“Killed for the abominable crime of sodomy”: building legitimacy with public executions of sexual and gender minorities in the Islamic state

ABSTRACT

The Islamic State, IS, is known for extreme violence and publishing and distributing extreme violent material online. IS’s public executions have previously been researched in the context of state legitimacy building, but this research has mostly focused on Western and/or foreign victims, leaving out other demographic groups, like local sexual and gender minorities, and what role their murders play in building IS’s legitimacy. This research analyses IS’s violence against sexual and gender minorities and how this violence helped build IS’s legitimacy regionally and internationally. To analyse a quasi-state actor with legitimacy aspirations, I develop a theoretical framework using Michel Foucault’s paradigms of sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical power. Utilising visual and audio-visual material from 18 different executions of victims accused of homosexuality, I argue that the persecution and murders of sexual and gender minorities build IS’s legitimacy on two levels: the local and the international. Furthermore, the “Us vs. Them” dichotomy typical for terrorist organisations is also formed in these executions and becomes present on these two levels. The research demonstrates that the participation of audience, whether present or witnessing the executions online later, is at the heart of the rationality of power in these executions.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic state
• sexual minorities
• homosexuality
• legitimacy
• executions
• extreme violence

Introduction

¹The Islamic State, IS, is known for the extreme violence it practiced under its rule and the violent material it produced and distributed. This research continues the discussion on IS and how its public executions built its legitimacy and supported its state-formation attempts. Although previous research on IS’s public executions has analysed the power relations between IS and who IS calls enemies, little attention has been given to distinct local demographic groups of victims, such as sexual and gender minorities, and how their murders affected IS’s legitimacy. IS’s violence against sexual and gender minorities has been discussed in the context of the sexual violence IS conducted against, for example, ethnic minorities (Ahram 2015), but the public executions of victims accused of homosexuality have not been studied extensively.

I argue that the persecution of sexual and gender minorities played a special role in IS’s legitimacy building. Through these executions, IS was building legitimacy as a state on two levels. Firstly, on the local level IS exposed and annihilated undesired community members, thus acting as the population’s “protector”; secondly, on the international level IS distributed material recorded of the executions to distant audiences to position itself in relation to its enemies, placing itself in stark contrast with Western political developments and values. This dual effect in IS’s public executions, notably beheadings, has been argued by, for example, Elisa Impara (Impara 2018). This research continues the discussion on the violent persecution of sexual and gender minorities in conflict contexts. The findings presented add to our understanding of why this specific minority continues to be in jeopardy and targeted during conflict or when a state, or an actor aspiring to establish itself as one, is seeking legitimacy internally and externally, and in the formation of a specific state identity in relation to other states.

The research question can be summarised as follows: how does IS utilise the public executions sexual and gender minorities to construct a particular political identity and reality? Simone Molin Friis and Roxanne Euben have studied IS’s public executions, and the power relations formed and produced in them. Euben discusses the recorded executions of two US citizens and analyses them through the concept of “retaliatory humiliation” (Euben 2017). For Friis, IS’s public executions facilitate a “particular political reality” (Friis 2018), and IS is establishing a distinct form of government as well as using its victims’ bodies and lives as symbolic tools to express lethal power over an enemy nation (Friis 2015). While Friis and Euben have mostly focused on the power play between IS and (mainly) the US and British governments, this research discusses the special role of the killings of members of sexual and gender minorities. IS committed a number of public executions, a myriad of which were not recorded and distributed (Tinnes 2016); the public executions of sexual and gender minorities are significant because they target a distinctive demographic group of people internal to the community and society IS is controlling and/or trying to form. Studying these murders adds to the existing body of research on IS’s public executions because it presents a new dynamic of legitimacy building where an internal member of the society transforms to an excluded, external threat.

As Friis argues, IS operates both on a physical, locational battlefield, and on a virtual one. Thus, to understand IS’s power building and power building abilities, it is essential to look at the visual aspects of IS’s communication about its performance and undertakings (Friis 2018, 245). Photographs and videos taken from the execution of victims accused of being homosexual or accused of having engaged in homosexual activities form the data of this research. Whether the victims engaged in homosexual activities or were homosexual remains unclear; what is important here is that they were labelled as homosexuals or having engaged in homosexual activities, executed for that, and the audio-visual material of those executions was distributed as material from executions of homosexual people. The legitimacy building manifests in the material in two ways; a local audience witnessed the event live, and a wider audience was affected by the event later when material of it was published and distributed online. The secondary research questions in this research thus are: to whom are these executions staged and recorded? What is the rationality of power of these killings?

This article is organised as follows. First, I begin with a brief encounter to IS’s position on homosexuality and homosexual behaviour. Then, I present the theoretical framework I create using Michel Foucault’s paradigms of sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical power. After having presented the data and methods, I continue to analyse the killings, together with presenting the findings.

Islam and homosexuality, and the case with IS

To better understand the persecution of sexual and gender minorities by IS, a brief introduction to the history of homosexuality in IS’s core areas is helpful. Before colonialism in the Middle East, the Islamic understanding of homosexuality did not see homosexual acts as defining identity per se and did not regard the (two) people practicing (anal) intercourse to be homosexual; rather, the role of the person was defined by the role they took in intercourse, i.e. whether they penetrated or were penetrated, active or passive. While the penetrating, active person in the intercourse was strengthening his masculinity by subjecting the receiving party, the penetrated passive person was emasculated (Kligerman 2007, 55). The more rigid gender roles and sexuality conventions of the colonisers transformed homosexuality in the Islamic countries from sexual behaviour to identity (Rahman 2015): something a person is rather than does.

