Archaeologist of Roman Ruins in Palmyra, Syria, Butchered By ISIS Islamofascist Barbarians

The aged antiquities scholar  Khaled Asaad  had worked at this UN World Heritage Site for over 50 years, looking after a historic heritage of all humankind. His family reports that the "Islamic State" cutthroats hacked off his head, and hung up his decapitated body as a ghoulish threat to anyone who runs afoul of their deranged intolerance for everything outside their stunted ideology.

He was 82 years old. Too bad that after a life's work, he had to see the looming destruction of the concrete evidence of the existence of a prior civilization. Ruins like these provide a window into the past, making us aware of the continuity of our species in time and connecting us mentally with that which went before.
But to ISIS, preserving any evidence of the past such as this is "idolatrous," and thus worthy of death and destruction.

These murderous scum need to be exterminated.

The U.S. must tell Turkey in no uncertain terms to stop bombing Kurds or be kicked out of NATO. And the U.S. needs to back the Kurds, who so far are the most committed by far to fighting back against the Islamofascist barbarians. (The Iraqi "army," hundreds of thousands strong, were abandoned by their officers and ran away in the face of a few thousand terrorists, who seized thousands of U.S.-supplied military vehicles, and weapons and ordnance in Iraq.)

It's true enough that the mess in Iraq is a direct result of the U.S. invasion of 2003. Just as the rise of Al-Qaeda and the conquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban were direct results of the U.S. jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. (Brought to you by James Earl Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ronald Reagan, the CIA, and the loathsome Pakistanis and Saudis.) Since the U.S. wrecked Iraq, one can argue that the U.S. has a political and moral responsibility to not just walk away but to stay the course and retake the territory ISIS has seized in Iraq and Syria. This is significantly worse than the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

If Iraq needs to be divided into two or three new countries or a loose federation- which I think is nearly inevitable- so be it. Too bad if Turkey doesn't like it.

["Isis beheads elderly chief of antiquities in ancient Syrian city, official says," guardian (UK), August 18, 2015.]