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<p>BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq's foreign minister Wednesday condemned a rocket attack in the capital a day earlier, calling it a “terrorist act," and said combat operations by the U.S.-led coalition will cease once troop withdrawals take place in the coming weeks.</p>

Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller on Tuesday announced a U.S. troop drawdown to 2,500 in both Afghanistan and Iraq, consistent with President Trump’s promises to bring U.S. troops home and his goal to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “I am formally announcing that we will implement President Trump’s orders to continue our repositioning of forces from those two countries,” Miller said. “By January 15th, 2021, our forces, their size in Afghanistan, will be 2,500 troops. Our force size in Iraq will also be 2,500 by that same date.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller on Tuesday announced plans to reduce U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying the decision fulfills President Donald Trump’s pledge to bring forces home even as Republicans and U.S. allies warn against a rash withdrawal. The new plan will accelerate troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan in Trump's final days in office, despite arguments from senior military officials in favor of a slower, more methodical pullout. Trump has refused to concede his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, who takes office Jan. 20, just five days after the troop withdrawals are...

UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites)'s new chief of staff heads to Washington on Wednesday to meet with critics and supporters of the United Nations (news - web sites) following a critical report of U.N. actions in the oil-for-food program in Iraq (news - web sites). Mark Malloch Brown's high-profile trip is aimed at informing U.S. lawmakers about ongoing U.N. management and administrative reforms and appears to be the opening salvo in a new offensive by Annan to present the world body in a more positive light. One of the U.S. lawmakers Malloch Brown is scheduled...

How did a close George Soros associate , a Quantum Fund VP, who lived in his NYC apartment get accepted for crucial voting machinery? Soros Minion: How did a close George Soros associate , a Quantum Fund VP, who lived in his NYC apartment get accepted for crucial voting machinery? Especially after Soros’ unrelenting attack on the US justice system by funding leftist DAs? Brown was concurrently Vice-Chair of Soros Fund Management & Vice-Chair of Open Society Institute. Is Lord Brown George Soros’ favorite lieutenant? Agent Provocateur Brown: So, what kind of person is Lord Brown? He secretly advances Soros’...

A reprioritization of America’s strategic interests would cement the legacy of the first president in the era of great-power rivalry.n a recent memo advocating a swift U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller gave shape to the fundamental political stand of the Trump administration—realism and restraint. “We are not a people of perpetual war — it is the antithesis of everything for which we stand and for which our ancestors fought. All wars must end,” the memo read. This comes after a rapid purge in the last couple of weeks, in which President Trump dismissed Defense Secretary Mark...

Five members of a tribal militia and six locals were reportedly killed in an attack on an outpost outside of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The assault was launched by the ISIS terrorist group, AFP reported, citing security sources. The attack took place in the area of al-Radhwaniya late on Sunday, as militants attempted to take control of a monitoring outpost, overlooking the outskirts west of Baghdad, the agency reported. The militants descended on the tower in four vehicles, targeting the outpost with grenades and raining down fire on the members of tribal Hashed forces, affiliated with the Iraqi government. The...

Ever since the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), there’s been rising alarm regarding the future for Christians in the Middle East. A Catholic priest who recently returned to his village in northern Iraq after six years in Rome described what he found as “shocking,” but doubled down on the need for Christians to survive. Father Karam Shamasha left the town of Telskuf in the Nineveh Plains headed to Rome back in 2014, only weeks after ISIS conquered northern Iraq, historically the cradle of Christianity in the country. “Our presence is a salt in this region,” he said. “Our presence...

The Syriac Catholic church, dating from the mid-1800s, was looted by Daesh after it invaded Mosul in 2014 The militants were finally driven out of Iraq’s second largest city in 2017MOSUL: Young volunteers have been clearing dust and debris from St. Thomas church in Mosul, as the Iraqi city occupied by Daesh militants seeks to sweep away the horrors of a brutal three-year rule and welcome back members of minority faiths. The Syriac Catholic church, dating from the mid-1800s, was looted by the hard-line extremist movement after it invaded Mosul in 2014 and has been abandoned ever since. The...

KIRKUK At least four people, including a police officer, were killed and three others injured in two separate attacks Thursday by the Daesh/ISIS terror group in Iraq’s eastern Diyala governorate. Habib al-Shimmar, the police captain at the Diyala Security Directorate, told Anadolu Agency that terrorists via remote control detonated an explosive planted in a roadway near Baqubah, the capital of the governorate. The attack killed three people and injured three others, al-Shimmar said. Another explosive was detonated during transfer of security forces to the scene of the incident and killed a police officer. He said security forces launched an operation...

When the so-called Islamic State (IS) took over their town, Qaraqosh in northern Iraq, Mathi and his family had no choice but to flee. He, his wife Nazik and their six children fled to safety – they knew that their Christian faith made them extremely vulnerable. Five years later, thanks to support from Christian charity Open Doors, they have been able to return home. https://missionsbox.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Mathi-Returns-Home-to-Iraqs-Nineveh-Plains.mp4 My name is Mathi Habib Khodor and I have six children. In 2014 we were forcibly displaced from our city Qaraqosh (by Islamic State). But in 2017 our city was liberated. When I returned to...

