The left often talks about how stories are 'filtered' from the Extreme Right into a right-wing media 'echo chamber'.

Well, more or less, this story- now on Yahoo thanks to Agence France Presse- is cribbed from the British Sunday Express via an unnamed British source who, in all probability, got the story from some Kurdish press sources (or maybe the hit-and-miss folks at Debka who, sometimes, are amazingly accurate and othertimes are telling tales about masses of Chinese troops in Afghanistan).

Now, because this story has an AFP stamp on it, it can be reported in the 'mainstream' US press. Hence how rumor gets turned into a story.