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Watching Murder
ISIS, Death Videos and Radicalization
Simon Cottee
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Watching Murder
ISIS, Death Videos and Radicalization
Simon Cottee
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About This Book
Watching Murder shines a light onto the dark world of jihadi murder videos and the people who watch and share them on the internet.
Images and videos of murder, torture and other cruelties are everywhere on the internet. Why do some people seek out and watch this material, how are they affected by it and do they have a right to watch any of it in the first place? In this ground-breaking book, terrorism scholar Simon Cottee visits the murky fringes of the internet in search of answers. Focusing on ISIS, he shows how the group transformed the urban myth of the snuff movie into a grim reality watched by tens of thousands of people across the globe. On shock-sites, he finds a contingent of ISIS fans who, while hating the group, love to watch its most monstrous depredations in high definition. He interviews his fellow extremism researchers and asks them about all the dark things they have seen online and how this has affected their mental health. He speaks with the "cleaners" whose job is to report and remove violent jihadi propaganda from the internet. And he surveys thousands of young adults to find out what they think of ISIS and its notorious beheading videos. Cottee exposes the hysteria around online radicalization, and shows how our engagement with violent online spectacles is much more complex and multifaceted than many would have us believe.
Watching Murder will appeal to anyone with an interest in violence, media, terrorism and ISIS. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of terrorism studies, political science, culture and communication.
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1Why We Watch
DOI: 10.4324/9781003279396-1
This is a book about how audiences deal with online spectacles of real-life violence, murder and gore. These dealings are multifarious. Many violent online images come to us unbidden: we stumble across CCTV footage of a drive-by shooting posted on Twitter or happen on a pixilated screenshot of an execution in a news story on Mexican cartels. Other such images are actively sought out and gawked over, savored, curated, catalogued, disseminated, decoded or deleted.
When I first read about the beheading video of the American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002,1 I hunted it down on the internet and watched it. I was in my mid-20s at the time and doing a PhD on the intellectual history of British criminology, an arcane and pedestrian subject that had nothing to do with political atrocity. I had no business watching it, in other words, and afterward, I felt a mixture of disgust and anger and no small measure of self-disgust. Perhaps I am drawn to disgust and indignation and self-loathing. I was certainly curious to know what a beheading looked and sounded like.
When I was in my late 30s, I made it my business to watch jihadi snuff. As a criminologist of terrorism, I felt a professional obligation to do so – or, at any rate, that was my high-minded excuse. Those days are now over. I am done with it and have moved on. This book is, in part, an attempt to understand what all that watching has done to me and why I chose to do all that watching in the first place. But it’s also, more centrally and less solipsistically, an empirical survey of how others who share an interest in jihadi snuff, ranging from the curious citizen to the seasoned gore fan and dogged jihadi documenter, understand and “process” disturbing online atrocity spectacles. This might sound like a specialist concern or interest. It is not. In an age of the spectacle, facilitated by the internet, social media and the smartphone, most of us have seen or been exposed to uncensored images of real-life murder and cruelty. No one can or should be indifferent to the meaning and cumulative impact of this witnessing. This book, dear reader, is also about you.
By “jihadi snuff” I mean staged jihadi execution videos in which sacrificial victims are murdered on camera.2 These videos first emerged out of the second Chechen war in the late 1990s. Hayden Hewitt, who in 2003 took over the shock-site Ogrish.com, which later became Liveleak, told Gilbert Ramsay that “there was some absolutely genuinely horrific media that came out of [Chechnya] at the time … not just murdering but torture as well and mass murder”.3 One of the most notorious items in this back-catalogue of horror is the video Russian Hell in the Year 2000.4 Produced by the “Islamic Army of the Caucasus”, the video was defining and emblematic. It explained the background of the conflict. It showed Chechen commanders preparing for an attack. It included combat footage and shots of dead and mutilated Russian soldiers. It lionized fallen jihadi warriors. It used anasheed (a capella hymns) and slow-motion effects. And it showed the live execution of a wounded Russian soldier, who is casually machine-gunned to death by the Saudi-born jihadi veteran Samir Salih Abdallah (AKA Ibn Khattab). “This seems to have been the first videotaped execution in jihadi cinema, but it was certainly not the last”, observes Anne Stenersen in her essay on what she calls “jihadi cinematography”,5 which is one way of categorizing jihadi murder videos.
In his profile of Evan Kohlmann, an American terrorism consultant, Wesley Yang mentions Russian Hell and two other productions (Martyrs of Bosnia and The Destruction of the USS Cole) in passing, just three of the many videos in Kohlmann’s vast jihadi media library. “They are sophisticated media productions at the outer limit of human extremity, and they are Kohlmann’s daily bread”, Yang writes.6 This observation hasn’t aged well, although Yang can scarcely be blamed for this. No doubt in 2010, when Yang wrote his profile, Russian Hell looked or felt sophisticated and extreme. But some ten years later, it’s almost unwatchable: the footage is grainy and poorly shot, the narrative is plodding and the violence isn’t all that violent. What happened in the interim to make it so was the decade-long and still ongoing civil war in Syria, where advances in technology and communication fused with spiraling sectarian bloodshed to create a deluge of transgressive, High Definition snuff.