The persecution of sexual and gender minorities is not a new phenomenon in the region where IS was active (Human Rights Watch 2009). Current homophobic attitudes and legislations in many Muslim majority countries can be seen as counteract of colonialism in a world where sexual and gender minority rights are to a large degree seen as a Western product and influence (Rahman 2015). While opinions are changing and more embracing attitudes towards sexual and gender minorities are forming in Muslim majority nations and Muslim communities (Kugle and Hunt 2012), most Muslim majority nations (Poushter and Kent 2020) take what Levi Geir Eidhamar labels as “traditional stance” on homosexuality and see it as both sinful and against the word of Qur’an and the Hadith (Eidhamar 2014). This “traditional stance” interpretation is quite literal, and homosexuality is understood as unnatural, an act against the natural order of things. Often, homosexuality is also seen as a threat to procreation (Simmons 2014, 161), and further, to the stability of the heterosexually arranged society.

IS builds its stance on homosexuality, and how people suspected of homosexuality should be punished, on a few Qur’anic verses and legal-traditional descriptions of homosexuals being executed either by stoning or throwing the accused off the roof of a high building, or both.² Most of the data in this research describes execution events in which the victim is either thrown off the roof of a high building, stoned to death, or both. With this link to holy texts and legal tradition, IS possibly wanted to portray itself as a rightful punisher and protector of the ummah (community of believers).

With IS and the executions of victims it accused of homosexuality, one faces the question whether IS killed these victims because of something that they did or because of something they were: homosexuality as sexual behaviour or identity. While it can be argued that IS sees homosexual behaviour as unlawful and these victims were killed because they committed a crime, and IS punished them according to the legislative framework it had established (Long 2015), I argue that despite referring to homosexuality as a crime, IS understands homosexuality as unnatural. As IS states in the 15th issue of its magazine, DABIQ, “the opposite of fitrah [inborn human nature] is all sexual perversion, the worst of which mentioned in the Quran was that of the sodomites” (DABIQ 15: Break the Cross). Here, homosexuality is not a crime; it is an unnatural part of a person and becomes inseparable from their identity. On the other hand, IS’s sexual violence against Yazidi³ boys (Ahram 2015, 68), for example, resonates with the traditional understanding of homosexual behaviour as formulating the active participant’s hypermasculinity, while emasculating the passive party. In this case, homosexuality is seen as inherent and incurable for those IS executes, while the homosexual behaviour IS fighters engage in does not define their identities as other than hypermasculine.

The shift from homosexual acts to homosexuality as an identity tied to an individual’s bodily reality makes it possible to create a social juxtaposition between homosexuals and the rest of society. Especially considering the pre-existing negative attitudes towards homosexuals in the area, homophobia could be deployed effectively, because the regulative and oppressive societal elements were already in place and in action in the society.

The violence towards sexual minorities was recorded and published to state an ideological difference between IS and the Western world. By showcasing its violence globally, IS shows that it is fighting the values of human rights, freedom, and democracy that it portrays as Western (Nuruzzaman 2015). IS’s Western opponents are disciplined out of IS’s society by these executions; while the Western world is increasingly practising inclusive policies towards sexual and gender minorities, IS does the very opposite. By that, it not only excludes sexual minorities in its own society, but ideologically also any society that practises pro sexual and gender minorities policies.

While not the first actor around its area of activity to persecute sexual and gender minorities, IS can be argued to be the first (or at least the first in recent history of the area) to establish a distinctive form of punishment for this crime (throwing the victim off a roof and stoning them), and, as can be detected in the data, systematically execute this punishment in this specific way. IS is also the first to publicly distribute these killings and make them a visible part of their political agenda. On June 26^th, 2015, when the US Supreme Court legalised same sex marriage in all US states (Supreme Court of the United States 2015), Twitter exploded with tweets tagged #LoveWins. IS replied with a tweet tagged with the same hash tag and containing 4 images of the execution of 2 men assumed gay. Whether these two men were executed because of the ruling of the Supreme Court remains unknown. What matters is that their death was recorded, published in the context of, and used to counter, Western political development.

Theoretical framework

This section discusses the theoretical framework I develop on Michel Foucault’s paradigms of power. I create this theoretical framework to analyse events that are often looked at from a legal and/or religious fundamentalism perspective from the vantage point of legitimacy building through extreme violence. The advantage of this specific theoretical framework is in its ability to discuss legitimacy building and state formation through the mechanisms of power functioning on all societal levels, the spatiotemporally varying subject being at the centre of these mechanisms. Foucault’s understanding of power as irreducible to state actions allows one to analyse power in other, more fluid and dynamic contexts, and with otherwise governmentally and politically unclear actors such as IS. For Foucault, power is dependent on the visual and what it can expose. Public executions are extremely visual, which is why the Foucauldian paradigms of power where exposure is a key element prove helpful. The modalities of power discussed here are sovereign, biopolitical and disciplinary power, and how these paradigms, in the case with IS, come together through the norms and biological features of sexuality and brutal, publicly displayed physical punishments.

To take the discussion about IS’s state-formation and legitimacy building further, especially on sovereign displays of power, two articles by Friis (Friis 2015, 2018) and an article by Euben (Euben 2017) are discussed. For the theoretical framework, multiple works by Michel Foucault (Foucault 1990, 1995; 2000, 2015) are visited. To strengthen the theoretical framework on IS and legitimacy building, Jarno Välimäki’s study (Välimäki 2022) on IS and the hybrid threat it poses is visited. Foucault’s paradigms of power have been previously applied to analysing IS by, for example, Brian Mello (Mello 2018). To deepen the conversation on abnormality, work by Judith Butler (Butler 2008) is discussed.

