ISIS beheads only two journalists?

Helping ISIS to be a master of media manipulation are a large number of journalists covering their exploits. So why have only two of the many  been executed.

Surprisingly when the whole ISIS thing started making headlines earlier this year, I had forgotten that I had predicted it over 10 years ago. Sure, I hadn't predicted the name or the nature of ISIS, or even the location, but I had predicted that the geopolitical nature of Iraq and its neighbors would lead to organizations such as ISIS being born.

This certainly wasn't a hard prediction to make as it was based on logic. That logic being that when the USA and friends finally withdrew from Iraq, that the country would be a mess, and so other organizations would emerge and try to take power.

So I'm sure other organizations with more resources made similar predictions.

The USA left Iraq with a form of democracy set up. Unfortunately democratic notions and control take many years to develop. So telling the Iraqi people “you are free of Saddam Hussein now, and you can enjoy voting periodically”, doesn't solve all their problems.

Anyhow, lets look at who ISIS’s neighboring enemies are in the region with concerns.

• Iraq, as mentioned;
• Syria, embroiled in a revolution;
• Iran, trying to build nukes;
• Turkey, hoping to join EU one day;
• Jordan, potentially the first real victim of ISIS (‘This will be discussed in a future blog);
• Lebanon, nobody knows who the government at the time of writing.

The two names I have left out are Israel and Saudi Arabia.

• Israel is probably happy about ISIS for diverting the world’s attention away from Gaza, etc. And ISIS will need to grow substantially to test Israel's defenses.
• Saudi Arabia, is the country most related to the ISIS movement through its links with the Wahhabi movement.  While Saudi Arabia denounces ISIS publicly most of the finance and recruits have been supplied to ISIS have come via Saudi Arabia. (‘another future blog’)
  

Obviously the two journalists have been executed for a reason. And I suggest they were chosen because they have discovered information that ISIS did not want them to let the outside world know about.

Thus I will next suggest that when ISIS next decides to execute a journalist it will be of no use to try negotiating for the journalist’s freedom.

What the journalists have discovered is unlikely to be simple tactics or atrocities as ISIS has no problem displaying this via the surviving journalists following their actions. So it must be something more insidious such as the identity’s of their military advisers.

And this leads to the big questions of. Who are the military advisers and who is supplying them?