FP’s Situation Report: Clinton says no to private email probe; The Islamic State executes an Israeli Arab; Corker says Obama is playing “footsie” with Putin; and much more from around the world.

By David Francis with Sabine Muscat

Hillary Clinton pushes back against a probe of her private email. The Democrats’ 2016 presidential frontrunner said emails deleted from her private account when she was secretary of state are “personal and private” and that her home Internet server would remain off-limits to investigators. FP’s Colum Lynch: “Left unsaid during a defiant yet deliberately breezy 20-minute press conference was why Clinton decided to wait two years before complying with federal rules that require official email to be preserved at the State Department.”

More on Clinton’s email below.

The Islamic State executes a young Israeli Arab hostage. The group released a disturbing new video showing the apparent execution of 19-year-old Muhammad Musallam at the hands of a child soldier. The extremists claim he was sent by the Mossad to infiltrate the group, but Musallam’s family maintains he traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State after being recruited online, FP’s Kate Brannen reports.

More on the Islamic State below.

Forget guns: U.S. non-lethal assistance still hasn’t reached Ukraine. Obama administration officials told Senate lawmakers, who are already angry over the White House’s refusal to send arms to Ukraine, that half of the $118 million in non-lethal assistance pledged for Kiev has yet to be sent. FP’s David Francis: “The admission infuriated some members of the panel, including its chairman, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who accused the Obama administration of playing ‘footsie with Russia.’”

More on Russia and Ukraine below.

Breaking this morning from the Associated Press: “Seven Marines and four soldiers were missing early Wednesday after an Army helicopter crashed during a night training exercise at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle.”

PRESS PACK: The battle over Clinton’s email is just getting started.

The Guardian’s Jon Swaine: “Clinton’s office said that she did not preserve 31,830 of the 62,320 emails she sent and received while serving as Barack Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.”

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz: “Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to quash the controversy over her use of a personal e-mail account as secretary of state with a strategy that can be reduced to two words: ‘Trust me.’”

The New York Times’ Scott Shane: “Anyone who has tried to pry information from the federal government may have been surprised on Tuesday by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s assertion that in all her emails in four years as secretary of state she never strayed into the classified realm.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler and Josh Dawsey: “Republicans said Mrs. Clinton’s responses on Tuesday showed that she couldn’t be trusted. Democrats said she had probably put the issue to rest, at least for most voters.”

Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of the Situation Report, where we’re guessing Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams are wishing the lines with Marvin Gaye’s family were a little less blurred a few summers ago.  

Contact me at david.francis@foreignpolicy.com and follow me @davidcfrancis, and spread the word about SitRep — your destination for global security news and Washington whatnot. Like what you see? Tell a friend. Tell your colleagues. Don’t like what you see? Tell me. Or holler with tips, reports, or anything else the world needs to know, and I’ll try to include it.

WHO’S WHERE WHEN TODAY

9:00 a.m. U.K. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon speaks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 9:30 a.m. Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter testify at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on “The President’s Request for Authorization to Use Force Against ISIS.” 10:00 a.m. Nigerian officials speak on the fight against Boko Haram at the Atlantic Council. 1:00 p.m. Brookings Institution hosts a panel on “Confronting National Security Threats in the Technology Age.” 2:00 p.m. Brookings Institution hosts a panel on “Israel’s Upcoming Elections.”

WHAT’S MOVING MARKETS

The Wall Street Journal’s Ira Iosebashvili and Min Zeng on the tumbling Euro: “The decline deepened a plunge that has seen the euro lose more than 11% of its value against the U.S. currency this year and brings it within 7 cents of parity, a level not seen since 2002.”

FP’s Keith Johnson: “Thanks to relentless prodding from the IMF, Ukraine seems poised to finally carry out the reforms of its energy sector that it has spent years chasing.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Bill Spindle: “Clobbered by falling oil prices, Iraq is headed over a fiscal cliff, unable to make critical investments needed to keep its oil flowing and still pay the skyrocketing costs of fighting Islamic State extremists.”

Reuters: “China’s pension fund will come under tremendous pressure to break even in coming years and as such, the government needs to gradually raise the official retirement age to salvage the finances.”

ISLAMIC STATE: The Iraqi military moves closer to taking back Tikrit as Sunnis and Shiites come together to fight the Islamic State. In Syria, U.S. supplies fall into the wrong hands.

The Wall Street Journal’s Tamer El-Ghobashy: “Iraqi government officials and military analysts say the campaign has been proceeding well for eight days, even as it exposes new domestic and international political fault lines.”

The Washington Post’s Erin Cunningham: “The cooperation in Tikrit could be a model for future battles. Still, such alliances are rare, and revenge attacks by Shiite militias on local residents could quickly destroy the goodwill.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Patrick J. McDonnell, Nabih Bulos, and W.J. Hennigan: “In recent days, Al Nusra and its adherents have gleefully uploaded images of foodstuffs and weapons purportedly captured after the group’s forces commandeered the former bastion of a U.S.-backed rebel faction known as Harakat Hazm, or Resolve Movement.”

