It is an atrocity. That said, lets look a bit deeper.
Obama on Paris Attacks: 'ISIS Is the Face of Evil' - NBC News
France launches fierce assault on ISIS targets in Syria in coordination with U.S. defense officials The Washington Post
Obama Says Paris Attacks Have Stiffened Resolve to Crush ISIS NY Times.
We know that ISIS receives funding and weapons. From where does their funding arise, and what country manufactures their weapons and ammunition?
Parties in this are Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, Russia, the United States and China. Three regional powers, and three world powers, all with their own agenda.
We will assume that all these powers are playing parts in a 21st century version of “The Great Game.”
Dimensions at play are religious -- Shia vs Sunni, and geopolitical – Eurasia (China and Russia) vs The United States.
Turkey is undergoing an extraordinary transformation under Erdogan, wherein he is trying to assume great powers over the state in his new office as President. With his party's success in the most recent elections, he appears assured of gaining these powers, and pursuing his ambitions, which are to remake Turkey, into a larger, Sunni Muslim state. Turkey is also a NATO member and one of the US' allies. Turkey appears to fear Kurds more than it fears ISIS, probably because ISIS is directly or indirectly advancing Turkey's agenda, and can be discarded in an instant should Turkey so choose, by invading northern Syria.
Saudi Arabia is the most radical Sunni Muslim state, and has just gained a new, apparently more aggressive Monarch, who has taken Saudi Arabia to war both against other oil producers, and allies of Iran, in Yemen.
Syria is but a stopping point, or province, on a unified Sunni Caliphate, spanning from Turkey to the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen), a future province of the New Ottoman Empire, complete with Calif.
Iran is a large regional power, and being a Shia Muslim state, is a possible challenger to either of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, or both, as the leader of the Muslim world. Iran would be contained by a Sunni Empire stretching from Turkey to Yemen. Both entities would face each other in an uneasy confrontation, based on both being Muslim yet favoring different religious practices and views.
Russia sits upon the silk road, a band of Muslim “'stans” which span Asia from Turkey on the West to China in the east, with mountains to the south and Russia to the north. Russia and China have a goal of using their shared land mass to build the 21st century major economic power, based on China's manufacturing, Russia's resources and Germany’s technology – a power base geographically protected from the largest Navy in the world, the US Navy, because it is based in the largest land mass on the planet: Eurasia.
Russia, having settled its Chechen problem, and expended much blood and treasure in that effort, does not want to sit on top of Muslim extremism which spans Asia from Turkey to China. What followed is Russia's interest in Syria to prop up an ally, and interfere with imperial Ambitions of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, simultaneously protecting its underbelly from 10 Chechnya-sized wars.
China and Russia share the vision of the pan Eurasia economic superpower.
What does the United States want? It does not want a world war, it does not want to invade Russia or China, with trade treaties favorable only to its culture and corporations It wants to contain Iran, maintain its superpower status, and also to continue to believe itself to be the only exceptional country on the earth.
What better way to achieve these goals than ferment Muslim unrest? Support ISIS indirectly, creating a threat aimed at its economic challengers on the planet, while containing the scope of the Muslim unrest -- yet not eliminating the source of the Muslim unrest, nor eliminating ISIS funding and ISIS weapons suppliers, making enemies by the score with drones, and enabling an apartheid state in the middle east antagonizing Muslims worldwide, all managed by attacking symptoms of unrest, not root causes.
What a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive.
Managing Muslim Extremism. What could go wrong with that?