More than two dozen terrorist organizations are currently active in Afghanistan, including the Islamic State-affiliated Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

By Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon

The Taliban took in $3.4 billion in revenue over the last year, boosting its cash supply by 14 percent amid the return of Afghanistan as a central safe haven for terrorist organizations across the Middle East, according to a U.S. government watchdog group.

The repercussions of the Biden administration’s disastrous 2021 military withdrawal from Afghanistan continue to reverberate across the war-torn country, with multiple al-Qaeda affiliates accessing American-supplied “weapons seized from the former Afghan National Army,” according to a new oversight report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

The United States left 78 aircraft, 40,000 military vehicles, and over 300,000 weapons in Afghanistan in a withdrawal that saw 13 American service members lose their lives.

According to the SIGAR report—which the watchdog group delivered to Congress on April 30—the Taliban transferred many of these arms directly to terrorist affiliates, while others made their way to the black market.

The Pentagon assesses that of around $18.6 billion worth of U.S. equipment provided to the Afghan Army over decades of support, $7.12 billion in weaponry remains in the Taliban’s possession.

As a result, “terrorist groups continued to operate in and from Afghanistan amid ongoing U.S., UN, and regional concerns that the country remains a terrorist haven.”

More than two dozen terrorist organizations are currently active in Afghanistan, including the Islamic State-affiliated Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

At least four al Qaeda offshoots are also using the country to organize operations. “Terrorist groups,” SIGAR reported, “continued to use Afghan soil to train and plan attacks and a ‘small but steady’ flow of foreign terrorists continued to travel to Afghanistan and join one of over two dozen terror groups based there.”

The findings come just months after the Trump administration terminated virtually all U.S.-funded assistance programs in Afghanistan, citing the Taliban’s ability to steal millions annually in American taxpayer cash.

The Biden-Harris administration pumped nearly $4 billion into Afghanistan after the Taliban retook control of the country, with several million in previously allocated funds continuing to flow up until March 31 of this year.

During much of this time, SIGAR repeatedly exposed instances of fraud, waste, and mismanagement that plagued U.S. aid efforts after the Taliban took power.

The White House reversed course earlier this year when it dissolved the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the primary organization pumping taxpayer cash into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

While the Trump administration initially attempted to preserve emergency food assistance programs inside the country, the State Department ultimately froze them in early April, citing “Taliban interference” in the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The agency nixed several other “cash-based assistance” programs around the same time “given concerns about misuse and a lack of appropriate accountability,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said.

SIGAR discovered last year that American aid partners on the ground in Afghanistan paid the Taliban at least $10.9 million in various fees.

The State Department terminated funding for all but 2 of the 24 U.S. programs inside Afghanistan, saving American taxpayers more than $1 billion through the end of 2025, according to SIGAR. The two remaining aid initiatives support Afghan students studying online or at universities outside the country.

The billion-dollar list of now-canceled grants runs the gamut from those fostering “integrated youth activity” to others bolstering “civic activists, human rights defenders, and journalists” inside Afghanistan.

The State Department had previously allocated $80 million to Afghan farmers to improve “efficiency” and strengthen “knowledge of smart cultivation and production practices” and another $80 million for “equitable access to quality education for boys and girls,” the SIGAR report shows.

Despite the significant investment in girls’ education from the United States, the Taliban has not softened its stance on the issue, largely barring girls from attending schools and preventing women from working in most jobs.

Other funding initiatives included a $62-million program meant to “empower Afghan youth, particularly girls and young women, by equipping them with market-relevant technical and soft skills, and enhancing economic resilience and food security” and a $14.9-million grant with the purpose of creating “jobs within the carpet-weaving and jewelry industries by providing development assistance to micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises in Afghanistan.”

SIGAR, the central U.S.-Afghanistan oversight authority since 2008, will cease its operations early next year as the Trump administration brings aid to the country to an end.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had told the Americans last week that the weapons supply had to be renewed or else the war would drag on even longer.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A massive arms sale to Israel has now been okayed after two key Democrats removed their opposition, the Washington Post reported Monday.

Citing three American officials as sources, the paper said that Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, finally gave in to White House and Israel advocates’ pressure after holding up the Committee’s authorization for months.

His parallel colleague in the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, Ben Cardin (D-MD), a prominent Israel supporter, immediately gave his backing as well. He had been “widely seen as standing with Meeks in an act of collegial solidarity,” the article noted.

The Republicans in these committees had backed the sale from the beginning.

