Free Republic

The debate is raging about Syrian migrants living in Germany and whether hundreds of thousands will have to return to their homeland.. Germany’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU) candidate for chancellor Friedrich Merz says that Germany cannot accept more Syrians from Syria and that those Syrians who are not integrated should return to Syria. Notably, Merz is pointing to the sky-high levels of unemployment among many of the country’s Syrian population. The chancellor candidate, during an appearance on ARD, said the “one-third” who “work and are integrated” in Germany can stay, “but the two-thirds do not work, they are overwhelmingly young...

The Syrian people are exuberant about the end of the Bashar al-Assad regime. But there is one atrocity by this notorious family that has been described as “one of the darkest moments in the modern history of the Arab world.” That is the 1982 encirclement, starvation and mass execution of the residents of the Syrian city of Hama. This atrocity was committed by Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad. Last Friday, residents of Hama tore down the statue of Hafez al-Assad while the city fell to rebels. While much of the world just saw it as another Syrian city falling, its significance...

Iran-backed militants entered Syria yesterday to bolster dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime against the Islamist rebels who seized Aleppo. Militias crossed into the war-torn country from neighbouring Iraq, following a lightning offensive against the Syrian army by rebel forces from the hardline Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and Turkish rebel groups. Their seizure of Aleppo, Syria’s second city, and swathes of territory in the north of the country has reignited the deadly civil war in Syria and shocked its allies in Russia and Iran. President Assad blamed the West for the ‘terrorist escalation’, and accused the US and its allies...

Reports that the Venezuelan intelligence agency is targeting and spying on the Venezuelan Jewish community as well as on Venezuelan companies and organizations with ties to Israel is deeply troubling, asserted the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “We are deeply troubled by a recent news report alleging that the Venezuelan Intelligence Service (SEBIN) is spying on the Venezuelan Jewish community,” said ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman. “Venezuela under the regime of Hugo Chavez has a history of harassing the Jewish community in that country,” he said. “It is chilling to read reports that the SEBIN received instructions to carry out clandestine...

Justin Raimondo: An American Neo-Fascist By Stephen Schwartz FrontPageMagazine.com | March 15, 2005 Dennis “Justin” Raimondo is a minor celebrity in the U.S., thanks to a 10-year career as an amateur demagogue in the libertarian milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area, a political environment where anything goes and nothing matters. He has the familiar personality traits of the type: “sentimental formlessness, absence of disciplined thought, ignorance combined with gaudy erudition.”  He poses as a conservative but maintains a website at antiwar.com, that features anti-American cranks like Noam Chomsky and is hugely popular with the left – not surprisingly since it...

In May 1988, a prison guard checked Taymour Abdullah Ahmad's name off a list and directed him to a bus idling in the Popular Army camp in Topzawa, southwest of Kirkuk. The camp was one of Iraq's grimmest prisons. During his month-long internment there, the 12-year-old Kurdish boy watched guards beating male prisoners senseless with lengths of coaxial cable. He had seen four children weaken and then die of starvation. He stood helplessly as a guard stripped his father to his undershorts and led him off to his death. So Taymour was not sorry to see the last of Topzawa....

In 1979, Saddam Hussein publicly accused 68 of his own party members of treason.

The Syrian military is prepared to use chemical weapons against its own people and is awaiting final orders from President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday. The military has loaded the precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, into aerial bombs that could be dropped onto the Syrian people from dozens of fighter-bombers, the officials said. As recently as Tuesday, officials had said there was as yet no evidence that the process of mixing the "precursor" chemicals had begun. But Wednesday, they said their worst fears had been confirmed: The nerve agents were locked and loaded...

The documents kept by the Iraqi Intelligence Service were meticulous in detail and sweeping in scope. In some, Iraqi intelligence officers in the United States are directed to use informers to track the "criminal'' actions of one current and one former Chicago area resident, both Assyrian Christians from Iraq who founded an anti-Saddam Hussein political party. Another accuses the group of being influenced by "imperialists'' and "Zionists.'' Others include the exact dates of the group's meetings and conventions in Chicago and elsewhere, the names of the people who ran the events, those in attendance and what statements were made. Trips...

Over and over again, the cluelessness of the Biden administration has people's heads shaking, hitting desks, or simply thrown back in disgusted astonishment. TELL ME HE DIDN'T SAY THAT Their complete inability to grasp any given situation was on display again yesterday as our diffident and generally incompetent Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, wandered out to a podium to mumble a few words on the state of the insurgency that had just conquered Syria. I don't know what I was expecting from this misbegotten spore off the old White House mushroom, but it most assuredly wasn't what came out of...

Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad tells his Russian ally Putin the assault on Ukraine is justified and aimed at ‘restoring’ post-Cold-War balance.

