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President Obama is lining up ISIS targets in Iraq and may launch an attack on the militant Islamic militia that is threatening Baghdad even if he does not get an agreement with the Iraqi regime, Secretary of State John Kerry said today. Speaking in Baghdad after meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other political leaders, Kerry said Obama is “each day” gaining more certainty of the targets he would strike if the United States decided on its own to take military action. “He has reserved the right to himself, as he should, to make a decision at any...

Sunni fighters seized a border post on the Iraq-Syria frontier, security sources said on Saturday, smashing a line drawn by colonial powers almost a century ago and potentially creating an Islamic Caliphate from the Mediterranean Sea to Iran. The militants, led by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), first moved into the nearby town of al-Qaim on Friday, pushing out security forces, the sources said. Once border guards heard that al-Qaim had fallen, they left their posts and militants moved in, the sources said.

President Barack Obama says Iran can play a constructive role in Iraq if it sends a message that Iraq's government must be inclusive and respect the interests of Sunnis and Kurds. He says that's the same message the United States is sending. But Obama says if Iran comes into the conflict solely as an armed force backing the Shiite-led government, its involvement would probably worsen the situation.

The deteriorating situation in Iraq is giving Congress pause about President Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. Lawmakers fear that the hard-fought gains in Afghanistan could be wiped out by a resurgent Taleban. Senior Obama administration officials insist Afghanistan is not Iraq. They say the population is far more receptive to a continued US presence, and a top American general says Afghans are better fighters. But the officials could offer no assurances that Afghanistan won’t devolve into chaos after Americans leave, as Iraq has.

The US is reported to have demanded the resignation of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki as a condition for US military intervention. The Wall Street Journal says the US has signalled its desire for unity government in Iraq without Maliki. Maliki's government has rejected calls for the prime minister to quit. His spokesman, Zuhair al-Nahar, said the west should focus instead on providing immediate military help to the Iraqi government.

A team from the world's chemical weapons watchdog believes toxic chemicals such as chlorine are being used in a "systematic manner" in Syria. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons sent a fact-finding mission to the country's north last month to investigate several incidents. The inspectors' preliminary report says information was gathered that seemed to corroborate the testimony of medics. But an attack on their convoy prevented them presenting definitive conclusions.

U.S. President Barack Obama is considering a range of military options to help the Iraqi government break the momentum of Islamic militants determined to crush the government in Baghdad. President Obama says the fact the Iraqi military will not stand and fight reflects the fractured politics of the country. “There’s a problem with morale, there’s a problem in terms of commitment. And ultimately, that’s rooted in the political problems that have plagued the country for a very long time,” says Obama. Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, says problems have been slowly fomenting. “And in recent times, especially...

The Iraqi soldiers tell of how they can hardly live with the shame of their rout under the onslaught of the Islamic militants. Their commanders disappeared. Pleas for more ammunition went unanswered. Troops ran from post to post only to find them already taken by gunmen, forcing them to flee. “I see it in the eyes of my family, relatives and neighbors,” one lieutenant-colonel who escaped the militants’ sweep over the northern city of Mosul told The Associated Press. “I am as broken and ashamed as a bride who is not a virgin on her wedding night.”

Iraq's Shi'ite rulers defied Western calls on Tuesday to reach out to Sunnis to defuse the uprising in the north of the country, declaring a boycott of Iraq's main Sunni political bloc and accusing Sunni power Saudi Arabia of promoting "genocide". Maliki has blamed Saudi Arabia for supporting militants in the past, but the severe language was unprecedented. On Monday Riyadh blamed sectarianism in Baghdad for fuelling the violence.

Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki has fired senior officers for failing to halt a sweeping advance by Sunni Islamist rebels. Four army commanders were dismissed for failing to perform "their national duty", a government statement said on Tuesday. Iraqi forces have been engaged in heavy clashes with the rebels who have seized several key cities in the past week.