The weapons package reportedly includes immediately-needed items such as JDAM kits, which turned simple bombs into precision-guided weapons, tank ammunition, armored vehicles and mortars, valued at close to a billion dollars.

It also includes the sale of 50 more F-15 fighter planes at a cost of several billion dollars, which will only roll off the assembly line years from now.

Meeks had told the Washington daily that he wanted the White House “to continue pushing Israel” for “significant and concrete improvements” regarding “humanitarian efforts and limiting civilian casualties,” as well as “assurances” about how the IDF would use the American weapons it received.

The Democratic legislator seemingly did not take into account Hamas’ own acknowledgment that it uses the Gazan civilian population as human shields, embedding its command centers, rocket-launchers and terror tunnels in and under homes, schools, mosques and hospitals.

This makes them legitimate military targets according to international law.

The Hamas-supplied and unverified number of 37,000 Gazan deaths that concerned the congressman does not differentiate between combatants and noncombatants.

Last month, Netanyahu disputed the terror organization’s figures, saying that the IDF has eliminated 14,000 Hamas fighters and estimating that 16,000 civilians have been killed so far in the eight months of warfare.

That the IDF has managed to keep their deaths to a ratio of a little over one-to-one, has been hailed by military experts as an unheard-of achievement in a military conflict.

Israel needs more weapons now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week when he was visiting Jerusalem, according to a Monday report in the Bild newspaper.

The German daily reported that Netanyahu had told Blinken that the U.S. had recently stopped supplying Israel with the weapons it needed “when it was in a fight for its existence.”

The prime minister noted that Israel would continue to fight with all the means at its disposal even without a renewed arms deal, but that the denial of weapons gives support to Tehran and its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies.

It thus only prolongs the war and heightens the risk of widening the war to other areas of the region, he said, according to the German paper.

Blinken reportedly responded that the administration was in the process of removing the obstacles to the arms supply.

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“Americans should be all in and helping Israel against an existential threat,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham.

By World Israel News Staff

The U.S. is strengthening the Hamas terror group and increasing the risk of harm to both Gazan civilians and Israeli hostages by threatening to freeze military aid to Israel, warned a prominent Republican lawmaker on Sunday.

The delaying of military aid as a measure to purportedly protect Gazan civilians is actually “rewarding the tactics of Hamas to put civilians at risk,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Meet the Press.

The lawmaker said that the Biden administration’s demand that Israel do more to prevent civilian casualties is unreasonable, because “it’s impossible to mitigate civilian deaths in Gaza as long as Hamas uses their own population as human shields.”

Graham continued on to say that Hamas’ “blatant efforts” to endanger civilians for political points was unprecedented “in the history of warfare.”

He urged the White House not to “reward this behavior,” citing Hamas’ tactics of using mosques, schools, and hospitals as military assets.

“Americans should be all in and helping Israel against an existential threat,” he said.

“Hamas would attack us if they could. Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorism that shouts ‘Death to America, ’and Hezbollah is in the same camp. I’ve never heard anybody in Israel chant ‘Death to America.’ The people Israel is fighting are bent on destroying all of the Jews.”

President Joe Biden’s decision to publicly announce that he was stalling a shipment of weapons to Israel and threaten further freezes should the IDF launch a full-scale invasion of Rafah has sparked controversy both among Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats.

Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban, a major donor to the Democratic party, penned a letter to Biden calling the move a “bad, bad decision” and urging him to reconsider.

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Biden is now doing what he said he would never do: harm Israel’s capacity to wage war.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

It used to be a Bidenite mantra: we may disagree with the Israelis on some policies, but we would never make our military aid contingent on Israel submitting to our demands.

But that was then, and this is now, when the Bidenites are furiously signaling to voters in Michigan and a few other states with large Arab and Muslim populations, that don’t worry, we hear you, and you can see us getting tougher on Israel by the minute.

Confirmation of this came on March 28, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, addressing the Defense Writers’ Group, for the first time openly admitted that some weaponry requested by Israel was not being provided.

Presumably that was done to pressure Israel not to invade Rafah, or not to go to war with Hezbollah, or possibly both.

Biden is now doing what he said he would never do: harm Israel’s capacity to wage war.

More on this appalling development can be found here: “US refused to give Israel some weapons for Gaza war, general says,” Reuters, March 28, 2024:

The United States’ top general said on Thursday that Israel had not received every weapon that it had asked for, in part because US President Joe Biden’s administration was not willing to provide at least some of them.

Washington gives $3.8 billion in annual military assistance to Israel, its longtime ally. The United States has been rushing air defenses and munitions to Israel, but some Democrats and Arab American groups have criticized the Biden administration’s steadfast support of Israel, which they say provides it with a sense of impunity.

