Islamic State parades Kurdish fighters in cages
CAIRO — Islamic State militants have released a video which appears to show caged Kurdish fighters being interviewed moments before their deaths.
With a microphone pushed through the bars of his cage, each man quietly repeats talking points about the righteousness of Islamic State’s war in the Middle East and North Africa.
At one point, the nineminute propaganda film shows more than a dozen prisoners being paraded through crowded streets of a northern Iraqi town near Kirkuk, with black-clad militants hanging to the cages and pumping their fists. It carries subtitled warnings to the thousands of Kurdish peshmerga fighters who have helped a U.S.-backed military campaign against Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, in Iraq and Syria.
“Peshmerga, stop what you are doing or you will have the same fate as those here — in the cage, or under the ground,” reads one.
Iraq’s Kurds have sought for years to carve out a semiautonomous homeland in the north of the country, and have been battling Islamic State’s Sunni extremists to keep hold of Kirkuk since last summer.
Those featured in Islamic State’s latest propaganda missive appear to have been captured during battle — one man is identified as a brigadier-general in the peshmerga. The film fades to black before showing video clips of previous Islamic State executions and, eventually, the men’s fate.
In the year since Islamic State occupied large swaths of Iraq and Syria, the group has established a slick multimedia operation to project images of sickening violence onto the world stage.
Experts said this was part of a strategy to goad opponents into retaliation. Last week, Egypt launched its first foreign military operation for decades in response to the filmed execution of at least 20 Egyptian Christians.