Tunneling underground is a tried and true tactic of the guerrilla fighter, one that has become especially prevalent amongst those facing Western air power which they simply cannot match.  By the same token, it has also been argued that the suicide bomber is another tactic which the guerrilla, or terrorist rather, uses to a militarily superior […]

Austin Tice, a former Marine Corps officer turned freelance journalist has now been missing in Syria since August of 2012.  Abducted from the neighborhood of Darayya in Damascus, a hotspot in the Syrian uprising, little has been heard about Tice aside from a YouTube video released in September, 2012.  The video shows a restrained Tice surrounded by […]

I set out in the morning to go about the time consuming process of obtaining the necessary permissions from the Syrian government to travel to a neighborhood in Damascus to do some reporting.  Katsia, located on the outskirts of Syria’s capital, had been under siege by Al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army until a month […]

Note: This is part of a series. You can read part one here. “Mr. President, I would like to ask you about your future vision of Syria.” President Assad looked at me, nodding his head for me to continue. “It seems that the institutions of Syria have been so damaged and the social fabric of […]

I will be the first to concede that I was wrong about this election, and not just me, but so were the professional statisticians that I was paying attention to.  Donald Trump won the 2016 election in a political upset that will be studied by the political science community for decades to come.  He broke […]

SOFREP reached out to several sources on the ground near Mosul, including a Kurdish intelligence officer involved in the battle against ISIS for Iraq’s second largest city. Predominately a Sunni city, Mosul was the home to about a million residents, after nearly half a million fled when ISIS took over in 2014. During Operation Iraqi […]

In the early morning, ISIS attempted to blow up a power station on the outskirts of Kirkuk as well as a police headquarters building.  The attackers, said to be about a dozen in number, killed six Kurdish police officers and 13 power company workers.  Although unconfirmed at this time, images obtained by SOFREP appear to […]

Like many Americans, I was taken slightly aback when Hillary Clinton mentioned that it takes four minutes from the time the President decides to launch nuclear weapons to the time that the missiles fire from their silos and submarines in a war that is thankfully hypothetical at this time.  Information surrounding America’s nuclear warfare capabilities are […]

Newly released documents from the FBI’s investigation into the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal reveal the Presidential candidate’s flagrant disregard for physical and information security, as well as how senior Diplomatic Security staff quit her detail and otherwise avoided it like the plague.  One member of the detail, “explained that Clinton’s treatment of DS [Diplomatic Security] […]

In recent debates and speeches Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has remarked that the United States government is using poor strategy by announcing the coalition effort to re-take Mosul from ISIS in Northern Iraq. “Why can’t they do it quietly?  Why can’t they make it a sneak attack?  And after the attack is made, inform the […]

“The United States and the rest of the international coalition stand ready to support Iraqi security forces, peshmerga fighters and the people of Iraq in the difficult fight ahead,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in a separate statement. “We are confident our Iraqi partners will prevail against our common enemy and free Mosul and the […]

The CEO of Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, was arrested last week on charges of pimping a minor, pimping, and conspiracy to do the same.  Backpage has long been used as a vehicle for human traffickers to advertise their product (both children and adults) to johns.  Before Backpage, Craigslist was the major hub for domestic human trafficking […]