(Dagbladet): – What happens in the border areas between IS- and Kurdish controlled areas of Iraq approaches which legally can be characterized as genocide, says Iraq researcher Cecilie Hellestveit by International Law and Policy Institute (ILPI) in Oslo Dagbladet.
She has studied the gruesome videos leaking from Iraq. IS has even published extensive video footage that shows what will be the mass killings and executions of Shia Muslims – both Iraqi civilians and Iraqi soldiers.
Bs on her knees
– I have seen almost 800 executions. A video shows a father with two sons who are digging their own grave as they pray for their lives. Multitudes of people entered the loading plan and run away to finish dug mass graves, until one by one being commanded down, executed and shoveled into the grave. In Iraq, we are now seeing more and more forms of execution belonging to ethnic cleansing and genocide, says Hellestveit.
Cynical, this is a very effective way for IS to operate on, says the researcher.
– These operations both tactical and ideological functions. In addition, this procedure it is possible to kill many a time without troublesome effects. Killing people where they are leaving a big clean-up work, and can lead to pest and diseases. Now they finished with the whole problem, and this is very disturbing images. This is improving the murder.
Very believable
A key question is: Are the videos real?
Hellestveit consider it highly probable.
– I can not judge how this works or if it is actually authentic pictures, but I note that the amount of different scenarios that come up are shocking, almost overwhelming. The degree of falsification that will be needed to get to as many scenes would be impossible to implement in practice, says Hellestveit Dagbladet.
– It undramatic in the videos gives it all a bit too high level of credibility and this appears to be very, very believable scenes. At the same time I am very keen to stress that one should be extremely critical of things that are out on Youtube and stated to show “truth witnesses of the war.”
Grim
Bernt Hagtvet, professor of political science at the University of Oslo, believes IS ‘mass executions go into a long tradition of the pursuit of purity and dehumanization of “the other”, where the enemy is reduced to “things” and the goal is to create a “pure” territory.
– The difference is that all previously tried to keep the horrors hidden – while IS ‘using a well-oiled propaganda machinery to broadcast videos on the web to reach as many people as possible and to create fear and again clean a territory. IS stands for an eerie combination of anti-modern ideology and modern technological aids, says Hagtvet Dagbladet.
– Mass Executions as such are not rare in war, or in the community under the influence of closed political systems and religious ideologies, says Hagtvet – and draws parallels between the IS’s ravages and both Hitler and Stalin despotisms, the atrocities committed by Mao, Pol Pot, Milosevic’s troops during the war in the Balkans, the genocide in Rwanda and the behavior of the British colonial government in Kenya and President al-Bashir of Sudan. This is about ethnic cleansing and “dehumanization” of the enemy, says Hagtvet.
He thinks IS ‘atrocities against people of other faiths are part of a long tradition.
– Memories of Nazism
– What is new is that they depict the horrors and send it online to create fear and help drive the enemy out of their areas. This is new, and made possible by new technology. There are many photos of the Nazi mass murder on the Eastern Front, but it was unofficial images, taken by the rank and file soldiers and unwanted by hærledelsen. The combination of anti-modern ideology and embrace new technology reminiscent of Nazism. IS will return to a medieval existence and old-fashioned literalist interpretation of Islam, while Nazism was an attempt to spiritualize the soulless world through cultivating a idyllisert interpretation of the past, says Hagtvet.– IS using the web, and the Nazis took also in the use of technological innovations such as radio and telegraphy. IS springs from religious fanaticism, while Nazi origins were ideological fanaticism caused by national humiliation and economic crisis. The humiliation is common for IS and Nazism. IS feel humiliated by the West, and included as such in a long Arab tradition says Hagtvet.
Humiliated
He thinks IS ‘extreme Islam plays a feeling of being humiliated by the West.
– It is about an end-time thinking and burn labeling victims as objects and things that shall be destroyed, saith Hagtvet Dagbladet.
– This dehumanization include at both sides in the ongoing Gaza conflict.
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