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In Syrian Town Cut Off From the World, Glimpses of Deprivation

BEIRUT, Lebanon

The people of Madaya and neighboring Zabadani have tried, since the siege by pro-government forces began in July, to keep society functioning and adjust to their surreal new set of dynamics

Rage grew in a Turkish town on Syria's border Monday in the aftermath of weekend bombings as the government blamed Marxists with Syrian connections for the deadly attacks.

The Turkish government places the blame for the attacks on local perpetrators. "For the time being, there is no evidence suggesting that al Qaeda was involved," Interior Minister Muammer Guler told Turkey's state news agency, Anatolia. The nine suspects in custody are all Turkish nationals, he said. Guler and other Turkish officials accuse a former Marxist terror group that they say maintains relations with Syria's intelligence services.

Bath, England — “France’s fascist uprising” screamed the front-page headline of a London newspaper following the National Front’s victory in the first round of the regional elections on Dec. 6. “Trump is a fascist,” asserts the combative neocon commentator Max Boo

“the word ‘fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” So has it acquired any more useful meaning in the 70 years since? The latest evidence suggests not.

Since then we have been warned about “Islamofascism,” and Al Qaeda and ISIS are denounced by Western politicians and commentators as “fascists.” Although Mideastern zealots have picked up the hate-filled anti-Jewis

ISIS steps up attacks far from its 'caliphate'

Istanbul, Jakarta, Philadelphia, multiple locations in Libya, the Russian republic of Dagestan: within the past two weeks all have been the target of attacks by ISIS supporters or affiliates, killing and wounding dozens of people.

Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is spreading its wings as it comes under greater pressure in its Iraqi-Syrian heartland

Three days after ISIS militants carried out a deadly terror attack in broad daylight, Indonesians poured out by the thousands onto the streets of this tropical city for an exuberant day of recreation.

Thursday's attack did not approach the scale of carnage caused by the 2002 al Qaeda-linked bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali, which killed more than 200 people.

In fact, counter terror experts here say ISIS only attracts a fringe minority of support in the world's most populous Muslim country.

At least eight people were killed and more than 80 injured in two attacks in Burkina Faso's capital, one of them targeting the French embassy, security officials said

Sawadogo confirmed there were two coordinated attacks: one against the French embassy, the other against the national army headquarters, and said assailants used a "vehicle packed with explosives" against the latter.

The UN Security Council issued a statement condemning "in the strongest terms the barbaric and cowardly terrorist attacks" in Ouagadougou.

Mr. Macron has already used his huge majority in Parliament to inscribe into law some government tactics — searches and seizures, house arrests, shutting down mosques — that had been applied before only as part of the state of emergency put in place after terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people in November 2015.

The case of Imam Doudi, 63, who was born in Algeria and is not a French citizen, is part of a high-profile effort by the Macron administration to intensify scrutiny of Muslim clerics and, in some cases, to deport them. Some analysts say that Mr. Macron is using it to display toughness, as European governments struggle for tools to battle radical Islam, and as he fends off political challenges from the far right.

“They want to make an example of him,” said Vincent Geisser, an Islam expert at the University of Aix-Marseille. “It’s got more to do with communicating firmness.”

American destroyer struck three sites in Yemen on Thursday

USS Mason

a minority Shia group that has taken control of swathes of Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa

The radical Islamist group ISIS, which now calls itself the Islamic State, is intent on establishing a new Sunni Muslim caliphate.

To some traditionalist Sunni Arabs, this caliphate was so debased that it is not even legitimate. After World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and a new secular, modernizing government took power in Turkey. 

In 1924, without consulting anyone in the Arab world, Turkey's secularist leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the office of the caliph entire

Carlson argued that white supremacy is a fake crisis cooked up by Democrats as a campaign ploy. “It’s actually not a real problem in America,” Carlson said, adding later, “This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”

violence tied to far-right ideologies have killed roughly as many Americans since 9/11 as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State combined.

The president has often called Hispanic migration an “invasion” — language echoed in a manifesto police believe the accused El Paso shooter posted online decrying a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Donald Trump, who was then an improbable but officially declared candidate for the presidency, tweeted, “When will President Obama issue the words RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM? He can’t say it, and unless he will, the problem will not be solved!”

Trump, when presented with the chance to denounce, in plain, direct language, individuals who could fairly be described as “white supremacist terrorists,” or with some other equivalent formulation, instead resorted to euphemism and moral equivalence.

Obama’s critics argued throughout his presidency that his unwillingness to embrace the incantatory rhetoric of civilizational struggle—his reluctance to cast such groups as al-Qaeda and ISIS as vanguards of an all-encompassing ideological and theological challenge to the West—meant that, at the very least, he misunderstood the nature of the threat, or, more malignantly, that he understood the nature of the threat but was, through omission, declaring a kind of neutrality in the conflict between the United States and its principal adversary.

More than 20 people - including secular writers and bloggers, professors, members of religious minorities and two foreigners - have been killed in attacks blamed on Islamist militants since 2013.