In sovereign power, the sovereign decides over life and death (Foucault 1990, 135). With this power, the sovereign also establishes life as the centre stage of power (Mbembe 2019, 66). The sovereign’s legitimacy rests on his ability to take a life and instil power by showcasing with graphic public displays of violence their might over disobedient citizens. Disobedient citizens, criminals, are punished publicly in a horrific manner both to tie together crime and punishment and to end the war between the sovereign and the criminal that started, when the criminal went against the sovereign and questioned their authority by committing a crime. The audience is the most important actor in these displays of violence. In these punishments, fear is instilled in those who have not committed a crime, and the most significant effect of the punishment is on the audience (Foucault 2000, 82;131). A public execution is a visual performance of power that creates a division of “us” and “them” – the “us” witnessing the correction of the society, as the “them” is being punished.

Differing from sovereign power’s absolutism, disciplinary power presents a system of monitoring that does not rely on the sovereign’s constant ability to create and uphold a (physical) threat. Rather, one is looking at a society where the power to expose, threaten and on the other hand, protect, relies on a system of monitoring that is operated by the society in its entirety. The aim of this kind of power is to strengthen, observe, discipline, multiply and organise the people and elements it represses (Foucault 2010, 100). However, the punitive system does not judge these aspects per se; rather, they are used to explain the criminal behaviour of an individual (Foucault 2000, 27). In other words, one would be moving from punishing a person for a crime towards punishing them for their identity.

Reflecting back to the development of Muslim homophobia on a societal level, Momin Rahman discusses government-level homophobia in post-colonial Muslim majority nations and how homophobia can be used to bolster the legitimacy of a ruling power (Rahman 2015). This is of course not exclusive to Muslim majority nations but is rather a universal example of the creation of a disciplinary power setting where legitimacy flows from one demographic (oppressed) group to (privileged) another. The more anonymous and functional disciplinary power gets, the more individualised its subjects become; this leads to abnormalities being singled out more effectively (Foucault 2005, 263) because they are more visible and can be detected more easily. Disciplinary power seeks to normalise, but it does not necessarily seek to destroy the abnormal it has created; the abnormal is needed to compare to the established normal, and the punitive mechanisms of the society need the abnormal to execute the system of punishments (Foucault 2005, 249–51). The abnormal’s existence is essential in this mechanism of power. Thus, disciplinary power also has a performative nature; as it is dependent on what it can expose, instead of hiding the abnormal individual, their existence is used to strengthen the normal and the system of monitoring.

Biopolitical power is power over life and death but differs from sovereign power’s right to take life. Biopolitical power seeks to protect life, and secure production and reproduction in the society. Controlling life by other means than threatening it by death opens the path for power to the body (Foucault 2010, 104–5). There is an in-built dualism in biopolitics: protecting and enhancing life comes with a flipside of repressing, excluding, and destroying some forms of life (Prozorov 2013). Biopolitical power is a widely spread form of power that touches upon all fields of life, but perhaps the most notable aspect of Foucault’s biopolitical power, is its power over sex and sexuality. Sex manages the life of the species, and thus it is a crucial part of biopolitics. This is because sex and sexuality are located between the individual body and the function of the population (Foucault 1990, 137). Members of sexual minorities are not a threat to the society solely by means of being a (biopolitical) threat to the reproduction of the species/nation: with sexual minorities, one is moving towards a more general rationality of power. Homophobia is an example where the biopolitics of sexuality is not aimed at the maximising the potential of an individual; a sexed body who is sexually disobedient is forced to be sexually productive “at the threat of death” (Repo 2013, 8) Homosexuals are a social danger because they are, by their bodily reality, at war with the society.

Associating people with homosexuality is labelling them as criminals and enemies of the society. Such association delegitimises these people, taking away their rights as citizens. Delegitimation by association creates the crime, the criminal, and the rest of the society, building the ruling authority’s legitimacy further, and taking the repression to all levels of society. Homosexuality enables the rejection of the individual, and their existence is disallowed to the point of death (Repo 2013, 8). An existence between life and death is the life of the abnormal – a life that is already disallowed before it is killed. Violence exercised upon an abnormal is seeking to negate something that has already been negated (Butler 2008, 22). Physically killing an abnormal produces a death that has, socially, already happened. Violence against the (established) abnormal continues because the abnormal cannot be re-negated (killed) – it continues to reappear (Butler 2008, 22). Public executions are, in the eyes of the authority, a security project that never ends. Legitimacy flows from the delegitimised citizen to the authority. In this research, homosexuality is what endows the articulation of all three modes of power and the movement from punishment that is particular to one mode of power (the public spectacle presented in sovereign power) to the procedures of regulation of individuals (and society) particular to the other two modes (the hierarchical observation and classification of disciplinary and biopolitical power).

In this research, I do not claim to know IS used public executions to bolster its legitimacy as a state; rather, I present a Foucauldian reading of the phenomenon and a specific framework of power through which these events are analysed. I argue that with the sexual and gender minorities, IS’s communication was aimed at audiences on two levels, local and international, and that the legitimacy building also took place on these two arenas; firstly, to establish a certain political system and rule of law on the local level and secondly, to highlight the political and ideological differences between IS and the West, further distinguishing IS, its regime, and rule of law. The bodily reality of the victim becomes a tool of legitimacy building in a state-building attempt, when it is subjected to and treated according to the laws, rules, and authority of IS, and understanding this is crucial when looking at IS’s global presence alike (Friis 2018, 258–60).

Excessive violence by the ruling authority acts as a counter-war against those who threaten the sovereign, and to neutralise the society after a violation against it. But in IS’s case, the counter-war was directed not only towards sexual minorities, and to protect local communities, but towards a worldwide audience. IS is still placing itself in a stark contrast against the Western world and values that are presented as Western. External recognition is essential for building state legitimacy; IS utilised the definitions of other states of it in (self-)constructing the state it had created (Al-Dayel and Anfinson 2018). As Välimäki discusses, IS, in effect, builds its own legitimacy as much as it is trying, with its actions, to erode the legitimacy of its opponents (Välimäki 2022).

