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Iraqi politician: Talks ‘very advanced’; IRGC-linked factions may lay down arms to prevent targeting by US airstrikes, say Iran told them to take whatever decision they deem necessary.BAGHDAD — Several powerful Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq are prepared to disarm for the first time to avert the threat of an escalating conflict with the US Trump administration, 10 senior commanders and Iraqi officials told Reuters.The move to defuse tensions follows repeated warnings issued privately by US officials to the Iraqi government since US President Donald Trump took power in January, according to the sources who include six local commanders of...

Hadi Matar finally went on trial Tuesday for attempting to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie back in Aug. 2022. There is little, if any, doubt about Matar’s guilt .. for he stabbed Rushdie multiple times in full view of a shocked crowd at the Chautauqua festival. .. Barone managed to delay the trial for over a year. Now that it has begun, both Barone and his opposite number, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt, seem curiously intent on preventing any discussion of Matar’s motive. Matar tried to kill the man who, at the time of the stabbing had carried for...

Iraqi refugee anti-Islamist activist who converted to Christianity, friend of Tommy Robinson and Mahyar Tousi, while podcasting, executed by Islamists who broke into his apartment and killed him on the air. Five arrested. One of them was dumb enough to show his face to the phone camera from which Salwan was broadcasting right before they murdered him. Sweden was trying to deport him. He was applying for asylum to come to the US before he was deported. Transcript linked below video.

Imam Husham Al-Husainy, a known supporter of Iraqi Hezbollah with ties to Iran, is scheduled to deliver a 'prayer' at Trump's inauguration. He previously delivered a prayer at a Democratic National Committee (DNC) event, where he attacked the U.S. He has a history of supporting Hezbollah and the Houthis, including defending attacks on American ships in Yemen and calling for the death of Saudis, whom he labeled "agents of the Jews." Following his DNC speech, he refused to denounce Hezbollah during an appearance on "Hannity" and reportedly displayed a portrait of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah. Al-Husainy signed a letter encouraging "Holy...

The president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq, Nechirvan Barzani, traveled to Tehran on Monday to meet with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who warned him to prevent “anti-revolutionary elements” from getting too friendly with the autonomous Kurdish region. The warning appeared to be a threat intended to dissuade Kurdish cooperation with the United States and any potential cordial ties with neighboring Israel. The KRG maintains friendly relations with the United States and cooperates militarily with Washington, particularly against the Islamic State (Isis) jihadist organization. The KRG’s Peshmerga forces were pivotal in the ouster of the ISIS “caliphate” from...

A Sacramento federal grand jury has indicted an Iraqi man living in Phoenix after he allegedly left hoax backpack bombs at a church in Roseville and another in Arizona, and attempted to leave others at churches in Southern California and Colorado, officials say. Zimnako Salah, 44, was indicted on a single count of false information and hoaxes following a months-long FBI investigation that tracked his movements from Texas, Colorado, Arizona and California, court records say. The investigation turned up materials that could be used for manufacturing hoax devices and bombs, court records say, as well as antisemitic writings. Salah, a...

The Islamic Resistance, an umbrella group of Iraqi anti-terror groups, announces carrying out a raft of strikes against American targets in the Arab country and neighboring Syria in response to a flurry of US air assaults. In a statement released in early Saturday, the resistance said it had conducted missile strikes against the Ain al-Assad airbase housing US occupation forces in the western Iraqi al-Anbar province. The group also said it had staged missile and drone strikes against the strategic al-Tanf military base in southeastern Syria near the border with Jordan and Iraq as well as the al-Khadra village in...

ifteen years ago today, an Iraqi journalist stood up in the middle of a press conference in Baghdad and shouted in Arabic, “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!” and then proceeded to hurl his shoes, one after the other, at then-President George W. Bush. The gesture by the journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, had dire effects on his own life — a risk he was well aware of beforehand — but it lives on in the public imagination worldwide as perhaps the most effective individual protest against America’s bloody and ultimately disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq....

Dozens of Iraqi protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad today over the burning of a Koran by an Iraqi protester in Stockholm. Video showed an angry mob breaking through an iron gate and climbing on top of the compound, as global fury grew over the stunt. It came after several Muslim countries condemned Sweden for allowing the Iraqi man to burn a Koran outside Stockholm's main mosque on Wednesday - during the Eid al-Adha holiday and the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Under a heavy police presence and in front of a crowd of 200, Salwan Momika, a 37-year-old...

