From what I discovered in conversations last month, as of April 5 more than 20 Iraqi journalists and media workers were missing or currently held by Islamic State. A larger number of journalists who were reported by media groups and families to have been kidnapped last fall were later released, but I was unable to confirm those numbers. I also heard accounts of how the militant group abused journalists, including by flogging them, how it occupied media buildings to use as offices, and how it confiscated and sold media equipment from local TV channels.
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Iraqi forensic teams began on Monday excavating 12 suspected mass grave sites thought to hold the corpses of as many as 1,700 soldiers massacred last summer by Islamic State militants as they swept across northern Iraq. REUTERS/Stringer
ISIS supporters on Sunday called on jihadis around the world to kill Twitter employees because of the company’s frequent blocking of their social media accounts.
“Your virtual war on us will cause a real war on you,” reads an online post addressed to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and shared by ISIS supporters.
The post, whose authorship is unclear, was accompanied by a digitally altered image of Dorsey in the cross sights of a gun.
Hundreds of Kurdish Peshmerga units including special forces rush to support newly gained ground in an attempt to assault the town of Mula Abdula on the outskirts of Kirkuk, Iraq. Many choose to walk instead of using vehicles do to the immense amount of IEDs left behind by the Islamic State group when they retreated from this position two days prior.
Molly Crabapple sketches a source’s descriptions and images of life in Mosul, an Iraqi city transformed under militant control. For Vanity Fair.
One story the world cannot ignore is the slow and murderous fracturing of Iraq and Syria. In separate projects, Pulitzer Center grantees Sebastian Meyer and James Harkin have been documenting the fallout from the sudden rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
An Iranian Kurdish female member of the Freedom Party of Kurdistan (PAK) sits with her weapon in Dibis, some 50 kms northwest of Kirkuk, on September 15, 2014. The world’s top diplomats pledged today to support Iraq in its fight against Islamic State militants by ‘any means necessary’, including ‘appropriate military assistance’, as leaders stressed the urgency of the crisis. Photo by Safin HamedAFP/Getty Images
‘The whole time, I was acutely aware that ISIS positions were never very far away, sometimes less than a mile…Wherever we went, I asked where ISIS positions were. Sometimes the answers were exact. Other times the reaction was a simple shrug and a crooked smile. I kept replaying in my mind a scene I had depressingly run into twice before — I was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents in April 2004 outside of Falluja, and by Qaddafi troops in Libya in March 2011 — where the desolate horizon turned into an impromptu checkpoint, full of masked men with guns. It is a degree of terror known only through experience, the fear of driving knowingly into the arms of possible death. The masked men shoot into the air and celebrate their prey, while they decide whether they want you dead or alive. The only difference with ISIS is that I know if they capture me, there will be little negotiation for my life. They will kill me, and in the most brutal way.’
- Reportage by Getty Images photographer Lynsey Addario writes in The New York Times about her experiences covering Iraqi Yazidis fleeing ISIS. Read more.
The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has beheaded Steven J. Sotloff, the second American executed by the Islamic militant group, and posted a video of it on the Internet, the SITE Intelligence Group, a research organization that tracks jihadist web postings, said Tuesday.
The execution of Mr. Sotloff, 31, came despite pleas from his mother aimed directly at ISIS’s top leader seeking mercy for her son, a freelance journalist who was captured in northern Syria a year ago.
Word of Mr. Sotloff’s beheading came two weeks after James Foley, 45, another American journalist, was beheaded by ISIS, which warned that Mr. Sotloff would be the next to die.
