Iraq

Concerns are growing over executions and mounting abuses by militants led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), amid a warning from the United Nations that hundreds of people were killed, many of them summarily executed, after the seizure of Mosul.

The U.N.'s human rights chief on June 13 condemned reports of summary executions and extrajudicial killings in Iraq amid fears of mounting abuses by jihadists as they advance across the north of the country.

Islamist fighters have managed to take over the Iraqi towns of Saadiya and Jalawla, days after Mosul and Tikrit fell into their hands.

A lightning advance by jihadists across northern Iraq has rekindled concern on oil markets, but the IEA cautioned June 13 that supplies from leading exporter Iraq may not be at immediate risk.

The US is considering "all options" to give assistance in fighting militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), President Barack Obama said.

Deployment of US ground troops is however out of the question, the BBC quotes White House officials as saying.

A news photographer was killed while covering fighting between Kurdish security forces and jihadists in northern Iraq on June 12, medical and security sources said.

Militants gained more ground in
Iraq overnight, moving into two towns in the eastern province of Diyala
after security forces abandoned their posts.

Security sources
said the towns of Saadiyah and Jalawla had fallen to the insurgents, as
well as several other villages around the Himreen mountains, which have
long been a hideout for militants.

There are hopes that the Turks taken hostage by the organization of Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), which captured Iraq’s second biggest city Mosul on June 9, will be soon released.

Intense contacts were carried out on June 12 by the Turkish Foreign Ministry and the National Intelligence Organization (MÄ°T) to secure the release.

The assessment in the title line does not belong to this columnist, but has been cherished in this column since a Turkey specialist realistically put it in a Reuters analysis a couple of years earlier.

The march of extremist Islamist fighters on Baghdad and the tearing down of border posts between Iraq and Syria surprise us with their speed. We are not used to seeing such changes on the map, as the years after World War II were devoted to avoiding any change of borders.