Tag: perpetual war

U.S. Intelligence Warns: More Than 2,000 Afghan Residents May Have Terrorist Links

The Director of National Intelligence of the United States, Tulsi Gabbard, raised alarms after revealing that more than 2,000 Afghan nationals currently residing in the country may have potential ties to terrorist organizations.

This announcement comes amid a thorough security review of approximately 190,000 Afghans who arrived in the United States following the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021, under the operation known as Welcome Allies.

U.S. intelligence agencies have launched a reevaluation process to thoroughly investigate the backgrounds of these individuals, with the goal of determining whether they pose a threat to national security.

Gabbard explained that part of the concern lies in the possibility that some of these Afghans “may be spreading radical Islamist ideologies within the United States,” and she argued that this scrutiny is essential to protect both the safety of the American people and the “fundamental freedoms” enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The measure also follows recent violent incidents, including a shooting that occurred in late November in Washington, D.C., in which an Afghan national—identified by English-language media as Rahmanullah Lakanwal—opened fire on members of the National Guard, killing one and seriously injuring another.

This incident reignited the debate over the effectiveness of the “vetting” process (background checks) applied to evacuees after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

Additionally, officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have indicated that thousands of investigations involving Afghans admitted into the country have been reopened, and that visa processes and asylum applications for Afghan nationals have been temporarily suspended while the detailed review is completed.

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Why Are American Troops Still Dying in Syria?

On December 13, 2025, two U.S. soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed near Palmyra, Syria. According to a Pentagon statement, a lone Islamic State (ISIS) gunman disguised as a shepherd opened fire on a joint U.S.–Syrian patrol, killing three and wounding three before Syrian troops shot him dead. Donald Trump responded with characteristic fury; he promised “very serious retaliation” and said Syria’s new president Ahmed al‑Sharaa was “devastated” by the attack. Yet the promise to end America’s “forever wars” has been part of his pitch since 2016, and U.S. troops remain.

The withdrawal that never happened

Trump first told Americans he had “won against ISIS” in December 2018 and ordered U.S. troops home. In reality, Pentagon and congressional pressure kept about half of the roughly 2,000 troops in place. Less than a year later he issued another withdrawal order, but officials left 90 percent of the force to “guard oil fields.” Reports noted that the mission quickly shifted from defeating ISIS to protecting oil; roughly 500 troops stayed behind to keep oil fields from falling into jihadist hands.

Behind the scenes, U.S. officials were playing “shell games.” James Jeffrey, Trump’s envoy for Syria, later admitted they deliberately misled the president about troop numbers. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” he confessed. Though Trump publicly agreed to keep only 200–400 troops, the actual number was “a lot more than” that. Journalists eventually learned that roughly 900 U.S. troops remained.

The Pentagon continued to slow‑roll civilian orders after Trump returned to office in 2025. In December 2024 the Defense Department quietly acknowledged there were about 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria – roughly 1,100 more than the 900 “core” personnel previously reported. Officials explained that these extra soldiers were “temporary rotational forces” deployed to meet fluid mission requirements. The new U.S. envoy, Thomas Barrack, announced plans to close most of the eight bases and consolidate operations in Hasakah province. Yet by November 2025 Reuters reported that the Pentagon intended to halve the troop presence to 1,000 and establish a new base at Damascus’ airport – a sign that numbers change on paper while the boots stay.

From jihadist to head of state

Understanding why American troops are still in Syria requires grappling with the identity of its new president. Ahmed Hussein al‑Sharaa – better known as Abu Mohammed al‑Julani – joined al‑Qaeda in Iraq and later founded the al‑Nusra Front. After splitting from al‑Qaeda the group rebranded as Hayat Tahrir al‑Sham (HTS), which the United Nations and United States still classify as a terrorist organisation. In late 2024 HTS swept across Syria, toppling Bashar al‑Assad’s government and ending the thirteen‑year civil war. By January 2025 its leader proclaimed himself interim president and adopted the name Ahmed al‑Sharaa. Despite the rebranding, the Congressional Research Service notes that both HTS and Sharaa remain on U.N. sanctions lists.

Trump embraced Sharaa as an ally. In May 2025 he met the Syrian leader in Riyadh and praised him as a “tough” leader. The following November he welcomed Sharaa to the White House – the first visit by a Syrian head of state since 1946 – and told reporters he was doing “a very good job.” Commentators recalled that only a few years earlier Americans would have balked at a president welcoming a former al‑Qaeda commander. The meeting delivered what Sharaa craved: legitimacy.

