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Recently, I was speaking with a friend of mine, a committed liberal and an equally committed member of the anti-Trump camp. Despising President Donald Trump is almost a default position in my Chicago-area community; however, my liberal friend has always impressed me as reasonable and well informed. Hence my particular consternation when he, in a most matter-of-fact way, said President Trump is costing us friends and influence around the world, as if it were an accepted truth. This was more annoying than surprising, because ever since Donald Trump took office, the mainstream media and their political allies have been working...

The father of Omar Mateen, identified by police as the man behind the carnage at an Orlando nightclub early Sunday morning, is an Afghan man who holds strong political views, including support for the Afghan Taliban. Seddique Mateen, who has been referred to as Mir Seddique in early news reports, hosted the “Durand Jirga Show” on a channel called Payam-e-Afghan, which broadcasts from California. In it, the elder Mateen speaks in the Dari language on a variety of political subjects. Dozens of videos are posted on a channel under Seddique Mateen's name on YouTube. A phone number and post office...

WASHINGTON — The Arabs who vanquished Al Qaeda in Iraq's Anbar province are counseling America to allow Afghans to form irregular militias and be mindful of their devout adherence to Islam, according to a memo from the Anbar Awakening to the American Embassy in Kabul. A rough English translation of the memo, which outlines an "awakening" strategy for Afghanistan and was originally prepared in Arabic at the request of the American deputy chief of mission there, Christopher Dell, was obtained by The New York Sun and confirmed as accurate by the military. The Afghanistan front has been a worry for...

June was the bloodiest month in a long time, with about a thousand dead (700 Taliban, a hundred government and foreign troops and 200 civilians). For the first six months of the year, about 3,200 were killed, compared to about 4,000 for all of last year. About 70 percent of the dead are Taliban. The high Taliban casualty rate is the result of high losses among Taliban leaders, and recruiting many younger, inexperienced Pushtun tribesmen. The more experienced Pushtun gunmen noted the losses from last year, and took a pass on a Taliban paycheck this time around. Their misgivings were...

Rumors of Osama bin Laden's death are greatly exaggerated and the al-Qaida leader is preparing his next video broadcast to be aired on al-Jazeera, reports an acclaimed Pakistani journalist who has interviewed him. In an exclusive interview with Paul L. Williams, author of the new book, “The Dunces of Doomsday,” and David Dastych in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, Hamid Mir says bin Laden is not only alive and well but in the process of preparing a video-taped appearance for al-Jazeera, the Qatari Arabian news network.

AMIAN, Afghanistan — Hussein Jan, a 51-year-old farmer, tossed a stone into a shallow pit dug on a slope above this town. "They shot us here, 76 people, they killed everyone, and only I survived," he said. "With me there were 11 people from my village, most of them relatives, and I alone survived," he said. He laughed, tipping his head back, but his face suddenly twisted into a grimace of terrible pain. In tales like this, the people of the Bamian region have been counting their dead since they returned to this fabled valley seven months ago, after the...

PESHAWAR, July 9 (IslamOnline) – Security forces in the Afghan city of Jalalabad revealed that there was an assassination attempt on Afghani President Hamid Karzai, during the funeral of Haji Abdul Qadir, the assassinated Afghani Vice President on Sunday, July 7. Abdul Qadir was killed by anonymous snipers outside his office at the ministry of public works in Kabul. Speaking to BBC’s Pashtu News Service Monday, July 8, Ajab Shah, the security senior official in Jalalabad said that a bomb was discovered inside one of the water tanks in the Central Mosque in the Afghani capital, Kabul, where the funeral...