A video purporting to show members of the radical Islamist group ISIS executing more than two dozen Ethiopian Christians in a location believed to be in Libya surfaced on social media Sunday. The footage showed the members of the militant Islamic group slaying about 16 people with shots to the head while another dozen at a separate location were decapitated.
The video identifies the militants as belonging to an ISIS affiliate in eastern Libya. Subtitles on the footage refer to the victims as “crusaders” who are “worshippers of the cross belonging to the hostile Ethiopian church.” A spokesman for the Ethiopian government told Reuters they had not been able to determine if the victims were in fact their citizens.
“Nonetheless, the Ethiopian government condemns the atrocious act,” government spokesman Redwan Hussein said. At press time, the exact number killed is unclear from the video, which has not been declared authentic by any government or major media organization.
The 29-minute video, which features the ISIS logo, is similar to footage attributed to ISIS and released in February which showed it executing 21 Egyptian Christians on a Libyan beach. The footage prompted retaliatory airstrikes from the Egyptian military on ISIS’s suspected positions in Libya.
The more recent video appears to show the beheadings occurring on a beach area while the shootings occur in a desert area. Prior to the slayings, the video purports to show Christians in Syria who were offered the option of converting to Islam or paying a fine and accepted the latter.
Abba Kaletsidk Mulugeta, an official with the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s Patriarchate Office, told the Associated Press he thought the victims were Ethiopian migrants trying to reach Europe who instead got captured by ISIS along the way.
“I believe this is just another case of the [ISIS] group killing Christians in the name of Islam. Our fellow citizens have just been killed on a faith-based violence that is totally unacceptable. This is outrageous,” Mulugeta said. “No religion orders the killing of other people, even people from another religion.”
Libya has been unstable since 2011, when an uprising ousted long-time authoritarian leader Moammar Gadhafi. Jihadist groups have taken advantage of the chaos to expand operations into the area and some native radical groups have pledged loyalty to ISIS, a group whose name roughly translates to “Islamic state.”
Majority-Christian Ethiopia has angered Islamic groups due to its periodic armed conflicts with neighboring Somalia, which is mainly Muslim. The video does not include direct references to the conflicts, although one militant in the video declares, “Muslim blood that was shed under the hands of your religion is not cheap… To the nation of the cross we are now back again.”