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Iran’s Response to Australia’s Bondi Beach Terror Attack Raises Questions

The mass-casualty terror attack targeting a Hanukkah gathering at Sydney’s Bondi Beach was the predictable outcome of a global environment in which antisemitic incitement is normalized, rationalized, and, in some cases, actively encouraged by state actors.

In the hours following the attack, attention has turned to Iran—not because Tehran immediately claimed responsibility, but because of how Iranian officials, state media, and regime-aligned commentators have responded.

Iran’s reaction follows a familiar pattern. There has been no direct praise for the murders.

Instead, Iranian outlets have worked to reframe the attack as an understandable—or even defensible—reaction to the Israel-Hamas war, while redirecting outrage toward Israel and the West.

This strategy allows the regime to distance itself from operational responsibility while sustaining the ideological climate that fuels antisemitic violence worldwide.

Iranian state media coverage was notably clinical on the surface. The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), Tehran’s official media, reported the basic facts: a shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration, multiple fatalities, and ongoing investigations by Australian authorities.

Missing, however, was any moral condemnation of the attack or recognition of antisemitism as a motivating factor. Instead, IRNA quickly pivoted, characterizing Israeli reactions as “harsh” and “unprecedented” and situating the massacre within the broader narrative of Gaza.

Iranian coverage repeatedly emphasized claims about civilian deaths in Gaza, citing figures from Hamas-run authorities and presenting them as uncontested fact.

The implication was clear: violence against Jews abroad should be understood through the lens of Israel’s military actions, rather than as terrorism targeting a religious minority.

By embedding the Bondi Beach attack within a Gaza-focused narrative, Iranian media effectively shifted blame from the perpetrators to Jewish collective identity itself.

That narrative was taken further by regime-aligned commentators. Lebanese journalist Hadi Hoteit, who identifies himself as a correspondent for Iran’s state-run Press TV, posted on social media questioning whether the attacker should even be labeled a terrorist.

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The Death of Ukraine’s Dream of NATO Membership

Ukraine’s dream of NATO membership is dead. It died, surprisingly, not on the battlefields of Ukraine nor at the negotiating table with Russia. It died in a document written in the White House to be sent to Congress to explain America’s national security vision.

The 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, dated November 2025, was released on December 4. Embedded unimposingly, without fanfare, in a section on The Regions called Promoting European Greatness, and not even in the section that discusses the war in Ukraine, the Security Strategy quietly states the priority policy of “Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” Those fourteen words seem to have pulled the plug on a dream that was already on life support.

That policy priority found expression in point 7 of Trump’s 28 point peace plan that states that “Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.”

Since it was first promised at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” the dream has been an unrealistic one. It did not take into account the real wishes of Ukraine, NATO or Russia, and it did not take into account previous promises already made by NATO and Ukraine. At the time of the Bucharest summit, the U.S. may have wanted NATO membership for Ukraine, but only 20% of Ukrainians did.

In 1990 and 1991, at the end of the Cold War, NATO promised Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand any further east. But it was not just NATO that promised to stay out of Ukraine, it was also Ukraine that promised to stay out of NATO. Article IX  of the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, “External and Internal Security,” says that Ukraine “solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs…” That promise was later enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution, which committed Ukraine to neutrality and prohibited it from joining any military alliance: that included NATO. Moscow has recently reminded that Russia “recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine back in 1991, on the basis of the Declaration of Independence” and added that one of the main points for [Russia] in the declaration was that Ukraine would be a non-bloc, non-alliance country; it would not join any military alliances.”

Ukraine’s constitution was only amended to include a mandate for all future governments to seek NATO membership in 2019, five years after the U.S. supported coup. The amendment was made with neither vote nor referendum. At the time, public support in Ukraine for NATO membership hovered around a tepid 40%.

That that amendment could be reversed, and that Ukraine could be willing to do so, was signaled by Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, in the early days of the war. At the start of the war, Zelensky said he has “understood that NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine.” In March 2022, he said “For years we have been hearing about how the door is supposedly open [to NATO membership] but now we hear that we cannot enter. And it is true, and it must be acknowledged.”

In April 2022, after the war had begun, polling indicates that only 24%-39% of Ukrainians wanted NATO membership. At that time, the tentative agreement arrived at in Istanbul included that “Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership…” The draft reportedly stipulated that “permanent neutrality” be enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution.

Ukraine was pushed off that path by the U.S. for their own policy reasons, including the “core principle” that Ukraine has the right to choose their alliances and that NATO has the right to expand.

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The Siren Song of War

In October of 2002, I shocked many in my Congressional District and beyond by voting against giving President George W. Bush authorization to use military force in Iraq.

