Free Republic

DUBAI - Thousands of Muslims, from Pakistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian territories, poured out of prayer services to join anti-France protests on Friday, as the French president’s vow to protect the right to caricature the Prophet Muhammad continues to roil the Muslim world. Demonstrations in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad turned violent as some 2,000 people who tried to march toward the French Embassy were pushed back by police firing tear gas and beating protesters with batons. Crowds of Islamist activists hanged an effigy of French President Emmanuel Macron from a highway overpass after pounding it furiously with their shoes. Several...

A powerful earthquake has struck off Turkey's Aegean coast, north of the Greek island of Samos, officials said. The 7.0 magnitude tremor, about 17km (11 miles) off the coast of western Izmir province, was felt as far away as Athens and Istanbul, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. There was no word on casualties but images from the Turkish city of Izmir showed buildings that had collapsed. An earthquake that struck Izmir in 1999 killed about 17,000 people. Reports said Friday's quake was also felt on the Greek island of Crete. Video on social media showed people searching through the...

Boko Haram has released a new video showing Rev Polycarp Zango, a pastor with the Church of Christ in Nations (COCIN) in Jos, Plateau State, who reportedly went missing penultimate Monday. The cleric was abducted on October 19, while travelling to Gombe State for a conference. According to an online medium, Sahara Reporters, a video from the Islamic State West Africa Province, ISWAP, has confirmed his abduction. In the video, Rev Zango, who spoke in eloquent Hausa, introduced himself as a cleric at COCIN LCC Wild Life Park, in the Plateau state capital. He revealed that he was in...

The police intervened Wednesday evening to prevent "several dozen" members of the Turkish community "to do battle" with Armenians in Décines-Charpieu, a bastion of this diaspora in France, announced Thursday October 29th. Prefecture. A large police force, with around a hundred men, was put in place "with the aim of restoring republican order" in this suburban town of Lyon which houses the Armenian genocide memorial. Nineteen vehicles were checked and the identity of all the protagonists was noted. Twitter: Hundreds Of Turks & Azeris Take To The Streets In Lyon, France Looking For Armenians."Calm returned at 11 p.m., two hours...

Hundreds Of Turks & Azeris Take To The Streets In Lyon, France Looking For Armenians.

A Turkish government minister has called French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo “b*stards” and “sons of b*tches” over a new satirical cartoon showing President Erdogan in his underwear. The frontpage cartoon of the magazine, which features Erdogan in his underwear looking at the bare bottom of a woman in an Islamic veil and bears the caption “in private he is very funny”, has earned the anger of the Turkish leader, who has now threatened legal action. On Wednesday, the Turkish presidency’s communications directorate released a statement on the subject of the cartoon, according to Le Monde, saying: “The necessary legal and...

5 others, including soldiers, also wounded in attack targeting district commissioner At least two people were killed and five wounded, including soldiers, Tuesday when a car bomb blast targeted an official in the Somali capital Mogadishu, officials said. The bomb attack went off near the Sinka Dher intersection in Mogadishu. “The Al-Shabaab terrorist group targeted the Kahda district commissioner with a car bomb blast killing two people and wounding five others, including soldiers and the Kahda district spy chief,” Abdifatah Hassan, a police captain in Mogadishu, told Anadolu Agency. Speaking to Anadolu Agency by phone, Ismail Mukhtar Oronjo, a Somali...

Two Islamic extremist terrorists were sentenced to death Wednesday in Mali for carrying out one terror attack and planning two others, including the 2015 hostage crisis in which two gunmen killed 20 people at a hotel. Fawaz Ould Ahmed and Sadou Chaka pleaded guilty and expressed no remorse for the three attacks, French news agency AFP reported. Ould Ahmed, a Mauritian national, said he was personally responsible for a March 2015 attack where he shot five people at a restaurant in the Malian capital of Bamako, according to Reuters. Ould Ahmed and Chaka are best known, however, for planning the...

The photographs from the Turkish occupation zone Serêkaniyê (Arab. Ras al-Ain) in northern Syria basically confirm only once again what the autonomous administration and human rights organizations have long denounced: The terrorist militia "Islamic State" (IS) is one of the proxy troops of NATO partner Turkey acting for Ankara in Syria. The footage, which has been circulating on online networks such as Twitter and Facebook since Sunday, shows "demonstrators" in Serêkaniyê protesting against French President Emmanuel Macron. In early October Macron had presented his law against Islamist separatism and announced that his country would increasingly counteract the development of...

ISLAMIC State is taking over swathes of Africa like it did in Syria and Iraq with "staggeringly brutal" tactics, the Pentagon has warned. According to a report from West Point, the US officer training academy, the group's expansion and regrouping on the continent shows "Islamic State is far from defeated". "By the summer of 2020, it had become resolutely clear that the Islamic State was a changed organisation, but by no means a beaten one," the report, published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Centre, said. The Pentagon report said there has been a "marked upward curve of claimed cumulative attacks...

