Free Republic

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq has formalized two major energy agreements with U.S. firms HKN Energy and WesternZagros in Washington, D.C., Kurdish media reported on Monday, in deals valued at a combined $110 billion, despite a legal showdown with the federal government of Iraq over control of the country’s oil exports... ...The deals were formalized during KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani's official visit to the United States this week... ...Washington has been advocating for the resumption of Kurdish oil exports, which have been stalled since March 2023 due to legal disputes and pipeline shutdowns. Washington's push aims...

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that the Syrian transitional authority may be weeks away from potential collapse and full-scale civil war, defending US President Donald Trump's decision to lift Syria sanctions and to engage with the Damascus government. "It is our assessment that, frankly, the transitional authority, given the challenges they're facing, are maybe weeks, not many months, away from potential collapse and a full-scale civil war of epic proportions, basically the country splitting up," Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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

2,700 years ago, Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire. Researchers from the University of Heildelberg have made a spectacular discovery in the palace of King Assurbanipal. During excavations, they came across the first large-format depictions of two important Assyrian deities. German archaeologists have made a spectacular discovery in Iraq. During excavations in the ancient metropolis of Nineveh, a team from Heidelberg University came across large parts of a monumental relief. It shows King Assurbanipal (668 to 627 BC), the last ruler of the Assyrian Empire, accompanied by two important deities and other figures. The relief was found in...

President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. has given Iran a proposal for a nuclear deal. "Yeah they have a proposal, but more importantly, they know they have to move quickly or something bad, something bad is going to happen," Trump said. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned this week that the United States is facing a critical moment with Iran to curb its efforts to develop a nuclear weapon and limit its uranium enrichment. TRUMP WARNS IRAN FACES ‘VIOLENCE LIKE PEOPLE HAVEN’T SEEN BEFORE' IF NUCLEAR DEAL FAILS The International Atomic Energy Agency, often referred to as the...

Madrid-based Prisoners Defenders, an NGO focused on Cuban human rights, reported that the Cuban and Russian governments signed an agreement in which Cuba would send soldiers to join the war in Ukraine. Such a development raises many important questions. The Wagner Group’s dramatic failed mutiny displayed something the Kremlin knew long ago: the group, including its leader, Yevgeny Prighozin, has become a problem for Russia, particularly on the Ukrainian front. The group had little military training and served as cannon fodder in the war. Thousands of its fighters fell in battle. Wagner was convenient to Russia, as many of its...

A man was mauled to death and eaten by his pet lion just days after buying the beast to keep in his back garden. A resident of Najaf, southern Iraq, was horrifically attacked by the predator before it consumed most of his body on Thursday. 'Today in a garden in the city of Kufa in Najaf, a citizen was attacked by a lion in his own garden and died immediately,' Mufid Tahir, spokesperson for the Najaf Police, told local news site Rudaw. He added that because the lion had eaten a large portion of the man's body, and because the...

Russia's Foreign Ministry said Saturday that it was disappointed with a U.S. court decision to sentence a former Russian diplomat to the U.N. to prison for money laundering and fraud. The ministry said in a statement that it would consider demanding Vladimir Kuznetsov be returned to Russia. The former diplomat, who once chaired the United Nations' powerful budget oversight committee, was sentenced Friday to four years and three months in prison by a U.S. district court after being found guilty in March of laundering money from foreign companies seeking U.N. contracts. He was also ordered to pay a $73,000 (€51,500)...

Reza Pahlavi, the son and would-be heir to the dictator who was deposed in Iran’s 1979 revolution, has openly tethered his political fortunes to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. (IRGC). As such, Pahlavi is most certainly an individual that the U.S. should not support. Flawed logic says that Pahlavi, the son of the Shah, is the ideal replacement, based on the premise that the people now killing Iranian civilians in defense of the “Islamic revolution” might one day help to overturn the very regime that defines itself by that revolution.

The case against a two-tour U.S. Army veteran facing deportation will continue for now. Forty-five-year-old Marlon Parris is from Trinidad and Tobago originally, and he’s been in the U.S. on a green card since the 1990s.

All the narratives are wearing off. Vietnam was a pointless war and we lost. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Afghanistan was a waste. And we gained nothing from any of those wars. Saudi Arabia has nuclear weapons and the 19 terrorists from 9/11 were all Saudis. Did we go to war with them? Nope. North Korea has nukes. Little rocket man hasn’t blown us all up yet but we were told he was going to. Pakistan and China have nukes as well. And big bad Russia has nuclear weapons. We were told Putin was going to...

