Syrian opposition fighters backed by the Turkish military took over the town of Dabiq, facing only “minimal” resistance from ISIS fighters, who had control of the town since 2014. Analysts say that ISIS token resistance was surprising, considering the fact that ISIS propaganda had depicted the battle for Dabiq as an apocalyptic final battle between Muslims and Christians, heralding the end of days. Still, ISIS theologians – perhaps sensing that the combined forces of the Syrian opposition and Turkey would easily defeat the ISIS forces in Dabiq — two weeks ago offered an interpretation in ISIS al-Naba online publication, saying that the battle at Dabiq would not, after all, herald the apocalypse.

Domestic terrorism in the United States “is not just a function of a couple of militia related guys taking over something out West. It’s not just a bunch of white supremacist in white hoods,” says Thomas Brzozowski was appointed to lead the Justice Department’s new domestic terrorism office a year ago. In the past, a host of groups such as anarchists and the Ku Klux Klan have been under surveillance by the federal government. When the FBI was formed in the early twentieth century, communists and later anti-war activists, women’s rights organizations, and civil rights groups came to be viewed as domestic threats. Brzozowski says that today’s Justice Department is more sensitive to the free exercise of civil liberties.

The plague of Black Death infamy has had the power to strike fear in people since the Middle Ages — and for good reason. Once someone begins to show symptoms, the disease progresses very quickly and is almost 100 percent fatal without prompt treatment. Antibiotic-resistant Y. pestis strains have been isolated from plague patients and can be engineered for use as a bioweapon. Researchers have developed new potential vaccines that protect animals against the bacteria that causes the deadly plague.

Relentless air and ground attacks by the U.S.-led coalition have been inflicting increasing pain on ISIS – from killing more than 50,000 ISIS fighters, decimating the organization’s leadership, and forcing it to abandon vast swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. A new study found that another victim of ISIS’s accumulating defeats has been the organization’s vaunted propaganda machine. The Islamist group’s propaganda specialist shave been producing only a small number of videos and images compared to their prodigious output two years ago.

Territory controlled by the Islamic State shrunk by 16 percent in the first nine months of 2016. In 2015, the Islamic State’s caliphate shrunk from 90,800 km2 to 78,000 km2, a net loss of 14 percent. In the first nine months of 2016, that territory shrunk again by a further 16 percent. As of 3 October 2016, the Islamic State controls roughly 65,500 km2 in Iraq and Syria, which is roughly the size of Sri Lanka. The flow of foreign fighters to ISIS has dried up as the Islamist organization continues to lose ground.

A new World Bank study found that contrary to popular notions, recruits to ISIS are better educated than their average countryman. Moreover, those offering to become suicide bombers ranked on average in the more educated group. The report is based on an analysis of 22,000 leaked ISIS documents obtained by German intelligence. The documents include questionnaires of each would-be recruit. The questionnaires contain information on 3,803 foreign recruits who joined the terrorist group between 2013 and 2014.

The House Homeland Security Committee says that we should to take stock of the “work the House of Representatives has done and continues to do to address the persistent threat we face from radical Islamist terrorists.” The House has passed dozens of bills aimed at bolstering U.S. efforts to fight terror at home and abroad, and the House Homeland Security Committee will “continue to lead the charge to do more to protect our homeland and our allies.”

Former British topless model, 27, arrested for communicating with ISIS recruiters and distributing violent ISIS propaganda videos on social networks. He contact was a British citizens calling himself Abu Usamah al-Britani, a known ISIS recruiter operating out of Syria. Terrorism experts say his “specialty” is trying to persuade young Western women to come to Syria to marry jihadist fighters.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the military campaign by Russia and Syria against civilians in Aleppo amounts to a war crime, and that the UN must launch a war crime investigation into the two countries’ actions. Military analysts noted that the Russian and Syrian campaign aims not only to kill civilians directly by dropping barrel bombs on Sunni neighborhood. Assad and his Russian allies deliberately increase the death toll by using bunker-busting munitions systematically to destroy the city’s civilian infrastructure — hospitals, clinics, water treatment facilities, and power stations. The analysts say that Assad’s ultimate goal is to make life in the city impossible, thus forcing hundreds of thousands of Sunnis to flee, making it easier for his Alawite and Shi’a forces to control the city once they recapture it from the rebels.