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When U.S. Special Operations forces raided several houses in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in March 2006, two Army Rangers were killed when gunfire erupted on the ground floor of one home. A third member of the team was knocked unconscious and shredded by ball bearings when a teenage insurgent detonated a suicide vest. Who, the relative asked, was this man — the one represented by a blue dot and nearly killed by the suicide bomber? After some hesi­ta­tion, the military briefers answered with three letters: FBI. The wounded agent in Iraq was Jay Tabb, a longtime member of the...

RAMADI, Iraq - So complete was the destruction of Ramadi that a local reporter who had visited the city many times hardly recognized it. "Honestly, this is the main street," Amaj Hamid, a member of Iraq's elite counterterrorism forces, told the TV crew as they entered from the southwest. He swerved to avoid the aftermath of months of fighting: rubble, overturned cars and piles of twisted metal. Airstrikes and homemade bombs laid by the Islamic State group had shredded the poured-concrete walls and ceilings of the houses and shops along the road.

In what's just more proof that ISIS is by far the most diabolical terrorist organization in the world, Fox News reports that its leaders burned their own jihadists alive because they fled when the Iraqi city of Mosul was attacked by the Iraqi army. ISIS fighters who fled to the terror group's Iraqi stronghold of Mosul after being defeated in Ramadi were burned alive in the town square, sources told FoxNews.com, in an unmistakable message to fighters who may soon be defending the northern city from government forces. Several residents of Mosul recounted the grisly story for stateside relatives,...

The Iraqi Army announced on Monday that it had reclaimed the Sunni-majority city of Ramadi from the Islamic State. But Iraq and its Western allies had best curb its enthusiasm: Counting the win as a major victory obscures how bad Iraq still has it. While the reduction of Islamic State territory is a delight in the abstract, in this case it comes with a reminder that the ongoing collapse of Iraq has much less to do with ISIS than we'd like to believe. We can trace the reason why back to Ramadi's fall this May, when approximately 6,000 Iraqi police...

Iraqi forces swept the devastated streets of Ramadi for bombs Monday, after recapturing the city they lost in May and clinching a major victory against the Islamic State group. Pockets of jihadists may remain in parts of the city, but the army said it had faced no resistance since fighters from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh, abandoned the flashpoint government complex on Sunday. Iraqis celebrated in the streets of several cities late Sunday, and officials congratulated the federal forces on their biggest victory since ISIS overran large parts of the country last year. "The security...

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—Iraq’s Vice President Nouri al-Maliki congratulated the armed forces and the people of Iraq on the liberation of Ramadi from Islamic State (ISIS) militants, making no reference to the US-led coalition air support. In a statement the former prime minister said that the army, anti-terrorism squad and the Iraqi air force inflicted a fatal blow to ISIS in Ramadi. “We salute our heroes that returned the trust of their people and proved the power of success when the forces are united,” said Maliki. He, in particular, praised the Shiite militia forces for their role in the liberation of...

raq's armed forces will move to retake the major northern city of Mosul from Islamic State once they capture the western city of Ramadi, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Friday. Capturing Mosul would deprive the militant group of its biggest population center in both Iraq and Syria, effectively abolishing the state structure of IS in Iraq, depriving it of a major source of funding and dealing a blow to its influence. The capture of Ramadi would give the army a major psychological boost in its move toward Mosul. The cities are about 420 km (260 miles) apart by road....

Iraqi forces have crossed the Euphrates River from the West and are moving into downtown Ramadi, which has been under the control of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant since May, according to Col. Steven Warren, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. "The fall of Ramadi is inevitable," Warren told reporters this morning in his latest update on operations against ISIS. He said there were about 250 to 350 ISIS fighters left in the city and that Iraqi forces are working now to drive them from the dense, urban terrain. He also noted that the Iraqi government had...

Iraqi troops closed in on Islamic State fighters Wednesday in central Ramadi, where they are trying to retake the city they lost seven months ago and further shrink the IS "caliphate." In the second day of a major offensive, forces led by an elite counterterrorism unit pushed toward the government complex in Ramadi, capital of Iraq's Anbar province. Several hundred Islamic State fighters are believed to have barricaded themselves in the city center. Iraqi military officials say government forces expect to be in control of Ramadi in a few days. A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition that is backing Iraqi...

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region--Over the last two days US-led coalition jets hammered Islamic State (ISIS) positions in Kirkuk and Mosul, killing a number of militants, Kurdish military officials said. In Mosul two air strikes on houses believed to be occupied by a local ISIS commander resulted in the death of 12 civilians on Monday, Reuters reported today. Eight militants were also reported killed. On Tuesday coalition jets covered a Peshmerga ground offensive against ISIS in Kirkuk. "Peshmerga obtained intelligence on an ongoing ISIS maneuver on the front," Kamal Kirkuki, the Peshmerga commander in Western Kirkuk, told Rudaw. The ISIS militants were...

