A suicide bomber detonated his explosives inside a husseiniya, or Shi'ite mosque, in central Baghdad on Aug. 25, leaving at least 13 dead. Three were killed and several wounded in two other car bombings elsewhere in Baghdad. Another 23 were killed in car bombings at the Shi'ite holy city of Karbala and nearby al-Hilla. (IraqiNews.com, IraqiNews.com, IraqiNews.com, BBC News, NYT) A Kurdish MP in Iraq's parliament called on new Prime Minister Haidar Abadi to either arm the Kurdistan Regional Government or permit it to seek arms elsewhere. "It is crucial for the new government of Baghdad to give weapons to Peshmerga forces and train them as part of the Iraqi army or allow the Kurdistan Region to be able to buy weapons from other countries," said MP Shwan Mohammed Taha. "Today, Peshmerga forces protect 20% of Iraq's border and our demands are not unconstitutional. Putting Peshmerga forces in the security system of Iraq is a constitutional demand." (BasNews) Iranian Kurdish guerilla fighters that crossed the border to fight ISIS in the Jalawla and Khanaqen areas were prevented by the continued presence of Iranian government forces, according to the BasNews independent new agency. Tehran denies reports that Iranian forces are fighting in Iraq. (BasNews)

US jets and drones carried out air-strikes outside Erbil Aug. 8 in an effort to drive back the ISIS advance on the Kurdish regional capital. The targets included ISIS positions  in Makhmour, about 60 kilometers southwest of Erbil, and a convoy of seven vehicles headed towards the city. The Pentagon said four aircraft executed two passes over the convoy, dropping a total of eight laser-guided bombs. (IraqNews) Peshmerga forces are delivering aid by helicopter to the besieged Yazidis on Mount Shingal. The aid was provided by Rwanga Foundation, run by Kurdish politician Idris Nechirvan Barzani. The number of those stranded on the mountain has been upped to some 100,000. US aircraft have also dropped supplies to the mountaintop. (Rudaw) Iraqi military planes struck the ISIS-held town of Gwier, outside Mosul, claiming some 130 militants dead and several humvees destroyed. (BasNews)

Days after declaring a new "caliphate" and formally renaming itself simply the "Islamic State," to emphasize its pretensions to world domination, ISIS has claimed possession of at least one Scud ballistic missile. The militant group published photographs of what appeared to be a Scud paraded on the back on a truck surrounded by masked men in the Syrian city of Raqqa—the proclaimed capital of their "caliphate." The missile was presumably seized from either Iraqi or Syrian military forces. In a voice-over with the video message, "caliph" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi issued a worldwide call to jihad, beseeching Muslims to rise up and avenge wrongs committed against their faith from Central African Republic to Burma. (Al Arabiya, July 2)

Six suspected militants were killed in a presumed US drone strike on Miranshah Tehsil in North Waziristan, Pakistan, June 18. This time, the drone attack comes amid Pakistani air-strikes on militant strongholds in the region—causing 150,000 to flee their homes in recent days. A camp for displaced people has been set up near Bannu, on the border with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, but it lacks food, water and electricity. The Pakistan Army has mobilized tanks and troops, in addition to fighter jets, and is expected to begin a new, more intense phase of what has been dubbed "Operation Zarb-e-Azb" after a three-day window to allow civilians to leave the area ends. Chinese authoriites claim that Uighur members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) are among the militants killed in the Pakistani air-strikes. (Newsweek Pakistan, June 20; CNN, BBC News, June 19; Xinhua, June 15)

US drone strikes on two targets in North Waziristan June 12, ending a nearly six-month halt in the Pakistan drone campaign. The  strikes killed at least 16 presumed militants in the villages of Dargah Mandi and Danda Darpa Khel, both outisde the tribal districts' main town of Miramshah. Dargah Mandi is said to be a stronghold of the Haqqani Network. Four of the six killed there were said to be Uzbeks. The strikes came just days after the Taliban launched a deadly attack on Karachi airport that killed 37 people. That attack ended a tentative peace process with the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, who in 2007 launched an insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives. (Dawn, June 12; Long War Journal, June 11)

The Islamabad High Court on June 5 ordered the arrest of former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official Jonathan Banks for his involvement in a 2009 drone strike that killed civilians. Kareem Khan, whose brother and son were killed in the drone strike in Waziristan, had petitioned the court to charge Banks with murder. Banks left Pakistan in 2010 after his identity was revealed and is unlikely to return to Pakistan to face charges. Nevertheless, activists such as the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which represented Khan, welcomed the ruling and expressed hope that it would set a precedent for additional charges against US officials.

The United States has deployed 80 troops to Chad to assist in efforts to find the abducted Nigerian schoolgirls, who are believed to have been absconded across the border. "The force, made up largely of Air Force personnel, will conduct surveillance flights and operate drone aircraft but will not participate in ground searches," the Washington Post informs us. While the deployment was announced by President Obama in a "War Powers Notification" letter sent to House and Senate leadership, the troops are actually there to maintain the drones—not to actually tramp through the forests in search for the missing girls. The drones are ostensibly unarmed and only for surveillance purposes. (Mashable, May 21)

Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report (PDF) on May 12 finding that the use of fully autonomous weapons by militaries or law enforcement would be an affront to basic human rights and should be preemptively banned by international convention. The report, entitled "Shaking the Foundations: The Human Rights Implications of Killer Robots," was jointly authored by HRW and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic . It questions the ability of autonomous weapons to comply with international humanitarian law. According to the report, robots could not be pre-programmed to handle every circumstance, and thus fully autonomous weapons would be prone to carrying out arbitrary killings when encountering unforeseen situations. Because it is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future that robots could be developed to have human qualities such as judgment and empathy, fully autonomous weapons will not be able to effectively comply with human rights laws.