Want to Hurt the Islamic State? Here’s How.

The Islamic State’s latest atrocities have triggered global revulsion.Beheading two utterly harmless and innocent Japanese men, Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto, was bad enough. Earlier this week the executioners decided they had to up the ante by putting the captured Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh in a cage and burning him alive. Today, they’re claimingthat a 26-year-old American female hostage, Kayla Mueller, was killed by Jordanian airstrikes. Needless to say, Islamic State (IS) leaders have been eager to compound the obscenity of these killings by distributing video of them across the web.

The reaction has been predictable: outrage and indignation. President Obama describes IS as a “brutal, vicious death cult.” He’s right. But what are we going to do about it? In his confirmation hearings this week, Ashton Carter, the president’s nominee for secretary of defense, said that U.S. strategy should aim to impose a “lasting defeat” on IS. Part of this, he said, has to involve “partners on the ground.” He was talking about Jordan, a country whose people now appear unified by horror over the killing of their compatriot.

Special Report: Amid Syria's violence, Kurds carve out autonomy

1 of 10. People wave red, green and yellow Kurdish flags in the back of a truck as they celebrate what they said was the liberation of villages from Islamist rebels near the city of Ras al-Ain in this

Letter from Kurdistan

At the edge of empires lies Kurdistan, the land of the Kurds. The jagged landscape has long been the scene of imperial aggression. For centuries, Turks, Persians, Arabs, Russians and Europeans looked to the mountains to buffer their territorial prizes farther afield, depriving the local mountain dwellers a say in whose throne they would ultimately bow to.

The hot temperament of this borderland was evident in an exchange of letters between Ottoman Sultan Selim I and Safavid Shah Ismail I shortly before the rival Turkic and Persian empires came to blows at the 1514 Battle of Chaldiran in northern Kurdistan. The Ottoman sultan, brimming with confidence that his artillery-equipped janissaries would hold the technological advantage on the battlefield, elegantly denigrated his Persian foes: