There is a caption on that photo sarcastically calling a British drone a "symbol of hope" for Al-Qaida, who recently pissed off ISIS by calling them too extreme. In fact, General David Petraeus recently suggested the U.S. use Al-Qaida fighters against ISIS. If all this seems surprising or counterintuitive to you, that's a sign of how little anyone including the U.S. government understands ISIS. There's a reason every prediction we've made about them has fallen flat. Up until very recently, the official word was that ISIS had just 35,000 active fighters. But now it looks like the CIA got that one wrong, and ISIS may have as many as 200,000 jihadis in their ranks.

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But the most surprising thing I learned about ISIS during my reading is that the primary target of their hatred is not the United States. It's not France or Russia, either. The one "enemy" they devote more time to ranting against than anyone else is the "apostate Muslim." The vast majority of people ISIS kills are Muslims. They use one slur in particular -- "Safawi" -- to refer to Shiite Muslims. That word is a play on the name of the Safavid dynasty, which ruled Persia in the 15-17th centuries and which you almost certainly haven't heard of even though soldiers for the most notoriously evil organization in the world use it as a curse every day.

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Jeez, it's almost like the scope of the problem ISIS represents is far too complex to boil down to a Facebook status. Go figure.

It's important that you're educated on just what the heck is going on over there. That's why we recommend you read We Met Syria's War Refugees: 7 Awful Things They Told Us and We Built Their Death Squads: ISIS's Bizarre Origin Story.

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