The United State did not oppose Jihadists’ actions against Syria, and only attacks on the Kurdish positions made Americans use force, turkologist Hakob Chakryan said.

He recalled that the Kurds are willing to fight, and the bloody clashes between Kurds and Turkish police officers occur every day.

The expert believes that President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan organized attacks on Kurds with the help of the Islamic State. However, on July 9 Jihadists declared war against Turkey, he added.

Ankara may propose its coalition partners to join operations along the border with Syria in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIL), Turkish Ambassador to Russia Ümit Yardim said.

“The creation of a no-fly zone [along the border with Syria] is not currently on the agenda and is not being utilized. There is a task of cleansing the territory of 400 square kilometers of ISIL militants. We call this operation of cleansing the territory of terrorists and are not creating any type of special zone,” Yardim told RIA Novosti in an interview.

The ambassador said that it was premature to begin such an operation, but if it needs to be done, then “it would be done with those countries who are members of the coalition that Turkey gives its approval.”

Warplanes believed to be part of a U.S.-led alliance struck Nusra Front positions in northern Syria on Friday following an attack by the al Qaeda-linked group on Western-backed rebels in the area, a group tracking the war said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group that reports on the war, said the air strikes hit Nusra Front positions near the town of Azaz, north of Aleppo.

Overnight, the Nusra Front had launched an attack in the area targeting rebels including a group said by opposition sources to have been trained under a U.S.-led programme to build a force to fight Islamic State, the Observatory reported.

The rebel group, known as Division 30, said Nusra Front fighters attacked its headquarters at 4.30 am. Five members of Division 30 were killed as they held off the attackers, it said.

The group has accused the Nusra Front of abducting its leader and several other members earlier this week.

Syrian opposition sources say members of Division 30 have been trained under the U.S.-led train and equip programme launched in May. The Pentagon has however cast doubt on the report, saying that no members of the “New Syrian Force” had been captured or detained.

The Nusra Front, which Washington has designated a terrorist organisation, has a track record of crushing U.S.-backed rebels in Syria. Last year, it routed the Syria Revolutionaries Front led by Jamal Maarouf, viewed as one of the most powerful insurgent leaders until his defeat.

It was also instrumental in the demise of the U.S.-backed Hazzm Movement, which collapsed earlier this year after clashing with the Nusra Front in the northwest.

Washington and Ankara this week announced their intention to provide air cover for Syrian rebels and jointly sweep Islamic State fighters from a strip of land along the border, with U.S. warplanes using bases in Turkey for strikes.

The US Consulate General in Erbil warned U.S. citizens of a credible security threat towards public places in Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan.

“As a result, all off-compound movements of U.S. government personnel under the Chief of Mission at the U.S. Consulate General in Erbil will be limited on Friday, July 31, 2015 and Saturday, August 1, 2015,” the consulate said.

The Consulate also asked the Kurdish government to deploy additional Kurdish Security Forces in and around the Consulate neighborhood. “This restriction does not impact visitor access or meetings on the Consulate compound,” the consulate said.

Moreover, the US consulate called on U.S. citizens to maintain heightened security awareness.

A deadly car bomb killed three outside of the U.S. consulate on Friday 17 April, however all main suspects of the bomb attack were quickly arrested by the Kurdish security forces.

Al-Qaida fighters have publicly shot to death six Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, in a town north of Aden, Yemeni security officials and witnesses said Thursday.

The witnesses, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said al-Qaida made the captured Houthi fighters, who were in their early 20s, kneel and kiss their hands before shooting them Wednesday afternoon in Dar Saad.

A witness said one of the rebels begged to be spared, saying he was the sole supporter of his family. But the witness said an al-Qaida fighter responded “Shut up, you dog,” before he and the others shouted Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) and opened fire.

Meanwhile in the southern Abyan province, five al-Qaida militants were killed in a suspected U.S. drone attack that targeted their vehicle in the district of al-Mahfad, security officials and tribesmen said.

The fighting in Yemen has continued despite a five-day unilateral truce by the Saudi-led coalition that has been waging an air campaign against the Iran-supported rebels since March. The truce was intended to pause months of fighting and allow for the dispersing of much-needed humanitarian aid.

Al-Qaida fighters raided the office of humanitarian group CARE International in Aden earlier this week, witnesses and security officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

CARE said in an email that its office in Aden was looted this week by unknown actors who stole two cars.

Local militia officials have accused al-Qaida fighters of trying to ride the wave of recent military advances by anti-rebel forces, which drove the Houthis from Aden in July and have been advancing around its outskirts. The Houthis and their allies still control the capital, Sanaa, and much of the country’s north.

Iranian officials declared via state television on Thursday that the country will not allow U.S. and Canadian inspectors to visit its nuclear facilities, according to an AP report.

“American and Canadian inspectors cannot be sent to Iran,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, according to the report. “It is mentioned in the deal that inspectors should be from countries that have diplomatic relations with [the] Islamic republic of Iran.” Iran has not had diplomatic relations with the U.S. since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Under the terms of the Iran nuclear agreement, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear oversight group, would be responsible for verifying Iran’s activities in reducing its enrichment program. IAEA documents detailing investigative procedures have not been made fully available to the U.S. government, and international law does not require them to be handed over.

