Free Republic

It was the kind of sweeping, last-minute demand that would have torpedoed most diplomatic talks: President Donald Trump insisting this week that in exchange for him ending the war with Iran, several Arab and Muslim countries should sign on to his Abraham Accords to normalize their diplomatic relations with Israel. But there’s been almost no response from any of the countries that Trump mentioned by name — more than half of whom already have diplomatic relations with Israel — and no statement of support from an Israeli government that would reap enormous benefits from such a deal. Analysts said Trump’s...

The social media post by President Trump made it sound straightforward. The United States would orchestrate a deal to end the war with Iran and, in exchange, a slew of countries across the Middle East and South Asia would join an agreement, called the Abraham Accords, establishing relations with Israel. In fact, he said, that “should be mandatory.” But half of the countries he named — such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey — already have relations with Israel. And the other half — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan — have no interest in establishing them anytime soon. As a...

Saudi fighter jets carried out airstrikes on Iran-linked Shi’ite militia targets inside Iraq during the Iran war, while retaliatory strikes were also launched from Kuwait into Iraqi territory, Reuters reported citing multiple sources familiar with the matter. Sources cited by Reuters included three Iraqi military and security officials, a Western official and two people briefed on the matter, including one in the United States. According to one Western official and another source familiar with the operations, Saudi air force fighter jets targeted Iran-backed militia positions near the kingdom’s northern border with Iraq. The Western official said some of the Saudi...

For the first time in the history of the modern Middle East, Saudi Arabia has crossed a major red line by launching direct military strikes against Iranian targets on Iranian soil. According to reports from Reuters and various Western intelligence sources, the Saudi Air Force conducted a series of secret aerial operations in late March 2026. These strikes were designed as a direct response to persistent Iranian attacks that had successfully bypassed the American military defense umbrella to hit targets inside the Saudi Kingdom. The operations, while unconfirmed by official government channels in Riyadh, represent a massive escalation in the...

A pivotal U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS command and control plane was among the aircraft damaged in a March 27 Iranian missile and drone attack on Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, people familiar with the matter told Air & Space Forces Magazine. The attack injured more than 10 service members, two seriously. Among the other planes damaged are aerial refueling tankers. U.S. Central Command has declined to comment on the incident. Air & Space Forces Magazine has reviewed an image that shows significant damage to an E-3 at Prince Sultan Air Base. The image appears to show one...

US political commentator and journalist Tucker Carlson claimed on Monday that Saudi Arabia and Qatar had caught and “arrested Israeli Mossad agents planning bombings in those countries”. “Why would the Israelis be committing bombings in Gulf countries, which are also being attacked by Iran?” Carlson said on his show. “Aren’t they on the same side?” “Israel wants to hurt Iran - and Qatar, and the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and Oman and Kuwait,” he added. Carlson also alleged that Israel deliberately sows chaos among America’s Arab allies. The American journalist did not cite a source for the claim,...

It appears that Neom—Saudi Arabia’s hugely expensive, architecturally bizarre urban development project—is floundering and close to collapse. A new report from the Financial Times cites high-level sources within the project to paint a picture of dysfunction and failure at the heart of the quixotic effort. Neom was envisioned as a vast series of fantastical urban developments spread across the coast of the Red Sea. At the center of the project is The Line—a proposed 105-mile-long city which developers had initially projected could house as many as 9 million people by the year 2030. The Line is defined by bizarre architectural...

There’s no business quite like the U.S. arms business and no audience roars louder in approval than Saudi Arabia. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump is expected to close several deals with Saudi Arabia’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a visit that could see billions more in U.S. weapons flow to one of the world’s most prolific importers of military hardware. Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that the U.S. will likely move forward with a deal to sell F-35 jets to Saudi Arabia. The F-35, the crown jewel in Lockheed Martin’s portfolio, is among the most...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi security forces clashed with five wanted militants at a suspected hideout north of Riyadh on Thursday, killing four and wounding the fifth, a security official said. A security agent was also killed and two others were wounded in the shootout at a house outside the town of Buraida, the official said on condition of anonymity. Buraida is one of the kingdom's fundamentalist strongholds. The official said the men were "misguided individuals," a euphemism Saudi officials use to refer to Islamic militants. He said weapons and ammunition were found at the scene. It was not immediately...

