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Welcome to your mid-week edition of CNN STUDENT NEWS.
We're catching you up on stories from around the world and we're doing it without commercials.
I'm Carl Azuz.
First up, Iraqi forces say they're fighting back.
They're trying to retake control of two provinces in western and central Iraq from the Islamic State terrorist group.
ISIS expanded its territory last week,capturing the city of Ramadi.
It's 70 miles away from the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said that the Iraqi army in Ramadi vastly outnumbered the ISIS fighters but that it didn't want to fight.
An Iraqi soldier put the blame on military leadership and said the army didn't have enough supplies or support.
But all this has renewed international pressure on the U.S. government, to do more to fight ISIS, following the terrorist group's two key victories last week.
Arguably, this is the terror group's best week in a year.
Combine their battlefield successes, ISIS' biggest strategic gains since they swept across Iraq last summer.
In Syria, the radical Islamists now control more than half the country, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The latest attack added more oil and gas fields, more ancient artifacts, and a key highway intersection, all potential money owners.
They also cemented their control of Syria's border crossings into Iraq, taking Tanf, the last outside the Kurdish region not already under their control.
Their advances at times hard to follow.
It's hard for us to nail down with any sort of granularity exactly what's happening on the ground.
So, this is something we're following.
The speed of ISIS's Syrian advance questions the ability or willingness of President Bashar al-Assad's forces to hold ground.
Local reports describe the Syrian army fleeing Palmyra.
By design or default, he is losing the east of Syria to ISIS.
