Captive British journalist John Cantlie features in new Islamic State video report in Iraq

The media arm of the Islamic State released a new video on Tuesday showing captive British journalist John Cantlie in the Iraqi city of Mosul. It is the 12th video he has been featured in since mid-2014. Cantlie was kidnapped alongside American journalist James Foley in 2012 in Syria.

In the three-minute video, Cantlie stands in front of the near-pulverised remains of Mosul University, which the US military bombed in March on intelligence that it was being used as a headquarters by the Islamic State. A video released by the US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria that shows the air strike can be seen below.

Cantlie discusses the air strike in the video, and, as in his earlier videos, is put forth as a prototypical presenter in a style seemingly modelled on documentary films. He espouses a pro-Islamic State agenda, mocking the logic of bombing the university. The sound of the drone used for filming the video buzzes in the background.

“Mosul University was the finest and biggest university in all of Iraq. Now if it was a military hub or if it was a weapons cache or if it was being used as a training ground by the mujahideen, perhaps you could understand,” says a noticeably gaunt Cantlie. “But it was simply Mosul’s and in fact Iraq’s finest university, now reduced to a huge pile of rubble.”

In the last of the three scenes in the video, all of which were shot recently in Mosul, Cantlie stands in a central business district while people go about shopping for Eid, the festival at the end of the holy month of Ramadan. If that timing is to be believed, then the video would have been shot in the past week.

The most recent video prior to Tuesday’s was also purportedly shot in Mosul. In that video, Cantlie derides the bombing of a kiosk which he says “took US$50 to build.” His tone is similarly mocking, as it is in the articles attributed to him in the magazine Dabiq, also published by the Islamic State.