During the final few nights of the Democratic National Convention, the politically-minded users of Twitter dot com noticed a phenomenon: Republican commentators openly lamenting that their party’s convention had been surpassed in the category of “patriotic fuckfest” by the Democratic party they had at one point successfully branded as only for anti-war pants-pissers.

After months of bureaucratic wrangling, the Obama administration has disclosed its official count of civilians killed in airstrikes outside of conventional war zones: Somewhere between 64 and 116 since 2009. Strangely enough, the administration chose to release the numbers on the Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend.

Early Monday morning, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi went on live TV to announce the launch of a military campaign to retake the city of Fallujah, which has been controlled by ISIS since early 2014.

Today, The Intercept began the process of making the archive of documents provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden available to the wider public, beginning with the first three months of SIDtoday, an internal, top secret agency newsletter that began publishing 11 days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The files are available for download here.

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.

The first thing I thought when I saw this footage from inside the Iraqi parliament today was, perhaps inappropriately, “Shit’s popping off!” It’s maybe not the most eloquent way to report the news—but an accurate one.

The job might be a bit different, but the Islamic State apparently has HR issues just like anywhere else.

History regularly offers up events that turn out to be litmus tests for political courage, wisdom, and judgment. The last one was the Iraq War. The new one is the candidacy of Donald Trump.

On Sunday, a fuel tanker rigged with explosives detonated at a checkpoint south of Baghdad, Reuters reports, killing at least 60 people and wounding at least 70 more. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Donald Trump is finally starting to talk some sense.

Responding quickly to BuzzFeed’s newly uncovered interview in which Donald Trump advocates for invading Iraq, Anderson Cooper asked the man himself if he remembered answering in the affirmative. In response, Trump comes as close to breaking character as we’ve seen him yet. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

At the Republican debate on Saturday, Donald Trump declared, “I’m the only one on this stage that said: ‘Do not go into Iraq. Do not attack Iraq.’ Nobody else on this stage said that. And I said it loud and strong.” This is—as the man himself might say—a big fat lie.

At least three Americans were kidnapped by militants in southern Baghdad on Saturday, according to several American and Iraqi news outlets. An unnamed official of the city’s police force confirmed the group’s disappearance to The Washington Post on Sunday evening, but their precise identities, and why exactly they were kidnapped, were initially unclear:

At least 17 people were killed when Islamic State militants attacked a shopping mall in Baghdad on Monday night, the New York Times reports. Five members of the Iraqi security forces were among the dead. Forty people were wounded.

Following several months of fighting, Iraqi forces, supported by a U.S.-led airstrikes, drove Islamic State fighters out of the center of Ramadi, military officials said Monday. Ramadi is the provincial capital of Anbar province. It fell to ISIS in May.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told Congress that the United States military will deploy a new, permanent “expeditionary force” to Iraq, escalating the fight there against ISIS.

Ahmed Chalabi, a con artist who spent a decade convincing America’s foreign policy establishment to topple a dictator so the Chalabi family could resume extracting their home nation’s wealth, died of a heart attack today, about 15 years too late. If you haven’t read it in a while (or at all), now is a good time to revisit Jane Mayer’s 2004 account of how long and how hard Chalabi worked to make regime change in Iraq the main foreign policy priority of a bunch of deeply stupid but powerful people, who grew to believe, despite of the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, that the deeply unscrupulous exile could be a credible leader of a secular and democratic Iraq.

Later today, the White House will announce a “shift” in the the U.S. policy against ISIS that will include sending a small group of special operations forces into northern Syria, according to NBC News. The reported announcement will come eight days after an American commando was killed while freeing hostages from ISIS fighters in Iraq.

U.S. defense officials said one American soldier was killed Thursday morning as Special Forces and Iraqi troops raided an ISIS-run prison in northern Iraq, the first U.S. soldier killed in action in Iraq since 2011.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for a car bombing at a market in Khan Bani Saad, in Iraq’s Diyala province, that killed at least 115 adults and children on Friday, Al Jazeera reports. The group said it was targeting Shiites celebrating the end of Ramadan.