Remember, the Taliban were prominent back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban

edit: grammar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beheading_video

it’s not like they just came from nowhere

So a lot of their members were Saddam's party. Part of 'debaathification' involved putting everyone who had been in the party on a list, but the nature of a 1 party state, that includes everyone from professors and traffic engineers to professional throat-slitters and the people managing them. If you were on the list, you could not be employed at any state enterprise. This made anyone whose job didn't have a private sector equivalent, functionally unemployable.

The one I saw around the same time, perhaps a couple of years earlier, was from Chechnia. It has always been a favourite execution method of Islamists. ISIS didn't invent it.

I saw it in that timeframe. Sadly, it's real.. ☹️😭

My dad sent me that video without any note or warning 😂

was it... was it the one with the chain saw? I dont really want to remember it but its burned into my memory.

I think ISIS came (at least partially) from a group called "Al Quaeda in Iraq" if I recall. They were beheading people long before ISIS.