ISIS has been cracking down on entertainment such as listening to music or watching sports, as it sees them as “acts of Western moral decadence.” One target in its crackdown is the sport of soccer, which is popular in the areas which ISIS controls. According to Hannah Parry of Mail Online, the militant group promised to punish anyone caught watching the Madrid versus Barcelona game with 80 lashes.
Soccer fans executed in January
It is not yet known whether anyone was caught watching the game, in which FC Barcelona beat their opponents by a score of 2-1. We can only hope that no more brutal videos, for which the ISIS has become well-known, surface in the aftermath of the match.
The militant group has previously exacted the death penalty on soccer fans that it caught watching an Asia Cup game between Iraq and Jordan. In January this year, 13 teenage boys were caught watching the game on television in Mosul, Iraq, which lies in an area controlled by the ISIS.
A week after their “crime” was discovered, they were rounded up and executed by firing squad, according to reports from an anti-IS activist group known as Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently. The group secretly documents the oppression and violence that IS uses to control the population of the area.
The activists stated that the ISIS warned residents not to touch the boys’ bodies, and left them in the open, presumably as a macabre reminder of the consequences of watching soccer.
Activists exposing ISIS brutality
IS clerics have imposed strict sharia law across all of the territory that the group now holds in Syria and Northern Iraq, with stories emerging of incredible brutality. The group has published a steady stream of videos online, and has been very successful in using its presence on Twitter to recruit fighters from around the world.
Since last month the city of Tel Abiad, in the north of the province of Raqqa, has been under a curfew which prevents residents from leaving their homes for any reason between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. The small activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently faces a dangerous struggle in its attempts to expose the bloody rule of the ISIS.
