With all of the recent turmoil surrounding our exit from both Iraq and Afghanistan of late the latest news form Iraq should disgust, but not surprise, every U.S. patriot around the world. If you think that the release of the infamous Gitmo five for Bowe Bergdahl was bad, just wait until you meet the guy that Obama let go five years ago! Yes, dear reader, you read that correctly. The Administration released Dr. al Baghadadi, an Iraqi warlord currently leading a band of armed jihadists across Iraq in a bloody quest to impose shari’ah law throughout the land, five years ago. This man is basically the Dr. Josef Mengele of the Middle East. Also known by the alias Abu Duua, this  man is known for kidnapping Iraqi civilians, sometimes entire families, declare them guilty of some charge against Islamic law, declare them guilty and then execute them publicly. If that doesn’t qualify the guy as a terrorist (defined by Merriam Webster as “one  who employs violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal”) then I don’t know what would.

The new butcher of Bagdad has been busy this week, you see he is also the chief of a group known as ISIS whose goal is to build an Islamic state across the Sunni areas in both Iraq and Syria, and if this week is any indication, they might succeed. So, who is this group and where did they come from? The group has its roots in al Qaeda and was almost successful in achieving its goal under the leadership of al Zarqawi in 2006 after the bombing of the Al-Askariya Mosque, which is an important Shia shrine in the Samarra region. Thankfully our killing of Zarqawi paired with the horrific treatment of civilians by the group and reinforced by the emergence of a moderate Sunni influence in the area spelled trouble for ISIS and frustrated it’s end goal. Now however, since the Obama administration has signaled its intent to leave the region and hand the responsibility to the Iraqi’s to “solve their own problems”, Baghdadi and his supporters are taking to the streets, rounding up hundreds of Iraqi civilians and decapitating people willy nilly-leaving their headless bodies strewn by roadsides lining the road to Bagdad.

The Army has tried to take this brutal individual out, but to no avail. According to Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb, a former British special forces commander:

‘We either arrested or killed a man of that name about half a dozen times, he is like a wraith who keeps reappearing, and I am not sure where fact and fiction meet. There are those who want to promote the idea that this man is invincible, when it may actually be several people using the same nom de guerre.’

 How much of a threat is ISIS and al Baghdadi? Well earlier in the year he and his men took Fallujah and Ramadi and now they have taken Tikrit and Mosul in recent days and they are currently moving toward Bagdad blazing a literal warpath across the country. As if the Berghdal swap wasn’t embarrassing enough, now Obama has been caught largely by surprise by the “sudden rise” of ISIS in the country. So much for leaving Iraq with our heads held high.