The latest ISIS refugee terror plot shows why we need a travel ban right now.. Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, an Iraqi Muslim, entered the country using a tourist visa. Seven months later, just before his visa was about to expire, he asked for political asylum and planned to bring his entire family into the United States. A year later the Iraqi refugee was arrested as part of a plot to kill George W. Bush for ISIS. According to a confidential informant, Shihab was actually Abu Ahmed, who boasted of being related to Al-Baghdadi, the deceased Caliph of ISIS, and claimed...

Australia’s rampant and destructive wildfires were started by arson, and fueled by dry conditions and high temperatures, but you’d never know it from the Golden Globes or mainstream media outlets. In November, a teenage volunteer firefighter from New South Wales was charged with setting 7 bushfires in the region, and then returning with his brigade to fight them. Apparently, he has set 17 fires, and the pyromaniac has now been barred from access to any firefighting equipment. ... Police arrested 183 people for lighting bushfires across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the past few months. NSW police...

A man accused of shooting a Colorado Springs police officer in the head in a shootout early Thursday while free on bond was known to immigration enforcement officials, yet evaded deportation despite a string of crimes, court records show. Why Karrar Al Khammasi wasn’t deported was among the questions left unanswered Friday as his bond was revoked. Cem Duzel, the officer he is accused of shooting, remained hospitalized in critical condition. The 31-year-old Iraqi immigrant appears to have lived in the Pikes Peak region for at least five years, and he had at least nine contacts with police in that...

ALBANY - A mosque leader charged with helping launder money in a missile plot thought all the weapon talk was a joke, his lawyer said yesterday - but prosecutors were not laughing. Imam Yassin Muhiddin Aref was jailed without bail after prosecutors questioned why his name was found in a notebook in a terrorist camp listed as "Commander Yassin, United States." They also unveiled a photo of the imam's co-defendant watching as an informant shouldered a real surface-to-air missile in the back room of an Albany-area convenience store. That was among the evidence cited by prosecutors in Albany Federal Court...

FAISALABAD, Pakistan — The father of Imran Awan — an IT aide to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz who investigators concluded made “unauthorized access” to House servers — transferred a USB drive to a Pakistani senator and former head of a Pakistani intelligence agency, the father’s ex-business partner, Rashid Minhas, alleged. Minhas told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Imran Awan’s father, Haji Ashraf Awan, was giving data to Pakistani official Rehman Malik, and that Imran bragged he had the power to “change the U.S. president.” Asked for how he knew this, he said that on one occasion in 2008 when...

Link only - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-19/wasserman-schultz-it-aides-ran-shady-cia-car-dealership-borrowed-100k-hezbollah-fugi

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presses world leaders to protect the Kurds as they lose ground in Iraq, some feel that the U.S. has sided with Iran. Kurdistan, in is in disarray (following) a command stand down, to Iraqi / Iranian occupation of Yazidi and Kurdish cities and villages.. Without significant American backing, the Kurds will lose territory including the oil hub @ Kirkuk.

FORT THOMAS — For the second time in two years, an Iraqi jet crashed during a training mission above the Arizona desert, killing its pilot. According to 1st Lt. Lacey Roberts, public information officer with the 162nd Wing of the Arizona Air National Guard, an F-16 Fighting Falcon crashed in Fort Thomas at about 3 p.m. The crash was in the vicinity of Blackrock Road, near the shooting range. “The pilot was doing a routine training mission in that area,” Roberts told Eastern Arizona Courier. Cause of the crash has not yet been released. An interim safety investigation board has...

Congressional aides suspected of criminally misusing their access to House computer systems owed $100,000 to an Iraqi politician who is wanted by U.S. authorities and has been linked to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Middle Eastern terrorist outfit.

As John F. Kerry tries to bounce out of Boston and into a decisive fall campaign lead, a skeleton from the past will slink out of jail - possibly looking to score headlines and undercut the new nominee. David Paul, a central figure in a 1980s savings and loan scandal, is set to be sprung from a halfway house in Miami Sunday - a decade after his conviction on 97 counts of banking fraud. TV news outlets are scrambling to line up the first interview, hopeful the long-silent Paul might spill some beans about his close fund-raising ties to Kerry...

The idea can no longer be shrugged off as a mere pipe dream -- the hope of the thousands of Iraqi Christians who were evicted from their villages three years ago by the criminal incursions of Islamic State (ISIS) -- that they might one day be able to return to their homes on the Plains of Nineveh. With the March 27th signing ceremony in the offices of the archdiocese of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Erbil, an agreement was reached between three Christian churches in Iraq -- the Syriac Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Chaldean Catholic Church...