Islamic State releases a new video parading Peshmerga forces in cages

[BalanceOfPower]

Islamic State releases a new video parading Peshmerga forces in cages

The video appears to show caged Kurdish fighters interviewed in the moments before their deaths

The captives, in orange jumpsuits with their heads lowered, are led to cages in a square surrounded by concrete walls and masked IS fighters carrying pistols

By Louisa Loveluck, Cairo
4:03PM GMT 22 Feb 2015

Islamic State militants have released a new video which appears to show caged Kurdish fighters being interviewed in the moments before their deaths.

With a microphone pushed through the bars of their cage, each man quietly repeats talking points about the righteousness of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (Isil) brutal campaign through the Middle East and North Africa.

At one point, the nine-minute propaganda film shows more than a dozen prisoners being paraded through crowded streets in Iraq with black-clad militants hanging to the cages and pumping their fists.

The video purports to show captured Kurdish peshmerga fighters paraded through Iraqi streets in cages

It carries subtitled warnings to the thousands of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters who have helped a US-backed military campaign against Isil militants in Iraq and Syria.

Kurdish sources told AFP it was filmed a week earlier in the main market of Hawija, an Isil-held town some 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Kirkuk.

“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 Kurdish population have sought for years to carve out a semi-autonomous homeland in northern Iraq.

They have been battling the Sunni extremists from Isil to keep hold of Kirkuk since last summer.

Those featured in Isil’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 the men’s fate, but their deaths are foreshadowed by video clips from previous Isil executions.

In the year since Isil occupied large swathes of Iraq and Syria, the group has established a slick multimedia operation which it uses to project images of its flamboyant violence onto a world stage.