A U.S. military service member has been killed in combat in northern Iraq, the Associated Press reports. The American, serving as an advisor to Kurdish Peshmerga troops, was killed by “direct fire” from Islamic State forces that had breached the Peshmerga’s forward line.

Two explosions tore through a peace rally, organized ahead of snap parliamentary elections, in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Saturday morning, killing at least 86 people and wounding 186.

Keith Broomfield, a 36-year-old Massachusetts native, has died in combat assisting Syrian Kurdish soldiers in a skirmish against forces of the Islamic State, the State Department confirmed Wednesday.

Kurdish authorities in Iraq say that ISIS used chemical weapons in a January 23 suicide attack against peshmerga fighters, the Associated Press reports.

State Department officials have confirmed to the New York Times and the Associated Press that the U.S. has begun selling weapons to Kurdish forces in Iraq following airstrikes on ISIS strongholds. “They are being armed from various sources,” one senior State Department official told the Times.

"Iraq is not our neighbor, ISIS is our neighbor," a Kurdish government official tells VICE. The Kurds have staked out their real estate and apparently come to an understanding with the Islamists to their south. The nation of Iraq is fast becoming a political fiction, in much the way it began.

A bomb attack on a bus carrying soldiers in Istanbul killed at least three, according to TV reports.