@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow:
First you might not know that it was recently declassified that the CIA actually forced the Soviet's hand by agitating things in Afghanistan and flooding the place with Chinese made weapons (because they look the same as soviet ones) much like they later did in Yugoslavia. There is alot of interesting bits about that conflict too that never made it into the "official" narrative.
This was more of a Soviet inter-clash. When the PDPA came to power, in early 1978, it only controlled Kabul, and it was only a matter of time, before the Marxist regime would collapse. Brezhnev, fearing a wider conflict with the US, provided token support.
The Politburo, and rogue side elements, realized that Kabul is going to fall to the Mujahedeen, so the decision to invade, was made, without Brezhnev's approval or knowledge. Effectively, on Dec 27, 1979, the entire country was in Soviet hands.
Zbigniew Brzezinski creamed his pants. He told Carter, that we should sit back, and watch, as the Soviets just got themselves their own Vietnam, and indeed, this is what happened. Carter, was never into Empire building.
Also we are told ISIS is exclusively a religious fanatical group and yet if you look at their actual fighting leadership they are almost all ex Iraqi Army staff or ex Republican Guard. Plus many defectors have mentioned they were only fighting for payback not some religious war.
Today, they are a religious fanatic group. That's not how they started out though. Their nucleus, is the disenfranchised Sunni Middle Management, that was the Baath Party leadership. It's a little complicated. The reason why Mosul fell so easily into ISIS hands, is not because the residents supported them, but because they (Sunnis), would have accepted anything, that freed them from the Shiite militias, that were randomly killing Sunnis, and were empowered by the Iraqi Shiite controlled government.
When ISIS consolidated its power, the people of Mosul (and other places), went "oops"! But by that time, ISIS was in control, and they started implementing their extremist agenda. These complicated interactions, are also behind the delay in liberating Mosul. The Sunnis, supported by Turkey and the GCC, were afraid that when the Iraqi, mostly Shiite army, enters Mosul, it's going to be score settling time. It took months of negotiations, before everyone was comfortable enough to launch the operation to liberate Mosul. The same scenario, repeated itself, in a number of other places.
Also a comment about the nazis we actually recruited their smartest people and put them in charge of "counter insurgency" and "counter intelligence" in the west after the war because even a mass murderer like Stepan Bandera was okay with the west as long as you hated communists. The US and other nations also funded openly fascist groups in the former USSR and Eastern bloc in an effort to destabilize them groups like the OUN-UPA in Ukraine (which later came in handy during the Maidan fiasco) and the Forest Brothers in the Balkans. These were groups that openly fought alongside the nazis and most of them where "true believers". Even scarier is fascist militias in places like Ukraine have actually started working with al qaeda linked groups in Chechnya, and Ingushetia and Dagestan in Russia.
Yes, we brought a whole bunch of Nazis, to start and run our rocket programs. Von Brain, is the most notorious. He was in charge of the Apollo Program. Thousands of former Nazi officers, also fought in Korea.
One of them, a fighter pilot for the Nazis (one of their youngest), fought in Korea, spoke perfect English, got his PhD in English Literature, on the GI bill, and I took a course from him at Berkeley. I would not have known his background, if he had not been going through some existential crisis, where he was wondering if he should blow his brains up, and I was one of his "better" students. Not in a million years, you would have guessed he was German.