Hannah Allam

Faced with an outraged public and political commentary that it had been humiliated by the Islamic State, the Jordanian government got a little payback Wednesday at dawn, hanging jailed militants to avenge the extremist group's killing of a captured pilot.

Mohamed Thaban al Shiblawy was prepared for this moment from the time he was a boy, with lessons about the protocols of battle from tribal lore and old photos that show his rifle-toting grandfather astride a horse during the 1920 uprising against the British occupation of Iraq.

The mortars rained down for 12 hours, an eternity for members of the Hassan family who huddled together in a single room, the children screaming and the adults praying to die in the shelling rather than be slaughtered by the Islamic State militants who rampaged into the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar two weeks ago.

The turbaned clerics, powerful dynasts and militia commanders who run this Shiite Muslim holy city have plenty of gripes about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.

Hopes that Iraqi politicians would rapidly form a new government to help counter the advance of Islamist gunmen and win U.S. help were dashed on Tuesday after Sunni Muslim and Kurdish members of the Iraqi Parliament walked out of what was to have been their first session since elections in April.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria sprang from a largely self-funded, corporation-style prototype whose resilience to counterterrorism operations was proven by the time Abu Bakr al Baghdadi assumed command in 2010.

Abul Waleed rifled through a pile of papers, considering the latest accusations against the elite brigade of Iraqi police commandos he leads from a dusty fortress. The complaints against the Wolf Brigade were the usual: excessive force, renegade patrols, kidnapping, murder. The charges came from Iraq's most powerful Sunni Muslim leaders, and Abul Waleed clearly relished reading them. It's precisely this take-no-prisoners reputation that's made his Wolf Brigade the most feared and revered of all of Iraq's nascent security forces.

On Day Four of clashes in Mosul between encroaching jihadists and Iraqi security forces, two officers visited an outpost of the Iraqi 2nd Division’s logistics battalion with bad news: they said that all senior commanders had fled.

Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, leader of the jihadist powerhouse that’s steamrolling across northwestern Iraq, remains a cypher despite his years in an American-run prison and the $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki urged his parliament Tuesday to declare a nationwide state of emergency after militants from an al Qaida offshoot seized control of a large swath of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in a humiliating sequence of events that saw Iraq’s U.S.-trained security forces abandon their posts, lay down their weapons and flee.

Just before Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl slowly walked away from five years as a POW, something remarkable happened.

After nearly five years in Taliban custody, Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was released to U.S. Special Forces commandos in mere seconds, in a tense but smooth scene that unfolded in a rugged patch of eastern Afghanistan as shown in a video released by the Taliban early Wednesday.

After three days of sidestepping the issue, U.S. military leaders are tentatively addressing the desertion controversy surrounding the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

For all the yellow ribbons strewn across his hometown in Idaho and the gratitude expressed by his parents in an emotional visit to the White House on Saturday, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will receive a hero’s welcome when he returns to the United States after nearly five years in Taliban captivity.

President Barack Obama’s top national security aides on Sunday defended the deal that freed an Army sergeant captured in Afghanistan in exchange for five senior Taliban officials held at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba even as the Taliban’s leader hailed the release as “a great victory.”