Free Republic

Nina Shea's year-end review in World Affairs analyzes the rising Islamist threat to Christians in the Middle East as the Islamic State terrorist group conquers land and gains influence.

When the Islamic State took over large parts of northern Iraq this summer, including the areas where the minority Yazidi community lives, the U.S. carried out air strikes and halted the advance of the extremists. Still, thousands of Yazidi women and girls have gone missing over the past few months and there are now reports they are being sold by the Islamic State as sex slaves. Nuri Khalaf, a representative of the Yazidi tribes in Iraq's northern province of Sinjar, has been making the rounds in Washington, pleading with U.S. officials for help. He also stopped by NPR's offices. When...

A video has emerged purporting to show Islamic State fighters bartering over Yazidi women at a slave girl 'market'. Recently, the terror organisation boasted of enslaving women from the Iraqi ethnic minority and the men appearing in the clip explain it is 'slave market day'. The clip shows the men negotiating the price of the women, with blue and green-eyed young girls fetching a higher price.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported today that at least 100 Islamic State fighters have been killed during just three days of fighting in and around the Kurdish city of Kobane. The monitoring group said that the deaths bring the current number of ISIS fighters killed in the conflict there to 576 since September 16. “Over the last three days, at least 100 members of ISIS and its religious police have been killed… in Kobani and its surroundings,” the Observatory said in a statement Saturday. The men killed were reportedly reinforcements brought from Aleppo and ISIS’s de-facto capital Raqqa,...

(IraqiNews.com) Today Human Rights Watch reported that gunmen from the so-called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria carried out the systematic execution of about 600 male inmates from a prison on the outskirts of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq on June 10 according to accounts of the survivors. The overwhelming majority of the dead were Shiites. After seizing Badush prison near Mosul, the militants ISIS separated the Sunnis inmates from the Shiites, and then forced the latter to kneel at the edge of a valley and shot them from assault rifles and automatic weapons, according to what...

For months, the White House resisted calls by concerned observers to intervene in the conflict in Iraq and Syria where the Islamic State was capturing territory and massacring locals. Only after it appeared likely that the ancient Yazidi minority would be exterminated by ISIS fighters did the United States consent to intervene in Iraq. Similarly, America and its coalition allies attacked ISIS in Syria only when it seemed likely that the al-Qaeda affiliated Khorasan Group was plotting imminent attacks. This week, however, we learn that the Pentagon has effectively failed to achieve either the objective of preventing massacres in...

The short-attention span generation has birthed the shiny-object election. The theme of the 2014 midterms — to whatever extent one is discernable — has been an explosion of one crisis after another, each of which demands an enormous amount of media attention before fading for the next one. From the Secret Service to ISIS, Ebola to immigration, mistreated veterans to Ferguson and race relations, candidates and the president have been forced to react to the controversy du jour. Strategists and experts say the result has been bad news for Democrats, who have had a tougher time underscoring their preferred campaign...

The campaign against the terrorist group ISIS claimed a victory Saturday, after ISIS militants were driven from two Iraqi towns. The Iraqi army retook the town of Jurf al-Sakhar, which is 30 miles south of Baghdad, from ISIS control Saturday. In the north of the country, Kurdish Peshmerga forces announced ISIS had been driven out of Zumar, a town near Mosul, on the same day. Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi celebrated the news in a Facebook post as "a strong blow" to ISIS. A representative for the Kurdistan Democratic Party estimated the Peshmerga killed 81 ISIS fighters in the battle...

(CNSNews.com) – Turkey’s president on Sunday rejected U.S. proposals to arm Syrian Kurds fighting against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) near the Turkish border, shortly after the White House said he and President Obama had pledged to “strengthen cooperation” against the jihadists. “It would be wrong for the United States, with whom we are friends and allies in NATO, to talk openly and to expect us to say ‘yes’ to such a support to a terrorist organization,” said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His comments were the latest sign that Turkey and the U.S. are far from being...

More than 10,000 women are fighting among peshmerga forces in northern Syria, about half the overall number, she says, though other reports suggest women make up around one-third of the total. Regardless, women fighters make up a critical force in the battle to stave off the macabre IS jihadists bent on establishing a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and massacring anyone who gets in the way of that. For the women fighters, the emergence of IS, which sees the women in society through a primitive viewpoint, is anathema. “Syrian Kurdish women are revolutionary women. Daish [IS] hate women, so we...

The UK’s National Union of Students (NUS) has rejected a motion condemning the radical Islamic State terrorist group—also known as ISIS or ISIL—on the grounds that it could be considered “Islamophobic,” sparking a row over the dominance of radical-left groups within the student body. The decision by NUS’s National Executive Committee to shoot down the motion is all the more shocking given that the same body adopted an aggressive bill just over two months ago condemning Israel and calling for a boycott of the Jewish state. The anti-Israel motion was adopted despite objections that it risked alienating Jewish students, who...

