ISIS video shows Turkish troops ‘burned alive’

ISIS militants on Thursday released a video purporting to show two captured Turkish soldiers being burned alive. The video, showing two uniformed men being hauled from a cage before being bound and torched, was posted on militant websites.

The 19-minute footage was purportedly shot in the ISIS-declared “Aleppo Province” in northern Syria. Speaking in Turkish, the killer of the two men verbally attacks Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and calls for “destruction to be sowed” in Turkey.

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The shock images recall the killing of Maaz al-Kassasbeh, a Jordanian fighter pilot, who was captured by the militants when his plane went down in Syria in December 2014, and was later burned alive in a cage. The ISIS-linked news agency Amaq said last month that the militants had kidnapped two Turkish soldiers, and the Turkish army separately said it had lost contact with two of its men.

The video’s release came a day after 16 Turkish soldiers were killed by ISIS militants, in Ankara’s biggest loss so far in its unprecedented incursion into Syria. They were killed in a succession of attacks around the Syrian town of Al-Bab on Wednesday that included three suicide car bombings.