Power makes all subjects and societal structures visual, and it is dependent on the visible. Any danger must be (visually) exposed because the visible builds the protector-role of those in power (the sovereign protecting its subjects). If the danger is not exposed and made visible to all, there is no danger and thus nothing to protect anyone from, and therefore no power relations to utilise.

Data and methods

All criminal punishments both renew existing and confer new powers to the impression of law and order. In the punishment, the crime and the criminal are visible and through them the punitive system also becomes visible (Foucault 2005). The data in this research is comprised of recordings of 18 separate events of execution. The data has been transcribed from the form of 74 photographs and 5 videos into textual scripts depicting the events. For data and methods, works by Knoblauch et al. (2006) and W. J. T. Mitchell (1995) on the operation of the visual sphere and how communication is formed in it are discussed. Recent studies by El Karhili et al. (2021) and El Damanhoury and Winkler (2018) on IS and its visual communication and the significance of it to IS’s strategy, identity and state-formation inspire and assist studying and understanding IS’s photographic and video material.

The chronological range of the pictures chosen as data in this research stretches from January 2015 to May 2016. The data collection in this research has been conducted by using saturation as a criterion. This means that data has been collected to the point where the occurring new data does not reveal anything new about the phenomenon in analysis. Because this research does not focus on the total number of the events but on the nature and similarity of them, this method suited the research interest.

The data is divided into four categories to ease the analysis (Table 1). The categories are 1. The verdict; 2. On the rooftop, the crowd; 3. Midfall; and 4. On the ground, stoned. Category 1 describes the moments when the verdict for the crime is read out loud. Category 2 shows the moments the victim is either taken to or already on the roof of a building. Category 3 portrays the fall, but not yet the death of the victim. In Category 4, the victim is either stoned, being stoned, or pronounced dead. This categorisation of the data allows the analysis to flow smoothly from one part of the event towards another yet allowing to stop and look closer at the specific features and positions of actors in each phase of the executions. The data has been acquired by performing a variety of Google searches using specified search word combinations. The data was located behind several links on multiple websites that have recently either removed the material or have been shut down. However, all the data in this research has been saved and stored and can be presented upon request.

Table 1. The total number of pictures in the data according to category.

Category 1: The verdict	19 pictures
Category 2: On the rooftop, the crowd	21 pictures
Category 3: Midfall	16 pictures
Category 4: On the ground, stoned	18 pictures
TOTAL:	74 pictures

Hearing and seeing are essential parts of human interaction, and thus it can be assumed that by recording them, the essence of the interaction itself can be captured (Knoblauch et al. 2006, 30). Here, however, the material is not so-called natural data (Mitchell 1995, 29) where the people whose actions are recorded go about as if there was no recording taking place. The IS execution recordings were staged events, heavily edited, scripted, and directed. What is taking place in the photographs and videos of the data is at the same time reality and a set up play of power, a show for those present, and those who will see the material later after the actual event has already taken place. As Euben points out, although not being present at the execution, the individual watching the recording can place themselves on the spot, with the possibility of reliving the experience (Euben 2017, 1023). Those taking part in the event, whether first hand or later through a recording, have a role in the display, and the display is, in turn, formed through the multitude of different roles participants take in the event, willingly or forced (Fujii 2021, 70–71). While the presence and participation of the audience in the live event can be monitored and controlled, when and where the material is consumed and how it is interpreted “second-hand”, cannot be controlled, which creates additional meanings and context to both the events and the material (Rose 2001, 38–39).

When analysing and collecting highly sensitive data, there are a number of ethical considerations to bear in mind. The data of this research consists of photographs and videos of public executions by a terrorist organisation, and it displays the death of defenceless people in a horrific manner. The material exposes the victims and violates their person and privacy, as well as, potentially, that of their family members and loved ones. The material also exposes IS affiliates, who may have been killed in conflict or are still active or have been captured.⁴

Online material is readily available to anyone searching with the right combination of keywords. Searching for the material via Google searches or on other platforms (e.g. YouTube, LiveLeak) also inevitably leads to the resurfacing of said material, albeit for research purposes. I avoid revisiting the material and thereby giving it more traffic by storing the material in my personal archive.⁵

I do not include photographic material in this research. By presenting photographic material of these executions, I participate in circulating and republishing the material, thereby further exposing the victims, and adding to the sensationalist nature of extreme violent material published and distributed by IS. I also wish to avoid exposing anyone else to this type of highly triggering material. Instead, in addition to the scripts, I present generalised visual figures of the executions that allow to detect similarities between set-ups of different executions to support the analysis.

In this research, the data is analysed through two levels of interpretation. Firstly, I decipher the photographs and videos into text. Secondly, I analyse the events through the scripts and present generalised visual figures. I acknowledge that these methods produce an analysis that leads to a specific view on the research topic (Rose, n.d..), and that the analysis may have benefitted from possible interviews or audience ethnographies.

Presented below is an example of one event, where the pictures have been divided into categories and given a short explanation about what is happening in them. I have coded the pictures in the scripts according to date and set. All the scripts are labelled with a specific number (e.g. P1.1. for photographs, V5.1. for videos), making it possible to discuss several scripts from different events but in the same categories together. Thus, I can look for similarities both between individual pictures from certain parts of the events as well as separate events. The videos have been transcribed using the same categorisation as with the photographs, splitting the video into shorter sections at the intersections, where chronologically one category ends, and another starts. This way, the videos can be analysed within the same framework as the photographs.

