Free Republic

A month after Russia informed the U.S. that it is suspending participation in the last remaining nuclear pact between the two countries, a senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday that Moscow is now refusing to hand over data on its nuclear warheads, due at the end of this week. In response, the U.S. will not provide Russia with data on its deployed strategic warheads, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb said on Capitol Hill. Plumb told a hearing of the House Armed Services subcommittee on Strategic Forces that the U.S. had pressed the Russians on the issue...

President Biden’s plan to sell F-16 fighter jets to Turkey faced another potential roadblock on Thursday when 27 U.S. senators, most of them Democrats, informed him in a letter that if Ankara does not stop blocking Sweden and Finland’s entry into NATO, Congress will not support the sale. “Congress cannot consider future support for Türkiye, including the sale of F-16 fighter jets, until Türkiye completes ratification of the accession protocols [for the two countries’ admission into NATO],” wrote the senators. Sweden and Finland last year applied to join the transatlantic alliance, jettisoning long-held neutrality in response to the Russian invasion....

The Taliban “grossly violated” its 2020 agreement with the United States by “hosting and sheltering” al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday, after President Biden announced that the fugitive terrorist had been killed in a weekend drone strike in Kabul. Blinken said the Taliban had violated not just the Doha agreement but also its “repeated assurances to the world that they would not allow Afghan territory to be used by terrorists to threaten the security of other countries.” “They also betrayed the Afghan people and their own stated desire for recognition from and normalization with...

The United States for months has been urging European countries to repatriate captured ISIS fighters and their families from northeastern Syria, to no avail, and the U.S. is not about to incarcerate them in Guantanamo Bay, President Trump said on Monday. “We’re not bringing 50, 60, 70 – or even 10,000 people to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We’re not going to be paying them for the next 50 years – or paying to take care of them for the next 50 years.” He characterized the European response to Washington’s appeals as another example...

The French women’s rights minister, already under fire for provocative comments relating to Islamic dress for women, is now caught between Air France management and unions in a row over a requirement that air hostesses wear headscarves when the airline renews flights to Iran this month. Following the easing of sanctions under the nuclear deal, Air France is resuming three weekly flights from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to Tehran on April 17 after an eight-year suspension. And management of the airline want female flight attendants to comply with Iranian modesty norms. The unions are incensed over a management...

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a speech last month repeated his periodic claim of a U.S. hand behind the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and the posted text alluded to a year-old conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton had admitted as much in her memoir. “Some Americans have confessed in their own memoirs [including Hillary Clinton’s memoirs] that they have played a role in creating, developing and establishing DAESH and today too, they are supporting them,” Khamenei told an Eid al-Fitr (end of Ramadan) gathering of government officials and Islamic ambassadors on July 18,...

A visit to Turkey by Hamas’ top leader and his participation in a convention of the ruling Islamist party is the latest sign that Turkey, a member of NATO, is becoming the key sponsor and ally of a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization. Khaled Meshaal met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday, before making a guest appearance at a weekend regional congress of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Welcomed onto the platform by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Meshaal received an enthusiastic reception. He endorsed Erdogan and Davutoglu by name, and expressed the hope that together Hamas and Turkey...

Russia on Tuesday accused the West of ignoring its warnings about the growing terrorist threat in Syria, and claimed that the moderate rebel front – the one the Obama administration wants to arm as part of its anti-ISIS strategy – “no longer exists.”The remarks by Russia’s ambassador in Geneva Alexey Borodavkin came during a session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, which was discussing the most recent report by a U.N.-mandated independent commission of inquiry into the conflict.The report, released late last month and roughly covering the first half of this year, recorded atrocities by the Assad regime and by...