Before he left his Pentagon post, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta concluded that the inability of the Obama administration to complete an agreement providing for an American military presence in Iraq after 2011 had deprived the United States of important political leverage in Iraq. When the United States had troops in Iraq, the former defense secretary explained, the American commander and the ambassador in Baghdad “created a strong force” that could often dissuade the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, from making “bad decisions” and “going off a cliff.” But the withdrawal of the last complement of American forces in...

Secretary of State John Kerry “should be on a plane right now for Baghdad,” former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said Tuesday. Crocker served as ambassador to Iraq under President George W. Bush from 2007 until 2009, and ambassador to Afghanistan under President Obama until July 2012. The Obama administration should have had more high-level diplomatic engagement with Iraq, he argued Tuesday, and emphasized the U.S. must now respond with urgency. “We are hard-wired into their political system. We helped create it. We can’t walk away from it,” Crocker said. “I would have preferred since 2011 to see us...

The Department of State warns U.S. citizens against all but essential travel to Iraq. Travel within Iraq remains dangerous given the security situation. On June 16, the Department of State began relocating some staff members from the Embassy to the Consulates General in Basrah and Erbil and Iraq Support Unit in Amman. The Embassy remains open and is operating. This Travel Warning supersedes the Travel Warning dated June 11, 2014, to update information on security incidents and to remind U.S. citizens of ongoing security concerns in Iraq, including kidnapping and terrorist violence. The ability of the Embassy to respond to...

ISIS TERRORISTS BEGIN ASSAULT ON BAGHDAD— Baghdad International Airport under Assault– Here’s a new image reportedly of an explosion at the Baghdad airport. The Battle for Baghdad has begun…

The Iraqi government says it has halted a militant group's advance on Baghdad. As The Telegraph reports, the Iraqi army started engaging the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, after it made a rapid advance in which it captured the key city of Mosul. "'Our security forces have regained the initiative,' said Maj Gen al-Moussawi, adding that the Iraqi army had won 'remarkable victories with the help of volunteers'. 'We will not stop at liberating Mosul from ISIS terrorists, but all other parts,' he continued."

The full horror of the jihadists’ savage victories in Iraq emerged yesterday as witnesses told of streets lined with decapitated soldiers and policemen. Blood-soaked bodies and blazing vehicles were left in the wake of the Al Qaeda-inspired ISIS fanatics as they pushed the frontline towards Baghdad. They boasted about their triumphs in a propaganda video depicting appalling scenes including a businessman being dragged from his car and executed at the roadside with a pistol to the back of his head. In the swathe of captured territory across northern Iraq, ISIS declared hardline Sharia law, publishing rules ordering women not to...

With U.S. forces out of Iraq and the nation spinning out of control, the nation has turned to someone else to help quell the violence: the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Two battalions of the Quds Forces have been sent to the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al Qaeda offshoot that took control of Iraq’s second-largest city Mosul and Tikrit in recent days. The influx of Quds Forces into Iraq comes less than a week after Qasem Sulaimani, the commander of the Quds Forces, arrived in Baghdad to assess the crisis, said a member of the...

Officials say three planeloads of Americans are being evacuated from a major Iraqi air base in Sunni territory north of Baghdad to escape potential threats from a fast-moving insurgency. Several hundred American contractors are still waiting to leave.

At a closed-door gathering of Gulf states in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in May, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and his Arab counterparts all signaled agreement on one thing for the first time: Islamist forces seizing territory in Syria and Iraq had become a regionwide menace that can't be ignored. What they didn't agree on was what to do about it, U.S. officials said.The fall this week of the Iraqi cities Mosul and Tikrit to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham rebel group shows how the insurgent threat is outpacing the response and posing a challenge to President Barack Obama's approach...

The debacle in Iraq, of course, has many causes. The dysfunctions of tribal cultures and Islam’s theology of violence––papered over by a national identity imposed from without and indifferent to the religious, regional, ethnic, and tribal fault lines of the region. Yet despite all that, in 2011 Iraq still had a chance to establish some sort of ordered government, as long as enough American forces were on hand to help keep order. And here is where the blame lands on Obama, for failing to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi government that would have left 10,000-15,000 American troops in...