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While the blitzkrieg of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham and its allies that saw the groups take control of Mosul on June 10 and quickly approach the outskirts of Samarra has slowed considerably, the advance has not stopped. ISIS continues to attack in Diyala and Salahaddin provinces, and has set its sights on oil infrastructure. Yesterday, ISIS took control of the Ajeel oil wells, which lie east of Tikrit and Bayji in Salahaddin provinces. There are four wells listed in the area: Ajeel, Ajeel 6, Ajeel 24, and Ajeel North 1, and they put out an estimated...

BAGHDAD — Iraqi security officials said Wednesday that fighters with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were advancing on the Haditha Dam, the second-largest in Iraq, raising the possibility of catastrophic damage and flooding. Worries about the dam came as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki criticized his political rivals but did not reject entreaties by Western leaders, including a personal visit by Secretary of State John Kerry, to help defuse the crisis by forming a new government with more equitable power sharing among competing groups. The ISIS militants advancing on the Euphrates River dam, about 120 miles northwest of...

Sunni rebels in Iraq say they have fully captured the country's main oil refinery at Baiji, north of Baghdad.The refinery had been under siege for 10 days with the militant offensive being repulsed several times. The complex supplies a third of Iraq's refined fuel and the battle has already led to petrol rationing. Insurgents, led by the group Isis, have overrun a swathe of territory north and west of Baghdad including Iraq's second-biggest city, Mosul. They are bearing down on a vital dam near Haditha and have captured all border crossings to Syria and Jordan. A rebel spokesman said the...

KIRKUK, Iraq – The insurgents came at midday, walking across a canal, advancing under cover of mortar fire toward the cluster of three Iraqi villages. Within eight hours, Shiite residents who fled said the Sunni insurgents had expelled thousands of them from the majority-Sunni province, helped by local Sunnis in neighboring villages. "You cannot imagine what happened, only if you saw it could you believe it," said Hassan Ali, a 52-year-old farmer siting in the al-Zahra Shiite mosque, used to distribute aid in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, where the displaced had fled, some 50 miles (80 kilometers) away....

<p>The world is reeling with the horrifying spectacle of the recent stunning success of the Sunni Islam, ISIS, (Islamic Society of Syria and Iraq),which in the past two weeks has taken over most of Iraq, and is currently encircling Baghdad. The group has become the richest terror organization in the world after plundering banks in Mosul(Biblical Ninevah), and as a prize has taken Fallujah and Tikrit, places the United States,Britain and their coalition spent billions in treasure and thousands of our finest young lives to “liberate”.</p>

U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly warned top government officials that Iraq's Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki and his policies were gravely antagonizing his country's Sunni population, two U.S. security officials said on Friday. The officials said the warnings were contained in secret intelligence reports and analyses presented in the last two years to policymaking officials, including President Barack Obama. This contrasted with public comments by the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, who in his annual presentation to Congress on "worldwide threats" in January made only bland references to religious tensions in Iraq.

Gen. David Petraeus, the former commander for U.S. military efforts in Iraq, warned that airstrikes to help Shia militias are not the solution to stopping extremists who are seeking to undermine efforts by the country to maintain its own government. "This cannot be the United States being the air force of Shia militias or a Shia on Sunni Arab fight," ... In the past two weeks, ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a bloodthirsty offshoot of al-Qaida — has been taking over city after city in Iraq and engaging in the mass slaughter of civilians. This...

Sunni extremists in Iraq have occupied what was once Saddam Hussein's premier chemical-weapons production facility, a complex that still contains a stockpile of old weapons, State Department and other U.S. government officials said. U.S. officials don't believe the Sunni militants will be able to create a functional chemical weapon from the material. The weapons stockpiled at the Al Muthanna complex are old, contaminated and hard to move, officials said. Nonetheless, the capture of the chemical-weapon stockpile by the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, known as ISIS or ISIL, the militant group that is seizing territory in...

The United States has evacuated most of its personnel from the Embassy in Baghdad and dramatically stepped up security for those who remain as thousands of Islamic fighters bear down on Iraq's capital city. Some 5,500 people work in the massive Embassy complex in the heavily-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad. Many will be airlifted to Amman, Jordan, and others will be sent to consulates in Basra, in the south, and Erbil, in the Kurdish north. Other workers will remain in Baghdad. Some 12,000 fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) are marching on Baghdad after quickly...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) A group of military deserters have painted a devastating picture of the ability of the Iraqi army to stand and fight, telling The Telegraph how entire divisions surrendered Mosul, Iraq's second city, without firing a single shot. Speaking from the Kurdish city of Erbil, the defectors accused their officers of cowardice and betrayal, saying generals in Mosul "handed over" the city over to Sunni insurgents, with whom they shared sectarian and historical ties. With Sunni insurgents now threatening the capital Baghdad the eye-witness accounts from the deserters' reveal how sectarian enmity have, in the space of mere weeks, destroyed...

