helicopters flying from Iraq landed inside Syria yesterday and dropped special forces who killed eight people, the Damascus government said last night, as Washington admitted it had targeted "foreign fighters." Syria warned that it held the US "wholly responsible for this act of aggression and all its repercussions". It described the dead as Syrian civilians, five of them members of the same family. Syrian state television reported that the attack was against a farm near Abu Kamal, five miles from the Iraqi border. Doctors in nearby al-Sukkariya said another seven people were taken to hospital with bullet wounds.

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) - U.S. military helicopters launched an extremely rare attack Sunday on Syrian territory close to the border with Iraq, killing eight people in a strike the government in Damascus condemned as "serious aggression." A U.S. military official said the raid by special forces targeted the foreign fighter network that travels through Syria into Iraq. The Americans have been unable to shut the network down in the area because Syria was out of the military's reach. "We are taking matters into our own hands," the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the political...

Israeli troops killed senior Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades fighter, Taher Abu Kamal, early on Saturday in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Abu Kamal had replaced Mahmoud Abu Khalifa, who was assassinated by Israeli forces in September. Meanwhile, the PFLP military wing Saturday claimed responsibility for ambushing an Israeli foot patrol near the settlement of "Ganei Tal" to the south of the Gaza Strip. It noted that fighters of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades shot and inflicted casualties in lines of the enemy soldiers at midnight Friday.