Free Republic

"Massive explosions have been reported inside Isfahan, the site of Iranian nuclear development facilites. All flights have been diverted away from Iran as another IRGC headquarters meeting has been hit south of Baghdad Iraq. EWS sites have been knocked out in Syria. We will be covering updates live and keeping everyone posted. Ukraine war news will be covered later in stream."

An apparent airstrike in Damascus on Monday killed Mohammed Reza Zahedi, a top commander in the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Iranian state television has confirmed. Iranian press reported that Zahedi was meeting with leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad at the time of the strike, but these reports could not be independently verified. Zahedi commanded the Quds Force's Unit 18000, responsible, among other things, for smuggling ammunition and precision weapons into Lebanon. He had also commanded the IRGC's Air Force and Imam Hussein Division in the past. Initial reports indicate that at least six people were...

Last week’s bombing near the grave of the Quds Force general that killed 84 is the latest episode in ISIS’s war on Shiite Muslims.. In the immediate aftermath of the January 3 blast that killed at least 84 people near the grave of general Qassem Soleimani in the Iranian city of Kerman, some low-level Iranian officials hinted at a possible Israeli involvement. Iran’s deputy parliament speaker claimed it had the signs of an Israeli assault — even though it showed radically different features from Israel’s alleged operations in enemy territory, which usually involve precision killings of key enemy figures. The...

Clashes between Iranian security forces and protesters angry over the death of a 22-year-old woman in police custody have killed at least nine people since the violence erupted over the weekend, according to a tally Thursday by The Associated Press. The scope of Iran’s ongoing unrest, the worst in several years, still remains unclear as protesters in at least a dozen cities — venting anger over social repression and the country’s mounting crises — continue to encounter security and paramilitary forces.

‘IT’S CHILLING’ Days before his alleged attack on the writer, Hadi Matar wrote a late-night email to his New Jersey gym. Three days before Hadi Matar allegedly rushed the stage at a literary event to brutally attack British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, the 24-year-old wrote a late-night email to his New Jersey gym to cancel his membership. “Hey this is Hadi,” Matar wrote in an Aug. 9 email to the State of Fitness Boxing Club at 1:31 a.m. “I was going tk [sic] ask if you guys can disable autopay for me right now. As I won’t be able to make...

British author JK Rowling has received a death threat from an Iran-backing Islamist extremist who appears to have praised Salman Rushdie's suspected attacker, repeatedly expressed support for Tehran's theocratic dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and branded Israel, Ukraine and India 'terrorist states'. The Harry Potter writer and free speech campaigner - who has been pilloried by trans activists for her beliefs on gender - had expressed her horror at the sickening attempt on Rushdie's life in upstate New York when she was issued the chilling threat on Twitter. Meer Asif Aziz, who describes himself on Twitter as a 'student, social activist,...

A New Jersey man with sympathies toward the Iranian government was arrested and accused of stabbing famed novelist Salman Rushdie on Friday, according to law enforcement sources briefed on the investigation. Hadi Matar, 24, was arrested after he stormed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York and allegedly stabbed the author in the neck. Sources told The Post that an initial investigation suggests Hadi is sympathetic to the Iranian regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

Hadi Matar, 24, was arrested after he stormed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York and allegedly stabbed the author in the neck.

Two more top Iranian officials have been killed this week in separate mysterious incidents, just days after a top Iranian commander was gunned down outside his home and an Iranian drone manufacturing site came under attack by suicide drones. Colonel Ali Esmailzadeh of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force reportedly died during an incident at his residence in the city of Karaj. Iranian media said that he died after falling from his roof. Opponents of the Islamic Republic, however, claimed that Esmailzadeh was killed by the state because they suspected him of being a spy involved in the death of...

Ever since the new administration has taken office, the Iranian regime has resorted to what it does best: terrorism and extortion.The Middle East is in turmoil again. From Kabul to Riyadh, and Beirut to the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem, people are frightened and forced to hear the horrifying blasts of emergency sirens that had long been silenced. If one were to search anywhere other than in Iran for the detonators of these blasts, they would be wrong again. An explosion in front of a girls’ school in Kabul, Afghanistan two weeks ago killed dozens of innocent people, embarrassed the Afghan...

