The latest video from ISIS depicting the killing of accused spies and apostates in grisly and bizarre ways is a twisted message to the world that the terrorist army is carrying out its savagery in accordance with Islamic law, according to analysts.
In the seven-minute, all-Arabic language video released June 23, victims say they have been treated well, but then 15 of 16 men are shown being murdered, some blown up in a car in a drone-style attack, others by being drowned while trapped in a cage and still more lined up on their knees in the desert with explosives detonating around their necks. Experts who analyzed the video shot in Iraq's Nineveh Province said there is a clear message underlying the carnage: ISIS wants the Muslim world to know it is imprisoning and killing enemies of Islam under its warped interpretation of the Koran.
"While ISIS likes the shock factor, these executions are chosen to show their compliance with sharia law," said Ryan Mauro, national security analyst for the New York-based Clarion Project. "ISIS is acting upon doctrines that say spies and apostates, those who leave Islam, are to be executed.
"They must offer a triptych of executions, each more savage than the last."
- Veryan Khan, TRAC
"ISIS will argue that these specific methods are justifiable according to Islam as they see it, and that they are not being barbaric just for the sake of it," he added. "Even its executions are an attempt to portray ISIS as the most legitimate followers of Islam."
The video begins with the captives being interviewed about how well they were treated while held by ISIS, also known as Islamic State, remarkable because the terrorist army is attempting to repair its image, Mauro said.
"The group includes this because it needs to be seen as humane," Mauro said. "It's hard to believe, but it implies that ISIS recognizes it has a negative image and wants to change that while still remaining brutal."
The video also shows ISIS has little popular support, and is worried about spies in their midst, Mauro added.
Veryan Khan, editorial director for U.S.-basedTerrorism Research & Analysis Consortium, said ISIS has a template for spy executions: There must be the "confession" and the hostage must remain calm before the execution to demonstrate both Islamic State generosity in their treatment of prisoners as well as the victim's knowledge they deserve this punishment. As with other videos, hostages are well rehearsed - likely through mock executions - and did not appear to know that this time they would be killed, Khan said.
BERLIN - A Syrian woman believed responsible for helping to deliver hundreds of young European girls to ISIS has defected, and is now warning young women of the hell that awaits them in the black-clad Islamist army's so-called caliphate.
"You are young," the defector, who used the alias Um Asma in an interview with German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, told young women considering running away to join ISIS. "The caliphate is not what you think it is. Women are whipped, sold and stoned. Corpses are on display publicly for weeks."
"The caliphate is not what you think it is. Women are whipped, sold and stoned."
- Um Asma
Asma described her efforts as a member of the women's terror group al-Khansa, named after a 7th century female poet who converted to Islam and wrote odes to dead Muslim fighters. The 23-year-old wore a full covering niqab that shields everything but her eyes in the interview, and used the alias because she fears ISIS retaliation. Before the outbreak of the Syrian war in 2011, she said, she wore "entirely normal clothes, had Christian friends, listened to music and went dancing."
But after ISIS conquered Raqqa in 2013, she said she joined in order to survive. Al-Khansa, which believes women can marry jihadists as early as age 9, and advocates a frighteningly misogynistic view of their role in Islamic life, picks up the women and girls on the Turkish border and takes them to Raqqa, the de facto capital of ISIS caliphate.
Asma said her brigade sometimes took 50 girls at a time from the Turkish border into Syria. Many of the girls were from Germany, France and the United Kingdom, she said. Once in Syria, newly arrived girls receive a four-week training course, including use of firearms and study of the Koran.
The bombshell interview struck a chord in Germany, which has become a leading European hotspot for luring women and girls to serve ISIS.
Of the 700 Germans who traveled to Syria and Iraq in recent years, about 100 are female, a German government intelligence source told FoxNews.com.
In yet another example of either the utter incompetence and ignorance of Barack Obama as commander-in-chief or the more nefarious possibility that he loftily ignored signs of Islamic terror, a report shows his administration received warnings in 2012 of the rise of the Islamic State.
