Baghdad: Daesh strung up four Iraqi fighters with chains and burned them alive, according to footage posted online, the latest gruesome execution video from the terrorists.
The victims — identified as fighters in the pro-government Popular Mobilisation forces from southern Iraq — were suspended from a swing set by chains attached to their hands and feet, then set on fire.
Daesh, which overran large parts of Iraq last year and still controls much of the country’s west, said the murders were in revenge for the alleged burning of four men by pro-government forces.
“Now retribution has come, for today, we will attack them as they attacked us, and punish them as they punished us,” a masked militant says in the video, which was not dated and did not say where the killings took place.
The video included a clip said to show a man suspended over a fire while still alive as pro-government forces look on, and another of famous Shiite fighter Abu Azrael (‘Father of the Angel of Death’) slicing a piece of flesh off a burned corpse with a sword.
Daesh has carried out a slew of atrocities in territory it controls in Iraq and Syria, such as mass executions and a campaign of killings, kidnapping and rape targeting minorities.
It has recorded many killings — including beheadings, shootings, drownings and burnings — in videos posted online.
Meanwhile, the mayor of a remote, Daesh-held town in western Iraq said on Monday that some 200 residents have been detained by the terrorist group at an unknown location following clashes there.
Trouble in Rutbah, in Al Anbar province near the Jordanian border, started on Saturday when Daesh militants killed a local resident for killing a member of the group as part of a long-running clan blood feud. Hundreds of residents demonstrated later in the day to protest the killing and clashes broke out when the terrorists attempted to disperse the protesters.
A provincial official in Al Anbar said on Saturday that some 70 residents were detained by the militants and more than 100 more were tied to streetlight poles for about 24 hours as a punishment.
Rutbah’s mayor, Emad Al Rishawy, said that around 200 residents are still held by Daesh at an unknown location and that the town is gripped by fears that they might be killed.
Demonstrations against Daesh in areas under its control had been rare since the group seized much of northern and western Iraq in the summer of 2014. The group has zero tolerance for non-compliance with its radical interpretation of Islam or cooperation with authorities in Baghdad, routinely handing down severe punishments like beheadings, burning offenders to death or, in less serious cases, flogging or placing offenders in cages placed at public squares.
In Baghdad on Monday, roadside bombs south and west of the Iraqi capital killed four people, including two policemen, and injured 12, according to police and hospital officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.