The Dangerous Dregs of ISIS
After five years of war with the Islamic State, the biggest problem for the winners is coping with the losers. The aftermath has produced one of the world’s most perplexing postwar challenges: there are tens of thousands of captured ISIS members whom no nation wants to repatriate, and the local militia holding them has neither the resources nor the personnel to keep them indefinitely. More than five thousand ISIS fighters surrendered in the final month of fighting alone. Thousands more were captured earlier in the conflict. They’re dispersed among the new pop-up prisons in northeast Syria.
A few hundred of the most severely wounded are in a small hospital, with the foreign fighters crowded in its basement for security. Between December and March, another sixty-three thousand family members of ISIS fighters—wives enveloped in black niqabs that cover their faces, and bedraggled young children—also poured out of Baghouz, the last ISIS redoubt in Syria. They’re held separately, most in tents, at a dusty, malodorous camp in al-Hawl that already held ten thousand. The prisons, the hospital, and the camp are all bursting.
“There is nothing else in the world that compares to this unprecedented humanitarian and security situation, which is legally complicated and politically fraught..."
READ MORE HERE
The EU Still Appeasing the Mullahs
Despite Iran's destructive behavior, such as support for terror and militia groups across the region, the European Union has chosen to help the ruling mullahs of Iran, ostensibly to maintain the flimsy, illegal, never-signed, unratified "nuclear deal" -- but possibly even more as an embarrassingly transparent attempt, if the EU could be embarrassed, to navigate around US economic and political pressure and continue doing business with the regime.
READ MORE HERE
The Real Takeaway of the Failed Mueller Investigation:
Washington Is Crawling with Foreign Influencers
The Mueller investigation into foreign collusion in the 2016 presidential election may set off a chain reaction that threatens the way Washington does business. The New York Times reports that in going after Trump, the special prosecutor opened a whole can of worms for the lobbyists.
READ MORE HERE
It’s Been Over 300 Days Since a Pentagon Press Briefing.
That Should Concern All Americans — Including the Military
For about six months now, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has used her briefing room so little that officials might as well turn it back into the swimming pool it was more than a half century ago. But she’s not the only one who has abandoned this post. Apparently taking the lead from the White House, the Pentagon has gone more than 300 days since the last time an official spokesperson stood up and gave an on-camera briefing to the press.
READ MORE HERE |
