By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 13 December 2017

The Islamic State (IS) triggered the war against its “caliphate” by disseminating footage of its jihadists beheading an American journalist, James Foley, on 19 August 2014. Over the next three months, five more Western hostages were decapitated on video. This was shocking to many, but it should not have been. IS began producing snuff videos like this a decade earlier.

The first video beheading by the Islamic State movement—known at the time as Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad or JTJ (the Group of Monotheism and Holy War)—was released on 11 May 2004; the murderer in the video was IS’s founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; and he gave a brief statement to accompany his crime, later published under the title, “A Word in the Tape of the Beheading of Nicholas Berg (Kalima fi sharit nahr Nicholas Berg)”. Berg was an American civilian who went to Iraq as a freelance engineer.

A translation of this speech is published below, taken from an anthology IS published days after Zarqawi was killed in June 2006, ‘The Complete Archive of the Sermons and Speeches of the Shaykh Honoured By His Deen, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’ (pp. 96-100).

This tactic of Zarqawi’s was not completely novel: the jihadists in Chechnya and Dagestan had filmed themselves beheading Russian soldiers when the war in the Caucasus restarted in 1999, and Khaled Shaykh Muhammad (KSM) had put out a video in February 2002 showing the butchered body of Daniel Pearl, an American journalist for The Wall Street Journal. The Pearl video stressed that he was Jewish and did not include footage of the actual moment he was murdered, it seems because KSM’s collaborator “had forgotten to load a tape into the camera”. In both respects, Berg’s murder was different: though he was also Jewish, the Zarqawists did not stress this—did not even mention it (perhaps because they did not know)—and Berg’s death was shown in gruesome detail.

Undoubtedly, however, it was Zarqawi who created the popular association between video beheadings and jihadism. After Berg, there were eight more such killings by the Zarqawists up to October 2004, most of them undertaken by Zarqawi personally, earning him the monicker “Shaykh of the Slaughterers” (Shaykh al-Dhabaheen) from his admirers across the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda was never happy about this.

In July 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Usama bin Laden’s deputy, wrote to Zarqawi criticising aspects of how he was running the jihad in Iraq, singling out “the scenes of slaughtering the hostages”. Al-Zawahiri warned Zarqawi not to be deceived by the praise from some “zealous and devout youth” because it “does not reflect reality” when it comes to “the opinion of the general [Muslim] public [that] does not accept this”, and, since the jihad is as much a media war as a military contest, Zarqawi had to stop. What is notable is that Zarqawi had stopped. Zarqawi swore public allegiance to Al-Qaeda on 17 October 2004, and, while one hostage was murdered on video after that, Japanese citizen Shosei Koda on 29 October, this was before Zarqawi’s oath to Bin Laden was formally accepted two months later, transforming JTJ into Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM).

This pattern holds for the earlier cases, too. The Chechen jihadists had links to Al-Qaeda—most famously, Al-Zawahiri went on his strange sojourn to Russia in 1996—but Shamil Basayev and his comrades were not subordinate to Al-Qaeda “Central” (AQC), nor did they carry out their filmed atrocities on Bin Laden’s orders. KSM was the architect of the 9/11 massacre and at the time he murdered Pearl was functioning as something like Al-Qaeda’s external operations chief, but it was a de facto position. It remains one of the most curious aspects of the September 11 story that KSM was never an official member of Al-Qaeda, having refused to give bay’a (oath of allegiance) to Bin Laden (p. 150), and in the months after 9/11, even more than before, KSM was acting autonomously. Bin Laden was in hiding, having narrowly escaped Afghanistan, and those parts of Al-Qaeda’s leadership that were still able to operate freely—namely, those in Iran—were vigorously hostile to KSM’s operations in this period.

These divergences in ideology and strategy were part of what led to the overt severance of relations between the IS movement and Al-Qaeda in 2014.

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A Word in the Tape of the Beheading of Nicholas Berg

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,

May God strengthen Islam through His victory, humiliate shirk [idolatry, polytheism] by defeating it, direct all affairs by His command, and gradually lead the disbelievers [to destruction] through their hatred of He who ordains the succession of days among nations with justice. And may peace and blessings be upon the one who raised the banner of Islam with his sword.

