Free Republic

Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko has died after being shot at his home in Kiev, according to police. Mr Babchenko, 41, was reportedly found bleeding in their apartment block by his wife and died in an ambulance. After writing about a crashed Russian military plane in 2016, Mr Babchenko said he received death threats and left his home country. He previously worked as a presenter on Ukrainian channel ATR TV, and has written about his military service. Ukrainian law enforcement confirmed his death in a Facebook post, written in Ukrainian. Kiev police chief Andriy Kryshchenko also told the media they suspected...

Antifa supporter Daniel Alan Baker was arrested for plotting to murder Trump supporters and police on Inauguration Day. He trained in Syria in 2017 with the YPG, was featured on VICE, and in 2020 participated in the CHAZ insurrection in Seattle, per DOJ documents. Jack Posobiec broke the story Friday. see links Daniel Alan Baker wanted to stockpile AK-47s and build bombs in CHAZ district in Seattle to start “the revolution.” Baker posted links to CNN on his “Call to Arms” to kill Trump supporters and police officers on Inauguration Day.

Federal law enforcement agents have arrested a Florida Man and charged him with trying to organize an armed response to pro-President Donald Trump protesters expected at the state Capitol on Sunday. The U.S. Attorney’s Office announced that the FBI arrested Daniel Baker of Tallahassee on Friday. Authorities say Baker issued a “call to arms” on social media to recruit people in a plot to create an armed circle around protesters and trap them in the Capitol complex “using firearms.” “Extremists intent on violence from either end of the political and social spectrums must be stopped, and they will be stopped,”...

ANTIFA supporter Daniel Alan Baker has been arrested for plotting to murder Trump supporters and police on Inauguration Day. He trained in Syria in 2017 with the YPG, was featured on VICE, and in 2020 participated in the CHAZ insurrection in Seattle, per DOJ documents. Independent journalist Jack Posobiec broke the story Friday.

Today, at President Donald J. Trump’s direction, the Department of the Treasury and Department of State announced important sanctions designations on individuals and entities actively supporting the murderous and barbaric Assad regime in Syria.  Today’s designations employ a wide range of sanctions authorities to target the Assad regime, including the Caesar Act provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2020, which authorizes sanctions on individuals providing support to the Syrian government.The targets of today’s sanctions include regime-loyalists, Syrian financiers supporting corrupt reconstruction efforts, and individuals actively involved in the ceasefire disruption in northern Syria.Since the...

The Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, assassinated a top Syrian rocket scientist on Saturday using a car bomb, the New York Times first reported Tuesday. The scientist, Aziz Asbar, led a confidential unit known as “Sector 4” at the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center developing cutting edge missile technology designed to further Syria’s efforts to initiate the long range bombing of Israeli cities. Asbar was killed along with his driver near the research center, which lies in the town of Masyaf and has long been believed to host chemical weapons development. The center has twice been the target of Israeli...

The president of Uzbekistan on Wednesday offered his country's assistance in investigating the deadly terror attack in the lower Manhattan area of New York City. The suspect in the attack was identified as an Uzbek national, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov. Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, but the country has been linked to at least three other terrorist incidents over the last year. In April, Uzbek national Rakhmat Akilov drove a truck into pedestrians in Stockholm, Sweden, killing five people. Earlier that same month, Akbarzhon Jalilov, a Russian citizen who was born in Kyrgyzstan...

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - A Florida man is charged with providing material support to the Islamic State extremist group, including attempting to buy multiple weapons and scouting potential targets for an attack in the Tampa Bay area, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. A criminal complaint charges Muhammed Momtaz Al-Azhari, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen, with attempting to provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization. The charge carries a potential 20-year prison term. **SNIP** According to the affidavit, Al-Azhari scouted a number of targets in the Tampa Bay region, including beaches, parks and even the Tampa FBI field...

Yesterday was a great day. Flynn has been freed. The DOJ has dropped the Flynn prosecution. The Justice Department on Thursday moved to drop its case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, in a stunning development that comes after internal memos were released raising serious questions about the nature of the investigation that led to Flynn’s late 2017 guilty plea of lying to the FBI.The announcement came in a court filing "after a considered review of all the facts and circumstances of this case, including newly discovered and disclosed information," as the department put it. DOJ officials said they concluded that Flynn's interview by the...

