Free Republic

Iraqi security forces were on Friday (June 26) interrogating pro-Iran fighters detained for planning a rocket attack in the first such raid in a country caught in the tug-of-war between Teheran and Washington. Since October, nearly three dozen deadly rocket attacks have hit US military and diplomatic installations in Iraq, with the US blaming pro-Teheran faction Kataeb Hezbollah. Infuriated, Washington has demanded Iraq take tougher action to hold the perpetrators accountable and Thursday's unprecedented raid appeared to be a response to this call. Just before midnight Thursday, the elite Counter-Terrorism Service stormed a base in southern Baghdad used by Kataeb...

Unidentified aircraft struck targets in Syria near the border with Iraq on Friday, killing eight Iran-backed Iraqi militiamen, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The rights group, which is based in the United Kingdom, obtains information through a network of activists on the ground in Syria, documenting the war in Syria over the past decade. The attack, carried out by “unknown drones,” targeted vehicles and armories, according to the organization. However, the head of the Syrian Observatory said it was “unidentified aircraft” that launched the attacks, without elaborating. “Unidentified aircraft targeted vehicles and arms depots in the Albu Kamal...

A contractor for the Pentagon has been charged with providing classified U.S. intelligence to a Lebanese national connected with terrorist group Hezbollah, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday. The department alleges Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, began transmitting the classified intelligence around December 30, when Iraqi militiamen stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Thompson is a linguist who at the time was working at a U.S. special forces base in Erbil in northern Iraq. The classified “files contained classified national defense information including true names, personal identification data, background information, and photographs of the human sources, as well as operations cables...

A Minnesota woman pleaded guilty today to one count of delivering national defense information to aid a foreign government. According to court documents, Mariam Taha Thompson, 63, formerly of Rochester, Minnesota, worked as a contract linguist at an overseas U.S. military facility where she was entrusted with a top secret government security clearance. ***** In December 2019, while Thompson was assigned to a special operations task force facility in Iraq, the United States launched a series of airstrikes in Iraq targeting Kata’ib Hizballah, an Iranian-backed foreign terrorist organization. These airstrikes culminated in a Jan. 3, 2020, strike that resulted in...

The rancor between Louis Freeh and former President Bill Clinton, who appointed him director of the F.B.I. in 1993, was laid raw anew today as Mr. Freeh continued his assault on the Clinton administration's handling of terrorism, while a former presidential aide accused Mr. Freeh of an "astonishing string of failures that helped leave America vulnerable to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." Mr. Freeh, appearing on NBC-TV's "Meet the Press" to promote a book he has written, repeated his assertion that the Clinton administration had failed to grasp the scope and severity of the threat of terrorism and had...

Ali Nouri Zadeh, Asharq Alawsat: Eight fundamentalist Islamist organizations have received large sums of money in the last month from the Iranian intelligence services, as part of a project to strike U.S military and economic installations across the Middle East Asharq Al-Awsat has learned. The plan, which also includes the carrying out of suicide operations targeting US and British interests in the region, as well as their Arab and Muslim allies, in case Iran is attacked, was drawn up by a number of experts guerilla warfare and terrorist operations, and was revealed by a senior source in the Iranian armed...

A former United States Air Force counterintelligence agent was charged with espionage after she defected to Iran and helped it target her former colleagues, the authorities said. In an extraordinarily detailed indictment made public on Wednesday, prosecutors disclosed that Monica Elfriede Witt, 39, gave the Iranians the code name and mission of a secret Pentagon program involving American intelligence operations. According to the indictment, she was working with members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The elite paramilitary group is known to carry out terrorist operations around the globe and has been sanctioned by the American government.

Prior to President Donald Trump authorizing targeted strikes against Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday, federal agents and Texas Department of Public Safety troopers have been arresting Iranian nationals, nearly all men, in the U.S. illegally. In the last few months, federal prosecutors have also brought terrorism charges against Iranians, including those in the U.S. working for the Iranian government. Iran is a designated state sponsor of terrorism. Iranian nationals illegally in the country are considered “special interest aliens” under federal law. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Sunday issued a warning to all Americans to be on a heightened...

Toll from Tehran’s terrorism and proxy attacks are a serious factors in Trump’s decision on whether to support or even join the Israeli war effort. Three years after 19 Americans died in a bombing at a Saudi Arabian apartment complex, then-President Bill Clinton sent a cable that told Iran’s president a secret that the 42nd president wasn’t even willing to tell the American public: U.S. intelligence had ample evidence that Tehran was behind the deadly Khobar Towers terror attack. “Message to President Khatami from President Clinton: The United States Government has received credible evidence that members of the Iranian Revolutionary...

“America can’t do a damn thing against us,” Ayatollah Khomeini bragged while holding our hostages. The Carter administration had undermined the Shah’s government in favor of the Islamists who seized power and then prevented the embassy’s Marine guards from defending the facility and the people inside against the Muslim ‘student’ groups who claimed to be coming in peace.The “peaceful” student activists took over our embassy and held our people hostage.Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei taunted President Trump with the same slogan in June after being asked to give up Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “Our response to the US nonsense is clear:...

Yemen government forces — backed by the Arab coalition — launched on Wednesday morning an offensive on the rebel-held port city of Al Hodeidah.

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...

A former Navy sailor has pleaded guilty in federal court in Chicago to plotting to attack Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, Illinois, purportedly on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).Xuanyu Harry Pang, 38, of North Chicago, Illinois, pleaded guilty to conspiring to and attempting to willfully injure and destroy national defense material, national defense premises, and national defense utilities, with the intent to injure, interfere with, and obstruct the national defense of the United States. The guilty plea was entered on Nov. 5, 2024, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and ordered...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is expected to announce he will cancel former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s security detail and clearance — and direct the Pentagon’s acting investigator general to launch an investigation into whether the retired soldier should be demoted in rank, Fox News reported Tuesday. Despite retiring from the Army in September 2023, the Secret Service has continued to protect Milley due to Iranian threats of retaliation on him for his role in the drone strike ordered by Trump in 2020 that killed Tehran’s Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Trump last week removed the protective...

Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has become the latest ex-official from President Trump’s first term to lose their security detail, according to a report. The Pentagon revoked Esper’s taxpayer-funded security detail on Tuesday night, CBS News reported on Wednesday. Esper’s security detail had been provided by the Department of Defense as a result of threats he’s received from Iran since the 2020 US airstrike that killed Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment. Esper, 60, served as Trump’s secretary of the Army from November 2017 to July 2019, before he...

Donald Trump has a name for everything and everyone, from Crooked Hillary to Little Rocket Man, who for a time became his best friend. Will he call the next region-wide conflagration in the Middle East, when it breaks out, Obama’s War? If he hasn’t thought of that already, he should start considering it now. Because the catastrophic policies of our former president have emboldened the Islamic state of Iran and enabled it to threaten the United States and our allies militarily in ways never before possible. When Obama took office in January 2009, he inherited a strong U.S. military and...

An Israeli security source on Saturday confirmed to Sky News Arabic that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's successor, Hashem Safieddine, was eliminated in a Friday night strike. According to Al Hadath, commanders from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were eliminated together with Safieddine. On Friday, Israel estimated that Safieddine was injured in the strike, since those who were with him in the underground area which was struck could not have escaped the site alive. In addition, it is estimated that alongside Safieddine, senior Hezbollah intelligence officials were also present at the site and were also injured. Safieddine, 60, is a cousin of...

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.

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...