Islamic State (ISIS) sent a Christmas message to Christians with a video of beheading eleven captives and shooting ten more victims to death. According to a statement issued by the Amaq news agency, the killings were carried out in Nigeria by the local unit of ISIS.

The execution of the 21 people, committed by the Nigerian branch of the international terrorist organisation, was in retaliation for the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of ISIS. The brutal video, published by ISIS news agency Amaq, was sent just in time for Christmas as a „message to Christians”.

According to the recording, soldiers of the radical Islamist terrorist organisation killed 11 captives and shot dead another 10 people in Nigeria. The Arabic subtitles of the footage say the killings were committed by the Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP) in Nigeria, and the victims were local Christians. ISWAP is a faction of Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, which broke away in 2016 in order to help fight ISIS, which has lost ground in Iraq and Syria, with more effective, even more violent means.

The video s creators said the executions had been carried out as a revenge for the death of their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a former ISIS leader, „caliph”, who had detonated a suicide vest in October 2019, killing himself and his three children.