@Brick_Suit YMCA plays as President Trump is joined on stage by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. Amazing finish to an incredible summit meeting!

Is it just me, or is this a sight to behold? Seeing Trump & MBS as co-hosts greeting all of them...I've never seen anything like it.. The MSM made it sound like a dozen or so CEO's & business leaders would be there. It seems like maybe 50.

Soaring knife crime in Germany, which many police officials openly say is directly tied to mass immigration, has now resulted in warrantless searches at German Christmas markets. In a news segment produced by state media broadcaster SWR, the clip reveals German police conducting controls on a German Christmas market in Ludwigshafen, where police were filmed confiscating a pocket knife from an elderly woman. In the SWR video, the narrator states that the police had not discovered any pocket knives up until that point that day. However, once police stopped an elderly woman and searched her bag, she was found to...

Breaking from multiple media outlets, Israel is saying it has killed Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah, first it was pagers, then walkie-talkies now the leader of Hezbollah has been killed, things are certainly heating up in that part of the world

FBI declassified a 1999 video of Saudi intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi casing the Capitol and other Washington D.C. sites for the 9/11 attack. How, then, did the CIA-FBI 9/11 report conclude in 2005 that Saudi Arabia was not involved in the attack? And why did the FBI maintain — for 20 years, before its recent retraction — that al-Bayoumi wasn’t a Saudi agent? Such willful deception, practiced increasingly by American intelligence, is the subject of former CIA agent J. Michael Waller’s new book Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains ......

Senate Democrats are launching a new investigation into the foreign payments made to Jared Kushner's investment firm. Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden announced the probe on Wednesday, saying that the panel would investigate the billions of dollars that Affinity Partners manages from foreign sources. Kushner started Affinity in July 2021, less than six months after leaving the White House as a senior adviser to former President Donald Trump. The firm quickly attracted big-time investors from the Middle East and within weeks, landed $2 billion from the Saudi public investment fund. Affinity continues to overwhelmingly derive the majority of its...

The Biden administration and the Saudis are reportedly cooking up a deal.Under the terms of the agreement, the Saudis will get nuclear capability, defense guarantees and a terrorist state inside Israel. And what will the United States get? Temporarily lower prices.The Saudis are not offering to boost oil production to bring down prices as a favor to America, but to Biden. And it’s an election quid-pro-quo that may cost millions of Americans their lives.After draining the strategic petroleum reserve ahead of the midterms, Biden has been unable to refill it because his environmentalist allies and the Saudis have kept prices...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with the crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, on Monday evening to discuss an Israeli “ceasefire” against the Hamas terrorist organization and “greater integration” in the Middle East. Multiple reports suggested that Blinken and bin Salman, widely considered the de facto ruler of the kingdom, discussed plans in which Saudi Arabia would normalize its diplomatic relations with Israel in exchange for a major security agreement with the United States and forcing Israel to recognize a “Palestinian state,” presumably governed by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

If someone says, “Trust the science!” these days, it’s usually an effort to short-circuit debate over weighty policy issues. “Trust the science” has been deployed in the past five years to prevent debate over COVID school closures and mask mandates, over electric-car subsidies, and over sex changes for boys and girls. For my entire time in Washington, though, “trust the science” has been used to oppose a missile defense system for the United States. For my first 20 years as a journalist, I was told that a missile defense system simply cannot work and that anyone who disagreed was a...

Saudi Arabia has been left humiliated after being forced to scale back its multi-trillion-dollar plans for a 106-mile linear megacity in the desert to just over one per cent of its original length. The ambitious project, named the Line, forms part of the kingdom's lucrative Neom infrastructure project - which had been slated to cost up to $1.5trillion.

Former President Donald Trump has spoken recently with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, according to a report. The phone conversation between the presumptive Republican nominee for president and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, reported by the New York Times, comes as the Biden administration pushes to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Normalizing relations between the Jewish state and a number of Muslim majority countries was one of Trump’s landmark foreign-policy achievements during his only term in office. It’s unclear exactly when the conversation between the 38-year-old de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia and the 77-year-old former president...