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Maj.-Gen. Hossein Salami said that Israel “security” has been eroded, and its safety “bubble” burst in the last few months in a wide-ranging television interview. He bragged at length about how the “Zionist regime” is supposedly in the midst of security, political and social disintegration. He then claimed that Israel has suffered strikes against its maritime interests, cybersecurity vulnerabilities and other security setbacks, including mysterious explosions and a rocket that flew over Dimona. Salami pointed to a string of incidents over the last several months, appearing to take credit for them. He said that...

Breaking — Mysterious explosions rock Tehran… A series of explosions have rocked the outskirts of the Iranian capital Tehran, as well as the cities of Garmdareh and Quds, Iranian media reported amid speculation that missile depots were the intended target. Citing social media, the official news agency IRIB reported an explosion in western Tehran in the early hours of Friday local time. More explosions were reported in Garmdareh and Quds, the Mehr News Agency added. The Saudi-based Al-Arabiya television reported that the explosion took place in missile depots of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), southwest of Tehran. Iranian officials...

When U.S. missiles killed Iran’s most important general and its most important militia leader in early January as they were visiting Baghdad, it looked like American forces would be kicked out of Iraq... More than four months later, not only are U.S. forces still there, but it’s clear that the killings have created space for a new Iraqi government to assert some independence from its powerful neighbor. The signs of this new approach have been building over recent months, and the ascendance last week of Mustafa Al-Kadhimi to the post of transitional prime minister is the latest and most profound......

Earlier this week senior defense officials in Israel announced that after years of Israel’s war-between-war campaign to drive Iran out of Syria, the Islamic Republic was finally withdrawing from the war-torn country. The news came just hours after an airstrike blamed on Israel targeted a research facility in Aleppo in Syria’s north. But the announcement also came as Iran is still regrouping from the targeted killing of Quds force commander Qasem Soleimani in January and as it continues to deal with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and a disastrous economic crisis hitting the country... Almost on a weekly occurrence foreign publications...

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...

Iran’s hard-line establishment is trying to ensure through a state propaganda campaign that the foreign operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its assassinated commander are not forgotten. Major General Qasem Soleimani -- the late commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force -- was targeted and killed by a U.S. air strike in Baghdad on January 3. Since then, Tehran’s conservative clerics and hard-line media have been paying tribute to the memory of “Martyr Soleimani,” as he’s now referred to in Iran. One apparent part of the campaign is a recent report published by the hard-line, semiofficial Fars...

By Hassan Mahmoudi On January 2, 2020, Qassem Soleimani, the notorious commander of Iran’s terrorist Quds Force was killed by a U.S.-led airstrike in the Baghdad International Airport. Soleimani, as a major general, was the second person in the Iranian regime and was a hated figure among the vast majority of Iranians. During uprisings in Iran in 2018 and 2019, protesters tore up and torched his posters in different cities. Some in the west, especially in the mainstream media, for political purposes, have been trying to portray Soleimani as if he was a “Hero for the Iranian people”, or a...

Qassem Soleimani to the millions of people of Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Middle East, was known as the butcher of families & the destroyer of cities. But for the Democrats, he was innocent and President Trump was the one that killed an innocent man, but the forget that Soleimani was responsible for at least 600 US soldier deaths in Iraq. The Dems might want to take those words back because the recent video shows the real character of the now killed terrorist Qasem Soleimani and his followers.

At least 35 people were killed and another 48 injured in a stampede Tuesday that broke out during a funeral procession for the Iranian general killed last week in a U.S.-led airstrike, according to Iranian state media. The incident occurred in Gen. Qassem Soleimani's hometown of Kerman, in southeastern Iran, according to Iran's state media. The report quoted the head of Iran's emergency medical services, Pirhossein Koulivand, according to the Associated Press. Iran has promised retaliation on American interests in the Middle East after an airstrike Thursday at Baghdad International Airport killed the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps'...

As head of the Quds Force in Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Suleimani is widely regarded as one of the world's leading terrorists. Now Barack Obama has effectively granted him an amnesty. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the elite Quds Force in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, fully deserves his reputation as one of the world’s leading terrorist masterminds. For a decade a more he has been the driving force behind an array of Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups, from Hizbollah to Hamas, which have orchestrated a reign of terror throughout the Middle East. From a purely British perspective, he was responsible for training and...