Once part of one of the most brutal dictator's army in the Middle East, over 100 former members of Saddam Hussein's military and intelligence officers are now part of ISIS. Now they make up the complex network of ISIS's leadership, helping to build the military strategies which have led the brutal jihadi group to their military gains in Syria and Iraq. The officers gave ISIS the organization and discipline it needed to weld together jihadi fighters drawn from across the globe, integrating terror tactics like suicide bombings with military operation

On Special Report tonight, Charles Krauthammer noted that Obama occasionally stumbles on the truth, as he did when he admitted that his administration does not yet have a strategy to defeat ISIS; but as is always the case with this president it’s never his fault when something goes wrong. “The reason is Obama’s entire strategy rests on the notion that trained Iraqis under this government are going to carry the fight to ISIS,” Krauthammer said, noting that strategy has failed in Mosul, Ramadi and Fallujah. “This is a country that was abandoned by Obama in 2011 and threw in its...

The White House is reportedly planning a shift in strategy in Iraq that would see hundreds of American military trainers deployed to help retake Ramadi and the delay of long-held plans to drive the Islamic State from Mosul. Six months after US forces began training Iraqi troops to take on the jihadist fighters, a string of defeats on the battlefield has prompted the Obama administration into a recalibration of its plans. The American military hopes to build up enough well-trained and well-equipped Iraqi forces to retake the city of Ramadi, which fell to Isil in mid-May. The plan would see...

The Obama administration is planning to send as many as 400 additional trainers to Iraq to train Iraqi forces against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, according to the New York Times . The decision comes after an embarrassing defeat of Iraqi forces at Ramadi last month to the terrorist group, prompting the administration to reconsider its training and equipping program for Iraqi forces. Sunni tribal fighters in Ramadi had complained of not receiving any training or equipment from the central government. After the defeat, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he had asked a team of top military...

Iraqi troops and Shiite militias recaptured key parts of the refinery town of Beiji from ISIS Sunday, a general said. The victory comes a day after Iraqi forces were able to withstand two attacks from ISIS in the hotly contested Anbar province Saturday. The commander of the Interior Ministry's Quick Reaction Forces, Brig. Gen. Nassir al-Fartousi, told state TV that the Iraqi flag was raised on a local government building in Beiji and that troops were advancing to other areas, without elaborating. The spokesman of Joint Operations Command, Brig. Gen. Saad Maan Ibrahim, said the security forces "are now controlling"...

Baghdad, Iraq (CNN)ISIS has closed off a dam to the north of the Iraqi city of Ramadi -- seized by its forces last month -- cutting water supplies to pro-government towns downstream and making it easier for its fighters to attack forces loyal to Baghdad, local officials and residents said. ISIS militants are opening only two or three of the dam's 26 gates on the Euphrates River for brief periods daily, the officials and residents said. The head of the security council in the town of Khalidiyah, Sheikh Ibrahim Khalaf al-Fahdawi, and two residents of the nearby town of Habbaniya...

A look at the Arab press in recent days gives the impression that the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria is on the verge of elimination. But before we pop open the champagne, it’s worth recalling that Assad’s rule has been in the same situation in the past. The old Syria has been slowly falling apart for four years and two months, and as far back as July 2012, following the bombing of the Syrian army’s headquarters in Damascus, commentators (including this writer) predicted it would be a matter of days, weeks, or months at most before Assad’s fall. But...

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Syrian rebels appealed for U.S. airstrikes to counter a new offensive by the Islamic State in the northern province of Aleppo that could reshape the battlefield in Syria. The surprise assault, launched over the weekend, opened a new front in the multi-pronged war being waged by the extremist group across Iraq and Syria, and it underscored the Islamic State’s capacity to catch its enemies off guard. The push — which came on the heels of the miltants’ capture of the Syrian city of Palmyra and the western Iraqi city of Ramadi late last month — took them...

Syrian insurgents rushed reinforcements into combat on Tuesday against rival Islamic State militants who have seized crucial territory near the northern city of Aleppo in recent days, building on the momentum the group has achieved in other battlefield successes in Syria and Iraq. Amid increased fears that Aleppo could be the next big prize to fall to the Islamic State in the latest twist to the four-year-old Syrian civil war, Syrian opposition leaders accused the government of essentially collaborating with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, by bombing other rival insurgent groups, even though the government and...

"We have very little food and ammunition, and we can't withstand the suicide bombers, snipers and rockets....All of us are thinking of committing suicide - Iraqi Federal Police Officer. Against this cataclysmic backdrop of bombs falling in Sana’a and with ISIS literally at the gates of the major Iraqi city of Ramadi, many US energy and security experts were shocked to hear President Barack Obama ignore the danger in a recent keynote speech in which he pinpointed global warming as an equally big risk for Americans. “Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our...