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.

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.

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.

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.

Alois Brunner, a high-ranking SS officer who helped run the concentration camps and was convicted and condemned in absentia for Nazi war crimes, died only recently after spending his twilight years as a trusted terrorism adviser to then-Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, according to a New York Times report.

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.

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.

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.

It's no Desert Storm. It's not even Desert Fox. It wishes it was Desert Crossing. It can't be Operation Iraqi Freedom, since we've used that, although it could be Operation Freedom Is Messy. The point is: U.S. war planners now say they need a name for this thing that's totally not a war, but a "targeted operation."

Bill O'Reilly has the spittle of a young soldier and the wattle of an elder statesman, but does he have the intellectual or moral mettle of a war strategist? No. No, he does not.

As U.S. bombs fell in Syria for the first time last night, the "official spokesman of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham" reportedly released a far-ranging 11-page message to its fighters, American opponents, and Muslims worldwide. It makes a tough read, unless you've got a glossary handy.

The Daily Mail just mistook a charity worker for the notorious religious head of a jihad-happy Middle East terrorist network. It was a simple mistake anyone could have made, except that nobody else did.

Reporters and pundits have noted how the new U.S. Iraq operation lacks much legal pretext, both internationally and domestically, for several weeks now. Which means it was time for crack reporter Eli Lake to write something up, too. With an extra heaping of hypocrisy.

Did you hear Barack Obama say last week that the U.S. would "not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq"? You may think that precludes U.S. foot troops from potentially leading Kurds and Iraqis in direct combat with Islamic State fighters. Don't think that.

Three architects of the failed Iraq War strategy have written up a strategy to defeat ISIS that "will require as many as 25,000 ground troops in Iraq and Syria." Sadly, the document doesn't say "PEW-PEW PEW-PEW BOOOOM" when you open it, and it evinces no familiarity with Clone Wars.

Now that America's long war is getting longer, it's worth getting some outside perspective on what that war's all about, with all its twists and pitfalls. In short, it's worth asking George Lucas.

Operation OK Let's Go Back There And Maybe Clean Up Some Spots We Missed, But You Know We're Just Gonna End Up Making A Mess Again is a go. Too bad; we could probably have used that name next week, when the Libyan Republic of Jihad makes ISIS look like JROTC.