Update for Wednesday, January 20, 2016

The UN reports that nearly 19,000 Iraqi civilians died violently between January 2014 and October 2015, with an additional 36,000 wounded and 3.5 million people displaced. Most of the responsibility falls on IS. The UN also reports that IS holds about 3,500 people as slaves, many of them women and girls kept for sexual exploitation.
The three Americans kidnapped on Friday have been publicly identified. They are reportedly held by a Shiite militia but there is no evidence that Iran is involved. They are identified as Amro Mohammed, an Egyptian-American, Wael al-Mahdawy, an Iraqi-American, and Russel Furat, an Iraqi-American woman. At least two of them work for General Dynamics and were training Iraqi troops. They were kidnapped because they are U.S. citizens. The report about the location from which they were taken being a brothel was apparently fictitious. (And the source, to which I did not link, was Fox News.)

Satellite images show IS has destroyed the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq.

Amnesty International accuses Kurdish troops of destroying Arab villages under their control, using bulldozers, explosives, and arson.

The U.S. is said to have taken control of an airfield in Kurdish controlled territory in Syria. If so, it is extraordinary that this has not been reported in the U.S. CentCom neither affirms nor denies it. This means, of course, that U.S. forces now occupy Syrian territory.