Free Republic

The Center Square) – After two decades at war with the Taliban, the U.S. government is now sending millions of taxpayer dollars to the terrorist group. The Taliban resumed power in Afghanistan immediately after the chaotic and deadly withdrawal of U.S. troops earlier in the Biden administration. A recently released federal watchdog report shows that the U.S. government has sent at least $11 million to the Taliban since the 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops. But experts and even the federal watchdog estimate the number is much higher. "The U.S. government has continued to be the largest international donor supporting the...

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, reports to Congress 4 times a year about how things are going in Afghanistan. The answer is not well. Not well at all. SIGAR is a relic of the Afghan war, and I was not aware it was still a thing, although I am glad it is. Given the hundreds of billions of dollars we poured into that country, somebody with a conscience should be rooting out all the corruption and incompetent actions that took place and keep tabs on what our blood and treasure bought. UN team identified up to...

"Legend" is a former US Army Intel NCO and key member of Vets4NRF (National Resistance Front of Afghanistan). Legend joined the US Army at age seventeen and served on multiple deployments to the Middle East under the Department of of Defense during the Global War on Terror. He now supports the NRF, the last resistance against Taliban rule in the region. Legend is risking his anonymity to bring information to light for the American people. Much in line with recently surfaced news reports, he provides an alternate account of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Most frighteningly, he reveals that the United...

A former senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton and former president Barack Obama’s administration is facing jail time for sex crimes involving young children. Rahamim Shy, 46, was arrested by British police in Bedfordshire in February this year after being accused of arranging the commission of a child sex offense, according to The Daily Mail. Shy was also charged with possession of two category C indecent images of children and possessing a prohibited image of a child. He appeared in Luton Crown Court via video on Friday. Shy, an American citizen living in New Jersey, worked for the White House...

PBS/CNN’s Christiane Amanpour joined CBS’s Stephen Colbert for her second late night comedy show appearance of the week on the Wednesday installment of The Late Show. The duo freaked out over the possibility of a second Donald Trump term and that the rest of the democratic world is similarly freaked out and over the same issues, such as American pro-lifers allegedly being comparable to Iran and the Taliban. Amanpour informed Colbert that the rest of the world is “watching your election very, very closely because that is really preoccupying them. Having had a collective nervous breakdown the last time. They...

US CIA Director William Burns going to Egypt this weekend seeking a hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas... US Central Command destroying a missile in Yemen... In the Rostov region of southern Russia a massive Ukrainian drone strike attack tonight. More than 40 targets destroyed... "We have been saying it for weeks now: this pattern of attacks is either intentional or indicative of reckless incompetence" Christopher Lockyear of the Doctors Without Borders charity saying numerous Israeli attacks on convoys of aid workers... "No it doesn't just happen" This is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau disagreeing with Israeli Prime Minister.......

Russia said on Tuesday it had important matters to discuss with Afghanistan's Taliban leaders and was working to remove the Taliban from its list of banned terrorist organizations. "This is a country that is next to us, and one way or another we communicate with them," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. "We need to resolve pressing issues, this also requires dialog, so in this regard we communicate with them like practically everyone else - they are the de facto authority in Afghanistan."

Islamabad — The leader of Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban government has said it is determined to enforce the Islamic criminal justice system, including the public stoning of women for adultery. "Our mission is to enforce sharia and Allah's Hudud [law]," said Hibatullah Akhundzada in an audio clip Taliban officials said was from his latest speech. They did not say where the reclusive leader spoke, but Akhundzada lives in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and rarely leaves what is known as the Taliban's historical birthplace and political headquarters. He primarily addressed Western critics of the Taliban government, which Akhundzada is effectively...

ISIL’s Afghan branch – also known as the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K) – has claimed responsibility for the attack... “Russian foreign policy has been one big red flag for ISIS [ISIL],” Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Washington-based Wilson Center told Al Jazeera. “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Russian actions in Chechnya, Moscow’s close relationships with the Syrian and Iranian governments, and especially the military campaigns that Russia has waged against ISIS fighters in Syria and — through Wagner Group mercenaries – in parts of Africa.” “ISK [ISKP] has consistently demonstrated its ambition...

An Afghan judge who has been forced to go into hiding from the Taliban was wrongly refused relocation to the UK, the High Court has ruled. The anonymous claimant prosecuted Taliban and Islamic State group members, and has since avoided an assassination attempt, the court heard. The UK government argued he had not worked closely enough with the UK in Afghanistan to qualify for relocation. A UK government spokesperson says officials are "considering" the ruling. The Afghan judge is currently in hiding in an unspecified third country with his wife and children, two of whom are in poor health, it...

