So we're going to war, but who is this that we're fighting? We started off calling them ISIS, for Islamic State Iraq and Syria. But then some people decided it should be ISIL, for Islamic State Iraq and Levant. And others drop the place altogether and just call it Islamic State. And then they also have the nickname “Daesh.”
The problem is that they aren't really thinking of themselves as limited to Iraq and Syria, and no one knows what Levant means (apparently just “middle east.”) “Islamic State” perpetuates the idea that Islam is all about terrorism (and probably leads to some hilarious mixups with the Nation of Islam.)
I'm assuming this is one of those cases where there isn't going to be a truly correct translation. So let's just choose our own. Supposedly they hate “Daesh,” so we could go with that, if “Those Bastards” is too unsubtle. Or we could poke fun at ourselves, calling them "This Week's Enemy." Let them try portraying this as ultimate Armageddon with a name like that.
And one of their enemies is the Kurdish force known as the Peshmerga. But, in the grand tradition of TV reporters showing off how good they are at pronouncing local names, they spit it out quickly as Thepeshmerga. Which I always mis-hear as “Depeche Merga” and that leads to some very strange imaginings.
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