“What happens, now, if you drag out the old movies and look again at even their most violent violence?”, asked the novelist Martin Amis in his 1994 New Yorker essay on-screen violence. The answer is that the really violent old stuff is nothing compared to the really violent new stuff. Amis continued:
And who can forget the various torments meted out to Marlon Brandon in On the Waterfront (1954), One Eyed Jacks (1961) and The Chase (1966)? Look again at such scenes and you marvel at your earlier susceptibility. They seem tame party because they are tame, and also because, in the interim, you have yawned and blinked your way through a thirty-year Passchendaele of slaughter. You have become, in other words, irreversibly desensitized.7
After the past five years of cringing my way through a Passchendaele of ISIS-orchestrated besplatterings, it is hard to resist the conclusion that I have become irreversibly desensitized: Russian Hell and similar titles from that era trigger not the slightest unease in me.
Still, there can be no question that Russian Hell blazed a trail, setting a template that was replicated and refined in jihadi propaganda videos in the years that followed.
But the decisive turning-point came in February 2002 with the release of the beheading video of Daniel Pearl.8 This marks the point when jihadi videos went full gonzo – by which I mean out there, way out there.9 My memory of this video – just over three-and-a-half minutes long – is now mercifully sketchy, and I have no intention of looking it up again. I can half-remember the short confession Pearl was coerced into making. But I have never been able to erase the image from my mind of the executioner raising Pearl’s head into the air.
This shocking image soon became a standard visual trope in jihadi videos. In May 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of al Qaeda in Iraq and founder of the group that later became ISIS, presided over the staged beheading of Nicholas Berg, an American contractor who was working in Iraq after the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of the country by the United States and its allies. (It is widely believed by terrorism experts that Zarqawi himself did the decapitation.) In the video, Berg is dressed in an orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuit in front of five hooded men holding AK47s, an image that ISIS would later seize on and weaponize in its propaganda. By October 2004, Zarqawi’s group, originally known as Tawhid and Jihad, had publicly released 11 beheading videos.10
These videos proved controversial even within the wider jihadi fold. Zarqawi’s boss and al Qaeda’s then second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri was especially displeased: in 2005, he personally wrote to Zarqawi to instruct him to stop doing them. The beheading videos, he warned, were bad publicity and would serve only to alienate Muslims from the jihadi cause. “We are in a race for the hearts and minds of our ummah”, he wrote, advising that “the Muslim populace who love and support you will never find palatable … the scenes of slaughtering the hostages.”11 Zarqawi, who was killed in a US airstrike in 2006, duly stopped.12 But the moratorium on beheadings didn’t last and was unequivocally lifted as soon as ISIS split from al Qaeda in 201313 and rose to power in Iraq and Syria. Indeed, ISIS turned filmed beheadings into a signature tactic.14
According to Judith Tinnes, who monitors and reports on ISIS execution videos, ISIS murdered 2375 people in filmed executions between January 2015 and June 2020.15 No other terrorist group has come close to matching this grim benchmark, and no other terrorist group, in consequence, has enjoyed such global renown and notoriety. Probably the sheer number of people who have seen a staged execution has never been greater than at any other time in world history. Certainly, the visual distance between the viewer and the killing act in public executions has never been closer.16
Mark Astley remarks that the “urban myth” of the snuff video, “where the death of a human being is staged primarily for the benefit of the unblinking eye of the camera”, stopped being a myth and became “an easily accessible and quotidian reality” after the filmed murder of Daniel Pearl.17 Furthermore, Astley argues, “snuff has now gone mainstream”.18 It is hard to disagree with this, especially when ISIS beheading videos surface on major social networking sites like Facebook,19 or when a prominent news magazine uses an illustration of President Donald Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty,20 or when soccer fans unfurl a giant banner depicting the severed head of a player from an opposing team just before the start of the game.21
In the mid-eighteenth century, in Europe, beheadings were carried out in the public square and drew in large and unruly crowds to witness them.22 Today, spectators can watch at home on their computer, tablet or phone, distant from the act of killing yet fully immersed in its grisly mechanics and effects, thanks to the unsparing eye of the digital camera. Frances Larson estimates that since the 2003 Iraq war hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have eagerly sought out jihadi beheading videos. “Nick Berg’s execution video”, she writes, “quickly became one of the most-searched-for items on the web.”23 In the United States, it remained the most popular internet search for a week, “and the second most popular throughout the month of May, runner up only to ‘American Idol’”.24 In a survey conducted five months after Berg’s death,25 and which Larson refers to, researchers found that between May and June 2004, 30 million people – 24% of all adult internet users in the United States – had seen images from the Iraq war that were deemed too disturbing to be shown on television. The cumulat...