Toby Harnden:
Sitting on the dusty ground in front of a group of men in balaclavas who are waving a black Islamist flag and chanting “There is no god but God”, the Iraqi officer, unshaven and dressed in a brown dishdasha, is resigned to his fate.
As one of the fighters shouts out jihadist slogans, the crowd begins to bay for blood and the officer, hands tied behind his back, sways nervously. Finally, the executioner lifts a foot-long knife.
The crowd shrieks as the officer’s head is swiftly severed and held aloft. A youth in an Arsenal shirt and with a Kalashnikov wanders in front of the camera. A cleric appears to be present. Later the video is posted on YouTube and jihadist websites.
According to the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (Isis), the victim was an Iraqi army commander who had been captured and condemned after a sharia trial.
On Thursday another Isis video appeared. This one was entitled There is No Life Without Jihad. In it, two friends from Cardiff are seen speaking in English. “We will go to Iraq in a few days and we will fight there, Allah permitting,” one of them vows.
Both videos — one designed to terrorise Iraqi soldiers into submission, the other to lure impressionable recruits — were shared widely via Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #AllEyesOnIsis.
A mobile phone app called Dawn of Glad Tidings helps Isis to promote its Twitter feed and includes embedded advertising. Twitter is also used to supplement traditional fundraising methods, such as extortion, by encouraging Sunni donors in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to click on a link.
If Vietnam was the first television war, the conflict that has spread from Syria into Iraq is the first social media jihad.
Isis is using the internet as part of a sophisticated campaign that combines financial acumen, strategic patience and unspeakable brutality. When it declared last week that it had taken army prisoners, followers on Twitter hailed the achievement and called for them to be executed.
“Brother, you must behead them all and post pictures of their heads on Twitter for all to see, these are not times to be gentle or merciful,” one supporter tweeted.
Stephen Kappes, a former deputy director of the CIA, said last week at an event at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies that Isis was “capable of more violence and [was] more predatory than any terrorist group we’ve seen in the post-9/11 environment”.
Another reason to NOT use Twitter.
They happily post these beheadings.
But when an informed person wants to rebut the call to jihad coming from Islam they are blocked!
“If Vietnam was the first television war, the conflict that has spread from Syria into Iraq is the first social media jihad.”
Since Team Obama bragged about their vaunted social media skills in 2008 and 2012, perhaps they can lend a hand in slowing down the ISIS recruitment on social media. Or, perhaps the NSA can lend a hand in bringing them down electronically – they’re supposed to be skilled in this department.