The night before that vote, my older sister told me a Knoxville television station had conducted a poll which found that in its viewing area 74 percent were for the war, 9 percent were against, and 17 percent were undecided.

When I pushed the button at about 3:00 the next day to cast that vote, I wondered if I might be ending my political career. My vote was so highly publicized that it was clearly the most unpopular thing I had ever done.

However, after three or four years and much to my amazement, that vote became the most popular of the more than 16,000 I cast during my 30 years in the U.S. House.

Unfortunately, the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that the Congress passed then is once again relevant because President Trump and his advisers seem to think it gives them authority to go to war in Venezuela without the declaration by Congress called for in our Constitution.

When we went to war in Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s total military budget was about 2/10 of one percent of ours. Venezuela’s is even less. Neither of those two countries were or are capable of attacking us in any serious way. Neither has even threatened to do so.

Two polls in late November by CBS News/YouGov and Reuters/Ipsos both showed that about 70 percent of the American people were opposed to going to war in Venezuela, and probably most of the other 30 percent did not really want such a war but just did not want to oppose President Trump.

While the overwhelming majority of the American people do not want more dangerous illegal drugs coming into this Country, far more drugs are coming from China and Mexico and various other places. If we take action against Venezuela, which country is next?

Just before we went to war against Iraq, U.S. News & World Report had a story headlined “Why The Rush To War?” We should be asking the same thing today.

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Top Biden Official Belatedly Admits Ukraine War Truth Bombshell

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is way behind the times. On Sunday he very belatedly expressed willingness to drop Ukraine’s bid to join NATO. In place of this, he’s seeking robust security guarantees. “We are talking about bilateral security guarantees between Ukraine and the United States — namely, Article 5-like guarantees … as well as security guarantees for us from our European partners and from other countries such as Canada, Japan and others,” Zelensky told journalists in a group chat, as reported in Financial Times.

“These security guarantees are an opportunity to prevent another wave of Russian aggression,” he said. “And this is already a compromise on our part.” But this should have been taken off the table all the way back in February of 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion, or even well before. He’s much too late ‘offering’ this ‘concession’ just as White House envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner are meeting Sunday in Berlin with Zelensky, and then separately with the national security advisers of Germany, France and the UK.

The open secret has for years been that the Washington and EU establishments know full well that it was historic and recent constant NATO expansion which led to this horrific, grinding war. This reality is so well understood that in their private, non-official commentary even former top Biden officials fully admit the fact. Yet these same Biden officials had while in government pursued policies fueling the Ukrainian proxy war as they wanted to ‘weaken’ Russia. They considered the issue of NATO expansion as a prime rationale of Russia’s invasion to be an off-limits talking point. Indeed for any sincere, independent commentators… to so much as raise the issue would get them smeared as a “Putin apologist”. But watch this recent and highly revealing clip below of Joe Biden’s top official for Europe and former national security official Amanda Sloat admitting the truth…

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Gunman Who Killed Three Americans in Syria Was Member of Syrian Government’s Security Forces

The gunman who killed two members of the Iowa National Guard and an American civilian interpreter in an attack in Palmyra, central Syria, on Saturday was a member of the Syrian government’s security forces, according to the Syrian Interior Ministry.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) first reported that the attacker was a member of the security forces and called for the Syrian government, which is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an offshoot of al-Qaeda, to get rid of members who have an “ISIS ideology.”

The Syrian Interior Ministry claimed that, before the attack, Syrian authorities had “decided to fire him” for having “extremist Islamist ideology” and had planned to do so on Sunday. “We discovered him in December and were going to dismiss him, but we didn’t make it in time because it was a holiday,” said ministry spokesman Nour al-Din al-Baba, according to The Cradle.

A Syrian security official told AFP that the attacker had been in the security forces “for more than 10 months and was posted to several cities before being transferred to Palmyra.”

According to Wael Essam, a Palestinian journalist who has covered the conflict in Syria for many years, the perpetrator has been identified as Tariq Satouf al-Hamd from the Aleppo countryside. Essam said that al-Hamd was previously a member of ISIS, but after the fall of former President Bashar al-Assad, he traveled to Idlib, the former home base of HTS, and joined the General Security.

The attack occurred when US military officers were meeting with Syrian Interior Ministry officials while US and Syrian troops stood guard at a base near the city of Palmyra. According to The Wall Street Journal, a lone gunman appeared in a window and opened fire on the US and Syrian soldiers, and he was pursued by Syrian troops and killed. However, according to Essam’s report, the attacker blew himself up.