“Although we’ve been supporting them with capability, they’ve not received everything they’ve asked for,” said General Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Some of that is because they’ve asked for stuff that we either don’t have the capacity to provide or are not willing to provide, not right now,” Brown added while speaking at an event hosted by the Defense Writers Group.

The Israeli offensive prompted opposition from within Biden’s Democratic Party, leading thousands to vote “uncommitted” for him in recent party presidential primaries.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Washington earlier this week, and the Pentagon said that security assistance for Israel had been discussed.

There are several ways to look at this announcement, none of them good.

One is that the Bidenites are not really withholding anything of importance, but want to give the appearance of doing so, in order to win back support from Muslim and so-called progressive voters.

It seems unlikely that that will do the trick; nothing short of the Biden administration demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza is likely to win them back.

Even that may not be enough.

Much more likely is that some weapons are indeed being withheld from a loyal ally, just as that ally is in the middle of a war that it did not want and did not cause.

This is the fourth war for the Jewish state’s survival, after those of 1948, 1967, and 1973. Withholding of weapons requested by Israel has obvious consequences.

Israel now must feel it cannot fully count on Washington’s military support, just as it can no longer count on its diplomatic support — that is, the use of the American veto — at the UN Security Council.

This means Israel will not only ramp up its domestic manufacture of weapons that until now it has bought from the Americans, but will also be more willing to consider other weapons it never thought it might have to employ, including tactical nuclear weapons.

Imagine, for example, that the IDF is still fighting Hamas in Gaza, and at the same time Hezbollah has attacked the northern Galilee, launching ten thousand missiles every day (Hezbollah has 150,000 rockets and missiles), hitting Tel Aviv, Dimona, ten of Israel’s military airfields, while the Houthis are still firing on ships in the Red Sea to prevent Israel’s shipping of goods to and from Asia.

At that point, might the state of Israel decide that it needs, by way of a demonstration meant to frighten Iran and all of Israel’s Iranian-backed enemies — Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFLP, and others — to drop a nuclear weapon in the Iranian desert?

Have the Bidenites considered how its other allies must be reconsidering their reliance on American weaponry, if even such a close ally as Israel can be denied weapons that the IDF says it needs?

If you were Taiwan, for example, wouldn’t you be wondering whether you can continue to rely on American assurances of military support should China try to invade?

It’s hard to know what weapons the Americans are withholding from Israel’s wish list, but I suspect they might have decided not to resupply the IDF with the bunker-buster bombs that it had delivered early in the conflict.

According to reports, the US has supplied 100 BLU-109 penetrating bombs to help the Israeli military destroy the deepest tunnels that have been dug, some 50 meters underground in the 500-mile network of terror tunnels that Hamas built under Gaza.

But the destruction of those tunnels also leads to the collapse of many buildings just above.

Perhaps the Bidenites want to discourage the IDF’s continued use of bunker-busters. It won’t discourage the Israelis — they are determined to destroy those tunnels, whatever the cost — but it will make that task much more difficult.

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Under Biden, Islamic terrorists can still count on American weapons, Israelis however can’t.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

In December, the Biden administration blocked a shipment of M4 rifles to Israel. The rifles were meant to be used by local community self-defense units of the kind that had served as the front line of defense against the Hamas attack on Oct 7.

However the Biden administration claimed that it was concerned that the self-defense units might be Jewish “right-wing extremists”.

The Islamic terrorists attacking them however had no trouble finding M4 rifles. They just expected theirs to come by a more complicated road from Afghanistan, by way of Iran’s terror operatives, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan via a drug smuggling route, and then inside Israel.

The M4 rifles were part of a package that included grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles, anti-tank landmines, RPGs, C4 and Semtex explosives, and hand grenades.

A number of those were clearly American weapons including the M4s and the M203 grenade launchers: both in use in Afghanistan.

The Alma Center, founded by IDF Lt Col (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, believes that the M4s are likely “spoils from Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan.”

If U.S. weapons from Afghanistan made their way to Islamic terrorists in Israel, it would not be the first time.

Islamic terrorists in Gaza had been previously spotted with M4 and M16 rifles, including during the Oct 7 attacks. Rep. James Comer had dispatched a letter after the Hamas attacks to the Department of Defense asking it to explain the M4A1 Carbines, which were “specially designed for U.S. Special Operations Forces” in the hands of the terrorists.

