There was never any doubting the brutality of Islamic State (is), the jihadist group that has swept across large parts of Syria and Iraq and declared an Islamic caliphate. Its war has been accompanied by a stream of gory video recordings of mass-executions and ethnic cleansing. As America has joined the fight against is, deploying bombers and drones to help Iraqi allies push back the jihadists, the group has started to kill Western hostages it had hitherto held for ransom. On September 2nd it released a gruesome video of the beheading of Steven Sotloff, an American journalist, supposedly in response to America's "arrogant foreign policy". It was the second such atrocity in a fortnight; last month another American journalist, James Foley, was killed in exactly the same way. is threatens to behead a British captive next.
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