Agencies
Baghdad, August 31: The Islamic State (IS) group strung up four Iraqi Shiite fighters with chains and burned them alive, according to footage posted online, the latest gruesome execution video from the jihadists. The victims — identified as fighters in the pro-government Popular Mobilisation forces from southern Iraq — were suspended from a swingset by chains attached to their hands and feet, then set on fire. IS, 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 burnings took place. The video included a clip said to show a Sunni 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.
Meanwhile, the Islamic State militant group has claimed to have started its own currency by minting coins and described the move as a “second blow” to the US after 9/11, according to a newly released video. In the documentary-style video, the radical group presented its new currency, claiming to have started minting and circulating its own gold coins.
200 Iraqi town residents held
Baghdad: The mayor of a remote, Islamic State (IS)-held town in western Iraq said today that some 200 residents have been detained by the group at an unknown location following clashes there. Trouble in Rutbah, in Anbar province near the Jordanian border, started Saturday when Islamic State 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 that day to protest the killing and clashes broke out when the militants attempted to disperse the protesters.
Part of famed Palmyra temple destroyed
Beirut: The Islamic State jihadist group has blown up parts of the Temple of Bel in Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra, a monitor and activists said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said late yesterday that the jihadist group had placed explosives inside the famed temple, at least partially destroying the building considered Palmyra’s most significant. Mohamed Hassan al-Homsi, an activist from Palmyra, also reported the partial destruction last night, a week after IS destroyed the Baal Shamin temple at the historic Greco-Roman site.