Consider yourself lucky if you are reading this, you most likely not to have lived in a society with extreme judgements, sentences, and punishments. Back in the good old days if you did something wrong, for example stole a goat, chicken, Adultery, you were pretty much assured being handed a death sentence. In those days there was no hanging around on Death Row, contemplating the errors of your ways whilst waiting for some form of humane, painless death. Executions in the ancient history seems to be so barbaric and devices used were built with careful engineering to push the guilty to feel extreme and prolonged pain before death. The forms of execution listed below really are so barbaric that you might question your faith in human nature. Blowing from the gun. With the invention of the cannon came this wonderfully imaginative way of executing enemy combatants. The basic method was to tie the unfortunate victim to the barrel of a cannon and fire it. Horrific as this sounds I imagine it w
Marched to their deaths: Sickening ISIS slaughter continues as 250 soldiers captured at Syrian airbase are stripped then led to the desert for mass execution
Sickening footage appears to show Islamic State militants parading around 250 captured soldiers through the desert in their underwear before they are killed and their bodies piled on the bare earth.
An Islamic State fighter claimed the men were from the Syrian government's Tabqa air base which extremists seized on Sunday, potentially handing them warplanes, tanks, artillery and ammunition.
The video, which has not been independently verified, is too graphic to be published in full.
It begins by showing dozens of men being marched through the desert wearing only their underwear. It then fades to black, resuming with a pile of bloodied bodies stacked on top of one another.
As the horrific footage progresses it pans slowly across a vast line of men who appear to be dead, and whose bodies have been laid out one by one.
The line forms a slow crescent across the desert, seemingly stretching to the horizon as militants stand beside it. Eventually, after more than a minute, the cameraman reaches the end of the line.
The precise death toll is uncertain and other sources put it at lower than 250, but at least 150 bodies are visible in the shaky video.
Its description on Youtube said it showed the execution of Army officers and Nusayri people, a significant minority of Shia Muslims in Syria.
A caption to another version of the video said: 'The 250 shabeeha taken captive by the Islamic State from Tabqa in Raqqa have been executed.' Shabeeha is the Islamist name for soldiers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.
An Islamic State fighter in Raqqa told Reuters: 'Yes we have executed them all'.
Before they were killed, the men's captors chanted 'Islamic State' - to which they replied: 'It will remain'.
Islamic State won a week-long battle on Sunday to capture the Tabqa base, which is 25 miles from their Syrian stronghold in Raqqa.
Syria's authorities insisted at the time that their soldiers had 'successfully regrouped' - suggesting they were later hunted down by the militants and executed.
Despite heavy losses on the Islamic State side, the base's capture prompted fresh fears that the fighters have got hold of advanced military technology which will allow them to cement their self-declared regime.
Video footage has already suggested Islamic State fighters have drones which were used to shoot reconnaissance footage of an army base.
Today's reported mass killing also underscores how the group uses images of violence as much as violence itself to terrorise its opponents, as it sweeps further into Syria and Iraq.
Nadim Houry, deputy director of Human Rights Watch for the Middle East, described the video as 'another ISIS war crime'.
And yesterday a UN commission accused the extremist group of committing crimes against humanity in Syria, similar to those it has already committed in Iraq.
Yet the extremists are also in touch with modern ideas of PR, releasing glossy magazines in English which feature mutilated bodies to promote their cause in the West.
The Home Secretary has sounded fresh warnings over the radicalisation of young Brits, with authorities fearing around 500 have joined an array of jihadi groups in Iraq and Syria.
Extremists have declared a self-styled caliphate, a Sunni regime ordering its subjects to operate under an extreme interpretation of Sharia law.
It has opened up three fronts in the fighting in Syria, which is already home to a bloody and long-running civil war between President Assad's forces and anti-government rebels.
Today CNN claimed the militants in Iraq have also been burning oil wells near the town of Zummar, which is crucial because it is near a road which links Mosul to the Syrian border.
The network suggested fighters are attempting to 'cover their tracks' as Kurdish Peshmerga fighters draw closer.
The Islamic State extremists now control roughly a third of Syria, mostly areas in the north and east of the country, as the U.S. threatens air strikes similar to those already used in Iraq.
But the situation is complicated as Washington has claimed the Syrian government - embroiled in a bloody civil war - is part of the problem despite offering itself as a force against extremism.
French President Francois Hollande added today that President Assad, whose forces used brutal force to crush what began as a peaceful uprising three years ago, was no ally in the fight against Islamic State.
Some 43 UN peacekeepers have been detained by gunmen in the Golan Heights, near Syria's border with Israel, where fighting has raged between rebels and government forces.
The identity of the armed group is not known. Several rebel groups operate in the Golan, but the Islamic State group has no known presence there.
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