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Israeli officials have been holding talks in Jordan with Syrian opposition officials “in advance of a possible Israeli-U.S. operation in Syria to protect the Golan Heights,” Western intelligence sources reported Tuesday, Jan. 1. There was no further information about this operation or how rebel commanders were involved in military plans “to protect the Golan Heights.” Altogether, the goings-on on the Israeli and Jordanian borders with Syria are in deep hush. But European intelligence sources, some of them French and Russian, reveal nightly clashes taking place between US, Jordanian, Israeli special forces and Syrian rebels, on the one hand, and Syrian...

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...

President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday that the United States should not interfere in Syria in a post on social media site Truth Social. "Syria is a mess but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!" Trump said. He also said that the rebels in Syria are on the outskirts of Damascus and are preparing for a major move to remove Assad. "Russia, because of the heavy losses in Ukraine, cannot stop it. The Russians, like Assad, could be...

Al-Golani’s ties to al-Qaida stretch back to 2003 when he joined extremists battling U.S. troops in Iraq. The native of Syria was detained several times by the U.S. military, but remained in Iraq. During that time, al-Qaida usurped likeminded groups and formed the extremist Islamic State of Iraq, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In 2011, a popular uprising against Syria's Assad triggered a brutal government crackdown and led to all-out war. Al-Golani's prominence grew when al-Baghdadi sent him to Syria to establish a branch of al-Qaida called the Nusra Front. The United States labeled the new group as a terrorist...

Islamist rebels have seized control of Aleppo and punched through into Hama city amid claims that Syria's dictator Bashar al-Assad has allegedly fled to Russia with his family. Thousands of Syrian insurgents fanned out inside Aleppo in vehicles with improvised armor and pickups, deploying to landmarks such as the old citadel on Saturday, a day after they entered Syria's largest city facing little resistance from government troops. Syria's armed forces said in a statement Saturday that to absorb the large attack on Aleppo and save lives, it has redeployed and is preparing for a counterattack. The jihadist-led rebels seized Aleppo...

Could the collapse of Hezbollah touch off a domino effect in the Middle East? Iran's primary proxy and the world's most powerful non-state organization didn't just keep Lebanon under Tehran's thumb, after all. Hassan Nasrallah played a key role in propping up Iranian puppet Bashar al-Assad in Syria.And now Syrians are beginning to cheer their "disarray," as the New York Times puts it:Even as most of the Middle East is overtaken by outrage at weeks of destructive Israeli strikes against Hezbollah and its leaders, some communities are celebrating the disarray of the powerful militia that persecuted them.Nowhere is that sentiment...

I first met Qassem four years ago, at the height of the European refugee crisis. The BBC had sent me to capture the stories of Mideast migrants, thousands of whom would daily wash ashore on the Greek isles. He was around 15, malnourished and clearly traumatized. As we sat together in a cabin at a ­migrant camp on the island of Lesbos, his hunched body rocked backward and forward. His marginal life amounted to a speck of dust amid the geopolitical earthquakes that were remaking the region at the time. Yet the story he told opened a window onto the...

A group of conservative veterans is preparing to visit Washington to laud President Trump’s withdrawal of troops from northern Syria and to urge Republicans to back his intention to pull out of Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East. Wyoming House Majority Whip Tyler Lindholm, who was in the Navy on 9/11, is helping organize the mid-November gathering featuring speeches at the National Press Club and lobbying visits to Congress. "If you listen to the sound clips of the war hawks who say you can’t pull out now because a vacuum will be created, and we can’t pull out...

"Trump has escalated military operations in Iraq to a degree that has hugely increased civilian deaths in the war against Islamic State militants.... Furthermore, sending in more U.S. forces to fight alongside the opposition (which includes jihadist groups formerly affiliated with al Qaida) will plunge the U.S. deeper into a conflict against Russia. The destabilizing impact of such a move has to be fully contemplated. While the images and videos of children struggling to breathe and survive is sickening, there must be some sober consideration about the realities on the ground in Syria. The truth is hard to come by...

