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Without much media attention, thousands of American troops are being deployed to Israel, and Iranian officials believe that this is the latest and most blatant warning that the US will soon be attacking Tehran. Tensions between nations have been high in recent months and have only worsened in the weeks since early December when Iran hijacked and recovered an American drone aircraft. Many have speculated that a back-and-forth between the two countries will soon escalate Iran and the US into an all-out war, and that event might occur sooner than thought. Under the Austere Challenge 12 drill scheduled for an...

What's Islam Got to Do with It?The role of Islam in terrorism should not be banned from discussion. Is there anything Islamic about Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? On what basis does Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al-Qaeda’s leader, formerly the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, claim to be a jihadi — an Islamic warrior? Do groups that justify terrorism on the basis of Islam have a doctrinal leg to stand on?Let’s not start by answering these questions. Let’s start by agreeing that such questions need to be asked — not suppressed. Yet right now suppression seems to be the goal of...

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HERAT: More than 20 armed men crossed the border from Iran into Afghanistan and entered a town, a police commander said in the first such blunt claim by a high-ranking Afghan official. Colonel Rahmatullah Safi - police commander in the three western provinces of Farah, Badghis and Herat - said according to intelligence information, the group of armed militants crossed the border Monday in Farah's Anardara district. "Two pickup trucks with over 20 armed people riding in them crossed the border from Iran to Afghanistan," Safi said in his Border Police headquarters, 15 km outside Herat city. He said according...

Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces have been spotted by British troops crossing the border into southern Iraq, The Sun tabloid reported on Tuesday. Britain's defence ministry would not confirm or deny the report, with a spokesman declining to comment on "intelligence matters". An unidentified intelligence source told the tabloid: "It is an extremely alarming development and raises the stakes considerably. In effect, it means we are in a full on war with Iran -- but nobody has officially declared it." "We have hard proof that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have crossed the border to attack us. It is very hard...

NATO officials say they have caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces, in what the officials say is a dramatic escalation of Iran's proxy war against the United States and Great Britain. "It is inconceivable that it is anyone other than the Iranian government that's doing it," said former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stopped short earlier this week of blaming Iran, saying the U.S. did not have evidence "of the involvement of the Iranian government in...

Iran has increased arms shipments to both Iraq's Shiite extremists and Afghanistan's Taliban in recent weeks in an apparent attempt to pressure American and other Western troops operating in its two strategic neighbors, according to senior U.S. and European officials. In Iraq, Iranian 240mm rockets, which have a range of up to 30 miles and could significantly change the battlefield, have been used recently by Shiite extremists against U.S. and British targets in Basra and Baghdad, the officials said. Three of the rockets have targeted U.S. facilities in Baghdad's Green Zone, and one came very close to hitting the U.S....

U.S.-led forces on Friday arrested suspected Shiite militants accused of smuggling powerful bomb components from Iran,

LAS VEGAS —Arizona Sen. John McCain said critics complaining about his recent joke about bombing Iran should "lighten up and get a life." "Please, I was talking to some of my old veterans friends," the Republican presidential candidate told reporters Thursday, a day after he parodied the Beach Boys song "Barbara Ann" at a campaign stop in South Carolina. The senator changed the song's title to "Bomb Iran." "My response is lighten up and get a life," he said. McCain's quip, which was circulating on the Internet, was prompted by an audience question about whether the senator believes the U.S....

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TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran on Wednesday freed the 15 detained British sailors and marines in what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called an Easter gift to the British people. Prime Minister Tony Blair said he bore "no ill will" toward the Iranian people. Iranian state television said the 14 men and one woman, who were seized while on patrol in the northern Persian gulf on March 23, would leave Iran on Thursday. An Iranian official in London said they would be handed over to British diplomats in Tehran. Ahmadinejad's surprise announcement came at a news conference shortly after he pinned a...

