The world is well aware of the brutal savagery shown by ISIL in their unending stream of macabre executions - captured in graphic and sickening detail in videos uploaded to YouTube and social media for consumption by aspiring jihadists, those unfortunate enough to be subjected to their occupation, and curious individuals drawn to images of violence.
Last year, we saw the first of their countless mass executions by shootings and beheadings. Since then, they've added to their repertoire of horrific executions, routinely subjecting their victims to crucifixions, stoning, immolation, being thrown from tall rooftops or burying them alive, hanging, or death by multiple amputations.
The estimate of how many have been executed are staggering - the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts the number of confirmed ISIL executions in Syria alone during the last year at over 3,000.
Inside Story: ISIL's tactics in Iraq
Women and children haven't been spared either, with well over a hundred such executions documented on video or in photographs.
Barbaric acts of cruelty
To most of the world, the executions are nothing more than senseless and barbaric acts of cruelty - stark reminders of history's most notorious despots and repressive regimes; some would say irrational or self-defeating.
But for ISIL there is a twisted yet deliberate purpose to their savagery - total domination of its subjects through fear and intimidation on the one hand, and outright hate and vengeance towards its enemies on the other.
It is based on a mythic and medieval past where how they execute their victims is as important as to why they execute them. And while there have been far worse regimes in terms of brutality, ISIL seems to openly revel in it, always looking for new opportunities to exploit their terror and find new enemies.
And as disconcerting as that may seem, their insatiable bloodlust and penchant for cruelty actually appeals to a global following of mostly angry, disenfranchised, or maladjusted young men and women all too willing to join their ranks to fight a common enemy - what ISIL spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani identifies as "infidels, Shia and apostate Muslims". Basically, anyone who defies them or does not accept and closely adhere to their strict form of religious ideology.
In his 2004 online treatise: The Management of Savagery, al-Qaeda strategist Abu Bakr Naji wrote what would eventually become the ISIL strategy. In essence, how to destroy "apostate" Muslim regimes so they fall into a state of "savagery", allowing them to be built back up under a caliphate. Naji believed that violence and cruelty were necessary in order to achieve and maintain control and that no mercy should be shown. According to Naji: "One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is nought but violence, crudeness, terrorism, deterrence and massacring."
Read more (worth it):
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/07/isil-management-savagery-150705060914471.html
