‘Blood of Jihad': ISIS training video promises recruits they will leave Iraq’s battlefields as ‘martyrs’
Alastair Beach, The Telegraph | October 12, 2014 | Last Updated: Oct 12 7:32 PM ET
ISIS / YouTubeIn a three-minute film, called "Blood of Jihad," shows the terror group’s latest members doing kung-fu style martial arts routines and learning how to strip down Kalashnikov machineguns.
A slick promotional video has been released showing Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham recruits at a so-called desert “graduation ceremony.”
The three-minute film, called “Blood of Jihad,” shows the terror group’s latest members doing kung-fu style martial arts routines and learning how to strip down Kalashnikov machineguns.
Apparently shot in Nineveh province, northern Iraq, it features about 100 young men being trained in the ways of insurgent warfare.
It is the latest promotional video produced by ISIS, which has been at pains to burnish its global image in the minds of disenchanted Muslims.
Last week another jihadi film was released, produced in a training camp in Kirkuk.
The group has even published an online propaganda magazine called “Dabiq” – named after a key site in Muslim apocalypse theology where the “final hour” of humanity will occur.
Introducing the latest ISIS video, an on-screen narrator wearing a baseball cap explains that “the first group of volunteers for jihad in the path of Allah has graduated.”
Standing in front of a young boy holding the group’s notorious black flag, the narrator explains that there are three stages of the training process.
The first of these, he says, is “physical fitness and strength.”
The camera then cuts to a long line of recruits standing in the sand in front of two military-style tents.
In a bizarre ritual, a man wearing a khaki T-shirt proceeds to make his way down the line and high-kick each recruit in the chest.
He finishes by striking his knee into the body of the final student.
The segment finishes with the recruits shouting “Allahu akbar,” or God is great, and “Islamic State is here to stay”.
In the following clip, which focuses on “weapons training,” the group of balaclava-wearing recruits are shown sitting cross-legged on the floor of a large room.
A man at the front of the room, also wearing a balaclava, shows them how to strip down and then reassemble a Kalashnikov, though, in a detail which suggests ISIS’ tutors still have some work to do, the clip has been speeded up to make the drill appear more impressive.
The film finishes with a sermon from a portly, bespectacled sheikh, who promises the recruits they will leave Iraq’s battlefields as “martyrs.”
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