A report out of Iraq indicates that ISIS militants have turned on their own, killing as many as 45 of its members following a battle outside Qayyarah in Nineveh Province. Atrocities reportedly committed by Islamic State (ISIS) fighters are nothing new to world headlines, nor are the terrorist state’s draconian methods of dealing with those within its ranks that have shown cowardice in battle or broken their oaths or tenets of Sharia law. Still, this may be the first time the group has executed members by burying them alive.

The Clarion Project reported May 12 that news agencies were relaying stories of ISIS fighters being buried alive for leaving the battlefield. One report, from AhlulBayt News Agency, noted that 35 militants had been executed for fleeing battle by fellow members of a Takfiri ISIS group. The news agency wrote that the source spoke of the mass execution on condition of anonymity.

“A provincial source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Tuesday that the terrorists buried 35 fellow extremists alive on the outskirts of Qayyarah.”

Iraqi News reported the same day that the number of extremists executed by being forced into a mass grave and buried alive was 45. The agency quoted the source, also anonymous.

“ISIS had buried its members, who escaped from al-Bashir battles, inside one grave in Qayyarah vicinity in Nineveh Province. The escaped ISIS members were buried alive. ISIS buried these members after escaping from Qasbet Bashir battles in southern Kirkuk.”

AhlulBayt also noted that the executed militants had fled firefights with pro-government Iraqi forces in Bashir in the Kirkuk Governate. Those forces, units from Popular Mobilization, recaptured Bashir from ISIS on May 1. The terrorist state extremists had controlled Bashir since 2014.

This is not the first time that ISIS has been quick to deal with those refusing to fight or refusing to hold ground in battle. According to AhlulBayt, ISIS shot and killed 12 members on February 27 who had fled armed confrontations with Iraqi government forces in Anbar Province. Those members were killed in al-Hadar, a village south of Mosul, Iraq.

The following day, ISIS executed by firing squad another 35 of its own, accusing them of conspiracy against the Takfiri military outfit. The mass killing was carried out at the Ghazlami military camp, which is south of Mosul.

Iraqi News reported last year in March that the self-proclaimed Sharia Court of ISIS sentenced the beheading of four of its members in downtown Mosul for various crimes, such as “theft, robbery, and abuse.” Sources indicated that the four militants were killed in front of a gathering in a public execution. The same reported noted that “many elements and leaders” had been beheaded due to their “escape” into neighboring cities during clashes with opposing military forces in Salahuddin.

Three weeks prior to that, it was reported that ISIS had executed three of its more prominent leaders in Diyali Province for alleged “cowardice in the face of the security forces during clashes in the villages of al-Nay…” The anonymous source told the news agency that the men had been held for two months before they were executed.

ISIS began its military takeover of territories in Syria and Iraq with the escalation of civil strife in Syria, according to The Week. Made up of primarily of disbanded, disaffected and disenfranchised former military elements of deposed Iraq president Saddam Hussein, not to mention several Sunni militant factions, the militant group known informally as AQI (al Qaeda in Iraq) moved into the war-torn eastern region of Syria as the Islamic State of Iraq. After several military victories and distancing themselves from al Qaeda (or the reverse, as was reported), the religious extremist militants renamed themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and declared itself a worldwide caliphate, even though it controlled regions only in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq. ISIS, or Islamic State, rules through its military and by a fundamentalist version of Sharia law as dictated by Wahhabi doctrine, a sect of Sunni Islam.

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]