The deal was struck between Iran and the P5+1, a coalition of six nations organized to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon through peaceful means. The international negotiations, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry explained to lawmakers in a series of hearings on Capitol Hill, cannot be codified as a treaty, precisely because the U.S. does not have formal diplomatic relations with Iran. Kerry and other Obama administration officials have argued that the new deal is America’s best chance to prevent Iran from becoming nuclear-armed without resorting to military force—and maybe the last.

Though the announcement from Iranian officials happened on Thursday, U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice has already articulated the problem of American inspectors on the record. The barring of U.S. inspectors is not a surprise to the administration, but Iran’s combative rhetoric has bothered many U.S. lawmakers, who fear that the country could use the deal to continue a nuclear weaponization program in secret. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has stated that this scenario is unlikely.

For critics of the Iran agreement, Thursday’s announcement—which broke as White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was speaking to reporters—will only compound doubts over whether the IAEA will be able to oversee the terms of the deal.

ISIS has lost almost 10 percent of its territory so far in 2015, yet another indication that the group, for all the terror it has sown in Syria and Iraq, is losing the war.

Defense analysis group IHS Jane’s 360 detailed the territorial loss in a report, which includes this map below estimating the change in ISIS’s territory between January 1 and June 29 of this year. Green shows territory ISIS has taken in those months, and red shows land that it’s lost.

Jane’s estimates the total loss at 9.4 percent of what ISIS held when the year began.

The year has included gain for ISIS, as well, most notably the Syrian city Palmyra and the Iraqi city Ramadi. But according to Jane’s analyst Columb Strack, “Successes in Palmyra and Ramadi came at the expense of significant territorial losses elsewhere.”

This points to one of ISIS’s most fundamental problems: It has too many enemies. You can see this in another thing on the Jane’s map, showing who gained territory: the Iraqi government, Syrian rebels (labeled “Sunni insurgents”), and Kurdish forces in both Iraq and Syria. All of those groups are hostile to ISIS, and two of them are backed by US airpower. ISIS’s fighters might be skilled, but they can’t fight everyone at once.

Losing territory is a serious problem for ISIS. The whole idea of ISIS, the thing that makes it really different from al-Qaeda, is that it claims to be the actual state: a caliphate that governs and holds territory. It needs that territory to ideologically justify itself, to collect the extortionary “taxes” it uses to fund its activities, and to attract ever more foreign recruits.

“When they declared the caliphate, their legitimacy came to rest on the continuing viability of their state,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me in October. If they keep losing territory, their funding and recruiting pool will slowly dry up.

Recent developments have been bad for ISIS. Syrian Kurdish forces advanced dangerously close to ISIS’s de facto capital, Raqqa, in late June. Iraqi forces are pressuring ISIS in Anbar province, home to Ramadi and ISIS stronghold Fallujah.

None of this means ISIS is going to fall quickly. But it does show that the widely feared terrorist group, for all the terrible suffering it has inflicted, is on the battlefield not as fearsome as it sometimes is perceived to be.

The Ministry of Defense announced on Thursday that its minister Khaled al-Obeidi has signed a military cooperation agreement with the Russian Federal Commission.

The ministry said in a statement received by IraqiNews.com: “The defense minister Khaled al-Obeidi has signed a military cooperation agreement with the head of the Russian Federal Commission Alexander Fomin in the federal city of San Petersburg, Russia.”

The defense minister Khaled al-Obeidi went in July 27, 2015 to Russia to discuss military cooperation between the two countries.

The Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi stressed in 20 May 2015 that Iraq has many arming contracts with Russia, pointing out that the current situation necessitates looking for several sources of weapons.

Despite statements to the contrary by Secretary of State John Kerry, the United States could access the secret agreements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) if it wanted to, a former IAEA executive told Armin Rosen of Business Insider today.

When pressed by legislators in congressional hearings, Kerry has insisted that the United States cannot access these agreements. But former IAEA Deputy Director-General Olli Heinonen said that this was not the case.

“According to the IAEA rules and practices such documents could be made available to the Members of the IAEA Board,” Olli Heinonen, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the IAEA’s former Deputy Director-General for Safeguards, wrote to Business Insider in an email. …

In one scenario, Iran would agree to divulge the documents: “Iran can make it available by asking to distribute it as an [Information Circular] document to all IAEA member states as they did with the 2007 Work Plan,” Heinonen explained, referring to a publicly available agreement between the IAEA and Iran on nuclear safeguards.

US diplomats could also view these side agreements if a member state of the IAEA’s 35-member Board of Governors requests their distribution.

The United States is one of the 35 countries represented on the Board of Governors.

According to Rosen, the signing of the roadmap for Iran’s explaining its past illicit nuclear work “could conceivably have been made contingent on Iran’s willingness to distribute the entirety of the agreement.” But Iran refused to agree to this, leading even supporters of the deal to acknowledge “that the roadmap was settled on terms favorable to Tehran.” For example, the IAEA used “Iranian language” to describing how Iran would resolve issues about disclosing its nuclear research. Rosen quoted a nonproliferation expert who favored the deal acknowledging that “you’re never going to have many of these questions fully resolved.”