A War Crime

Terrorism, pure and simple. A masked man with a British accent stood in front of a camera and decapitated Steven Sotloff, an independent journalist who worked with Time and Foreign Policy.

The news, which Washington has not officially confirmed, would be the second staging of an American journalist’s brutal murder in cold blood in the name of a fanatical “holy” war.

The decapitation was carried out by the group that calls themselves the Islamic State, whose goal is to install a new fundamentalist caliphate and which operates, for now, in Iraq and Syria.

The victims of the armed terrorist attacks are civilians and conventional military forces from both countries. From the Sunnis’ point of view, the rules imposed in the zones that the Islamic State has conquered come from the most anachronistic social and religious traditions.

Putting their victims on display is the most simple and crude of terrorist methods; it causes fear and panic in the general public and intimidates the political establishment, not only in the zones that have been illegitimately invaded but also in the global community.

Now a considerable group of European supporters from many nations is joining the guerillas, who seek to install a fundamentalist caliphate. They’re the ones in charge of the executions, to which their accents add a much bigger impact.

President Barack Obama isn’t yielding to the blackmail, but the trail of innocent blood continues, and the crimes against humanity are generating a global clamor.