ISTANBUL — The likely breakup of Iraq into feuding ethnic and sectarian bastions accelerated Friday as Iraq’s senior Shiite Muslim cleric broke years of support for the central government and decreed that every able-bodied Shiite man had a religious obligation to defend the sect’s holy sites from rebellious Sunni Muslims led by fighters from the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. In answer to the call, thousands of Shiites many with militia experience from the sectarian war that pitted Sunnis against Shiites and killed thousands from 2006 to 2008 flooded the cities of Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala to receive...

Emboldened by its success in Syria and Iraq, al-Qaeda is widening its reach There’s a name that you should remember: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the commander of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), whose fighters now control large swaths of Iraq. There are few photos of al-Baghdadi, and even fewer details about his life are well-known. But as Iraq is engulfed by conflict and the country’s second largest city fell to Sunni extremists, the influence of Islamic terrorism’s newest star is set to grow. TIME’s International Editor Bobby Ghosh explains the danger behind al-Baghdadi’s rise to power, and what...

Iran Deploys Quds Forces To Support Iraqi Troops, Helps Retake Most Of Tikrit By Howard Koplowitz@howardkoplowitz on June 12 2014 1:55 PM Iran Deploys Forces To Iraq, Helps Retake Tikrit An elite branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard is in Iraq fighting alongside Iraqi troops in a battle against an al-Qaeda affiliated militant group. \ Two battalions of the Quds Forces are already making progress in their fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the Wall Street Journal reported. The militant group took control of Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit on Wednesday, but Revolutionary Guard and Iraqi...

Signs are emerging that a top fugitive and other military officers from ousted dictator Saddam Hussein's regime are backing Al Qaeda-inspired militants in Iraq, who vowed Thursday to march against Baghdad after seizing two key northern cities. Two senior intelligence officials told The Associated Press Thursday that an armed group led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri -- the late leader's former deputy who escaped the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and eluded U.S. and Iraqi forces ever since – is fighting alongside the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

An Islamic Caliphate in Seven Easy Steps The First Phase Known as "the awakening" -The aim of the attacks of 9/11 was to provoke the US into declaring war on the Islamic world and thereby "awakening" Muslims. The Second Phase "Opening Eyes" recruiting young men during this period. Iraq should become the center for all global operations, with an "army" set up there and bases established in other Arabic states. The Third Phase This is described as "Arising and Standing Up" and should last from 2007 to 2010. "There will be a focus on Syria," The Fourth Phase Between 2010...

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Wednesday that the administration was “watching very carefully” the rise of a new growing threat in the Middle East, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni group calling itself the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL), which has already seized control of two Iraqi cities in two days and is threatening to take Baghdad as well.

Sunni militants on Tuesday seized control of military bases and the provincial governor’s building in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, as police officers and army soldiers abandoned the town and left weapons, vehicles and even their uniforms to the gunmen. By midday, the militants, believed to belong to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an extremist group, were in control of much of central and southern Mosul, according to witnesses and local officials. Soldiers who fled the city said the militants had seized a jail, freeing the inmates. “They took control of everything, and they are everywhere,” said one soldier...

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Conflict in Syria kills hundreds of thousands of people and spreads unrest across the Middle East. Iranian forces battle anti-Shi'ite fighters in Damascus, and the region braces for an ultimate showdown. If the scenario sounds familiar to an anxious world watching Syria's devastating civil war, it resonates even more with Sunni and Shi'ite fighters on the frontlines - who believe it was all foretold in 7th Century prophecies. From the first outbreak of the crisis in the southern city of Deraa to apocalyptic forecasts of a Middle East soaked in blood, many combatants on both sides of...

AMMAN, Jordan — In offices above busy commercial streets here in the Jordanian capital, Iraqi tribal and religious leaders are plotting a revolution in their own country. “It is a war,” said Muthana al-Dari, surrounded by satellite maps of flash points in western Iraq, where government security forces, tribes and al-Qaeda-inspired insurgents are engulfed in a complicated clash.

...[Ma]ny observers across the political spectrum argue that there’s no coherent American Middle East policy at all....[C]olumnist Charles Krauthammer argues that Obama is simply presiding over a decline in American influence, while Democratic[s]...like Sen. Robert Menendez apparently can’t make heads or tails of the White House’s Iran policy. If sanctions got the Iranians to the negotiating table...then why is the White House fighting against a further round of sanctions that would give Washington more leverage? Because it’s part of the Administration’s grand strategy. As Obama explained to David Remnick in a recent New Yorker interview, the goal is to create...