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.
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