May, 2015

Set 3: 5 pictures May 5th, 2015, location: Mosul, Iraq

P3.1: The picture is a close-up of a crowd gathered on a small hill. The people in the crowd appear to be looking upwards. There are several armed people, assumed men, in front of the crowd. Category: The verdict (1)

P3.2: The picture is taken from the ground, directed upwards. It shows several people, assumed men, on a rooftop, and in between them, a blindfolded victim. Two men are holding the victim, one on each side. There is also a man standing behind the victim. Two men at the rightmost corner of the rooftop are holding up an IS flag. Category: On the rooftop, the crowd (2)

P3.3: The picture is taken from a low birds-eye perspective and shows a crowd gathered in a half circle. The first few rows of the crowd are sitting. There are two low buildings behind the crowd and on the roofs of these buildings there are four armed people, assumed men. Also, in front of the crowd, there are several armed men. Category: On the rooftop, the crowd (2)

P3.4: The picture shows the victim in mid-fall from a low two-floor building. The victim is falling back first on to a pile of rocks. There are 11 people, assumed men, on the roof, several of which seem to be armed. One is holding up an IS flag. There is another IS flag on the wall of the building. Parts of the crowd are also visible. Category: Midfall (3)

P3.5: The picture shows the victim on the ground. The victim’s hands are tied behind his back. The crowd around the victim appears to be gathering closer. Category: On the ground, stoned (4)

Analysis and discussion

This section analyses and discusses the executions from three different standpoints: the staging and location of the executions; the victim/perpetrator relationship; and participation and activity of the audience present in the executions. Additionally, the analysis discusses what the images and videos are doing performatively, e.g. what their message entails and how they facilitate the exposure of the victims.

IS formed a caliphate, and it needed a governmental structure to manage the conduct of this political entity. This governmental structure could be created and strengthened by different aspects of power that legitimise one’s right to rule. This also makes possible the analysis of extreme violence directed towards sexual and gender minorities without analysing it through (solely) religious traditions but placing the persecution deeper into the context of state building and legitimacy. Thus, sexual minorities were not just religious enemies or rule-breakers, but became, through their existence, a tool to foster the punitive system and governmental bodies IS set up. These concepts help to grasp IS’s ambitions about building a distinctive political entity or arguably, a state, rather than trying to locate IS among traditional religious extremist groups, merely seeing it just as one with more territory and a state-like ruling system.

The analysis reveals power relations at play in the executions in multiple ways. Below, I discuss the most notable features I detected from the data.

Empty space and location

As many of the scripts in Category 1: The verdict describe, the crowd stands at a distance from the speaker and his companions, and in all but one the speaker uses a microphone. The use of empty space between the speaker and the crowd indicates the need for clear vision: both the speaker and the victim need to be clearly visible to the crowd. This is essential in a display of power by a sovereign against a criminal. In many instances, the audience is gathered in clearly formed half-circles or straight rows. Such positioning not only prepares the sovereign, public spectacle, but also singles out the victim as an abnormal, outside the privileged lives that get to witness the victim’s destruction. Often, the victim is standing next to the speaker. The empty space creates a stage to which there are no limitations, such as walls or doors. The only limitation is the distance between the audience and the speaker’s and the victim’s position. This way, nothing is unclear or hidden about the execution from the very start. Physical distance from the victim creates mental and social unity among the onlookers that forms when witnessing the same event together. In many events, children and youngsters have been put on the first few rows of the crowd. There is no place for the victim to hide; his body and his crime are made visible to all members of the crowd.

The use of empty space is also clear in the scripts of Category 2: On the rooftop, the crowd. The space between the victim and the audience grows larger and together with the building where the execution takes place it builds a stage that was somewhat absent in category 1. There is a crescent formation or a straight line the audience has formed away from the “stage” of the execution, the building (Figure 1; Figure 2). The scripts in category 2 reveal the importance of the building not as only the site of punishment traditionally, but also locationally and visually. In most events, the site of execution is a building at least two storeys high, usually alongside a busy street in an urban setting. Many of the executions also took place (according to the location given with the data when the data was retrieved) in larger cities, such as Aleppo in Syria or Mosul in Iraq.

Figure 1. Execution event, general view from side, victim on rooftop.

Figure 2. Execution event, general view from the rooftop, victim on rooftop.

A noteworthy exception in the data is set 14, in which all the 4 scripts describe moments prior to the arrival of the victim and/or the moment of arrival to the scene. The victims arrive by car. This might suggest that certain places are preferred as scenes for the execution over others. Given that most of the executions are done by throwing the victim(s) off the roof of a high building, some locations become more desirable than others. But, in case of set 14 the height of the building or its location seems to play little role. The victims of set 14 appear highly like those in set 13, where the execution is done by stoning only. Set 13 is thus also an exception in the data.

This might indicate that no buildings were (deemed) tall enough for the execution, or the location might be optimal for attracting a higher number of crowds. The location for sets 13 and 14 is Aleppo, pre-war (population 2.5 million) one of the largest cities in Syria (European Union Agency for Asylum 2020). In a war-torn area, the scene for the execution might be chosen because of a location’s capacity to attract or force to attend a higher number of audiences.

There is similarity in the positioning of the audience and the victim throughout different executions. The positioning might be executed this way because it is natural for people to stand back from the building when something is about to fall off the roof. Some events also took place in a building that was located on a narrow street, where it is perhaps not possible to manage the positioning of the audience at same accuracy. But that does not explain the tight first few rows of the audience and the half-circle formation of the crowd, or the clean lines of people on narrow streets that go further on down the street away from the scene of execution, nor the presence of armed IS affiliates who, in many cases, seem to be monitoring the distance between the crowd, the victim and those reading out the verdict and carrying out the murder. Here, the sovereign’s power is shown not only in its ability to expose and punish the “criminal” but also to monitor its people with the threat of violence. Clearly, this is not a leisurely event in which the audience is free to move about as they wish, but rather something that is strictly guided and controlled.