In many of the attacks, victims have been hacked to death with machetes, and in some cases beheaded.

Initially, secular and atheist bloggers and writers were targeted. But now the militants seem to be widening their list of targets.

In his vicious and ad hominem way, Carlson is doing something extraordinary: He’s challenging the Republican Party’s hawkish orthodoxy in ways anti-war progressives have been begging cable hosts to do for years. For more than a decade, liberals have rightly grumbled that hawks can go on television espousing new wars without being held to account for the last ones. Not on Carlson’s show.

Carlson responded that Boot had been so “consistently wrong in the most flagrant and flamboyant way for over a decade” in his support for wars in the Middle East that “maybe you should choose another profession, selling insurance, house painting, something you’re good at.”

On Iran, Carlson made an argument that was considered too dovish for even mainstream Democrats to raise during the debate over the nuclear deal: He questioned whether Tehran actually endangers the United States

The C.I.A. is expanding its covert operations in Afghanistan, sending small teams of highly experienced officers and contractors alongside Afghan forces to hunt and kill Taliban militants across the country, according to two senior American officials, the latest sign of the agency’s increasingly integral role in President Trump’s counterterrorism strategy.

The assignment marks a shift for the C.I.A. in the country, where it had primarily been focused on defeating Al Qaeda and helping the Afghan intelligence service.

The C.I.A. has traditionally been resistant to an open-ended campaign against the Taliban, the primary militant group in Afghanistan, believing it was a waste of the agency’s time and money and would put officers at greater risk as they embark more frequently on missions.

a huge section of the city, previously considered relatively safe, now lies in ruins.

Ghastly as al-Shabaab is, negotiating with the group may be the only road to peace.

Within Somalia, al-Shabaab continued to control much of the countryside and has proved all but impossible to dislodge.

William Ruger’s argument for a precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan works only if we forget what we’ve learned and pretend that there will be no consequences for us and our Afghan partners.

A year ago, the Taliban promised the United States that it would prevent terror groups from regrouping in Afghanistan, pursue peace with the Afghan government and others, and contribute to a more stable and secure country. But the Taliban is failing to deliver on all of these, and other, promises.

A broad cross-section of military leaders, allies and other experienced U.S. observers agree that abandoning Afghanistan now will almost certainly undermine our security interests and allow the Taliban to accelerate political violence and spawn a civil war that will needlessly kill, shatter and displace large numbers of Afghans. United Nations reports confirm that the Taliban continues to maintain ties with Al Qaeda.

President Biden has decided to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 20 years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon launched the country into its longest war, United States officials said Tuesday.

“The Afghan government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support,” the report said.

A new intelligence report released Tuesday offered a grim assessment of Afghanistan and the prospects for peace. American intelligence agencies assessed that a peace deal was unlikely in the next year, and that the Taliban would make battlefield gains.

President Joe Biden formally announced his decision to end America's longest war on Wednesday

Biden said he would withdraw US troops from Afghanistan before September 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that launched the war in the first place.

Biden declared Wednesday that no amount of time or money could solve the problems his three predecessors had tried and failed to fix.

But straight out of high school, Aidan fulfilled his dream in this patriotic town south of Pittsburgh, where there are crisp American flags around memorials to veterans in front of the municipal building. Today, Aidan is 20 and stationed with the Army in Kentucky. And this past week, his father exhaled in profound relief when President Biden announced that American troops would be coming home from Afghanistan.

“I’m not a Biden fan but I’m for that, pulling the troops out of there,” said Mr. Miller, 46, a salesman. He dismissed the arguments of some Republican officials and military leaders that Taliban extremists would overrun the country once Americans left. “We can’t babysit everybody,” he said.

“It’s a very complicated question,” said Rick Palma, standing outside McGrogan’s Tap Room, reflecting on Mr. Biden’s decision. Mr. Palma is a retired manager at a United States Steel mill in nearby Clairton, which is the fictional setting for “The Deer Hunter,” the 1978 movie that powerfully evoked blue-collar communities whose young men went to Vietnam.“Is it time to bring them home? Perhaps,” Mr. Palma, a former Army officer, said. “If you bring them all the way back, there’s the possibility that Al Qaeda will regroup.”

The lies American officers told were necessary ways of pretending the country they were handing to the next rotation of troops was better off than when they found it. "Turning the corner" and "winning hearts and minds" each summer and year being the "most important yet" to "turn the tide."

Bar this, there really was no specific "thing" the coalition would count to quantify success. It was much easier to arbitrarily claim progress instead. The artifice was to maintain morale, funding, careers and, presumably, belief among those on the frontline that there was an overriding success in their endeavor.

There was also the larger, comforting confection America recites to itself about how much it cared: God bless our troops. Too heartfelt to be a lie, but undermined by how stagnantly the Afghanistan war has been treated as a policy issue for so long. It's also a phrase echoing in America, where only about 1.3 million people -- less than half of 1% -- are on active duty. And the other 99% seem either barely aware there is a war, or passionately believe the troops' sacrifice is either an essential bedrock of their freedoms, or wasteful.