Free Republic

An Egyptian court on Saturday banned the armed wing of Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, declaring it a "terrorist" group, a judiciary official said. Since Egypt's military ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, the authorities have accused Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, of aiding jihadists who have increased their attacks on security forces in the Sinai Peninsula. Saturday's court verdict followed a complaint from a lawyer accusing the Hamas armed wing of direct involvement in "terrorist operations" in the Sinai, a court official said. The lawyer also accused the movement of using tunnels under the...

About 380 migrants are taken by bus to emergency housing in and around Paris PARIS—French police dismantled a makeshift migrant camp that had popped up in the heart of the capital, the latest sign of a major influx into Europe that France and other countries are struggling to contain. About 380 migrants from Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia had set up tents under a subway bridge in northern Paris—the largest migrant camp to appear in the city in recent years, according to authorities. The migrants, including about 76 women and children, were taken by bus Tuesday to emergency housing in and...

A pair of RAF Lakenheath based USAF F-15E Strike Eagles that were bristling with live bombs and air-to-air missiles, along five KC-135R tankers, flew on a secretive and grueling 12 hour mission over the Southern Mediterranean on Monday, May 25th, Memorial Day. Multiple radio interceptors and plane spotters state that four F-15E’s, callsigns ABLE 01 through 04, took off from their home base at RAF Lakenheath laden with yellow banded (live) AIM-9M sidewinders, AIM-120 AMRAAMS and no less than seven 500lb Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs). These aircraft were accompanied by five KC-135Rs tankers, callsign QUID 91 through 95, that...

The rebel group that has seized power in Yemen has taken at least four U.S. citizens prisoner, according to U.S. officials who said that efforts to secure the Americans’ release have faltered. One of the prisoners had been cleared for release in recent days only to have that decision reversed by members of the Houthi rebellion that toppled the U.S.-backed government earlier this year and now controls most levers of power in Yemen.

As the bloc’s 12 oil ministers meet in Vienna, the march of Isil jihadists in the Middle East is putting Iran and Saudi Arabia on a collision course with explosive consequences Thick black smoke rising from the Baiji oil refinery could be seen as a dirty smudge on the horizon as far away as Baghdad after fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) set fire to the enormous processing plant just over 100 miles north of the capital last week. The decision to torch the refinery, which once produced around a third of Iraq’s domestic fuel...

Saudi-led air strikes hit three military bases in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Saturday and the Yemeni government in exile expressed reservations about United Nations-led talks aimed at ending the eight-week war. Residents said the air raids hit a munitions store in one of the bases, setting off a large explosion which sent rockets flying into the air and crashing down on civilian areas...   Yemen's exiled government in Saudi Arabia headed by President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi expressed reluctance to attend UN-sponsored peace talks set for May 28 in Geneva. A spokesman said on Saturday the Houthis and their powerful...

[1]The Goldberg interview with Obama reads like a conversation with an idiot. Actually make that two idiots, both of whom are also compulsive liars.One of the highlights of their insane exchange is when Obama tries to insist that Iran won’t be more dangerous if it gets another $150 billion. Obama: The question is, if Iran has $150 billion parked outside the country, does the IRGC automatically get $150 billion? Does that $150 billion then translate by orders of magnitude into their capacity to project power throughout the region? So Obama brings out the math, and by math, I mean...

On Friday, President Obama spoke at a Jewish American Heritage Month celebration being held at the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington, D.C. Wearing a yarmulke, Obama addressed his Jewish gravitas, citing his two Jewish former chiefs of staff, saying he has been called America's "first Jewish president" by Jeffrey Goldberg, who recently interviewed him for The Atlantic. Goldberg was in attendance.

Goldberg: What is Obama seeking here, in your mind? Cotton: Well, I think he clearly wants to have a kind of grand rapprochement with Iran. This goes back to his actions in his earliest days, when he was silent in the face of [Iran's] Green Revolution, and even some of his statements in the campaign. Goldberg: What's wrong with wanting a grand rapprochement with Iran? Cotton: I would love to see that happen. As Secretary Schultz and Secretary Kissinger wrote, they've been in government when Iran was an ally, not just of the United States but of Israel. The Iranian...

A rare glimpse into Hezbollah's underground tunnels was provided on Friday by Lebanese publication As-Safir, which is associated with the militant organization. The report praised Hezbollah's activities and painted it as a strong army ready for battle. While it is difficult to verify the claims in the article, it contained a rare discussion of the tunnels by Hezbollah members. The reporter wrote that in order to meet Hezbollah fighters near the Israeli border in southern Lebanon, he travelled from the city of Tyre and was required to stop at a house known to locals as a Hezbollah headquarters, where he...

Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge — while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall. It gets worse. The Gulf states’ top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief.Note: “were,”...

ormer U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, in an interview with JTA, surmised that the next U.S. administration would be friendlier with Israel than the current one. The onetime vice presidential candidate also expressed concern over America’s nuclear negotiations with Iran, saying they are “going in a bad direction,” and urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to embrace the long-shelved Arab Peace Initiative. Lieberman predicted that if the 2016 presidential election were held today, a higher percentage of Jewish-Americans would vote Republican than in past races. But he noted that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the party’s front-runner for the Democratic...

Russia came in for harsh criticism last week when state-owned jet producer MiG delivered 12 MiG-29 planes to Sudan. Amnesty International suggested that the jets could be used against civilians in Sudan's western region of Darfur, where attacks against indigenous black tribes by the government-backed Arab janjaweed militia over the last 15 months have left at least 30,000 people dead, forced villagers into refugee camps and left some 2 million people without sufficient food and medicine. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton blasted MiG for selling modern weapons to a government the United States considers a sponsor of international terrorism....

The threat of a limited surgical naval or air force bombing of critical nuclear installations--with no ground troops The contention that there are only two options in dealing with the rogue Ayatollahs’ regime—negotiation or military option, which supposedly amounts to war—defies reality. Such a contention is either mistaken or misleading. The threat of a limited surgical naval or air force bombing of critical nuclear installations—with no ground troops - would not amount to a war, would deter the Ayatollahs, possibly moderating their nature, and—if activated - would permanently cripple their pursuit of nuclear capabilities, and could be repeated if necessary...

Netanyahu has achieved close coordination with the most important Arab leaders that include Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates The Israelis will destroy several Iranian nuclear facilities and my educated guess is that they will do so before the end of this year. Israel has no margin of error when it comes to nuclear reactors in nations that threaten its existence. While President Obama does everything in his power to enable Iran to create its own nuclear weapons, it is a good idea to recall that in June 1981 the Israelis destroyed a reactor in Iraq. It...

According to a report by al-Jazeera, several American generals are skeptical that Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen will succeed.  A “senior commander at CENTCOM” claimed the Saudis did not keep the operation secret from American authorities because they feared the Obama Administration inform Iran, but rather because the Saudis feared the Pentagon would dismiss their battle plan as a “bad idea” and try to talk them out of it. “Military sources said that a number of regional special forces officers and officers at U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) argued strenuously against supporting the Saudi-led intervention because the target of the intervention, the Shia...

Around mid-April, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia –who once wrote a letter to Barack Obama beseeching the president to reconsider his foreign policies which enable the persecution of Christians in Syria — spoke again of the threat of Christian extinction in the Mideast during a meeting with Greek Defense Minister Panagiotis Kammenos. In the Russian Patriarch’s own words: "I regularly get reports of horrible crimes that are committed there against Christians, especially in northern Iraq. I have visited those places and I remember that there were many churches and monasteries there. The city of Mosul alone had 45...

Commander of Iran's Army Ground Force Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan on Saturday firmly rejected allegations about the presence of Iranian military forces in Yemen and Iraq.

As ISIS first blitzed across northern Iraq in June 2014, the militants seized large quantities of US arms and vehicles from the fleeing Iraqi forces. Over the almost past year of fighting, however, ISIS has gone from fielding large quantities of US weapons to using a mixture of Iranian, Chinese, Russian, Soviet, and Sudanese ammunition. According to a fact sheet from the Forum on Arms Trade, citing the Conflict Armament Research (CAR) and the Small Arms Survey, ISIS was largely able to acquire this ammunition from the constantly shifting battle lines of the Syrian civil war. A large amount of...

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, the world’s only sitting leader wanted on genocide charges, is expected to win a landslide victory in elections this week, extending a 25-year reign in which the country has endured multiple insurgencies and the secession of the oil-rich south. Despite Sudan’s seemingly perpetual unrest, al-Bashir survived the 2011 Arab Spring. His ruling party dominates the parliament and local councils, and the massive security apparatus has left the once-vibrant opposition a husk of its former self. Al-Bashir has ruled the country since taking power in a 1989 coup, but billboards across Khartoum showing him in traditional robes...