Who Got the British Sailors Released? By Catherine Mayer/London and Azadeh Moaveni/Tehran The President of Iran was clearly relishing his role as beneficent liberator of the 15 British Marines and sailors detained by Iran for nearly two weeks. At a press conference today, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the release a "gift to the British people" on the occasion of Easter as well as a commemoration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday. The smiling President then met with the British detainees, nodding his head munificently as they lined up to offer thanks for their release. "It is for Islam," he reminded one. He...

A senior Iraqi foreign ministry official said on Tuesday that the government was "intensively" seeking release of five Iranians detained by the U.S. military more than two months ago in northern Iraq. "We are intensively seeking the release of the five Iranians," the senior official said. "This will be a factor that will help in the release of the British sailors and marines" held by Iran since March 25. The official also said that the Iraqi government had exerted pressure on those holding an Iranian diplomat, who was released Monday and returned to Tehran on Tuesday. The official would not...

Britain is looking for a speedy and peaceful end to the crisis over 15 Royal Navy personnel held captive by Iran, the foreign secretary has said. Margaret Beckett described earlier comments by an Iranian diplomat, who said the group could face legal action, as "unhelpful". Gholamreza Ansari said "legal process" had started but denied reports quoting him saying the group may face trial. A British diplomatic note has been sent to the Iranians. Mrs Beckett said: "I think everyone regrets that this position has arisen. What we want is a way out of it - we want it peacefully and...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - Iran's foreign minister says Britain must admit that its 15 sailors and marines entered Iranian waters for the standoff to be resolved.

ABOARD THE USS JOHN C. STENNIS, (AP) -- American warplanes screamed off two aircraft carriers Tuesday as the U.S. Navy staged its largest show of force in the Persian Gulf since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, launching a mammoth exercise meant as a message to the Iranians. The maneuvers with 15 warships and more than 100 aircraft were sure to heighten tensions with Iran, which has frequently condemned the U.S. military presence off its coast and is in a faceoff with the West over its nuclear program and its capture of a British naval team. While they would not say...

THE official notification, delivered in secure calls yesterday morning to senior Whitehall figures, was the latest dramatic behind-the-scenes move to get to grips with a crisis that is now engulfing the government. After a day of shadow-boxing with a notoriously slippery regime, Tony Blair is set to up the ante: the plight of the Shatt al-Arab 15 is officially a crisis and he will need the Cobra team to handle it. The clutch of VIPs will gather in an operations room several floors below Downing Street as early as this afternoon to plot an escape from a military spat that...

U.S. forces have arrested the two leaders of the network believed responsible for the brazen raid in Karbala by terrorists disguised as Americans, in which five U.S. soldiers were kidnapped and later killed in January, U.S. military officials said today. In operations over the past several days in Basra and Hillah, coalition forces captured Qais Khazali, his brother Laith Khazali and several other members of the Khazali network, a splinter faction of the Mahdi army. Senior U.S. military sources tell ABC News that hard evidence linking the Khazalis to the Karbala raid, including the ID cards of several of the...

Iran is training anti-American Iraqi Shi'ites at sites inside Iran and Lebanon in the use of armor-piercing munitions blamed for the deaths of 170 U.S. troops in Iraq, a top U.S. intelligence official said on Tuesday. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, newly installed U.S. intelligence chief Mike McConnell said it was "probable" that Iranian leaders including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were aware that weapons known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, had been supplied to Iraqi Shi'ites. But he and other senior intelligence officials told a hearing on threats to the United States that al Qaeda remained the...

The Iraqi government said on Sunday that half the Sunni Muslim militants behind the bombings shaking the country had arrived through neighbouring Syria. The United States and Iraqi officials have long accused Iraq's neighbours, particularly Syria and Iran, of failing to stop Islamic militants from crossing into Iraq to carry out attacks. U.S. and Iraqi officials say many of the insurgents responsible for the violence are not Iraqis. "We have confirmation that 50 percent of these takfiris and killers who call themselves Arab jihadists come across the Syrian border," Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told Al Arabiya TV, referring to...