Mosul

Isis has claimed responsibility for the shooting attack that has left at least 50 dead in Las Vegas.

A statement published by the group’s Amaq propaganda agency claimed the attacker was a “soldier of the Islamic State”.

“The Las Vegas attacker is a soldier of the Islamic State in response to calls to target coalition countries,” it said.

The president of Iraq’s Kurdish region warned on Friday that the Kurds might be forced to retaliate if the central government persists with what his spokesman called a “very aggressive” stance toward the pro-independence referendum.

The pressure on Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is building as the date for the Sept. 25 referendum on independence nears; unsurprisingly, Turkey's attitude is also hardening considerably.

KRG leader Massoud Barzani, on the other hand, seems determined to go through with the referendum unless he is provided with concrete reassurances on the KRG's sovereignty rights.

Iraqi forces are reported to have launched an operation to recapture the last stronghold of so-called Islamic State in the country's western desert, reported BBC.

A military source told the BBC that soldiers, Anbar provincial police and Sunni Arab tribal fighters began moving on the town of Ana on Tuesday morning.

Turkish nationals make up half of the hundreds of families being held in a camp near Mosul for suspected links to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press on Sept. 16.

The revenues of the Islamic State terrorist group have fallen five times in two years, according to the Italian newspaper La Stampa, quoted by BGNES.

In June, 2014, the instructions were clear: Stay away from Mosul. The city, Iraq's second largest, had just been captured by the so-called Islamic State, whose fighters faced virtually no resistance in doing so.

Iraqi authorities are holding 1,400 foreign wives and children of suspected Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants in a camp after government forces expelled the jihadist group from one of its last remaining strongholds in Iraq, security and aid officials said.

Syrian government forces and U.S.-backed militias converged on Islamic State in separate offensives against the militants in the eastern Syrian province of Deir al-Zor on Sunday, reported Reuters. 

With a sudden lunge through jihadist lines, the Syrian military  and its allies on Sept. 4 came to within three kilometres of relieving the Euphrates city of Deir al-Zor, where Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has besieged an army garrison and 93,000 civilians for years.