Russia’s top aviation official said Sunday that the Russian jetliner that crashed in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people aboard, broke up at a high altitude shortly after takeoff on Saturday, the Associated Press reports.

The Islamic State tied three of its captives to Roman-era columns in Palmyra, Syria and killed them by blowing up the structures with explosives, activists in the ancient city, captured by the Islamic State in May, told the Associated Press.

A Japanese man, Kunio Hoshi, was shot and killed Saturday near Rangpur, in northern Bangladesh, five days after an Italian man, Cesare Tavella, was murdered in the capital Dhaka’s diplomatic zone, The Guardian reports. The Islamic State took responsibility for both murders.

On Sunday, French President Francois Hollande said that six of his country’s jet fighters had targeted and destroyed an Islamic State training camp in eastern Syria, the Associated Press reports. The airstrikes were France’s first in Syria.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for a car bombing at a market in Khan Bani Saad, in Iraq’s Diyala province, that killed at least 115 adults and children on Friday, Al Jazeera reports. The group said it was targeting Shiites celebrating the end of Ramadan.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Islamic State have planted land-mines and explosives around the ancient Roman city of Palmyra, which was captured in May.

Senior military and administration officials have said that the United States is considering a strategy to combat the Islamic State that would involve opening up a network of training bases across Iraq, the New York Times reports.

Keith Broomfield, a 36-year-old Massachusetts native, has died in combat assisting Syrian Kurdish soldiers in a skirmish against forces of the Islamic State, the State Department confirmed Wednesday.

In an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said that the Iraqi military lacked the “will to fight” the resurgent Islamic State, demonstrated by the loss of Ramadi to militant forces last week.

Iran has sent a small number of troops to help Iraq retake a major oil refinery from the Islamic State, the Associated Press reports. The Iranians will operate artillery and heavy weaponry in support of advancing Iraqi ground troops.

Islamic State forces captured another key Syrian territory Wednesday night, toppling government forces in the ancient city of Palmyra.

As part of a longterm, undercover FBI operation, federal authorities arrested two women allegedly planning to detonate a bomb in New York City on behalf of the Islamic State, ABC News reports.

The Associated Press is reporting that the leader of ISIS (aka the Islamic State aka ISIL), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was wounded in an airstrike on Saturday. Brief statements from Iraq’s Defense and Interiors Ministries said that al-Baghdadi had been wounded, working off of intel provided by informants within ISIS. They did not elaborate on the extent of said injuries.

NBC News just broke the fascinating news about a 33-year-old Southern Californian with a crazy Twitter account who has been killed in Syria fighting for ISIS, Al Qaeda's uglier, nastier little brother:

The United Nations' top commissioner for human rights argued Sunday that the Islamic State was committing "crimes against humanity" and offered proof of a prison massacre in which ISIS militants separated the inmates into Sunni and Shia groups and killed all the Shias.

Boko Haram, the militant Islamic group that has been kidnapping women, girls, and boys and capturing territory in northern Nigeria, has declared an Islamic caliphate. The Nigerian army already rejected the claim as "empty," noting that the "sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Nigerian state is still intact."

Perhaps ISIS should open a new training camp to instruct its murderous recruits on how to tweet without revealing the precise location of its training camps to citizen investigative journalists.

James Foley was courageous, and his murder by an apparently English-accented zealot of the Syria-based Islamic State was so horrific that no simple narrative can do it justice. Unless, that is, you're a conservative political opportunist of a special sort, eager to pin the crime on liberal policies.

Vice News reporter Medyan Dairieh's unprecedented video series on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria continues with its third installment today, in which Dairieh shadows the religious police through their Syrian capital, Raqqa, and visits prisoners whose "crimes" involved not being sufficiently Muslim.

VICE News has dropped part two of its mesmerizing five-part behind-the-scenes look at the "Islamic State," and it is a maddening inside look at how the militant movement sweeping Iraq and Syria recruits young boys, uses UN humanitarian aid, and hides away women.