“The attacker tried to reach the meeting room in the headquarters of the General Security in Palmyra (formerly the Military Security headquarters) where senior officers are present, and in the corridor he clashed with the American guards and the translator and blew himself up,” Essam wrote on X.

Essam also suggested that other members of the Syrian security forces were involved in the attack. “Security sources confirmed to me that Syrian intelligence, along with the Coalition forces, arrested six elements from the General Security at the headquarters in Palmyra, accused of coordinating the operation with him, and it is said that they are from the group that moved with him from the desert to the General Security in Idlib,” he said.

He added that Syrian authorities were “unable to identify his previous affiliation with the organization (ISIS), and there are hundreds like him, due to the large numbers who joined and which the security apparatus needed after the fall of the regime.”

President Trump and other US officials have called the incident an “ISIS attack” and have left out the detail that the perpetrator was a member of the Syrian military, which the US has allied itself with despite HTS’s al-Qaeda past, and as of Sunday, ISIS hasn’t taken credit for the shooting.

“This was an ISIS attack against the US, and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

He added that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is “extremely angry” about the attack. Trump recently hosted Sharaa at the White House despite his past as an al-Qaeda leader and ally of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS.

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Land Along Southern Border Is Transferred to Navy To Become Part Of ‘National Defense Area’

The Trump administration said on Dec. 10 that it would transfer roughly 760 acres of public land along the U.S.-Mexico border in California to the Navy for three years to support border security operations.

While announcing the decision Wednesday, the Interior Department said the land would become part of a “National Defense Area,” or militarized zone, to bolster immigration enforcement.

The land stretches from roughly a mile west of the California-Arizona state line to the western edge of the Otay Mountain Wilderness Area in San Diego and Imperial counties, according to the Interior Department.

“This corridor is one of the highest-traffic regions for unlawful crossings along the southern border, creating significant national security challenges and contributing to environmental degradation,” the department said.

The Interior Department said the land was originally set aside in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt for “border protection purposes,” and the Navy will use it to “strengthen operational capabilities while reducing ecological harm associated with sustained illegal activity.”

Since April, the federal government has transferred large portions of land along the southern border to the military, allowing troops to detain migrants attempting to cross the border or arrest people accused of trespassing on military bases.

The process began with a 170-mile swath of land along the border in New Mexico before the government expanded into Texas and Arizona.

While the Interior Department referred to the Southern California lands as a high-traffic area for illegal border crossings, arrests along the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped to the lowest level since the 1960s as the Trump administration continues its crackdown on illegal immigration.

“President Trump has made it clear that securing our border and restoring American sovereignty are top national priorities,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement.

“This action delivers on that commitment. By working with the Navy to close longstanding security gaps, we are strengthening national defense, protecting our public lands from unlawful use, and advancing the president’s agenda to put the safety and security of the American people first.”

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Germany Sends Troops Into Poland ‘To Protect’ NATO’S East Border With Russia and Belarus

They keep beating the drums of war.

Germany is sending troops into Poland! Calm down – it’s not 1939. But it could end up just as bad.

Today (13), it has been reported that Germany is sending soldiers to Poland, in a bid to ‘strengthen’ NATO’s eastern border with Belarus and Russia.

Politico reported:

“Several dozen German soldiers will join Poland’s East Shield from April 2026, with the mission initially running until the end of 2027, Deutsche Welle reported, citing Berlin’s defense ministry.

German troops will focus on engineering work, according to a ministry spokesperson quoted in the report. The spokesperson described this as building positions, digging trenches, laying barbed wire and constructing anti-tank obstacles.

The East Shield is a €2.3 billion program announced by Warsaw last year to bolster security along its eastern border.”

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Western officials ‘alarmed’ over secret FBI-Ukraine meetings – WaPo

Western officials are concerned by the secrecy surrounding meetings between Ukrainian negotiators and the FBI, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing sources.

Kiev’s lead negotiator, Rustem Umerov, has visited the US three times in recent weeks to meet with President Donald Trump’s top envoy, Steve Witkoff, and also held closed-door talks with FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

Several unnamed Western officials said the meetings could be aimed at speeding up Kiev’s acceptance of Trump’s peace roadmap. Leaked versions require Ukraine to abandon its NATO ambitions, drop its territorial claims, and cap its army at 600,000 – terms which Kiev and its European backers believe favor Russia.

Ukraine’s ambassador to the US, Olga Stefanishina, confirmed the FBI meetings, but declined to provide details. Sources say the secrecy “has caused alarm” among those not privy to the talks over their true purpose.

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