Christian human rights leaders have called on the Trump administration to issue sanctions on Turkey in response to its actions in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, and warned that Turkish actions were guided by "animus" against Christians. The calls came during a panel discussion, hosted by the group In Defence of Christians Friday, titled “Turkey is Committing Another Christian Genocide. Why is the Trump Administration Silent?” The event focused on Turkish actions in the recent conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The historic conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan has reignited in recent weeks. The two countries, formerly part of the Soviet Union (USSR),...

Three martyred in the blast in Shia Hazara market in Quetta Hazar Ganji on Sunday. A remote-controlled bomb exploded in Quetta. Due to that, at least three people embraced martyrdom and seven sustained injuries. According to police, the explosion took place at the Hazarganji fruit market on the outskirts of Quetta. They said the terrorists had planted explosives in a motorcycle. Preliminary investigations revealed that the terrorists used explosives weighing four to five kilogrammes in the attack. National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) in Islamabad had recently issued a threat alert for Peshawar and Quetta. It said that banned militants of...

Explosion in the northwestern city’s mosque which also serves as a religious school kills seven people and wounds at least 109 others. Islamabad, Pakistan – An explosion at a religious school in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar has killed at least seven people and wounded 109 others, police and health officials say. The blast occurred at the Speen Jamaat mosque, which also serves as a religious school for the local community in the city’s Dir Colony area, at 8:30am local time (3:30 GMT) on Tuesday, a police official told Al Jazeera shortly after the blast. “[Students] were reading the...

Suspected Fulani extremists murdered a Christian man in an ambush-style attack as he and two others walked home from work. According to the Emancipation Centre for Crisis Victims in Nigeria, Justine Patrick was 25 when he was killed earlier this month. He was walking home from work with his coworkers Daniel Gyang and Sele Dung through some maize fields about an hour before sunset on Oct. 14, Gyang said. Patrick walked behind Gyang and Dung. “We never knew that a group of seven Fulani had already ambushed us,” Gyang said. The attackers rushed from the bush, raising sticks, machetes and...

Two facilitators from the Bible Society of Cameroon’s literacy program in the Far North region have been killed by Boko Haram over the past few weeks. After a two-year lull, attacks by Islamic militant group Boko Haram in that region are on the rise again, and are claiming many victims. Among the lives recently lost were two literacy facilitators from the Bible Society of Cameroon’s Alpha Program in the Parkwa language. One of them died in early August, and the second in mid-September. Jonas, 42, an elder in the Union of Evangelical Churches in Cameroon, was killed on the night...

The insurgents attacked the farmers on Sunday as they were harvesting crops in Moranti outside Maiduguri. Eight farmers have been killed by Boko Haram jihadists in northeastern Nigeria, security sources said Monday. The insurgents attacked the farmers on Sunday as they were harvesting crops in Moranti outside Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, two sources said. “The attackers used knives, not guns, to kill all eight farmers, so as not to attract attention,” militia leader Babakura Kolo said. Local communities have resorted to armed vigilantes or militias, who work alongside the army, as self-defense. “They (Boko Haram) hacked the farmers...

The United States believes it killed seven senior leaders of al-Qaeda in Syria in an airstrike last week as they were meeting near the Turkish border, US Central Command said Monday. A Central Command spokeswoman, Major Beth Riordan, said the strike was conducted in Idlib, in northwest Syria, on October 22. She did not identify the seven leaders by name. ‘The removal of these AQ-S leaders will disrupt the terrorist organization's ability to further plot and carryout global attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians,’ she said.

Paris (AFP) — France’s largest employers’ federation on Monday urged companies to “resist the blackmail” over a product boycott by Arab countries as a backlash widens over Paris’s hardened stance against radical Islam. French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to take the fight to Islamic radicals after the October 16 beheading of a history teacher who had shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed to pupils in a class discussion on free speech. But his comments triggered protests in Muslim-majority countries at the weekend, with people burning pictures of Macron in Syria and setting fire to French flags in the Libyan...

The French cyber authority has announced that many government ministries, media outlets and financial institutions have been hit by a mysterious attack. In recent days, there has been an escalation in French-Turkish relations. According to reports published in the last hours of tonight (Sunday), it appears that a major and significant cyber attack has hit France. It is not yet clear the size of the attack and whether it has ended, but it has been reported that many government ministries, media outlets and financial institutions have been affected. The National Cyber Authority in France issued an official statement in which...

The leader of Turkey is calling on citizens to boycott French products after French President Emmanuel Macron defended a teacher who was murdered by an 18-year-old radical Islamist, vowing to crack down on radical elements in France. "Never give credit to French-labelled goods, don't buy them," Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan said Monday during a speech in Ankara, according to the BBC and CNN. "European leaders must say 'stop' to Macron and his campaign of hatred," he added. His remarks come amid a deepening dispute between Turkey and France over the treatment of Muslims in France. French authorities argue they are taking...