Jihadist Sites Boast of Massacre Showing Widening Iraq Rifts *** CAUTION - graphic pic***

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-15/jihadist-websites-boasting-of-massacre-show-widening-iraqi-rifts.html

Jihadist Sites Boast of Massacre Showing Widening Iraq Rifts
By Andrew J. Barden and Tarek El-Tablawy 2014-06-15T16:07:56Z



An al-Qaeda-affiliated group said it killed 1,700 Iraqis, setting social media and jihadist forums ablaze with claims that could further fuel the country’s sectarian tensions and propel it closer to civil war.

The claims by militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, posted on jihadist forums and on Twitter, couldn’t be independently verified. They were accompanied by photos of the purported mass shootings, images that recalled some of the footage from the civil war in Syria, where about 160,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. If verified, the massacres would be among the worst atrocities in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein unleashed sectarian battles between the Shiite Muslim majority and the Sunni minority that had held power for decades.

Iraq’s government is seeking to regain territory held by the Sunni militant group. Its advance after capturing the city of Mosul last week put in doubt Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s rule over a unified Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest oil producer.

The images showed scores of young Iraqi soldiers, either piled into trucks after their purported capture, or lying down at the mouth of long ditches that were to serve as mass graves. Some pictures showed militants, clad in black or in civilian clothing, firing into groups of 30 to 60 men. The captions mocked the victims, with one saying: “A lion against the weak and in war, an ostrich.” It described the men as apostates.