engel. reporter: isis today hit back with a sneak attack on a government complex in the city of kierkuk where they exchanged fire with security forces. isis may be trying to slow down the assault on mosul. it doesn t seem to be working. iraqi troops say they pushed within just four miles of the city. the isis capital in iraq. the biggest battle was for control of the town of bartella on mosul s eastern doorstep. to reach the front, we climbed into an iraqi special forces old american humvee shot and nearly blown up by isis bomb. iraqi troops brought in the heaviest weapons. isis fought back with suicide bombers. but all this was music to the iraqi soldiers ears. we ll win, god willing. be in mosul in days. isis does seem to be retreating from some of its positions.
isis and now and has been a bigger threat. i don t think it is conclusive that said that aircraft was brought down by an oh, sis bomb. there are 75 investigators and four countries are represented. it is scattered in the desert and no one said they have one piece of forensic evidence with burn fragments or periods or luggage or going to indicate it was a bomb. i am not quite there. i think if some of those things were out there, we would have heard about it already. most of the authorities that are experiencing an opinion are not willing to be named publicly. obviously the various investigating agencies have to come to that conclusion. one official said 99 percent certain it was a bomb and
mistakes, but he did correct. we can t rewrite history here. there was a real misunderstanding of what happened when the iraqi army was taken down and a slow ability to adjust. i know you are out campaigning but you still are doing your day job. do you have any insights from the intelligence that s being reported, especially from the british and what david cameron had to say about the plane and whether or not it could have been a bomb? no. i just don t think david would have said that if he didn t believe it but i m going to let my government lead on this. for the british prime minister, i know very well, to say that particularly when the egyptian president s standing by him is pretty compelling. let me just tell the viewers this. if isil did not do this, they would like to and they would like to do worse. so we really do have to degrade and destroy these people. but if it is an isil-inspired coordinated attack, that shows reach and coordination and lethality outside of syria and i
related because we were told early on that the passenger lists were vetted by u.s. and foreign, uk and others, and that they didn t see any suspicious indicators among the passengers on the plane. that s a very good point. i think the manifest was scrubbed pretty well so the passenger list didn t seem to raise any flags. i think what we re concerned about is did it get through, if a bomb was put on the plane, could it have gotten through the screening at the airport. i think what seems to be a more likely probable scenario would be some sort of insider threat where this could have been put on the plane by somebody compromised at the airport who could have put the luggage in the cargo hold of the plane itself. but that s just really speculation at this point. but if there was a bomb on the plane, that seems to be the more likely route. finally, the tsa has not done anything, we are told, to increase security at american airports and we don t have
u.s. and british officials putting into high likelihood a bomb brought down that plane. senator john mccain joins me now. i know this is not conclusive evidence and u.s. intelligence is being more cautious than the brits right now but you have the prime minister standing next to the egyptian leader and calling putin today and saying this is a high likelihood. that certainly indicates they have heard something. i think they heard something. just on the face of it, planes made by airbus do not break up at 30,000 feet. also, as we all know, there was a so-called heat flash. that could have been a lot of things, but generally speaking, it means some kind of explosion took place. now, it could have been a fuel explosion, but that s in my view unlikely. finally, you know a lot of the airports, particularly where this one took off, probably