In a secret raid in Libya, U.S. Special Operations forces have captured Ahmed Abu Khattala, who is suspected of being one of the ringleaders of the attack on the embassy in Benghazi.

+ With ISIS within 100 miles of Baghdad, Iran has reportedly offered Iraq “everything it needs” including the use of its army and spies.

+ New Republic asks an expert: What in God’s Name is Going on in Iraq?

+ “The overwhelming majority of their money comes from criminal activities like bank heists, extortion, robberies, and smuggling.” From FP, how ISIS operates like the mafia.

+ The Atlantic: How ISIS Games Twitter.

+ “She came into Baghdad after months in one of the world’s most forbidding deserts, a stoic, diminutive 45-year-old English woman with her small band of men. She had been through lawless lands, held at gunpoint by robbers, taken prisoner in a city that no Westerner had seen for 20 years.” From The Daily Beast: Gertrude of Arabia, the Woman Who Invented Iraq.