Pro-Palestinian students at the University of Washington occupied the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building Monday evening, renaming it the Shaban al-Dalou Building, in protest against the university's ties to Boeing. A separate group dressed in all black stacked furniture to create a blockade in front of the building before toppling dumpsters to block off nearby Jefferson Road, then confronted a security officer until he drove away.

Iran is on fire — literally, again — and nobody knows why. A massive power plant and a "cardboard factory" caught fire bigly in Iran over the weekend. But there is impressive new video of Iran's port explosion from last week. Iran International reported that a "series of incidents unfolded in Alborz Province, west of Tehran, on Saturday evening, including two fires, reports of an explosion, and a magnitude 4.0 earthquake, according to official statements and eyewitness accounts." Israeli action? Typical authoritarian regime attention to maintenance issues? God just doesn't like the mullahs' regime? Who knows. For reasons yet unknown,...

A powerful figure has emerged in the Muslim world, and his newly founded religion is gaining followers worldwide. Shockingly, on Easter Sunday, his followers declared him to be the new pope, and the next day, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had passed away. Abdullah Hashem Aba Al-Sadiq, commonly known as Abdullah Hashem, was born in 1983 in Indiana to an Egyptian father and an American mother. He is an Egyptian-American and the founder of the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light (AROPL), not to be confused with the Ahmadiyya community discriminated against in Pakistan. He claims to be the...

A suspected ISIS member was arrested in connection with the Jan. 1 attack on Bourbon Street that killed 14 people and injured at least 57 others, Iraq's judiciary said Sunday. Following a request from the U.S. for assistance in the investigation, Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said the individual “was arrested for inciting the Jan. 2025 truck attack in the United States," according to Al Arabiya News, a Saudi state-owned international Arabic news channel. The unnamed suspect is “a member of the external operations office of the Daesh terrorist organization" — the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group known ISIS....

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has decided that the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees is not immune from being sued, reversing the U.S. government’s position that the organization was protected from civil liability.The Justice Department revealed its new stance in a letter it filed in federal court in New York on Thursday as part of a lawsuit that aims to hold the agency, known as UNRWA, accountable for the Oct. 7, 2023, deadly attack on Israel by Hamas. The change in position underscores the hardened perspective toward the agency under the Trump administration following allegations by Israel that some...

While the media and military have been silent, what the Navy did against a Houthi attack is pretty magnificent. Has the U.S. grown ashamed of its military victories? There are reasons to believe this is true. In April 1988, the U.S. Navy effectively destroyed the Iranian navy following a mine attack on the destroyer USS Roberts. The Navy sank an Iranian frigate, four armed speedboats, blew up two armed oil platforms, and damaged another frigate in one of the shortest and most successful campaigns of the postwar period. Yet even today, there is no actual name attached to the engagement....

Ten years after the ISIS genocide that devastated northern Iraq, the Christian communities of the Nineveh Plains find themselves facing a new and insidious threat. While the world commemorates the atrocities that peaked in 2014, when ISIS militants swept through Mosul and the surrounding region killing, enslaving, and displacing tens of thousands of Christians and Yazidis, the security and future of these ancient minorities remain far from assured. Nadine Maenza, a leading advocate for religious freedom and a global fellow at the Wilson Center, has authored an analysis raising alarm about the current situation in the Nineveh Plains. In her...

Moments ago the U.S. Treasury Department announced official sanctions against Tareck Zaidan El Aissami Maddah (El Aissami). El Aissami is the Executive Vice President of Venezuela. WASHINGTON—Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Venezuelan national Tareck Zaidan El Aissami Maddah (El Aissami) as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act) for playing a significant role in international narcotics trafficking. El Aissami is the Executive Vice President of Venezuela.

Iran is beating a retreat from Yemen, where it has backed the Houthi rebels, who in turn have launched missiles and drones against Israel, and have also attacked international shipping in the Red Sea, as well as western naval vessels. The reason: U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a relentless assault on the Houthis while also restoring a “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions that makes it impossible for Iran to sustain its overseas terror proxies. The UK Telegraph reported on Thursday: Iran has ordered military personnel to leave Yemen, abandoning its Houthi allies as the US escalates an air strike...