Free Republic

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...

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...

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...

The Feds arrested former member of Michigan Army National Guard Ammar Abdulmajid-Mohamed Said for plotting a mass shooting at a military base in Warren, Michigan. The DOJ announced that Said, 19, was charged in a criminal complaint with “attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and distributing information related to a destructive device.” “According to the complaint, Said informed two undercover law enforcement officers of a plan he had devised and formulated to conduct a mass-shooting at the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive & Armaments Command (TACOM) facility at the Detroit Arsenal in Warren, Michigan. In April 2025, the...

SOKOTO, NIGERIA – Monday, May 12 marks three years since radical jihadists in Nigeria murdered a 22-year-old Christian woman, and new first hand testimony is shedding light on her final moments. However, the Nigerian Department of State Services detained the three journalists today for about four hours after publishing the new report. Deborah Emmanuel’s story first made international headlines when a violent Muslim mob beat her to death in 2022. Journalists identified her as a victim of a so-called “blasphemy” murder in the capital of Nigeria’s Sokoto state. Judd Saul, the founder of Equipping the Persecuted and executive director of...

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...

During the fighting in the Gaza Strip, Israel managed to capture a local Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) agent, who admitted during his interrogation that he had been operating as a double agent. The agent revealed that his role was to lull Israel’s defense establishment into a false sense of security on the eve of Hamas’s deadly terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. According to a report published on Channel 12 News on Tuesday evening, the agent lied to Shin Bet officials in a conversation held just hours before the attack. In that conversation, he stated, “There is no preparation...

Edan Alexander reunited with his family on Monday at the Re'im Camp in southern Israel after 584 days in Hamas captivity. After a moving hug to his parent's he was surprised by how much his younger brother had grown, and exclaimed: "This kid is a giant, who is he?!" Kan News reported that Edan described being tied hand and foot inside a cage, deprived of daylight, and suffering from extreme hunger in a Hamas-controlled tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip. During his release, Alexander was visibly weakened, struggling to walk due to the toll of prolonged confinement. Lots of pics...

Footage shows the moving moment released American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander reunited with his family in Israel... Edan described being tied hand and foot inside a cage, deprived of daylight, and suffering from extreme hunger in a Hamas-controlled tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip. During his release, Alexander was visibly weakened, struggling to walk due to the toll of prolonged confinement

Climate activist Greta Thunberg blamed Israel for the drone attack on a vessel transporting humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip that occurred in international waters off Malta early on Friday in a video posted to Instagram. In the video, Thunberg stated that she had planned to board the ship in a mission with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) to “end the siege and open a humanitarian blockade” in Gaza. “This is yet another crystal clear example of how international law and human rights are being completely disrespected,” Thunberg claimed in the video while wearing a keffiyeh scarf, commonly associated with...

In the run-up to the vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., knew her party had a problem — and its name was John Fetterman. Fetterman, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, was open to confirming President Donald Trump’s embattled pick, according to two people familiar with his thinking. Murray wanted to speak with her colleague one-on-one. So she reached out to set up a time. But Fetterman refused, as the two people familiar with the episode told NBC News. “He figured that she wanted to yell at him about it,” one person familiar with the...

Texas has halted any construction of EPIC City. There is no construction taking place. The state of Texas has launched about a half dozen investigations into this project. That includes criminal investigations. And, the US Department of justice is also investigating. This matter, and similar matters, are taken very seriously, and actions are being taken to address all concerns.

...The Turkish foreign ministry called on both parties to "exercise common sense and refrain from unilateral actions."They added, "We expect that measures will be taken to reduce tensions in the region as soon as possible and that the necessary mechanisms, including in the field of counter-terrorism, will be put in place to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents. We also support Pakistan's call for an investigation into the 22 April terrorist attack."...Azerbaijan also issued a statement soon after the attack, condemning violence against Pakistan.In their statement they said, "The Republic of Azerbaijan expresses its concern over the further escalation of...

Could President Donald Trump officially recognize Palestine as an independent state on his trip to the Middle East? That’s what some analysts are predicting as a lively debate rages in the Arab media sphere over just how far the U.S. president will go while abroad. There had already been some writing on the wall that Trump’s Middle East tour — which includes visits to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — was not coming in the midst of a period of unalloyed harmony between the administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hebrew-language Israeli media reported Thursday that...

The United Kingdom does not have a blasphemy law, but that didn’t stop the Criminal Prosecution Service trying their best, leading to something of a volte-face (about-face) after backlash. 50-year-old Hamit Coskun was charged with acting with intent to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” against the “religious institution of Islam” by the UK’s Criminal Prosecution Service (CPS) this week after allegedly burning a copy of the Qur’an outside the Turkish consulate in London. Yet after a short campaign by free speech activists, including the Free Speech Union, which is supporting Coksun, and Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick, the charge has...

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...

India has killed Abdul Rauf Azhar, the Pakistani Al Qaeda terrorist who brutally beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl on video in 2002.. Daniel’s last words were: “My name is Daniel Pearl. My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am a Jew.” Thank you India. ... Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is alleged to have been involved in the death of Daniel Pearl, and he is currently in American custody.