Free Republic

The Taliban want to use the flights to send their own people abroad to earn desperately needed money. The Afghan economy is in tatters. The Taliban have halted all flights of Afghan evacuees for the past two weeks in a dispute about how the airport in Kabul is run and who is allowed on the evacuation flights, according to a congressional source, two refugee advocates and a source familiar with the matter. A State Department official involved in relocation efforts confirmed that flights have stopped.... ...The Taliban’s argument is that they run the country and that it is their airspace...

Leaked spy cables reveal how Iran came to dominate the political and military spheres in Iraq. Here’s what the hundreds of documents tell us. -excerpt- The leak exposed Iran’s vast influence in Iraq, detailing the painstaking efforts of Iranian spies to co-opt Iraqi leaders and infiltrate every aspect of political life. The trove consists of roughly 700 pages of reports and cables written mainly in 2014 and 2015 by officers in Iran’s version of the C.I.A. who were based in Iraq. -excerpt- Many of the files show that as senior American diplomats met behind closed doors with their Iraqi counterparts...

After being publicly sacked by al Qaeda leader Aymann al-Zawahiri and accidentally beheading a fighter from one of their main allies in Syria, it’s fair to say the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)’s PR campaign has suffered in recent weeks. So, like any half decent group of militant extremists, they obviously want to address this slip. Unfortunately, a traditional media outreach is very difficult for them, given ISIS’s policy of kidnapping journalists. So they've turned, like many before them, to social media. Over the past few weeks, foreign fighters from ISIS and their subgroup the Muhajireen Brigade have been...