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...

Russian-controlled forces in Syria have been roaming deeper into U.S.-held territory, raising the risk of conflict in an apparent effort “to challenge our presence in the northeast,” according to a senior State Department official. “These are not daily occurrences, but they have been increasing in number,” James Jeffrey, the State Department’s lead negotiator for the Syria crisis, told reporter

Al-Qaeda terrorist's son an Obama fundraiser Here's another 'associate' that Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama may want to throw under the bus. This is a Debbie Schlussel exclusive. Al Churbaji is a Syrian national currently living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from where he is fighting the Department of Homeland Security's endeavors to deport him. If successful, this will be the second deportation for Al-Churbaji, after a return to the U.S. that violated federal immigration and deportation policies. More on that later. But even if Al-Churbaji is deported, at least two of his six children, a son and a daughter,...

A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling...

The Investigative Project on Terrorism has learned that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Democratic Party fundraiser with leaders of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood front groups in May of this year. The invitation-only fundraiser was sponsored by Reps. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.; Andre Carson, D-Ind.; and Steve Israel, D-N.Y., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and took place on the evening of May 16, 2012, at the W Hotel in Washington D.C. In attendance were about 20 members of a Syrian dissident group and 10 officials representing Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas front groups. Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)...

So, just who is this top Iranian general the U.S. just eliminated? For many of us who watch and analyze news out of the Middle East daily, he was the world’s number one bad guy. Qassim Soleimani has been in control of Iran’s Quds Force for more than 20 years. His current greatest hits include helping Bashar al Assad slaughter hundreds of thousands of his own people in the Syrian civil war, stoking the Houthis in Yemen’s civil war, and overseeing the killing of hundreds of Iraqi protesters recently demonstrating against Iranian influence in their country.

A federal judge was aghast over the Trump administration’s assertion it could indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant without providing access to a lawyer, saying the Justice Department’s defense of the practice amounted to “an end run” around the man’s Constitutional rights. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is weighing a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to allow the group access to the man in order to provide him legal representation. “He wants counsel, which is an assertion and a request that I don’t think I can ignore,” Judge Chutkan said Monday, adding that she plans...

Retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is no stranger to controversy, with a legacy of questionable statements on Israel and the US government. In 2013 the former chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that Israel was responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Syria. In 2007 Wilkerson appeared in a Dutch documentary, claiming that American foreign policy was dominated by “the Jewish lobby”. Despite his history of inflammatory rhetoric and frequent conspiracy theories, Wilkerson was tapped to serve as a military and foreign policy adviser for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015. In the wake...

After eight years of war, the Syrian opposition announced that all armed groups united under the command of the Syrian Interim Government’s Defense Ministry and joined forces under the banner of the National Army. For the first time, the Syrian Interim Government formed by the Syrian National Coalition has managed take the armed opposition under its command. With this step, the political opposition for the first time may be able to proclaim itself the representative of the entire Syrian opposition.

For the past several weeks it seemed as if Germany had truly become the promised land for Mideast asylum seekers, primarily those seeking to escape the Syrian civil (and global proxy) war, but according to various media reports, also a material number of "ISIS-linked terrorists." Then it all came crashing down earlier today when Germany's beloved by all refugees "Mutti" said genug, and with one decision shut down the border with Austria in the process unraveling decades of customs-union progress (following promptly by the Czech Republic doing the same, with Italy expected to follow suit in the hours ahead). Ironically,...

Full title: Judicial Watch: Defense, State Department Documents Reveal Obama Administration Knew that al Qaeda Terrorists Had Planned Benghazi Attack 10 Days in Advance Administration knew three months before the November 2012 presidential election of ISIS plans to establish a caliphate in Iraq Administration knew of arms being shipped from Benghazi to Syria (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained more than 100 pages of previously classified “Secret” documents from the Department of Defense (DOD)and the Department of State revealing that DOD almost immediately reported that the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was committed by...