Islamic State fanatics have released one of their most sickening videos yet – new footage of hundreds of military cadets being machine gunned to death while lying face down in the dirt. The grisly footage shows executions on an industrial scale, as young men are seen falling from trucks and pleading for their lives before being lay down in shallow graves and sprayed with bullets.
Others are shot individually and their bodies dumped into the Tigris River, while an excavator is seen shifting vast piles of bodies as the executions continue into the night.
The footage reveals the true scale of last year’s Speicher massacre, in Tikrit, Iraq, where up to 1,700 military cadets are thought to have been slaughtered.
Highest estimates put at 1,700 the number of cadets ISIS gunmen captured at the Speicher military base near Tikrit and executed at various locations, mostly in the city’s former presidential palace complex.The 22-minute video, posted on jihadist forums, shows some victims pleading for their lives, attempting to explain they had only just joined the security forces.Around 600 bodies have been exhumed since government and allied fighters retook Tikrit from ISIS in April but many of the victims were dumped into the Tigris river.An unidentified ISIS leader in military uniform is seen in the video released on Saturday.
He states: ‘This is a message I address to the whole world and especially to the Rafidha dogs, I tell them we are coming,’ he said, using the pejorative term ISIS employs for Shiite Muslims.
The video was released four days after a court in Baghdad sentenced 24 men to death by hanging over the Speicher massacre.