Syrian civil war grew out of a popular uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, part of Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East. The brutal response of the security forces against initially peaceful protests demanding democratic reform and end of repression triggered a violent reaction. An armed rebellion to the regime soon took hold across Syria, dragging the country into a full-scale civil war. Main Issues: The Roots of the Conflict The Syrian uprising started as a reaction to the Arab Spring , a series of anti-government protests across the Arab world inspired by the...

The Texas senator is seeking an implicit contrast with the more hawkish Marco Rubio.Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday warned against the deployment of U.S. forces in the Middle East in hopes of creating democracy, nodding to a portion of the Republican Party exhausted with military escapades abroad. Even as he emphasized the need to defeat the Islamic State group in a speech coming just a week after the San Bernardino, California, shooting rampage that's since been linked to radicalization, Cruz, a 2016 presidential candidate, chastised those rushing to place American troops on the ground to fight the enemy. "Some in...

Texas is taking the gloves off when it comes to the fight over Syrian refugees by suing the federal government. Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office announced the lawsuit yesterday, saying the Obama Administration’s plans go against federal law. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton today announced that he has filed suit on behalf of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) against the federal government to halt the relocation of refugees from Syria in the state, citing the Refugee Act of 1980, which requires that the federal government consult with state authorities in advance of such relocations. The federal government...

DAMASCUS, Syria, June 9 (UPI) -- A human rights observer group says more than 320,000 people have been killed in the Syrian Civil War since 2011. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says it documented 230,618 deaths in the Syrian Civil War between March 2011, when the conflict began, and June 8, 2015.

i>This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison. The former President of Lebanon, Amine Gemayel, is a Maronite Christian. He recently warned of “an exodus approaching biblical proportions.” Gemayel told a gathering in Zurich of Christian Solidarity International (CSI) and other human rights activists that the current wave of church burnings, murders, and riots against Christians in the Mideast is the work of radical Islamists. The former Lebanese leader’s own brother had been assassinated in Beirut by these same jihadists. President Gemayel’s warnings echo those issued two years ago by Vienna’s Catholic prelate. Christoph Cardinal Schönborn in 2012 told a religious...

The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords. Psalm 55:21 There are many things that are difficult to explain about the Obama administration. An apparently free and independent people not only elected him president of the United States, but also re-elected him even as it was apparent that his administration was mostly a miserable failure-- even by the measure of liberals. Historians will long ponder how a president who spent as much money and legislated as much produced very little that actually...

The United States has ridden -- and tamed -- the wild global tiger since the end of World War II. The frantic ride has been dangerous, to us, but a boon to humanity. At the same time, America's leadership role has been misrepresented and misunderstood abroad and at home, including by some of our country's own leaders. Accordingly, our current president, Barack Obama, has decided to climb down from the tiger, with the certain consequence that it will run wild again. The crowning achievement of postwar American policy was the defeat of Soviet communism. After the fall of the Berlin...

The Geneva talks on Iranian nukes have turned into a "pull my finger" charade. Iran says that it's only making electricity, not nuclear bombs. The U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany are somehow all supposed to agree on reeling Iran in -- but let's face it: Russia and China are close Iranian allies and trading partners, while even Germany and France have significant geopolitical ties to Russia through, for example, the European defense conglomerate EADS and the Nord Stream pipeline running Russian gas into Europe. And Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman reportedly bragged to Russian journalists at the...

Japan-China: Two Chinese navy ships sailed through the international waters between Okinawa and Miyako in the Ryukyus. Yesterday two bombers flew between the two islands. Syria: The fighting has continued with no let up. The government has made small gains in multiple areas. However an al-Qaida-affiliated group of the al Nusra Front drove government forces from the village of Maaloula. This is one of the three villages in the world that still speak a variation of Western Aramaic, which is the language thought to be closest to the language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. As occurs whenever a Christian village is captured,...

President Obama's on-and-off-again planned American attack on Syria is nothing new. Besides its five declared wars, America has a habit of intervening all over the world. Even apart from clandestine CIA operations, and even after the unhappy end of the Vietnam War, we have attacked lots of countries and non-state militias. The roll call of recent American military interventions is quite astounding: Cambodia, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Liberia, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Zaire and Afghanistan. Even the notion of Past American isolationism is a myth. In the four years between 1912 and 1916 alone, the U.S. sent...