Editor’s Note: This story first appeared at the Daily Mail. We reprint in part here.
Eight dead bodies hang from a metal frame in the Iraq’s Kirkuk province in Islamic State’s latest public display of barbarity.
The gruesome images which emerged on social media show the men’s limp bodies suspended from their feet off a tall structure in the town of Hawija. The notorious black flag used by Islamist groups like ISIS is displayed above them as horrified onlookers inspect the scene.
Some of the deceased men appear to be wearing military fatigues but it is not known if they were Iraqi soldiers.
An ISIS fighter believed to be Abu Al-Rahman poses triumphantly in one of the pictures — giving the one-fingered salute in front of a bloodied victim’s corpse. The same tyrant has been been pictured before alongside severed heads and masked ISIS fighters.
A shocking video released in February showed orange-clad captives being paraded in cages in the same city of Hawija.
Frenzied crowds taunted the kidnapped men during the merciless procession which echoed the terrible death suffered by captured Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. He was also caged before a film of him being burned alive, implying the same fate would befall the trapped captives in Hawija.
It was seen as revenge against the Kurdish forces who dragged the bodies of ISIS fighters through the streets of northern-Iraq earlier that month.
Previous reports suggest he is an Iraqi national from the town of Almere and the heads once belonged to members of the Syrian army whom the militants captured and beheaded.
The extremist group has established a firm foothold in what was once an oil-rich Kurdish stronghold of Kirkuk. ISIS has been preparing a new base for its deadly operations in Hawija as the United States train Iraqi troops for an invasion to retake Mosul, the International Business Times reports.