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A woman rests near rubble in the Syrian town of Darat Izza in Aleppo Province on February 28.
A woman rests near rubble in the Syrian town of Darat Izza in Aleppo Province on February 28.

Live Blog: Tracking Islamic State

Follow all of the latest developments as they happen.

Latest News For February 29

-- The United States Army's elite Delta Force is on the verge of beginning operations to target, capture or kill top IS operatives in Iraq, after several weeks of covert preparation, an administration official with direct knowledge of the force's activities told CNN.

-- Syrian government forces have regained control of a road used by the army to access Aleppo, after making advances against Islamic State fighters, a monitoring group and state television reported.


-- Authorities in Iraq say the death toll from a double bombing at a market in Baghdad’s Shi’ite neighborhood of Sadr City rose to 73 on February 29 after several critically wounded victims died overnight.

-- Tajik media are reporting that a woman known to be the second wife of Gulmurod Halimov, the fugitive Tajik colonel who defected to the IS group, has left for Syria along with the couple's four young children.

-- The UN is poised to begin delivering aid to people living in besieged areas of Syria, making use of a truce brokered by the United States and Russia. The first deliveries are planned for Feb. 29, with aid due to reach about 150,000 Syrians in besieged areas over the next five days.

-- A truce negotiated between Syrian rebels and the government has caused a dramatic decrease in airstrikes around rebel-held territory, but there were few celebrations, with many residents suspecting a trick, CNN report.

* NOTE: Live blog posts are time-stamped according to Central European Time (CET).

17:36 16.12.2015

Reuters has more on the reports that IS has fired on the Bashiqa military base in northern Iraq where Turkish troops are stationed.

Kurdish military sources including Jabbar Yawar, the secretary general of the Peshmerga militia, told Reuters that IS militants fired rockets at the base as part of a wider offensive against Kurdish positions near Mosul.

17:32 16.12.2015

Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence group tweets this image of a women's clothing shop in an IS-controlled area.

17:20 16.12.2015

Mahir Zeynalov of Turkey's Today's Zaman says at at least four Turkish soldiers have been wounded in an attack by the IS group on the Bashiqa base in northern Iraq.

17:19 16.12.2015

The U.S. Department of Defense has tweeted these photographs of Defense Secretary Carter's meeting today with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

17:17 16.12.2015

The Kremlin has denied Iranian media reports that Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani visited Moscow recently for a meeting with Russian President Putin.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov simply answered "no" to a question from a TASS reporter about whether such a meeting had taken place.

17:14 16.12.2015

Nick de Larrinaga of Janes Defense Weekly tweets that Russian Su-34 frontline bombers in Syria are flying with a new weapon: the KAB-500-OD TV-guided bomb.

According to the Tactical Missiles Corporation website, the KAB-500-OD is a corrected air bomb "fitted with TV/terrain-matching homing heads and various types of warheads. TV homers with target data processing correlation algorithm can "remember" target location and correct bomb's flight trajectory until the impact on the target, thus realizing the "fire and forget" principle. Such homing heads can help defeat low-contrast and masked targets provided that terrain reference points and target coordinates related to them are available."

16:58 16.12.2015

Turkish state TV is now saying that the Bashiqa base in northern Iraq has been attacked by IS militants and that four Turkish soldiers have been wounded.

16:55 16.12.2015

Turkey's Hurriyet News says the source for the casualty figures of two dead and six wounded in an apparent IS shelling of the Bashiqa camp in northern Iraq is a Kurdish news website.

Some of the reports are saying that the casualties are Iraqis.

Turkey has not yet made a statement on the reports.

16:52 16.12.2015

Turkey's Daily Sabah has this update on the breaking reports that IS has shelled Turkish forces in the Bashiqa camp in northern Iraq.

Daily Sabah puts the casualty figures at two dead and six injured. It is not clear if all the casualties are Turkish.

16:50 16.12.2015

The IS group has "revolutionized" terrorism by seeking to inspire small-scale individual attacks around the world through social media, encrypted communications and slickly produced propaganda, FBI Director James Comey has said, Reuters reports.

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