bill neely, it sounds as if the situation has deteriorated fairly quickly. reporter: yeah, very quickly indeed and you ve now got turkish troops or turkish-led troops facing president assad s forces. and don t forget, these are not regular turkish troops. these are turkish militias. they re, in fact, the old free syria army, in other words, rebels in a new uniform. and they re islamists, many of them. we saw very disturbing video yesterday craig of kurdish prisoners being executed by one of these groups. u.s. officials tell nbc news that some of the turkish militias contain members of al qaeda, and old isis members. so assad s forces are now facing a very old enemy, the rebels, and they re also facing a very old external enemy in president erdogan. remember, erdogan was calling for assad to be removed years
breaking news out of iraq tonight. militants believed to be isis extremist fighters taking more territory regaining control of the refinery in baijii, and gaining ground in parts of the kurdish north. arwa damon witnessed the fighting there. reporter: the battle lines drawn but for over a week, not crossed. then came the isis assaults. they came at us from three directions, colonel ahmed tells us. the battle lasted for six hours. in the distance, an iraqi iraqi military vehicle commandeered by isis. the intersection at this combat outpost is protectinging is increw credibly strategic. saddam hussein s hometown. to the north, the oil rich city of kirkuk. sewell i ma nia to the east and then to the south, a two-hour drive, a straight shot to the capital.
a lot of people would be shocked, see the video slickly produced by isis, targeting and geared towards westerners trying to encourage americans, brits, french, and other westerners to join isis forces to hear these guys speaking english with a british accent. it obviously doesn t surprise you. you know about all this firsthand. but, what draws some of these guys to this cause, to leave their life in england or america, and go there. i think we have to look at a combination of perception of grievance, grievance to the wider world, foreign policy, to, to their place in their societies in which they were born, identity, links into it as well. but we also have to consider ideology because ultimately it is the ideological world view that allows them to redefine themselves from being british south asians to being people that feel they have more in common with arabs in syria and iraq than they do with either
checkpoints and creating traffic jams but clearly incapable of stopping the offensive that isis insurgents have launched. speak to the sunni leadership, they ll tell you america needs to learn from the lessons of its deadly era that it spent here and realize if it it s going to get involved in iraq, it needs to reach out to the sunni tribes. they ll not turn on isis till they say malaki is out of power. nick in, baghdad over the weekend, we saw this huge show of force, this huge parade by the militia linked to muqtada al sadr, the shia cleric in sadr city and baghdad. i know you covered this. how are thesemy lish az going to be used? i mean with so much territory being lost, why are they parading around the streets? shouldn t they actually be doing something? yeah, it s kind of a double message there. i mean part of the message was
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