Outside the Beltway

Beheading Videos Top Sellers in Iraq

James Joyner · Thursday, September 23, 2004 · 4 comments

Images of horror top sellers in Baghdad’s ‘thieves market’ (AFP)

Hostage throat-slitting videos rub shoulders with pornography in the stalls of central Baghdad’s infamous “thieves market”, as Islamic radicals immortalise their acts of terror in grisly films like Monday’s beheading of a US national. The latest video, posted on Monday night on an Islamic website, showed five masked gunmen reading out their Islamic verdict against their American captive Eugene “Jack” Armstrong and then slicing off the victim’s head as he cried out in pain.

Once such gory videos are posted on the Internet it does not take long for them to make their way to the packed stalls of central Baghdad’s Bab al-Sharqi marketplace where consumer appetite is hungry for bloody spectacle. In the teeming open-air market, television sets rigged to sound systems broadcast the sounds and sights of tortured hostages, belly dancers and pornographic movie stars. Shoppers can ask stallholders to play DVDs that catch their attention.

Behind a plastic case, a dull picture of a local singer on the cover, are concealed the grisly exploits of the Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and Holy War) group of alleged Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. The telltale sign is a little white rectangular sticker on the sleeve, on which is written by hand in Arabic, “Al-Assifa” (storm).

Given the interest that the videos continue to generate on the Internet in the U.S., I’m not sure that there’s anything to read into their popularity in Iraq. Still, it’s rather unsettling.