Since I've been following the trail of the Chahine Hezbollah organized crime family for years, I've learned a lot more about Hezbollah spy and FBI/CIA Agent Nada Nadim Prouty. Don't forget that she and her sister Elfat El-Aouar Chahine are not the only members of their family to defraud the federal government in immigration, tax, and Hezbollah related matters. Another sister, an OB-GYN, Rula Nadim Al Aouar (different spelling to confuse/evade U.S. authorities--a common Muslim and Arab practice), also engaged in a sham marriage and immigration fraud.

IT WAS the stench that hit us first, gusting like a chemical cloud across the prison courtyard. The smell, unmistakable to anyone who has scented it, of human flesh slowly decomposing just under the surface of the earth. One by one, the grave diggers, toiling in a dust storm under a blazing sky, lifted the crumbling bodies from the clay-lined mass grave stretching along the prison lawn, in the shadow of an empty watchtower on top of the sprawling prison block. Each of the 13 corpses pulled from the ground was still dressed in his blue-and-white-striped prison pyjamas, his hands...

BAGHDAD, July 15 (VOI) - Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, Iraq's former military commander and Saddam Hussein's vice president, criticized al-Qaeda network in Iraq and Mahdi Army militias loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in his first audio call, vowing to fight U.S. troops in Iraq. Al Douri, who has not been seen since the last days of Saddam's rule, became the leader of the Baath Party after Saddam's execution in December 2006. It was unclear why al Douri chose this time to release an audio tape — his first ever at a time that Iraq is witnessing an all time...

The former vice-president of Baath Party, Izzat Ibrahim has been appointed as the new party leader after the execution of Saddam Hussain, according to a statement issued from the party today. Saddam Hussein`s fugitive deputy Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri vowed that the ousted president`s execution would only strengthen the anti-US insurgency in an internet statement posted Tuesday. "I call on the valiant commanders of the jihad and the brave fighters in all jihadi groups to strive seriously to create a jihad and resistance front .. in order to destroy the enemy and liberate our beloved homeland," said the statement posted on...

Saddam Hussein had a secret torture room built in the basement of the Iraqi mission to the United Nations in New York’s Upper East Side, it has been reported. The Iraqi dictator ordered the installation of the “detention room” inside the five-story building at 14 East 79th Street when he rose to power in 1979, two unnamed Iraqi officials told the New York Post. “It was a dark room. The doors were reinforced in a way that nobody could break in or out. You didn’t need to soundproof it,” one official said. The other official added: “You’re not going to...

Ruling party learned from Nazis THE chances of a lightning-quick war in Iraq evaporated with the unexpected determination and guerrilla tactics of the Baath Party militia. Trapped between a civilian population which viscerally hates them, and the advancing allies, it was predictable the petty bureaucrats and young thugs behind Saddam's totalitarian rule would fight it out. But who are the members of the Baath Party? In Arabic, baath means renaissance or resurrection. The Baath Arab Socialist Party, to give the organisation its formal title, is the original secular Arab nationalist movement, founded in Damascus in the 1940s to combat Western...

The following are excerpts from the televised confessions of Muayed Al-Nasseri, who commanded Saddam Hussein's "Army of Muhammad" throughout 2004. The confessions were aired by an Iraqi TV channel that operates from the UAE, Al-Fayhaa TV, and were monitored and translated by the MEMRI TV Project. The following are excerpts; to view the clip, visit http://memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=492: [1] 'The Army of Muhammad was Founded by Saddam Hussein After the Fall of the Regime' Interrogator: "What is your name?" Muayed Al-Nasseri: "Colonel Muayed Yassin 'Aziz 'Abd Al-Razaq Al-Nasseri, commander of the Army of Muhammad, one of the resistance factions in Iraq. The...

While the media is busy focusing on the troubling story of the two American soldiers detained at Guantanamo Bay for alleged espionage, both of whom had Syrian connections, another Syria story has passed them by. The names of Ahmad al Halabi, an American of Syrian descent, and Captain James Yee, a convert to Islam who spent four years in Damascus before returning to active service, are now well known. But the name of Nizar Nayouf, a Syrian journalist and human rights activist that was detained last week by French police in Paris, will most probably stay anonymous.   Nayouf?s only...

BASRA, Iraq, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- More than 50 bullet holes in the wall of the empty swimming pool at "Chemical Ali's" house here indicate just how violent the former Saddam Hussein operative could be.Border police who have taken over the house don't go out to the pool much, said Col. Ali Hussein Jabar, commander of about 30 men working there. Bad things happened there, Jabar said. The relatively modest two-story house is built on an artificial hill surrounded by concrete. It looks out over flat, desolate desert sands inhabited only by sheep herders and oil pipeline guards for as...