The New York Times’ David D. Kirkpatrick details how the Islamic State gained traction in Libya.

AFGHANISTAN: SIGAR issues another damning report on U.S. money in Afghanistan as a suicide bomb claims at least seven lives.

Bloomberg’s Anthony Capaccio: “Billions of dollars in U.S. and international aid for Afghanistan’s security forces are at risk because the ministries that manage the money aren’t preventing waste and corruption.”

Radio Free Europe: “Helmand Province’s Deputy Governor Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar said the attack took place on March 10 on the outskirts of the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.”

UKRAINE: The president explains his reasons for refusing to arm Ukraine as Russian-backed rebels appear to abide by the terms of a February truce. Meanwhile, the U.K. rejects the idea of a European army.

The New York Times’ Peter Baker: Obama “has told aides and visitors that arming the Ukrainians would encourage the notion that they could actually defeat the far more powerful Russians, and so it would potentially draw a more forceful response from Moscow.”

The BBC: “Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko says pro-Russian rebels in the east have withdrawn a ‘significant’ amount of heavy weapons.”

Defense News’ Julian Hale: “The UK has strongly rejected any possibility of a European army being created following a proposal along those lines made by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.”

IRAN: The Obama administration and angry Democrats worry Republicans could harm a nuclear deal with Tehran. The United States and Israel would rather not acknowledge a certain covert operation against Iran.

The New York Times’ Jennifer Steinhauer and Julie Hirschfeld Davis: “Angry Democrats on Tuesday excoriated the open letter sent to Iran’s leadership warning about a nuclear agreement with President Obama, but the 47 Republicans who signed it remained defiant and unapologetic.”

The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and Adam Goldman: “A sensitive leak investigation of a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has stalled amid concerns that a prosecution in federal court could force the government to confirm a joint U.S.-Israeli covert operation targeting Iran, according to current and former U.S. officials.”

Al-Monitor’s Arash Karami: Ali Younesi, a top adviser to President Hassan Rouhani, “accused Iran’s enemies of creating propaganda by misconstruing his comments at a March 8 conference on Iranian history and culture.”

BOKO HARAM: Nigeria’s government downplays Boko Haram’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State. As the fighting continues, so does the plight of one million refugees, many of them children.

AFP: Nigerian “security spokesman Mike Omeri called the pledge ‘an act of desperation and comes at a time when Boko Haram is suffering heavy losses.’”

Reuters’s Lanre Ola: “A suspected female suicide bomber killed at least 12 people on Tuesday in Maiduguri, capital of Nigeria’s Borno state, military and hospital sources said, three days after a multiple bomb attack in the city killed more than 50.”

USA Today’s Tonny Onyulo: “The chaos has displaced more than 1 million Nigerians, creating a wave of refugees that include 157,000 people who have fled to neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger.”

MIDDLE EAST: A challenger to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gains traction.

The New York Times’ Isabel Kershner: “[A]s the March 17 elections approach, Mr. Herzog, the leader of the Labor Party and co-founder, with Tzipi Livni, of a new center-left slate called the Zionist Union, is posing a credible challenge to Mr. Netanyahu of the conservative Likud Party.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Nicholas Casey: “A standoff over Israel’s withholding of tax payments to the Palestinian Authority has drawn mounting complaints of hardship in the West Bank, where civil servants have seen their salaries slashed and some teachers don’t have enough cash to commute to work, according to officials.”

UNITED NATIONS: It sounds as if the next secretary-general could be a woman.

The Associated Press’s Cara Anna: “Just three female candidates have been included in past closed-door votes and straw polls that the Security Council has used to make its choice for decades, but now two campaigns are launching to make sure the next ‘Your excellency’ is a she.”

CHINA: For President Xi, control of the People’s Liberation Army is a top priority.

The South China Morning Post’s Minnie Chan: “President Xi Jinping grew determined to shake up the army after he saw first-hand how his predecessor Hu Jintao was treated as a mere figurehead by his deputies.”

VETERANS AFFAIRS: The VA has a new scandal.

FP’s Kate Brannen on a VA medical center in Indianapolis: “[A] social worker has been caught emailing her colleagues photos of a toy Christmas elf, dressed as one of the hospital’s patients, begging for Xanax and hanging himself with a set of Christmas lights.”

SURVEILLANCE: The NSA and CIA are in hot water again.

The Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett: “The Central Intelligence Agency played a crucial role in helping the Justice Department develop technology that scans data from thousands of U.S. cellphones at a time, part of a secret high-tech alliance between the spy agency and domestic law enforcement.”

FP’s Elias Groll: “[N]ew documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the CIA has developed the means to undermine the software used to build applications for Apple devices in order to install backdoors in iPhones, iPads, and computers manufactured by the California company.”

AND FINALLY, the Romanians need either a history or geography lesson, via the BBC. “The Romanian Foreign Ministry has apologised for giving a German diplomat a booklet marking relations between the two countries which showed a map of France with a German flag covering it.”