Free Republic

The first two of 12 Sukhoi Su-30K fighters Angola ordered nearly four years for $1 billion have arrived in the country, giving a country with one of the most formidable air forces in the region some of the best military hardware Russia has to offer. Angola enters the club of African states possessing Su-30s along with Uganda and Algeria. The planes bounced around a lot before they got there. In 2013, Angola inked the purchase with Russia for the fighters, which served with the Indian Air Force from 1998-2005 before returning to Russia in exchange for more modern Su-30MKIs. Via...

An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman told reporters on Monday that Tehran is planning to “definitely respond” to an Israeli counterattack in late October that reportedly neutralized key missile manufacturing sites. Spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei was not alone among Iranian officials hinting at an imminent attack against Israel on the eve of the American presidential election, in which the two top candidates on the ballot are offering significantly different policies on the Middle East. Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has promised to return to his policies of heavy human rights sanctions on Iran and isolating the rogue regime in the...

As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House after scoring a spectacular victory in the US presidential election, Iranians wonder what his second term could mean for their country. The results of the "elections are an opportunity to review and revise the wrong approaches of the past," Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said, according to Iranian media. "We have very bitter experiences with the policies and approaches of different US governments in the past," Baghaei said. Relations between the United States and Iran have been extremely tense for nearly four decades. Sources of contemporary tension include Iran's nuclear...

Telegram channel of Iran's IGRC, its military force, posted a video threatening to kill Trump. After President-elect Trump's victory, Iran must now prepare to contend with the man it's been trying to assassinate for years. Tehran had reportedly been interfering in the U.S. election on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris. But with former Trump’s win, the regime will have to prepare for a U.S. leader who is, at the very least, a wild card. On Wednesday, the Telegram channel of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC), its military force, posted a video threatening to kill Trump. It ended with...

The Iranian government instructed one of its agents to stalk and assassinate former President Donald Trump this past September, according to a bombshell indictment unsealed by Manhattan federal prosecutors Friday. The indictment, which charges Iranian Farhad Shakeri and two New Yorkers with murder for hire and conspiracy, states that an unnamed official in Iran’s notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) instructed Shakeri in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign to “focus on surveilling, and, ultimately, assassinating, former President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.” Prosecutors say that when Shakeri noted that the plot would “cost a ‘huge’ amount...

The U.S. Department of Justice has unsealed charges against three men, one of them Iranian, who were tasked by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to kill Donald Trump before the election. This is at least the second assassination plot by Iran uncovered by the Justice Department. The first plot involved a Pakistani national with ties to Iran who hired a "hitman" to kill Trump. The "hit man" was a federal agent, and the would-be assassin was arrested in July before he left the U.S. This is an entirely new plot uncovered by DoJ and is much more involved than the first...

Hossein Salami, the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, says that the plan to isolate Iran has been abandoned, and today "Israel and the US are the most isolated and hated in the world." "Defending our country's borders today is not just about guarding the border. Blocking the border of the Islamic Republic of Iran means blocking the global policies of our enemies against Iran," he claimed. He added that "Iran does not base its security on a narrow territorial margin but seeks to establish security across all borders of Islam, and this is a great task entrusted to the military...

Authorities have released very little information about their investigations and announced no arrests, but they have accused Iran's "enemies" of using the suspected poisonings to undermine the clerical establishment. Some Iranians believe the girls' schools are being targeted by hard-line elements to stop them receiving an education. Others suggest the authorities may be punishing girls for their leading role in the nationwide anti-government protests that erupted in September. Since then, a total of 127 schools in 25 of Iran's 31 provinces have been affected, according to a tally by the reformist news outlet Etemad Online. Students have said they smelled...

Iran could now produce “one bomb’s worth of fissile material” in “about 12 days,” a top US Defense Department official said Tuesday. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl offered one of the most striking US government assessments to date of Iran’s “breakout time” as efforts to try to restore the Iran nuclear agreement remain halted and Tehran continues to breach the restrictions set out by the deal. Kahl said that “Iran’s nuclear progress since” the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal “has been remarkable.” “Back in 2018, when the previous administration decided to...

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: The Earthquake in Turkey and Syria Is a “Small Thing” Compared to Political Issues Like Palestine or American Interference in the Region #Iran #earthquake #EarthquakeTurkeySyria #Khamenei pic.twitter.com/g2ey6bY6mg— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) February 20, 2023

International inspectors this week found Iran has uranium enriched to 84% purity, just 6% below that needed to produce a nuclear weapon, Bloomberg News reported Sunday. The International Atomic Energy Agency is preparing its quarterly report on Iran's nuclear program, and two monitors found the near-nuclear weapon capability — the highest found to date.

The US is on high alert after receiving intelligence shared by Saudi Arabia that an attack by Iran on targets within its kingdom is imminent. According to the Wall Street Journal, Saudi and US officials said that Saudi Arabia, the US, as well as other neighboring countries have raised the level of alert for their military forces in the area.

Ever since the recent murder of a 22-year-old Iranian woman by the morality police after she was found not “properly” wearing her headscarf, protests have erupted in the streets of Tehran and other locations around the country. The government has been beating down and/or arresting the protesters, but some of them have continued to take to the streets. Yesterday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had clearly had enough of the unrest. He issued a blistering message to let everyone know who the real villains are and why the protests need to stop. This isn’t even about head scarfs, you see....

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responded publicly on Monday to the biggest protests in Iran in years, breaking weeks of silence to condemn what he called “rioting” and accuse the U.S. and Israel of planning the protests.

The recent massive investigations in Albania of a group of Iranian regime spies did not grab headlines in the US. But its revelations are truly newsworthy. Unable to crush the unfolding uprising at home, the Iranian regime is striking overseas. Terrorist plots targeting the MEK in Albania, France, the US and Denmark have been foiled. One Iranian diplomat is jailed in Belgium, three have been expelled from France and the Netherlands, and the terrorist arrested in Denmark has been exposed as closely linked to the regime’s ambassador in Norway. Thankfully, those attacks have been to no avail. What recently happened...

Excerpt: "Biden yesterday reaffirmed his commitment to returning to the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran– a deal which saw the Obama government send $100 billion to Iran, including a C-130 Hercules carrying $400 million in cash on January 16, 2016, as CNN reported. The Islamist regime then used that money to wage war in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza and around the world, massively destablizing the world. Now, Biden’s offer to the Ayatollahs threatens to dwarf even that gargantuan act of treason. “Under the deal, Iran gets a financial package worth up to $275 billion in the first year and...