I get it now, ISIS (or Dash) is really the revenge of saddam Hussein. They want to get back at Bush and the Americans who brought down the tyrant. In retrospect it was a mistake to invade Iraq—hindsite is 20-20. Still we must punish IS with more than bombs.
ISIS was formerly Zarqawi’s group Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad a/k/a “Unity and Jihad” or al Tawhid - one of the plots Zarqawi’s mostly Palestinian group was noted for even before the US invasion of Iraq in early 2003 was the 1999 Millennium plot, a plot to simultaneously bomb the international airport in Los Angeles and targets in Jordan, including a popular hotel.
Another was their successful assassination of USAID’s Laurence Foley in Jordan in 2002 by his northern Iraq cell. They also were being used by Saddam to assassinate Kurdish leaders before 9/11 in an apparent effort to eliminate Kurds who would work with any US invasion force, much as one of al Qaeda’s European cells assassinated Afghan leader Ahmed Massood on Sept 9, 2001 to deny us an ally for our counterattack.
Zarqawi’s Baghdad cell in 2002 was happily settled in Sadam’s capital and for reasons I don’t know they murdered a Chaldean nun there by beheading her. This was before ANO leader Abu Nidal’s death in Baghdad, where he allegedly “shot himself in the head” several times.