Free Republic

U.S. military strikes against the Assad regime will be back on the table Wednesday at the White House, when top national security officials in the Obama administration are set to discuss options for the way forward in Syria. But there’s little prospect President Obama will ultimately approve them. *snip* The CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, represented in the Deputies Committee meeting by Vice Chairman Gen. Paul Selva, expressed support for such “kinetic” options, the official said. That marked an increase of support for striking Assad compared with the last time such options were considered.

As the Isis (now known as Islamic State) terror group continues to consolidate its self-declared "caliphate" in territory seized in its march across north-eastern Syria and northern Iraq, a map has been released that details the "ten-state solution" it hopes to achieve over the next decade. Walid Shoebat, a former Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) terrorist turned Islamic scholar, has translated the Arabic map of the expansionist caliphate to show the Balkans, Spain and Portugal are long-term targets for the militants. The group, which stemmed from al-Qaeda and the Salafist ideology, rejects the notion of nationalism, aiming to remove secular governments...