An August 5, 2012, Defense Intelligence Agency report, obtained by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and reviewed by Fox News, indicates that members of the Obama administration were warned in August 2012 of the rise of ISIS and the possibility of it creating a caliphate. This happened over a year before Obama referred to the group as a "JV team."
An October 2012 report further detailed that members of the administration knew that arms were being shipped from Libya to Syria, despite claims by administration officials of their ignorance of such events.
A third report from September 12, 2012, offers damning evidence that, within 24 hours of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, evidence piled up that the attack had been planned for at least a week and was revenge for the June 2012 drone strike that killed an al-Qaeda strategist-not an attack caused by an anti-Islam video, as the Obama administration initially claimed.
The report stated, "The attack was planned ten or more days prior to approximately 01 September 2012. The intention was to attack the consulate and to kill as many Americans as possible to seek revenge for the US killing of Aboyahiye (Alaliby) in Pakistan and in memorial of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center buildings." Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, "The Obama administration says it was a coincidence that it occurred on 9/11. In fact, their intelligence said it wasn't a coincidence and in fact specifically the attack occurred because it was 9/11."
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IS militants purge Syrian town of Assad loyalists AP News | May 22, 2015
BEIRUT (AP) - Islamic State group militants hunted down Syrian government troops and loyalists in the newly captured town of Palmyra, shooting or beheading them in public as a warning, and imposing their strict interpretation of Islam, activists said Friday.
The purge, which relied mostly on informants, was aimed at solidifying the extremists' grip on the strategic town that was overrun Wednesday by IS fighters.
It also was part of a campaign to win the support of President Bashar Assad's opponents, who have suffered from a government crackdown in the town and surrounding province in the last four years of Syria's civil war.
The strategy included promises to fix the electricity and water grids - after Palmyra is cleared of regime loyalists, according to an activist in the historic town. The man is known in the activist community by the nom de guerre of Omar Hamza because he fears for his security.
The capture of Palmyra has raised alarm that the militants might try to destroy one of the Mideast's most spectacular archaeological sites - a well-preserved, 2,000-year-old Roman-era city on the town's edge - as they have destroyed others in Syria and Iraq. For the moment, however, their priority appeared to be in imposing their rule, with activists saying there were no signs the group moved in on the ancient ruins.
In neighboring Iraq, IS militants made more territorial gains, seizing the small town of Husseiba, less than a week after capturing the provincial capital of Ramadi, said tribal leader Sheikh Rafie al-Fahdawi.
They captured the Iraqi side of a key border crossing with Syria on Thursday after Iraqi forces pulled out. The fall of the al-Walid crossing in Anbar province will help the militants shuttle weaponry and reinforcements more easily across the border of the two countries where they have declared a self-styled caliphate.
The IS militants imposed a curfew in Palmyra from 5 p.m. until sunrise and banned people from leaving town until Saturday morning to ensure that none of the government figures they seek manage to escape, activists and officials said. Jihadis went through the streets telling residents via loudspeakers not to give refuge to Assad loyalists.
IS commanders also fanned out to Palmyra's mosques to deliver sermons during Friday's weekly communal prayers. Mosques were packed after fighters on Thursday had urged people to attend and told women to cover their faces.
The sermons were mostly about the importance of performing the five-times-a-day prayers in the mosques and women having to cover their faces and dress in loose clothes, Hamza said via Skype. At the mosque where he prayed, the person delivering the sermon was a non-Syrian Arab, as were most of the leaders in the group in town, he said, while the fighters were Syrians.
In his sermon, the speaker warned that women not wearing the proper Islamic attire will be flogged.
Fighters were carrying out a bloody, door-to-door search to find and kill fugitive soldiers and known Assad loyalists, several activists said.
Prompted by the IS warnings not to provide shelter, some residents came forward with information about troops who had tried to melt into the population when the militants stormed into the town, said another activist who goes by the nom de guerre of Bebars al-Talawy for his security.
