If Washington is perceived as leading an alliance that includes Iran and Hezbollah, this will augment the propaganda assistance loaned to ISIS with every US missile that falls.
The Obama administration is preparing to carry out a campaign against ISIS that may take three years to complete, involving a coalition of some 40 countries.
Despite Tehran's denials, reports mount from northern Iraq that Revolutionary Guards have been sent into battle against ISIS, and an Iranian drone crashed in a Kurdish village.
ISIS fighters massacred 700 Turkmen civilians—including women, children and the elderly—in a northern Iraqi village last month, a UNICEF official reports.
ISIS posted videos online of Syrian and Kurdish troops being beheaded, while Nusra Front seized 43 UN peacekeepers near the Israeli line in the Golan Heights.
Thousands of Yazidi refugees who have fled the Sinjar region of northern Iraq have been denied entry into Turkey by military forces, and are stranded in the mountains.
A wave of terror blasts, including at a Shi'ite mosque, left 35 dead across Iraq, as the Pentagon prepares surveillance flights over ISIS territory in Syria.
A Yazidi militia is fighting alongside Peshmerga to re-take Sinjar from ISIS, while the UN's Iraq envoy warned of an imminent massacre of Turkmen at ISIS-besieged Amerli.
Up to 70 were massacred during prayers at a Sunni mosque in Iraq's Diyala governorate—apparently by a Shi'ite militia seeking retribution for a bomb attack on their forces.
Tens of thousands joined the funeral for a youth killed by Turkish troops who attacked local Kurds trying to protect a statue of PKK guerrilla leader Mahsum Korkmaz near Diyarbakır.
ISIS released a video showing the forced mass "conversion" of hundreds of captive Yazidis. Some 90,000 displaced Yazidis now face horrific conditions, without even rudimentary shelter.
Kurdish parliament leaders charged that ISIS is selling abducted Yazidi women in Mosul, and that an Iranian Quds force has intervened against ISIS—with US connivance.
