NEW YORK (AP) — Iran's foreign minister on Wednesday ruled out cooperating with the United States in helping Iraq fight Islamic State militants and warned that the terrorist group poses a much broader global threat that needs new thinking to eradicate.

Mohammad Javad Zarif said Iran has serious doubts about the willingness and ability of the United States to react seriously to the "menace" from the Islamic State group "across the board" and not just pick and choose where to confront it as it has just started doing in Iraq.

"This is a very mobile organization," he told the Council on Foreign Relations. "This is not a threat against a single community nor a threat against a single region. It was not confined to Syria, nor will it be confined to Iraq. It is a global threat."

The U.S.-Iranian relationship is at a delicate moment, with a new round of talks on a deal to rein in Iran's nuclear program set to begin on Thursday, which Zarif said is his top priority. Leaders of the two countries — who talked a year ago — are also arriving next week for the annual ministerial meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

Iran was the first country to provide help to neighboring Iraq when the Islamic State group swept across the border from Syria in July. France wanted Iran to attend an international conference in Paris on Monday aimed at coordinating actions to crush the Islamic State extremists in Iraq, but the United States said "no."

Zarif called the 24 participating nations at the Paris conference "a coalition of repenters" because most supported the Islamic State group "in one form or another" from its inception following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

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An Islamic State militant (L) stands next to residents as they hold pieces of wreckage from a Syrian …

At the end of the day, he said, they created "a Frankenstein that came to haunt its creators."

Zarif said Iran's assistance — without any troops — helped Iraq prevent the Islamic State group from taking over Baghdad and the Kurdish capital Irbil.

Zarif said it's now time for the international community "and particularly the coalition of the repenters" to stop providing financing, military equipment and safe passage for the group and its fighters.

He didn't name any coalition members, but Saudi Arabia and Qatar provided financing to the al-Qaida breakaway group, and Turkey has not stopped thousands of foreign fighters from crossing into Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State group.

Zarif said the international community must begin to deal with the resentment and disenfranchisement that allows the Islamic State group to attract young people from the Middle East to Europe and the United States.

The international community, he said, must also recognize that in a globalized world problems can't be solved through coercion, exclusion or imposing solutions.

Zarif agreed with U.S. President Barack Obama that the group is neither Islamic nor a state so he referred to it by a previous name, ISIS. But he was critical of the U.S. approach to dealing with the threat from the group.

In Iraq, where the U.S. is carrying out airstrikes, Zarif said, "it will not be eradicated through aerial bombardment."

In Syria, where the U.S. is beefing up military support for the moderate opposition to confront the extremists and step up opposition to President Bashar Assad's government, he said, "you cannot fight ISIS and the government in Damascus together."

When Zarif was asked what circumstances could lead the two countries to collaborate or even discuss the threat posed by the Islamic State group in Iraq, he said he told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that Iran has two fundamental principles — "it should be for the Iraqis to decide and we should not be rewarding terrorists."

He also implicitly criticized the U.S. for supporting Iraq's new Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to replace Nouri al-Malaki, saying Iraqis must be allowed to determine their own politics.

"And that was one of the problems we had in the initial approach by the United States, and that is why we turned it down," Zarif said.

Iran rules out cooperation with U.S.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says his country will not work with the America to eradicate the Islamic State.
Tehran's principles

Australian police: Raids thwarted beheading plot

A rare, potentially severe respiratory virus that has sickened children in more than a dozen states has surfaced in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, health officials said late on Wednesday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed three new cases of enterovirus EV-D68 in the tri-state area.

• In Connecticut, 6-year-old girl was treated at Yale-New Haven Hospital last week and released. The Connecticut Department of Public Health said there are suspected cases at four other Connecticut hospitals.

• In New Jersey, health officials said a child who had been hospitalized in Philadelphia was confirmed to have the virus.

• In New York, one of the 12 confirmed cases of the virus previously confirmed in the state is in New York City, NBC News reported. And on Lond Island, a girl was hospitalized earlier in the month and is now recovering at home, the Nassau County Health Department said.

According to the CDC, a total of 140 people in 16 states (Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Virginia) have been confirmed to have the respiratory illness caused by EV-D68.

There are more than 100 types of enteroviruses, which cause mild cold-like symptoms for up to 15 million people in the U.S. each year. But this particular strain of the virus, first identified in California in 1962, can be severe, the CDC said.

Mild symptoms may include fever, runny nose, sneezing, coughing, and body and muscle aches, while those who have been hospitalized have had difficulty breathing.

Infants and children are at particular risk, because they do not yet have immunity from previous exposures to the viruses, the CDC said, noting that in Missouri and Illinois, children with asthma seemed to have a higher risk of coming down with the respiratory illness.

There is no specific treatment for people with EV-D68 and no vaccine to prevent it.

To protect yourself and your children, the CDC recommends the following:

• Wash hands often with soap and water for 20 seconds, especially after changing diapers.
• Avoid touching eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands.
• Avoid kissing, hugging, and sharing cups or eating utensils with people who are sick.
• Disinfect frequently touched surfaces, such as toys and doorknobs, especially if someone is sick.

"We want parents, especially if they know their children are prone to asthma, if they get a common cold, watch it closely," Dr. Lawrence Eisenstein told WABC-TV. "If there's any sign of wheezing ... they should reach out to their medical provider."

Rare respiratory virus surfaces in 3 new states

Health officials confirm new cases of EV-D68 in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
Infants and children more at risk

Washington (AFP) - US aircraft have targeted a training camp for Islamic State jihadists in northern Iraq, bombing buildings, fighters and vehicles in the first such air strike, military officers said Thursday.

"In total, one air strike near an ISIL (Islamic State group) training camp southeast of Mosul destroyed an ISIL armed vehicle, two ISIL-occupied buildings and a large ISIL ground unit," the US Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, said in a statement.

