General says Isis photos appear genuine

This image posted on a militant website appears to show militants leading captured Iraqi soldiers wearing civilian clothes. Photo / AP

Iraq's war of sectarian vengeance has its first pictures of record: images that show Sunni extremist fighters massacring army soldiers.

Posted online by the jihadist group that has taken territory across the country, they show the Shia men being led away and lying in trenches before and after being shot.

Lieutenant General Qassim al-Moussawi, the Iraqi military spokesman, said the pictures were authentic and depicted events in Tikrit, birthplace of Saddam Hussein.

One shows a crowd of men, hands on head, wearing jeans, flip-flops and Manchester United shirts, being herded into open-topped lorries.

They are ferried out bent double to the palm-lined savannah. By the side of a rough road, they are laid in lines, some in single rows, heads facing directly towards their Kalashnikov-wielding captors, some in shallow graves, others feet-to-shoeless-feet, arms bound at the wrist. The photographs show Kalashnikovs are raised, and clouds of dust rise up from the end of the line.

Isis, which released the photographs and claimed to have carried out the killings, are master manipulators of social media and exaggerate their own brutality as part of their propaganda of terror against their enemy.

But the pictures are not doctored and are internally consistent. One of the series shows a government office in Tikrit, one of Salahuddin province's two big cities, with a masked man wielding an Isis black flag.

The same doomed figures can be identified in several of the pictures, before and after what seems to be their deaths.