Free Republic

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday sacked Russia's chief of land forces, General Oleg Salyukov, the Kremlin said, in the latest removal of a high-profile military establishment figure amid the war in Ukraine. Salyukov, 70, will become a deputy to ex-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was removed last year and made Secretary of the Security Council. The move was announced in a Kremlin decree. Less than a week ago, Salyukov was running the grand Victory Day military parade in Red Square with current Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, marking the 80th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany. Russian law enforcement has charged...

President Donald Trump on Thursday will visit a U.S. installation at the center of American involvement in the Middle East... Trump plans to address troops at Qatar’s al-Udeid Air Base, which was a major staging ground during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and supported the recent U.S. air campaign against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis. The president has held up Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar as models for economic development in a region plagued by conflict as he works to entice Iran to come to terms with his administration on a deal to curb its nuclear program. The...

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of the jihadist terrorist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), praised President Donald Trump in an address on Wednesday for taking the “courageous and historic” step of lifting sanctions on his country. Sharaa delivered a speech to the Syrian people following an in-person meeting with President Trump in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where President Trump concluded the first of three stops in a Middle East tour on Wednesday. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who first met Sharaa shortly after HTS toppled the half-century-old Assad family regime in Damascus, arranged and presided over the meeting. The...

There’s more to Donald Trump’s Middle East trip than billion-dollar contracts, parades of camels and a storm back home over Qatar’s offer to give the president a new Air Force One. A tour narrowly billed by the White House as a chance for Trump to show he’s a master dealmaker is jumbling the region’s geopolitical jigsaw puzzle.Wherever he goes, Trump’s brings disruption that can forge possibilities. And he takes risks – for instance, his decision on this trip to lift sanctions on Syria to give a war-ravaged nation a second chance.But the move revives a perennial question about Trump’s entire...

Madrid-based Prisoners Defenders, an NGO focused on Cuban human rights, reported that the Cuban and Russian governments signed an agreement in which Cuba would send soldiers to join the war in Ukraine. Such a development raises many important questions. The Wagner Group’s dramatic failed mutiny displayed something the Kremlin knew long ago: the group, including its leader, Yevgeny Prighozin, has become a problem for Russia, particularly on the Ukrainian front. The group had little military training and served as cannon fodder in the war. Thousands of its fighters fell in battle. Wagner was convenient to Russia, as many of its...

Donald Trump has said his administration is now exploring the possibility of normalising relations with Syria - his comments coming shortly after he met Syria's interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose forces ended the decades-long dictatorship of the Assad family. The extraordinary encounter, unthinkable just months ago, was short but significant. "I think he has got the potential," Trump remarked after his meeting in Riyadh, 37 minutes long, with the former Syrian fighter formerly linked to Al-Qaeda. The $10m US bounty on his head was only lifted in December. Video footage of their conversation in a lavish Saudi royal palace showed...

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday had tea with a former jihadist who until recently had a $10 million US bounty on his head. Interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, once known by his militant nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, met Trump in Riyadh six months after leading a swift campaign that toppled the half-a-century-old Assad regime, ejecting Iran-backed armed groups and declaring himself leader of the country. Al Sharaa was placed on the US Specially Designated Global Terrorist list in 2013 for heading al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, known as Al Nusra Front, and allegedly orchestrating suicide bombings across...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Trump urged Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to sign the Abraham Accords in a previously unplanned meeting on Wednesday, one day after lifting all sanctions on the Middle Eastern country. The two leaders met on the sidelines of a Gulf Cooperation Council gathering in Riyadh, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan phoning into the conversation. Syria currently doesn’t recognize Israel’s statehood, and the Abraham Accords were just one of Trump’s requests to Syria in an effort to normalize relations. Trump also told the Syrian leader to make all foreign terrorists leave Syria, deport Palestinian terrorists, help...

SUMMARY Donald Trump has met the Syrian interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in Saudi Arabia this morning The brief meeting came after the US lifted sanctions on Syria - Trump said the move is designed to "give them a chance at greatness" Until December, the US offered a $10m reward for al-Sharaa's arrest, our correspondent Lina Sinjab writes from Damascus Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attended the US-Syria meeting, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined remotely Trump then addressed a Gulf leaders' summit - saying again he wanted a deal with Iran, but they must stop "sponsoring terror" After...