Victim/Perpetrator relationship; power play on visibility

A prominent element in all the events is the relationship between the victim(s) and the perpetrator(s). When the verdict is read out and the victim is present, the verdict is tied to his person. The victim(s) is often companied by at least one (1) armed man and without exception the victim is blindfolded, and his hands are tied. Blindfolding the victim is a power play with the visual. The event itself is visual to the extent of no areal or constructional limits (open and outside), but the victim does not get to visualise the verdict and place of punishment. He is denied visual contact with his surroundings, the audience, and his punishers. He cannot reciprocate the gaze of the public; he is looked at, but he cannot react to the looks on him. On the contrary, in the killings of Western victims, the victims are themselves highly visible and recognisable throughout the act, while their executioners and capturers remain virtually anonymous, their faces heavily masked and bodies covered (Euben 2017, 1017). In this research, in many events the perpetrators do not cover their faces. This might indicate, that in the case of the Western victims, the identity of the victim is of great(er) significance; in the local killings, the victim remains relatively anonymous, which indicates the importance of the victim as an undesired member of the society, who’s person is not of importance, but whose essence is.

Physical interaction between the victim and the perpetrator is common throughout the data. 10 of the scripts in category 2 describe the moments the victim is being pushed down from the rooftop or being held at the edge of the roof. In many cases, movement can clearly be detected. A noteworthy script in this category, P2.3., describes a moment before the execution, where physical interaction between the victim and the perpetrator is not directed at carrying out the execution. The victim is sitting down and surrounded by IS affiliates. One of the men is squatting in front of the victim, who is blindfolded and whose hands are tied. The squatting man appears to be talking to the victim. A person behind the victim is described holding their hand up, clenched in a fist as if they are about to hit the victim. The setting highlights the absolute deprivation of power on the victim’s part. He is completely at the mercy of his perpetrators as to how the punishment unfolds as well as under the threat of direct physical violence prior to the execution.

The direct physical touch between the victim and the punishers signals the punishers’ ultimate power to end life, and his control over the situation and the victim is further emphasised by the victim’s forced blindness and thus inability to be in even a slight control of his fate. In addition, in most events many IS affiliates physically interact with the victim; usually two or three people are leading the victim by the arm or the shoulder or holding and pushing him by the legs or on the back when the execution is carried out. This signals the massive imbalance of power between the victim and the perpetrators; as in a sovereign’s public display of power, the parties are not equal in force, and the victim has no chance to fight back, which further highlights the victim’s weakness and IS’s power over him.

Reflecting to the Foucauldian forms of power, one comes to think whether what this research has presented is merely a sovereign spectacle. However, there is more to these events than just sovereign power at practice. The sovereign showcases his power only through the death he is “capable of requiring” (Foucault 1990, 136), but for that, a system of monitoring is required and that needs to be extended to the entire society to be successful. The sovereign cannot require a death over a social danger if the social danger has not been exposed. In these executions, the sovereign retains the right to take a life, and some bodies are determined useful, productive, and thus worth protecting, while others are not. The constant, ubiquitous observation, exposure and delegitimation by association are active in the context of these persecutions and killings, and the minority has been exposed to these elements historically in the area. In these killings the modalities of power were at play in purifying the ummah and upholding opposition against Western societies, and they were used to draw attention and stir discussion and possible counter-acts from other states and/or the international community. This way, IS was also seeking credibility and independence as an international player. Purging the ummah of undesirable life and standing apart from the Western values is at the heart of the rationality of power behind these executions.

Audience, participation, and activity

Whether the participation and witnessing of the event is voluntary or not is hard to say. First-hand witness reports, however, indicate that at least in some areas under IS’s control, audiences were forced to attend public punishments as witnesses (United Nations Human Rights Council 2014). The presence of armed IS fighters and affiliates may indicate that some members of the audience were forced to witness the execution, or that they are forcibly kept in place by threat of violence for the duration of it. Some scripts, on the other hand, show distinct reactions from the audience; some are pointing up and are clearly shouting something. Together with the positioning of the crowd and the active participation of the audience, a theatre or stadium like situation is created.

There are no constructional or areal limitations to the visibility of the event, and the victim is the only one who is denied witnessing the event visually,⁶ as the victim is without exception blindfolded. Without an audience the effect of the execution only falls on the victim. If there is no crowd, the execution does not deliver a message.

During Category 3: Midfall life ends, and death starts. The legal script turns into action, punishment becomes reality, not only text and speech. To those witnessing the event, it becomes clear that the punishments and order set in the penal code by IS can and will be carried out accordingly. The crime of homosexuality is tied to the body, the person of the victim and the penal code set by IS becomes visible through them. For a fleeting moment, the victim is the active party and during this moment, the body of the victim ultimately becomes the reality of the punishment. The community witnesses the moment when the criminal’s life is nearing its end and with the end of his life, a part of the social sickness of the community, and the war between the criminal and the sovereign, ends as well. The scripts in category 3 portray an interphase in the punishment. The punishment is aimed at ending the life of the criminal, and in category 3 the punishment has been put to action but is not yet completed.

Whereas in the previous category the victim and the punishment were in between life and death, in Category 4: On the ground, stoned, death is either pronounced or ensured by stoning the victim(s) at the scene of action. The death of the abnormal is final, and the victim has been corrected of his crime. Category 4 is also the category that describes the moments where the audience transforms from passive or mildly active onlookers to active participants in the punishment (Figure 3). In many of the events, clear movement from the part of the audience, such a picking up or throwing stones, shouting, gesturing at, and approaching the victim, can be detected. It is not (solely) the IS fighters that are stoning the victims or have gathered around them; in many cases, the members of the audience who have in chronologically preceding scripts been standing in the audience, are now moving and active participants in the final stages of the execution. The audience somewhat merges with the IS fighters and the line between Us vs. Them is one between the audience together with the IS fighters, and the victims.