It was the first time US aircraft had targeted a training camp since the air campaign began on August 8, a US military officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

About 40 jihadist fighters were on the ground at the time of the strike, the officer said.

A second air raid damaged an IS ammunition depot southeast of Baghdad, according to Central Command.

The air strikes, which involved both bombers and fighter jets, took place over the past 24 hours and "all aircraft exited the strike areas safely," it said.

US warplanes have conducted 176 air strikes against the Sunni extremists since August 8, mostly in northern Iraq.

President Barack Obama has vowed a relentless campaign against the IS group, which has seized a large swath of territory in Syria and Iraq.

U.S. targets IS training camp in Iraq for first time

About 40 militants were on the ground near Mosul at the time of the strike, military officers say.
Second raid near Baghdad

By Tom Perry and Laila Bassam

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Islamic State fighters besieged a Kurdish city in northern Syria on Thursday after seizing 21 villages in a major assault, prompting a call to arms from Kurds in neighboring Turkey who urged followers to go and help resist the group's advance.

The attack on the city of Ayn al-Arab, known as Kobani in Kurdish, came two days after the top U.S. military officer said the Syrian opposition would probably need the help of the Syrian Kurds to defeat Islamic State.

With the United States planning to expand military action against Islamic State from Iraq to Syria, a surveillance drone was spotted over nearby Islamic State-controlled territory in Aleppo province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks Syria's civil war, said.

It was not immediately clear who was operating the drone.

U.S. President Barack Obama last week said he would not hesitate to strike the radical Islamist group that has used Syria as a base to advance its plan to reshape the Middle East according to its radical vision of Sunni Islam.

The United States is conducting air strikes against Islamic State in Iraq and last month Obama authorized surveillance flights over Syria.

Islamic State fighters, armed with heavy weaponry including tanks, seized a group of villages near Kobani in an offensive which the Observatory said had started on Tuesday night.

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An image made available on the jihadist website Welayat Salahuddin in June shows an IS militant wavi …

It said 21 villages had fallen to Islamic State in the last 24 hours as the group advanced on the city.

"We've lost touch with many of the residents living in the villages that ISIS (Islamic State) seized," Ocalan Iso, deputy head of the Kurdish forces in Kobani, told Reuters via Skype.

He said the group was committing massacres and kidnapping women in the newly-seized areas, giving the names of 28 members of a single family he said had been taken captive. It was not possible to verify his account immediately.

The Kurds were appealing for military aid from other Kurdish groups in the region including the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), he said. Support from Kurds who crossed from Turkey helped to repel an Islamic State attack on Kobani in July.

Turkish PKK rebels later issued a call for young men in Turkey's southeast to join the fight in northern Syria.

"The youth of northern Kurdistan (southeast Turkey) should go to Kobani and take part in the historic, honorable resistance," the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) said in a statement on its website.

Footage posted on YouTube on Wednesday by the YPG, the main Kurdish armed group in Syria, appeared to show Kurdish fighters armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades battling a tank flying the Islamic State's black flag west of Kobani.

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Turkish soldiers stand guard as Syrians wait behind the border fences near the southeastern town of …

TANKS, ROCKETS, ARTILLERY

About 3,000 men, women and children arrived at the Turkish border roughly 10 km (6 miles) from Kobani but were still waiting on the Syrian side after night fell, a Reuters witness said. Turkish forces stopped the crowd from crossing.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the governors of border provinces in Turkey, where Kurdish militants have waged a three-decade insurgency to push for greater autonomy, had been ordered to extend aid to refugees on Syrian side of the border.

"We're ready to help our brothers who are building up at the borders regardless of their ethnicity, religion and sect. But our priority is to deliver aid within Syria's borders," he told reporters in Ankara.

Redur Xelil, spokesman for the YPG, said Islamic State had encircled Kobani.

The group was using tanks, rockets and artillery in the attack. "We call on world powers to move to halt this barbaric assault by ISIS," he told Reuters via Skype.

Western states have expanded contact with the main Syrian Kurdish party, the PYD, since Islamic State seized wide areas of Iraq in June. The YPG, which says it has 50,000 fighters, says it should be a natural partner in a coalition the United States is trying to assemble to fight Islamic State.

But the Syrian Kurds' relationship with the West is complicated by their ties to the PKK - a group listed as a terrorist organization in many Western states because of the militant campaign it waged for Kurdish rights in Turkey.

Western officials also cite concerns about the Syrian Kurds' ambiguous relationship with President Bashar al-Assad, who has mostly left the Kurds to their own devices while focusing its firepower on insurgents fighting to unseat him. The Syrian Kurds have denied accusations of cooperating with Damascus.

Obama's plans to expand support for groups fighting Islamic State in Syria have focused on Sunni Muslim insurgents deemed moderate by Washington.

But General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that the Syrian opposition would probably need the help of the Syrian Kurds, together with the Jordanians and the Turks, to beat Islamic State in Syria.

There have recently been new signs of cooperation between the YPG and such non-Islamist insurgent groups in Aleppo province: they set up a joint operations room to direct the fight against Islamic State in that area.

Islamic State has been trying to establish control over a belt of territory near the border with Turkey, expanding out of its strongholds further east in the provinces of Raqqa and Deir al-Zor, which borders Iraq.

Residents had seen at least one drone over the Islamic State-controlled towns of al-Bab and Manbij in northeastern Aleppo province on Thursday, said Abdulrahman of the Observatory. "They hadn't seen them before," he said.

(Additional reporting by Daren Butler in Istanbul, Gulsen Solaker in Ankara and Seyhmus Cakan on the Turkey/Syria border; Editing by Janet Lawrence, Andrew Heavens and Dominic Evans)