The Islamic State (IS), a Sunni Islamist and extremist terrorist group, performed beheadings for capital punishment and propaganda purposes. The beheadings received significant worldwide media coverage and attracted widespread condemnation from both governments and Islamic leaders worldwide. IS beheadings peaked in 2014 and 2015—then concentrated in Iraq and the Levant—and steadily declined as the group lost its territories. However, the practice has persisted or appeared in other regions, most notably in Northern Mozambique.
Background
According to historian Ibrahim al-Marashi, modern beheadings as part of terror campaigns began during the war in Chechnya with decapitations of Russian soldiers. The beheading of Daniel Pearl, at the behest of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, was one of the first to generate worldwide outrage. The antecedents of the Islamic State, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, began "routinised" beheadings after the start of the Iraq War in 2003. Al-Zarqawi's group targeted foreign nationals, most famously Nick Berg, and embarked on a wider campaign of beheadings against captured Muslims. Al-Marashi stated that the motivating factors for these early beheadings were to discourage foreign nations from deploying troops in Iraq, to prevent companies from investing in post-war Iraq, and to intimidate local Muslims. After Barack Obama launched Operation Timber Sycamore to arm Syrian rebels during the Syrian Civil War, Sunni extremist groups dramatically increased their use of beheading as a terror method.
Islamic State's justifications or reasons for beheadings On 12 August 2014, prior to the 2014–2015 wave of IS beheadings of Westerners and Japanese, IS members sent an email to the family of American hostage James Foley stating that American hostages would be killed in retaliation for:
the 8 August 2014 beginning of the American-led intervention in northern Iraq; U.S. incarceration of Pakistani Muslim woman Aafia Siddiqui; the U.S. and its government having "no motivation to deal with the Muslims except with the language of force". According to historian al-Marashi, IS uses beheadings of locals to intimidate people, including their own soldiers, into obeying the dictates of a weak state. Beheadings of Westerners are designed to strike back at the United Kingdom and the United States for military actions that IS has no other way of responding to. "With an act of a sword, they manage to force both [American President] Obama and [British Prime Minister] Cameron to react. The two men, who control the world's most advanced militaries, find themselves at the mercy of the sword. Both displayed physical pain and grief when they condemned the way their nationals died." says al-Marashi. "Terror marketing" to recruit new fighters is another motivation, according to Paul Cruickshank, a terrorism analyst for CNN. "Some of these men have sort of a pornographic attraction to these violent scenes, these violent beheading videos. It really sort of energizes them", Cruickshank told The Atlantic.
List of incidents
Alleged beheading plots
Jihadi John Sky News spoke to a defector, from the Islamic State, who claimed he witnessed Mohammed Emwazi, known as Jihadi John, murder Japanese hostage Kenji Goto. He is the only person to admit seeing Emwazi kill. The Islamic State said that Emwazi was employed as the chief killer of foreign hostages. The Islamic State claimed foreign hostages captured and murdered by the group were subjected to numerous mock executions until the mock procedure became normal, which, it has been suggested, was why many hostages appeared calm in execution videos published online by the group. The Islamic State said the hostages were beheaded later.
2014 Australian counter-terrorism raids
In a pre-dawn police raid on 18 September 2014, Australian law enforcement detained 15 individuals in Sydney and Brisbane who were allegedly plotting a "demonstration execution". The detainees' purported plan was to kidnap a random resident of Sydney and behead the individual on camera, draped in the black flag of the Islamic State. The beheading did not occur.
Theresa May assassination plot In November 2017, Naa'imur Zakariyah Rahman planned to detonate bombs and behead the then British prime minister Theresa May in the name of Islamic State. He was arrested before he could do so and convicted in 2018.
Beheading of a child in Mozambique In March 2021, Save the Children, a UK-based aid group, reported the beheading of a 12-year-old child by IS-linked militants.
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