By Casey Michel
A particularly disturbing video featuring a Kazakh child prompts a renewed clampdown from Astana.
Earlier this week, the forces behind the ISIS video production team released one of their most excruciating offerings yet. The video opens with a pair of testimonies – two men, strained and twitching, claiming their work within Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), admitting their espionage within ISIS’s ranks. One man, Zhanbolat Mamaev, claims to be from Kazakhstan. The second says his name is Sergei Ashimov, a thirty-year-old former Muslim. Both claim to be searching for tactical information on ISIS – where the group’s leadership is located, information about the Russians in ISIS’s ranks. At some point, their work was found out. The duress in their confessions spills through the screen.
The video then transitions outside, with Mamaev and Ashimov kneeling in the scrub and sunlight. An ISIS fighter stands behind, invoking Quranic verse and ISIS pledge – rote, expected language. Aside this fighter, though, is a child, watching. A young boy, no more than 12 years old. He appears to be the same Kazakh child from an earlier ISIS video, a lead interview who had described how, with the rest of the Kazakh schoolchildren under ISIS’s watch, “We’re going to kill you, O kuffar. Insha’allah, we’ll slaughter you.” This time around, looking emotionless, the child holds a pistol. The incantations finish. The boy raises the gun, and fires, and the two men crumple in front of him. The child keeps firing. The video fades to black.
Before delving into the fallout from the video, which has already been taken down, a few caveats. There’s no way of confirming whether these two men were at all who they claimed to be. Kommersant has cast heavy doubt on their claims of being FSB agents, reporting that Ashimov, also from Kazakhstan, had recently finished his work as a janitor and perfume-seller in Kazan, Russia. The paper also noted that the absence of “heavy bleeding,” in conjunction with the lack of last-ditch pleas, called into question the execution itself. Global Voices ran through further concerns about the video’s authenticity, sharing questions of “tricky camera angles” and a lack of recoil. As it is, the FSB has remained mum on the identities of the two men. Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee has further said the two were not Kazakhstani citizens.
Read the full story at The Diplomat