December 3, 2002 C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet SmallpoxBy JUDITH MILLER he C.I.A. is investigating an informant's accusation that Iraq obtained a particularly virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist who worked in a smallpox lab in Moscow during Soviet times, senior American officials and foreign scientists say. The officials said several American scientists were told in August that Iraq might have obtained the mysterious strain from Nelja N. Maltseva, a virologist who worked for more than 30 years at the Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow before her death two years ago. The information came to...

The horrors of Islamic war rage in Syria. A young Alawite girl, Mira, was kidnapped and married to an Afghan jihadi fighter. Her father was threatened with death if he did not keep quiet and the government forces protected the Afghan man who raped the Alawite girl. The government forces also fabricated a false story to justify this marriage and that the girl had run away with this Afghan man. ... The young woman Mira Jalal Thabat (20 years old), the only child of her parents from the village of Al-Makhtabiyah in Talkalakh, went missing inside the Teacher Training Institute...

Reza Pahlavi, the son and would-be heir to the dictator who was deposed in Iran’s 1979 revolution, has openly tethered his political fortunes to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. (IRGC). As such, Pahlavi is most certainly an individual that the U.S. should not support. Flawed logic says that Pahlavi, the son of the Shah, is the ideal replacement, based on the premise that the people now killing Iranian civilians in defense of the “Islamic revolution” might one day help to overturn the very regime that defines itself by that revolution.

The al Qaeda terror leader of Syria – Al Sharaa who is perpetrating the wholesale slaughter of Christians, Alawites, Druze as we speak is hosted by French president Macron in Paris This the same Macron who has pledged to arrest Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu if he came to France. Didn’t they vote this craven scumbag out? ... The Syrian dictator, an ISIS murderer, who just recently set his Sunni dogs to butcher Alawites and Druze, has landed in Paris to meet Macron. If Bibi were going down those stairs he would be arrested for being a Jewish leader who fights...

Massive airstrikes targeting Houthi-held Sana'a International Airport and al-Dailami airbase in Sana'a Over 15 strikes so far This after the IDF ordered an evacuation of the airport earlier

Houthi terrorists got a lucky shot at Israel on Sunday with a missile strike near Ben Gurion Airport, wounding four — and the IDF wasted no time in striking back at prime Houthi-held real estate in Yemen. Details are still a bit thin, but the videos are... explosive. Reports vary — between 30 IAF jets and up to 50 in a joint operation with the U.S. — but either way, it was big. Sorting out the discrepancy during a breaking story isn’t easy, and not even the official statements are much help. A just-released statement from Israeli Prime Minister Bibi...

Pro-Palestinian students at the University of Washington occupied the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building Monday evening, renaming it the Shaban al-Dalou Building, in protest against the university's ties to Boeing. A separate group dressed in all black stacked furniture to create a blockade in front of the building before toppling dumpsters to block off nearby Jefferson Road, then confronted a security officer until he drove away.

Dozens of Israeli warplanes have carried out airstrikes on targets in Yemen as the Arab nation’s military forces escalate operations in response to foreign aggression and Israeli atrocities.

Iran is on fire — literally, again — and nobody knows why. A massive power plant and a "cardboard factory" caught fire bigly in Iran over the weekend. But there is impressive new video of Iran's port explosion from last week. Iran International reported that a "series of incidents unfolded in Alborz Province, west of Tehran, on Saturday evening, including two fires, reports of an explosion, and a magnitude 4.0 earthquake, according to official statements and eyewitness accounts." Israeli action? Typical authoritarian regime attention to maintenance issues? God just doesn't like the mullahs' regime? Who knows. For reasons yet unknown,...

Shortly after a massive terrorist attack in Moscow, Russia, the first unverified claim of responsibility has been made. Initial speculation centered on Chechen rebels or Ukrainians, but according to a post put out by the Amaq News Agency, which is the propaganda wing for ISIS, the terrorist group is saying it carried out the attack. In English: ISIS claims responsibility for the terror attack in Moscow Reports from the scene suggest the men who carried out the attack were bearded and carrying Russian AK-style weapons. That doesn't exactly narrow it down given the proliferation of both throughout the world. Still,...

Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani said Thursday that Israel "had failed to respect" January’s ceasefire agreement in Gaza, as he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, APA reports, citing Al Arabiya. “As you know, we reached an agreement months ago, but unfortunately Israel did not abide by this agreement,” said the ruler of Qatar, a key mediator of the deal. Putin on Thursday told Sheikh Tamim that it was important for Moscow to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict and the future of Syria during the Qatari ruler’s visit to Moscow.