“The surprise terror attacks by Hamas into Israel were made possible, in part, because of U.S. arms left behind in Afghanistan by the Biden administration,” Larry Keane, the Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, wrote at the Firearm Industry Trade Association.

The weapons package now intercepted by Israel shows how Iran may have tapped into the weapons left behind in Afghanistan. The weapons shipment appears to be a ‘sandwich’ with Iran moving American weapons to the Islamic terrorists backed by the Biden administration.

While the weapons were being smuggled by Iran through its IRGC terror arm, the key player was Munir Makdah, a top figure in the Fatah movement which controls the PLO and the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinian Authority is a major recipient of American foreign aid and the Biden administration has been pressuring Israel to put its terrorists in charge of Gaza.

Even as the Biden administration was demanding that Israel allow Fatah terrorists to run Gaza, a top Fatah leader was recruiting terrorists to attack Israel.

The anti-tank weapons, mines, and RPGs suggest that the goal was a significant assault on Israel in order to open a second front in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, to relieve the pressure on Hamas in Gaza.

Munir Makdah serves as a deputy commander of Fatah in the Ein al-Hilweh terrorist settlement in Lebanon. Misleadingly described by the UN as a refugee camp, it’s actually a major city of over 100,000 which various Islamic terrorist groups have been fighting over since at least the 1980s.

While Ein al-Hilweh is often described in the media as a “Palestinian refugee camp”, large numbers of Syrian Islamists fled there after losing their civil war, and have been fighting with Fatah for control of the city using heavy weaponry including rockets.

The weapons were intended for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a Fatah terrorist arm, sanctioned by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization for its numerous bloody attacks.

Even as Al Aqsa has gone on murdering Israelis, Marwan Barghouti, its founder, in prison for his involvement in multiple murders, including that of a Greek monk, has been promoted as a future president of the Palestinian Authority.

The New York Times ran an op-ed by Barghouti while failing to identify him as a terrorist. The Washington Post recently claimed that the Biden administration had “raised the treatment of Marwan Barghouti” with Israel. The International Red Cross, which has failed to visit any of the Jewish and non-Jewish hostages held by Hamas, has been clamoring to visit him.

“The Biden administration should make it very clear to the Netanyahu government that if Barghouti is harmed or killed in prison, it would throw gas on a raging fire,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, notorious for his promotion of Iranian agendas, warned.

While the Biden administration and Iran Lobby adjacent figures like Van Hollen were lobbying for Barghouti, the terrorist’s men appeared to be preparing to unleash a major attack on Israel.

And who was behind the attack? Iran.

Apart from being a top Fatah terrorist, Munir Makdah has also been identified as an operative with Iran’s Hezbollah terrorist movement in Lebanon and the IRGC. After consolidating its control over Hamas and Al Qaeda, Iran is gaining a deeper foothold in the Palestinian Authority.

And the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist operation subsidized by American taxpayers.

The weapons, including the M4 rifles, had come by way of Iran’s terror operatives, including those in Syria, who would have been in a position to move them through Jordan into Israel.

Captagon, the amphetamine used by the Hamas terrorists on Oct 7, is manufactured under the protection of the Assad family, an Iranian client, smuggled out of Syria and into Jordan, where it’s then trafficked to Iran’s enemies in Saudi Arabia, but also into Muslim areas in Israel.

Iran’s global drug smuggling empire provides wealth, but it’s also used by the terror regime to piggyback terror operatives and weapons like those that were meant for the Fatah terrorists.

Opiates and weapons from Afghanistan make their way to Iran, and from there to Iraq, Syria, Yemen and to Gaza and now even the West Bank.

In 2022, Israel had detected a significant increase in both drugs and weapons being smuggled into the country. This was likely part of the prep for the Oct 7 attacks which employed both drugs and weapons.

Iran’s drug network is also a terror network and the terrorists are also its clients. Gaza has an estimated 150,000 drug addicts from a population of only a few million.

After Biden turned over Afghanistan to the Taliban, along with its drug trafficking operation, Iran boosted a pipeline of weapons and drugs that are used to bind its allies and attack its enemies.

Weapons left behind in Afghanistan have made their way into Israel. But this time they were intended for the Palestinian Authority terrorists backed by the Biden administration.

While the terrorists want the M4s left behind in Afghanistan, Israel is pivoting away from the rifles denied to it by the Biden administration and shifting over to local manufacturing.

After the Biden administration began moving arms from Israel to Ukraine, and then began cutting off weapons to stop Israel from finishing off Hamas, the Israeli government is going local.

Under Biden, Islamic terrorists can still count on American weapons, Israelis however can’t.

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