ISIS video shows 'mass execution of Syrian soldiers

BAGHDAD - Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) jihadists have executed more than 160 fleeing Syrian soldiers, the latest in a string of brutal abuses alarming Western powers who fear a global spread of the terror.

Video images posted online showed the men being marched through the desert in their underwear by the extremists and then lying dead in the sand.

As it stormed through Syria and northern Iraq, ISIS has dealt brutally with its captives, beheading them and crucifying them to terrify its enemies.

In the latest display of savagery, it posted a video yesterday of the execution of a captured Kurdish fighter, in a warning to Iraqi Kurds to end military cooperation with the United States, Agence France-Presse quoted a monitoring group as saying.

The US has carried out a wave of air strikes against the jihadists in northern Iraq, helping Kurdish forces to claw back ground lost to the militants earlier this month.

The video, titled A Message In Blood To The Leaders Of The American-Kurdish Alliance, opens with 15 men in orange jumpsuits standing around the ISIS flag.

Three of the men ask Kurdish regional president Masoud Barzani "and the Kurdish government to end their relationship with the US... military intervention in northern Iraq", the Site Intelligence Group monitoring service said.

The video then cuts to three masked men dressed in black standing with another man wearing an orange jumpsuit kneeling before them. They behead him.

This video follows another released by ISIS that showed US journalist James Foley was beheaded. It also comes hot on the heels of the video showing what the group said were Syrian soldiers they had executed after seizing an airbase last weekend.

But tales of horror came from eye-witness accounts as well, including that of a 13-year-old boy who had joined an ISIS training camp for children. He told CNN how he and other children were made to watch horrific acts including beheadings, lashings, stonings and even a crucifixion.

"We saw a young man who did not fast for Ramadan, so they crucified him for three days, and we saw a woman being stoned (to death) because she committed adultery," he said. The boy has since fled to Turkey, CNN said in its report yesterday.

In June, English newspaper The Telegraph reported that a man survived being crucified by ISIS after the jihadists raided his village near the border with Turkey. He was nailed to a cross for eight hours, the paper quoted the monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, as saying.

However, eight others who were also crucified did not survive. The men were said to be fighting against both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and jihadist groups such as ISIS.

This article was first published on August 30, 2014.
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