Twenty-six-year-old American communications contractor Nick Berg was beheaded a hostage in Iraq on this date in 2004 — allegedly by the personal hand of Al-Qaeda in Iraq chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
A veteran of the mujahideen who drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Zarqawi spent most of the 1990s in a Jordanian prison but was amnestied just in time to rejoin militant Islam before it became a post-9/11 boom industry.
Zarqawi’s Jordanian terrorist group Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, founded in 1999, transitioned with the American invasion of Iraq into the Al-Qaeda franchise in that country, a feared prosecutor of the sectarian civil war there, and the lineal forbear of the present-day Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL).
It also became a lusty early adopter of the emerging beheading-video genre: an ancient penalty perfectly adapted for the digital age.
This ferocious group was a severe mismatch for Berg, a Pennsylvanian freelance radio tower repairman (and pertinently, a Jew) who set up his Prometheus Methods Tower Service in the northern city of Mosul* in the months following the 2003 U.S. invasion. This was also around the time that American occupation forces’ abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib came to light — a powerful excuse for blood vengeance.
Berg vanished from Baghdad in April 2004, and was not seen in public again until the whole world saw him: the unwilling feature of a May 11 video titled Sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi slaughters an American infidel with his hands and promises Bush more.
“We tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls,” a voice says. “You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins … slaughtered in this way.”
Warning: Mature Content. This is both a political document of our time, and a horrifying snuff film. Notice that Berg appears in an orange jumpsuit, a seeming allusion to Muslim prisoners being held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay.
Twenty-five months later to the day, Zarqawi was assassinated by a U.S. Air Force bombing.
* As of this writing, Mosul is occupied by Zarqawi’s creation, the Islamic State.
On this day..
- 1720: James Cotter the Younger
- 1949: Li Bai, PLA spy
- 1864: Utuwankande Sura Saradiel, Ceylon social bandit
- 1900: James Nettles
- 1829: Richard Johnson and Catharine Cashiere, the last public hangings in New York City
- 1909: Fred Seward
- 1946: Anton Mussert, Dutch collaborator
- 1318: Four Fraticelli friars
- 1323: Jourdain de l'Isle-Jourdain, Gascon rascal
- 1896: H. H. Holmes, America's first serial killer
- 1795: Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, Robespierre's prosecutor
- 2002: Ahmed Sultan and Mohammad Humayun, who murdered Meena