ISIS militants took full control of the Iraqi town of Al-Baghdadi, west of Ramadi, early yesterday, security officials told CNN, bringing them within a few miles of an air base housing US military personnel. Now they’re closing in on the strategic Ayn al-Assad Air Base, only about 15 kilometres (9 miles) from Al-Baghdadi, the security officials said, and Iraqi forces there are calling for reinforcements.

A US defence official told CNN that no evacuations have been planned from the base.

That western front is just one of many where ISIS forces are on the move.

CNN’s Phil Black, in northern Iraq, said yesterday that Kurdish Peshmerga fighters were starting to move from the north toward the city of Sinjar, held by ISIS since the summer.

The militants’ seizure of the city provoked a major humanitarian crisis as its ethnic minority Yazidi population fled onto the rocky slopes of Mount Sinjar, where many became trapped without food and water.

The Kurdish fighters are on the offensive but face a long, difficult battle to win back the city from ISIS, whose fighters are firmly in control there.

ISIS attacked Peshmerga fighters in Sinjar on Thursday, as well as Kurdish forces positioned north of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and the town of Ba’shiqa, east of Mosul.

But it’s in Iraq’s west where ISIS militants have the momentum over the Iraqi army and Sunni tribesmen opposing them.

The ISIS fighters seized Al-Baghdadi, northwest of the capital of Baghdad, yesterday after attacking from three directions against Iraqi government forces, the security officials told CNN.

Ayn al-Assad, the largest military base in western Anbar province still under government control, is also where US instructors train Iraqi pilots.

Already, the air base is taking sporadic indirect fire from militants using rocket launchers and mortars, the officials said.

Two security officials in the Anbar provincial office told CNN that security forces inside Ayn al-Assad killed eight suicide bombers yesterday who were trying to breach the air base’s perimeter from the direction of Al-Baghdadi.

The US defence official said the US troops on the base do not feel as though they are pinned in and are not contemplating engaging ISIS on the ground.

The official reiterated what has been said many times publicly by Pentagon officials: That US forces retain the right to defend themselves if necessary, but at this point there have been no injuries to US forces at the airbase and there is no change in status.

A separate US defence official said the attack Friday by a small ISIS unit had been directed against an Iraqi Army facility on the base. The Iraqi forces defeated the attack, killing all the militants, the official said.

Coalition forces were several kilometres away and at no stage were they under direct threat from the attack, the official said.

ISIS’ media centre this week released the seventh issue of the group’s English-language propaganda magazine, Dabiq.

In it is a piece purportedly written by captive British journalist John Cantlie in which he criticises what he says is the UK government’s failure to act on his behalf, and urges his family and fiancée to forget him.

“I say thank you, thank you so much for your tireless efforts. But let it go. Leave it be and get on with your lives, all of you,” the writer says.

“What can the remnants of one family, smashed and emotionally exhausted after two years of searching, be expected to do by themselves while the government, so full of intelligence officials, think tanks, and pompous men in suits, sits back impassively and does nothing?”

Cantlie — who was kidnapped in November 2012 and is clearly acting under duress — purportedly says he feels “real anger” toward the UK government.

The online magazine published only a couple of days after ISIS released a video in which Cantlie acts as though he is reporting on Aleppo in Syria. Cantlie, who has appeared in previous ISIS videos, calls this one the “last in this series.”

The latest issue of the magazine also carries a purported interview with a 19-year-old Palestinian man from Jerusalem who is accused of working for the Israeli spy agency, Mossad.

The man, named as Muhammad Said Ismail Musallam, is quoted as saying that he was recruited and trained by Mossad before being sent into Syria to spy on ISIS. — CNN.

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