Photo Gallery A State of Evil
A girl from the minority Yazidi sect can be seen fleeing the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar. Here, she rests at the Iraqi-Syrian border crossing in Faysh Khabur.
The power of the Islamic State terrorist group, pictured here, stretches from the steppe between Marea and al-Bab in northwestern Syria to an area around 100 kilometers outside of Baghdad in Iraq.
The group has emerged in the past few years to become the greatest terrorist threat since al-Qaida. Its origins can be traced back to the period that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States.
Islamic State is by far the world's most brutal, most successful -- and most sinister -- jihadist group. Here, militants can be seen gathered near the central Iraqi city of Tikrit.
The Islamic State's brutality is notorious. Here, an image grab from a video uploaded on YouTube on Aug. 23, allegedly shows a jihadist group affiliated with IS executing Syrian truck drivers. In Syria, the IS militants and their predecessors have killed countless people in recent years.
In recent weeks, IS fighters managed to drive out the peshmerga fighters of the Kurdish Autonomous Government of Iraq with disturbing ease. In some cases the Kurdish soldiers, previously considered the best Iraq has to offer, didn't even resist. In recent days, however, the peshmerga have been able to gain back territory with assistance from US air support.
Here, US President Barack Obama can be seen arriving to make a statement on the situation in Iraq on Aug. 11. Little could do more to underscore the failure of America's iraq adventure than the bombing of US weapons systesm by US fighter planes in northern Iraq in recent weeks. They also had to eliminate armored vehicles and mobile artillery units that they had once delivered to the Iraqi army -- and which fell into the hands of the Islamic State in June.
