Free Republic

The Taliban threatened on Sunday that it could conquer Iran as tensions increase over water disputes between Afghanistan and Iran, leaving at least three people dead. Senior Taliban commander Abdulhamid Khorasani, aka Nasser Badri, has in a video message warned that the group will fight against Iranians "with more passion" than they did against the US forces. "We will conquer Iran soon if Taliban's leaders give the green light for jihad."

The capture of the officer confirms that Iran is directly supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. The officer, from the elite al-Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, was captured by US special forces on December 18, a Nato spokesman said. Described as "a key Taliban weapons facilitator", he was arrested in Kandahar province. "The joint security team specifically targeted the individual for facilitating the movement of weapons between Iran and Kandahar through Nimroz province," a Nato statement said.

Afghan and NATO forces uncovered the weapons cache on Aug. 29 in Herat. It included a small number of Iranian-made "explosively formed penetrators," hyper-powerful roadside bombs similar to the weapons used to kill U.S. forces in Iraq, a senior U.S. Defense Official told FOX News. Also seized during the raid were 107 Iranian-made BM-1 rockets and dozens of blocks of Iranian C4 plastic explosives.

Citing an "unimpeachable source," Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are in Iran, according to a Fox News analyst. Al-Zawahiri was seen within the last two weeks, and bin Laden was spotted in July, says the network's foreign affairs analyst Mansoor Ijaz. The report dovetails with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's announcement last summer that he had sent his own army into the northern tribal areas near the border with Iran to ferret out bin Laden. "That was an extraordinary admission at the time, one that I could not understand how he could make if bin Laden, in...