Free Republic

Esmail Qaani, commander of the Quds Force in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, was killed during an Israeli strike in Iran, The New York Times reported on Friday evening, citing an Iranian source. Qaani succeeded Qasem Soleimani as commander after the latter was killed in a targeted operation by the United States in 2020. What was Qaani's mission in the Middle East? From an intelligence perspective, Qaani's mission appears to have had several dimensions, none of which have escaped the vigilance of Mossad, the CIA, or allied intelligence agencies in the region. Qaani also wanted to revive and consolidate control of...

Astonishing news out of Israel today and confirmed by at least one Israeli TV network that Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Gen. Esmail Qaani, commander of the crack Quds Force, is in Jerusalem after being identified as an Israeli intelligence asset.There's no doubt that Qaani was under suspicion. On Sept. 27, 2024, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, one of the most well-guarded people in the world, was killed when at least 80 bombs were dropped on a bunker in Beirut, where Nasrallah was meeting with top aides. Qaani was placed under house arrest and interrogated, according to Middle East sources. Qaani...

While American forces were able to shoot down the terror drones, these latest acts of Iranian diplomacy came complete with the words “Soleimani’s revenge” scrawled on the drones. The latest Iranian attacks on Americans forces use Soleimani’s death as a pretext, but the attacks began before the Iranian terror boss was killed, and have sharply escalated under Biden in response to his appeasement of the Islamic terror regime.

An Iranian general who promised to “see the dead bodies of Americans all over the Middle East” is missing after an Israeli attack in Lebanon that may have also killed the presumed new Hezbollah chief. The whereabouts of Brig. Gen. Esmail Qaani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, remains a mystery after Friday’s airstrike in Beirut, the New York Times reported. Some Arab and Israeli outlets say he is dead, while others report him as wounded. Lebanese security forces also have lost contact with Hashem Safieddine, a top local Hezbollah official and the presumed successor to the terror group’s...

Las Vegas police arrested a woman who allegedly stabbed her date she met online in retaliation for the US drone strike that killed an Iranian military leader in 2020. Henderson Police Department charged 21-year-old Nika Nikoubin with attempted murder last Saturday after she allegedly lured a man she met on the dating site Plenty of Fish in bed only to attack him with a knife, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Police said that on March 5, Nikoubin and her date, who has not been identified, rented out a room together at the Sunset Station Hotel where the 21-year-old turned off...

Last Thursday was the second anniversary of the killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani; while the date passed virtually unnoticed in the United States, it was a major event in the Islamic Republic of Iran, featuring numerous threats of revenge from enraged Iranian leaders. One of these stood out from the others: Soleimani’s successor as Quds Force commander declared that the revenge would come from inside the United States. Iran’s state-controlled Tasnim News Agency reported that Brigadier General Esmaeil Qaani was “delivering a speech to a ceremony in Mashhad” for the anniversary...

When Syria’s civil war erupted, Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) recruited, trained, and deployed thousands of Shi’ite fighters to prop up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Among them was the Fatemiyoun Brigade, comprised mainly of Afghans from the country's Shi'ite Hazara minority. From 2011, the IRGC recruited thousands of Afghan migrants and refugees within its own borders and covertly drafted hundreds of Shi'a inside Afghanistan. The majority of Muslims in Afghanistan are Sunni, but around 15 percent of its population -- mainly Hazara -- are Shi’a with religious links to the Shi'ite majority in Iran. With the...