Matthew Rosenberg

It appears so. At the end of 2010, al-Qaida found itself suddenly flush after securing a $5 million ransom, and the group had to decide what to do with its windfall. At a time of the financial uncertainty of the Great Recession, gold was a hot investment.

The United States this week killed a top Islamic State commander in Syria as part of a spate of military actions targeting the terrorist group’s leadership and explosives caches, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Friday.

Recent gains against the Islamic State in eastern Syria have helped sever critical supply lines to Iraq and set the stage for what will be the biggest fight yet against the Sunni militancy, the battle to retake Mosul, Pentagon officials said Monday.

Yellow ribbons and stickers are mostly gone, and the five years that Hailey, Idaho, stood behind its hometown kid when he was held by the Taliban have given way to a distrust of outsiders and a bitterness about the hostile tenor of American politics.

Across wide swaths of Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State, with the goal of building a credible government, has set up a predatory and violent bureaucracy that wrings every last U.S. dollar, Iraqi dinar and Syrian pound it can from those who live under its control, or pass through its territory.

The option that is being most seriously considered is a proposal made this past summer by Gen. Martin Dempsey, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to keep 3,000 to 5,000 troops for a counterterrorism mission.

By now, the billions of dollars spent by the United States on flawed reconstruction projects in Afghanistan have become part of the war's history.