Who’s to blame for ISIS’s rise to power in Syria and Iraq? How do we stop it? What’s the end goal really look like? If you read Gawker’s April interview with badass intel officer Malcolm Nance, you know a bit about these questions. He offers more (depressing) background today in the Intercept.

In addition to an aggressive goatee, Gulmurod Khalimov has a certain set of skills. He commands Tajikistan’s special forces, trained and funded by American military whizzes. Or he did, before recently turning up in a YouTube video saying he’s gone to Syria to fight with the Islamic State.

As nuclear negotiations between Iran and U.S. allies go down to the wire, the Islamic Republic has accused America of killing two of its advisers in the ground war in Iraq with an unmanned aerial vehicle—though U.S. officials say the allegation has no merit.

Federal authorities late yesterday arrested Spc. Hasan Edmonds, 22, a Illinois Army National Guard soldier, and his cousin Jonas, 29, for attempting to join the Islamic State's anti-Western jihad, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Is the world flat enough for you yet? Do you require more flattening? 'Cause it can be arranged. Nay, it should be, according to Tom Friedman, who—and he's just spitballing here—wonders, in the New York Times, where he is paid to spitball for Pulitzers: "Should we be arming ISIS?"

Kurdish forces besieging an ISIS-held position Tuesday have confirmed that Ashley Johnston, 28, an Australian pictured above at right, was killed fighting with the Kurds, making him apparently the first English-speaking Westerner to die in combat against the Islamic State.

It takes a special kind of person to leave home and join a foreign militia to fight the theocratic brutes of the Islamic State's army. It takes an even more special person to realize, a little too late, that his chosen anti-ISIS militia holds a political and religious ideology that's as antithetical to his own as ISIS's.

Amid all the slights and grievances, real and perceived, between conservatives and liberals in America, you might imagine some common baseline moral sentiments—like, say, mourning a young American woman killed in ISIS custody. But to some well-compensated mavens of the right, she's just a dead "bitch."

The Taliban, bane of America's post-9/11 Afghanistan operations, said Wednesday that they captured Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, a renegade insurgent and ex-Guantanamo detainee who was in Afghanistan recruiting for the Islamic State, the latest parry in a messy internecine conflict between violent Islamist regimes.

There are two sure-fire ways to get yourself immediate mainstream media attention: Allude to terrorism, and do it on Twitter. Someone purporting to represent the dread Islamic State did both Monday, proving the U.S. military's public affairs business is a trainwreck but accomplishing little else.

One of the original tires on the axis of evil is apparently being swapped out for a more aggressive tread: Iran, that longtime Islamic bogeyman used in bedtime stories to scare Republican children straight, is now bombing the far-more-terrifying Islamic State in an apparent convergence of interests with the U.S.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, devoted Islamic State imam, has reportedly survived a U.S.-led attack and proven that the line between blood-lusting despot and sexually repressed punchline is, as ever, a fine one with a new audio sermon exhorting his scruffy man-warriors to "explode the volcanoes of jihad everywhere."

A U.S. airstrike over the weekend may have targeted and hit Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the fancy watch-wearing head of ISIS's wannabe worldwide caliphate. He may be dead, according to some people. Top people.

The Free Syrian Army, a moderate militia being trained and equipped by the Obama administration in hopes that it could defeat both ISIS and Syria's secular dictator, was routed by Al Qaeda allies over the weekend, with many of its men and weapons being taken over for the jihadi cause.

Registered voters are interesting.

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows more Americans than ever want a ground war to fight ISIS. More Caucasian, Republican, male, senior Americans than ever!

It's been more than two months since America started dropping laser-guided freedom all over the Islamic State. But for some reason, the flowers of liberty aren't blooming in all those new holes we've dug in Iraq and Syria. Perhaps it's because we should bomb more shit, say two experts in talking about bombing shit.

To defeat the Islamists of ISIS, everyone says, you need boots on the ground. How about motorcycle boots? Kurt Sutter from Sons of Anarchy has to be pissed he didn't think up this story line first.

It's tempting to believe, isn't it? Our mortal enemies in the Islamic State are so primordial, so primitive, so twisted that they have sex with barnyard animals. As evidenced by this drone video! Except it's bogus. Here's why.

Perhaps in hopes of revising his image as an ineffectual peacenik, or to bolster his grandson's chances in a tight gubernatorial race, or simply because he's an opinionated 90-year-old South Georgia peckerwood, ex-president Jimmy Carter today criticized Barack Obama for dropping the ball on ISIS.