The Islamic State terror organization recently published a disturbing new propaganda video showing its militants executing civilians who are begging and crawling for their lives.
The undated video depicts several scenes of executions, including jihadists beheading and shooting their victims. Iraqi soldiers, officers and government officials are among those slaughtered in the footage.
According to the MailOnline, one particularly heartbreaking clip shows a man dressed in civilian clothing as he crawls on the ground and begs for his life, before being executed, while other men are shown dressed in the infamous orange jumpsuits as they await to be beheaded.
The propaganda footage, likely filmed primarily in the Anbar Province in Iraq, also depicts IS fighters driving through towns, foreign fighters pledging their allegiance to the terror group, and bomb attacks on Iraqi government vehicles.
"Releasing the video could be an attempt by ISIS to regain some strength in the country, following announcements this week that the number of fighters has fallen to its lowest level since 2014," notes the report, referring to a speech delivered Wednesday by President Obama.
During his speech, Obama claimed that IS' core in Iraq and Syria "continues to shrink," but admitted that the terrorists still have the power to "inflict horrific violence on the innocent."
However, he asserted that their "barbarism only stiffens our unity and determination to wipe this vile terrorist organization off the face of the Earth."
Since 2014, Christians and members of other religious groups in Iraq and Syria have been killed, tortured, raped and driven out of their homes by the terrorist group. The group has also taken hundreds of Christian women and girls as sex slaves and forced children into battle, according to US researchers.
Last week, Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II, the head of the Syrian Orthodox Church, revealed that a group of 21 Christians were killed in the Syrian town of al-Qaryatain after IS captured the city last year.
Those Christians were part of a larger group of 230 Christian who were kidnapped by IS in the town. The church official said that five more people are believed to be missing or dead, while the remainder of the group was reunited with their families after negotiations and ransom payments. The patriarch also said that the terrorist group had planned to sell the Christian girls to slavery.
ISIS has also continued to efface both Christian history and signs of any Christian presence in the Middle East, most recently destroying a 2,000-year-old structure known as the "Gate of God" near its stronghold of Mosul, Iraq.
"Much of what took almost 2,000 years to build has been lost in a matter of months," reads a report from CBS. "As it seeks to erase Christianity from the landscape, the Islamic state allows no Christian symbols."
Nuri Kino, founder and president of A Demand For Action, a group advocating the protection of ethno religious minorities such as Assyrians and Yazidis in the Middle East, said that the continuous attacks on Christian symbols and structures by ISIS shows that the group are continuing in their attempt to "cleanse" their caliphate.
"If so, it's a scary development, until now they have bombed or, in other ways, destroyed churches but when they change [the church to a mosque], it feels more definite," he said.
"A year ago they said 'Convert, pay or die' then it turned out to be a lie, that even if you pay you will not be able to stay," he added.
"If they changed a church to a mosque it is further proof of their cleansing, something that many call a genocide. They destroy our artifacts, our churches and try to erase us in any way they can."