To proceed:

O umma [community] of Islam, rejoice! For the signs of dawn have begun to appear, and the winds of victory have blown. Indeed, God has honoured us with a decisive victory in Fallujah—a day from the days of God.[1] And all praise and grace belong to God alone.

Umma of Islam, is there any excuse left for sitting idly?

How can a Muslim sleep peacefully, turning on his side, while he sees Islam being slaughtered, dignity bleeding out, and images of shame and humiliation, the news of the devilish abuse [at Abu Ghraib] spreading, with the men and women of Islam imprisoned in a foreign jail?

Where is the rage? Where is the outrage? Where is the anger for the sanctities of a Muslim? Where is the fury for the deen [lifeway] of God? Where is the rage for the violated honour of Muslim women? Where is the vengeance for the violated Muslim women in the prisons of the Cross?

As for you, O ulema [scholars, “clerics”] of Islam, do you not see that God has raised proof against you through the youth of Islam, those blazing flames of strength? They broke through the barriers of history, shattered them, and carried its [Islam’s] burden on their shoulders. Is it not time for you to learn from them trust in God, and draw lessons from those who fulfilled the meaning of sacrifice and giving? Why do you remain in slumber, knowing nothing but the language of blame, and recognising no path but wailing and lamentation?! This one pleads for water! That one begs! A third cries out like Amr ibn Musa! A fourth calls for peace negotiations!

How many have raised banners of surrender—and how many will listen to the words of God: “O you who believe! What is wrong with you that when you are told, ‘March forth in the cause of God,’ you cling heavily to the earth?” [Qur’an 9:38]. Or have you become content with a life free from jihad, with comforts and the sweetness of ease? Is it not time for you to take up the path of jihad—the path of the sword, which the Master of the Prophets was sent with?

We warn you not to behave like those before you, who sought to appease the Americans. You have denied the command of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), and he is the one who struck the necks of prisoners with his own hand, and killed captives and sent their heads flying, and there is in his example a noble model.

As for you, dog of the Romans—Paul Bremer—wait and see what God has in store for you. Your day is coming, and your soldiers are now standing helplessly on the land of Iraq, and our raids have reached their trenches.

And as for Nicholas Berg, the filthy agent [al-ameel al-najis], we say to him: You shall never dream of safety. Your blood will be shed before the Americans. You will taste what our brothers have tasted. And we—we are the ones who have pledged to God.

As for the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we say: we offered a deal to the American administration—an exchange for some of the prisoners—but it was refused. So we say: if you hold our honour sacred, then hand over our women. But if you will not, then let there be between us the heat of battle, and blood and souls. We are not pleased with anything but skulls crushed beneath coffins—and coffins following coffins—along this very path.

[Zarqawi murders Nicholas Berg at this point, then says:]

O brothers, deliver this infidel’s corpse to one of the bridges of Baghdad so that it may serve as a witness and a lesson to all.[2]

“Kill the idolaters [or polytheists: mushrikeen] wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every ambush point” [9:5].

Glory is for God, His Messenger, and the mujahideen. Our final call is that all praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the Worlds.

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NOTES

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[1] The debacle in trying to clear IS from Fallujah in April-May 2004—which had begun with the hideous atrocity of four American contractors butchered, burned, and strung up over the main bridge—had concluded with Iraqi government and Coalition forces retreating, leaving the IS movement to its first experiment in governance (finally terminated in November 2004). It was in jihadist-ruled Fallujah, in the Jolan neighbourhood to be exact, that Zarqawi murdered Nick Berg, and “the IS movement seems to have crammed its entire leadership into this first video: alongside al-Zarqawi was Abu Usama al-Tunisi, Manaf al-Rawi, Umar Yusef Jum’a (Abu Anas al-Shami), and Mustafa Ramadan Darwish (Abu Muhammad al-Lubnani).”

[2] Berg’s body was discovered in Baghdad on 8 May 2004. Berg had been detained by Iraqi forces in Mosul until 6 April, and Berg then went to Baghdad, where his family heard from him for the last time a few days later.