Back before 9/11, the Islamist terrorists in al-Qaida used training camps across the Middle East and Afghanistan to prepare men for those suicide missions that ultimately cost nearly 3,000 innocent lives. Those camps often were eliminated when the U.S. military went to that underdeveloped region of the world and stamped out terrorists on sight. Now, however, under Joe Biden’s policies, they’re back in business. Survival Food Is Surging With an Unexpected Twist: Prepper Beef Company Founder It’s not the only blame that Biden is given for terror there. When he abruptly jerked American soldiers out of Afghanistan, the move cost...

A UN Security Council report has found that since the Taliban resumed ruling Afghanistan in 2021, the country has returned to being a shelter for terrorist organizations.. The al-Qaeda terrorist organization is having a resurgence in Afghanistan under the ruling Taliban, setting up eight new training camps alongside five madrasas, Islamic educational institutions, around the country, a report from the UN Security Council in late January has revealed. The report said that the training camps are located in various provinces, including Ghazni, Laghman, Parwan, and Uruzgan. It also listed sites used by al-Qaeda to move its operatives in and out...

33-year-old Roya Heshmati accused by Tehran’s judiciary of having ‘encouraged permissiveness’ after violating mandatory dress code in public... TEHRAN — Iranian authorities have whipped a woman 74 times for “violating public morals” and fined her for not covering her head, the judiciary said. “The convicted, Roya Heshmati, encouraged permissiveness [by appearing] disgracefully in busy public places in Tehran,” the judiciary’s Mizan Online website said late on Saturday. “Her penalty of 74 strokes of the lash was carried out in accordance with the law and with sharia,” and “for violating public morals,” Mizan said. Kurdish-focused rights group Hengaw identified Heshmati as...

“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” — George SantayanaThere are many who have been advocating for and praising the so-called “ceasefire” agreement between Israel and the Islamic terrorist organization Hamas. I know that the families of those held hostage want to have their loved ones released back to them, especially the elderly and little children. How utterly savage and barbaric, but that is to be expected from a terrorist organization whose existence is dedicated to the extermination and eradication of the Jewish people and their homeland . . . a continuation of Adolf Hitler’s final...

[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]After Biden’s withdrawal, the fighting ended in Afghanistan and moved into Europe.Even before the Taliban takeover, a massive traffic in migrants and drugs flowed over the ‘Balkan Route’ that took Afghans into Iran, Turkey and then Eastern Europe. One of the biggest holes in Europe’s armor was the former Yugoslavia, illegally invaded and partitioned by the Clinton administration, with a large Muslim population in Bosnia and heavy criminal organizations across the former republic that tie together the Russian mob, local gangs,...

In the late interwar period, a few years before the ascendency of Adolf Hitler to the Chancellery, the famed German film director Fritz Lang created a classic of the silent film era. Spione (English: Spies) is a thriller of international espionage, intrigue, and manipulation by a criminal mastermind. Playing diplomats, politicians, and detectives against each other, using prostitutes, opium, and blackmail to control his adversaries, Lang’s arch villain Haghi pushes the world to the precipice of total war before he is brought down by the film’s hero. There is a man operating like this today. He has control of vast...

McMaster had purged Derek Harvey, one of the NSC's best people on the Middle East, for trying to fire Obama holdovers. "In the late 1980s, Harvey traveled throughout Iraq by taxicab—500 miles, village to village—interviewing locals, sleeping on mud floors with a shower curtain for a door. He [was] full of questions, intensely curious and entirely nonthreatening. After the 1991 Gulf War, when the CIA was predicting the inevitable fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Harvey, then a major, insisted that Hussein would survive because members of the Sunni community knew their fortunes were tied to his. He was right....

Ritter talks about the idea of peace via reverse-spin. and the question of a trillion dollars in the pentagon budget that simply turned up missing... The missing trillion might have something to do with our black-op manned space program...

John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), issued his latest report ... revealed the United States and its allies have supported the Afghan economy with “cash shipments” averaging $80 million that “arrive in Kabul every 10-14 days” ever since the Taliban takeover and President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal in 2021. The U.S. has sent over $11 billion in assistance to Afghanistan and Afghan refugees since then. ... SIGAR did not wade into the argument about the fungibility of foreign aid money that has raged ever since the Biden administration paid a $6 billion ransom to Iran for...

[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]Many people are seeing the war between Israel and Hamas as an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil, and there is good reason to see it that way. And as has so often been the case, Donald Trump enunciated what many others were thinking but didn’t dare to say.Trump: “The fight between Israel and Hamas is between civilization and savagery, between good and evil. There is no comparison between a group that worships death and a group that cherishes life. Every...