And he believed that in doing so, he was offering service to his god. In fact, his religion inspires, motivates, and guides all his actions — but that is the one factor that Western analysts and policymakers discount and gloss over when studying him and people like him.

“Iraq crisis: the bare faced ISIS executioner who spreads terror with his open killing,” by Colin Freeman, the Telegraph, June 14, 2014: In an army full of masked, black-clad figures, he is the one man who is never shy to show his face. But for those unlucky enough to cross him, the face of Shakir Wahiyib, a feared enforcer for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, is often the last they will ever see.

The star of a series of grisly jihadist videos, including one in which three men are executed after failing his “Quranic quiz”, Wahiyib is one of the few publicly-identified leaders of the shadowy jihadist group that has swept through northern Iraq.

The movement, otherwise known as ISIS, generally instructs its followers to keep their faces masked to minimise the chances of them being tracked down by the Iraqi government. But while its commander-in-chief, Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, is even said to disguise himself while meeting fellow commanders, Wahiyib has no such reservations.

Showing considerable relish for his work, he grins for the lenses of jihadi cameramen he goes on the rampage with his masked underlings. However, the endless photo ops of him posing with machine guns and interrogating terrified prisoners is not just a matter of personal vanity. Instead, it seems to be an attempt by an otherwise anonymous organisation to graft a menacing human face onto its campaign of terror – a sergeant-at-arms who is all too real, and very clearly active on the ground.

“He is the only one who kills without covering his face, and is working on declaring an Islamic state,” said Colonel Yassin Dwaij, a senior police in Iraq’s western Anbar province, where officials put a $50,000 bounty on his head. “He is dangerous and cunning.”