US Commander believes Mosul and Raqqa will be retaken in the next 6 months

Baghdad, Iraq– On Wednesday, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the commander in charge of leading the coalition campaign against ISIS, stated he believes Mosul and Raqqa will be retaken in the next six months. He indicated the next assault on western Mosul begins in the next few days. Additionally, the Syrian Democratic Forces recently announced they have entered […]

Trump has first phone call with Turkey’s Erdogan

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Donald Trump had their first telephone call late Tuesday, a highly anticipated conversation in which Erdogan was expected to press the new U.S. leader to reject Pentagon proposals to arm Kurdish fighters in Syria and to quickly extradite a Turkish cleric exiled in Pennsylvania and regarded by Turkey […]

ISIS militants are faking illnesses to get out of fighting

There’s a term US soldiers give to one of their own who tries to shirk duty by making constant medical appointments: Sick call commando. It looks like ISIS has the same problem. Documents seized last month by Iraqi forces at a former ISIS base in Mosul, Iraq reveal that, despite its ability to recruit religious fanatics to […]

President Trump turns his eye to Ukraine

President Trump recently remarked that he would look into the Ukraine crisis. More specifically he said he would look into the separatist movement in Ukraine. But, POTUS Trump has stated he will not lift Russian sanctions. The future state of Trumpian foreign policy toward Ukraine is a complete unknown. But it’s shaping up to be something […]

Gunmen kill 6 Red Cross staffers in northern Afghanistan; 2 others missing

KABUL — Six staffers of the International Committee of the Red Cross were killed and two others are missing after their convoy was ambushed by unidentified gunmen in northern Afghanistan, the humanitarian agency said Wednesday. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, the deadliest against the ICRC in Afghanistan, but local officials blamed the […]

Suicide bombing outside the Afghan Supreme Court kills 20 in Kabul

A suicide bomber killed at least twenty people outside the Afghan Supreme Court in Kabul on Tuesday.  More than forty more were injured and rushed to local hospitals, ten of whom are listed in critical condition. The attacker, who has not been identified, approached the building on foot and targeted a side door that dozens […]

Not ‘lone wolves’ after all: How ISIS guides world’s terror plots from afar

HYDERABAD, India — When the Islamic State identified a promising young recruit willing to carry out an attack in one of India’s major tech hubs, the group made sure to arrange everything down to the bullets he needed to kill victims. For 17 months, terrorist operatives guided the recruit, a young engineer named Mohammed Ibrahim […]

Freed from jihadists, Mosul residents focus fury on Iraqi politicians

As raw sewage gushed out of a crater made by an airstrike against Islamic State in Mosul, seething residents who sold their clothes to survive had a sobering message for Iraqi politicians boasting of military advances against the group. “If life does not improve, we will not accept this and there will be a revolt […]

Eleven civilians killed in air strikes in Iraq, Syria: U.S. military

Eleven civilians were killed in four separate air strikes by the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between Oct. 25 and Dec. 9, the U.S. military said on Thursday. “Although the Coalition takes extraordinary efforts to strike military targets in a manner that minimizes the risk to civilian casualties, in some incidents […]

WebOps: Losing the quiet war against ISIS

ISIS, or the Islamic State, has had a fair amount of success spreading their message and recruiting people through social media—a task that is far more challenging than many might consider. Think about the level of effort and expertise McDonald’s uses to engage millennials in the digital sphere, and despite a marketing budget that would […]

Some Muslims are doing more than many Americans to fight Islamic terrorism

There is a lot of hate and vitriol flying around out there lately, admittedly on both sides of the political aisle, with regards to the refugee ban and stoppage of select immigrants recently enacted by the Trump administration.  This article is not going to litigate that issue. What this article is going to do though is hopefully […]