Antichrist Condemns Revenge Beheadings

Iraqi Shia militia who fought Isil condemned for revenge beheadings

Militant off-shoot Imam Ali Brigade, who took part in attack on Isil under American air cover, condemned for beheading of Sunni captives

Moqtada al-Sadr has condemned the killings Photo: HAIDAR HAMDANI/AFP

By Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent

5:38PM BST 10 Sep 2014

An Iraqi Shia militia that helped lift a siege by Isil jihadists under the cover of American air power took revenge on captives by beheading at least two of them, pictures posted online appear to show.

The beheadings and photographs are intended as a direct response to the propaganda of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil), which has gloried in the beheading of captives.

Apart from the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, hundreds of pictures have been circulated by Isil of the heads of Syrian government soldiers and other captives, while hundreds of other prisoners have been summarily shot.

The revenge killings were apparently the work of a Shia militia splinter group called the Imam Ali Brigade, after the founding father of Shi’ism, the Islamic world’s fourth caliph.

It is nominally a unit of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq Brigade, or the League of the Righteous, which kidnapped the British IT engineer Peter Moore in 2007 and killed his four British bodyguards and has since become a powerful fighting unit in both Syrian and Iraqi civil wars.

That brigade in turn split off from the Mahdi Army, the principal Shia militia that fought the Americans in the Iraqi civil war. However Moqtada al-Sadr, the Mahdi Army leader who is now an important power-broker in Iraq’s politics, condemned the beheadings, saying they were “an insult to the true doctrine”.

“Punishment must be announced against those who commit this kind of crimes, whoever they are,” he said.