Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) jihadists reportedly tied nine young men to iron poles in Mosul before hacking them in half with a chainsaw.
The young men, identified as teens by the Daily Star, were sentenced to death by an ISIS sharia for allegedly being involved in a resistance movement.
U.S.-backed Iraqi forces are getting ready to launch an offensive to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and the terrorist group’s last major stronghold in the country.
The young men were executed in public.
“ISIS fighters have executed nine youths of Mosul. The outfit accused that these youths belonged to an anti-ISIS resistance faction,” an anonymous source told Iraqi News, according to the Daily Mail.
“The death sentence pronounced by ISIS sharia court stated that the men should be tied to an iron pole in the centre of Tal Afar Square in Mosul and then sliced into two with an electric chainsaw,” added the source.
Thousands of Mosul citizens have been executed since ISIS took control of the city in 2014.
Last month, the terrorist group forced some Mosul residents to watch as six men were boiled alive.
“Gay men have been routinely thrown off buildings by ISIS savages while some prisoners have even been dissolved to their deaths using nitric acid,” notes the Daily Star.
The chief of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which overseas U.S. military operations in the Middle East, said this week that the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are “on track” to recapture Mosul from ISIS “by the end of the year.”
“My assessment… I think is that they are on track to achieve that objective. They own the timeline here for this, and so we’ll continue to work very, very closely with them and insure that we can support their operations when their ready to go,” he said. “But I think we are proceeding a pace exactly where we hope to be at this particular time…”
He noted that momentum against ISIS has increased as the terrorist group loses territory in its self-proclaimed “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria nearly two years after the jihadists seized large swathes of territory there.