Figure 3. Execution event, general view from the crowd, victim on the ground.

The scripts describe a structured, well-planned public spectacle where the presence of the audience is vital for the message of authority to be delivered. The audience is the most important part of the procedure, as their witness of the executions is the foundation of the power of the penal code set by IS. The punishment is thus aimed both at the victim and the witnesses. The visual recording of the event classifies the crime and the respective punishment for it. Because the witnesses have not been classified as abnormal, they have a right, by their normality, to witness the event where the balance of power is restored.

The interplay between the audience, the IS fighters and the victim is clearer in the scripts describing the videos. 2 of the 5 events included in the analysis (V3 and V4) depict long periods during the verdict, in which the speaker takes centre stage and the audience around him watches quietly. Active vocal engagement from the part of the audience starts when the victim is already on the rooftop. During the moments immediately after the fall there is an activity peak from the part of the audience towards the end of the events. Especially in V5 during the final moments (V5.2, V5.3), the audience starts to shout increasingly as the victim appears on the rooftop. The shouting escalates as the victim is pushed over the edge of the roof, and finally the audience rushes shouting towards the victim who landed from the fall a second before.

Public shows of violence are merely one regime of visibility. In disciplinary power, every member of the society is both an observer and being observed constantly. These executions are not only a result of sovereign power; they are also disciplinary in nature. The pre-existing homophobia in IS’s core areas helped to classify the victim as deranged and unproductive in the community. The biopolitical mechanisms of correction already existed in the society (although it can be argued they have not been always as active as under IS’s rule). IS reaped the benefits here as it did not have to implement the disdain; IS only needed to facilitate an outcome for it. Visuality and performativity are at play in two ways here; both in murdering the victim and killing by facilitating an indirect murder in the society by exposure (Foucault 2003, 256).

The power relations between the IS fighters and the audience are operating on two levels here; on the one hand, one cannot know how spontaneous or voluntary the engagement from the audience is in these events, and how their presence as witnesses to the events is managed; but on the other hand, for the distribution of the visual material it does not matter, as long as it looks like the audience supports the course of events and the punishment. There is a double message: IS is powerful enough to attract or force a large audience to witness the action of its penal code, and it can showcase the effectiveness, prowess, and popularity of its regime in the material it distributes.

The killings of the members of sexual and gender minorities were twofold in nature. The shock value and the political end goal of these killings differed from that of the Western victims because the message of this crime was directed also at the local population and the governance of the citizens of the Islamic State. Thus, the recordings of these killings do not portray just a display of sovereign power on a local and international level; they also showcase elements of power tied to the bodily realities, lifeforms and disciplinary elements of the society that choose and act to expose and demolish a certain demographic group.

Purging the ummah might have been the reason for these atrocities on a local level, but their recording and wide distribution made little sense on the grounds of protecting any local community. They were directed at a broader audience worldwide. IS was fighting its physical war on the local level through public executions, and ideological war on the international level through the distribution of visual material from these events.

All this leads to societal unity through a visual extravaganza of violence. These killings were an ultimate display of power with seemingly minimal cost on the population. They were done on the grounds of protecting the majority of the society, and recorded and distributed to gain visibility, recognition, and power on an international stage. Thus, the legitimacy building was taking place on both a local and international level, but with different operational choices and strategic ends. On the local level, IS was exposing the crime of homosexuality and using the punishment for it to further enhance and justify its rule of law. On the international level, IS was no longer exposing homosexuality, but using it and brutal visual material from public punishments to expose its own capability, policies, and society to the rest of the world.

Conclusion

This research set out to answer the question “how does IS utilise the public executions of sexual and gender minorities to construct a particular political identity and reality?” and furthermore, to whom the public executions of presumedly homosexual victims were staged, recorded, and distributed. Analysing (audio-)visual material of 18 different events of executions, I showed how the three modalities of power, sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical, are active in the execution and how they allow for the exposure and judgement of the victim. I found that the executions build IS’s legitimacy in two levels, local and international, and that the participation of the audience as witnesses to the execution, whether on site in real time or online consuming the material published of the executions, is vital for legitimacy building.

IS builds and manages the Us vs. Them positioning between itself and the Western world through outbursts of violence that are recorded, edited, and published on various platforms. IS efficiently harnessed the use of social media and from 2013 onwards, it gained significant presence on various platforms (Shehabat and Mitew 2018, 83–84). IS’s communication strategy towards Muslim audiences is to portray IS as a fighter for Islam and restoring the caliphate (Farwell 2014, 49–50); what it wants to broadcast towards non-Muslim audiences is a different story. IS’s ideologically coherent and strategic presence on various online channels is as much directed to portray their ideology to their enemies as it is to lure new affiliates (Fisher 2015, 3). Much of the propaganda published and broadcast by IS does not reach the Western audience and might not be even directed at audiences outside the Muslim community (Zelin 2015, 89). Rhetorically, IS is pointing out its uniqueness as much as it is trying to distinguish itself from what it constitutes as the West (Lorenzo-Dus, Kinzel, and Walker 2018).

IS’s violence against sexual and gender minorities first reached headlines in 2014, with reports appearing in The Times, and Tom Coghlan (2014), Haaretz.com (2014), Advocate and Garcia (2014) and Al (2014), to mention a few. In August 2015, IS’s systematic violence against sexual and gender minorities was discussed in an informal Arria-formula meeting of the UN Security Council (United Nations Security Council 2015). The meeting also heard two refugees, who had fled persecution in the area (International Business Times and Morrison 2015). Both men addressed their situation having been life-threatening not only because of IS, but also because of the negative reactions of their families, friends, and communities (Newsweek and Westcott 2015).

