Jonathan Landay

U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria are likely to last “for years,” a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday, as the United States began to assess the impact of three waves of aerial assaults launched in the early morning hours that targeted both Islamic State installations in eastern Syria and facilities housing a shadowy al-Qaida group further west.

President Barack Obama on Thursday asked Congress for the first lethal aid to arm moderate Syrian rebels in a move aimed against both Syrian President Bashar Assad and radical Islamists who have increasingly dominated the opposition movement.

After taking a hands-off approach toward the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria for several months, the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad has reversed course and launched air attacks against the Sunni Muslim extremist group inside both Syria and Iraq.

McClatchy DC's Jonathan S. Landay appears on CNN's Reliable Sources to discuss the media coverage of recent events in Iraq following how reporting was handled during the buildup to war in 2003.

Ninety U.S. military advisers arrived in Baghdad on Tuesday to begin assessing Iraqi security forces’ ability to regain control of the embattled country, with the Pentagon acknowledging for the first time that the Iraqi capital could fall to Islamist militants.

An American leader of al Qaida based overseas could be killed without violating international or U.S. law because he was a senior member of a terrorist group who posed a continuous threat to the United States and whose capture wasn’t feasible, according to a Justice Department memorandum that was declassified Monday.

President Barack Obama’s decision to send up to 300 U.S. military advisers to Iraq is a limited move to stiffen the beleaguered Iraqi government and army against an Islamist extremist-led revolt that reflects the president’s aversion and the American public to U.S. intervention in the sectarian bloodletting.

Even as it blocks deliveries of food and other crucial aid, the Syrian government allows the Syrian Arab Red Crescent through its siege lines into rebel-held areas to immunize children against polio.

The Syrian government carried off its anointment of President Bashar Assad to another seven years in office on Tuesday pretty much as everyone had expected it would _ with a huge celebratory turnout in government-controlled areas, angry denunciations from the United States that the exercise was illegitimate, and a surprising lack of rebel efforts to disrupt the balloting.

Hungry, encircled by better-armed Syrian troops and desperate to flee the Islamist rebels who’d tortured him for months before forcing him to join them, Alaa al Dagastani seized his chance during a U.N.-brokered evacuation of civilians from the shell-blasted ruins of the Old City of Homs.

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.

As the cavalcade rolled down the sun-baked boulevard, young men leaning from the vehicles’ windows interspersed calls to vote for President Bashar Assad with choruses of a popular song blaring from roof-mounted speakers.

And then there were 23.

The Air Force’s top general appeared to be losing his cool. But it wasn’t over a controversial plan to scrap an aircraft prized for protecting ground troops or billions of dollars in cuts that are straining a service striving to recover from the grind of 12 years of war.

In comments to reporters Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said there was strong evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons, including chlorine gas, in 14 small-scale attacks since Syria agreed to join the world’s ban on such weapons last fall.