Remarkable fightback by Kurdish troops forces ISIS militants out of KobaneAssisted by U.S. and Arab airstrikes, Kurds are reclaiming the besieged citySustained bombing raids have killed scores of militants over the past weekNow ISIS only has two small pockets of resistance in the east of the city Islamic State militants have been almost entirely driven out of the Syrian city of Kobane following a remarkable fightback by Kurdish forces who vowed to either defeat the terrorists or die trying. The extremists have abandoned all of their positions in the city, except for two small pockets of resistance in the...

A woman known as "Rehana" has become a hero across the internet as news spread that the Kobani soldier has reportedly killed more than 100 Islamic State terrorists single-handedly. Rehana became famous in Kurdish Twitter circles after a photo of her giving a peace sign began to circulate on the social network. Rehana has killed more than a hundred #ISIS terrorists in #Kobane . RT and make her famous for her bravery pic.twitter.com/YvmfXMpuu1— Pawan Durani (@PawanDurani) October 13, 2014 According to the International Business Times, Rehana is a YPJ (Kurdish female Peshmerga) soldier under the command of famed female soldier Mayssa Abdo, who herself has become famous...

Washington (AFP) - US-led air strikes on a Syrian border town killed "several hundred" Islamic State fighters but it may still fall, officials warned Wednesday, acknowledging significant jihadist gains in Iraq and Syria. While Iraqi troops prevented the jihadists from seizing a lynchpin provincial capital near Baghdad, a senior US envoy admitted IS forces have scored important advances in Iraq, John Allen, a retired four-star general and US envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, said it would take time to build up local forces to defeat them there and in Syria. In the border town of Kobane, Kurdish...

Judge Jeanine Pirro Opening Statement - Have We Lost All Sense Of Respect Of Those Who Risk Their Life For Us? Kurdish Fighters Say They're Outgunned As ISIS Gains Ground In Kobani

Western airstrikes and Kurdish resistance appear to have slowed the Islamic State’s takeover of Kobani, a Syrian town on the border with Turkey, for now. But the situation in the area, where Syrian Kurdish rebels have been steadily losing ground to the jihadists, demonstrates the inadequacy and incoherence of President Obama’s strategy. The Obama administration has said that losing Kobani isn’t a big setback for the fight against the Islamic State. But if our goal is to degrade and destroy the group, it is. The president has prioritized driving the jihadists out of Iraq, but this is senseless when the...

SURUC, Turkey (AP) -- Kurdish militiamen are putting up a fierce fight to defend a Syrian town near the border with Turkey but are struggling to repel the Islamic State group, which is advancing and pushing in from two sides, Syrian activists and Kurdish officials said Saturday. The battle for Kobani is still raging despite more than two weeks of airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition targeting the militants in and around the town. The strikes, which are aimed at rolling back the militants' gains, appear to have done little to blunt their onslaught on Kobani, which began in mid-September. Just...

ISIS Bearing Down On Baghdad Even As World Watches Kobani Siege October 10, 2014 Waves of U.S.-led air strikes against Islamic State fighters appear to have done little to stem the terrorist army’s advance in Syria, and now the militants are close to overrunning key positions on the outskirts of Baghdad. With the world’s eyes on the terrorist army’s siege of the Syrian border city of Kobani, where U.S.-led airstrikes are backing Kurdish fighters, some 500 miles southeast, Islamic State fighters are within eight miles of the Iraqi metropolis. The Islamic militants have reportedly infiltrated the Baghdad suburb of Abu...

The NATO alliance has drawn up a strategy to defend Turkey if it is attacked along its border with Syria, a Turkish official said Monday. Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz, whose country is a NATO member, said the alliance did that at his government's request as Islamic State militants, who have captured a large swath of Iraq and Syria, are trying to take the Syrian town of Kobani near the Turkish border. "If there is an attack, NATO's joint defense mechanisms will be activated," Yilmaz told reporters.

The Huffington Post interviewed the chief Imam of a notorious northern Virginia mosque who argued that Muslims should not be obligated to criticize the Islamic State. Current Dar Al-Hijrah Imam Johari Abdul-Malik said in an interview with the Huffington Post that “it sounded like they were apologizing for something they haven’t done, like they were running for cover.” The Imam’s frustrations and grievances would be perfectly understandable were his mosque not associated with a plethora of Islamic terrorists. Nowhere in the Huffington Post piece does it mention that Dar Al-Hijrah is the mosque with arguably the most convicted terrorists associated...