These killings resulted in two kinds of separation. Firstly, the victim was separated from his community and killed for his crime. Secondly, the killings were used to separate IS from Western liberal values, such as pro sexual and gender minorities policies. The exclusion of the individual stemmed from pre-existing societal homophobia in the area, but the homophobia only took a more physical, lethal form in the penal code of IS and IS’s execution of the penal code. Surely, Western media was bombarded with news about IS’s atrocities, but these killings were used to signal a very clear difference between Western and IS’s political development. As a counter-act to a major political sexual and gender minorities development, IS signalled that it is moving in an opposite direction.

Whereas public executions are direct and clear features of sovereign power, the biopolitical and disciplinary powers start at a much deeper level, such as personal or family relations, of violence and long before the execution itself takes place. It can be argued that perhaps what the data in this research describes is only a sovereign spectacle, and the theoretical framework utilised in this research is better suited to discuss the wider context of the executions, rather than the events themselves. However, in the events there are elements of disciplinary and biopolitical power, for example, in the blindfolding and covering the face of the victim; his personal identity is irrelevant for the punishment (unlike in the execution of Western victims), while his undesirable essence takes central stage.

In this research, the theoretical framework allows the analysis to bring into the visual the disciplinary and biopolitical aspects of power that are much more hidden in a society than public displays of power by a violent sovereign. Through these executions, IS transformed the deep-rooted stigma of homosexuality in the area into powerful public confrontations, where the minority was powerless and unable to hide. The special features of both parties, IS and the minority it persecuted, lead to this combination of violence for politics, and the unique power relations these acts produce. The result is a mixture of an effective penal code, credibility gained by public executions and securing the future of the community. Purifying the ummah was the mission IS set out to accomplish and with these executions it was fulfilling this mission and building its legitimacy both as a capable ruler regionally and as a noteworthy actor internationally.

These killings are a combination of acts of legitimisation that is aimed at both the local population to establish a distinctive political entity and internationally to oppose IS’s enemies, and to specifically counter major pro sexual and gender minorities political developments, such as the US Supreme Court ruling. IS used public executions as punishment widely and across demographic groups (including women and children), but not all executions were filmed or photograph, nor did all filmed executions end up published and distributed (Tinnes 2016). The executions of members of sexual and gender minorities, and publishing material of them, were of special political interest to IS locally and internationally. The killings also took sexual and gender minorities and their persecution to the UN agenda for the first time, and in this way resulted in an important moment in the history of sexual and gender minorities in global politics.

This research has provided a theoretical framework to study the special role the persecution of sexual and gender minorities plays in IS’s legitimacy building, state formation and crafting state identity. The presented theoretical framework allows the analysis of future actors such as IS to address the power relations in individual conflict situations without explaining the persecution solely through religious, cultural, and legal-traditional factors or anti sexual and gender minority policies. It provides a more general, legitimacy-based understanding of why members of this minority were persecuted and murdered by IS and adds to understanding why this minority continues to be persecuted in conflict situations and state identity building.

The persecution of sexual and gender minorities is ongoing in the areas where IS was active. IS’s support remains strong among its dispersed fighters and jihadi sympathisers (Massé 2022) and the position of sexual and gender minorities in the areas IS controlled has shown little signs of improvement (IRAQueer 2020). The discussion of the future of sexual and gender minorities in IS’s previous core areas is beyond the scope of this article, but this research provides a framework to discuss the part sexual and gender minorities have in legitimacy and state identity building for fluid, category escaping international actors such as IS.

Geolocation information

Latitude: 33.2209 Longitude: 43.6848; Latitude: 34.8149 Longitude: 39.0465

Acknowledgements

I thank the reviewers and editors for their constructive feedback, valuable suggestions and insightful comments that vastly helped improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Harry H. J. Lehtolaakso

Harry H. J. Lehtolaakso is a doctoral candidate in the Doctoral Programme for Political, Societal and Regional Change at the University of Helsinki. Their research focuses on legitimacy building through public violent spectacles, the Islamic State, and jihadist extreme violence.

Notes

1. Citation appeared in IS’s magazine DABIQ 15: ‘Break the Cross’ accompanied with a picture of a person being stoned to death. ‘DABIQ 15: Break the Cross’. n.d. Islamic State Archive. Jihadology. Accessed 12 September 2022. https://jihadology.net/wp-content/uploads/_pda/2016/07/the-islamic-state-e2809cdacc84biq-magazine-1522.pdf.

2. See, for example: ‘The Quranic Arabic Corpus - Translation’ https://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=7&verse=81 and ‘The Punishment for Homosexuality - Islam Question & Answer’ https://islamqa.info/en/answers/38622/the-punishment-for-homosexuality.

3. The Yazidi people are an ethnic-religious minority living in parts of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey. They were heavily targeted and persecuted by IS, the persecution including murders and sexual slavery and abuse. On IS sexual violence against the Yazidi people and Yazidi boys, see (Ahram 2015).

4. The data is retrieved from published, public sources available to anyone, and the research complies with the research ethical requirements on online primary or secondary source material at the University of Helsinki. The author additionally protects the privacy of the data subjects by transcribing the visual material into textual and using drawn generalizing models instead of photographs or video screenshots in which privacy of the persons involved could be breeched.

5. The author has access to the photographs and videos used in this research. The material is stored in the author’s personal archives.

6. There are no women or female-assumed people in the crowd; thus, there are limitations, at least when it comes to accessibility, to the witnesses that might apply to these events.