The White House says the U.S. is continuing air strikes on ISIS targets in Syria to eliminate a safe haven for the militants.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said Thursday, the U.S.led coalition is on the offensive, but insisted Iraq remains the top priority.
Kirby also said Baghdad is not under "imminent threat" from ISIS forces, although the terror group now controls as much as one third of Iraq's territory.
For an education on whats really happening, how it's happening and why, Al Jazeera America's "fault Lines" is taking you deep inside the troubled country.
Correspondent Josh Rushing, a U.S. Marine veteran and his team travel 600 miles across Iraq's front lines to look at the fight against ISIL, and how U.S. allies may be dividing Iraq even more. A "Fault Lines" producer says "bombing ISIS is like drinking vodka to cure a hangover"
Saturday night on Al Jazeera America, "Iraq Divided: The Fight Against ISIL" at 7pm. Find Al Jazeera America in Orlando on Bright House channel 1223, AT&T channel 1219 and Century Link channel 3740
We begin at a refugee camp in northern Iraq, where a Yazidi family buries a 19-year old woman killed escaping Mount Sinjar. The only place in the world where Yazidis are found in large numbers is northern Iraq, where they live in communities built around their religious shrines. But they feel they have no future there because they are targets of a genocide. “The minorities, like Yazidis, cannot live beside Arabs,” a man tells Fault Lines. “Even if the West and America resolves the issue, and we went back to our land - they would kill us all.” President Obama has referred to the attacks on this group as “genocide,” but no one knows exactly how many Yazidis have been killed because ISIL-held territories are off-limits to journalists and human rights workers.