According to Yasna, an association that promotes Zoroastrianism in Kurdistan, since 2014 about 15,000 people have registered with the organization, most of them Kurds converting from Islam.Aram Mehdi, an Iraqi Kurd who recently converted from Islam to Zoroastriansim, poses for camera as he holds a pendant representing Zoroaster, in Dohuk, Iraq Carefully tucking his Farvahar pendant under his shirt, Aram Mehdi reminds himself of the core Zoroastrian principles it represents: good words, good thoughts and good deeds.Born and raised in a conservative Muslim family, the 31-year-old Iraqi Kurd from the city of Dohuk, in the north of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan...

Three young men were killed and set ablaze in the village of Toulk in northern Kirkuk province on Saturday evening. Peshmerga fighter Aram Mustafa, his brother Harez and cousin Peshawa Abdulrahman, all in their 20s, were searching for cattle in the area when they were killed. According to village residents, the three men were shot dead in their vehicle and were then set on fire. According to Luqman Sartki, commander of the Peshmerga’s 11th Brigade, bullet fragments were left in the vehicle but no other evidence was recovered from the scene. Aram and Harez’s father say the three men were...

The grisly killing 10 days ago of a French school teacher had many of the hallmarks of past attacks carried out by the bloody Islamist terror outfit ISIS. A well-defined symbolic target in the West: Samuel Paty, a respected history and geography teacher who'd been criticized by a Muslim parent and Islamist agitator for showing satirical cartoons of the prophet Muhammad as part of his annual lesson on free speech; the brazen brutality of the act: a swift stabbing and beheading with a butcher knife on a street near the school north of Paris; online exchanges discovered later between the perpetrator, a...

d biological weapons, sought nuclear weapons, supported terrorism, and threatened peace. In October 2002, then-U.S. Sen. Biden voted in favor of a resolution that authorized Bush to enforce ''all relevant'' United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq and if needed, to use military force against Iraq. In a Senate floor speech before voting for the resolution, Biden said that "failure to overwhelmingly support" the resolution was "likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur." The objective of the resolution was to compel Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, Biden said. He left open the possibility that Hussein...

A mass grave of dozens of Iraqis killed by the Daesh/ISIS terrorist group was unearthed in the northern Kirkuk province... The grave in the town of Dawood al-Alouka contains the remains of 45 people killed by Daesh/ISIS ... Daesh/ISIS terrorists gained full control in Mosul, Salahadin and Anbar provinces and seized territories in Diyala and Kirkuk in 2014.... The terror group left tens of mass graves in areas that were under their control in which thousands of opponents were killed and buried. ... The United Nations Mission in Iraq documented 202 mass graves in 2018 in areas held by the...

Nine days after registering his presidential exploratory committee last November, Rudolph Giuliani appeared in Singapore to help a Las Vegas developer make a pitch for a $3.5 billion casino resort. Though the bid ultimately failed, and there was nothing illegal about the involvement, it drew Giuliani into a complex partnership with the family of a controversial Hong Kong billionaire who has ties to the regime of North Korea's Kim Jong Il and has been linked to international organized crime by the U.S. government. ... Giuliani's public involvement in the gaming bid began at a September 2006 news conference in Singapore...

...The two attacks on opposite sides of Africa are among the scores of violent episodes to shake the continent in what experts are calling a breakout year for extremist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. .... The spike in terrorist attacks mirrors a steady, if less dramatic, increase in Islamist violence in parts of Syria and Iraq, driven by Islamic State fighters who slipped away after the caliphate’s defeat and have now regrouped.... The resurgence threatens to undermine one facet of President Trump’s reelection pitch to voters: his oft-repeated claim of victory over the Islamic State. ...The rise...

Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th U.S. president and a decorated war general, once said: "Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin." If Europe wants to preserve peace, it should find it paramount to deliver justice against an Iranian diplomat soon to be prosecuted on terrorism charges. Moreover, from a political perspective, European nations need to send a powerful message to Tehran's terrorists that the age of terror campaigns is over. Tehran's 2018 bomb plot was the stuff of detective novels, yet there was nothing fictional about it. It could have led to an astounding level of carnage.In June...

The legal conditions for extraditing a suspect linked to a 1982 attack in France, in which six people were killed, have been met, a Norway appellate court found Friday. Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed, a 61-year-old Palestinian who became a Norwegian citizen in 1997, is wanted by French authorities on suspicion of being one of the shooters in the attack on the Jo Goldenberg restaurant in Paris's Marais district, a historically Jewish quarter. The attack on August 9, 1982, which left six people dead and 22 injured, was blamed on the Abu Nidal Organisation, a splinter group of the militant Palestinian...